Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?
Would you? Have we reached a saturation point for bootcamp graduates? Has the bootcamp experiment failed, or succeeded?
About two years ago, the concept of a dev bootcamp was still relatively uncommon, with a competitive admissions process and a good reputation. Now, it seems like there's more than I can keep track of. I also want to know if graduates who don't have much luck finding work after their program just decide to do something else?
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadThat said, I'm suspicious of this too. You can certainly teach someone git, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and Rails in 12 weeks - but you can't go very deep with any of them.
But if the company decided that they needed a new component that would be a standalone Java service (or whatever), I a) wouldn't feel confident that the person would be able to pick up Java in a reasonable amount of time, and b) wouldn't trust them to structure the application in a good way, as they just don't have the experience building real things.
The coding projects were, in hindsight, pretty pathetic compared to what I can do now. I wish the program had forced us (or tricked us) into becoming more mature programmers, just by doing a lot of coding and holding our code to higher standards. Come graduation, the best engineers had gotten the experience to mature in this way entirely outside of our classes. I didn't get that at all so I was very behind.
I don't see a reason one couldn't learn the useful skills in 12 weeks. Except, possibly, for the sorts of mathematical intuition that you get from studying CS theory.
However. I think I got a huge amount of intuition on a wide range of engineering problems from my degree. I did modules on compilers, real time systems, operating systems, control systems, security, genetic algorithms, databases, web services, and many more, and while the depth on each of those topics was not great, I feel that if presented with any of those problems now I would have a very solid starting point, and more importantly, when looking at problems in my day job, I have a far broader set of experience that I can draw from, which helps me make much more informed decisions.
I don't think it's the mathematical intuition, I think it's the engineering intuition.
But there's not a class where you learn Linux + shell commands and basic sysadmin-y things, and for those of us who didn't really know what we liked and just followed along through the coursework, it was easy to pretty much not learn any of that useful stuff.. ever. Not before graduation at least.
Everything I learned in class, I could have taught myself. However, working with others and having built-in schedules and accountability helped me learn what I may never have followed through on alone. Also, being guided toward achievable milestones is immensely valuable. In those ways and others, the course helped maintain my motivation. And, as inevitably happens when learning something completely new, I encountered some hurdles. Usually, it was worth working through those problems myself. But there were one or two that I encountered that stymied me, and might've killed my momentum. Having access to fellow students as well as the instructors was invaluable in those times, and allowed me to continue learning.
Most importantly for me, the course gave me some level of credibility. I had an atypical background and, while development was something that interested me, I didn't see my resume getting any traction. Code Fellows gave me an in, and allowed me to show what I was capable of - that is ultimately what got me hired and has brought me success since. Since being hired, my salary has almost doubled and I have risen from an entry-level position to an architecting role in one of our top teams. If that sounds unlikely, I've had trouble accepting it myself. All it has shown me is that there are ample opportunities for capable people who are willing to put in hard work.
Finally, hiring. It is difficult to find good developers for entry positions. It isn't that hard to find experienced developers, if you're willing and able to pay. But new devs are difficult to sift through. Many look good on paper - maybe they left a good impression at a meetup, or their GitHub profile looks solid, etc. However, it is amazing how many of those people really are... not a good fit. Bootcamps have helped us to weed out those we aren't interested in, and given us a slate of candidates that have a much better chance of working out.
I got a BS in Computer Science from liberal arts school with a theory-focused CS department.
Pros:
- I developed a very strong sense of code smell. Intuition. My department cared about elegance and good coding practices. I used to be a TA and my prof even had a couple points dedicated to "style" on his grading rubric. I don't think this is something you can pick up in 12 weeks, but at the same time, there are plenty of college CS programs that don't teach best practices.
- Algorithms. Data structures. Systems. Math. Yeah, I probably never have to write out a proof as to why a program is O(nlogn) again but not all programming jobs are full-stack dev stuff. These subjects are a lot more difficult to teach yourself than just reading a book about Javascript. There are a lot of careers in programming that require strong theoretical CS knowledge. Go to Glassdoor and look at the interview questions for entry-level programmers at Google or Amazon.
Cons:
- Didn't know anything about industry practices. None of our professors had ever held a job in the industry.
- Teaches "irrelevant" stuff. Now, this is a commonly cited as an issue with traditional education. I actually disagree because you never know what's going to be relevant in your future. If you go after a specific subset of the field from the start ("I am going to be a full-stack developer") you are inherently limiting your future. You don't know what you don't know. And you don't know if that's something you're missing out on because you never tried it.
If you took 100 random people and put them in a coding bootcamp, I would expect far worse results.
Regardless, no hiring manager should expect someone to jump into a professional role. The program teaches you the basics and how to find relevant resources to help you learn. If a hiring manager is expecting more than that, that's on them, not the program.
Would you feel confident in starting a job at a company that used a language you don't already know?
Thanks!
The worst thing that bootcamps can do is to encourage developers to simply "pad" their GitHub accounts with exercises in order to have used as many technologies as possible. I've seen developers bragging solely about the number of repos and commits they have in GitHub.
Generally speaking though, some people come through the programs having gained an incredible amount of skill, some people were already very good and simply looked to extend their skills, and some came through without gaining much at all. Much like any education program.
Industry hiring practices are encouraging this; bootcamps are simply keying their students into it.
When I took the course, 4 of my classmates ran their own companies, 2 others were project managers. None of them were looking to become developers. They were trying to gain some knowledge to better communicate with half their company. We had UI/UX designers trying to extend their reach. The vast majority were artsy people looking to apply their design skills to front end web development, while still making sure they knew where the data was coming from (or be able to fall into a full stack role). Out of a class of 25, I think only 5 of us ended up doing any back-end related programming, and I'm the only one that ended up as purely back end(Math/Stats major in college).
