
Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now? - anm89
I feel like I have seen various waves of hype regarding programming bootcamps but the people who I have talked to about it are always people who are considering going or just graduated. Interested to hear from someone who&#x27;s been out in the wild for at least a couple years.<p>What are you doing now? Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got? Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?
======
mabbo
Note some selection bias may exist in the answers.

If you did a tech bootcamp three years ago and it went fantastically, you're
probably reading HN today and will see and reply to this. The more success you
had, the more likely you're a developer today!

If it went terribly, you might still be working at Starbucks and don't read HN
very often.

~~~
abeyer
You can't work at Starbucks and read HN?

Seriously, though, after some early career burnout I did a stint at a
restaurant job to pay the bills while I decided what I wanted to do with my
life...and that was by far my most productive period of time as far as keeping
up on general tech news, personal projects, academic
research/reading/conferences, etc...

A non-code day job can be a great way to have the mental energy to spend on
non-job code. :)

~~~
rubicon33
There is a YouTuber I like to watch sometimes because he occasionally uploads
videos demonstrating really unique and high level programming skills.

His day job? A bus driver.

I saw that in the comment section of YouTube, people always ask him "why don't
you go code for a job and make tons of money!". His response is that coding is
something loves to do, and he wouldn't want to risk losing that love for it,
by making it a job.

I love the idea but sadly in the US, living on a bus driver salary would be
very difficult. He was based in Finland I believe, so I assume their bus
drivers make more money.

~~~
SlippyCrisco
I believe you're referencing Bisqwit:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bIcbnDXSRg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bIcbnDXSRg)

~~~
JHonaker
Bisqwit is a bus driver by trade? That's somehow surprising and unsurprising.

That guy is awesome. I love all of his videos.

------
postnihilism
I went to Hack Reactor in 2014 and have kept in touch with many members of my
cohort. Just about everyone has been and continues to be employed as a
developer. A few have started companies. Three members of our 30 person cohort
joined Google, including me.

I was a philosophy major who took some CS courses in college, programmed as a
hobby and was working as a product manager. The bootcamp was a great way to
build an understanding of the production software development process. It also
allowed me to build a strong skillset within one tech stack (MEAN).

The bootcamp was absolutely not an end to my cs/engineering education. When I
started at Google the learning curve was steep and I have been constantly
taking at least one coursera/udacity/edx course for years as well as company
internal classes. Hack Reactor wasn't an end all solution but it gave me a
great lay of the land and was instrumental to landing a job of the quality
that I did.

~~~
swyx
the Google interview process is notoriously tough especially for bootcamp
grads. how did you navigate the process (apart from the usual CTCI stuff)?

~~~
postnihilism
After HR I stayed on for three months as part of their Hacker in Residence
program. During that time I prepared and delivered lectures on various
algorithms and data structures, which was great preparation for whiteboard
interviews.

I also planned for the Google interview to be relatively late in my job hunt.
I already had offers in hand and a lot of on-site practice going into it. I
doubt I would have passed had it been my first on-site engineering interview.

Beyond that nothing special. A lot of CTCI stuff and daily practice.

~~~
swyx
that sounds like excellent strategy. i will follow this path.

------
scyclow
Disclaimer: My post-bootcamp experience (Chicago 2014) was probably very
different from what I'm seeing today (New York 2017). Every meetup I go to
seems flooded with bootcamp grads, and it appears the market is oversaturated
with bootcamp grads. Overall, it seems like it's much harder to get that first
engineering job

I graduated from Dev Bootcamp Chicago in 2014. Before starting, I was a
financial analyst for three years, and had been teaching myself some
rudimentary python for about a year.

It took me about two months to get my first job at a start up, where I stayed
for a year and pretty much made what I was making as an analyst. After that I
moved to New York, where it took me a month to find a (better) job at another
start up. Now I'm at a third start up as a senior engineer, which also took me
about a month to find.

The program was fun, I met some great people (some of whom I'm still good
friends with), I think it helped me get a foot in the door in the industry,
and I picked up a lot of good conceptual knowledge and soft skills related to
building software.

However, the the technical skills I learned from the curriculum ended up being
almost completely irrelevant the second I graduated. They focused primarily on
back-end development, with a Ruby/Rails/SQL/jQuery stack. Since then, I've
focused mainly on front-end, and worked almost entirely with
Angular/React/Node/Mongo. Now I'm am starting to dip my toes into Scala and
PureScript and have no intention of ever using Ruby again.

My cohort mates saw mixed (but mostly positive results). All the people who
were clearly talented got jobs immediately after graduating. It was more
difficult for those who had no prior coding experience, or had trouble picking
up the material.

~~~
jimbokun
"However, the the technical skills I learned from the curriculum ended up
being almost completely irrelevant the second I graduated."

I hope both boot camps and CS curricula will emphasize this point very
strongly. The exact technology stack you are learning right now is probably
not the one you will be using in the near future, and that's OK. Learning to
learn, and understanding the fundamentals of what makes a good developer
regardless of technology stacks are the key skills.

Anecdata: In a recent job search, the developers who had something close to
the technology stack we use were bad on algorithmic questions, and we decided
to hire the person who had almost no overlap with our technology stack but
aced all of the algorithm questions.

The technologies we use in our backend have changed over time as our needs
have changed, so it's very important to us the person filling this position
understood the underlying algorithms well enough to have a good mental model
of the key algorithms determining how the system will perform and write code
that plays to the strengths of those algorithms. (Or pick a different system
implementing different algorithms with different characteristics, if
required.)

~~~
Teknoman117
The problem is that people misunderstand the point of getting a Computer
Science degree. At the school I attended, the head of the department was
upfront that what the degree would be teaching had nothing to do with any
specific stack any specific company was using, learning those things would be
up to us individually.

Personally, I ended up dual majoring in computer science and computer
engineering. The idea was that the former is the abstract science behind
programming (algorithms, complexity, etc.) and the latter is how and why
computers actually work. Computer Architecture was probably one of the coolest
classes I took in college.

~~~
geccan
A professor in college told us that we'd likely never use 90% of what we
learned in our curriculum. He said engineering is largely an exercise in
vocabulary: the core structures in CS are like "function" words (articles,
prepositions, pronouns) in human language; they tie the other "meaty" words
(nouns, adjectives) together. The nouns and adjectives are the specific
technologies you use.

A CS degree teaches you the function words. A bootcamp teaches you a small set
of meaty words with a sprinkling of function words. However, the meaty words
are the most useful day-to-day. But you have to be able to discern and use new
meaty words all the time, or you'll "sound" dated eventually. "Radical, dude!
I'm stoked about these parachute pants!"

I've met many CS-degree-holding engineers who don't understand this vocabulary
exercise. They choose a particular programming language they're most familiar
with and proceed to reinvent the meaty words. They're doing it wrong, and will
almost always be less productive and useful. Bogus!

If I'm going to build a machine learning system, I'm not going to open my
editor and start writing parsing libraries and convex optimization algos in my
favorite language. I'll find a well-supported framework and learn how to use
it. If I need to learn the framework's language better, then I will.

Go for the meat first, and you'll be a great engineer.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
I often hear "You weren't a CS major?!?!". My common response is "You
were?!?!".

I worked in finance as an equities trader for 6 years before taking a boot
camp and switching over. I was heavily involved in hiring while in my prior
role. One thing I found is that I was drastically more inclined to hire the
English major over the Finance major. If they've managed to overcome the
commonplace cognitive biases that work against them, chances are they are more
intelligent/hard-working than the relevant educational background.

None of this is meant as a slight to CS grads, I'm simply pointing out the
somewhat irrelevant dependence on an undergraduate degree. Technical
mindedness is much more important than a 4 year rubber stamp.

~~~
geccan
It seems you're guilty of the same cognitive biases. "Screw those finance
guys! Rosencrantz and Guildenstern over Oskar Morgenstern!"

Edit: On my first job interview out of college I was turned down by the head
of engineering because I didn't have enough experience in C++. "Silly college
kid can't do shit." I was called back and offered a job because another
manager was impressed by my work at the speech recognition lab at my school.
Three months into my employment they filed a patent on an algorithm I devised
to build databases that were searchable through speech interfaces. The
engineering head ate crow.

Hiring developers is a crap shoot, but it's hard nowadays to hire a truly
incompetent developer. I've really only encountered one in my lifetime who was
incapable of basic development tasks.

In the 15 years I've been a working engineer (and 25 in general programming),
I've noticed the level of knowledge and skill required to build usable
products has been greatly reduced. Why? Because there's been 15 years of
advancement by seasoned engineers, prompted by business people, to build tools
and frameworks that fit large swaths of business needs.

That cycle is ever present in tech. The obscure things become clearer and more
accessible to laymen through the efforts of the experts. And you can bet those
experts have deeply studied CS topics, whether at a college or on their own.

------
huntermeyer
In 2013 I attended Epicodus in Portland, OR. At the time, it was a 17-week
Ruby on Rails bootcamp.

I moved back to my home state of Florida following graduation.

Within two months I landed a Junior Rails Developer position at Listen360 - a
badass company in Georgia. I relocated and have been with the company for over
three years now.

In that time I've developed JrDevJobs.com, a job board for junior devs. Built
several side-projects, and taken on contract work at a growing rate.

Bootcamps aren't for everyone, and they don't guarantee success. They are a
spring-board and structure for those who are committed and able to learn the
trade.

Software development is hard as hell. It challenges your abilities in every
way: decision making, risk assessment, empathy, time management, and your
ability to handle stress. But for those that love it know the rewards to be
worth the struggle.

I'd like to say my bootcamp prepared me for the job I have, but I also know
that I was going to become an engineer regardless. I saw the bootcamp as a way
to get there faster than learning on my own.

I've toured and given speeches at several bootcamps across the country. I've
seen patterns amongst the students: there are those that think they're "done"
once they graduate, and those that think they're just getting started once
they graduate. The latter tend to outperform the former. Full disclosure, this
is totally anecdotal.

I think bootcamps are great for those who love to learn, are always
challenging themselves, have a competitive nature, and love technology.

~~~
kemiller2002
Good for you!

I ask all the interns that I interview to hire, "why do you want this job?" I
can pretty much tell by the answer alone whether or not they are going to work
out. Those that say, "I didn't know what to study" or "I heard there was a
good career in this" I can pretty much write off. They almost never want to
learn anything except what they learned for a grade. Often its over for them
after school, they'll never have the drive to learn what they really need to
advance. I always tell them that dollar for dollar, we are one of the poorest
paid fields. The amount of time we spend learning vs how much we are paid is
way out of proportion even with our technical salaries. They never believe me.

It's those that get kind of that geekish giggle about some theoretical concept
(state machines, some language concept they discovered they think is cool,
compilers, etc.) I know are going to be great. These are the ones that I
really go after. With these people it doesn't matter how much they know at
that moment, because when they're done, they'll know more. They'll keep doing
it too.

~~~
justinhj
There's another aspect to this though. Programmers have to be smart and get
things done. In my experience of interviewing and hiring these qualities can
entirely orthogonal. I've hired people who program enthusiastically on side
projects and study advanced topics at the weekend but are pain in the
workplace; overcomplicating tasks and working slowly while others deliver
faster and with better quality. At the same time I've worked with people who
express no interest in any realm of computing outside their direct area of
expertise. They work hard from 9-5 being extremely productive and I know that
they don't think about so much as a bit or a byte until they come into work
the next day.

~~~
thanksgiving
> There's another aspect to this though. Programmers have to be smart and get
> things done. In my experience of interviewing and hiring these qualities can
> entirely orthogonal. I've hired people who program enthusiastically on side
> projects and study advanced topics at the weekend but are pain in the
> workplace; overcomplicating tasks and working slowly while others deliver
> faster and with better quality. At the same time I've worked with people who
> express no interest in any realm of computing outside their direct area of
> expertise. They work hard from 9-5 being extremely productive and I know
> that they don't think about so much as a bit or a byte until they come into
> work the next day.

Speaking of teams, I'm usually the least productive member of any team I've
been a part of because I often fall into the role of project servant: someone
who bounces across team members as they get stuck with something or another.
The best compliment I've gotten is that the role is that of the guy who gets
ammo from person to person at the end of saving private Ryan: not the sexiest
job but someone is doing it.

~~~
throwanem
> someone who bounces across team members as they get stuck with something or
> another

Helping them see what they've missed or otherwise get over the hurdles? Sounds
like a senior dev to me.

~~~
belenos46
>Sounds like a senior dev to me.

That's what I'd call them.

I've always like troubleshooter, though: when there's trouble, they shoot it.

