90% of jokes at DBC are programming word play jokes, so...I would not be surprised to learn they are building a storefront that sells single jacks for playing jacks.
The rapid expansion was likely a huge part of why those coding bootcamps closed. Coding bootcamps generally aren't major educational institutions - they're usually more like recruiting agencies that happen to target people who are about 9 weeks of serious effort away from being entry-level developers. That is, they're limited by the number of high-quality applicants that they can find and vet, not by the ability to recruit teachers and refine their curriculum.
This makes sense to me and rings true to my own experience. I went to a bootcamp and the people that did the best were those with a good deal of prior experience, and thus able to digest the most information. Students coming with zero (or close to it) programming experience/effort didn't perform well.
I'm including myself in the "good deal of prior experience" group, I did fine in the class and in my subsequent jobs. My class even had students that had been web devs on less desirable stacks using the class to ramp up on rails and they did even better.
Yeah, one of the best-served demographics is "People who attended at least 2 years of engineering school and either did not graduate or are underemployed after graduation."
"But the coding boot-camp field now faces a sobering moment, as two large schools have announced plans to shut down this year — despite backing by major for-profit education companies, Kaplan and the Apollo Education Group, the parent of the University of Phoenix."
Not sure "despite" is the right phrasing here. I'm a DBC grad from about three years ago, and I know DBC had various issues, but I do suspect that there was pressure from Kaplan to expand rapidly, crank prices, and decrease the quality of the education (because that's how Kaplan made their money everywhere else they've been profitable). Kaplan bought them right before my cohort started, and there was serious concern even then that it was a bad omen. I think a lot of startups in general would do well with less pressure for rapid growth, and I suspect that the bootcamp market is much the same.
Nailed it, did an online course with Kaplan a few years back (Diploma) and was pretty chafed by the experience. The content was dated, the "teaching methods" non-existent, with pretty ridiculous qualification criteria.
I quit the Iron Yard right after Apollo bought them/imvested in them. I have to say, the situation was similar. Reminds me of DHH's semi regular rants about the pitfalls of selling your business... It almost always is a bad move for the product, and is often regretted by the founders, despite a large windfall.
Thank you! I remember when in High School, everyone was worried about standardized tests, Kaplan and Princeton Review were considered horrible for SAT/ACT prep. Most of the top students reported that local prep classes were much better, despite having several standardized locations throughout each city (Testmasters for Houston, KD for Dallas).
It's not surprising that Kaplan, a company that relies on services that are supposed to improve performance but not actually teach, would suck at teaching skills. I think the debate should expand from just coding schools vs uni to comparing coding schools.
Current Data Science Student at Galvenize in Phoenix here.
I came from a mix of technologies (approximate knowledge, but a master of none) before settling into the data sciences (Python ecosystem).
Galvenize has been precisely the challenge I was looking for and so much more. I barely got by the interview process, but picked up a Veteran Scholarship worth half my $16,000 tuition along the way.
Quit my job as a Salesforce case jockey and currently trying to stay afloat with the curriculum.
It's intense. As it should be. I want it that way. Otherwise everyone would be doing it. A counter argument might be that; "every one and their mother is taking a 'Data Science' title for the pay." From 2013 to now, that may have a lot of truth, but they are eventually found out I hope.
As for my cohort. There is a Physics PhD, undergrads in Mathematics and Physics, an acctuary Statistician from an insurance company, a Mom, and Biology grad, and a Veteran. An elclectic group I feel.
At this point, half way through, we just want to survive and not wash out.
Finally, once capstone projects get rolling in a couple weeks and whom is left of us should be feeling pretty good about their accomplishment and competent to take on entry and junior level Data Science roles.
"There is a Physics PhD, undergrads in Mathematics and Physics, an acctuary Statistician from an insurance company, a Mom, and Biology grad, and a Veteran. An elclectic group I feel."
How can this work? I mean, I can understand those with a math background being there to learn the tooling and programming, but how can a mom (presumably with no prior education?) and a vet (also presumably without any other qualifications) keep up? Or, if they're teaching at the level of 'this is the slope in a linear equation', what's in it for the math guys? I just don't understand how this sort of thing works in real life.
It's implied that the vet is the commenter themselves ("picked up a Veteran Scholarship worth half my $16,000 tuition"), who "came from a mix of technologies (approximate knowledge, but a master of none)" - hardly "no qualifications."
There's no reason to assume the mom isn't similar (many stay-at-home mothers in the US have college degrees).
Because dozens of bootcamps are churning out tens of thousands of candidates a year. There's only so many entry level positions to fight over, especially if they all have essentially the same skill set (full stack web).
Universities churn out teens of thousands of candidates every year as well. Actually there are at least a thousand universities in the us. Let's call it 30 cs students at each. That's 30k. Stanford has 574 last year in undergrad / 4
His point was that thousands of people coming out of bootcamps were saturating the market. My point is I think the market is bigger than that or bootcamps wouldn't exist.
Maybe you are correct but I think that bootcamps are created for attracting people to spend their money on a premise that they will get payed very good as programmers.
Here in Minnesota we went from getting almost no developer applicants and unable to fill seats to a TON of absolutely under qualified applicants who went to boot camps.
I'm not sure it's an improvement.
We've hired a few, but only one has actually worked out.
Do you remember from what boot camps these people were from? I understand you don't want to shame people but curious as to whether there's been much success from even the bigger, more well known camps
Could you elaborate on what you hired the bootcamp graduates to do, what you mean by "under qualified" for the rejected candidates, and the gap between expectations and performance of the ones you did hire?
It's almost as if putting huge expansionary pressure on (mostly) locally-minded organizations causes them to fail. Who knew?
A couple of cherry-picked examples don't mean the coding bootcamp industry is going anywhere. IMO, there's no reason to panic until these bootcamps are being advertised alongside x-ray technician jobs during midday reruns of Judge Judy.
Now, the glut of junior devs entering the market - that's something to be a smidge concerned about.
I went to 2 bootcamps The Starter League Web Dev '12 and Mobile Makers for iOS Dev '14. Neither of the bootcamps are still in existence today. I feel fortunate to have gone through them when I did. Post Bootcamp I did independent work for 5 years, Web/Mobile Dev, before joining a startup.
IMO Bootcamps are great, people try and add up the cost and run the numbers, but the experience of growing and struggling through stuff with others, in an in-person environment, was enriching.
If there was a Kotlin Bootcamp in my area I'd be interested in learning more.
There is no STEM shortage and hasn't been for decades. Unemployment for CS grads in the UK is 14% according to the Graun (other sources have it at only 13%). And these people want to charge you a fortune claiming they can teach you better than a 3-year degree in a few weeks.
Is that for CS itself? The stats I've seen published in the past bundle lots of computer related subjects together, which massively distorts the picture.
Once you consider the consolidation of the web into a few companies, and the news every week of another company outsourcing jobs to low cost locations, it's clear we are near or passed "peak tech" in the West.
People paying for training should look into things that can't be outsourced.
That's easier said than done. Which visa do I get if I'm a British citizen who wants to work in
the US? The only realistic option is the H1B. This requires me to have a job offer already, can only be applied for at a certain time of year, and makes switching jobs a pain once I'm there. All the other visas either (i) have no path to residency or (ii) are very difficult to get.
Huh? The main difficulty lies in getting authorization to work in the US, and EU citizens don't get any kind of preferential treatment in the visa application process.
Remote interviewing is easy now. We have Skype, hangouts, etc.
First, our salaries aren't high compared to the value we generate for these companies.
Second, the relatively higher salaries we get out here are driven by two things: 1) the number of companies competing for talent and 2) the artificial scarcity induced by how they define the arena of competition (over-focus on "CS fundamentals" and under-focus on engineering fundamentals).
If demand is high, because of a large amount of companies that are competing for talent... And supply is low enough that it can't fulfill that demand, then that is a shortage.
Supply being unable to fulfill a large amount of demand is the definition of a shortage.
Sort of off topic, but in the second picture the whiteboard says "Ajacks" (and not ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and xml). Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors, unless this is just a staged shot, or maybe a joke I didn't get.
Not that you need to know what the acronym stands for (hell, no one I know uses the technique to get xml anymore anyways!), but it is weird to see the details wrong in such a detail-oriented discipline, and wouldn't people wonder where the name came from?
I think it's a joke. I doubt that the instruction is exclusively verbal; they must have seen "AJAX" somewhere along the line before whiteboarding Web applications. They're just having fun.
No, it's completely on-topic! These bootcamps are not teaching these people how to be effective developers when they skip the "hard stuff" and bring in the lowest common idiom in lieu of that. It's so difficult to try and re-teach people this exact concept--try explaining to someone who knows nothing but jQuery and AJAX that a promise has nothing to do with fetching data.