Edit: So, you can't say that a candidate is a good or bad hire based on which bootcamp they attended.
Skill and experience come with time... a personal drive to learn/try things is more than something that can be learned in a bootcamp.
Why are there so expensive? (10k is more than what I am paying for my BSc degree at McGill)
The original question seems to suggest that students who take this path are more alike than different. There is surely a wide spectrum of graduates from the brightest student at the most selective bootcamp to the least engaged student at a poorly run school. I don't think you can generalize any more than you can for cs graduates.
Looked at from this lens, $10k isn't much for a program that will give you skills to earn about the same salary after a year of work that a physical sciences engineer can attain.
http://www.macleans.ca/interactive-how-canadian-tuition-fees...
Absolutely would hire again. Not just because he's damned skilled for a "junior" but the commitment to give up everything and haul ass across the world says something that coding literacy can't.
So far so good in my company! But I've only worked in web development ever since I graduated, would like try something new later on
For these 5 women, that was in addition to the soft skills necessary to succeed which I assume they all had before going into the program. I absolutely would hire them all again. We have interviewed several more from that program as well as other bootcamps who didn't exhibit those soft skills (bad attitudes, unable to communicate clearly what they worked on).
Most bootcamps have a group project, this for me is the key to whether they will be successful on your team. The group project shows from experience some of the challenges on working on a team - merge conflicts,how they manage time and how they work with others (who might not be on the same level or who have a bad attitude). One of our developers had worked on a team that had a team member drop out of the program mid way through their project. We happened to meet her teammate who told us that not only did they get it out on time but she had stepped up big time and made sure that all the features got out the door.
TL/DR : Hired 5 awesome women through General Assembly and would hire them all again.
That's really interesting to hear, and something I haven't run into. Thus far my experience with developers from bootcamps has been underwhelming and over-hyped. ("We made our own Facebook in the program" is really "You made a guestbook-wall-web-app that saves data to a database using RoR")
I could see how those soft skills could be extremely useful, and it is honestly something on a daily basis I have the most problems with in other developers.
Do you have some sort of explicit gender-based filtering in your hiring or recruiting process?
However, depending on the class they can be pretty close to even on women to men. 2 of 3 hiring events i've been to in the last year were half men/women, one i'm pretty sure was more women then men (7/4? something like that) but that was in Boston at specific time so YMMV.
Junior developers have a lot to learn and showing commitment and openness to be taught is really important when we commit to mentoring them professionally.
We are happy to hire more but our local bootcamp is out of graduates :)
One of the hires has been on my product team and is a total badass. Better with ~1 year of experience than I ever was.
I do think college in C.S. changed my brain in interesting ways, but the number of really good professors I had was probably small in my major, and smaller outside.
I find myself mostly using some very minor bits of discrete math in the end, and college left me with a employeeable but misguided interest in Java that I quickly learned I probably didn't like so much. Still, there were some abstract projects that were conceptually difficult. On the job learning is more useful.
Looking at the program I was talking to's syllabus, it was pretty much all "near best of breed" tech presented in a good order with a focus on automated testing.
Universities are trying to avoid being career farms, and yes, you want to learn things that last, but I think the answer is somewhere in the middle.
Some of the best people I've worked with with art or music majors. On a similar front, C.S. programs don't do a great job of teaching what industry really feels like - if I had known, I might not have gone into C.S. :)
A C.S/related degree helps a hiring decision, but I'm not sold on it if there are projects to back it up, and is no guarantee of awesomeness. I do like to see some four year degree on a resume still though.
I think you somewhat want proof of being able to learn, and also learning how to learn, and an appreciation for things like reliability and performance and "good code" and things like that. However you come to them is ok.
Just curious, what would you have majored in to know what the industry is like?
Internships or co-ops I highly recommend along the way, but when you're that inexperienced you really won't see much of the organizational-structure/politics/churn/team-dynamics that can often exist.
I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying the creative burst of coding awesomeness that I so much love about tech has a lot of other things around it all of the time, and you don't usually see that in college.
tl;dr CTO fights to keep me.
Some other notes: I think the quality of instruction was very high at my particular camp. In retrospect I feel I was perfectly well prepared to contribute from day 1. However, I'm a philomath and my skill set and personality are both good fits for coding. I probably would have made it without a boot camp, the boot camp just got me there faster.
Happy to answer any questions about my camp experience, motivations, contribution level, etc.
One stepped up, and the other was fired. They were great for basic web development, but really crashed and burned for anything more than that. They had some issues understanding basic system administration, data modeling, basic algorithms, web architecture, and systems modeling. Our lead developers didn't have time to give them a two year education on these issues. We were all busy building stuff. The one bootcamp developer who survived, from what I found out was basically eat sleep breathing itunes computer science courses. But she eventually resigned from massive burnout.
I personally think there should be a better median between a 10-20wks bootcamp and four year degree.
I think the first 2 1/2 years of my computer science b.s. really really helped me learn the basic mental model for computers, and how to learn new concepts from that model.
As a self taught developer myself, this pretty much describes how I managed to keep my first job. I'd be working 16 hour days.... itunes U didn't exist at the time, but I made enough to buy as many books as I needed. I'd spend all night learning what I didn't know.
I started programming at 12 (my first dev job was at 18), so going in I had a good idea of how to program, but going from side projects to full time work required that extra effort.
Can you expand on this a bit? As in, what kinds of things within those areas were they not getting or completely ignorant of?