------
goorley
I finished Byte Academy (New York) June of 2016, so only one year out. Before
attending the bootcamp I was a petroleum engineer running an international
drilling project management company. I really wanted to work in tech, so I
left and moved to NYC and began the bootcamp. For the past year I've been
constantly interviewing and have been offered 0 jobs. The bootcamp has been a
terrible resource for careers (the main thing I was hoping for by attending a
bootcamp, because I was transitioning from oil and gas to technology with no
network in the industry), and although I've make it very deep in the process
with many companies, I can't seem to get a break. I was hoping to use my
project management background coupled with what I learned at the bootcamp to
hop right in contributing, but nobody has shared my view. After a year of
trying to break in with full force, I'm probably going to have to go back to
my previous line of work. Zero people that graduated from the bootcamp I
attended found a developer job in 2016, and I'm pretty sure the same for 2017
- and though some smart people passed through, most had to go back to their
previous line of work. I see so many success stories posted above, and I can
only look to my choice of bootcamp that crushed my dream of working in tech.

------
lando2319
Bootcamps have a lot of haters who want to nitpick the details, it makes me
glad I didn't think about it too much when I signed up, I just thought, "hey I
want to code, they teach coding... I'm in"

first bootcamp (web dev) 5 years ago, second one (mobile dev) 3 years ago.
Unlike most in my CoHort, I had no interest in a dev job, I wanted to provide
contract work and perhaps join a startup for equity.

> What are you doing now?

CTO at a startup

> Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got?

It got me started, which is what I needed, so yes, but it took lots of work
beyond the bootcamp.

> Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?

I'd estimate over half

IMO Bootcamps are great, you get a nice headstart with learning, you meet cool
people, it's unaccredited so any job prospects are going to be obtained with
your own blood sweat and tears anyways.

~~~
lucaspiller
Out of interest, what were you doing before the code camp? Being CTO needs
people and management skills which a lot of developers don't have.

~~~
k__
I guess being CTO at a startup can be like being lead dev at a bigger corp.

~~~
chrisan
Depends on the size of the startup. A startup CTO can be the equivalent of

The only developer, the senior developer out of 1 or 2 juniors, lead dev in
charge of many, an actual CTO

------
JohnDotAwesome
Is anyone surprised by the amount bootcamp folks in this thread who are now in
"Senior" roles after only a few years? I'm not trying to diminish their
accomplishment; Their accomplishment is astounding. But are bootcamps really
that effective?

I remember interviewing a ton of bootcamp grads from a couple of schools in
Austin, TX and being largely unimpressed. You know that feeling after you
interview someone where you're just _not sure yet_? Maybe you liked talking to
the person; Maybe they did great on the coding exercises, but you're just not
sure. I've since learned that when I'm not sure, that means no.

~~~
nilkn
I think senior titles in general are given out too easily in the software
industry. Compared to many other professions and industries, the idea of
anyone -- bootcamp graduate or not -- being senior within 3 years is kind of
laughable. That's not to say it doesn't happen in other professions, but it's
often reserved for the truly exceptional -- being considered senior within a
few years of starting your career is for the best of the best and isn't the
"normal" path at all.

~~~
logicfiction
I think part of this is because of company/domain knowledge. It may not be
that the person is necessarily "senior" level generic technological talent,
but they have built up deep knowledge of the companies systems to become a key
part of the team's brain trust. I feel like I see this leading to title
advancement just as much as technical aptitude. The flipside is that it is
somewhat specific to the exact employer, but it should signal ability and
willingness to become an expert of the company's product domain. A lot of
times I think that is more valuable than raw technical ability anyway, but
it's harder to interview for.

------
savanaly
I did App Academy in New York two-three years ago (10-week bootcamp). I'm now
a front-end dev and work from home making about 80k per year. I believe most
of my cohort are in the same situation (App Academy appears to be above
average for boot camps from what I've heard about other boot camps, but not by
much). Although most of my cohort probably stayed working in New York or moved
to SF and so make more money but don't get the luxury of working from home.

The boot camp served its purpose in preparing me for the job. Namely, serving
as a commitment device to force myself to study the initial couple hundred of
hours one needs to be able to do entry level programming from scratch. Plus
having them provide a curriculum and teachers was nice too, I guess, but
secondary to the commitment factor. Having graduated from that was also
probably not a detriment to have on my resume and I keep it on there since I
have no other programming related education.

I suspect my experience is not unusual-- that the boot camp's value is in
being a catalyst that unlocks someone's ability to be a programmer and teach
themself most of the skills they need, rather than in being an information-
imparting institution.

~~~
anamexis
I am a September 2013 SF App Academy grad, and I found exactly the same value
as you in the program. Launched programming from a thing I had a good aptitude
for and played around with a lot, and gave me an the engine that made me study
a lot of marketable skills (as well as interview preparation).

I am now a lead engineer at a small company. I'm grateful for the experience,
although I suspect the situation is tougher for current grads. It's pretty
amazing seeing 90% of applicants for dev openings be fresh bootcamp grads.

~~~
busterarm
I started to see the market for Rails devs on the junior end nosedive right as
my cohort was graduating. Since then AppAcademy has been stricter about who
they accept and for a larger cut of salary.

Big chunks of the recent cohorts I've seen are people with STEM degrees,
usually from seriously good places, who didn't get much experience writing
code in school. a/A is mostly throwing them at the large companies that hire
large groups of recent grads.

Switching their JS framework curriculum to React probably helped a lot and
most of the people I talk to there lean more on their JavaScript than their
Ruby.

I'm grateful for the experience but I'm mixed for recommending it to others.
It has to be a certain kind of person in certain lucky situations to begin
with. I didn't have to pay rent while I did it, which made it all possible,
really.

------
planxty
I graduated from General Assembly in the summer of 2015. That is less than 3
years, but I can tell you that my outcome was very positive. I am now a full
stack developer team lead in a quickly growing web application company, and I
was certainly empowered by the training I received. Self study is great, but I
was able to leverage the kick in the pants I received from my teachers.

As for my colleagues, I believe most are employed, but I will offer that you
only get what you put into that kind of intensive training. It's only
meaningful and effective if you really care. The folks who might have been
enticed by a cool job in a growth sector don't do as well as those who code
simply because it's a compulsive habit and joy.

I'll submit that there are myriad things you can't absorb in a brief program,
that's life. If I was rich I would live to go to college again. But I would
also say that I've met plenty of CS grads of traditional 4 year programs that
don't have the same drive or problem solving skills as that I've seen come
from bootcamp students.

Worth it, especially if you're a grown up with the passion to push yourself
and the maturity to follow through.

Hype is all nonsense.

------
morgtheborg
I took on a position as the sole web dev as my first position, with promises
that a senior dev would be onboarded within 3 months.

Instead, the company paid for me to pair program with experts in different
areas (security, devops, general full stack) whenever I felt out of my depth;
the first 6 months it meant I spent eight hours pair programming a week with
the focus being on my learning rather than feature pushing. I found the people
I wanted to learn from either from my past instructors at my bootcamp who
really impressed me or from AirPair.

3.5 years later I'm .5 years from vesting 4% at a company that's closing its A
rounds now. I work with people I love, I learn new things routinely, I
regularly get technical level ups through pair programming or classes paid for
by the company, and it's pretty awesome.

I renegotiated my compensation probably every 6 months. I'm quick to give
pushback if I'm out of my depth or feel like I'm being treated poorly. It's a
startup so it's been a learning experience for everyone.

I'm pretty damn happy how it all ended up.

~~~
adamzerner
That sounds like an insanely amazing experience.

1) To what extent do you think it was luck for you to find such a great
company?

2) Any job search advice?

3) I'm curious - do you think the investment the company made in you has paid
off for them?

------
seniorghost
I did Hack Reactor in 2013. My background prior to that included a year of
college CS and a couple of years doing recreational coding challenges like
Project Euler problems. I had been dreaming of a professionalizing my coding
skills and getting a tech job, and Hack Reactor did that perfectly for me. I
had several offers upon graduation and took one at a startup I was really
passionate about. While there, I was able to work on and later lead a variety
of projects, including a complete rewrite of our frontend and a large-scale
database migration.

I'm now in the middle of my second job search after 3 great years there. I'm
generally interviewing for "Senior Backend"-type roles that expect 3-5 years
of experience. However, I have seen some prejudice against bootcamp graduates,
and tend not to reveal that I went to one unless pressed. Otherwise, it's easy
to be pigeonholed as unqualified to work on the backend. Interviews have gone
well and I've made it to most of the onsites, with two offers already.

I don't keep up with most of my cohort but the ones I know are still engineers
and generally seeing career success, though a few people have struggled.
However, I think the market was much easier for bootcamp-level grads in 2013
than it is today. I don't recommend bootcamps as strongly anymore, especially
for people with very little previous coding experience.

------
pharrlax
Graduated coding bootcamp 2.5 years ago. Currently on my 2nd developer job,
making 750% of my pre-bootcamp salary. Most of my classmates continued on to
do development professionally. Most commonly focused on Node and frontend JS
frameworks, i.e. Angular 1 and React.

A handful tried and failed to get development jobs, and went back to their old
career, or pivoted more or less laterally to a tech-adjacent field that pays
less than development. I can tell you that 100% of the people who failed to
get development jobs were people who, during the bootcamp, visibly put in the
bare minimum of effort to skate by.

------
brookside
I attended a bootcamp Winter 2013-2014, after making a last minute decision
not to attend grad school for something unrelated.

My choice was almost entirely pragmatic, and was heavily influenced by the
book _So Good They Can 't Ignore You_[0] by _Deep Work_ author and Georgetown
CS professor Cal Newport.

As for the bootcamp experience - I have trouble focusing for long classes, and
would have benefited from a couple or more months of pre-study. (Classmates
who did the best during the course had the most prior knowledge.)

However, the camp was a great launching point. I did work my ass off, staying
up all night to work on individual and group projects in the lobby of the Ace
hotel. If anything, the bootcamp helped solidify my own internal identify
shift.

3.5 years later, I'm happy with my choice. I'm currently working remote for a
startup and teaching evening intro to coding classes (yeah, at a bootcamp, so
take my account with however many grains of salt). I really like teaching, and
enjoy the intellectual challenge, salary and freedom provided by my day job.

Most of my classmates who I am in touch with are working as developers and
seem to be doing alright also.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
You/dp/14555091...](https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
You/dp/1455509124)

~~~
illuminator
Which boot camp did you attend?

------
jypepin
I attended DevBootcamp October-December 2012. I was the third cohort of this
Bootcamp, and I believe it was one of the first, I think I'm part of the rare
ones who reached 4 years of full time work experience after a bootcamp - which
is the length of a CS degree.

I've written a blog post about it here:
[http://jonathanfromgrowth.com/2017/03/14/From-Devbootcamp-
to...](http://jonathanfromgrowth.com/2017/03/14/From-Devbootcamp-to-Uber.html)

> What are you doing now? Senior engineer at Uber

> Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got? Definitely.
> My first job was at a small YC startup doing Rails (that's what I learned)
> and that first year there taught me a lot and was a perfect continuation of
> the bootcamp.

> Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers? Yes

~~~
ajlai
I'm part of jypepin's cohort (good to see you again!). I'm now a lead
developer at GeneDx, and have been working there since I first graduated.

I was the first bootcamp grad hired at my company, and I was trained well
enough there that we went on to hire three more bootcamp grads (of five new
hires total). Those three are all still working with us.

At the time I applied to Dev Bootcamp, there wasn't any job/salary information
for previous cohorts, so attending was a giant leap of faith that we'd be
employable afterwards. My cohort seemed to be mostly made up of people who
sincerely enjoyed programming and had an aptitude for it, based on my
experiences pair programming with them. There were a few people from my cohort
that I wouldn't hire, but I'd say they were in the minority.

------
beefsack
Many people may have had negative experiences but I feel very few of those
would post here, for a variety of reasons.

~~~
rcarrigan87
Agreed. Likely to get a good deal of survivorship bias here.

~~~
swsieber
And self selection - I think people who read hn are more likely to survive
than those who'd don't (not because hn is special, but because those who read
hn tend to have certain inclinations)

------
santaclaus
I know a few folks who did a six month bootcamp almost exactly three years
ago. At present they are: two front end devs, three back end devs, two
'enterprise' (aka Java) devs, a dev evangelist, a devops, a stay at home dad,
a currently job hunting, and an agile consultant.

------
leesec
Went to a bootcamp in Detroit 7~ months ago, had a job offer before I finished
the bootcamp, started immediately as a Java E-commerce Developer, and am
happily working there still. Of the 8 or so people I kept in contact with, all
had jobs within 2-3 months.

For me, it was a bit less about the technical knowledge ( I think I could have
self taught most content, albeit a bit slower) and more about the networking
and the structure that forced me to dedicate 8-12 hrs/day. The bootcamp was
constantly directing me towards jobs and hosting employers. In fact, my
current company came in and spoke at lunch one day and that's how I met them
and got my job.