Sure, our UX/UI guy does "AJAX" to create working prototypes of his designs before handing it off to be stuffed into React / Ionic / WhateverJS (which is quickly becoming the standard requirement for a UX person), so it's not obsolete tech by any standard. But let's not act like "boutique" web dev shops are actually still a thing... stay relevant people, especially if you're paying those sorts of fees to show up and learn how to build an Angular2 app on headless Rails in 2017.
Groups pick a team name for their projects, and they clearly picked ajacks as a play on "Ajax"... Possibly they also have 2 people named jack on the team.
If I was making dummy applications to show basics of how browsers, networks, web servers and databases work (which it looks like the rest of the picture is doing), I find it wholly plausible that someone comes up with a play of words on fundamental concepts like that.
> ["Ajacks"] Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors...
Yeah... but that's just one word on whiteboard totally out of context. You don't know who wrote it, it could have been a student literally writing it for the first time after hearing it uttered, or perhaps, the instructor was spelling out the correct pronunciation to discourage folks from saying "A-J-A-X". Whatever the case, this doesn't make for a good "gotcha."
IMHO, there's too many jargon-jockeys in this field and not enough people who can truly explain things. Getting the acronyms strictly correct is the least of the problems.
Once recruiters figured out that placing these under qualified people into jobs was not a good thing, the bootcamps started to train people how to fake their resumes. Just like how people figured out that if they want a specific job, they only need to update their resume to include all the keywords in the job description.
When I was hiring and screening hundreds of people, applications would show 'projects' completed on them as if they were real work. Hired.com was full of this for a while until they started blocking them there too. People would go so far as to make a domain name for a class project appear as if it was a real company. You'd go look at their github and realize they only made a few commits towards the 'project'. How is that a demonstration of skill?
I'm sure a few people have come out of these bootcamps with some real knowledge and skills. But this is the edge case, not the norm. You can't shortcut your way to a well paying software engineering career by spending a ton of money.
Folks gotta start somewhere. If someone is sufficiently capable and motivated to put together a basic app why not count that experience? Surely if they built it then their work is exactly a demonstration of their skill.
It was a 'team' effort. So, when you go look at the git history of the 'project', you can see who in the team actually contributed. Usually, it wasn't the person looking for a job. Then you wonder, ok, maybe shared computer... which makes it even harder to figure out. How is that a win for people who are paying tons of money to get an 'education'?
I believe strongly that software engineering is an art form that requires tons of practice to get good at. As such, you wouldn't expect a designer or artist to show up at an interview and not be able to show examples of their work. Just like a software engineer should be able to show something as well. Of course, the counter argument to that is maybe they didn't have time to work on something extra curricular. Except for the fact that the people who did the extra curricular work in high school, got into better colleges. Go figure.
Even worse is that I did try to interview some of these people and it became clear that the bootcamps were about training for the minimal viable education. Leaving a lot of basic fundamentals out. I'd ask what idempotency is and get blank stares. So sad.
Yes, you have to start somewhere, but that doesn't mean you are immediately prepared to get a job as soon as you graduate. That is part of the broken promise of these bootcamps.
If they submit projects they did not contribute to then that is an issue. Your other points however, I disagree with.
- all code I write commercially will have dozens of contributors. It's a team sport and you need to be able to play well with others to succeed.
- the best place to get experience is in the works place. That is why folks hire juniors. They will have massive gaps in their knowledge, but they will also be keen and in learning mode. Help them improve and become great developers. They will do much better in a commercial environment with good guidance than struggling at home alone
I wasn't arguing against working with other people. LOL.
What I'm saying is that you should have clearly identifiable portions that you can point at as something you did. I also think that it takes extra curricular activity to truly master a subject. You can't just rely on others to show you everything. You have to experiment and learn on your own too.
Idempotency is a good example of a trivia term that would be unreasonable to expect most recent CS graduates to know. Not to say that it's not a valuable property for a service or library or whatever to have under certain circumstances-- but it's not a reasonable way to decide whether a candidate for a junior position is a good fit.
Huh, I did a diploma in computing (UK) in my spare time about 12-16 years ago and remember covering it in a databases module (and possibly when doing OOP with Smalltalk?) - I'd go with "it's about repeatability, knowing that sending the same request, eg SQL query, will return the same results".
That's a little off the mark, as I've checked, but I'd think a full-time CS (as opposed to programming or computing or IT) student would be able to define it very readily ...?
>>When I was hiring and screening hundreds of people, applications would show 'projects' completed on them as if they were real work.
You have to start somewhere, right? Those projects may not be "real" work but they may be enough to have given the candidate exposure to various problem domains and experience in solving problems using code, which should really be sufficient if you are hiring entry-level devs.
I mean what is the difference between the projects I do on my weekends and the projects a code school student completes as part of their curriculum? At the end of the day there is only one thing that matters, and that is whether the candidate you are interviewing has the necessary skills and insights or the potential to gain them.
Keep in mind that many computer science graduates can't even solve fizzbuzz.
As I said above, 'group effort' doesn't mean the person actually did the work or learned anything really. A project YOU do on the side means that YOU did it. =)
The difference between the projects you do on your weekends and projects a code school student completes are absolutely immense.
An applicant with strong weekend projects implies:
- They have a passion for building software
- They are self directed learners
- They have the initiative and determination to build things and ship them
- They managed to navigate problems without having an instructor hold their hand
- They actually did the work, and aren't taking credit for a group effort they may have had minimal impact on
Code camp projects don't say much of anything either way to me on a resume. They don't rule out the above but they don't support it either. They basically say:
- I care enough about learning to code that I paid for a code camp
- I didn't get kicked out or completely fail out of the code camp
- I realize that employers value seeing projects on resumes
To me putting the code camp projects on a resume when they are not clearly marked as being part of that code camp is as dishonest as doing it for college projects when they are not listed under your education background. I've seen countless resumes come in where the projects from code camps are presented in a way so that the recruiter/hiring manager thinks they were self directed projects the person did on their own. The code camps know that this is a strong signal for top talent, and so they mentor the students to craft their resumes to mask the fact that the projects were assigned work.
The result of this, sadly, was that enrollment in code bootcamps became a first order screen for me. I'm sure there were some good people in there. But the work required to actually decipher what the resume was actually telling me required too much effort. (It would require opening the projects they did, trying to figure out if it was assigned or not, if it was a group project, and what contributions they made directly.) In the end, this combined with the fact that many code boot camp applicants are woefully underqualified made it not worth the time to sift through them to find the best ones.
"Keep in mind that many computer science graduates can't even solve fizzbuzz."
I have encountered far more people who repeat this "fact" than I have encountered CS graduates who actually cannot solve fizzbuzz.
Closer to the truth is the statement that many computer science graduates can't solve a topcoder-elite problem, on a whiteboard, within 45 minutes, while talking out loud the entire time. Because that's closer to a real-world "fizzbuzz test" than anything I've seen on Joel Spolsky's blog. (sadly)
Most coding bootcamps are a complete waste of money. Ever since I launched https://edabit.com, I've noticed a ton of traffic coming from these bootcamps and I'm not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, I like the free promotion but on the other, I can't help but feel as though these people are getting ripped off (considering they can access the site for free).
I left The Starter League after the first semester when I realized the buyer's remorse of paying more per day than tuition at MIT. The prices for bootcamps simply aren't worth it, especially given the numerous online and self-paced options out there... many of which are free. How my story ended: I left the bootcamp and took a few Udacity Nanodegree programs for $200/month and (full disclosure) loved them so much that I applied for and got a job at Udacity. I really flourished in the self-paced environment, and found that I was able to learn a lot more, faster. Now, I get to go to work every day and build systems that provide affordable education for students across the globe.
There are so many amazing and cheaper options out there, and I cringe when I hear about people dropping $15k+ for the same (or better) content that they can get for 100x to INF-x cheaper.
I definitely agree that there are less expensive options out there, but self-study isn't for everyone. Also, one of the main benefits of these boot-camps are their career counseling services.
At the end of the day, if you're able to increase your salary from $30k to $80k, the extra $15k on a course seems well worth it.
agreed. I started learning on my own with books and the internet, and Zed Shaw and Chris Pine. I loved it. I then went to a highly regarded bootcamp to find that there seems to be no value placed on teaching and hiring great teachers. I'd take the internet, stack overflow, zed, and chris any day over a bootcamp.
I'm not going to say bootcamps work for everyone, but my anecdotal experience proves otherwise. I know several people who were interested in coding but didn't have a formal education. After a $15k bootcamp, they got a better job and doubled their salary. It paid for itself in less than 6 months.
Apologies for (slightly) off-topic, but I have a question about edabit. How much of a beginner can a user be and still get value rather than frustration from time spent on the site? I've been wanting to learn some real modern programming beyond HTML/CSS & some JavaScript for aeons, would your site be the place to do it if that's my current base?
