Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?
And yet, looking around, there don't seem to be many jobs for entry-level Rails or iOS developers. If you look around on job boards, there simply is not much competition for entry-level talent. Most of the job growth appears to be in academic stuff like AI and data science which requires at the very least a BS and probably an MS. The run-of-the-mill web and mobile developer positions all demand at least some level of experience (generally 2-6 years). It just doesn't seem like there is enough demand for inexperienced talent to make this kind of program effective.
But if the stats that these bootcamps throw out are true, there are companies hiring people at $100k who, twelve weeks ago, had never opened a text editor in their lives.
If you've hired from one of these programs, what made you turn to them? Was it a success? And if it's really possible to build a rails developer from scratch in 10 weeks, why not just just do it in-house through an internship program and avoid paying commission to these schools? And why do most companies still ask for "at least a Bachelors in CS" for web and mobile development positions?
263 comments
[ 836 ms ] story [ 6002 ms ] threadI work at Conde Nast. I helped work with a bootcamp program to create a "internship" program for new graduates. We took eight students after attending a recruiting event and invited them to work on a cycling program. From the eight, we hired four.
We cycled the students through four of Conde Nast's brands/responsibilities. Currently, we have junior developers from this program working on GQ magazine, Glamour, and our in-house CMS system. They are doing JavaScript web app development.
Going into the hiring process, I was betting on the students rate of learning. We knew they didnt have the domain experience. We were hiring out of a RoR bootcamp, so their knowledge was also going to be irrelevant. Knowing they spent 10 weeks learning at a rapid pace, I believed we could extend that to our own code base.
Our experience was good. Because our company was in a unique hiring period, it made sense. We wouldnt do it again.
I assume you mean 'would do it again'?
It'd be more clear to say "We probably won't do it again," I think. And if you did end up needing multiple entry-level hires, it sounds like you would be open to a similar approach?
Possibly pedantic, but, that's the simple conditional (which, in this particular context without an explicit condition, has the implicit condition of "in similar circumstances"), not the past tense.
Its almost the reverse in this case. Among the meanings of the simple conditional form is the "future-in-the-past" meaning (which is sometimes called a form or tense of its own.)
There are conditional sentences in which one or the other of English's past tenses/forms are used, but they are used in the condition clause (which was implicit, not stated, in the sentence at issue). The other clause (the conditional) uses a future form (usually marked with the modal verb will or shall -- English doesn't actually have a future tense, as such) or a conditional form (marked with the modal verb would or should.)
Its almost the reverse in this case. Among the meanings of the simple conditional form is the "future-in-the-past" meaning (which is sometimes called a form or tense of its own.)
There are conditional sentences in which one or the other of English's past tenses/forms are used, but they are used in the condition clause (which was implicit, not stated, in the sentence at issue). The other clause (the conditional) uses a future form (usually marked with the modal verb will or shall -- English doesn't actually have a future tense, as such) or a conditional form (marked with the modal verb would or should.)
Its almost the reverse in this case. Among the meanings of the simple conditional form is the "future-in-the-past" meaning (which is sometimes called a form or tense of its own.)
There are conditional sentences in which one or the other of English's past tenses/forms are used, but they are used in the condition clause (which was implicit, not stated, in the sentence at issue). The other clause (the conditional) uses a future form (usually marked with the modal verb will or shall -- English doesn't actually have a future tense, as such) or a conditional form (marked with the modal verb would or should.)
No. In "If we were in similar conditions again, we wouldn't do the same thing", the condition clause ("If we were in similar conditions again") uses the past tense, the main clause ("we wouldn't do the same thing") uses the conditional mood, which is marked (in this case) by the use of the modal verb "would".
In the sentence "We wouldn't do it again" where the condition is implicit, there is no use of the past tense, only the conditional mood.
If the experience was good, why not?
If we are hiring for single spots, we need experienced developers.
That's why you don't see openings for entry level positions.
shameless plug: we're hiring in SF for ruby/scala/angular, email me if interested.
i hired a guy who had been through a general assembly course in london, he had also had a couple short of internships before he got to us. hired as a junior javascript developer and he is doing very well
if its is so it's time to dust of my interesting bits of my job using ML to optimise ppc acountmanageent
if its is so it's time to dust of my interesting bits of my job using ML to optimise ppc acountmanageent
Which rather puts the £8k fees in an unflattering perspective, but there you go.
