Andrew Moore (00:02)
All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are back. So you will forgive us if this is a little clunky or if we have any issues, but we, we took a bit of an unplanned hiatus for a year. And as I was starting to dig into why we did that and what all that meant, I realized that we did 47 episodes in a year and that was our first year. So we're not going to do that again.

And if you're looking for any reason why running a podcast by, by yourself, producing it as a independent entity without a whole bunch of team and staff, there it is. It's, it's a fair amount of work. It's a surprising amount of work. So we're going to take for this second season, it feels odd calling it a season, but for this second season, we're going to take a much more conservative approach. The intent right now.

Seeing as this is the second season premiere is to release 12 core episodes in 2025, one a month. That's very doable. If we don't do that, then shame on us, but that is very doable. And also I think we have to set smart goals, don't we? But...

Jess Agnew (01:13)
I'm

realistic goals.

Hahaha

Andrew Moore (01:22)
The intent is to also give us some more time to work on some more out of the box things that we've been wanting to do for a while and just haven't had the time or the motivation or the brain power. So doing the 12 core episodes, that's sort of our traditional, the stuff you're used to. That's the meat and potatoes. But the other things, I've got one that's in the pipeline that should be coming in January as well that I think you'll find really interesting.

We're going to branch out a little bit into what it truly means to be plays well with others. We're not just the organizational leadership shtick. That horse has been beaten at least 47 times and she's dead. We're going to try to dig more into the hard hitting topics you expect from your news provider. No, we're going to try to dig into something that's a little more meaty, so to speak.

So without further ado, digging into this first episode, the more that I've hashed through this, we planned the topic, I don't know, six weeks ago, something like that. And I've been going back and forth on how to approach it. there could be some touchy topics or touchy subjects. None of this is meant to be disparaging at all or anything. We can only bring our perspective.

And that's what it is. It's the best we got is our stuff. So today we're going to talk about the role and the impact of AI in post-secondary education, I think is what you call it, but basically anything outside of after high school in the United States. Because the primary impetus for this is chat GPT, LLMs, quote unquote AI has taken off like

gangbusters. It's been a thing for a while, but it's taken off like crazy in 2024 and I expect it to continue to grow. And the question that I had was as more specifically developers, cause remember software engineering VP here, but as developers take more time out of their day using chat GPT, using Microsoft co-pilot, using Gemini, whatever they are.

Jess Agnew (03:23)
Yeah.

Andrew Moore (03:46)
as they're using these models to accomplish kind of the mundane, what does that do for the junior developer? And what does the role of the bootcamp become? So I want to start there. And I think the best way for me to hand it, hand it off or to make this into a conversation would be to just start by some, some stats on bootcamps. What are bootcamps and where does that fit in this conversation? Why am I even bringing it up?

So first off, a bootcamp is meant to upskill or reskill. So it's kind of like an accelerated certificate program for technical folks. You kind of think of it like a six month certificate type program. You go in, you learn very quickly how to do various different things and you come out with a certification that says I can develop in the mean stack or the Mern stack or whatever it is.

So you learn your, you learn your particular area and then you go get a job on that. And they have grown drastically in five years. think a lot of that is because of COVID. We needed more remote learning skill or more remote learning capabilities, but also we had, we've had this conversation of automation and computers are going to take your jobs. And so I think there's a lot of fear that drives people towards development.

Which motivations aside, I'm not against anybody turning to development because I think it's pretty cool. But that I think that's been the large driver, but I found the metric in five years. So since 2021, these boot camps in terms of participant count, they've grown about 30 % year over year. And that's, that's growing up to in 2024, there've been over 300,000 participants in a technical bootcamp program this year.

or last year now, which is pretty incredible, but they're also expecting this growth pattern to continue. And they're looking at, I say they, I'll cite my sources in this show notes, but the article I found said that they're expecting this growth pattern to continue and it's going to be a multi-billion dollar industry by 2030, which is incredible.

Jess Agnew (06:11)
Pretty huge.

