Maybe in past decades some employers were willing to give it a shot? I can't imagine anyone who just does this camp getting into "Big Tech" immediately. Maybe they actually were clever, had some relevant experience before, strong interest in technology already.
I know someone who did a bootcamp to move from sales to something they described sales engineer.
One of my best hires in big tech was from a bootcamp.
He made Sr Eng in 3 years. Previous job was a musician and waiter. Currently a principal engineer at Twilio.
There’s a reason entry level tech recruiting pivoted from “new grad” programs to “early career” programs.
I will add, just like any school the quality of the instructors is very important. You are probably getting better boot camp experiences in the Bay Area.
I’ve worked with 2 fresh bootcamp grads in the past and they were both fantastic. Our bar for hiring entry-level programmers was that they can write syntactically valid code while pairing with a more experienced engineer, ask lots of questions, and are quick learners.
Nobody expects a bootcamp grad to jump directly into engineering entire features from scratch. They do expect this from uni grads but I can tell from personal experience as a fresh-out-of-uni engineer that this is a terrible idea.
For about a decade, the tech sector had explosive growth, and some companies were taking “anything” they could get, which often included people who don’t know what an array is.
I’m biased about this as a boot camp grad -> staff engineer who has worked with a lot of interns that went on to be very successful engineers from the boot camp I attended, but yes it can definitely help.
> The sanctions for BloomTech appear to be quite severe. It can no longer collect any income share loan payments from grads that didn't get a job in the past year, and has to cancel the multi-thousand dollar finance charge for students who graduated more than 18 months ago and don't work a job making more than $70k a year. Plus, current students must be allowed to drop their loans and withdraw, or be able to continue attending but with a third-party loan.
> As an added bonus, BloomTech and Allred personally have to pay into the CFPB's victims' relief fund, with the company getting fined $64k and the CEO $100k. Plus, Allred is prohibited from student lending for a decade.
The best results I’ve seen from bootcamp, as someone who has interviewed over 200 such graduates is they act as
1. Talent identifiers. The best bootcamp grad I’ve ever interviewed is now a staff engineer at Uber. He started as a practicing lawyer and hated the hours
2. Finishing school for amateur programmers. The second best grad that I’ve interviewed was an ultima online hacker
Unpopular opinion, but I think if you already possess the necessary mathematical knowledge as a foundation, something like a boot camp followed by an internship or apprenticeship would probably be at least as good as what a college education would provide.
Sans the boot camp, you're describing many self-taught developers, myself included.
I was motivated to learn to code, and used the resources available — library, school computers, etc. — when a job turned me down because I know 8502 assembly but not 8086 assembly, I bought myself a cheap second hand, green screen PC and found a shareware assembler.
The critical part was finding that first employer that would hire me with an unrelated degree, because that served as my apprenticeship.
With one job on your resumé, the next is much easier
Luck, via an acquisition, was what got me into Microsoft, and with one of the big companies on your resumé job switching can become almost trivial. The Sankey diagrams for my last 4 job changes are close to being straight lines
What boot camp brings that isn't taught ad nausea in good online courses? Discipline?
I went through full IT-focused university, and added value from those times to my actual work is nearly 0, most of what I learned that I use I myself forced upon university via semester projects.
Campus life was fun, and probably biggest added value from those wild times. But I've spend maybe 70 USD/month on all university study-related costs together back then (study itself was for free so I mean campus, food, traveling... one of very few benefits of coming from former eastern block in Europe).
Getting into massive debt for studies when you can get everything online (and much more if you really have focus & discipline) ain't smart. It will get you a better CV, in some employer's eyes (nothing SV cares about from what I've heard, unless we talk about at least PhD in related fields). Law or medical degrees are a different beast of course, thats a walled garden and its not changing anytime soon.
That's an extremely common opinion on the internet. But I don't get it. If a 12 week bootcamp is "at least as good" as a 156 week bachelors degree, then what are people learning the remaining 144 weeks of college? I feel like my first 12 weeks of college were worse than a bootcamp - I was working from dusk till dawn having a nervous breakdown trying to keep up. And there were plenty of hard quarters after that. Calculus, Linear Algebra, C++, Differential Equations, Discrete control systems, Numerical analysis, having to make a weather simulation with navier-stokes equations in MATLAB, having to make a room mapping roomba out of a microcontroller and some bump switches. I could go on and on but college was hard AF for me. Jobs have felt like a breeze in comparison. Maybe it was all waste of time, and I should have gone straight into job experience. I'm genuinely saying that, not sarcasm. I just don't know.