I've had some experience with bootcamp grads over the past couple years, as they have applied to jobs I had posted (I recruit engineers). Based on my experience, the bootcamps seem to do a good job of building confidence in their grads, although that might be a trait of people who go to bootcamps (those confident that they can change careers in 10 weeks).
I believe there was also a trend of some bootcamps to hire their own grads in some capacity, which could skew the numbers a bit.
2 had 2-3 years experience post boot camp. They are excellent mid-senior devs. They are from Flatiron School.
We have hired 3 juniors straight out of camp. All are on boarding at or exceeding our expectations. 2 are from App Academy, one is from GA.
EDIT: I'm pretty certain our JRs don't make 100k.
Why wouldn't someone with 30-40 years of programming experience and who is motivated not be able to learn a new language?
If someone told me to train a productive programmer from scratch in 12 weeks time I would tell them that this is impossible. It took me five years of professional experience and a ton (really LOTS) of spare-time hacking to feel reasonably fireproof in my profession. Maybe I'm not the smartest guy and it it took me longer but I honestly doubt its doable in 12 weeks.
There is just too many concepts you need to learn. 12 weeks would give you someone who can edit JavaScript code without really knowing what he's doing and how his tool (JS) works imho. He might be able to wire up a dynamic website with some GUI callbacks but I doubt he could actually design a program.
From a proficient programmer, I'd expect that you can give him any programming language and that he can use it after a weekend or two. I'd also expect him to be able to read the language implementations source code. What good are you if you can't debug your tools?
No, but they could very likely need a "boot camp" to get their resume past braindead gatekeepers or to make contacts that allow them to bypass said gatekeepers.
Although I think your idea of who goes to these bootcamps is pretty off. These aren't people who "had never opened a text editor in their lives." Some of them are people who were working in science, doing research and matlab programming, and wanted to make a career switch. Others are people who maybe majored in math, or perhaps a completely non-technical major but went to a bunch of hackathons or took some intro programming classes for fun, and then when they realized they loved tech it was to late for them to make the switch in college.
Top programs like the Flatiron school are NOT a walk in the park. They are intensive, 60-80 hour a week programs with a very low acceptance rate.
Of the dozen plus people I know who have gone through one, I can't think of a single person who had never programmed before entering into one of these bootcamps (not that it is not possible!).
"looking around, there don't seem to be many jobs for entry-level Rails or iOS developers. If you look around on job boards, there simply is not much competition for entry-level talent."
What? I get emails every other day from recruiters hiring for their social mobile ruby on rails web app. The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.
If not, then your recruiting emails mean little.
If yes, then your assessment of other entry-level programmers who happen to have come from bootcamps is perhaps less valuable.
I had done some SharePoint front end design when I was on an editorial team and we needed some features in our SharePoint site in 2008, but had to take any mention of SharePoint out of my resume because I got too many contacts from recruiters looking for a SharePoint architect.
I'm also a Zend Certified Engineer in PHP (don't hate). I'd never worked with Zend Framework, but would get very regular recruiter contacts because they didn't know the difference between "Zend" (a company) and "Zend Framework" (an MVC framework that was just one of their products).
At every level of the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.
At every level of the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.
In the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.
In the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.
As an App Academy graduate, I can confirm this. Pretty much everyone has some prior programming, technical, or engineering experience. Personally, I had gone through most of an Electrical Engineering program.
Good bootcamps aren't something that takes average people and turns them into good developers. They take talented individuals and fills in the missing pieces for being able to contribute professionally.
In the web and mobile sections of the industry, maybe.
The problem is that people don't practice them because they believe that these questions test some sort of intrinsic, unchangeable quality of how smart you are, which is totally false.
But if people practiced them more, they would realized that there is only 10-20 questions that you can be asked, and everything else is just some minor variation of the most common questions, and you don't specialized training to do project Euler or glassdoor.com questions.