Yeah. I mean, it's its own university system almost, but a trade, like almost a trade school version, right?

Andrew Moore (06:16)
Right.

Right. And the other caveat is this is 100 % not a blanket support of the United States industrial university complex at all. But I do have one of those degrees for whatever it's worth, but that's

Jess Agnew (06:37)
You're never going to catch

me being mad about people getting as much liberal education as they can afford.

Andrew Moore (06:43)
That's fair. And I think that's why this is going to be a fun topic because we may have vastly different opinions on the topic. I'm excited. I have missed this, by the way.

Jess Agnew (06:54)
arguing. We like her.

Andrew Moore (06:57)
Yeah,

yeah, it's lower stakes arguing because it's on on the mic.

Jess Agnew (07:05)
only goes so far, I guess.

Andrew Moore (07:07)
Yeah, that was episode 48. You'll never see that one.

I kinda want that to be an inside joke now. It wasn't actually that bad, but...

Jess Agnew (07:21)
there was an episode 48. Not for you guys.

Andrew Moore (07:23)
There wasn't episode 48. No,

it exists within the vault. You've gotten two clips. That's all you'll ever see.

But no, like, what are your thoughts? Because the one topic that keeps coming to mind, I used my liberal arts degree one time. I got my first job and then that was it. By and large, the stuff that I learned in university and college, I don't pull out very often.

And mostly when I do pull it out, it's like at a dinner party and it's arts and Western civilization. It's not computer science. Can't tell you the one time I've used Dijkstra's algorithm or frankly, binary coded decimals. It's not a, not a thing that comes out very often.

Jess Agnew (08:18)
You know, that's interesting because what you're talking about are specific things that you've learned in college. What I'm thinking of in terms of why it's a good investment is not that specific algorithm that you learned or that specific formula or that specific thing. It's the a broadening of your worldview. So you're forced to, at least in the college experience I had in anthropology and communication, there's a lot of broadening of horizons.

introduced to concepts that were not in my high school curriculum, forcing me to kind of reevaluate expectations or thought patterns that I had. The second one would be the critical thinking skills that you learn as you go forward. Because it's not, at least in, again, in my personal experience, it wasn't just you learn.

facts and data. It was a lot less memorization and a lot more learning how to think almost, right? How to analyze data, how to identify a good source. And that I think is a big problem in a lot of people who haven't. Yeah, a lot of people who haven't had the opportunity to go to college. Sometimes it's difficult to identify where's a good source of information. What criteria do I use?

Andrew Moore (09:30)
especially now.

Jess Agnew (09:41)
to identify a source of information that can be trusted, especially in the culture we're in right now, the misinformation that floats around. And I'm not going to dive into anything specific, but I think it's a good ability to be able to have that capability to analyze data and identify what might be true and what might not be. So there's a lot, I think, that you take away from growth as a human from a college experience.

Andrew Moore (10:11)
Yeah, I don't disagree. I do think that your mileage may vary because comparatively, I did not go to Texas A I went to, I won't say uber conservative, but fairly high on the conservative scale, your private Baptist college. So not a ton of expanding of worldviews going on there.

Jess Agnew (10:40)
Right. And I had the opportunity to study abroad as well. I mean, that's not something everybody is going to have the opportunity to do. So it definitely is. And here's the thing, college isn't the only place you can learn those skills either. So it's not a, that's not the only place. Travel can have almost the same impact from a worldview expanding. You don't have to go to any school, forcing yourself to, you know, live life in different scenarios, not just one.

place in life your whole, you know, expanse of time that that can have the same impact. So there's a lot you can do to gain that experience and gain that inside outside of college and for a lot cheaper potentially. Maybe even traveling the world is cheaper. I don't know.

Andrew Moore (11:25)
It very much depends on where you go, but I can tell you, could have gone a lot of places on my tuition. And, but I do agree. And I think a lot of it comes down to personal experience and personal drive, which is why, and this kind of leads us into the, the bootcamp part of the topic. think that by and large, when we talk about.

folks go into bootcamp and I don't have the metrics on this so I apologize but I the folks that are going to bootcamps aren't using those as a replacement for college. I think they're kind of in the position where either they went down one path whether they went to a university or not they went down a path and are looking to get into a new path.