A significant portion of the first two years of a typical Bachelor's degree program are very liberal arts heavy with a generous sprinkling of electives. These classes may deliver some value to the individual, but it is questionable how much they add to your skillset as a software developer. Also a bootcamp is a very compressed format, versus a typical college schedule.
On top of all of this there is also the elephant in the room that the cost of college has become so great that the value proposition isn't the same as it was in the past. If I can learn even 75% of what I could learn from a college at a bootcamp for a fraction of the price, does it still make sense to choose college?
Bootcamps typically focus on a single tech stack, i.e. web apps made with Ruby on Rails. While a degree focuses on all aspects of software development and could delve into hardware depending on the school.
Honestly, I think not getting a college degree is extremely short sighted. When you want to move into management and don’t have a Bachelor’s and can’t go get a Master’s, and coding loses all the fanfare, it’s going to be difficult to compete with people who have college degrees for a job.
I think bootcamps make sense for someone who got a degree that like anthropology that has high unemployment rates and low starting salaries and wants to move into the coding field, but not a good alternative to a bachelors degree as they are so expensive and won’t offer much value after the first job.
I know someone that worked their way up in a company and the company was sold and it was very difficult to get a similar job, because many places wouldn’t hire them for a similar position without a bachelor’s degree.
24 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadI know someone who did a bootcamp to move from sales to something they described sales engineer.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-484806/X-Facto...
He made Sr Eng in 3 years. Previous job was a musician and waiter. Currently a principal engineer at Twilio.
There’s a reason entry level tech recruiting pivoted from “new grad” programs to “early career” programs.
I will add, just like any school the quality of the instructors is very important. You are probably getting better boot camp experiences in the Bay Area.
Nobody expects a bootcamp grad to jump directly into engineering entire features from scratch. They do expect this from uni grads but I can tell from personal experience as a fresh-out-of-uni engineer that this is a terrible idea.
100% of students that are hired are hired.
> As an added bonus, BloomTech and Allred personally have to pay into the CFPB's victims' relief fund, with the company getting fined $64k and the CEO $100k. Plus, Allred is prohibited from student lending for a decade.
1. Talent identifiers. The best bootcamp grad I’ve ever interviewed is now a staff engineer at Uber. He started as a practicing lawyer and hated the hours
2. Finishing school for amateur programmers. The second best grad that I’ve interviewed was an ultima online hacker
The pool of such individuals is small
I was motivated to learn to code, and used the resources available — library, school computers, etc. — when a job turned me down because I know 8502 assembly but not 8086 assembly, I bought myself a cheap second hand, green screen PC and found a shareware assembler.
The critical part was finding that first employer that would hire me with an unrelated degree, because that served as my apprenticeship.
With one job on your resumé, the next is much easier
Luck, via an acquisition, was what got me into Microsoft, and with one of the big companies on your resumé job switching can become almost trivial. The Sankey diagrams for my last 4 job changes are close to being straight lines
I went through full IT-focused university, and added value from those times to my actual work is nearly 0, most of what I learned that I use I myself forced upon university via semester projects.
Campus life was fun, and probably biggest added value from those wild times. But I've spend maybe 70 USD/month on all university study-related costs together back then (study itself was for free so I mean campus, food, traveling... one of very few benefits of coming from former eastern block in Europe).
Getting into massive debt for studies when you can get everything online (and much more if you really have focus & discipline) ain't smart. It will get you a better CV, in some employer's eyes (nothing SV cares about from what I've heard, unless we talk about at least PhD in related fields). Law or medical degrees are a different beast of course, thats a walled garden and its not changing anytime soon.
On top of all of this there is also the elephant in the room that the cost of college has become so great that the value proposition isn't the same as it was in the past. If I can learn even 75% of what I could learn from a college at a bootcamp for a fraction of the price, does it still make sense to choose college?
I think bootcamps make sense for someone who got a degree that like anthropology that has high unemployment rates and low starting salaries and wants to move into the coding field, but not a good alternative to a bachelors degree as they are so expensive and won’t offer much value after the first job.
I know someone that worked their way up in a company and the company was sold and it was very difficult to get a similar job, because many places wouldn’t hire them for a similar position without a bachelor’s degree.
Actual official post: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939