Ask HN: Which programming bootcamps do you take seriously?
I am new to the tech industry and was one of the people who got in after doing a rails web development bootcamp. I was honestly pretty disappointed with my bootcamp, but I just wanted some direction with my education and validation with a credential. Now that I'm in the industry I've heard a lot of back and forth.
Rather than ask IF you take graduates of these programs seriously (because I'm sure that's a conversation we have read before) I'm curious which programs you take seriously. This might help me as I meet people who want to get into the industry and have shown they have the willpower to get started on their own.
Thanks for any feedback!
21 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 19.1 ms ] threadIf you want to further your education. Build applications, websites or whatever thing makes sense for your field of interest. Proof of your abilities is the application. Other than prior work experience it is the only thing that validates your knowledge.
A bootcamp is nothing more than a vocational school, it teaches just enough to be dangerous but will never make you a serious software engineer. That requires a much deeper background which would allow you to pick up any language and any framework that might be required. After going to a bootcamp you will have to spend years "practicing" and learning on your own to even be considered a junior developer as far as I'm concerned.
On my end I think I need to find something outside of work that I want to build. There are so many neat things out there. I just need to figure out what excites me as I get more into the industry.
What languages, frameworks do you now have experience with? Ruby on Rails? Are you primarily interested in web development? Software development is a huge field with many specialties. Web development is completely different from native application development, server development is completely different from GUI applications. Firmware and device drivers yet again are very, very different from the already mentioned specialties. Then there are specialties like algorithm development, encoding, artificial neural networks, encryption, compression, game logic AI, etc. Pick one thing, because you will quickly lose your focus if you keep bouncing from topic to topic.
I'm currently finishing up my first app for the Apple Itunes store. Things I had to learn to accomplish this: Objective-C, Cocos2D framework, openGL, Adobe Illustrator, Quartz 2D, Cocoa Touch, XCode, Git, FreeBSD (to host my custom game server), TCP/IP, UDP, mono. And that's just the programming stuff. I had to create a very intelligent algorithm to handle the computer player AI.
Prior to taking on such a monumental project, I had over 20 years of experience with x86 assembly, C/C++/C#, desktop application development experience using MFC and .Net, firmware development for ARM processors, device driver development on windows, simulator development for an engineering shop, manufacturing operations and testing software with database backend, reverse engineering of cell phones for forensic analysis, software development management, and the director of software engineering for a medical device company.
What are you most intersted in? The topic you are MOST interested in. Start there. If you tell me more about what you are looking to do, I can certainly point you in the right direction.
Good advice on being focused. When I was self teaching I felt like I was getting great exposure, but not direction. My bootcamp was meant to solve that issue, which it did. To be fair my bootcamp was Bloc.io and is online, making it cheaper than most bootcamps. There were some tradeoffs because of that type of curriculum but it got me started. Now I work with a team that is super supportive of me wanting to learn more. Super helpful to have people to support you and answer questions.
At least at the particular school I attended, I got a great deal out of time and money I invested. It's true you can find great lectures online. However, I found the that having a better than 2:1 student teacher ratio and having instructors around while I was actually in the process of writing software to be very helpful. Ditto for code reviews. While I could have learned everything on my own with books and other resources, it would have probably taken closer to 4,000 instead of 1,000 hours. It's also worth pointing out my classmates did generally end up with the kind of background that let them confidently jump into another language and framework. Quite a few did in their first jobs out of the program.
>"After going to a bootcamp you will have to spend years "practicing" and learning on your own to even be considered a junior developer as far as I'm concerned."
Fortunately for my friends and fellow alum, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber and many, many start-ups don't subscribe to this point of view. The average salaries of fresh grads of the program are higher than those of Stanford CS grads. The gap after a year is even greater.
I certainly can't claim that every immersive school is worth it, but some definitely are.
Update: The class hours were 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for 12 weeks (total of 864 hours). I generally stayed a couple of hours late and kept working on things and/or playing around with things from previous lessons. During that time I was technically on my own but the instructors were actually still around. I truly don't know when they slept. I also put in about 25 hours during the break week halfway through.
- Quit their old job to go to school full time. This is huge in indicating seriousness of their career change.
- Pay real cash to attend. Again, this shows that an attendee is serious about their new career.
