"Short" courses

I regularly see sweeping criticisms aimed at people who take short IT courses¹, and it annoys me. I’m an ESIEE Paris engineer, IT stream, class of 2007. If I add up all the time I spent coding during my training, it amounts to a few months, at most.

My engineering degree taught me a lot, and I was often aware of the strength this diversity provides in the job market. But I would never look down on people in initial training or, even more often, those retraining, who also know many things besides code and have completed a 3, 6, or 9-month course.

Of course, these courses are incomplete. But wasn’t I pretty incompetent myself when I started? Of course I was. And then I gained know-how, soft skills, and the ability to communicate, all rooted in my experience and skills. And that’s normal.

The quality of my initial training allowed me to get by quickly, without too much pain, and at a time in my life when I didn’t have too many worries. That’s no reason to feel superior; it’s rather an immense privilege.

I admire people who can assess their career, pivot to a new one, and jump into it when they have a mortgage, children, have to pay attention to their relationship, have community investments, or care for elderly relatives, all with far less naivety than I had when I started. They are true heroes.

Can we question how the sector trains (whether for retraining or not)? Yes, absolutely. I’ve trained people myself, and I know how programs are designed in many schools: to feed the biases of students’ parents.

Do short courses do better? No. They also sell an unrealistic time-to-market and exit salaries that are often grand promises. But that doesn’t mean people don’t graduate as competent as other juniors.

Is it a problem that people are juniors? I don’t think so. I believe many people can come to coding late, or superficially, and that’s okay. They’re not stealing anyone’s job. They get a job with their skills.

Is this what companies want? Perhaps not. And that makes it very hard for these new people in the market. Many are impoverished in statuses that make them bear the risk of their employment, at derisory daily rates.

Don’t companies have a role to play in this situation? Certainly. Few are inclined to hire these profiles because they don’t want to bear the cost of training these employees.

They end up demanding training during employees’ free time, even though they may have a legal obligation to keep their employees up to date for their positions (this is how it works in France). But honestly, at this level, it’s a culture of the entire development industry where the perception of skill development needs to be re-evaluated. We are often treated as clients of our own companies, responsible for our training with the leverage of looking elsewhere if we’re not happy.

This turnover dynamic means companies continuously hire juniors to perform tasks that now-senior people used to do, but no longer do since they’ve left to seek recognition elsewhere.

And since these companies need to replace identical profiles, they will naturally hire people who resemble those they had before, leaving little room for people in retraining (or for women if there are already few women in place).

None of this is the fault of the training programs; we should realize that. Training programs have their flaws (seriously, when I see web courses that don’t teach the basics of HTML, I cry), but this issue of matching trained profiles to company needs is a systemic market dynamic.