Sounds like you're my ideal user. I created Edabit out of frustration with codecademy and other sites like it. They're essentially interactive books (poor ones in my opinion). With Edabit, I structured it to simulate how people naturally learn to code "in the wild" and added simple game mechanics. The challenges can be sorted in order of difficulty (start on easy and progress to hard), each challenge has relevant learning resources and a discussion area for questions. Do a challenge every day and you'll progress very fast.
I think it's just natural consolidation in an early-stage market. There's only going to be room for a few major brands in the space, and then some niche players in particular regions and specialities. A lot of also-ran bootcamps are just trying to cash in in the meantime.
I remain a big believer that bootcamps will continue to supply a lot of the talent in the tech world, particularly in app development. I know too many success stories to think otherwise.
Same thing happened during the dotcom boom/bust. Newly-minted MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers) were coming out of the woodwork with almost no real experience, and immediately getting well-paying jobs ($80k-100k at the time). As soon as the bust hit, those certificates were worthless and those people moved away from the Bay Area in droves. They didn't have any real passion for the job, they just knew that they could make good money if they passed a few tests. We called them dot-com migrant workers, at the time. The traffic was actually pretty decent for 3-5 years on 101.
I assume the same thing will happen with bootcampers, because I feel like many of them that I've met lack the passion for CS that the better programmers have. I know a few bootcampers, a couple from HackBright and a couple at my work. One of the HackBright graduates never found a job and went back to her old job which was kind of depressing considering how much she spent. But the others were decent, not great but decent. But I would prefer hiring a good fresh grad with a couple of internships under her belt over any bootcamper I've worked with, mainly because of the depth of knowledge they would bring to the table. Let's be real, how much can someone learn in 12-16 weeks, compared to someone with 4 years+?
I can't believe how much this looks like 1999. Remember "Will code HTML for food"? Prepare to see a lot of JavaScript developers hanging around the back of Home Depot...
Newly-minted MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers)
I had MCSE back in the day (my org wanted n of them so it could become a gold partner of Microsoft or something, and the perks such as MSDN subs and 10 support calls were nice).
What killed it was "braindumps", people weirdly undermining their own certification by posting the questions they could remember online, until databases of all the questions were built up, at that point you could literally just memorise the exam, or blatantly cheat in some locations. That was why it was worthless; but someone who had actually learnt the material the old-fashioned way would be competent.
Can someone remind me why boot camps were even a thing? What employer wouldn't be more impressed by a work sample? One possible plan:
1) Define success before doing anything. Pick specific companies or a specialty you want to end up with first.
2a) Take the three months (or however long you can afford to invest) and work backwards. Figure out the most impressive and relevant project that can be reasonably be accomplished in that time. Make sure it's part of a hot trend because the time spent is probably the same regardless.
2b) In parallel, network and build the best quality contacts you can in your target area. Blog about any interesting observations made as the project progresses. Come right out and say in your posts that you are doing this in hopes of building skills, experience, and proof of your abilities, and say where you want to end up.
3) When its done, make it public online make sure it presents with visual appeal and with cogent explanations. Ask for feedback from your contacts, because that's your excuse to show off: "sure was challenging but I was able to go from zero to learning and building this in three months!". Ask for feedback because it's your chance to ask about openings and interviews. Ask for feedback because you really will need it.
How does somebody new make a good project choice, when taking into account everything that would actually be impressive and help land a job would require years of experience to know? You can't without feedback or validation, so don't make the mistake of choosing solo. Just ask people who are in the target area to help you decide. Lots of people would be willing to give input and it's more chances for networking and follow up conversations.
I agree this is probably a 1000x more effective way to get hired at engineering firms that are seeking out top talent.
I think a big reason coding bootcamps exist is because the mental model is that "pay money -> software job" -- it's an appealing idea, and doesn't necessarily mean the person is not going to put in the effort, but it's broken.
I think it makes logical sense to someone that if they are going to pay lots of money for something, they think they are going to ultimately have an advantage over someone who took the path you mentioned, which is basically "free" other than opportunity cost. Surely, they must be getting something valuable for their money. Think of similar things like SAT test prep or other forms of job training that actually do legitimately teach trade skills that result in job placement that are hard to learn without experienced mentors, in person training, or expensive equipment.
Unfortunately, the reality is the opposite in software engineering due to the nature of what we do and what makes people really good. You don't need much other than a computer, an internet connection, and focused time to build something noteworthy enough to cause potential employers to notice.
The person above who built something from scratch on their own stands out head and shoulders above the sea of applicants from coding boot camps who have only done coursework.
Of course applicants "who built something from scratch" will stand out above bootcampers, and some can get into big tech firms with just a "computer," "internet connection" and "focus[]", but that's also a really tall order.
There's nothing wrong with a "pay money -> software job" mentality, as long as the person is interested in the work, and puts in the effort. I know several people who came out of college with a humanities degrees only to become a poorly paid social media consultant or something similar. They didn't have the know-how to get started with software development on their own, but they enjoyed working with tech and were smart. They paid the $15k to the local bootcamp and within a few months got jobs increasing salaries from ~$30k to $80k (I know one who started well into six figures).
We shouldn't lock people out just because they didn't get into coding at ten years old. Bootcamps often lead to solidly paying entry level coding jobs, a great lifestyle, along with the gratification of actually building something. Bootcamps serve a real need between self-study and a heavy-handed multi-year BS or MS. The driven MS or self-study guy or gal may get the better job, but bootcamps will get the candidate in the door quickly, and they can prove themselves while on the job.
You disagreed with me, but upvoting your comment because the counterpoint is compelling.
It's easy to assume resources are the key point - are people with less time/money well served by these bootcamps?
However, it makes sense that individual personality traits like motivation, ambition, and comfort level with uncertainty / cutting your own path could matter.
As aside I've always felt successful STEM people receive unbalanced praise, always credit for some ethereal genius, not enough credit for maniacal drive, near clinical obsession with goals, gall. Does the general public realize that everyone from Einstein to Musk would have been greatly diminished without these qualities?
Motivation, ambition, and comfort with uncertainty are definitely huge factors in a successful career. STEM people are experts in their field, and they have a mountain of seemingly magical knowledge, but respect for their "genius" ignores these more universal and often more desirable attributes.
I friends with an incredibly intelligent patent lawyer who quit her job to become an FBI agent. I know another really smart guy who took a huge pay cut from his big-tech job to be a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. They didn't quit their technical fields because it was too hard, they could easily handle the STEM jobs when they were thrown at them.
I look at them now and see an even greater level of professionalism than they had in their previous positions, and that comes with a greater respect. Many STEM jobs often get that self-respect, and probably also FBI agents ans WSJ reporters, wish the same could be said about many other positions.
"How does somebody new make a good project choice, when taking into account everything that would actually be impressive and help land a job would require years of experience to know? You can't without feedback or validation, so don't make the mistake of choosing solo. Just ask people who are in the target area to help you decide. Lots of people would be willing to give input and it's more chances for networking and follow up conversations."
If only there were some sort of...educational institution...that could put you into contact with people in the target area and get you that kind of input, even if your personal network doesn't already include people in that profession. And that could help you figure out the most impressive and relevant project that could be reasonably accomplished in a short time. And that could provide instructors from the industry who could provide immediate, rapid feedback on your projects. And then, maybe that institution could connect you to a network of quality contacts composed of previous graduates and contacts from the instructors' time in the industry.
Omg... with that kind of intense training and focus... it would make sense to call it something like "boot camp"! Let's do it! Shut up and take my VC money.
This is misleading. I hope if anyone here is in the process of choosing, they will consider that making these contacts would likely not be that difficult. Reason is, the type of contact determines the difficulty.
Building a high quality sales contact list and network is extremely difficult, it can take decades. It's not uncommon for salespeople to be hired mostly on the basis of their rolodex.
Conversely approaching someone to ask for career feedback is much easier. In general, people don't want to be sold something, but they don't mind helping out an up and coming person in in the field. It can even make them feel good they were respected enough to be asked.
Can someone remind me why boot camps were even a thing?
There was a sense among some that webdev had advanced to a point where the skill of labor needed had declined to cogs that could be squirted out by a crash course.
Ofc, there were always people willing to take the opposite perspective: that advances in the state of the art of development are continuously folded back into development processes. And there aren't roles that still require man-time after driving the skill barrier to zero because that becomes tooling given to the internal customer that specializes in a different part of the business.
But payroll and management salivate at the cog idea. So we got to see the idea be tested in the marketplace and prove out what was fantasy and what wasn't.
I think traditional education, university, has a lot of flaws. But I also think one reason college/university has been around for a "long" time is that the system has merit. That merit in my mind being grading rigor, deadlines, classmates, and office hours.
