Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?
I feel like I have seen various waves of hype regarding programming bootcamps but the people who I have talked to about it are always people who are considering going or just graduated. Interested to hear from someone who's been out in the wild for at least a couple years.
What are you doing now? Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got? Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?
356 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadThe boot camp served its purpose in preparing me for the job. Namely, serving as a commitment device to force myself to study the initial couple hundred of hours one needs to be able to do entry level programming from scratch. Plus having them provide a curriculum and teachers was nice too, I guess, but secondary to the commitment factor. Having graduated from that was also probably not a detriment to have on my resume and I keep it on there since I have no other programming related education.
I suspect my experience is not unusual-- that the boot camp's value is in being a catalyst that unlocks someone's ability to be a programmer and teach themself most of the skills they need, rather than in being an information-imparting institution.
My cohort graduated about 23 and only 2 didn't find work. As far as I know, all but one of those that did are still working in the field -- mostly as Front End engineers. I've doubled my pre-App Academy salary twice over and am working as Senior Full Stack Developer.
I skewed more towards the experienced side of my cohort but I was sans-degree and had a previous career in tech. I mainly went through it because I knew it would be the fastest route towards getting my portfolio together and a job, albeit an expensive way to do that.
Most of what I learned didn't really prepare my skills (I've been writing code since I was 6), but it gave me confidence that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I don't do Rails on the job and I'm pretty happy continuing that way for now. One thing I did get though was an extremely solid foundation in SQL which has paid off in my career enormously.
My skill with data, sysops and ability to keep the whole project in my head are what set me apart from my peers. I'm the guy everyone calls to do 'weird, arcane shit' (not my words) with regexp, sed, awk, etc. Small scripts combining the power of Ruby with basic shell commands that replace large, crumbling applications. Things are going great.
I do wish that we had spent more time just practicing interviewing. I consider myself a weak interview and have missed some jobs I'm well-qualified for but didn't do as well as I'd like. Or at least I'd like the ability to go back and drill with folks going through that process now.
I'd been reading/posting on HN for years before I even considered the career change, btw.
I am now a lead engineer at a small company. I'm grateful for the experience, although I suspect the situation is tougher for current grads. It's pretty amazing seeing 90% of applicants for dev openings be fresh bootcamp grads.
Big chunks of the recent cohorts I've seen are people with STEM degrees, usually from seriously good places, who didn't get much experience writing code in school. a/A is mostly throwing them at the large companies that hire large groups of recent grads.
Switching their JS framework curriculum to React probably helped a lot and most of the people I talk to there lean more on their JavaScript than their Ruby.
I'm grateful for the experience but I'm mixed for recommending it to others. It has to be a certain kind of person in certain lucky situations to begin with. I didn't have to pay rent while I did it, which made it all possible, really.
If you do your prep work and are ready to dedicate 100% to the bootcamp and all that it entails, you will certainly be successful and find the job you want. If you are not fully prepared for the commitment it takes, you will likely not fulfill your expectations.
You get out of it what you put into it.
As for my colleagues, I believe most are employed, but I will offer that you only get what you put into that kind of intensive training. It's only meaningful and effective if you really care. The folks who might have been enticed by a cool job in a growth sector don't do as well as those who code simply because it's a compulsive habit and joy.
I'll submit that there are myriad things you can't absorb in a brief program, that's life. If I was rich I would live to go to college again. But I would also say that I've met plenty of CS grads of traditional 4 year programs that don't have the same drive or problem solving skills as that I've seen come from bootcamp students.
Worth it, especially if you're a grown up with the passion to push yourself and the maturity to follow through.
Hype is all nonsense.
This is 2.5 years out. Part of the issue too is that "bootcamps" is too nebulous. Some are 7 months full-time, some are 6 week night classes. It's not always apples to apples.
My program was Galvanize, six months full time.
The code place I went to did a really good job preparing me for the actual work. I am a senior level contractor and actually get to work on interesting stuff.
I know over 10 people off the top of my head who also went to code bootcamps and are all making over 70k in LCOL locations. They are thriving and not hack's in the least.
SF / NYC are certainly not, Mississippi certainly is, but where is the threshold? Oregon? Colorado? Vermont? Pennsylvania?
I had zero background before the bootcamp, and the bootcamp itself was pretty shocking.
The biggest part of the bootcamp was having it on my resume - giving my limited knowledge "legitimacy".
EDIT: My starting salary was mid 40s after I finished bootcamp. And I felt like I knew nothing for a good 6 months - luckily many employers are happy to take chances on you if you're willing to learn and have common sense.