For people saying it's too expensive, I think that's absurd, at least in my
case. My bootcamp was 6500, and it paid for itself with my signing bonus +
first month of work.

I am still skeptical the model is sustainable, but seems to be working for
now.

~~~
hunterjrj
Which bootcamp was this?

~~~
leesec
Yes, I was apart of the Java bootcamp at Grand Circus. I am also concerned
that the market will become over-saturated, but they seem to be varying the
programs enough and actually growing enough of a reputation that they seem to
be getting more business.

------
CellularArrest
I graduated from The Iron Yard in Charleston about a year ago.

I had a couple of interviews the week following graduation which didn't turn
into anything. Since then I've been continually applying to jobs and trying to
put a decent portfolio together. I can't seem to land an interview anywhere.

Realistically, I'm aware my lack of a degree and long list of irrelevant jobs
are likely getting my resume tossed into the trash. I assumed at the very
least that I'd be able to land a QA job that I could try to pivot towards
development later.

It can be a bit difficult to stay motivated to code/practice/study/apply while
also working a 40 hour week at a soul sucking job. I find myself pining for an
entry level job so I can at least combine my desire to continue to code with a
job. At this point it's the only reason I keep going.

~~~
atemerev
Care to send me a CV?

sorhed at gmail

~~~
CellularArrest
Sure, the info is in your inbox.

------
kolatts
I'm in my second job as a .NET dev after boot camp. My salary has nearly
tripled since when I attended the boot camp. The technical skills I learned at
boot camp were a great start, but I'd say the biggest change is just how slow
work gets done at an enterprise. Most of the work I've done since has not used
the newer tech (Angular, ORMs) I learned at the bootcamp, but I've been a
rather successful advocate for them.

Needless to say I am pretty happy about my choice, the ROI manifested in the
first year. I'm not so certain the rest of my class did as well, as many of
them struggled with the material and most of them did not understand our final
team project. I would also have not gotten very far if I stopped learning
independently and pushing myself after bootcamp.

~~~
rpeden
Working as a .NET developer is relatively unusual for a bootcamp grad. That's
not a bad thing - and you might find it to be a significant advantage in the
long run.

It's one of those things that isn't likely to help you get a job at a hot
startup, but is probably more bubble resistant than a skillset based mainly
around something like React. And I say that as someone who uses and loves
React. I get pinged by recruiters all the time due to having React experience,
but if I had to put money on it, I'd say that my .NET and Java experience are
more likely to be earning me money in 10-15 years than is my experience with
React. The React/Angular/Node job environment seems a bit frothy right now -
it feels a bit like the U.S. real estate market in 2007.

.NET is one of those things that flies under the radar of many HN readers but
in many medium to large sized companies, it is _everywhere_. I can only speak
from experience about Ottawa and Toronto, but I've seen a ton of opportunities
for good .NET developers here. I've had friends who worked for the government
of Canada, and they told me that some government departments would be
completely unable to function without their .NET applications.

I've also met a few .NET developers who are doing phenomenally well with
Sharepoint consulting. Sharepoint is, I think, one of those 'iceberg'
technologies. Not very visible externally, but lurking beneath the surface in
lots of large organizations.

------
Mz
_People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?_

I completed a Certificate in GIS at UC-Riverside's GIS Summer School, an 8
week bootcamp style program. IIRC, this was in 2002.

I currently do freelance writing and run a bunch of blogs. I have never had a
job in GIS. I am currently homeless. On the upside, this month is the last
payment on my student loan for the course.

I wasn't going to reply. I figure this isn't really the kind of thing you want
to hear and trying to convey a meaningful reply would tend to run long and
would also run the risk of the usual accusations that I am trying to make a
spectacle of myself for attempting to participate in conversation.

But I saw some back and forth in the comments dissing the idea that Starbuck's
baristas would post here. Yeah, I wish I was as successful as a Starbuck's
barista. That would be a step up. Yet, when taken at face value, I absolutely
fit the question as asked. I did complete a tech bootcamp 3+ years ago (not a
programming one, but a tech one). Also: My loser self absolutely reads HN
regularly. So there.

So, I am not going to bother to try to give the whole story or whatever. Let's
just sum this up with:

Pro tip: Don't be born with a life threatening genetic disorder. Also, there
are plenty of people here who are not currently wildly successful and well
paid programmers. But some of them will refrain from admitting that in
questions like this one for various reasons.

------
kk5678
I went to a bootcamp 2.5 years ago. Before that I was working in tech and
doing a bit of python for my job. I also took an evening course in front-end
development at a different bootcamp school before applying. After the course I
stayed at the school as a teaching assistant for three more months, and had
several job offers within weeks of finishing that. I started working for a
startup and am still there now. Looking into other options now.

Most of my cohort had some kind of experience in tech before, or had taken a
community college class or a few CS classes in college or something. A few
that didn't struggled a lot after - one just gave up and went back to his old
career, one has been getting odd contracting jobs but nothing stable for the
past two years. I'd say that it's definitely not the easy way to suddenly
become and engineer, I would definitely recommend spending at least 6 months
doing some self-study or taking courses before deciding to take the leap.
Bootcamps are also much more expensive now than when I attended, so that's
even more reason to make sure this is what you really want to do.

The rest of my cohort is still employed as software engineers, as far as I
know. Some have been with the same company, others have switched around a lot.
Everyone seems pretty happy when I see them at reunions. A few started their
own companies.

------
EternalData
As others have noted, this is a bit of the "bomber problem".

If in WW2, you would've noted that all of the planes that came back had tons
of bullets headed to the underside, you might be tempted to reinforce that
particular part.

But you're actually looking at the planes who survived -- not the ones who
crashed.

You can put that to the "reading HN today" and "not reading HN today" crowds.

~~~
lbotos
Not trying to be snarky at all, the formal name for this is Survivorship bias
if anyone wants to do some more reading:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)

------
ravenstine
I graduated from Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco about 3.5 years ago.

Admittedly, I didn't really need to "learn how to learn" as many claim they
did. That's fine for them, but I was already going in with that mindset. What
I got was mainly an environment where I could study and hack on things with
other people wanting to do the same, without all the distractions of everyday
life. I could have done similar things without dropping thousands for tuition
and a living situation, but I still may not have been exposed to more current
technologies. If I had tried to study programming on my own for the same
amount of time, I might have still been writing Python 2.4 scripts in Notepad
to do boring things with spreadsheets. I would have wasted so much time and
avoided diving into Rails, Sublime Text, JavaScript, etc. I was pretty smart
before going to bootcamp(I could at least do script kiddie crap) but very
inept in many ways.

What mattered after DBC wasn't so much the technologies I learned but my
willingness to come up with difficult ideas and say to myself "Sure, I'm gonna
learn X (language|framework) to get this thing done". I had too much of an
"I'm not that smart" mentality beforehand. I never would have dreamed that I
would ever spend a month and a half sitting in Panera Bread with a friend
hammering out a streaming video app to show to employers. And it worked!
Poorly, mind you. It was pretty awful, but also glorious – it allowed you to
build a shared playlist and watch YouTube videos with multiple people, all
synchronized, with chat, a vote-skip button, and even a way to draw over
videos. It did work, and we both got hired in another few months from writing
it. Granted, my first employer was pretty crappy, but now I've ended up
working 2 years somewhere that I've been very happy.

From what I can tell, those in my cohort who applied themselves actually made
it after graduation. Those who couldn't shake the "knowledge on a silver
platter" mentality didn't fare as well. Simple as that. There are so many
opportunities in our field that it seems that even in 2017 someone with the
drive and even average talent can make it.

EDIT: I forgot to mention where I work! I work at KPCC, a public radio station
in Pasadena.

------
throwaway4569
Did Front-End nanodegree at Udacity 1.5 years ago. It's an online self-paced
program. Dropped out of college and worked part-time while staying at home.
Took me 5 months to finish(with only have written my first line of code 2
months prior) and got a job the week I graduated. So from scratch only 7
months of study to land a job. Low paying (San Diego) but so much better than
fast food

I feel the program prepared me well for the day to day things I do and
projects I've been able to work on.

Currently working on my algorithms and data structures. Feels like it's time
to move on. Been taking courses online to finish my undergrad degree but don't
see the value in it at this point.

Considering moving to the Bay Area or remote work.

I'd definitely recommend an online program if you're disciplined. Worked out
great for me personally. An in person bootcamp would help getting past
sticking points a lot faster, but all of this can be learned online for free
like others have pointed out.

Have seen others who took the program be successful in their careers

------
Tommyixi
I graduated 3 years ago from a San Francisco bootcamp and got what I wanted
out of the program. My trajectory since then has been:

Full Stack Software Developer -> Database Administrator -> Graduate School in
Biostatistics + Statistical Programmer.

I really don't know how else I would've landed on this track (considering my
bachelor's degree) but I quite enjoy the diversity of my education and just
generally am a person who likes to learn things.

------
michelleclsun
I went to Hackbright in 2012 and in 2013 started a kids coding education
company First Code Academy (firstcodeacademy.com) in Asia, covering Hong Kong,
Singapore and Taiwan today. We have taught over 4000 students since 2013 and
growing strong :)

Hackbright paved the foundation for me to start my own company. Couldn't be
more grateful for that!

~~~
pradex
Just visited your website, I see there is an issue in Title as it appends some
html element to it, probably you are missing some closing tags on it.
Otherwise it looks good and all the best to you and your company.

------
foo-man-chu
I graduated CodeFellows in Seattle 2.5 years ago.

I've been gainfully employed as a software dev since about 6 weeks after
graduation, fist as an "associate engineer" then promoted to a regular
engineer.

My bootcamp focused on Node/Mongo/Angular, but after I got my first job most
of the work needed to be done in Rails. The bootcamp did not directly prepare
me to work with Ruby, but it taught me how teach myself new skills and be okay
with being in over my head. I was able to get up to speed after a couple
months. I have gotten comfortable working with a lot of cool technologies
since then - including Docker/Kubernetes, Kafka, and various tools for running
distributed systems. Now I mostly work on the front-end of the product with
React/Redux.

I feel comfortable working with much more complicated code than I did 2 years
ago, and I keep getting good performance reviews.

I can say that going through the bootcamp definitely put me into the right
mindset to be successful as a software developer. Often I was given vague
answers left to figure something out for myself, which is pretty spot on to my
current work.

From what I gather through Linkden and Slack, the top 2/3 of my cohort is in a
similar situation, with the rest still getting Jr. level jobs and a couple who
gave up altogether on the software thing.

------
trustyhank
I completed my bootcamp exactly 3 years ago (python), currently I am a Systems
Engineer at a competitive start up in NYC, before that I was a Backend
Software Dev at a fast growing start up in Seattle. There was some luck
involved but overall my career change couldnt have gone better.

I think my bootcamp prepared me about as well as anyone could reasonably ask,
8 weeks included 1) decent introduction to algos + data structures, 2)
overview of django / flask / pyramid, 3) introduction to machine learning +
data science with python, 4) 2 portfolio projects, 5) overview of relational
databases, 6) intro devops (i.e. deploy python app to aws). Probably missing a
few things, but this was most of it.

That said I had done a significant amount of self directed learning prior to
the bootcamp, 2-3 CS courses on EDX + a lot of tinkering. I think I eventually
would have arrived at the same skill set without a bootcamp, but it was
undoubtedly the right decision to go.

I cant account for everyone, but I believe most of my bootcamp cohorts are
working as devs (at least, I run into them at conferences / see their updates
on FB / etc). It took me about 10 weeks to find a job, the people with no
prior coding experience took a bit longer.

Am happy to answer any more questions you may have.

------
jcotillo
Hai guysss; I'm a queer latina full-stack dev in SF and I went to Ironhack
spring of 2015. I attended their second cohort in Miami (they're one of the
first bootcamps in Europe, not so known here) and I been happily coding ever
since. The biggest value that bootcamps offer is an opportunity to learn new
skills at whatever point you are in life. This to me meant an entry point into
software after a short career as a financial analyst -- despite the fact that
I carry around student debt for two B.A.s from a top American uni. What other
channels are out there for highly motivated individuals from non-traditional
backgrounds? I def couldn't afford to go back to uni for a CS degree. Anyways,
I got a job right out of Ironhack, took a break to backpack in Asia and moved
across the country and now started a full-stack dev position at a company I'm
psyched about in SF. NOTE-- being a dev is CONSTANT learning. I been taking
classes online ever since I finished Ironhack to keep myself competitive and
fill in gaps of knowledge. This is sometimes everyone does even if they got a
traditional CS degree (right?).

And oh yeah, most of my peeps from Ironhack are still coding too.

------
travisjungroth
I'm going to speak for my girlfriend who went to a bootcamp about two years
ago. She says it didn't really prepare her (she did that on her own through
self study) but it did open up doors. She's a data engineer at Airbnb.