Cause I've talked to multiple people over the years that, know, they started out as an accountant or, you know, I had somebody that worked with me that was a roof inspector and then he went to a bootcamp and now he's a AVP at a mortgage company. think he may have moved since, but either way, you know, you

Jess Agnew (12:32)
I know someone who was

a nurse and now they're a data engineer. mean, there's a lot of benefit, I think, in doing that sort of thing as well. And especially when people find out when they're a little older what they're actually good at and what they actually enjoy. That happened to me. mean, my work that I'm doing now is nothing that I thought I would be doing all those years ago.

Andrew Moore (12:37)
Right.

Yeah,

as it turns out, an 18 year old isn't great at making life altering decisions.

Jess Agnew (13:01)
Who let 18 year old me pick

a major? I don't know.

Andrew Moore (13:06)
But I think the point stands. You can approach a boot camp from a perspective of, I graduated high school and I wanna get into tech and I don't wanna go to a two-year program or a four-year program. Fair enough. The numbers prove it, it works. We've gotten to a point where we can very quickly train higher and field technical people.

going through this process. And some of the best developers that have ever worked with me are from boot camps. So 100 % we can't disagree that boot camps work.

Jess Agnew (13:44)
Well, I think we've maybe seen also some fresh out of college individuals who come into companies and they've started doing work in decades old system that had 50 people adding their own personal touches into it, spaghetti coating the back end to the nth degree. And that little fresh out of college developers realizing that their hands on experience is very different than the lab that they did in their computer science program.

So, you know, there's definitely something to be said for treating development, at least in some degree, like a journeyman type, you know, apprentice implementation sort of model. I think that's why the junior senior dev model is so common because of that.

Andrew Moore (14:35)
I think you may have unintentionally made a different point there too. And that is that vastly more educated people can make vastly worse decisions than you. And anyone that has worked in a legacy code base can, can agree. There's, there's something unique about big code bases that inevitably turn to bad decisions. But, but.

What I, what I, what I'm wondering though is we have the, and we're going to hone in a little bit on the develop, the developer bootcamp ecosystem or industry, particularly because that's where I have expertise. But you mentioned the junior senior paradigm. I am a product of the junior senior paradigm. You start out as a junior developer and you do the mundane work that nobody wants to do. And that the.

the corporate system has determined is limited risk. You can't screw this up bad enough, right? And some of that, it's like, I want this field over here, I want it rotated 90 degrees, I want it green, and I want a button beside it. What does the button do? Doesn't matter. It's got a button, cool. And you do that 20 times a day for a year, a year and a half, and then you've been deemed safe enough to become a...

a full boat software engineer or a full boat developer. And then you do that for a couple of years and then, Hey, you're a senior now you can make decisions, which is fine. But, and this has come from over the last three months, I've had a developer working for me that came in and has been very open about the fact that he uses co-pilot and chat GPT on a fairly regular basis to accomplish tasks.

And the dude has developed a solid platform, a solid product that I've attempted to rewrite with a team before, took three months and made no progress. Now we almost have a fully operational product that I have slated for quarter two to release for next year and it's almost done. And I'll be gone for two weeks on vacation at the end of December when we're recording this. So I'll be out of his way, which probably tells me that it'll be done by the time I get back.

Jess Agnew (16:59)
So.

I just want to mention something here because you sent me the topic for this and I was doing some research and it was really funny because there was one side of the house that was like, you know, AI is going to kill junior devs. They're not going to need junior devs anymore. You're only going to need senior devs. only going to need the people who can do machine learning and integrations between systems. That's it. That's all you're going to need. And then there was another side of the house that was like, no, this is going to kill needing senior devs because actually, you know, AI has come in.

the reverse of the direction we thought it was going to. It's not taking the small mundane jobs, it's taking the creative jobs. So you're not going to need a senior dev anymore. Your junior dev is going to be able to ask AI to do the important stuff, which I'm not saying I agree with that by any means, just to be very clear. Until AI can draw a hand that doesn't look like it's from the pitfires of 80s, I am not going to trust it to do senior dev work, but that's a different story. But what I think you just did there is you kind of introduced

Andrew Moore (17:43)
I have thoughts.