I'd advocate something like freecodecamp to others looking at bootcamps that can't afford the "good" ones (hackreactor etc)
The bootcamp I went to did a group project at the end (that was a complete failure and waste of time) - however, I made it seem quite the opposite during interviews. I also built my own side project for a real business (very simple app, basic CRUD) that took 2-3 weeks to build (business owner is a family friend).
Talking about these 2 projects in interviews was invaluable, as was brushing up on common questions/terminology (SOLID, OOP, REST vs SOAP etc) and basic programming problems (FizzBuzz, fibonacci etc)
We hired a guy with 7 years experience to be our Lead Frontend dev and he basically built nothing usable for 4 months before we fired him. He made twice as much as me but my title was still Jr at the time. He didn't add a single piece of infrastructure to make his workload easier. My boss and I threw out all of his work, split it up and got it done in a month.
7 years of experience can very easily end up being 7 years of 1st year experience. I want to see some kind of scale in their responsibilities/accomplishments.
There are some junior-experience people out there with the potential to get a lot done right now.
I took a low offer and had to bust my ass and show up a few $120k/yr bad apples that we hired to get my salary raised to an appropriate level and that still took about 18 months over 3 raises.
It would have been easier if I'd left and gone somewhere else and for most other people it will be too.
P.S. How did you know I like baked goods?
I was able to take what I learned and apply it to a CRM that I had worked with for years prior to going to General Assembly. I was able to develop services around this CRM that my former employer still uses and I was recognized by the company that provides the CRM for my contributions within their CRM's community.
Right now, I am on my own, still trying to figure out where to go next. I think the biggest takeaway I got from the program was to keep learning; it's part of why I keep coming back to hacker news.
This wasn't always the case, but it was overwhelmingly the majority. I'm not that impressed by CTOs of tiny businesses unless they're also co-founders and domain experts on top of that.
Someone in my cohort did a couple months of contracting, one job and then cofounded a startup all within like 8 months. He's the sole dev and his cofounder is a rich friend. Their business is in the California marijuana industry. I am not too envious.
I moved back to my home state of Florida following graduation.
Within two months I landed a Junior Rails Developer position at Listen360 - a badass company in Georgia. I relocated and have been with the company for over three years now.
In that time I've developed JrDevJobs.com, a job board for junior devs. Built several side-projects, and taken on contract work at a growing rate.
Bootcamps aren't for everyone, and they don't guarantee success. They are a spring-board and structure for those who are committed and able to learn the trade.
Software development is hard as hell. It challenges your abilities in every way: decision making, risk assessment, empathy, time management, and your ability to handle stress. But for those that love it know the rewards to be worth the struggle.
I'd like to say my bootcamp prepared me for the job I have, but I also know that I was going to become an engineer regardless. I saw the bootcamp as a way to get there faster than learning on my own.
I've toured and given speeches at several bootcamps across the country. I've seen patterns amongst the students: there are those that think they're "done" once they graduate, and those that think they're just getting started once they graduate. The latter tend to outperform the former. Full disclosure, this is totally anecdotal.
I think bootcamps are great for those who love to learn, are always challenging themselves, have a competitive nature, and love technology.
I ask all the interns that I interview to hire, "why do you want this job?" I can pretty much tell by the answer alone whether or not they are going to work out. Those that say, "I didn't know what to study" or "I heard there was a good career in this" I can pretty much write off. They almost never want to learn anything except what they learned for a grade. Often its over for them after school, they'll never have the drive to learn what they really need to advance. I always tell them that dollar for dollar, we are one of the poorest paid fields. The amount of time we spend learning vs how much we are paid is way out of proportion even with our technical salaries. They never believe me.
It's those that get kind of that geekish giggle about some theoretical concept (state machines, some language concept they discovered they think is cool, compilers, etc.) I know are going to be great. These are the ones that I really go after. With these people it doesn't matter how much they know at that moment, because when they're done, they'll know more. They'll keep doing it too.
Speaking of teams, I'm usually the least productive member of any team I've been a part of because I often fall into the role of project servant: someone who bounces across team members as they get stuck with something or another. The best compliment I've gotten is that the role is that of the guy who gets ammo from person to person at the end of saving private Ryan: not the sexiest job but someone is doing it.
Helping them see what they've missed or otherwise get over the hurdles? Sounds like a senior dev to me.
That's what I'd call them.
I've always like troubleshooter, though: when there's trouble, they shoot it.