My gut reaction to this is that you're not asking very good questions if it's such simple variations. Unless you're being excessively reductive in that all of programming can be done in just a handful of compiler operations, and thus only a handful of programming questions could be asked.
I recently interviewed a ton of boot campers and the skill level varies greatly. I would have hired a few of them for junior level roles, but we were really looking for more experienced people. IF you are considering boot camps is try to get in early so you have access to the best people there. My guess is that the best get snapped up fast.
To give you an idea about what kind of juniority is attractive to a shop like ours: We run our own in-house internship program which takes 9 months. It requires CS degree plus some previous experience (private pet projects are OK) to enter.
The intern is paid living expenses and has vacation like other employees. The goal of the program is to hire the intern as a permanent junior developer after 9 months. Junior starting salary is also a far cry below 100K USD, but then again we don't have to live in San Francisco.
We treat our QA department as kind of a software engineering farm team. In fact, I don't know the last time we hired an entry-level SE directly. So maybe our QA engineers are what other places might consider a "junior SE".
What was great about Flatiron: - Really good faculty that cared not just about tech, but about teaching - Really good curriculum that fosters basic CS skills and an 'engineering mindset' instead of just 'learning Rails' - Fosters an attitude that encourages learning for learning's sake - Great support through the job placement system.
What was not so great: - You really can't come in with 0 experience and come out a competent developer. Most of the people in the program had at least some prior familiarity with coding, even if the experience was shallow. - Instruction focuses on the students at the middle of the individual semester's bell curve. Students with no experience (or lacking basic computer skills) can get left behind, students with way more experience (or more aptitude) can get bored. - To me, the average salary touted by the school is inflated. Most people seem to have landed in jobs that pay around 50-60k initially, although many people are able to move to higher paying positions quickly.
I haven't personally been through the GA bootcamp, but I know two people who have and have worked/interviewed with others that have. GA seems to not really give a shit about actually educating people or getting them jobs, just about making sure they pay tuition. There is little to no job counseling, instructors are of (at best) mixed quality, and the curriculum is extremely confused.
Like anything else that you're going to spend 12k on, do your research before you commit. Some schools are great, some are not, and what you get out of it always depends on what you put into it. Look for one (like flatiron) with great job placement, and connections to companies.
Additionally, the idea that 'most companies' require a CS degree for web devs is just not true. Most job postings that are out in the wild might ask for that, but most companies hire new devs through job placement services, or connections that can vouch for the skills of non-degreed developers, rather than through cattle call services like Linkedin, Craigslist, etc.
Where this school did lack however, is the staff. The people behind the scenes that are supposed to be helping us find jobs and get us ready for interviews. I had no support in this area. In fact I was really surprised by the fact that my former class mates were more helpful in reviewing my resume and my portfolio and interview tips than the staff. After we finished our class they moved on to the next one interviewing new students and didn't give 2 fucks about us. For that reason I could not recommend the school I attended.
I know most if not all of the instructors and staff read HN so hopefully they read this and reevaluate how they handle graduates.
These schools are popping up everywhere and growing at a rapid pace, so I hope they don't succumb to the University of Phoenix reputation however unless there is some type of standard by which they must operate I don't see a good future in the long run from these places. There is too much discrepancy between cost, curriculum and standards of acceptance right now.
At least do it to help other students avoid paying a bunch of money for a bad experience. That kid who posted about the nightmare at Coding House did the whole community a big favor.
I think, perhaps unsurprisingly, the statement that
> "GA seems to not really give a shit about actually educating people or getting them jobs, just about making sure they pay tuition"
is flat wrong. We have a large, dedicated "Outcomes" team whose sole job is to educate and prepare students for the workplace and find them positions after they graduate. Unlike other bootcamps, GA does not act as a recruiter by taking fees from employers for placing candidates, nor do we take a percentage of students' first year salaries as tuition. I think this is great, because it means that our Outcomes team is only concerned with finding the best fit for each student, rather than placing them with a "partner" company or in the highest paying job, which may not be suitable for them.
We also integrate workplace related programming throughout the entire course by bringing in developers from other companies to talk about what it's like to work in the industry, taking students on tours of potential employer offices so they can see what a typical dev environment might look like, encouraging students to participate in meetups and local dev events to grow their own development communities, and more. Also, GA has an excellent (90%+) success rate in helping our students get relevant (i.e. something that uses the skills they just learned) jobs post graduation.