Jess Agnew (18:00)
reduced a third and I think better.

like model of what the AI world is going to do to development. It's going to mean that a developer at whatever spectrum they're at can be more efficient because they now have an army at their disposal that they can, you know, be the puppet master in control to do the things that they need to do. And I love that idea. And I think that is, in my opinion, the best. What does the future look like with AI and development that I've heard?

Andrew Moore (18:15)
yeah.

Yeah. So

this, this is where this gets really, really nuanced and some things I, some things I like about it and some things I don't. But the comment that this, particular developer has made is that, man, I'm a senior dev with 20 plus years of experience.

And I'm using co-pilot effectively. I'm using chat GPT effectively. And most days it feels more like I'm a technical BA than a developer because I'm spending time thinking about what is it that I need. Then I am talking about code and structure. And I think that's a really fair point because I did the same thing.

Jess Agnew (19:02)
writing requirements and yeah.

Andrew Moore (19:14)
I admittedly, as much as I am an innovative technician or technologist, I have not used ChatGPT or any other LLM as much as I should. So I've made a considered effort over the last six weeks to use it for more things. And I have a platform running on my desktop at home that allows me to run my own private models. So nothing leaks, nothing goes anywhere. Super cool. But that's...

outside of the scope of this particular topic. But, I've started as, as need comes up and a lot of times it does, Hey, I need a script to do XYZ. Typically I would sit down in 30, 45 minutes. I'd bang it out, test it, run it, be done with it. But I just decided to start asking my local LLM like, Hey, I need a Python script that takes a file of this format, transforms these columns, spits it out into this format and shoves it over here.

And dang it, if it's not really good, it, some cases, some, some use cases, it spits out the perfect thing, the right, the right, the right thing, the first time other cases, it gets really close. And I just have to say, Hey, I got this exception on this line number and it says, oops, here it is. Here's the face, which is really nice. It does take a lot of the enjoyment of coding out of it, which is mostly why I do it, but

it's really dang effective. So I think I fall, I definitely fall more on the side of maybe junior developer titles need to be reconsidered a bit. Not saying junior devs are going away.

Jess Agnew (20:58)
Maybe

your junior devs become junior dev slash business analyst and their job is to do some of that, you know, writing of technical requirements. I mean, there's definitely an opening there and that would make a good senior dev. A senior dev that's really good at understanding and consuming and writing about requirements.

Andrew Moore (21:15)
Yeah.

There are, and we've said it time and time again in the last 47 episodes that the best developers are ones that can develop their own requirements and can understand the business problem. But here's the crux of the question. So if we're talking about the role of the junior dev in a post chat GPT world where suddenly I can ask for any framework, I can ask for any programming language, I can ask for anything that I need.

Jess Agnew (21:33)
Yeah.

Andrew Moore (21:51)
that's really kind of simple or straightforward.

What do we then train? So if you look at two sides in my computer science degree, I left that four years with a fairly round awareness of a lot of things. And I knew how to write Java code. It's about it. And I'm oversimplifying, but you get the picture with a bootcamp. You leave that bootcamp knowing how to write.

JS code or Python code or whatever the particular flavor is. And you enter the workforce as a junior dev. You know how to write code, but you don't know how to work in an enterprise environment and a huge code base and a pre-existing code base. You may or may not know how to work in an agile environment. You may or may not know that particular framework or even how to pivot frameworks. That comes with experience and we're

I'm painting with a broad brush, I know it, but there may be some programs that are better than others at doing this. But so what do we then prioritize in the education world so that a developer is super successful day one?

back from technical difficulties break. I, what I was going to is, so we have junior developers, whether they come from boot camps or universities that by and large have a skillset, but they don't have the experience to, to know how to use that skillset in an environment. And I'm painting with a broad brush because some programs are better than others.

