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Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

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Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#101

Post by busterarm »

lbrindze wrote: post #98

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 fr…

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

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#102

Post by flavio81 »

jaequery wrote: post #76
_e wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#103

Post by flavio81 »

christinahuang wrote: post #56

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

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...

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#104

Post by busterarm »

huntermeyer wrote: post #19
w1zeman1p wrote: post #17

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.

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#105

Post by flavio81 »

cdt_hiker wrote: post #75

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…

>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...

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#106

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#107

Post by 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/) and Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/) for free.

You can download Linux for free (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

Free Programming Books: https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/bl...

Free development services: 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.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#108

Post by busterarm »

flavio81 wrote: post #102
jaequery wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#109

Post by [deleted] »

abeyer wrote: post #65
mabbo wrote: post #35

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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#110

Post by [deleted] »

swyx wrote: post #30
bacontacos wrote: post #26

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 job…

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?

[deleted]
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