~~~
swyx
which bootcamp was it?

------
speaktochris
Attended a local bootcamp-like program in my area. Afterwards started working
at a local startup as a jr dev. The pay increase wasn't as astronomical as
they hype at the time suggested but I knew it was expanding my opportunities
way more than my previous gig.

The startup then got acquired and I got experience working with a larger
company. Left that after a while and now have my dream job as a Developer
Advocate! Literally the job I have wanted ever since I got into programming
and attended my first hackathon. Can't believe where I am now.

To answer your other questions:

1) Did the bootcamp prepare me for the job? Yes, but only in that it taught me
Rails and I could begin working at this startup that did mostly Rails. The
startup took a chance on me, I think that's what really prepared me to
succeed.

2) What about my cohort? During the program me and some other devs worked on
projects outside of the class. We attended community events, hackathons, and
worked on OSS with local devs. All of those that participated in stuff like
that with me all went on to have successful careers. Those that didn't? I
think they're still taking classes or interviewing for jobs.

------
ens
I graduated from General Assembly's bootcamp in the fall of 2013 (1.5 years
out of college). Found an internship 3 weeks after I hired via the developer
Meet & Greet GA hosted, and was hired full time at a startup a month into the
internship. I'm still with the same company almost 3.5 years later in an
engineering team lead role. Like some other commenters said, at GA I learned
how to learn. I graduated the program still knowing very little about
programming to be honest and I was lucky I got hired at an early stage company
that asked a lot of me and forced me to learn quickly. I never would have
gotten the job I got without GA because at the time I learned better with the
accountability and structure of a classroom setting. In terms of skills, I
haven't touched Ruby since GA and I knew basic JS, but GA was critical in
teaching me how to be comfortable working through problems I have no idea how
to solve.

Of my cohort of 15, I think over half are developers, a few are in other
product roles at startups, and 1 or 2 went back to their previous jobs.

------
nearlynameless
I went to Dev Bootcamp in 2012. I was self taught beforehand, and had done a
little bit of contracting work.

They focused pretty heavily on soft skills, like communication and pairing,
and also somewhat on generic software construction ideas, on thinking through
a problem and breaking it down into its component pieces. The curriculum used
JS and Rails, although I didn’t feel that I had much more than a surface
familiarity of either by the end of the cohort.

I think that, in general, if a bootcamp has a decent focus on software
construction and doesn't totally fall down on teaching you the technical
stuff, you’ll probably be prepared to work, at least, as a junior dev. But,
you can't just rely on a bootcamp. You really have to spend a lot of time
(like, a ton of time) learning on your own, writing code and reading code
others have written.

Since then, I’ve been working steadily as a mostly front-end and sometimes
full-stack developer.

My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start
their own bootcamps. But, I believe most of the people who wanted to be devs
are still doing just that!

~~~
hello_newman
> My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start
> their own bootcamps

I think that's really funny about the first ~3 DBC cohorts. A few grads of
those first cohorts went on to start App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright
Academy (I think) and others like it.

~~~
rexpop
What do you make of it?

~~~
hello_newman
well back in 2012 was literally the first time a code bootcamp had been done.
I think because of that, a lot of smart people saw you could take this
business model and get started really cheaply and it could be huge, which is
was/is.

If you look at the early cohorts of DBC, anyone of those people could have
learned to program on their own or already was. I think a lot of smart risk
takers saw a huge opportunity that was wide open and ran with it.

------
yeahbaby
I went to a code bootcamp 3 years ago. Now I make over 6 figures doing java in
a LCOL state.

The code place I went to did a really good job preparing me for the actual
work. I am a senior level contractor and actually get to work on interesting
stuff.

I know over 10 people off the top of my head who also went to code bootcamps
and are all making over 70k in LCOL locations. They are thriving and not
hack's in the least.

~~~
lint_roller
What's the trick to getting six figure work in LCOL areas?

~~~
yeahbaby
Work through a recruiter, find a java gig at a fortune 100 company, then
demand over 6 figures as your rate. If you have a decent work history and are
actually competent and well put together - they will pay.

------
AlanSE
Checking in - Iron Yard python/django graduate from summer 2015. I had
struggled professionally for years before that, and I was hired as a Software
Engineer at a startup within 2 weeks of finishing the code school. Today I'm a
Software Engineer but at a larger corporation. My job is perfect. I love what
I'm doing. I love python, open source, web development.

There needs to be balance to the discussion of code school. I'm kind of
saddened to read comments that are either hostile against them, or
cheerleaders who ignore the struggles that some students/grads face. Yes, lots
of people from my cohort continued to struggle after the program. For a
smaller number of them, doing the code school left them worse off. We can't
forget about that because industry (and alumni in particular) has a moral
obligation to an oversight role to some extent. Same as for conventional
universities. Nevertheless, it was a career inflection point for me, and this
would have never happened without the code school.

------
throwzy1234
As a dev I've always suspected programming was easy, but never really thought
it was _this_ easy. Literally anyone can pick it up in a few weeks. That's
surprisingly depressing.

~~~
jnmandal
While thats generally true, it can take years for people to get the hang of
developing software, which I would distinguish from just programming.

~~~
throwzy1234
That distinction clearly doesn't matter to employers.

As this thread demonstrates, anyone can make 6 figures after spending a few
weeks learning to program. They have every bit as much market value as long
time software developers do.

It's only a matter of time (a year or two at most) before we're all paid
slightly more than janitors - the field clearly (demonstrably) has no barrier
to entry whatsoever. Literally anyone can become a professional software
developer in less time than it takes to pass high school algebra.

~~~
rpeden
I think that certain parts of the developer job market are easy to get into.
And in those parts of the market, things feel a bit bubbly right now. And so
you're seeing big salaries for new entrants to the market. If you jumped into
the market and took a new job, you'd probably be able to match or beat them.

If the dev job market _is_ in a bit of a bubble state, your experience will
serve you well when it bursts. This is especially true if you have experience
with distributed systems, or database optimization, or any number of
complicated things that newcomers to the market aren't as likely to have.

I could certainly be wrong about the bubbliness of the market, though. I've
been wrong about things often enough before. :)

------
seansmith1020
Today is actually the three year anniversary of me starting a bootcamp
(Galvanize). So I'm about 2.5 years out. Everything is going great, work at a
startup. Contribute just as much as our other developers with a CS background,
have received three raises. Galvanize taught me the exact right tools and
processes to start making meaningful contributions on day one.

I surely don't know as much technically in many areas, but having well rounded
developers (have a business/analyst background) can really be a huge benefit
to a dev team.

I'd say I have a much more product oriented role. Working closely with our
business team, product manager, customers, etc... to guide the
product/platform moving forward. Occasionally on trickier technical issues
I'll need to consult with someone with a CS degree for 10-15 minutes for a bit
of guidance, but by no means do I need any hand holding.

It was a great decision and it's worked out very well.

------
toomanyrichies
+1 for being mindful of cognitive biases. For that very reason, I'm almost
hesitant to post my experience. The only reason I do so anyway is because HN's
comment crowd is more mindful than average about their own biases and those of
others.

I graduated from Dev Bootcamp's Chicago location in August 2013, and after
almost 4 months of (quite stressful) job searching, I got 2 offers on the same
day- a job offer at a technology consultancy and an apprenticeship offer from
an ad-tech startup. Both companies were kind enough to let me pursue both
offers (I did the apprenticeship first followed by the consulting role). And
after consulting for almost 3 years in both San Francisco and New York, I
recently accepted an engineering position at a unicorn in NYC. I'm glad I
experience both consulting and startup life, because now I know the startup
world is where I belong.

Starting my dev career as a consultant resulted in me becoming a "jack of all
trades" to some extent, which has its pros and cons. DBC taught me Rails and
Javascript, I spent my apprenticeship coding in Java and JS, and I spent my
consulting career coding in Java, Objective-C and Rails again for a bit.

I'm glad I got such a broad exposure to different tech stacks, but I
definitely missed out on "diving deep" into one specific tech stack. It's
reasonable to believe I'd be much more qualified for a senior developer
position at my current job if I had worked in a Rails-only environment for the
last few years, although without a time machine it's impossible to be sure.

I enrolled at bootcamp at a time when DBC was by far the most well-known
school of the bunch. The Dan Rather Reports clip had just come out, and it was
a pretty glowing profile. If I were to do it all over again, I would consider
Dev Bootcamp or Hack Reactor, as the latter focuses on JS frameworks, which
seems applicable to a broader number of job opportunities than the Rails
ecosystem (although Rails is certainly useful as well).

~~~
bonniemuffin
The diversity of experiences that you get from consulting has bigger longer-
term value, IMO. You might be more likely to be a senior dev today if you had
been working in one tech stack for those years, but I think you'll go farther
in your career 5 years or 10 years from now due to the consulting experiences,
than if you spent all those years focused on a single tech stack.

------
w1zeman1p
I went through App Academy in 2013, I'm a Developer for a small startup in SF
applying some of the skills learned at the bootcamp. I feel like its pretty
good prep for super entry level work. Most of my cohort is still employed as
software engineers or has been promoted to director / CTO level positions.

~~~
huntermeyer
The CTO/Director positions are really impressive. I'm curious if those people
had proficiency in something other than software which is relevant to their
business. I'm also curious as to the size of the companies they lead. The
titles _sound_ great, but they're relative.

~~~
busterarm
I'm not so sure. I've had a ton of CTO offers come my way and usually it's a
situation where they're really hiring their first developer and want to pay
more in equity than in cash. Most of the ones I bothered to talk to weren't
really offering any kind of meaningful decision making power about the
business.

This wasn't always the case, but it was overwhelmingly the majority. I'm not
that impressed by CTOs of tiny businesses unless they're also co-founders and
domain experts on top of that.

Someone in my cohort did a couple months of contracting, one job and then
cofounded a startup all within like 8 months. He's the sole dev and his
cofounder is a rich friend. Their business is in the California marijuana
industry. I am not too envious.

------
ericdykstra
Hey! I graduated from Dev Bootcamp in Spring of 2013 as part of the 3rd cohort
of that year (when they switched from classes to cohorts), which I think puts
me in the first ~150 or so of people who did a "bootcamp."

> What are you doing now?

I'm a programmer working for a startup company in Tokyo.

> Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got?

The primary focus when I went was learning how to "think like a programmer"
and learn while building. This let me contribute at least marginally at my
first job as I gained more experience through just building more.

It seems like the focus has shifted, though, from what I've seen. I don't
think I would choose to do it now, given the current messaging.

> Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?

I haven't checked everyone individually, but at least 50%, maybe more.

------
lukedavis
I did Hack Reactor in 2014 and work at Google now as a software engineer (it's
currently 2017).

~~~
huntermeyer
That's awesome! "Where" in Google are you working? I'm naive to their team
structure, but curious if it's in site-reliability, embedded systems, ads,
search, etc.

~~~
lukedavis
Photos

------
rodlevy
As a member of Dev Bootcamp's first class in Chicago (summer 2013), which was
one of the very earliest coding bootcamps, I can shed a little light on
outcomes for me and all of my fellow DBC graduates. Hopefully this avoids the
selection bias being discussed.

All 14 graduates are today using the skills they learned at DBC. Here is where
they are:

I am the founder of Code Platoon, a nonprofit coding bootcamp for Veterans,
heavily modeled after DBC. Of the remaining 13, they are :

10 are software developers, 2 are founder/presidents of small tech-enabled
companies, doing development as well, 1 is an instructor at Dev Bootcamp.

I think we would all agree the Dev Bootcamp had a profound (positive) impact
on our lives.

------
handbanana
Finished bootcamp mid 2014, currently a Software Developer (full stack) making
105k base (110k total package) with some great benefits (and no state income
tax).

I had zero background before the bootcamp, and the bootcamp itself was pretty
shocking.

The biggest part of the bootcamp was having it on my resume - giving my
limited knowledge "legitimacy".

EDIT: My starting salary was mid 40s after I finished bootcamp. And I felt
like I knew nothing for a good 6 months - luckily many employers are happy to
take chances on you if you're willing to learn and have common sense.

I'd advocate something like freecodecamp to others looking at bootcamps that
can't afford the "good" ones (hackreactor etc)

~~~
_e
Hiring three people at $40k/yr each at the beginning is safer than hiring one
experienced person at $120k/yr. Maybe one or two of the three don't pan out
but, at least, you didn't invest all your time into one person who might
ultimately be the wrong fit.

~~~
jaequery
on the contrary, if you find the right experienced developer, he/she will run
circles around 5 or even 10 jr developers.