I would be careful about making that assumption - it was only 4 1/2 years ago when I landed my first job as a developer after 2 1/2 years of searching for any career track job after leaving my PhD program in mathematics. I was someone who was willing to do anything and was open to a wide variety of jobs. I put in long hours outside of work early in my career to learn and grow, with the mindset that I was behind and needed to accelerate my learning greatly - I had a work ethic that might be seldom seen in the industry, and a proven intelligence to match.
Fast forward to today, I am right now actively interviewing and being hotly contested by many companies for senior, lead, and management roles, including the likes of Google and Apple with multiple onsites scheduled or being scheduled (4 alone between Google and Apple over the next week or so).
IMO companies should try to tease out characteristics of people - how do they handle difficult situations, how open are they to feedback, how hard are they willing to work (especially earlier on), and how smart are they? Positive answers to these questions when interviewing inexperienced people are probably the biggest factors in determining the likelihood of someone being successful IMO (don't ask these questions directly of course, but the answers should be teased out).
I was a philosophy major who took some CS courses in college, programmed as a hobby and was working as a product manager. The bootcamp was a great way to build an understanding of the production software development process. It also allowed me to build a strong skillset within one tech stack (MEAN).
The bootcamp was absolutely not an end to my cs/engineering education. When I started at Google the learning curve was steep and I have been constantly taking at least one coursera/udacity/edx course for years as well as company internal classes. Hack Reactor wasn't an end all solution but it gave me a great lay of the land and was instrumental to landing a job of the quality that I did.
You know exactly what they are going to question you on(algorithms), so it is straightforward to prepare for (which is not the same as "easy")
I also planned for the Google interview to be relatively late in my job hunt. I already had offers in hand and a lot of on-site practice going into it. I doubt I would have passed had it been my first on-site engineering interview.
Beyond that nothing special. A lot of CTCI stuff and daily practice.
I was prepared enough to not totally screw things up at my first job. I was an expert in Javascript and reasonably knowledgeable at data structures and how to implement basic web stuff.
I'm now more focused on back end things...AWS, infrastructure, services, etc.
As far as I know, most of my cohort is still working at good jobs.
I also read a ton of books on design patterns, architecture, deployment, ops, etc.
If you're totally new to deployment, I'd do something like this:
* Get comfortable with the basic Unix/Linux commands (basically, to the point where you can navigate the file system and mv/cp/rm files with ease, change chmod permissions, etc.)
* Create a simple webapp in the stack of your choice. Literally a webserver for a site that says 'hello world'.
* Deploy it on Heroku. With their CLI it's like a single command.
* Congrats! You deployed a site! Go on Heroku's management dashboard and take a look at the logs. They won't make much sense, but get a feel for what's going on.
* Go on digitalocean and make a droplet, which is a VM that's running on their servers. Pick the Ubuntu 16.04 droplet. (Note, you can pick 'One Click Apps' which are VMs that come preloaded with the stack of your choice, but don't do that now). Read about how SSH works. Now SSH into your droplet. Cool, now you're connected to your server!
* Learn how to install the dependencies for your webapp. I don't think the droplets even come with git, so you gotta install everything from scratch. Then get your app running!
* From here, keep playing with your webapp. Figure out how to make your server run your updated code. How to add a database. Do it until you're really comfortable with running your site.
* By now you've run into a ton of issues with the site breaking. It's hard to keep your dev env and the live server synced! Start learning about Docker. Dockerize your app and deploy your app to Digital Ocean as a Docker image.
* When you're comfortable with THAT, start learning AWS. Learn what a EC2 instance is, what RDS is, what you can do with S3, etc.
* Finally, deploy to AWS!
You can use the free account tier at Digital Ocean / AWS to accomplish all these tasks.
Good luck and have fun!
I get alumni surveys all the time asking what things they should teach and the one thing that is consistently never on the list is ops/cloud-related training.
Care to tell who you are and what the company is?
How did you find the article?
How did you go to a senior role in 3 years?
I'll also add that my account is 3275 days older than yours and isn't a throwaway.
To the above poster that was flagged, it sort of sounds like you're accusing me of lying, but I'll give you the benefit of best intent and answer your questions.
Yes, I created this account just to make this comment. I was introduced to HN by someone in my bootcamp cohort. Never felt the need to comment on something until a post that was directed right at me. Never made an account either because no reason to. So, hope that clears it up.
I think you are assuming my tech progression started at Hack Reactor 3ish years ago. It in fact has been most of my life. I was building computers from spare hardware in grade school, learned some code in middle, took 2 yrs of college classes while in high school to prepare for the CCNA exam (cisco certified network associate). I entered college as a computer engineer.