Jess Agnew (23:35)
right.

Andrew Moore (23:40)
For example, I was always jealous of my buddy who went to Vanderbilt and day one, they taught him how to use source control. And here I went through my four years emailing zip files dot BAK dot BAK broken dot BAK broken, but I fixed it. Dot old, dot old, dot older, et cetera, until four in the morning. But what do we do about that? And do we do anything? Cause I.

Jess Agnew (24:03)
jeez.

Andrew Moore (24:08)
I think that the important part of why we're covering this topic here is that not as educators, as hiring managers, things are different now. Things are getting shook up.

Jess Agnew (24:21)
Yeah.

So you're talking about the same problem that honestly blue collar jobs have, right? You have a skill, but you don't know how to build an entire house. You don't know how you fit into the orchestration of all of the different skills that have to be combined together in order to get the desired outcome. So it's a very interesting dichotomy there.

Andrew Moore (24:32)
Hey.

Jess Agnew (24:53)
And actually you sent me an article about is programming a blue collar job, which is very funny and kind of perfect to tie into this. But yeah, there's definitely something there of, yes, that's what a trade school is. You learn a skill and then how do you mesh it into the larger orchestration.

Andrew Moore (25:15)
Yeah, I totally did send you that. And I thought that was kind of the core topic of discussion and it just didn't come back up naturally. yeah, the, we, we were worried, I'll say worried. I think that's a reasonable way to put it, but it was like back in 2013, 2014, there was this article that came out and maybe it wasn't a single article. I mean, it was a general generalized feeling or generalized opinion, but

There was this concept or this topic that said software development is becoming another blue collar job. And there were kind of two camps on that. One was no, I'm offended. This isn't blue collar. I'm a professional. went to school over this. And then there was the other, which was no, yeah, that makes total sense because I'm having to hire a boatload of professionals to support kind of repetitive work. So now how do we.

how do we adjust this or how do we right size this and fast forward to, I mean, it was definitely before now, but if you look at how we staff for software engineering these days, there is a lot of work that's being done by, by software. So if you think about keeping libraries up to date, all that's automated for us. Like you just, we get the pull request open, we review it and we approve it and off she goes.

or maybe you're nearshoring or offshoring. Yeah, that's a component for kind of the repetitive maintenance stuff. And maybe you leave your onshore to be engaged with the business. And this is driving back to your point, Jess, of maybe developers should get closer to the business problem rather than becoming highly technical specialists. Yeah, that's part of what this is, but...

I think this does develop into a similar conversation around AI because we make these polarizing statements of developments becoming a blue collar job and this isn't professional and blah, blah. And then you fast forward and turns out there's degrees of truth and AI is going to take all our germs. Fast forward. There's probably a degree of truth. Like we're, not going to staff individuals to do.

Jess Agnew (27:33)
Yeah.

Andrew Moore (27:37)
a new field type maintenance. We're just going to put that onto an existing developer and make it make 10 minutes, take 10 minutes or crap. Maybe that's part of the next automation CICD. You just spit in the ticket. It's in LLM language or prompt language, and then it gives you a PR and you review it.

Jess Agnew (27:45)
Yeah

You know, at the beginning of that article we were talking about, the guy had this similar reaction that you had, or that you mentioned, you know, that he was kind of offended by the connotation that he was a blue collar worker and he had this thought of like, in the future, are they going to look back at me and think of me like a factory worker from the industrial revolution, one, you know, cog in the wheel of this massive mechanism that produced all of this technological landscape that we live in nowadays.

So he was kind of like, pontificating on what that the future might look like, right? So when you really think about it, there is a parallel though, between kind of a factory worker during that era and a programmer now, not in the level of, know, professionalism at the role, but in the shift that's going to occur because of technology. So the factory workers from the industrial revolution,

were often replaced by robotics that would take over their very repetitive single task roles in these factory assembly lines. Similar to how now is AI coming in to take over the single factor job roles that some of these junior developers might have right now. And I think that gives us a clue to what the future might hold for programmers as well, right? Because factory workers didn't disappear.

they evolved.