Both of these require significantly more commitment than _just_ buying books, going to meetups, and finding more experienced friends. It's not mutually exclusive -- when hiring, I want to see if the bootcamp grad has done these things. But, attending a school is definitely a positive.
Source: I've hired 3 bootcamp grads, and the result has been so good I'm actively continuing to do so.
The sentiment I got from a majority of bootcamp attendees is feeling like they got legitimately scammed.
Examples include: * 95% of the time being spent with a "teacher's assistant" who "graduated" 1 week before and had less experience coding coming out of the program than most did going into it. * A week spent on basic HTML (which should obviously be pre-requisite knowledge) * After bringing up legitimate concerns about teaching material, and instruction being poor during the program looking for any type of refund and to part ways being met with extreme hostility. * Zero communication or follow-up on the job search a couple months after the program (which since they obviously couldn't get a job after a very basic program, they spent that time building out projects)
The advice people give is to not mention attending a bootcamp during interviews. Whether or not it's "fair", the "credential" of having attended a bootcamp is a negative signal.
Why? I thought these places were about learning to program?
Oh right. Well that explains it. Web dev does seem to get an enormous amount of press and attention for such a small part of the industry, but then it is the most obviously visible and as you say, it can have a very tight feedback loop for the coder[1].
[1] I expect, based on your words :) Never touched so much as a single line of it.
I think a lot of people mention bootcamps thinking that it is their ticket into the industry. I looked at it as one piece of my resume that I can use to sell myself, not a golden ticket.
I never expected my bootcamp to help me get a job, and boy did they meet that expectation. In the end I tapped the network I was building along the way and that's how I got my job. People need to take a bit more initiative on things like that rather than hope someone else will secure the interviews and jobs for them.
Another one with the same premise, made by the same guy is http://turing.io, and it works very similarly and some consider it to be gSchool 2.0
There are still are many people (like some who have given answers in this thread) who have never been to a bootcamp, know nothing about them, and continue to shit on them just because it is a different way of doing things. On the other hand, I have heard of some bootcamps basically just doing things you could do online, so YMMV. I dropped out of college and enrolled, and I am currently writing code for a living, so these programs definitely produce value despite what ignorant people may say.
The bootcamp I personally take incredibly seriously is Hack Reactor. I applied and had a great interview, but they told me to reapply again because my js wasn't were it needed to be for their bootcamp (which is fair, as I have focused way more energy on ruby/rails). I took that as a challenge, and I will be having my second interview in the next month, and I hope to go spring of 2015.
Hack Reactor seriously produces top notch people, rivaling that of many CS degree programs in my opinion. The instructors are incredible, the founders are very empathetic who have been in the position of many people coming to the program, and the students are all top notch. I could not think of any better way to spend 12-24 weeks.
I understand that you're asking for opinions we might have on which programs to take seriously, but I feel that narrowly focusing on that can create a flamewar that won't be productive for you as you talk with friends and others about which program to apply to.
I'll at least start by pointing out some great external resources to help you verify your own opinions, learn about new programs, and help people make an informed decision.
- Quora (http://quora.com) is a great resource to get information about which programming bootcamp to choose from. Yes, you can get subjective advice from people inside these bootcamps, but just searching "programming bootcamp" will send you through a wormhole of information.
- If you don't feel Quora provides you with enough objective data, there are a rising number of bootcamp review sites popping up. From our experience with these sites, I can say that Switch (switchup.org) and CourseReport (coursereport.com) have their stuff together.
I will also add that there are other options besides just 3-month programming bootcamps. There are even more intense programming bootcamps like the Turing School of Software & Design (http://turing.io/) or gSchool (http://www.galvanize.it/school/), and 30 Weeks (https://www.30weeks.com/), a new design school created by Google.
Taking objective cap off
We have also created a 9-month program in Chicago called Starter School (http://starterschool.com), which not only teaches web development, but web design, product development, and entrepreneurship. If you want to get a graduate's perspective of this program, I encourage you to read this post (https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3771-jack-mallers-from-dropou...).
Putting objective cap back on
Final cautionary note: If prospective students have the goal of getting a "validation with a credential" the chances of being disappointed at the end of the program are extremely high. These programs were created in direct retaliation to that premise. It's all about what you learn, what you build, and what type of person you are. The more serious you are about your education, the better chances you have of being successful after you are done with your bootcamp education.
Cool to see people repping Hack Reactor in this thread! Thanks <3