~~~
flavio81
Agree. My experience is that an experienced (7-10 years experience) developer
can do 8x the throughput of a junior developer.

~~~
busterarm
I don't really use years experience as a metric.

We hired a guy with 7 years experience to be our Lead Frontend dev and he
basically built nothing usable for 4 months before we fired him. He made twice
as much as me but my title was still Jr at the time. He didn't add a single
piece of infrastructure to make his workload easier. My boss and I threw out
all of his work, split it up and got it done in a month.

7 years of experience can very easily end up being 7 years of 1st year
experience. I want to see some kind of scale in their
responsibilities/accomplishments.

There are some junior-experience people out there with the potential to get a
lot done right now.

------
philpee2
I attended App Academy nearly 3 years ago. I'm currently a software engineer
at Airbnb. I haven't kept in touch with everyone from my cohort, but I know
some of them are working at Lyft, Uber, Google, Slack, and 23andMe.

------
escribmac
I attended Fullstack Academy in NYC, completed in February of this year. I had
some CS fundamentals under my belt from college before I attended. I'm
currently employed as a developer and I feel like my education has properly
equipped me for the Junior Dev role. Many people in this thread are saying
that they must continue learning after the bootcamp - I'd be really surprised
if any CS major decided to stop learning about programming after completing
college. I'm extremely happy with the quality of education I received at my
school, but I can't speak to other programs.

------
rajangdavis
I graduated from the Web Development Immersive at the end of 2014 from General
Assembly.

I was able to take what I learned and apply it to a CRM that I had worked with
for years prior to going to General Assembly. I was able to develop services
around this CRM that my former employer still uses and I was recognized by the
company that provides the CRM for my contributions within their CRM's
community.

Right now, I am on my own, still trying to figure out where to go next. I
think the biggest takeaway I got from the program was to keep learning; it's
part of why I keep coming back to hacker news.

------
jnmandal
I did Dev Bootcamp and graduated in early 2015 -- have been employed ever
since. Unfortunately I think the program has changed for the worse during the
past year or so. They had been acquired by Kaplan around the time I started.
About a year ago, it seems to have become a lot more focused on the bottom
line: they are charging more, offering less, and have removed some of the soft
touches that made it a great program.

Most folks from my era of the program are still in touch and we're all very
supportive of each other from a professional/networking standpoint.

------
timbuckley
I graduated from App Academy NYC in January 2014.

I'm in my 2nd post-bootcamp developer job at a small-ish company, making
double my previous salary before a/A. I love what I do and attending the
bootcamp was the hardest and most rewarding thing I've done in my professional
life.

I keep in touch with some friends of the bootcamp (my cohort and others), and
they have gone to work at various companies like Spotify, Google, Thoughtbot,
Bloomberg, Capital One, Vimeo, Tumlbr, WeWork, and lots of smaller companies.

------
magoon
Not an attendee. However, a client hired several older people who rejuvenated
their careers with coding bootcamps and I find them to be extremely competent
developers. Recommend.

------
mathattack
I know a few physicists who did a data science bootcamp ~3 years ago. I was
very unimpressed with the boot camp itself, but they've become solid data
scientists.

~~~
Neutrion
looks like what matters is the decision to take on new things in life.

~~~
mathattack
And an ability to put numbers on things. (Physics seems to be a good pre-data
science field)

------
llamataboot
I completed a bootcamp about 3.5 years ago. I've been programming full-time
with stellar reviews since then. I would say probably about 30% of my cohort
are full-time programmers, but that's just a wild guess. I know some of them
went into other things.

I've seen quite a few people graduating from bootcamps now that have struggled
more to land that first job. It seems like the jr dev market is starting to
get a bit saturated.

------
nemacol
I have been a sys admin for ~5.5 years (in IT for 7). I took a MEAN stack boot
camp Jan2015 - Mar2015. I am still a sys admin.

If I had to do it over again I would still take the class.

I know that is not 3+ years ago.

Even though I am not a developer I read hacker news because the article
selection is usually of a high quality and the comment sections are full of
reasonable conversations. People trying to find answers or make a point
instead of flame wars. Usually.

------
alkjdf
App Academy 2013 (SF)

What are you doing now? SWE at Google

Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got? Yes! I had
some background coming in and I learned a ton about the web, how to break down
problems, and how to be productive.

Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?

I think so, but I haven't stayed in touch with all of them. I definitely think
the market for juniors has gotten more saturated and I was very lucky to get
in when I did.

------
bootcamper18
Bootcamp grad from 2014 in Boston. Struggled for 2-3 months to get a job
(probably did 40 interviews), got 3 offers in different states ranging from
30k-50k/yr. I took the 50k job and moved to a LCOL area but had a good tech
market.

Before that I was 9 credits short of a degree and I was working in account
management at a tiny start up in California. I chose the bootcamp in Boston
because I didn't have any money saved up to live anywhere but with my mother.
I was 30, swallowed my pride and moved home for 6 months. In hindsight that
was one of the smartest decisions I made.

> What are you doing now?

Now I'm a senior software engineer at PayPal. I also finished my degree.

> Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got?

I went from couch to employable in 3 months so yes. I worked 60hrs a week on
my craft for 2 more years though - now I'm one of the top contributors across
teams.

> Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?

I think so but I have been really bad at keeping in touch. Our cohort was
unfortunately competitive with each other so friendships and bonding was not
easy to come by.

------
bacontacos
Graduated from Hack Reactor in 2014. I'm a Senior Software Engineer at a large
company now.

I was prepared enough to not totally screw things up at my first job. I was an
expert in Javascript and reasonably knowledgeable at data structures and how
to implement basic web stuff.

I'm now more focused on back end things...AWS, infrastructure, services, etc.

As far as I know, most of my cohort is still working at good jobs.

~~~
swyx
bootcamps are pretty light on backend/devops type knowledge which turns out
pretty critical for "real" jobs. Do you think this can generally be picked up
later or should people in bootcamps do something like an AWS certification
(just to pick an arbitrary skill proof point) to be sufficiently well-rounded?

~~~
bacontacos
I've never done an AWS class or have any certs, so I can't say for sure if its
worth doing. In my case, I've mainly learned on the job and have had some
really fantastic mentors to work with who have trusted me to make decisions
and let me run with them.

I also read a ton of books on design patterns, architecture, deployment, ops,
etc.

~~~
swyx
thank you. if you have any architecture/deployment/ops books to recommend I
would love to hear it.

~~~
tannhauser23
Deployment / DevOps changes so fast though - Docker and AWS didn't even exist
a few years ago!

If you're totally new to deployment, I'd do something like this:

* Get comfortable with the basic Unix/Linux commands (basically, to the point where you can navigate the file system and mv/cp/rm files with ease, change chmod permissions, etc.)

* Create a simple webapp in the stack of your choice. Literally a webserver for a site that says 'hello world'.

* Deploy it on Heroku. With their CLI it's like a single command.

* Congrats! You deployed a site! Go on Heroku's management dashboard and take a look at the logs. They won't make much sense, but get a feel for what's going on.

* Go on digitalocean and make a droplet, which is a VM that's running on their servers. Pick the Ubuntu 16.04 droplet. (Note, you can pick 'One Click Apps' which are VMs that come preloaded with the stack of your choice, but don't do that now). Read about how SSH works. Now SSH into your droplet. Cool, now you're connected to your server!

* Learn how to install the dependencies for your webapp. I don't think the droplets even come with git, so you gotta install everything from scratch. Then get your app running!

* From here, keep playing with your webapp. Figure out how to make your server run your updated code. How to add a database. Do it until you're really comfortable with running your site.

* By now you've run into a ton of issues with the site breaking. It's hard to keep your dev env and the live server synced! Start learning about Docker. Dockerize your app and deploy your app to Digital Ocean as a Docker image.

* When you're comfortable with THAT, start learning AWS. Learn what a EC2 instance is, what RDS is, what you can do with S3, etc.

* Finally, deploy to AWS!

You can use the free account tier at Digital Ocean / AWS to accomplish all
these tasks.

Good luck and have fun!

------
mrborgen
Hey,

I did a bootcamp 2.5 years ago (Founders and Coders on London). Today I'm a
co-founder of Scrimba ([https://scrimba.com/](https://scrimba.com/)), which is
a new interactive video format for communicating code.

I'm mostly doing non-technical work at the moment, though some technical as
well.

After I graduated I worked a little over a year as a front-end developer at
Xeneta (a Norwegian-based startup).

I could not have gotten a job as a professional developer if I didn't do the
bootcamp. Or it would have taken me MUCH MUCH more time. So I'm super happy
with my experience. Also, most people in my cohort who graduated also work as
developers now.

I've been writing a lot about how my process from non-technical to technical
was. Feel free to check it out here:

[https://medium.com/founders-coders/from-non-technical-to-
hir...](https://medium.com/founders-coders/from-non-technical-to-hired-
in-5-months-d010f601b1bc)

------
throwthisawayt
I finished AppAcademy about 2.5 years ago. It took me about 4 months to find a
job and I've been working as a full stack engineer since. I mostly work in
Java & Typescript (Angular) now.

My trajectory has been pretty solid - we had several people join when I
started and I've been at the top of my cohort. I've been promoted and given a
raise while my company went through layoffs and perform well even compared to
the CS grads from Stanford & Berkeley who joined at the same time.

I expect to be promoted to the senior title in 1-2 years, but I will probably
job hop somewhere else in the next year so I can get exposed to tougher cs
areas (distributed systems, scaling, information retrieval, etc)

My close friends at the bootcamp work at companies like Pivotal Labs,
Pinterest, Yammer, etc. it's definitely a biased sample but I've seen many
people do well. Many fail as well, but that's expected.

------
kolatts
I'm in my second job as a .NET dev after boot camp. My salary has nearly
tripled since when I attended the boot camp. The technical skills I learned at
boot camp were a great start, but I'd say the biggest change is just how slow
work gets done at an enterprise. Most of the work I've done since has not used
the newer tech (Angular, ORMs) I learned at the bootcamp, but I've been a
rather successful advocate for them.

Needless to say I am pretty happy about my choice, the ROI manifested in the
first year. I'm not so certain the rest of my class did as well, as many of
them struggled with the material and most of them did not understand our final
team project. I would also have not gotten very far if I stopped learning
independently and pushing myself after bootcamp.

------
dvdhnt
I went to The Iron Yard, their very first offering in Atlanta, back in 2014.
My cohort was focused on full-stack development; it started with Ruby,
Sinatra, and finally Rails.

I graduated that summer and immediately began doing contract work with a
couple fellow graduates. By the end of 2014, I had moved my family to
Chattanooga to work for a startup in the eSports space. It was a Rails shop
and they had grand plans but the senior developer left and our CEO decided I
could take the lead. To be blunt, I wasn't ready, obviously, and knew it. I
wanted to be a part of a team and have room to make mistakes (plus be
mentored); you can'd do that when you're the only developer then lead
developer. So, by spring of 2015, I joined a wellness startup (awesome team)
in town and have remained there ever since.

In the beginning, all I did was write tests. I started to contribute to
features on both the front and back ends. Now, I own entire features, make
design decisions (re: database, code, and the stack), implement CI/CD, review
code, and randomly build things in other tech (like an iOS app for testing
Firebase Cloud Messaging integration). There's no way I could have done much,
if any, of this fresh out of bootcamp.

Bootcamp got my toes wet and taught me, beyond introductory full-stack
concepts, both how to read documentation and to accept that programming is
hard. Those two lessons are what really helped me to become a professional
developer. My team accepted me because I was still passionate even after
learning so much so fast. They also were confident that when presented with a
problem I would either have a solution, know how to go find one, or be smart
enough to ask for direction (that last one took more time to develop than the
others).

To be fair, I was an intelligence analyst by trade prior to bootcamp, so I
definitely had previously developed skills useful to programming. However, as
others have said, bootcamp was/is a springboard that provides structure to the
process.

As for my peers from the cohort, I think MAYBE half are still developers and a
few own companies.

------
veza
Disclaimer: East-European hustle version (self-directed and free)

Not really a bootcamp but a combination of udacity, lynda, online
books/tutorials.

My Background: tennis coach, basic arithmetic, PC power user.

    
    
        May 2013 - Start learning HTML->CSS->jQuery(Codeacademy+other)->Python(Udacity:Intro to CS+Web Dev)
                      ->Javascript(Eloquent JS)->PHP&MySQL(Lynda) (+countless others in between)
                 - Went for PHP as I started looking for jobs and there were almost no Python options.
    
        Apr 2014 - First Job - for a friend of mine who has an online tennis shop 
                 - Opencart (mainly front-end templating, some jQuery - mostly plugins usage)
    
        Jul 2014- Second Job - a web shop (10 people) - still have this one but doing totally different stuff
                 - Wordpress theme customizing (still mostly front-end and jQuery, some php)
    
        Sep 2014 - First 'big' project: 2 person, Codeigniter+Postgres
                 - Built the whole front-end (learned that css on a big website is hard and you need some architecture)
                 - Ended up doing some CRUD stuff on the admin side too
    
        May 2015 - d3.js project - a landing page with lots of custom graphs and a custom map 
                  (started the project with 0 knowledge of d3 - finished quite well)
                 - Interestingly enough I was already 'the javascript' guy at the shop so this was assigned to me
    
        Jul 2015- Tryout with a remote team in my area working for an american startup 
                - Flask, microservices, aws, data analysis - cool stuff
                - they needed me on the back-end - got rejected, 
                - the lead said I was too inexperienced and that he didn't have time too train me.
    
        Aug 2015- Built a custom Wordpress theme for a website 
    
        Sept 2015- Python job - for a US based startup 
                 - a LOT of scripts, mainly web scraping, data mining, data cleaning
                 - a LOT of sql for all that data
                 
        Sept 2016- Started working on a new front-end for the same US based startup
                 - React, Webpack, ES6, NPM, Babel, Flux... head-blown, die...

------
mmartinson
I did a bootcamp fall 2014 in Vancouver. I got a couple decent job offers the
week I finished, took one of them with a startup, and have been working there
since. I had no professional experience before, but took 8 months off before
the bootcamp to prepare and was probably the most prepared student in the
cohort.

Looking at where my peers are now, I would say that about 50% have turned it
into a good career, and the others either changed course or quit.

The curriculum gave me a pretty solid start, though it leaned heavily on
libraries and getting things done. Starting my job I felt productive in a very
narrow sense, and needed pretty direct supervision for about 6 months before I
was at a place to work mostly autonomously.

------
spectrum1234
I started a bootcamp 2.5 years ago. Then I spent 2 years trying to go straight
into Product Management. No one would hire me without development experience
so I worked as a technical project manager and my own startup.

Finally I decided to get a web developer job. It has been 8 days, we are using
React and Redux, and its fantastic. But the senior developer left the team and
now with 4 of us left I've realized I am the most knowledgeable developer on
the team. This is in SF but not with a tech company. Luckily there is no
stress and the hours are great.

For some reason coding on my own projects was only okay but coding for a job
is amazing. The day flies by and I get really deep into my work.

------
lbrindze
Fwiw I never went to a boot camp (nor have an engineering degree of any kind).

I was lucky enough to have a few opportunities where I was paid to learn. Got
my first big boy developer job at a startup in Santa Monica in oct 2014 after
working as a scuba instructor. Now I work very part time from a boat sailing
around the sea of Cortez. I can only do this because my resume is solid enough
that picking up short term freelance work is not impossible.

If you want to learn something (or do something for that matter) I think
passion is the first and most important ingredient. If you want it bad enough
the opportunities will manifest themselves.