I haven't done a bootcamp, but I've done quite a few MOOC courses so my opinion is based on equating the two. This might not be a valid assumption.
To me, MOOCs and I'd imagine Bootcamps are good to get an intro to something new, but they can't replace rigorous study of a defined base of fundamentals...i.e. a course of study.
What seems like a real opportunity are programs like OSU post-bacc in comp sci, and GA Tech comp sci masters. I've been toying with OSU for about 2 years now, and haven't commited to it yet because they don't have some of the courses online that I'd like to take (computer graphics). And I haven't done the masters program at Tech yet because I don't want to get into that without a more solid foundation. To me, more schools with post-bacc in comp sci and expanded course offerings (online) would find themselves flooded with demand. Recently I signed up at UCLA Extensions...It is almost the right thing, but still has a limited offering and isn't quite the right fit.
Which courses are you doing at UCLA extension? I'm hoping to get into the GA Tech Master's eventually, but I know it's extremely competitive, especially as someone who doesn't have a CS degree.
Fundamentals of Software Development. If you are familiar with loops, if/else, simple functions that don't return anything or take any arguments, and using printf...I'd say give this class a pass. It is trivial really unless you are 100% unfamiliar with programming. Unfortunately, I didn't make that judgement until after the date where I could be refunded.
Attention code boot campers: if you literally have any other relevant experience for a software engineering job, my advice is to just leave the code camp off your resume and focus on that. And then, your experience from the code camp will come through positively in the actual technical interview process.
Hiring managers are under a deluge of underqualified code boot camp candidates, who are trying to effectively get past resume screens using all sorts of tricks. The blow back from that (I'm speculating here) is that code boot camp folks are probably often being screened out early at a lot of places since its just too difficult to assess them on paper based on the extensive grooming their resumes and github profiles get by their mentors at these bootcamps.
Instead, my advice would be to clearly label the work you've done at a code camp in your README files and include a link to your github. Explicitly call out on your resume projects you have done on your own, and talk about those in your cover letter. If you have literally any other projects or experience related to software engineering include those on your resume and emphasize them!
But highlighting your code camp and trying to tout it as "highly selective" and "accepts only top 1% of applicants" and all that stuff may be doing more harm than good at this point. The well has been poisoned by enough under-qualified people applying that ultimately need to be screened out via an on-site interview, which is time consuming and considered a failure of the hiring process, since they have been set up to pass the resume screen and the initial phone screens. So my advice is to just leave it off, consider the knowledge a secret asset, and don't risk inadvertently damaging your own application!
All it takes is for a company to be burned once or twice by misleading applications from a coding boot camp candidate to just auto-screen out all resumes from them in general. It sucks, but I found myself looking at resumes that seemed genuinely good, but as soon as the boot camp was listed there, I no longer had trust in what I was looking at. So be mindful, there may be folks out there who would have normally had you interview but didn't just because of past negative experiences with others from your code camp, or other boot camps altogether!
Why would I believe, as a bootcamp grad, that you're going to be able to put aside your already-admitted bias when I make it to the table for the interview, or if I make it through the hiring process? Why would I want to work with a coworker who thinks "their resume looks great, but they're a bootcamp grad, so it must be a lie"? How can I be confident that you won't throw some bullshit about me being a bootcamp grad at me when we inevitably disagree about some question? I'd rather put it on my resume and take my chances.
The issue isn't with the candidate it's with the application of the candidate. You've presented two different things as the same. The initial screening process at many companies is pretty deterministic, based on fixed inputs in the person's application, and so can somewhat be easily gamed unless it is continually refined by engineering leadership to counteract some of the dynamics I mentioned by those who basically make a living trying to get all of their students through these screens.
If there is a sufficient correlation between radically underqualified candidates passing the initial screens due to their applications being (retrospectively) designed by the coding boot camp to do so, then it's reasonable to assume applications from those boot camps contain basically no real signal, and so really don't say much one way or another about the candidate's technical skills. In general, interviewing people is costly, and so with minimal signal you'll just say "no."
On the other hand, if there is no coding boot camp on the resume, there's no reason to believe the person's resume, github profile, etc, has been hand crafted by domain experts around passing technical job screens. You can much more likely take it at face value. So, that is why my honest advice at this time is to leave it off, because you are probably doing more harm than good. (This doesn't mean remove the work from your github or wipe the knowledge you had from your brain, just don't put it there because it may be sending a negative signal, regardless of your own merit.)
Once the person is in the door for an interview or the job their application is, generally speaking, not very relevant at that point vs their actual abilities to get the job done and work well on the team.
He's saying a person with a liberal arts degree and some amateur experience looks better than some one who graduated from a boot camp.
The implication is that boot camps let people appear better than they are.
And you don't need to tell them you went to a boot camp. So if you get hired without mentioning it you won't deal with that bias.
Hack Reactor is touted as really exclusive, but it's a 12 week boot camp. Does anyone seriously think that 3 months or even 6 months is enough to become any sort of passable? A well paced, self taught programmer can surely strive to a higher standard.
For a junior web developer position? Yes, absolutely.
And it turns out that junior web developers make a shit ton of money in the bay area.
A whole lot of companies do not need serious CS algorithms experts. A whole lot of companies merely need blue collar, CRUD web devs to build their CRUD angular react node web app.
Being a crud web devoper is still a pretty good gig.
Hack Reactor is ~11 hours a day and has all the social support and camaraderie that comes when you do the same thing w/ other people. I'd be surprised if someone on their own could learn as well in the same time.
11 hours a day is a bit extreme. After a certain point I would be concerned about my retention. Personally, I've never had good results from studying more than a few hours a day, but I understand this may not be the case for others. I usually study a bit, take a break for a couple hours, and study some more.
Also startup accelerators usually work with businesses that already exist. It's actually a good analogy. If you already know a little bit about coding and computer science a bootcamp can really help. If you don't have the drive to learn programming than a bootcamp can leave you with a huge skills gap.
My first business failed miserably. I had no business training and no one in my family who'd ever run a business. I was just overwhelmed all the time and never had advisors to reach out to (a problem YC students wouldn't have)
In hindsight, I know what I did wrong and what I should have done instead.
I'd say it took me at least a year of failing before I could gather my bearings and understand what was going on.
That's my main gripe with these boot camps. If you're an experienced programmer with all the fundamentals in place, you could certainly learn a lot about a new language/framework in 12 weeks.
But, that's not who these things are aimed at. New programmers need time to absorb the fundamentals of programming. Getting pushed through some fast-paced program is the worst way to absorb anything.
I do like the idea of hopping right into writing applications vs the more traditional route, but it needs to be over years, not weeks.
Someone who's self taught doesn't need a bootcamp.
In reality all good coders are self taught - you can't really teach this stuff. You have to learn to play, to explore the solution space and figure out the different ways of composing your raw materials. And you need to do this over and over again throughout your career as new materials become available. Self-teaching never stops.
The post above highlights the negative stereotype of bootcamp grads (being under-experienced and under-qualified for the jobs they apply for), and therefore recommends highlighting your experience and projects over your bootcamp certification.
If you have a "great resume" then a bootstrap certification is not what makes it great. Self taught developers prove that a degree is not essential, and being self taught shows motivation and interest.
If someone disagrees with you and they have more experience and/or education, then your level of knowledge is the first thing they would attack, so again keeping it on your resume is no advantage in that case.
In my area, I have had recruiters specifically tell me that they will not list junior positions because of the hiring market being completely oversaturated with bootcamp graduates. I have had several tell me something along the lines of "this is listed as a mid-to-senior level position, but that is just to keep bootcampers from applying".
Without any commentary on whether you can be skilled/productive/knowledgeable after a bootcamp program, it CAN hurt your odds to list it on your resume. A former employer of mine was burned so bad by a string of bad hires they say they will never work with bootcampers again. Anecdotally I have observed that bootcamps tend to have their own tight-knit networks of alumni or companies willing to hire from a given camp, so I can't comment toward the net effect (whether it's better not to list the bootcamp on your resume at all), but I can guarantee you there are employers who want nothing to do with you if your primary education and experience are from a bootcamp, as misguided as that may be.
The person you are responding to makes a reasonable point that if an employer cares about productivity, then what you can accomplish on your own and what you actually know and understand should be emphasized. They may perceive that applicants whose primary self-advertised selling point is "I went to Einstein-Hawking Ruby Camp" may not have anything unique/valuable to offer for a given role because they seem identical to many other applicants from that same place, some/many of whom may have underperformed. I would recommend not developing a chip on your shoulder about it.
>"this is listed as a mid-to-senior level position, but that is just to keep bootcampers from applying"
Wouldn't help. Would actually be counterproductive. Listing requirements higher than actual requirements is a game, and boot camps are good at figuring out and optimizing for games. Bootcampers will (and should) apply to literally every job description that involves writing code.
