
Ask HN: Reverse Bootcamp Idea - codegeek
I keep thinking about this so I thought to ask HN&#x27;s opinion. We all know what bootcamps do. They charge you to train you and then you hope to get a job at a good company.<p>As a bootstrapped SAAS founder, I am finding it very hard to try and attract experienced talent as I cannot pay the high salaries for senior folks. However, I can afford to pay 60-70K USD&#x2F;Year with profit sharing options. The issue is that you have to work with us in our office at least for first few months before I am comfortable doing remote.<p>So I thought of an idea where I would run a web dev bootcamp as an employer. I will pay entry level folks to join the bootcamp and out of the batch, I will then hire the best candidates once bootcamp is over. So there really is no downside to the bootcampers. They get paid to learn but I get to choose who I want to hire from that batch. Win win ?
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masukomi
speaking as someone who's interviewed a LOT of bootcamp "graduates" i'd also
say it's a terrible waste of money and human resources. Let the bootcamps do
it. There are way to many people who go through them who aren't up to the
standards any reasonable company would want. There are definitely some gems in
there BUT...

also teaching is actually really hard, and to do it right requires someone who
understands how people learn, not just someone who knows how to do x.

also, teaching bootcamp cirriculim is a full time job for multiple people. You
up for that?

> I will pay entry level folks to join the bootcamp and out of the batch, I
> will then hire the best candidates once bootcamp is over. So there really is
> no downside to the bootcampers.

as a somewhat snarky aside: The idea of taking low paid people and teach them
to do a task, and then if they do it really well, you pay them more to
continue doing it, is an established idea called an internship.

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codegeek
Well, there you go. I probably should hire interns and your comment gives me
more clarity. Thank you for that.

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plasticbugs
Speaking as someone who went through a Bay Area bootcamp (Hack Reactor) it
seems to me that it would be more cost-effective to work with a local
reputable bootcamp and interview candidates who will soon be graduating. You
won't get the top of the class with your salary offering, but I would
confidently hire any of the people who came out of my bootcamp's cohort.

You should also consider remote candidates from places where that salary is
livable (not SF Bay Area or NYC).

I would say nearly 100% of my bootcamp cohort came in very rough, with little
to no production experience and not ready to do any kind of productive work.
The bootcamp really started with the basics which we worked on for 10 hours a
day / 6 days a week in JavaScript - data structures, algorithms, and many many
toy problems. After six weeks of that, we were introduced to Node, then
Backbone and finally React and Angular.

I don't think you want to invest that amount of time in developing a
curriculum and becoming a bootcamp just to get some cheaper junior engineers.
There's a reason why bootcamps are not super-lucrative -- good instructors
cost money and there's a ton of competition from other bootcamps so they have
to price their product competitively.

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Juliate
Serious question: if you are not comfortable doing remote at once, what will
make it more comfortable thereafter?

What will this bootcamp, or this preliminary period in the office, change to
the fact you're not comfortable with remote working?

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probinso
I have never seen a bootcamp that prioritizes teaching collaborative remote
workflows. This is a learned skill that many experienced software engineers
still have no experience with.

I Love the idea of incorporating collaboration and remote-flow into a
educational model. It makes for stronger long term engineers

[]

I taught at several bootcamps, I was discouraged from teaching with ticketing
or including asynchronous communication. Rarely do they cover strategies for
success across time zones.

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jdhawk
That's because they are two very disparate skills. One is how to create
software products, and the other is how to be an effective employee in a
specific style of management.

The second is much more unique to the company, and honestly easier to grasp.

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brunoc
Wouldn't you be spending the money you save on salaries on training your new
"reverse bootcamp" employees? Hiring entry level people and giving them work
isn't the same as teaching. The costs involved in actually training them has
to be paid from your own pockets after all.

Might be possible to have them sign an employment contract beforehand and
simply have them join an existing, reputable bootcamp.

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SavageBeast
Attempting to hire dev resources that do not have Computer Science degrees and
a SOLID grasp of CS fundamentals is a suicide mission. The FAANGs have already
figured this out. As a bootstrapped founder you should strongly consider that
behaving like a FAANG makes you much more likely to be successful like a
FAANG.

What are you going to do with these Reverse Bootcampers when one of your
paying customers demands a Web Scale API implementation of The Blue Eyed
Island problem? What happens when the pager goes off in the night because the
recursive palindrome finder service is stack overflowing? Personally I really
don't want to be on the phone with an angry customer trying to explain how the
sub-optimal time complexity of my products sorting algos is "good enough" or
giving other excuses ("..results typically come back in <400ms").

I'm sure you can get a bunch of junior folks in and train them to repeatably
perform common dev tasks, bang out some functional Javascript, maybe even take
some data from a form on a website and query a database with it but unless
you're willing to get a crop of campers and pay them to memorize Cracking The
Code Interview (6th edition) then I feel like you're probably just wasting
your time.

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duxup
Isn't your time more valuable working than training?

I did a bootcamp full time M-F for 3 months, there was an instructor and two
assistants, and there were a handful of us capable of being productive....
that's a lot of time you spend to get a few of us.