Then I switched to a totally different career path from which I learned how to be an effective leader and teacher. When I hit the end of that path, I came back around and did Hack Reactor to work my way into an engineering role.
I became a senior in a relatively short amount of time because of my background but also because I learned a lot at my first startup gig after my mentor quit, leaving me as the only engineer responsible for the codebase. Thrown into the deep end for sure, as the business had to keep moving forward.
I have taken on volunteer work at my current job outside my normal responsibilities, give meaningful review to my peers, and work on large, impactful projects. I make it a point to get to know other engineers and get my name known in the org. I placed myself in the senior role and was rewarded with the title after.
Another point, many of the people in my class already had a technical background as well. More then half. I think among all bootcamps this is probably more rare today.
They tend to have started with strong backgrounds in something else. People who would excel in a lot of fields, in no small part because they continue to learn.
If you did a tech bootcamp three years ago and it went fantastically, you're probably reading HN today and will see and reply to this. The more success you had, the more likely you're a developer today!
If it went terribly, you might still be working at Starbucks and don't read HN very often.
Seriously, though, after some early career burnout I did a stint at a restaurant job to pay the bills while I decided what I wanted to do with my life...and that was by far my most productive period of time as far as keeping up on general tech news, personal projects, academic research/reading/conferences, etc...
A non-code day job can be a great way to have the mental energy to spend on non-job code. :)
I'm not questioning the argument about frequency, I'm questioning the underlying assumption that "success" in a bootcamp is only measured by employment as a developer.
If you don't measure the success of a coding boot camp by "employment as a developer", what would you measure it by?
It's been 4 years since my bootcamp experience and I very, very much doubt I'll ever seek "employment as a developer" again except in the case of failure as an entrepreneur.
Now they're talking about starting code camps targeting other vets, help with transitioning to civilian life, build community, mitigate PTSD, work with kids, etc.
I've been mentoring a number of our senior support folks on coding, and they've been doing something along the lines of a boot camp. My management finds that support team are able to better understand how things work, attempt to debug things they'd have been afraid of, and ask better questions of software engineers. Support engineers get to do something different and are building skills. They have seen "coders" move quickly through support to the engineering team. Another group manages our tools, but I hope they'll be able to hack on some tools for our team. Some people will stay in support, but it should be less stressful because they can understand how things work better. From a distance you can see how the online communications have changes between the two organizations.
From my past experience in Pharma I know there was similar interest from scientists to learn to code (if they didn't already). I also know that some of the designers working on electronic detailing apps for sales at the time really wanted to learn to code because they had to transition from Flash to HTML 5 and JS.
For these reasons, I think that the make up of coding boot camps may surprise some. A differentiation may be related to where someone is in their career. Someone laid off, or without a job is probably more like to jump to a boot camp than someone who has a job. Quitting to take part in a boot camp is probably a huge jump for people, if they are in the tech sector because they may have more awareness of what is involved, or other means to make the jump to coding.
The fact that there is not a single negative response is basically proof positive that people who don't succeed at coding boot camps do not read HN. Unless you happen to believe that almost everyone does succeed after coding boot camps. I find that notion incredible, personally.
That's exactly how my career started.
Which still doesn't mean it is not rare but maybe a bit less rare than you thought it was.
If they are different, one can not make statistics out of the comments here.
Hypothetical example: Say only 1% of coding bootcamp graduates find the program to be a "success" for them. All of that 1% read hacker news and zero of the 99% read hacker news. If you ask about bootcamp on hacker news you'll only get HN reader's perspective, then you'd believe bootcamps are wildly successful whereas the real number is the opposite.
I search for next books to read by searching first on HN and also the constructive discussion that takes place here always leaves me being a bit smarter.
My point isn't that non-programmers can't or don't read HN. My point is that there are more programmers reading and posting on HN than Starbucks baristas. If you hated your boot camp, the odds of you reading HN is lower. Selection bias doesn't mean absolutes, it means probabilities.
> after some early career burnout I did a stint at a restaurant job to pay the bills while I decided what I wanted to do with my life
I really respect that. I think I'd like to do the same, but the mortgage can't be paid on minimum wage.
His day job? A bus driver.
I saw that in the comment section of YouTube, people always ask him "why don't you go code for a job and make tons of money!". His response is that coding is something loves to do, and he wouldn't want to risk losing that love for it, by making it a job.