As one of those under-deluge hiring managers, I've found that candidates have already begun hiding their bootcamp / academy education during the application process.
It is still pretty obvious, though: the resumes are all the same format, as are the application channels and techniques, and experience levels.
I'd recommend these individuals look toward internships, as I haven't found one qualified for a full-time job yet. Why aren't bootcamps lining up internship programs?
When I was an intern working on data warehouses, I made like $25/hr, which is pretty good for starting out. With overtime, you make pretty good morning for how little investment is required.
They haven't been able to guarantee an internship, but they do seem to go to a fair amount of trouble to get everyone one. The last cohort all got internships in the last round, and a couple people from previous cohorts also did as well.
Some of them are - Ada's, for instance, and LaunchCode, both focus on internships as a big part of the program. But getting employers on board is a lot of work and I'd be surprised if it were possible to find enough places for all the boot camp students out there these days.
Is a bootcamper over age, say, 30 going to be able to get an internship? The problem there is that internships are generally regarding across the industry as being for fresh college grads.
I think it varies and a lot of companies do it differently. I had a part time internship with a software company over the spring semester which "ended" at the end of the semester but that was just a formality to start a new internship contract full-time and with a pay raise for the duration of the summer. Most software companies use internships as "junior-junior" developer positions, I was still writing code that was impactful and used by the company, it was just understood that it was going to take a couple months to get me to a point that I was semi-autonomous.
Same experience here as a Director of Front-End Development. Worse than not only hiding that they're coming from a bootcamp, they're positioning their exercises as actual "work experience." Granted, this appears to be a few of many bootcamps instructing their classes to do this, but it's definitely something on my radar these days when I'm looking to hire. Also--and this is an egregious oversight in my opinion--many of the portfolios are nothing more than a lightly modified (if that) Wordpress site, using a select few "popular" templates; usually the templates that tell people what level of experience they have with each technology, etc. If you want my eye, you really need to take the time and initiative to build it independently using what you learned.
Agreed, however, that internships and apprenticeships are a great first step coming out of bootcamps, but I don't believe that's the expectation being set when they're admitted. The reason I usually have to pass on bootcamp grads is that, working in a client-focused environment on tight deadlines, time spent training someone up from a narrow view of the industry to what we need is at a very high premium; CS grads coming in as Juniors have anecdotally worked better to that end.
Apprenticing at a product-focused organization with high competency in managing expectations is where I see most bootcamp grads excelling.
Got to go to DevMtn for free in 2016. Got kicked out for smoking weed and they gave me a full refund out of pity. Learned enough to work 2 dev jobs in Utah, enough to realize what I really wanted out of life vs. what I thought I wanted.
Buying a Jeep soon and will be working remotely while roaming North America in 2018. Hobbies include: photography, writing, painting, hiking, design, animal rescue.
It's easy to bash these code camps saying they don't do a good job at teaching people the "real stuff" like traditional education does. People graduating with CS degrees are probably on average better than a boot camp grad but they likely spent 8x the time and money. And most of then still need a lot of investment from their first employer.
Education is broken on both ends. Spending 4 years teaching yourself will get you way farther than a CS degree will. Code boot camps need to focus on teaching people how to self learn because that's really the only thing separates average engineers from great ones.
> Spending 4 years teaching yourself will get you way farther than a CS degree will.
For the extremely disciplined, maybe. For the rest, no.
Traditional schooling helps in two ways. First, they point the way to the important and useful stuff. If you're coming in knowing nothing, it's hard to figure out what to study. A good school will tell you. Second, they make demands. They set assignments and exams, grade what you did, and hold you accountable. They push you harder than you would push yourself, and that's really useful for anyone who is less than perfectly self-motivated, which is most of us.
One of the biggest differences between bootcamps and traditional schools is that bootcamps often measure (and market) their success by job placements. Most large universities have entirely different incentives, often based on honors from research programs and large funding grants.
If your goal is to get a good job and you don't have a strong background, then these bootcamps are a fantastic resource.
Who gives a shit where or how you learned to code. What a stupid and indirect way to filter candidates.
Just show me what you've done. Send me repo links, production code, or even just the end result with some sort of proof that you actually built it. That's the best part about any craft - practicing or building something creates tangible results. If you don't already have a portfolio, get to work on that before you start applying.
The sad reality of software engineering is that the wast majority of code everyone writes is not something they would want to show in an interview. Even if they legally could, which is rarely the case for commercially developed software.
Heck, even reasonably good software can produce a very negative impression. Utilitarian code can be seen as ugly or overly simplistic. Elegant conceptual stuff often runs the risk of grinding against biases and preconceptions of the particular reviewer.
Your first argument is true, but I would argue that if you already know what you're doing, you can write some demo portfolio code specifically to show off your skills in very little time. Make that code pleasant to read, free of legal constraints, and be ready and able to talk about it. You probably will spend at least 40 hours a week at your job and it will dramatically affect your life. That's worth spending a few days, maybe even a few weeks preparing for so that you can get one you like.
For your second argument, I know what you mean, but that's also totally subjective, dictated by chance, and would apply equally across the board for all candidates. Even if that happens, it sort of naturally levels itself out competition-wise.
Also, remember that you're evaluating the employer too - do you want to work for someone who chooses employees that way? Would you want to work with someone who has a closed mind and an axe to grind about certain concepts? I wouldn't trust people like that to make good decisions that will make the company succeed, thereby keeping me employed - let alone providing opportunities to advance. Plus they sound like they'd be a pain in the ass to work with.
Produce it on your own time, using no company resources. If a company claims ownership of everything you produce in your own time using your own resources, you've signed the worst contract possible and the company should go out of business. Most of the time, they claim things you make using their resources or company time. Avoiding that avoids most issues.
Anecdotal, but most companies I've worked for have policies that claim ownership of everything I produced in my own time on my own equipment. I think that's the rule, not the exception.
You're right, maybe not the right thread for this.
I was commenting less on the article and more on the general disdain for bootcamp grads that seems to crop up in every article or thread about them. It always devolves into whether people with this education or that education are any good, and it's just completely irrelevant.
That's great for front-end guys, but it's frustrating to me as a back-end developer to have expectations that I can show live examples of my past work to potential employers when I've spent years designing and building enterprise internal systems which have no visible result outside of the code itself, which is under strict NDA.
I get it, development is a craft, it's easy to judge the quality or experience level of a coworker after having to deal with their PRs for a month or two. However, it's not like any toy project I could throw on github is going to have real relation to the actual work I do, and trying to replicate e.g. some of the third party integrations I've written internally as public stand-alone packages is going to get me fired and sued by an overprotective employer.
This isn't a hypothetical fear either, multiple times I've gone through phone interviews to a "lets review some of your past work" stage, and my "I can't legally show you any of these things, but here's general descriptions of some of the major internal projects I've led or handled solo" has resulted in failing to make the next interview round.
Have you tried putting together an abbreviated version of your work on github? I've had success with toy utility apps to demonstrate my coding style and basic competencies because I am in a very similar position. Generally I've found it's less about having a large, completed application and more about having a solid chunk that's well architected and demonstrates an understanding of best practices. Like I have a bare bones UI WPF app with multiple projects, dependency injection with a stairway pattern, thorough comments, and decent though not complete unit test coverage. It doesn't do anything special and it only took like a weekend to put together, but it shows I know what I'm doing. It's a private repo and none of the code shows up in Google searches so it's also pretty clear that I didn't just copy and paste someone else's work.
How do you know how much of the work person has actually done the work in the repo rather than fork and change, or even recommitting the files, copy-pasta, etc.?
At the annual Denver Startup Week I notice about a third to half of the startup industry is incestuous, that provides facilities for developers to work better. These are mainly code academies and coworking spaces. I feel if the tech industry ever ever has one of its periodic down turns, then this it could rapidly implode with all these developer services.
The reality is about half of the workers entered the tech industry since its last major down turn during 2000 - 2003 and live in the fairy tail land that it could not happen to us. Welcome to economic reality, suckers.
Don't count on that. If an economic downturn happens, it's entirely possible that the less experienced, but less expensive developers will do well. It may be the experienced one will feel the hurt.
In recent downturns people without college degrees got burned. HR could ask for more credentials, even if they were less relevant than experience.
Its just its been so long since the last IT downturn, the newbies feel invincible.
You can study computer science and software engineering at universities. (Bachelor/Master of Science/Engineering)
You can study it at universities of applied science.
You can study it (without degree only state-certificate) at a school. (Staatlich geprüfter Informatiker)
And you can also do an apprenticeship in software development. (Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung)
All are mostly free of charge OR you will even get paid doing them and you got an officially recognized paper that tells the world that you know stuff.