As far as the curriculum: frankly, most of the bootcamps (including us) are teaching on the same stack (Ruby, Rails, Git, and obviously HTML, CSS/Sass, Javascript, jQuery and some JS framework). I would be very surprised if the curriculum was wildly different amongst bootcamps. What we've found is that the quality of instruction and an emphasis on problem-solving techniques is more important to long term success than particular technology stacks. I'd be very interested to hear if Flatiron has some groundbreaking new way to teach the Rails stack.
Finally, on instructor quality: I'm obviously very biased here, but the other instructors I've met and worked with at GA have been some of the best I've seen. I suppose it could be argued that I must not have seen great developers before, but if that's true then I have been faking my way through the last several years coding at prominent VC-backed startups. My co-instructors are experienced, knowledgeable, and most of all they take pride in their craft and care about their students. I have a lot of respect for Flatiron and think they're a great bootcamp, but I wouldn't trade the developers I get to work with on a daily basis for anyone.
YES - we have hired out of Flatiron school. A total newbie who goes through the program can't come out as a full-fledged developer, but we have brought them in as QA/Automation engineers and then promoted to developer after 9-12 months.
To answer the original question - companies in my area are unlikely to hire from a Bootcamp and I think this may be a trend in smaller hiring markets.
Those are related. I can help translate. It means you'll have a non-technical boss. You must be comfortable with learning from google, and your non technical boss is not tech savvy enough to learn from google for you.
For example, its humorous to see this story on the front page adjacent to the "I'm a freelancer and can't find work" story. In that story, theres a comment with a link to the periodic "hiring" stories you'll see here on HN. One of the most recent has a very entry level back end data processing job where (paraphrasing) they need someone to write a python script to open a text file, connect to a database, read the text file and import into the database, and then the javascript frontend guys take it from there. For this, which sounds like a first programming assignment in baby's first python class, they demand a "Python Expert". I cannot possibly imagine how bored a real python expert would be, taking care of something like that. They don't really want or need a "real" python expert, they are signalling that the boss will be totally non-technical and don't expect any training or hand holding at all, which for some noobs with self training skills is perfectly OK. Or by the standards of a totally non-technical businessman, a guy who can "apt-get install python" then write a hello_world or fizzbuzz that actually works is, relative to the businessman, a python expert.
Another reason you'll see weird job offers is H1B legal requirements. There's a large energy company about a mile from my house that periodically posts its legally required H1B job for a CCIE with 25 years experience and similar BS for $50K. All it means is they have a H1B working there and can't find a local willing to work for, say, $45K with 30 yrs (real, not resume) experience, so they don't have to deport the poor guy who's currently working there.
Or they demand a "Rockstar". :)
Judge for yourself.
<3 //
Avi Flombaum
> Most of the job growth appears to be in academic stuff like AI and data science
This is incorrect -- web jobs are growing quickly.
> there are companies hiring people at $100k who, twelve weeks ago, had never opened a text editor in their lives.
This is rare, but it does happen. The more common case is the student that coded on the side for a year or two and then jumped in full-time to a school like mine.
> And if it's really possible to build a rails developer from scratch in 10 weeks, why not just just do it in-house through an internship program?
Running an educational program is hard. You might as well ask me "If your grads are really worth $100k a year, why not hire them all and make software?" That's, like, a whole different company.
> And why do most companies still ask for "at least a Bachelors in CS" for web and mobile development positions?
We tell our students, "This means 'you have to know how to code', so that random non-coders don't apply." As a former engineering manager, this was true in practice. I didn't care if an applicant had a BS or not, as long as they could code.
Running an educational program is hard, I agree. And if you guys are doing a really excellent job of it over, say, 10 weeks the way I look at it is this: the potential hire is an entry level person who has about a 3 month jump on the approx 2 years it will take to make a developer out of them.
So given that: I'd have no problem hiring these people as entry level (i.e. developer in training), and if I knew something about the program itself that would count in their favor against similarly green candidates.
