
Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again? - burritofanatic
Would you? Have we reached a saturation point for bootcamp graduates? Has the bootcamp experiment failed, or succeeded?<p>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&#x27;s more than I can keep track of. I also want to know if graduates who don&#x27;t have much luck finding work after their program just decide to do something else?
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securingsincity
At MaxwellHealth we've hired 5 graduates from the general assembly intensive
program, 2 for QA and 3 for Dev. The one take away I've had is that they all
are coming with a baseline of knowledge that could let them contribute on day
one.

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.

~~~
xiaoma
Given the gender ratio of students at General Assembly it would be improbable
in the extreme that all five candidates you hired from them were women.

Do you have some sort of explicit gender-based filtering in your hiring or
recruiting process?

~~~
crazypyro
Isn't that illegal?

~~~
securingsincity
It certainly would be.

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airwot4
I've come across many developers who have been through the bootcamp process.
Some were great, some less so.

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.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
My brother took one of the bootcamps. One of his classmates had been a CS
major. He took it to bridge the gap between CS and real world application as
well as make use of the networking aspects of the program.

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).

------
MollyR
My company hired two bootcamp developers.

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.

~~~
swalsh
"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."

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.

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cynusx
We have good experiences hiring from dev bootcamps in europe but we take care
to hire for attitude rather than technical skills.

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 :)

~~~
jowiar
This a thousand times. Hire for attitude, pay for skill (and keep pay in line
with skill as skill increases).

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gexla
The problem with this question is that there are probably a long list of
attributes which are much more important than technical skills. The bootcamps
largely only address the technical skills. They can't turn you into "great to
work with" or "smells nice."

Edit: So, you can't say that a candidate is a good or bad hire based on which
bootcamp they attended.

~~~
tracker1
I'd say more than that, the best people I've worked with in software
development have been those driven to learn and try things... Those who don't
know something who will take the time to read/learn enough to try something,
then try it.

Skill and experience come with time... a personal drive to learn/try things is
more than something that can be learned in a bootcamp.

------
danpalmer
I'm also interested in this question, not because of the issue of saturation,
but more because I am skeptical that a bootcamp that lasts ~12 weeks could
teach someone enough to be a professional software developer.

~~~
ajkjk
I felt that in my CS degree program I didn't really learn a lot that set me up
to be a professional software developer either. It made me do some coding and
learn some algorithms, and gave very basic familiarity with how computers
work, but that's about it.

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.

~~~
S4M
I guess the best students of your program managed to find something they liked
a lot (like machine learning, compilers, embedded, etc.) and got specialized
in it, while the majority of the students just followed along somewhat
passively - I don't mean to be condescending, it's sort of to what happened to
me as well, and still now I regret not to have taken more time to think of
what I wanted to do and pick my courses more carefully.

~~~
ajkjk
Yeah, I think that's common. A lot of people also worked on coding projects
outside classes - people came in with experience setting up LAMP stacks, that
sort of thing. Others ran the school newspaper's website or played around with
startup ideas.

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.

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bmbootcamp
I'm a graduate from a bootcamp, and I can quite confidently say my company
would hire again. I've been there almost a year and feel as if I contribute a
significant amount to the team. Feel free to ama

~~~
danpalmer
What was your programming experience like before the bootcamp, and then after
it? What sort of depth did you learn to?

Would you feel confident in starting a job at a company that used a language
you don't already know?

~~~
bmbootcamp
Before the bootcamp, I new basic HTML and CSS. I'm now working as a rails dev,
with lots of work in JavaScript too. That would entirely depend on the company
and the language. So I guess that says something. I wouldn't feel confident in
a company that mainly uses functional languages, as I'm mainly used to OO
principals. In saying that, it's not something I wouldn't want to learn

~~~
cmcnally
I am at a similar level of experience and have been interested in learning
more about programming, with the hope of pursuing it as a potential career
path down the line. It is encouraging to hear about someone else's success.
Can you tell me more about the program you used? What were you doing for work
before the bootcamp?

Thanks!

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mpdehaan2
I haven't actually hired anyone from a bootcamp, but I was involved a bit with
a local one to a minor degree (a guest lecture once).