The US Navy gets some IT work done by Information Systems Technicians. It's not clear from the job description, but they seem to be something between software developers and sysadmins. They have 24 weeks of training, which is comparable to a long civilian bootcamp. Anyone know if they're any good?
And you get loaded up with a bunch of very relevant people skills like management skills, and it will teach you all the je ne sais qois about yourself that you normally see in commercials for the military. Stuff like discipline and perseverance and drive. There are few other places in the world that will hand a teenager as much responsibility, trust, and purpose. There are some kids out there handling millions of dollars' worth of equipment. Plus, you can travel, you'll get into the best shape of your life, and they'll even give you a free pair of boots.
Was in the navy, not as IT, but I had friends who were. Way, way, way more on the sysadmin and traditional "IT" side than software dev. I doubt most of them could code at all, other than things like simple bash scripts. Zero CS fundamentals.
288 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] thread- Talking about something else
- Being ironic
I'm including myself in the "good deal of prior experience" group, I did fine in the class and in my subsequent jobs. My class even had students that had been web devs on less desirable stacks using the class to ramp up on rails and they did even better.
Not sure "despite" is the right phrasing here. I'm a DBC grad from about three years ago, and I know DBC had various issues, but I do suspect that there was pressure from Kaplan to expand rapidly, crank prices, and decrease the quality of the education (because that's how Kaplan made their money everywhere else they've been profitable). Kaplan bought them right before my cohort started, and there was serious concern even then that it was a bad omen. I think a lot of startups in general would do well with less pressure for rapid growth, and I suspect that the bootcamp market is much the same.
It's not surprising that Kaplan, a company that relies on services that are supposed to improve performance but not actually teach, would suck at teaching skills. I think the debate should expand from just coding schools vs uni to comparing coding schools.
I came from a mix of technologies (approximate knowledge, but a master of none) before settling into the data sciences (Python ecosystem).
Galvenize has been precisely the challenge I was looking for and so much more. I barely got by the interview process, but picked up a Veteran Scholarship worth half my $16,000 tuition along the way.
Quit my job as a Salesforce case jockey and currently trying to stay afloat with the curriculum.
It's intense. As it should be. I want it that way. Otherwise everyone would be doing it. A counter argument might be that; "every one and their mother is taking a 'Data Science' title for the pay." From 2013 to now, that may have a lot of truth, but they are eventually found out I hope.
As for my cohort. There is a Physics PhD, undergrads in Mathematics and Physics, an acctuary Statistician from an insurance company, a Mom, and Biology grad, and a Veteran. An elclectic group I feel.
At this point, half way through, we just want to survive and not wash out.
Finally, once capstone projects get rolling in a couple weeks and whom is left of us should be feeling pretty good about their accomplishment and competent to take on entry and junior level Data Science roles.
How can this work? I mean, I can understand those with a math background being there to learn the tooling and programming, but how can a mom (presumably with no prior education?) and a vet (also presumably without any other qualifications) keep up? Or, if they're teaching at the level of 'this is the slope in a linear equation', what's in it for the math guys? I just don't understand how this sort of thing works in real life.
There's no reason to assume the mom isn't similar (many stay-at-home mothers in the US have college degrees).
Not just data science but "the data sciences" now! Where will it end?
People who graduate from UNI actually know some things.
I'm not sure it's an improvement.
We've hired a few, but only one has actually worked out.
A couple of cherry-picked examples don't mean the coding bootcamp industry is going anywhere. IMO, there's no reason to panic until these bootcamps are being advertised alongside x-ray technician jobs during midday reruns of Judge Judy.
Now, the glut of junior devs entering the market - that's something to be a smidge concerned about.
IMO Bootcamps are great, people try and add up the cost and run the numbers, but the experience of growing and struggling through stuff with others, in an in-person environment, was enriching.
If there was a Kotlin Bootcamp in my area I'd be interested in learning more.
Once you consider the consolidation of the web into a few companies, and the news every week of another company outsourcing jobs to low cost locations, it's clear we are near or passed "peak tech" in the West.
People paying for training should look into things that can't be outsourced.
There is certainly a geographic shortage at least, right?
Perhaps those people in the UK need to move to a location where their skills are more in demand.
> Perhaps those people in the UK need to move to a location
It is very difficult and tedious process to go to work from EU to US. Also, most EU residents don't even want to live in US.
It's a lot easier than from most of non-EU world: at least you can hop on the plane for a job interview without fussing with visas.
If one can't be arsed to move there's always an option to remain unemployed.
I'm not so sure that those 13% unemployed are really good.
Remote interviewing is easy now. We have Skype, hangouts, etc.
Second, the relatively higher salaries we get out here are driven by two things: 1) the number of companies competing for talent and 2) the artificial scarcity induced by how they define the arena of competition (over-focus on "CS fundamentals" and under-focus on engineering fundamentals).
Supply being unable to fulfill a large amount of demand is the definition of a shortage.
Not that you need to know what the acronym stands for (hell, no one I know uses the technique to get xml anymore anyways!), but it is weird to see the details wrong in such a detail-oriented discipline, and wouldn't people wonder where the name came from?
https://www.npmjs.com/package/ajacks
Sure, our UX/UI guy does "AJAX" to create working prototypes of his designs before handing it off to be stuffed into React / Ionic / WhateverJS (which is quickly becoming the standard requirement for a UX person), so it's not obsolete tech by any standard. But let's not act like "boutique" web dev shops are actually still a thing... stay relevant people, especially if you're paying those sorts of fees to show up and learn how to build an Angular2 app on headless Rails in 2017.
IMHO, there's too many jargon-jockeys in this field and not enough people who can truly explain things. Getting the acronyms strictly correct is the least of the problems.
Once recruiters figured out that placing these under qualified people into jobs was not a good thing, the bootcamps started to train people how to fake their resumes. Just like how people figured out that if they want a specific job, they only need to update their resume to include all the keywords in the job description.
When I was hiring and screening hundreds of people, applications would show 'projects' completed on them as if they were real work. Hired.com was full of this for a while until they started blocking them there too. People would go so far as to make a domain name for a class project appear as if it was a real company. You'd go look at their github and realize they only made a few commits towards the 'project'. How is that a demonstration of skill?
I'm sure a few people have come out of these bootcamps with some real knowledge and skills. But this is the edge case, not the norm. You can't shortcut your way to a well paying software engineering career by spending a ton of money.
I believe strongly that software engineering is an art form that requires tons of practice to get good at. As such, you wouldn't expect a designer or artist to show up at an interview and not be able to show examples of their work. Just like a software engineer should be able to show something as well. Of course, the counter argument to that is maybe they didn't have time to work on something extra curricular. Except for the fact that the people who did the extra curricular work in high school, got into better colleges. Go figure.
Even worse is that I did try to interview some of these people and it became clear that the bootcamps were about training for the minimal viable education. Leaving a lot of basic fundamentals out. I'd ask what idempotency is and get blank stares. So sad.
Yes, you have to start somewhere, but that doesn't mean you are immediately prepared to get a job as soon as you graduate. That is part of the broken promise of these bootcamps.
What I'm saying is that you should have clearly identifiable portions that you can point at as something you did. I also think that it takes extra curricular activity to truly master a subject. You can't just rely on others to show you everything. You have to experiment and learn on your own too.
That's a little off the mark, as I've checked, but I'd think a full-time CS (as opposed to programming or computing or IT) student would be able to define it very readily ...?
You have to start somewhere, right? Those projects may not be "real" work but they may be enough to have given the candidate exposure to various problem domains and experience in solving problems using code, which should really be sufficient if you are hiring entry-level devs.
I mean what is the difference between the projects I do on my weekends and the projects a code school student completes as part of their curriculum? At the end of the day there is only one thing that matters, and that is whether the candidate you are interviewing has the necessary skills and insights or the potential to gain them.
Keep in mind that many computer science graduates can't even solve fizzbuzz.
An applicant with strong weekend projects implies:
- They have a passion for building software
- They are self directed learners
- They have the initiative and determination to build things and ship them
- They managed to navigate problems without having an instructor hold their hand
- They actually did the work, and aren't taking credit for a group effort they may have had minimal impact on
Code camp projects don't say much of anything either way to me on a resume. They don't rule out the above but they don't support it either. They basically say:
- I care enough about learning to code that I paid for a code camp
- I didn't get kicked out or completely fail out of the code camp
- I realize that employers value seeing projects on resumes
To me putting the code camp projects on a resume when they are not clearly marked as being part of that code camp is as dishonest as doing it for college projects when they are not listed under your education background. I've seen countless resumes come in where the projects from code camps are presented in a way so that the recruiter/hiring manager thinks they were self directed projects the person did on their own. The code camps know that this is a strong signal for top talent, and so they mentor the students to craft their resumes to mask the fact that the projects were assigned work.