Andrew Moore (29:28)
I think this gets, it starts getting very philosophical and I'm happy about that because we've got plenty of time left, but

Jess Agnew (29:31)
Ha ha ha!

You

Andrew Moore (29:38)
I think what you're describing is kind of that old adage, a rising tide raises all ships. So in a perfect world, by introducing automation, by introducing, whether it be in factory automation or software automation, AI, you're improving the lives of the people that were doing the roles. I think the expectation though, and this is where the challenge is introduced.

is that the people that automation replace or the jobs that automation replaces, those individuals then have to upskill to either be the mechanics that work on the robots or do a role that is next in line for automation, right?

Jess Agnew (30:27)
Well, even there,

there's similarities to the past, right? Because that robot that just did the one thing now has code sitting behind it and it has complexities in its creation that change it. yeah, the upskilling is obviously a path you could talk about. And as much as I hate to say this, the person who's doing that one job may not be the person that we're talking about needing to upskill. We might be talking about the workforce in general needs to upskill, right?

similar

fashion to the robot is changing and evolving and that needs people to do those back end things, AI is going to change and evolve. Machine learning is going to change and evolve. It's going to get ever more complicated and complex until eventually the robots take over and we all perish.

Andrew Moore (31:15)
Look, I'm I talked about

this this morning in my standup. I am looking forward to living in a cyberpunk dystopia. I don't think you're going fast enough that it'll that I'll make it but I think that'll be very exciting.

Jess Agnew (31:28)
For the record, I'm not a threat to

you robots. will, you can be my overlords. I'm fine with it. It's fine.

Andrew Moore (31:34)
I mean,

people need doctors, robots need engineers.

Jess Agnew (31:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Andrew Moore (31:42)
You need me, but no, think, I think that is a key point. the, was having this conversation with somebody else recently when, when I started developing the topic here, my thinking is that we started out and maybe I'm oversimplifying, but we started out developing engineers and universities teaching them in a classical way and

Jess Agnew (32:10)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Moore (32:11)
Largely that was how do you think, how do you problem solve? And we accomplished that with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn't. But as that moved forward and as things like the dot com bubble came and went, and as we, an industry, as a civilization developed more legacy code that needed maintaining, we built this pile.

that had to be addressed. And so it became disproportionately high demand for developers to help work on this stuff. Even you think back to Y2K, suddenly we need all these COBOL developers to help untangle our mess. So as this demand grows, in comes the bootcamp or the VOTEC to help fill the demand. And that demand was largely

Jess Agnew (32:56)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Moore (33:09)
I need somebody that knows how to write code and can come in and figure it out real quick. And I just need to be able to scale that over and over and over again. With AI, that expands the capacity of existing developers. So maybe that diminishes the demand for the, call it the parts changing type work and raises the demand for more engineer work.

And so does that circle us back around to the topic of maybe we are back in the world of we don't need specific skills, we need generic thought process.

Jess Agnew (33:52)
mean, when you get down to kind of what is a programmer, there's that a lot of times, a lot of the developers that I've spoken with, yourself included, you almost come across as these.

You're not a specific type of developer. You're a problem solver, right? So you have, yeah, you do the magic behind the scenes. And so there is a certain truth to it's not necessarily this one skill that you have to do Java development that has made your career what it is. It is your ability to be thrown at a problem and you can solution into something that is vastly superior to what you started with. Now,

Andrew Moore (34:17)
I'm a wizard.

Jess Agnew (34:41)
That might include you doing the coding. That might include you orchestrating a better process. I've seen how you've solved problems without doing a single line of code. So having that skillset in addition to the tools that you're using, you know, these AI, you know, copilot and chat GPT, they become just another methodology to solve the problem, right?

Andrew Moore (35:10)
another tool in the tool belt, which brings us back to the, not back, brings us to that principle that I never can remember the name of, but it's effectively when every tool you have is a hammer, everything looks a whole lot like a nail.

