Tuesday, January 1, 2013

I need help with a question please.

Seriously I need help from you guys/gals with a question I have:

"How many hours does a student actually spend coding/learning software from a typical 4 year CS degree?

I've looked on Google and really couldn't find any good answers. The reason I want to know know is just as a bench mark in my head. They say mastery of a subject is 10,000 hours, I know most of these 9 -12 week RoR bootcamps teach anywhere from 320 - 480 hours, although they encourage their students to study at night and on weekends.

 Dev bootcamp says some of their students put in up to 800 - 900 hours in 9 weeks of study.  9 weeks divided by 900 hours is 14.28 hours per day 7 days per week. To me that begs the question: How much of those 900 hours is really retained? Meaning would it be more beneficial to do less hours over a longer period of time? I don't know. Dev bootcamp is obviously very successful, I'm not knocking it I think it's great. I just am thinking for my own personal growth.

I will have just over 200 hours of study be the end of this week my 11th week.  I feel pretty good with my progress and what I have learned, I could have done better but all in all I feel like I'm really starting to grasp some of this stuff:)

I always hear people talk in years of experience like I've been coding for 2 years or 3 years.  I have a friend who has been coding for 6 months and he studies 1 hour per night, so to him 6 months experience is 128 hours.  I'm trying to get a more definable answer as to how many hours it takes to be a junior developer, at least in RoR.

At a job as a developer working 50 weeks per year at 40 hours per week means in 1 year that person will have 2,000 hours of experience, 4,000 hours over 2 years. Do we need to put in 4,000 hours before we are useful enough to be a junior developer?

 I will be taking 1 semester worth of RoR training from the same courses taught at Berkeley from Berkeley edX from January 7th - March 15th for a total of 120 hours of study. So when a job posting says 4 year CS degree or equivalent experience required, I wonder how to quantify that, are all 4 years of a CS degree relating to Computer Science? If so I would just do 120 * 8 giving a total of 960 hours.

Sorry to ramble on I love programming! I would love some feedback please, thank you so much:)