Ask HN: Any “bootcamps” or courses for intermediate/advanced people?

>"Students must pass a rigorous selection process to be admitted to any of our programs."

Would you be able to share what that selection process entails exactly?

although most of the content is ruby/rails based, the concepts are widely applicable to improving your skills as a software engineer.

tl;dr: Big Nerd Ranch offers short retreats for intermediate and advanced instructors. They are not cheap but they are thorough and powerful, as long as you're willing to put in the work.

Details: We have short (typically 5 day), intensive courses. The instructor leads the class through a series of lectures and intense labs, building out real applications throughout the week. The instructor works with each student to help them maximize what they can learn and achieve during the week.

There is no magic for scaling across different ability levels, but there are ways to do this better or worse. Our courses target intermediate to advanced level learners. We intentionally build our chapters, demonstrations, and lectures to be very dense with material. For the advanced students, they're able to glean API gotchas and sharp corners, as well as real world tips (pretty much all our instructors are also active consulting developers), and lots of looks at different working practices. Seeing another developer work is a great way to learn new techniques.

For intermediate or closer to beginner students, they won't that level of detail as much, as they're still absorbing all the new APIs, design patterns, and details necessary to just get apps building and shipping.

Our courses allow you to get out what you put in. In other words, there's not any particular magic to leveling up. You have to put in the hard work yourself. But I believe our retreat-style approach - where we remove or take care of all possible distractions, and provide expert aid at your call - gives you the best chance to maximize how much you can learn in a week. Food and lodging is included. You'll spend the week learning, programming, and going for hikes every day. It's sort of my ideal world. :D

We don't call them bootcamps half-heartedly. You'll be exhausted by Friday. But if we've done our job right, you'll feel like you've just shortcut several months of work in leveling up as a developer.

The first took a while to find: Two 4 to 6-hour sessions per week, for 8 weeks. 200+ hours of work.

The second looks sketchy: Tuition: Not cheap

How high are we talking about? Let's say around ~5 yrs exp dev who would otherwise be considered intermediate level elsewhere spends the equivalent of 3-6 months of full time effort in preparation: what comp can such a candidate expect to negotiate in the big4/5?

In college I graduated in a digital media like program, and took a "super minor" in Computer Science- one Data Structures and Discrete Math class, and two courses on OOP software design. I have familiarity with some structures, understand the general concept of Big O but I'd like to fill in some gaps.

So it may be valid to swallow your pride and do the basic course, most of which you know, to find what you don't.

Or to trust that you can fill in holes yourself on demand. (People's belief about how well they can do this tends to exceed their actual ability...)

Or to have someone evaluate you to find those blind spots.

If you could cut out the middlemen (schools), we could probably get better "professors" (i.e. one of the best people in the field - im sure people in industry would love to pick up an extra 10-20k to teach 1 class a year) for cheaper and in smaller class room settings.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........Just gotta figure out how to do the signaling properly so businesses will look at the classes you took and think 'I want to hire that person.'

The best thing about Bradfield though is that it has the feel of a lifestyle business run by people whose call to arms in life is learning and teaching computer science. This isn't an interview skills factory - the focus is on learning and loving an important and fascinating branch of science, mathematics, and thinking. Personally, I think that difference ultimately makes you a better interviewer and engineer in practice, but again, that's not the point.

Still one of the best decisions I've made yet.

I took a 10wk leave from work to go full-time through Bradfield and would recommend it to anyone that's spent time working as an engineer and is interested in leveling up generally or refining a specific skill set.

The stuff I learned there has ended up showing up almost daily for me at work and I've since been promoted to technical lead.

If you're a mostly self-taught engineer lacking foundational CS knowledge (I personally have a minor in CS; most of my colleagues at Bradfield went through a bootcamp) you will very quickly discover and confront the gaps in your knowledge.

Regardless of your title at work (maybe level II engineer, tech lead, whatever), you will be made to feel like a beginner in short order when they ask you to write programs that manipulate bytes, that deal with concurrency, or do anything more nitty gritty than manipulate JSON in your high-level language of choice...while disorienting initially, I personally have found Bradfield to be one of the most illuminating and rewarding educational experiences of my career.