
Ask HN: Have you ever hired bootcampers? - vladimirsvsv77
We’re searching for junior developers and thinking about hiring graduates from bootcamps and online schools. We think that it could be useful that most bootcampers have previous experience with other jobs.<p>For example, ex- HRs and recruiters may be super useful for our HR startup as they have knowledge in both HR and programming. A better understanding of this field will help them to better understand the product. Also, this may increase our workplace diversity.<p>What do you think? Do you have any experience hiring people who switched their career?
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avitzurel
Yes!

We hired multiple bootcampers. I can definitely say the experience this time
was good and the employees are successful.

It does take time and patience (and a path), it includes quite a bit of
mentoring and guidance.

It's also about expectations. You can't expect them to be "in the know" of
everything and it requires more management resources in the beginning. If the
company is committed to it and not doing it as a means to save money, it can
most definitely work.

~~~
vladimirsvsv77
Got it, thank you. Yes, I think we are ready to invest time in mentoring grads

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chasingthewind
At my old company (in a small east coast market) the leadership had supported
a local boot camp wholeheartedly and highly encouraged teams to bring in
junior candidates from each graduating cohort. In the round I participated in
we interviewed four candidates for my team. (I was the tech lead.)

Of the four candidates, two were essentially extremely under-prepared on
multiple levels. We simply could not even convince ourselves that they had
rudimentary coding skills or problem solving intuition. One candidate was
marginal but seemed intelligent and possibly able to handle the role.

One candidate was previously working in IT doing helpdesk and project
management work and wanted to break into software development. She did quite
well on the fizz buzz level coding task and we had a strong belief that she
would be able to perform and get up to speed so the company hired her.

She was very intelligent and hard working and she did slowly begin to learn
the applications and the tech stack (Java + Spring) but I can't emphasize how
much hand-holding, mentoring, and knowledge transfer it required on our part.
She was assigned a mentor to do pairing with her and I personally spent a lot
of time with her going over the systems and pairing with her. A short time
later I moved to another team and then later left the company but my former
coworkers report she's doing ok. It worked out but it was definitely a slow
and time consuming process.

I think the key challenge is that when a very junior engineer like this gets
12-24 months under their belt they're going to be very attractive to other
companies and are very likely to leave. I do not currently believe that the
investment that any single company would put in on some of these folks is
likely to pay off. The productivity that these folks contribute minus the
effort spent on them in 12-24 months is very likely to be a wash unless the
person is exceptionally talented.

I get the weird sense that companies recognize that they won't get too much
benefit out of mentoring _any specific person_ but that they've collectively
decided that they want to increase the number of junior candidates badly
enough that they're willing to "take one for the team" in a sense. Perhaps the
expectation is that for every junior candidate they train but quickly leaves
they'll just get a junior-mid candidate that somebody else trained.

In conclusion, not all candidates from these schools are good and the good
ones probably won't stay all that long. It doesn't seem to be an obviously
great bargain but companies are clearly willing to take those risks.

~~~
protonimitate
>In conclusion, not all candidates from these schools are good and the good
ones probably won't stay all that long

I think this could be said about candidates from traditional CS degree
backgrounds as well, no?

Companies are creating self-fulfilling prophesies by trying to hire juniors
for as cheap as possible and then refusing to implement decent raise/retention
strategies. I can't imagine that it's cheaper in the long run to constantly
have to interview, hire, and on-board mid-level engineers than it is to just
give a junior an decent raise of a year or two.

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godot
My previous company hired a lot from bootcamps (specifically Hack Reactor).
For a dev team of < 15 people, we had at least a handful of them from
bootcamps. I was one of the senior engineers and interviewers on the team so I
was part of the hiring decision, so I have some insights on why. Although I
didn't call that shot (of deciding to hire from bootcamps), I can see the
reasoning behind it.

Like many startups, it was on a node/react stack. And like many startups, we
were not tackling particularly hard algorithm problems. A lot of the problems
we face were just about building out lots and lots of features on the
consumer-facing site and managing a rather large and unwieldy codebase. The
skills we needed were not FAANG style algorithm-solving and having computer
science degrees. We needed people who really knew node and _especially_ react,
and just build out those features that product management and the business
wanted efficiently.

Incidentally, outside of the core of 4~5 senior engineers on the team (who've
been there pretty much since the beginning), these bootcamp recruits had the
highest retention in that engineering team, among many others who had come and
go. Your regular CS-educated software engineer tends to get a bit bored doing
that kind of work for a couple of years. I left as well, but for mostly other
reasons (though that was a small part of it).

To answer more directly to your question of interest though -- it's probably
quite hard to pinpoint bootcamp candidates with specific backgrounds you're
looking for, though. For example, the backgrounds of the bootcamp hires I
mentioned varied widely, from things like chemical engineering to business
majors and entrepreneurs of small local businesses who wanted to become a
software engineer.

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linkel
At my current company, it seems like about half the folks here are from
bootcamps (generally career switchers). On my team specifically, out of 6
developers 4 are bootcampers, including me. My company is currently hiring
more software engineers, and it seems like every other candidate interviewed
is a bootcamper, and they vary in skill. The folks I work with are all very
enjoyable to work with, so I think the interview process seems to work in our
case to bring in excellent people regardless of the presence of a CS degree.

Speaking personally, I am continuing to self-study CS topics by taking online
courses and going to universities' class websites and doing their assignments
if they put them online. This won't compare to actually having been in that
class environment with peers and mentors and grading feedback, so I have to
maintain my learning to discover and fill in the gaps I have in my knowledge.
I think if you're able to find two people who are equivalently good at
communication and soft skills and one has a CS degree and the other is a
bootcamper, generally speaking I'd expect the CS degree holder to have
superior technical skills.