The result of this, sadly, was that enrollment in code bootcamps became a first order screen for me. I'm sure there were some good people in there. But the work required to actually decipher what the resume was actually telling me required too much effort. (It would require opening the projects they did, trying to figure out if it was assigned or not, if it was a group project, and what contributions they made directly.) In the end, this combined with the fact that many code boot camp applicants are woefully underqualified made it not worth the time to sift through them to find the best ones.
I have encountered far more people who repeat this "fact" than I have encountered CS graduates who actually cannot solve fizzbuzz.
Closer to the truth is the statement that many computer science graduates can't solve a topcoder-elite problem, on a whiteboard, within 45 minutes, while talking out loud the entire time. Because that's closer to a real-world "fizzbuzz test" than anything I've seen on Joel Spolsky's blog. (sadly)
I left The Starter League after the first semester when I realized the buyer's remorse of paying more per day than tuition at MIT. The prices for bootcamps simply aren't worth it, especially given the numerous online and self-paced options out there... many of which are free. How my story ended: I left the bootcamp and took a few Udacity Nanodegree programs for $200/month and (full disclosure) loved them so much that I applied for and got a job at Udacity. I really flourished in the self-paced environment, and found that I was able to learn a lot more, faster. Now, I get to go to work every day and build systems that provide affordable education for students across the globe.
There are so many amazing and cheaper options out there, and I cringe when I hear about people dropping $15k+ for the same (or better) content that they can get for 100x to INF-x cheaper.
At the end of the day, if you're able to increase your salary from $30k to $80k, the extra $15k on a course seems well worth it.
I remain a big believer that bootcamps will continue to supply a lot of the talent in the tech world, particularly in app development. I know too many success stories to think otherwise.
I assume the same thing will happen with bootcampers, because I feel like many of them that I've met lack the passion for CS that the better programmers have. I know a few bootcampers, a couple from HackBright and a couple at my work. One of the HackBright graduates never found a job and went back to her old job which was kind of depressing considering how much she spent. But the others were decent, not great but decent. But I would prefer hiring a good fresh grad with a couple of internships under her belt over any bootcamper I've worked with, mainly because of the depth of knowledge they would bring to the table. Let's be real, how much can someone learn in 12-16 weeks, compared to someone with 4 years+?
I had MCSE back in the day (my org wanted n of them so it could become a gold partner of Microsoft or something, and the perks such as MSDN subs and 10 support calls were nice).
What killed it was "braindumps", people weirdly undermining their own certification by posting the questions they could remember online, until databases of all the questions were built up, at that point you could literally just memorise the exam, or blatantly cheat in some locations. That was why it was worthless; but someone who had actually learnt the material the old-fashioned way would be competent.
1) Define success before doing anything. Pick specific companies or a specialty you want to end up with first.
2a) Take the three months (or however long you can afford to invest) and work backwards. Figure out the most impressive and relevant project that can be reasonably be accomplished in that time. Make sure it's part of a hot trend because the time spent is probably the same regardless.
2b) In parallel, network and build the best quality contacts you can in your target area. Blog about any interesting observations made as the project progresses. Come right out and say in your posts that you are doing this in hopes of building skills, experience, and proof of your abilities, and say where you want to end up.
3) When its done, make it public online make sure it presents with visual appeal and with cogent explanations. Ask for feedback from your contacts, because that's your excuse to show off: "sure was challenging but I was able to go from zero to learning and building this in three months!". Ask for feedback because it's your chance to ask about openings and interviews. Ask for feedback because you really will need it.
How does somebody new make a good project choice, when taking into account everything that would actually be impressive and help land a job would require years of experience to know? You can't without feedback or validation, so don't make the mistake of choosing solo. Just ask people who are in the target area to help you decide. Lots of people would be willing to give input and it's more chances for networking and follow up conversations.
I think a big reason coding bootcamps exist is because the mental model is that "pay money -> software job" -- it's an appealing idea, and doesn't necessarily mean the person is not going to put in the effort, but it's broken.
I think it makes logical sense to someone that if they are going to pay lots of money for something, they think they are going to ultimately have an advantage over someone who took the path you mentioned, which is basically "free" other than opportunity cost. Surely, they must be getting something valuable for their money. Think of similar things like SAT test prep or other forms of job training that actually do legitimately teach trade skills that result in job placement that are hard to learn without experienced mentors, in person training, or expensive equipment.
Unfortunately, the reality is the opposite in software engineering due to the nature of what we do and what makes people really good. You don't need much other than a computer, an internet connection, and focused time to build something noteworthy enough to cause potential employers to notice.
The person above who built something from scratch on their own stands out head and shoulders above the sea of applicants from coding boot camps who have only done coursework.
There's nothing wrong with a "pay money -> software job" mentality, as long as the person is interested in the work, and puts in the effort. I know several people who came out of college with a humanities degrees only to become a poorly paid social media consultant or something similar. They didn't have the know-how to get started with software development on their own, but they enjoyed working with tech and were smart. They paid the $15k to the local bootcamp and within a few months got jobs increasing salaries from ~$30k to $80k (I know one who started well into six figures).
We shouldn't lock people out just because they didn't get into coding at ten years old. Bootcamps often lead to solidly paying entry level coding jobs, a great lifestyle, along with the gratification of actually building something. Bootcamps serve a real need between self-study and a heavy-handed multi-year BS or MS. The driven MS or self-study guy or gal may get the better job, but bootcamps will get the candidate in the door quickly, and they can prove themselves while on the job.
It's easy to assume resources are the key point - are people with less time/money well served by these bootcamps?
However, it makes sense that individual personality traits like motivation, ambition, and comfort level with uncertainty / cutting your own path could matter.
As aside I've always felt successful STEM people receive unbalanced praise, always credit for some ethereal genius, not enough credit for maniacal drive, near clinical obsession with goals, gall. Does the general public realize that everyone from Einstein to Musk would have been greatly diminished without these qualities?
I friends with an incredibly intelligent patent lawyer who quit her job to become an FBI agent. I know another really smart guy who took a huge pay cut from his big-tech job to be a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. They didn't quit their technical fields because it was too hard, they could easily handle the STEM jobs when they were thrown at them.
I look at them now and see an even greater level of professionalism than they had in their previous positions, and that comes with a greater respect. Many STEM jobs often get that self-respect, and probably also FBI agents ans WSJ reporters, wish the same could be said about many other positions.
If only there were some sort of...educational institution...that could put you into contact with people in the target area and get you that kind of input, even if your personal network doesn't already include people in that profession. And that could help you figure out the most impressive and relevant project that could be reasonably accomplished in a short time. And that could provide instructors from the industry who could provide immediate, rapid feedback on your projects. And then, maybe that institution could connect you to a network of quality contacts composed of previous graduates and contacts from the instructors' time in the industry.
Building a high quality sales contact list and network is extremely difficult, it can take decades. It's not uncommon for salespeople to be hired mostly on the basis of their rolodex.
Conversely approaching someone to ask for career feedback is much easier. In general, people don't want to be sold something, but they don't mind helping out an up and coming person in in the field. It can even make them feel good they were respected enough to be asked.
There was a sense among some that webdev had advanced to a point where the skill of labor needed had declined to cogs that could be squirted out by a crash course.
Ofc, there were always people willing to take the opposite perspective: that advances in the state of the art of development are continuously folded back into development processes. And there aren't roles that still require man-time after driving the skill barrier to zero because that becomes tooling given to the internal customer that specializes in a different part of the business.
But payroll and management salivate at the cog idea. So we got to see the idea be tested in the marketplace and prove out what was fantasy and what wasn't.
I haven't done a bootcamp, but I've done quite a few MOOC courses so my opinion is based on equating the two. This might not be a valid assumption.
To me, MOOCs and I'd imagine Bootcamps are good to get an intro to something new, but they can't replace rigorous study of a defined base of fundamentals...i.e. a course of study.
What seems like a real opportunity are programs like OSU post-bacc in comp sci, and GA Tech comp sci masters. I've been toying with OSU for about 2 years now, and haven't commited to it yet because they don't have some of the courses online that I'd like to take (computer graphics). And I haven't done the masters program at Tech yet because I don't want to get into that without a more solid foundation. To me, more schools with post-bacc in comp sci and expanded course offerings (online) would find themselves flooded with demand. Recently I signed up at UCLA Extensions...It is almost the right thing, but still has a limited offering and isn't quite the right fit.
Hiring managers are under a deluge of underqualified code boot camp candidates, who are trying to effectively get past resume screens using all sorts of tricks. The blow back from that (I'm speculating here) is that code boot camp folks are probably often being screened out early at a lot of places since its just too difficult to assess them on paper based on the extensive grooming their resumes and github profiles get by their mentors at these bootcamps.
Instead, my advice would be to clearly label the work you've done at a code camp in your README files and include a link to your github. Explicitly call out on your resume projects you have done on your own, and talk about those in your cover letter. If you have literally any other projects or experience related to software engineering include those on your resume and emphasize them!