Jess Agnew (35:12)
Exactly.

Andrew Moore (35:28)
So that was always, that's always the challenge with developers is, know what, don't focus so much on how do I write code to solve this problem, focus more on how do I solve this problem? And if code happens to be the answer, super. Now that, that, direction does change. give it differently depending on the organization. Like right now I've got a handful of developers. That's going to be a vastly different.

structure and approach than in past lives where I've had 30 developers, right? So if we're in a, a rigid development shop that we're, we practice agile, but rigid, big mature development shop, you know what I mean? We're, we're going to focus more on writing code because that's the efficiency. It's not the, the whole organization isn't built around just needing to do, to run the business.

the smaller you get, the more you have to focus more on the ability to pivot and react, which now is, hey, go solve the problem first, come back, let's talk about it. If we can solve it without writing a line of code, that's a lot cheaper than writing a bunch of code and deploying it.

Jess Agnew (36:47)
So the answer to does AI replace development is really kind of, but not really.

Andrew Moore (36:59)
I think it is one of those scenarios where...

You cannot draw a hard line on it. If you do, you're going to have problems. I saw so many people on LinkedIn when chat GPT first came into prevalence that were screaming to the hilltops. AI is terrible. You should not use it. I am a tech expert and AI is awful. Don't use it. And there are varying reasons and I'm I'm over overplaying it because it's entertainment, but

Jess Agnew (37:08)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Moore (37:34)
That was the general sentiment was like, it's either everything and this is changing our world forever or it's nothing is a passing fad. Don't worry about it. And all of those people, every single dang one of them are now back to the middle of, yeah, we should use it. This is cool. And by the way, I'm a consultant if you need help with your AI project. Okay. Just pretend we didn't see that two years ago.

Jess Agnew (38:01)
But

this all kind of leads us back into that, like, well, what's the effect on school, right? Like, do you do a boot camp? Do you do college? And I tend to land back on, do you absolutely need college to become a developer? No. But it can really, really help your career if you have gone through some level of liberal education that's going to teach you to think broader.

be more critical in how you dissect information, and to teach you the skills around even writing more coherently, understanding other perspectives better. All of that information, all that capability will help you in this world of AI digital world a lot better than what you would just come out of a boot camp with.

I just don't think you're going to get away from a college education, a liberal college education can be incredibly valuable in your journey.

Andrew Moore (39:10)
Again, don't disagree. I think... Again, it is not at all.

Jess Agnew (39:15)
It's not the only path. I just want to be clear on that. I am not saying

that's the only path. There are other things you can do to get to the same result. But if you're thinking about how am I going to grow a career as a developer when developing might be an ending career, if AI can do all the things I could learn in a boot camp, why do I need to be a developer? Well, there's more to it. And I think having that broader education can help you get to it.

Andrew Moore (39:44)
I think perhaps. I'm coming at this, most likely. I do think, I come at this with lot of skepticism because I think most things in our world deserve a pretty healthy shakeup every few decades. And I think that the vast university complex has gotten out of hand and...

Jess Agnew (39:47)
Because I'm so persuasive.

my gosh, can we do that

for our next episode? Because I've got feelings. We're saving for my daughter's education right now. And I have big feelings, OK?

Andrew Moore (40:15)
mercy.

Okay. Well,

we will not play well with others in that episode, I suspect. But, you know, that I think a lot of the time people look at college as like a, I'm either going to go be a executive or I'm going to go be something else. And that's the college decision. And I think fundamentally that's a flawed question even to ask is like,

If the value statement from a university is thought process and experience, I think you can, you said it, I'm not arguing, but you can do that in so many different ways. And as a society, we have placed this weight on a university education that is a bit classist in nature. Like if you didn't get to go to university, then you're not, you're not

Jess Agnew (40:56)
Yeah.

it can come across that way.