I love the idea but sadly in the US, living on a bus driver salary would be very difficult. He was based in Finland I believe, so I assume their bus drivers make more money.
As is often mentioned, that depends on where you choose to live. Around here, I know someone who was a bus driver and a homeowner. She was quite happy with it.
One person's bug is another person's feature :-)
That guy is awesome. I love all of his videos.
If you are now working in Starbucks, you aren't likely to read HN _because you are fed up with this stuff_. Not because you can't.
Most people outside of the startup scene, including myself, especially those over 35, are only in this for the money. That doesn't mean we can't find both personal and professional success.
My guess is there would be more failure cases than success cases, but I don't see many negative stories here and suspect much selection bias here.
You're not wrong, I could have worded it better. Mostly I wanted to give a little more context on what I meant by selection bias.
I'm much more attuned to these things from the following podcasts and blog:
https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/
http://theknowledgeproject.libsyn.com/
https://youarenotsosmart.com/
A few of my favourite episodes and articles:
- http://theknowledgeproject.libsyn.com/rory-sutherland-on-the...
- https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/01/13/yanss-092-avoiding-t...
- https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/06/habits-vs-goals/
Most relevant I guess:
- https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/08/04/yanss-055-psychology...
Boot camps are no silver bullet. Like any kind of education, more is better, and the quality of the student is a factor. I will admit that while I got a great job, but there are fundamental CS concepts I'm still playing catchup with. Not sure if I would really be all the more effective as a developer if I did have a traditional degree, and maybe I would, but I can provide for my family and have no regrets.
All said, I think you might be right about some selection bias.
If plenty of folks enter a boot camp and wash out because they aren't prepared, I don't think that's much about the students. I think that's a huge failure on the part of the boot camp program.
The theory of boot camps is that you turn anybody who qualifies into somebody basically competent. E.g., US military boot camp drop out rates are around 10%. If ill-specified student quality is used to justify higher failure rates, then we end up with something almost tautological: only the quality students succeed, and the way you measure quality is by whether or not they succeeded.
If you want a silver bullet for success, go to an ivy league or similarly-pedigreed school. There are plenty of people graduating from the top schools that burn out on their programs, but still get into successful gigs based on the reputation of their degree, and the connections they made.
Didn't study hard in high school, or Mommy And Daddy didn't send you to private school? Too bad. Life is competitive, and it needs to be that way if we want to make progress as a species.
No one is saying failure should come with punishments like unemployment or homelessness, but not every program out there needs to be as easy to coast through with C's as Harvard is. Not everyone needs to be a developer, doctor, pilot, etc., either. But the military needs almost everyone to get through boot camp.
I am fine with the programs being hard. But these programs should only accept students who are likely to make it through. If they create a hard program but take anybody who can write a check, then it's a badly run school.
I hope you can see how the above disagreements are still related... It seems self-evident, no?
In my limited experience, the ones that struggled most were the ones who simply didn't do the prework that was asked of them. Some people think education is something that will happen to them if they pay somebody enough, compared to those that went to a boot camp to accelerate the self-education they had already started.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean the answers are uninteresting or of no value. It is still very interesting to see what what some people who have gone through a bootcamp do with their careers.
I don't think selection bias is a problem for the questions the OP asked.
A handful tried and failed to get development jobs, and went back to their old career, or pivoted more or less laterally to a tech-adjacent field that pays less than development. I can tell you that 100% of the people who failed to get development jobs were people who, during the bootcamp, visibly put in the bare minimum of effort to skate by.
They focused pretty heavily on soft skills, like communication and pairing, and also somewhat on generic software construction ideas, on thinking through a problem and breaking it down into its component pieces. The curriculum used JS and Rails, although I didn’t feel that I had much more than a surface familiarity of either by the end of the cohort.
I think that, in general, if a bootcamp has a decent focus on software construction and doesn't totally fall down on teaching you the technical stuff, you’ll probably be prepared to work, at least, as a junior dev. But, you can't just rely on a bootcamp. You really have to spend a lot of time (like, a ton of time) learning on your own, writing code and reading code others have written.
Since then, I’ve been working steadily as a mostly front-end and sometimes full-stack developer.
My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps. But, I believe most of the people who wanted to be devs are still doing just that!
I think that's really funny about the first ~3 DBC cohorts. A few grads of those first cohorts went on to start App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright Academy (I think) and others like it.
If you look at the early cohorts of DBC, anyone of those people could have learned to program on their own or already was. I think a lot of smart risk takers saw a huge opportunity that was wide open and ran with it.