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.

~~~
eugeneross
> "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."

Just curious, what would you have majored in to know what the industry is
like?

~~~
mpdehaan2
I don't think it's possible.

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.

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oliyoung
Hired a guy who took himself halfway around the world to crash-course in dev
for 3 months after graduating a science degree.

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.

~~~
germs12
I've worked with 5 developers that have come out of the bootcamps. Only 1 of
them was a "good hire". He exhibited the same behavior your guy did:
commitment.

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harel
We hired from one a while back. Guy was good/ok but came with some attitude
issues for someone in his first role. Having said that, some of our best hires
have been interns that stayed as full time developers (not from bootcamp per
se, but straight out of Uni or equivalent diploma courses). Those were some of
the best people I worked with.

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dlsso
Bootcamp graduate here. Short story: Took a low paying startup job to get my
foot in the door, 2 months later got a much better offer, first place offered
me a raise but not match, I said ok bye. Next day I walk in the CTO (who
supervises me) says "why are you leaving" I say "no match" he says "Let me
smash some heads." An hour later I have a match.

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.

~~~
gxespino
What camp?

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ldd
so, um, as someone who has considered entering into a bootcamp program, I have
a question:

Why are there so expensive? (10k is more than what I am paying for my BSc
degree at McGill)

~~~
woah
McGill is subsidized right?

~~~
ldd
It is subsidized in the sense that local (Quebec students) pay less than
Canadian students and significantly less than international students.

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lloyd-christmas
My company has hired 4 bootcamp graduates (myself included). 2 of them were a
year before me and no longer work in the industry. I'm very confident they
would hire me again. They even hired another student I recommended. The major
difference between the two of us and the two of them were personality traits,
not course material. It always comes back down to the human factor.

------
mobman
my company had a special internal 1 month bootcamp for new hires and
unfortunately so much was taught to them, that when they were sent to
production they forgot what they had learned on day 1. Moral : It's about
individual skill. Put them into production and the committed ones will always
perform better no matter they are from bootcamp or not.

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gchucky
At a previous job, we hired two people from General Assembly. One was decent;
the other far less so. Admittedly, the hire that was less useful had other
issues in terms of attitude, which perhaps we should have caught during the
interview process.

~~~
ldd
Could you clarify what you mean by 'attitude problems'? I assume something
like 'unwillingness to learn new things and admit mistakes, etc' but I'd like
to know an employers point of view.

~~~
gchucky
Sure. It was a sense of arrogance and inflated ego more than anything else.
Just because you went through ten weeks of boot camp doesn't mean that you're
a master at your craft. Huge mistakes were made left and right without any
sense of responsibility, accountability, or willingness to learn from one's
mistakes.

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jeffclark
We've hired 2 (so far). I was hesitant at first since those boot camps sound
like a for-profit college.

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.

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mariogintili
I was a bootcamp graduate, feel free to ping me at mariojgintili@gmail.com :)

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

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theaccordance
I've been a bootcamp instructor for the last 2 years and have seen the full
spectrum of students come through in that time; it's not so much about the
programs themselves but rather the students as individuals. Some have a better
understanding of their career goals and are more dedicated than others, and it
typically reflects on the placements they'll receive after completing the
program. IMO it's no different than the type of graduates coming out of the
average university today.

~~~
kzisme
What does the general curriculum cover in a bootcamp? I'm just curious to
compare it to the traditional 4 year degree etc.

~~~
theaccordance
Bootcamp curriculum is specialized to a career path, you can't compare it to
the whole of a traditional 4 year degree. If anything, it relates closest to a
declared Major/Minor within that 4 year degree.

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jraines
Yes! (This was in NYC, through The Flatiron School)

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lfender6445
we hired an english teacher from a local rails bootcamp and he has been great.
wouldn't look back. this speaks more to personality than experience of course,
but in a market strived for developers I am glad to see those with an interest
in the field getting the opportunity to explore it professionally.

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seansmith1020
I did gSchool and am now a fully contributing member to our dev team. There
are definitely a few shortfalls compared to a traditional CS degree, but day-
to-day writing code and delivering features the difference is relatively
negligible.