Andrew Moore (41:16)
of a certain ilk. And I don't care for that because again, a lot of the people that I've hired, a lot of the people I've worked with either had no formal education. So they're the people that taught themselves how to develop. And that's impressive in its own right. Or they're bootcamp graduates, or they've got a partial degree or whatever it is. And again, coming at this as a, as an executive, not a educator. like,

Jess Agnew (41:40)
you

Andrew Moore (41:46)
As a hiring manager, don't particularly care about your knowledge of, you know, Renaissance art, but those people tend to have more skin in the game or at least as much skin in the game. We started with this. We decided we were going to do it. We stuck with it. We fought through it. Now here we are and we're successful. I've got a right to be here.

Jess Agnew (42:11)
You just explained exactly what can duplicate that college capability, right? That impassioned, persevering, pushing through and learning mindset. I mean, that's what you're forced into if you go to a university, right? You end up studying until midnight, pushing yourself beyond the bounds of what you thought was possible, doubting 20...

gallons of coffee so that you can accomplish the thing that you need to accomplish. It's a very stressful, enlightening experience. That doesn't mean that you can't achieve something similar, but it has to be a, it's honestly more impressive when you do it outside of a university experience because there's no one making you do it in that scenario. You're the one who's pushing your own envelope, who's being curious and

dedicated and driving their own growth as a human. Frankly, I think it's wildly impressive the people that have done that and ended up with the same capabilities, the same skill set, if not better, because it was all, you know, hard won. Not that it's not hard won in university. I don't want to underplay the fact that it can be very, very difficult, but definitely hard won in a different sense. A little bit grittier.

Andrew Moore (43:34)
Yeah, I mean, I your

investment in your learning is a lot stronger when you're not in a university setting. think if you rewind all the way back to the beginning to, I don't know, Oxford was not the first university, but you get the picture. Rewind to the start.

universities gave an opportunity for you to learn unfettered by daily responsibilities and you didn't have, you could learn for knowledge sake. And when you fast forward into a scenario where we have a framework of four years and after that you get a degree and that's what allows you to get a job to be successful. You're not necessarily as invested in the learning as you are in getting the piece of paper at the end of the four years. And so

Jess Agnew (44:06)
Yeah.

Andrew Moore (44:23)
as an individual who is time boxed, like, hey, I've got a day job. I'm a music producer. I'm a roofing inspector. I'm a welder. I'm a whatever. And I want to be a developer. I want to be a cybersecurity professional or I want to be whatever. That puts you in a mindset of I got to learn this as fast as I can learn it and as good as I can learn it. Because a lot of these boot camps, too, don't necessarily have.

programs like you're not going to be sitting there for six months one way or the other. You've got to complete the curriculum.

Jess Agnew (44:57)
Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. I mean, there's that.

side by side, okay, yeah, you can do it in this path, but it's not the only path to get to the same thing. Through perseverance and curiosity and pushing yourself, you can take a number of boot camps, you can get the skills that you would learn in college, and you can come out of it with that same broader horizon, that same ability to critically think and push yourself that you might have achieved in the same way. So mean, yeah, I think that you can achieve the end result in a number of different ways. There's a package and a formula to get it going this route or...

you forge your own path.

Andrew Moore (45:33)
I think that's a good way to, a good place to wrap it up for this inaugural season two episode. But I think in summary, what we decided is it depends, which probably should have been the name of this podcast. depends. But the, sometimes, but that's the bit, right? Boot camps work. University works.

Jess Agnew (45:43)
Ha!

in most... as... it depends. Please welcome others slash it depends.

Andrew Moore (46:02)
everything works. AI is not taking all of our jobs. It will take some of them or some parts of them. You have to be growth minded. You have to be forward thinking. You have to be pragmatic because otherwise you're just going to be rote repetition and that's not where anybody wants to be when it comes down to how am I progressing myself. So that's us for today.

Jess Agnew (46:07)
Yeah.

Andrew Moore (46:29)
some technical difficulties that I will polish up. And now we have to go do other things this evening. So thank you for your time, Jess. It's always a pleasure. And for those of you that tuned back in, thanks for listening.

Jess Agnew (46:39)
You

same.