~~~
busterarm
Being able to work on a boat remotely, or even literally work on a boat, is
something I would maybe kill for. Very envious.

------
tnolet
A sincere question: Do people ever NOT graduate from these types of bootcamps?
I'm asking as IT Manager / Engineering Manager person. When it's on someone's
CV, I never know how t value it.

~~~
thisisforyou
The graduation rate is irrelevant, as a very selective bootcamp that works
hard to make sure everyone learns and has a 100% grad rate will put out higher
quality folks than a dev-mill that doesn't care what folks do and has a 75%
grad rate. The base fact is bootcamps vary in quality. As a hiring manager it
would be in your best interest to take a day to visit the bootcamps you see on
resumes and get a sense for what goes on there, you will get a very quick
sense of which ones are legit and which ones are not. (I say this only as a
graduate of a bootcamp)

~~~
tnolet
That sounds fare, however the reality is this is a global market: I asses a CV
from a Mexican guy/girl who went through a US bootcamp while I'm a hiring
manager in Berlin. An actual coding chalenge still helps though.

------
maxxxxx
I am surprised how well most seem to do. It makes me wonder if even as a
senior engineer who maybe isn't up to date with the latest cool stuff doing a
bootcamp is a way to refresh the career.

------
Ocin
Post graduation: started working for a startup owned by one of the Silicon
Valley dinosaurs for 3 years and now starting my own agency with friends
([http://www.blackbeltlabs.com](http://www.blackbeltlabs.com))

My classmates who wanted to become developers are still developers. I had
quite a few that went in to start their own businesses etc. They wanted to
gain more insight into the tech side of things. Probably because hiring tech
staff for early stage companies is quite challenging.

------
adamgoodapp
Graduated from General Assembly in London 4 years ago. Now working for a
Robotics company as a software developer.

Bootcamps are great in teaching you the foundation of software engineering
(mainly in a web development role). The biggest learning experience I received
was learning how to learn.

During my time I have needed to venture into lower level programming and
having more CS knowledge really is a big plus.

I feel like bootcamps could spend some more time teaching general Computer
science topics, however you can pick the experience up during your career.

------
nycbootcamp
Graduated: App Academy December 2014 (almost 3 years)

What are you doing now? I'm a front-end developer at an NYC unicorn. I used to
work full-stack but I think backend work is boring to me. I also run a
consultancy where I build random projects for clients. So far, I've built an
iOS app and a couple one-off web apps. I am on my third job. I left the first
because I didn't like AdTech, then I worked in media, and now I work in a
nerdy infrastructure monitoring company. I finally feel like I found a fit.

Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got? It was
necessary and the best RoI I have ever gotten on anything in my life.

Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers? Yes. Most of
them are on their first or second job. My cohort had about 14~ people and they
went to Google, Tumblr, couple into regular startups(Finance, Health, AdTech),
and a few at unicorns. I don't know anyone who graduated who didn't find a
job. A couple people got kicked out for doing badly in the bootcamp, like 1 or
2. I haven't followed up with the people kicked out.

I mainly learned Ruby/Rails at my Bootcamp but I'm pretty much only writing
functional JavaScript (ES2017/Sagas/Redux) now with a hint of Python (2.7). I
straight up love my job. I've flirted with a bunch of stacks throughout my
jobs: Angular, Rails, PHP, Scala...and found I like working with Python/JS the
best...

My only regret is going to a bootcamp so focused on Ruby, but at the time the
financial model was the only viable decision...and I don't think any bootcamps
existed yet that were focused on JavaScript.

The only real critique I have of the bootcamp is I also wish I would have more
career guidance. My career has progressed financially but I am not sure that I
am doing the right thing, whereas if I had an extensive network from
university I could compare/contrast, talk to fellow alumni, brainstorm career
ideas, etc.

I'm kind of on my own career-wise. I already got my 10x+ RoI, which is more
than my uni education gave me, and a better lifestyle.

I've also helped 3 friends go to a bootcamp and they've ended up at Hack
Reactor or App Academy. All of them have jobs. I think going to a bootcamp is
fine as long as you pick an extremely selective one like a/A or Hack Reactor.

~~~
nycbootcamp
piece of crap won't let me edit but salary: 80k (1 yr) -> 110k (2 yr) -> 145k
(3 yr) with about 15-20k from consulting work on my own in the past year

------
rednerrus
I graduated from python developer bootcamp in 2015 (not three years ago) and
I'm an operations engineer at a medium-sized startup. The other people in my
class that were technically competent and worked hard are all working today. A
couple of front-end developers, a dev manager, and two other Devopsish
engineers.

Bootcamp gave me the basics. I took them and busted my ass to build on those
skills. It took about two months before I got my first job.

------
aniseseed
1) I am teaching the course I originally took, while struggling to find a job
as a developer. Anyone over fifty should expect great difficulty in finding a
position. Only the young need apply.

2)The course I took was totally inadequate. However, several of us were hired
to teach that course and our template is now used across the company.

3) Of the 12 folks who took the same course I did, only one is working as a
developer. No luck for anyone else.

------
jacques_chester
Where I work we have a fair contingent of bootcamp alumni who joined in the
past 3 years, some of whom have now moved into engineering and product
management.

They tend to have started with strong backgrounds in something else. People
who would excel in a lot of fields, in no small part because they continue to
learn.

------
MrDrone
I completed a Front End Dev apprenticeship/boot camp with Bloc.io. I'm now the
manager of support training at Zapier. While I think the technical skills it
provided me with helped me out in my current role I don't think it would've
prepared me to be an actual developer.

------
suddensleep
I'll speak up from the (seemingly underrepresented) data science side here,
despite not making the 3+ years ago cutoff.

I attended a data science bootcamp almost two years ago now. It was 12 weeks
long and ran 9-5 each day with a mixture of lectures and pair programming
exercises in the morning, and time set aside in the afternoon for working on
projects. My cohort was very diverse; there were kids just out of grad school,
teachers, actuaries, data/business analysts, and even practicing software
developers all taking the same course. I came into the bootcamp with a fair
amount of background knowledge (Bachelors/Masters degrees in Math as well as a
~10 year history of teaching myself various computer science concepts and
languages), and I have to say that this served me quite well. I didn't
struggle to learn Python (the language of choice for this program) or grapple
with what gradient descent was really _doing_ , because these were already
parts of the way that I understood the field. Instead, I used my 12 weeks to
learn about Git/Github, get really good at _actually_ working from the command
line, learn about different "big data" techniques and database structures, and
pursue a passion project.

That being said, throughout the bootcamp I was keenly aware of the fact that
no one was going to "fail out". There were students that needed more direct
guidance than others when difficult topics were broached, and there were
students whose presentations revealed that their project hadn't worked as well
as they'd hoped (this includes some of my own projects). On the one hand, it
was good to have a community of people (students and instructors alike) who
embraced these failures and helped you learn from them. On the other hand, it
instilled some level of self-doubt: "Maybe I am wasting a solid amount of my
life savings on an experience that will only teach me how bad I am at this."
Or even, "I feel like I did well with this project, and I have some validation
from my peers and mentors, but what would a future boss think of this work?"

As a practicing data scientist now, I feel like the bootcamp prepared me to
both know how to ask the types of questions data scientists ask, and to know
where to look for the answers I need. As far as I know, everyone in my cohort
is employed as a data scientist now, save a couple individuals with visa
issues (and these few are still actively working on personal projects). Those
with prior exposure to the field were certainly able to get better jobs, and
quicker.

Ninja edit: italics

------
run28
I went to General Assembly in 2013, quite possibly the worst bootcamp. Now I'm
a lead engineer at a startup with top tier pay. The bootcamp helped a little
but it was more about working my ass off and finding any way possible to get
that first programming job.

------
zumu
Most of the people I bootcamped with do not religiously read HN, but of those
who do, most of us have solid jobs.

This is obviously an anecdote, but I think it's logical those who had bad
experiences and did not end up developers most likely do not read HN.

------
stickperson
Since most people responding here have some sort of technical job, what sort
of stuff are you working on? All of the bootcamps I'm aware of focus on web
development. Do you still do strictly web stuff? Frontend or backend? Anything
else?

------
maddcastles
I graduated from General Assembly in NY 2 years ago. I worked as a junior dev
on Long Island for 6 months. Then I hopped across the pond to Berlin, Germany
to teach at a Bootcamp whilst I travel Europe. It's been a dream so far :)

~~~
good_vibes
They let you teach with only that much experience?

~~~
maddcastles
I had 1 full year of dev experience and I had direct bootcamp experience.
Also, I'm technically a TA, not the lead teacher. Bootcamps, such as GA, hire
teachers and TAs who are fresh out out of their own bootcamps, with a lot less
professional experience than I had.

Also, like a lot of bootcamp grads in this thread, I did a lot of programming
on my own, getting better and more confident. So I personally believe I was/am
a stronger programmer than my years of experience would imply.

There is a stigma with the hiring of developers solely based on the number of
years of experience they have. If you are qualified to do something, and the
employer has determined that you are qualified for that position, then number
of years of experience you have should be irrelevant.

~~~
good_vibes
Gotchya. I guess I'm in better shape than I thought. I'd like to teach at a
bootcamp in some foreign country and travel in my spare time too.

How did you apply? How hard was the interview process?

It's just demoralizing sometimes when every job listing around where I live
says 3-5 years of experience required for something that isn't beyond what I
can do right now.

~~~
Mz
FWIW, when I was in GIS school, they talked about the fact that many GIS jobs
would say crap like "requires 5 years experience in X software" when the
software in question was not even 5 years old.

So, you might want to take that requirement with a grain of salt.