Running an educational program is hard, I agree. And if you guys are doing a really excellent job of it over, say, 10 weeks the way I look at it is this: the potential hire is an entry level person who has about a 3 month jump on the approx 2 years it will take to make a developer out of them.
So given that: I'd have no problem hiring these people as entry level (i.e. developer in training), and if I knew something about the program itself that would count in their favor against similarly green candidates.
Running an educational program is hard, I agree. And if you guys are doing a really excellent job of it over, say, 10 weeks the way I look at it is this: the potential hire is an entry level person who has about a 3 month jump on the approx 2 years it will take to make a developer out of them.
So given that: I'd have no problem hiring these people as entry level (i.e. developer in training), and if I knew something about the program itself that would count in their favor against similarly green candidates.
Running an educational program is hard, I agree. And if you guys are doing a really excellent job of it over, say, 10 weeks the way I look at it is this: the potential hire is an entry level person who has about a 3 month jump on the approx 2 years it will take to make a developer out of them. If your program is a year long, they're maybe half way there.
So given that: I'd have no problem hiring these people as entry level (i.e. developer in training), and if I knew something about the program itself that would count in their favor against similarly green candidates.
Running an educational program is hard, I agree. And if you guys are doing a really excellent job of it over, say, 10 weeks the way I look at it is this: the potential hire is an entry level person who has about a 3 month jump on the approx 2 years it will take to make a developer out of them. If your program is a year long, they're maybe half way there.
So given that: I'd have no problem hiring these people as entry level (i.e. developer in training), and if I knew something about the program itself that would count in their favor against similarly green candidates.
Running an educational program is hard, I agree. And if you guys are doing a really excellent job of it over, say, 10 weeks the way I look at it is this: the potential hire is an entry level person who has about a 3 month jump on the approx 2 years it will take to make a developer out of them. If your program is a year long, they're maybe a bit over half way there.
So given that: I'd have no problem hiring these people as entry level (i.e. developer in training), and if I knew something about the program itself that would count in their favor against similarly green candidates.
Hack Reactor focuses entirely on JavaScript and Web Development, after baking in the basics (algorithms, logical thinking, recursion vs iteration, introductory functional programming and TDD). And it is incredibly successful.
I think you're underestimating the difference between college and immersive learning. College is about many things, your major and focus being one of them. Immersive learning is about one thing. In Hack Reactor's case, it's becoming a competent Web Developer.
Elon Musk's response in this thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk...) rings true. Almost no college is teaching Web Development, and so the students get little class based exposure to it, and stumble through many pitfalls. An immersive experience gives you the trunk and several branches, and then frees you up to go deep into whatever you care about.
And smart, voracious people who are eager to learn and better themselves quickly outclass everyone else.
Oh, and I could code competently before I went to Hack Reactor (I was a contractor). I went to gain deep web experience, work in crossfunctional teams, and have a safe place to fortify the foundational soft skills which are absolutely essential for productive software developers.
Oh, and the ROI is insane.
Maybe not all who go through a bootcamp like Hack Reactor are bad - the story certainly reinforces to avoid assumptions about a candidate and assess each person carefully.
I wouldn't hire someone just because they'd graduated from a decent CS program either, it's just a reasonable proxy for some of the skills (but not others) they will need to become a developer over time.
It turns out, immersive learning is absolutely capable of compressing synthesis time as well as knowledge transfer. One of the best parts of Hack Reactor is the time after the 'solution lecture', during which everyone gets the chance to reflect on their code and solutions and discuss macro and micro optimizations that were possible.
For general reflection, Socratic seminars are a great way of condensing the synthesis time. Those who have had small epiphanies share them, and hopefully it avalanches.
But you're correct. The deepest learning is very personal and requires effort, solitude, and time. Immersive learning gives you the trunk and knowledge of a few select branches, but if you want to see the leaves you must find them yourself, or at most with one other person. In Hack Reactor's case, only half of the course is absorbing information. The second half is left to projects, during which synthesis must occur and individuals specialize and gain deep knowledge.
500+ hours of steady research and application is nothing to scoff at, especially since it happens while connected to a huge wealth of intellectual resources (I worked directly with Neo4j peoples for a project).