But highlighting your code camp and trying to tout it as "highly selective" and "accepts only top 1% of applicants" and all that stuff may be doing more harm than good at this point. The well has been poisoned by enough under-qualified people applying that ultimately need to be screened out via an on-site interview, which is time consuming and considered a failure of the hiring process, since they have been set up to pass the resume screen and the initial phone screens. So my advice is to just leave it off, consider the knowledge a secret asset, and don't risk inadvertently damaging your own application!
All it takes is for a company to be burned once or twice by misleading applications from a coding boot camp candidate to just auto-screen out all resumes from them in general. It sucks, but I found myself looking at resumes that seemed genuinely good, but as soon as the boot camp was listed there, I no longer had trust in what I was looking at. So be mindful, there may be folks out there who would have normally had you interview but didn't just because of past negative experiences with others from your code camp, or other boot camps altogether!
If there is a sufficient correlation between radically underqualified candidates passing the initial screens due to their applications being (retrospectively) designed by the coding boot camp to do so, then it's reasonable to assume applications from those boot camps contain basically no real signal, and so really don't say much one way or another about the candidate's technical skills. In general, interviewing people is costly, and so with minimal signal you'll just say "no."
On the other hand, if there is no coding boot camp on the resume, there's no reason to believe the person's resume, github profile, etc, has been hand crafted by domain experts around passing technical job screens. You can much more likely take it at face value. So, that is why my honest advice at this time is to leave it off, because you are probably doing more harm than good. (This doesn't mean remove the work from your github or wipe the knowledge you had from your brain, just don't put it there because it may be sending a negative signal, regardless of your own merit.)
Once the person is in the door for an interview or the job their application is, generally speaking, not very relevant at that point vs their actual abilities to get the job done and work well on the team.
And you don't need to tell them you went to a boot camp. So if you get hired without mentioning it you won't deal with that bias.
For a junior web developer position? Yes, absolutely.
And it turns out that junior web developers make a shit ton of money in the bay area.
A whole lot of companies do not need serious CS algorithms experts. A whole lot of companies merely need blue collar, CRUD web devs to build their CRUD angular react node web app.
Being a crud web devoper is still a pretty good gig.
Part of the problem is the high salary comes with the expectation of quick growth.
I think a lot of bootcamp graduates come up short.
11 hours a day for 12 weeks can't compare with two hours a day for a year.
I never learnt how to code though, but I know a lot of technical stuff.
So I legitimately thought that "hey, I can learn to code in a few months"
Nope. 12 weeks is hilariously less to truly understand coding.
You can, at most, mimic the actions of the teacher.
It took me quitting, then months of idle rumination to understand what a recursive loop could be used for.
In hindsight, I know what I did wrong and what I should have done instead.
I'd say it took me at least a year of failing before I could gather my bearings and understand what was going on.
But, that's not who these things are aimed at. New programmers need time to absorb the fundamentals of programming. Getting pushed through some fast-paced program is the worst way to absorb anything.
I do like the idea of hopping right into writing applications vs the more traditional route, but it needs to be over years, not weeks.
In reality all good coders are self taught - you can't really teach this stuff. You have to learn to play, to explore the solution space and figure out the different ways of composing your raw materials. And you need to do this over and over again throughout your career as new materials become available. Self-teaching never stops.
You can read about it all you want but unless you are doing it, you are not going to grow.
If you have a "great resume" then a bootstrap certification is not what makes it great. Self taught developers prove that a degree is not essential, and being self taught shows motivation and interest.
If someone disagrees with you and they have more experience and/or education, then your level of knowledge is the first thing they would attack, so again keeping it on your resume is no advantage in that case.
Without any commentary on whether you can be skilled/productive/knowledgeable after a bootcamp program, it CAN hurt your odds to list it on your resume. A former employer of mine was burned so bad by a string of bad hires they say they will never work with bootcampers again. Anecdotally I have observed that bootcamps tend to have their own tight-knit networks of alumni or companies willing to hire from a given camp, so I can't comment toward the net effect (whether it's better not to list the bootcamp on your resume at all), but I can guarantee you there are employers who want nothing to do with you if your primary education and experience are from a bootcamp, as misguided as that may be.
The person you are responding to makes a reasonable point that if an employer cares about productivity, then what you can accomplish on your own and what you actually know and understand should be emphasized. They may perceive that applicants whose primary self-advertised selling point is "I went to Einstein-Hawking Ruby Camp" may not have anything unique/valuable to offer for a given role because they seem identical to many other applicants from that same place, some/many of whom may have underperformed. I would recommend not developing a chip on your shoulder about it.
Wouldn't help. Would actually be counterproductive. Listing requirements higher than actual requirements is a game, and boot camps are good at figuring out and optimizing for games. Bootcampers will (and should) apply to literally every job description that involves writing code.
It is still pretty obvious, though: the resumes are all the same format, as are the application channels and techniques, and experience levels.
I'd recommend these individuals look toward internships, as I haven't found one qualified for a full-time job yet. Why aren't bootcamps lining up internship programs?
Unfortunately, I do not believe they are able to line up internships for all students anymore.
Are you unsure about their skills and need time to evaluate?
Agreed, however, that internships and apprenticeships are a great first step coming out of bootcamps, but I don't believe that's the expectation being set when they're admitted. The reason I usually have to pass on bootcamp grads is that, working in a client-focused environment on tight deadlines, time spent training someone up from a narrow view of the industry to what we need is at a very high premium; CS grads coming in as Juniors have anecdotally worked better to that end.
Apprenticing at a product-focused organization with high competency in managing expectations is where I see most bootcamp grads excelling.
Buying a Jeep soon and will be working remotely while roaming North America in 2018. Hobbies include: photography, writing, painting, hiking, design, animal rescue.
Education is broken on both ends. Spending 4 years teaching yourself will get you way farther than a CS degree will. Code boot camps need to focus on teaching people how to self learn because that's really the only thing separates average engineers from great ones.
For the extremely disciplined, maybe. For the rest, no.
Traditional schooling helps in two ways. First, they point the way to the important and useful stuff. If you're coming in knowing nothing, it's hard to figure out what to study. A good school will tell you. Second, they make demands. They set assignments and exams, grade what you did, and hold you accountable. They push you harder than you would push yourself, and that's really useful for anyone who is less than perfectly self-motivated, which is most of us.
Turning away customers is bad for business,but essential to keep up standards.
If your goal is to get a good job and you don't have a strong background, then these bootcamps are a fantastic resource.
Just show me what you've done. Send me repo links, production code, or even just the end result with some sort of proof that you actually built it. That's the best part about any craft - practicing or building something creates tangible results. If you don't already have a portfolio, get to work on that before you start applying.
Heck, even reasonably good software can produce a very negative impression. Utilitarian code can be seen as ugly or overly simplistic. Elegant conceptual stuff often runs the risk of grinding against biases and preconceptions of the particular reviewer.
For your second argument, I know what you mean, but that's also totally subjective, dictated by chance, and would apply equally across the board for all candidates. Even if that happens, it sort of naturally levels itself out competition-wise.
Also, remember that you're evaluating the employer too - do you want to work for someone who chooses employees that way? Would you want to work with someone who has a closed mind and an axe to grind about certain concepts? I wouldn't trust people like that to make good decisions that will make the company succeed, thereby keeping me employed - let alone providing opportunities to advance. Plus they sound like they'd be a pain in the ass to work with.
That would be difficult for people who work for companies that claim presumptive ownership over everything they produce.
I was commenting less on the article and more on the general disdain for bootcamp grads that seems to crop up in every article or thread about them. It always devolves into whether people with this education or that education are any good, and it's just completely irrelevant.
I get it, development is a craft, it's easy to judge the quality or experience level of a coworker after having to deal with their PRs for a month or two. However, it's not like any toy project I could throw on github is going to have real relation to the actual work I do, and trying to replicate e.g. some of the third party integrations I've written internally as public stand-alone packages is going to get me fired and sued by an overprotective employer.
This isn't a hypothetical fear either, multiple times I've gone through phone interviews to a "lets review some of your past work" stage, and my "I can't legally show you any of these things, but here's general descriptions of some of the major internal projects I've led or handled solo" has resulted in failing to make the next interview round.
In a gold rush, sell shovels.
You can study computer science and software engineering at universities. (Bachelor/Master of Science/Engineering)
You can study it at universities of applied science.
You can study it (without degree only state-certificate) at a school. (Staatlich geprüfter Informatiker)
And you can also do an apprenticeship in software development. (Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung)
All are mostly free of charge OR you will even get paid doing them and you got an officially recognized paper that tells the world that you know stuff.
https://www.navy.com/careers/information-and-technology/info...