~~~
good_vibes
I just moved back home to my parent's house. I'm going to use this time to get
a basic job to save money and use my free time to learn as much as possible by
designing, developing, and promoting an app/platform I thought of. There is a
market for it, I lose sleep over it, and worst case: it'll help me land a job
like yours.

------
timwaagh
i find the reactions so intersting. a financial analyst no less who does a
three month course to become a programmer. product managers who do the same.
senior developer in a year.

in my country these people make so much more than programmers that they would
never consider such steps. and senior generally means 5-10 years of
experience.

maybe i need to find my way to the us after all. it sounds like 'opposite
town'. not really because i need the money, but if i could to tell these suits
'i'm a software engineer, maybe if you do some course you could get as much as
i do'. maybe i could die sniggering...

~~~
lloyd-christmas
I went from equities trader to software developer, while also going from 80
hours a week to 50. Sure, I took a pay cut, but not everyone makes decisions
on a pure monetary basis.

------
bootcamp1
A lot of people who attend programming bootcamps seem to be coming from other
backgrounds or relatively new to programming.

Interested to hear the experience from anyone who was already a developer and
took a bootcamp. Was it was worth it?

------
cagataygurturk
Why the most of bootcamp grads go to frontend jobs? Is it easier?

~~~
hkjgkjy
I think it's more accessible - my designer friend felt sorry for me when
working because I had "no pictures". Front end development usually means GUI
programming, where graphics is the first world.

You don't need to learn about data structures, count in binary and you
instantly see graphical, useable results. It's a gateway drug.

------
spasiu
I graduated over two years ago from makersquare. I was a Dev for those two
years, now I'm moving into developer experience work. I'm very happy with my
career.

------
werber
I'm just about 3 years out of a boot camp and have since transitioned into a
UI Dev role which suits me much better than being a straight dev.

------
eggie5
probably a lot of selection bias on these responses.

------
thjan
How do you determine the quality of a bootcamp before attending? Are there any
recommendations for Europe / Austria?

------
cdt_hiker
I went through a boootcamp several years ago. Before joining I had done a
small amount of dev work (mostly trying to debug simple js errors) for an
existing employer and researched bootcamps all over the country before
deciding on one. Since then I've worked at several companies and have been in
charge of hiring a couple people, both jr and sr to myself, and in the process
have interviewed a number of other bootcamp grads. My general thoughts:

-Bootcamps are insanely overpriced for what you are getting. Most seem to have a decent student to instructor ratio but almost always the instructors are recent graduates and lack the technical skills in a lot of areas. They could help out on general syntax errors but lacked debugging skills that most devs outside of extreme entry level posses. In the past two years the cost has continued to rise almost exponentially and the trend of hiring former students seems to have continued.

-I'm sure this varies by bootcamp but they seem to paint too wide of a brush. In ten weeks they will touch on both front and back end and give the attendee the illusion that they are "fullstack devs". This is great because you have a nice shinny Quara clone to show off at the end but in reality most people will walk away with little understanding of either. I would rather bootcamps focused on one area (probably client side) and briefly touch on the other end. For my bootcamp I specifically said up front I was interested in the backend and was assured that they tailor the curriculum to the student. In reality it's more a one size fits all.

-Students can't problem solve for themselves. A lot of students (and I include myself in this) couldn't handle issues that could be solved with a basic google search. Some people figure this out fairly early, others carry it on into their careers, but it seems to be especially prevalent with bootcamp grads.

-Students walk away with unreal expectations. Having friends and family that have gone through bootcamps in both large and small markets the salary and employment numbers don't seem grounded in reality. I'm sure this depends on the market but it seems like a lot of people end up taking short term low paying jobs straight out of bootcamp and while some of them find other dev jobs a not insignificant amount don't. Also a lot of people end up being pressured into taking tech but not dev related jobs by their bootcamp, presumably so they can collect a placement fee. The bootcamp I went to is fairly well regarded (you have probably heard of it) and I've never been contacted by them about my employment status, and I know a fair number of people either went back to their old careers or are marginally employed in the tech field (yet they still claim a high placement rate).

-I'm SURE this depends on the bootcamp but mine seemed to openly play favorites. At first it was great because of extra attention but after a number of staff openly ridiculed a guy on the spectrum I became extremely disheartened. A bootcamp should be about education, not a popularity contest.

After my bootcamp I didn't feel ready to be employed and opted out of the
opportunity to meet perspective employers. This was met by numerous "talks" by
the staff trying to convince me to attend, presumably so the bootcamp would
get a cut of any offer I took. In the end I spent a fair bit of time
consulting in my previous industry before finally feeling ready and taking a
job as a developer (although the job search in a new market was brutal). Since
then things have been great and I'm extremely happy with where I ended up, but
I'm still disillusioned with the bootcamp model. Part of that is at due to my
experience and partially due to interacting with bootcamp devs both in
interviews and with employees at my current company.

We are starting to look at hiring two new people at the company, one is for a
non dev role who might have to deal with some basic html and css, I'll
probably hire out of a bootcamp for this position. The other will be for a
full dev position. I'm hoping to poach within the company on this one (from
somebody with no experience but who has the interest) but if not I'm going to
give self taught or CS grads priority.

If you are looking to change careers and just want to work in tech. A bootcamp
is probably a way to get your foot in the door. If you really love programming
go back to school (I wish I had, cs masters are pretty cheap) or really work
on your own, network like crazy (buy as many beers or coffee for as many devs
as possible) and build something really cool. Most people won't notice it on
your resume but one or two out of a hundred will and that is all that matters.

~~~
flavio81
>In ten weeks they will touch on both front and back end and give the attendee
the illusion that they are "fullstack devs". This is great because you have a
nice shinny Quara clone to show off at the end but in reality most people will
walk away with little understanding of either.

I think this is a modern problem that not only happens with bootcamps. There's
little time to cover both sides in enough depth, IMO. It's better if they
focus on one of them, as you suggest.

And then there's the problem of the "full-stack" word. I can implement you a
full web application by myself, but I wouldn't call myself a "full stack dev"
because to be a real full-stack dev, I would then need to have quite a bit of
experience on server clustering, load balancing strategies, paralellization of
CPU intensive processes, database query and schema optimization, etc...

------
kmakm
I didn't do one, but my friend did and is now a Google SWE!

------
christinahuang
what are your thoughts on all-women coding bootcamps (ie hackbright in sf and
grace hopper in nyc)?

~~~
flavio81
Here in Peru we have a famous one, "Laboratoria". I think they were featured
by Y-combinator once. They are able to give young, financially-troubled women
an education that usually lands them a good job afterwards. So it seems it's a
success.

Disclaimer: My friends work there, so i'm a bit biased...

~~~
jcotillo
LABORATORIA LOOKS AMAZING! SO proud to be a Peruvian web dev (in SF) and to
see that happening in Latin American :D

------
divmain
I attended Code Fellows in October-December of 2013. I had held a handful of
tech-heavy positions prior to that time, but had never worked as a software
engineer/developer.

I originally saw three primary benefits to attending bootcamp, and I think
they're still relevant:

1\. It gave me some credibility. Before bootcamp, I had worked with children
overseas for a couple of years, and as a care provider the year before that. I
had considerable tech experience further back, but nothing related to software
development. My resume would have been easy to discard without some way to get
connected with employers.

2\. It enhanced my motivation. I was paying a lot of money out of pocket, so
it placed pressure on me to follow through. I also enjoy working with people,
and the classroom setting exceeded self-study in a number of ways.

3\. It provided people I could go to when I was stuck. This only happened a
half dozen times over the course of the program, but any one of these times
might've derailed my interest or motivation.

Overall, my experience was very positive and I was offered a position at
Formidable Labs (now just Formidable) before graduating.

It has gone rather well since then. I started as a junior engineer on their
Walmart project and progressed to a senior position on my team within the
year. A few months in, I received a ~30% raise.

From there, I joined the Walmart Core Web team. That involved building
foundational libraries, components, and patterns for the rest of the web
teams, as well as a lot of broad architectural work. After a couple of months
on that team and some significant successes, I took on additional
responsibility, which coincided with another ~35% raise.

Since then, I've worked on Formidable projects for Microsoft and Starbucks, in
senior and lead roles. Starting Monday, I'm joining the Edge browser team at
Microsoft as a program manager.

Its hard to know what I should attribute my success to - I definitely went
into bootcamp with the intention to make the most of every opportunity that
came my way, and I continued in that mindset afterwards. I jumped at every
chance to learn something new, and spent considerable amounts of time outside
of work learning and doing OSS. A few of my projects [0][1][2] got relatively
popular (others, not so much [3][4]). All of these were side projects that I
pursued independantly, and I think that increased my desireability as a team
member. A lot of it was probably timing and luck too!

It's worth noting, however, that my experience was atypical and not in line
with the rest of my cohort. I know at least a handful that struggled to find
positions.

[0] github.com/divmain/GitSavvy [1] github.com/FormidableLabs/rapscallion [2]
github.com/FormidableLabs/freactal [3] interlockjs.com [4]
github.com/divmain/recollect

------
rytor718
Attended a bootcamp (General Assembly) in 2014. Very positive outcome for me I
got a job offer the week I graduated, but like others have mentioned, a
significant number of others had a harder time getting their first gig. Some
gave up and I don't blame them. I'm in San Francisco where competition and
opportunity are very high.

Bootcamps have their flaws, but are definitely filling a need in the tech
sector. There's too many dev jobs and not enough devs so while there's some
saturation leaking from bootcamps, it's not because there aren't enough jobs;
it's just very competitive and companies generally do poorly at recruiting.
Bootcamps are trying to fill a void, but they're not all equal.

For anyone thinking of attending a camp: look for camps that offer
scholarships to attend. They're hungry for students for a lot of reasons but
also it's indicative of a camp that really wants to offer you something and
they've managed to get the big companies to pay the way for you. Yes that's
how many of those scholarships work. The bootcamp networks with big companies
like Google who offer sponsorship for a set amount of students (usually
minority students). Whatever you think of the camp, that's a good sign they're
trying to expand their offerings and those camps will usually do a great job
of helping you succeed.

Second, look at the more established camps. If you're a woman, Hack Bright and
Grace Hopper and the like are premiere camps. Their programs are amazing. If
you can get to one, consider those your best options for getting a quality
education. For others, App Academy has a well earned reputation; Hack Reactor
is competitive; General Assembly is well established and has vast resources
for students. I'd say Dev Bootcamp but as someone else mentioned, they've
changed somewhat over the years and I'm not sure where the quality lies there.
I work with a lot of bootcamp grads from different camps for the past few
years and I continue to mentor at these camps so this is my firsthand
experience with them.

Finally, be ready to study ...not necessarily all day everyday (people have
families to attend to) but definitely for a _solid_ 8-10 hours to get the most
of it (and try to take 1 or 2 days off; the brain needs a break to absorb all
the things you learn and it will be tempting to keep going without breaks).

In all cases, you're going to be surrounded by other students and developers
of varying experience daily ...this is the greatest benefit you reap from
bootcamps. You have people you can go to hourly! Ask anyone who is self taught
how valuable it is to have this sort of access to getting your questions
answered all day every day. You're also going to be at a place that constantly
networks with companies on your behalf. Regardless of how good the camp is at
placing grads, the fact is they're already in the door and it's a leg up for
you to have them do a lot of foot work to connect you. That brings me to
networking: bootcamps are a great place to do it. There will be guest speakers
and events to attend every week and professionals on site whose daily job is
to talk to companies so that you know what they want to hear.

Whatever you think of bootcamps, they're always a hotbed for networking and
learning. If you go into it with goals, a learning mindset and dedicate your
mental resources for the 12 - 24 weeks you're there, you'll do well.

I must emphasize to make sure you set your goals before hand and chase them
tenaciously. I think one of the best I things I did was have a mental timeline
and SEVERAL acceptable outcomes that I'd be satisfied with. For example, my
endgame was to get a job as a developer within 3 months of graduating. During
that time I'd attend weekly workshops and network; and I set a schedule to
study algorithms and build an app everyday in any language (the idea was
repetition, make hacking second nature while studying algorithms was more
about digging deep). I would have accepted working as a contractor, creating
my own business or being employed as a junior dev and my study schedule made
all of those equally likely outcomes. I focused on improving myself,
establishing my own network and at the end of 3 months I'd be prepared to
either strike out on my own or have a job. Two of those were in my control,
and that was important. Nothing can be promised in a bootcamp no matter where
you go so it's important to set realistic expectations and to hold yourself
accountable for the outcome.

It's a lot of hardwork, but I found it enjoyable, productive, efficient and
just flat out fun (really enjoyed late nights with other poor students and all
the creative ways we found to grow together) and I highly recommend it.

------
gothrowaway
I got paid to learn to program. 45k a yr to start off with. Then 70k a few
months later.

You don't need to pay a school to learn to code.

The sad truth is, there are recruiters who will throw out your resume if you
associate with bootcamps. Why? Because the quality of the programmers they
generate is low.

Code camps run like mills. From stories I've heard, they pay instructors as
contractors below market rate (20-50k, long long hours) and throw them away
with no severance.

That's not even to speak about those who forked over $16,000 you'll never hear
of here because they're too embarrassed and afraid they'll get jumped.

Worse, try mentioning anything critical on Bootcamps and they'll create sock
puppet accounts to downvote you, harass you and so on.

If you don't believe me, go on /r/cscareerquestions or quora threads
mentioning bootcamps. They'll have coursereport.com shilling and trying to
keep you from the reality:

You can learn to code on GitHub for free.

You can host repositories on GitHub for free.

You can download Atom ([https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)) and Visual Studio
Code ([https://code.visualstudio.com/](https://code.visualstudio.com/)) for
free.

You can download Linux for free
([https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop](https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop)).

You can watch MIT/Stanford/etc. Data Structures and Algorithm courses online
for free: [https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-
courses](https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses)

Free Programming Books: [https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-
books/bl...](https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-
books/blob/master/free-programming-books.md)

Free development services: [https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-
dev](https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev)

And you do not need any college or bootcamp to work at Amazon, Microsoft, or
Google.

Seriously, just grab a copy of Cracking the Code Interview.

~~~
xiaoma
> _" The sad truth is, there are recruiters who will throw out your resume if
> you associate with bootcamps.Why? Because the quality of the programmers
> they generate is low.

>Code camps run like mills. From stories I've heard, they pay instructors as
contractors below market rate (20-50k, long long hours) and throw them away
with no severance."_

Bootcamp grad here who mentioned it prominently in my resume and blogged my
experience and put up a YouTube video once a week while I was going through.
I'm not sure who filters out bootcamp grads, but I can say Google, FB, Apple,
Netflix, and many many YC companies reached out to me repeatedly and I ended
up working at a YC startup.

Maybe the companies tossing out non-traditional candidates are actually the
same companies that wouldn't be that great to work for to begin with.

------
cosmocrackers
I graduated a python/django bootcamp in Aug 2014, became a Software Engineer
right afterwards, and I'm now a Engineering Manager at a startup in San
Francisco. I believe just under half of 21 are writing code in some developer
type role. Definitely there were others there who were only looking to gain
technical understanding for more Product/Marketing/PM type roles.

If you do your prep work and are ready to dedicate 100% to the bootcamp and
all that it entails, you will certainly be successful and find the job you
want. If you are not fully prepared for the commitment it takes, you will
likely not fulfill your expectations.

You get out of it what you put into it.

~~~
yeswecatan
Are you still at the same company? I finished a bootcamp back in 2013 and
would like to explore a management role but don't really know how to get into
it.

~~~
cosmocrackers
Basically. I did a short 6 months right out of class, and then started at the
place I'm still at. I've been here 2.5 years and moved up from engineer to
engineer manager in the last 6 months. I was promoted due to the last manager
leaving and then asking for that job + responsibility + pay raise.

------
gothrowaway
See the above? This is what codecamps do to innocent people. They prey on the
weak, act authoritative, and take advantage of their hopes of getting jobs.

You should demand your money back, every penny.

> I can only look to my choice of bootcamp

Bootcamps are not gatekeepers. They portray themselves as such to take your
money.

There's no such thing as an elite bootcamp. It's a lie to pray on your naïveté
of the industry. It's just ruby and javascript. It's web development. Nothing
magic. Nothing elite here. You could teach it in a community college setting
for 2k a semester.

But every town needs electricians, plumbers, doctors, etc. It's just frankly,
we're pouring out more junior programmers desperate for jobs than there are
positions to fill. Every time a cohort finishes, it's 30 more people on top of
the thousands of others seeking a handful of positions.

They end up creating junior level programmers, and cherrypicking success
stories from people who have already coded before.

> that crushed my dream of working in tech.

Nothing's stopping you from:

\- installing Linux
([https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop](https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop))

\- downloading Atom ([https://atom.io](https://atom.io))

Using these resources:

\- [https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-
courses](https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses)

\- [https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-
books/bl...](https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-
books/blob/master/free-programming-books.md)

\- [https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-
dev](https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev)

Maybe you would be a good programmer if you continued studying, maybe it's not
your path.

I don't know you, but don't be fooled into thinking that any institution or
person is a gatekeeper from you coding and getting a job in it. These code
camps want you to believe that so they can justify their existence.

~~~
goorley
I think you've misunderstood me. I'm not of the opinion that I do not have the
ability or the skill set. I have been a finalist for various positions (full-
stack developer, web developer, project manager, product manager, front-end
dev) for 16 companies over the last year - all have which have rejected me on
my inexperience in technology. That's not to mention the many many more that I
interviewed with that I did not become a finalist. I know I can work in tech.
I know I can make things become a great technical professional. I'm constantly
learning and adding to my skill set, my problem is I need an income. What
you're giving is resources for learning above, but that is not where my choke
point is.

I was never under the impression that I needed to go to a coding bootcamp to
learn how to code. I wanted to go to one to immerse myself in an industry that
I did not have previous exposure to.

~~~
gothrowaway
OK, so you're sincere. You have a genuine intellectual interest. Good heart.
And an honest worker.

But the brutal world of supply and demand, no one cares about your feelings,
honesty, or character. Which is why you are, in my opinion, a victim of code
camps.

Did you ever read there was a skill gap for programmers? A shortage of
programmers? You were lied to. Completely and totally.

> my problem is I need an income. What you're giving is resources for learning
> above, but that is not where my choke point is.

And here's the problem with that. Codecamps are also destroying the job market
on a macro level too.

We're placing, what, 1000 new junior javascript/ruby grads into the job
seeking pool every 16 weeks?

That's stacked on top of what, thousand of other code camp grads who didn't
land a job?

And how many positions do you think there is to fill? Maybe in USA, 500 or
800, and most of those want prior work experience.

Not to mention that employers are using H1B's as a way to get cheap labor.
There's no end in sight.

You should demand your money back, contact the FCC and a lawyer.

~~~
goorley
Very interesting take on the matter. I try not to take a victim's mentality on
the matter, but you do have very true points. Thank you for your comments.

------
gothrowaway
You signed up just to give a review? How did you find this article?

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518276)
and marked it off-topic.

------
songzme
Thanks for asking this question, I've been meaning to write a blog post but I
haven't gotten the chance. Although I didn't attend a bootcamp, I've been
teaching coding since I started learning coding (Junior year of university):
[http://dailybruin.com/2011/11/03/computer_science_student_so...](http://dailybruin.com/2011/11/03/computer_science_student_song_zheng_shares_selftaught_skills_in_programming/)

For what its worth, I feel empowered by your question to write and here is my
story (unfiltered, so please be understanding):

My first internship (senior year) was with facebook. During that internship, I
committed myself to teaching my best friend (B) how to code. He was a musician
who could not find an internship with his econ degree and was worried for his
future. He reached out for help, and when your best friend reaches out for
help you make it work with your schedule. So everyday I went home after my
internship to teach him, and on the weekends we went to hackathons and worked
on projects together. I listened to his frustrations, adjusted my expectations
from a beginner, and worked with him to help him become a better coder in
hopes that some day he would be at the same level as I am. (His family also
lived around the area at the time so I got to live with his family rent free
and his mom cooked delicious food for us, so I felt that I got the better end
of the bargain).

(After my internship) Right before I graduated from college, I met a wonderful
girl(A) and we started going out. I moved to the bay area and she followed
after graduation and moved in with me into our cozy one bedroom shared
apartment in the heart of SF. Unfortunately, she felt intimidated and it was
hard for her to settle in as someone with no technical background. It seemed
as if all conversations would end up technical and leave her isolated. It was
incredibly frustrating for me to hear someone feel that way so I made it my
mission to talk about my work in a way that a 5 year old could understand. I
refrained myself from using technical terms and I tried to create analogies to
everyday life for the problems I encounter at work (I did not tell anybody
this, it was more of a personal mission).

I'd like to think I had an impact on (A), but who knows? Over a couple of
weeks since living with me, A decided to apply for App Academy and was
accepted! She continued with her job for a few months until her cohort
started, then quit and immersed herself with Rails and JavaScript (their
curriculum is not something you can keep up with part time). Although we lived
together, she was so exhausted after her day that I had no glimpse into her
curriculum. She received all the help she needed from her classmates and all
she wanted after a long day was just some relaxation and Netflix. Once in a
while, I participated in their social activities and I met other students of
her cohort. They were just like A and I: ambitious, hopeful, and eager to
learn the things we believe will help us achieve our goals. As far as I know,
everyone at A's cohort did great; A landed a job at Cisco, receiving a salary
almost 3 times what she was making as a support staff at Academy of Arts
University (AAU).

I saved and bought a house in the bay. My friend (B) and my girlfriend (A)
moved in with me. I felt lucky to be able to afford a house in the bay area
and I wanted to make sure the people I care about has the same luxury. B saved
and bought his own house. A saved and bought her own house. I associated their
success for my own and I thought I was invincible. I thought I had a gift for
teaching and inspiring people so I committed myself to teaching another friend
whom I used to know in high school. He worked hard and in 3 months got hired
as a front end developer at American Express. I thought his success validated
my teaching abilities but this was a short-lived euphoria: A broke up with me
because I was distracted and did not fulfill my role as her partner. B moved
into his new home and the commute deterred us from hanging out. I was alone.

In the midst of my solitude, my mom successfully convinced me to buy a 3 unit
property in Oakland. I didn't care much for it because I have a blinding trust
towards my parents. I focused on my own personal growth and landed a job at
Google on the analytics team. I worked with an incredible team (some of the
brightest people I've worked with) but unfortunately my heart was not in the
right place. In the 13 months I was with Google, I probably submitted less
than 50 changelists (merge requests). Out of respect for a great team and a
great company, I quit.

The past 2 months has been the most fun I have ever experienced. The 2
properties that I invested in produced enough income monthly for me to be
financially secure. Without a financial burden, I was able to consolidate
everything I had ever learned about teaching coding and come up with my own
original curriculum. The realization is profound. Currently I have 4 students
(a recently divorced mom who had been a housewife for the past decade, a high
school student, a army veteran looking for new opportunities, and a former
software test engineer who felt discouraged with her technical growth), and
from their diverse background I have learned a few things that I would like to
share.

Learning coding in a class of 40 with a 3 month curriculum is not only a bad
way to learn, but it amplifies the problem we have with our education system
today: Everybody learns at a different pace, understands things at different
times, and thus it is wrong to expect everybody to follow the same curriculum
with the same timeline. This traditional way of learning prevents students
from building a strong foundation, which is essential for their technical
growth. It is much more efficient to create a system for people to learn at
their own pace than to impose a syllabus with dates for getting things done.

Programming is a team sport, so it is important to realize from the beginning
that your code could have a profound impact on somebody else's code. From my
personal experience, most technical backlog comes from engineers being
ignorant about the potential impact of the code they write. When my students
join our team, we teach them the basics and get them going on our Github open
source projects right away (submitting and reviewing pull requests):
[https://github.com/llipio/algorithms](https://github.com/llipio/algorithms)

Programming is a team sport, so it is important that when a new engineer
graduates from the basics, he/she is put into an ongoing project that multiple
people at their level have working on together as a team. Our projects (web
and mobile) are all in production with real users to emulate a real working
environment. You can checkout our app by searching for (llip) on the app store
or visit [https://llip.io](https://llip.io).

Every Saturday, our team (in full force) attends our local Free Code Camp
meetup and helps any beginner learning how to code with their questions and
unblock them on their journey.

I'm still figuring things out, so if you want to grab coffee I'd love to share
ideas. My email is song@zheng.club

Thanks for reading!

~~~
aliceyhg
I actually attended a few free code camp meetup groups in Santa Clara on
Saturdays and your lectures are amazing. Your example with infinite arrays and
objects was really cool. Thank you!

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songzme
Anytime!

For the curious: const a = [1, 2, 3]; a[2] = a;

infinite array! a[2][2][2][2]...

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tu7001
I didn't read the comments, but the question is: People who completed boot
camp 3+ y ago, and don't have a CS degree, what r u doing now?

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adrice727
I attended Hack Reactor in 2014. I'm currently an engineer at small PaaS
company.

I don't think I was _job-ready_ upon graduation, or at least I didn't feel
that way at the time. I spent a few months helping out s bootstrapped startup
while looking for a job and learned a lot from working closely with the CTO. I
stayed on with the startup while working a contract gig and eventually left
both for my first full-time gig.

