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Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#101

Post by fat0wl »

I have friends who have done them & gotten hired -- nowhere near 100k tho.

Its very depressing to me though..... I freelanced as a web dev for years & turned it into a career because it came easy & now am sticking with it for a bit because I got an easy job offer to do some consulting. But man am I envious of pretty much every other profession...

Basically: if I were not already in this position (handed it on a platter), I wouldn't aspire to it. It upsets me to see friends with master's degrees in arts, sciences etc. clamoring to be low-end web devs. If you get up on the wave easily then by all means ride it for a bit but if you have to start from square 1 there are lots of better things to do with your time.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#102

Post by mdholloway »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #86
mdholloway wrote: post #49

I just finished such a bootcamp and I'm looking for a job. I'm in an geographic area where there's somewhat of a shortage of tech talent. My plan was to save up for Hack Reactor or similar (I have some experience, but not professionally, and no CS degree) but I had the opportunity to do this one for free. We've had several companies interested in recruiting, albeit not the coolest startups on the block. I do not anti…

Well, in development, it's all about experience. Any way you can get experience is a plus. Don't think about the companies you're going to work for, if you can learn about agile, work on a small team and deal with source control issues, bugs and get some real world project experience, you're salary requirements will escalate pretty quickly. Just as an FYI, I'm a self starter. Got a huge break at a large corporation.…

Thanks. And just to be clear, I wasn't saying 50K is anything but entirely reasonable for someone in my position, just that 100K coming out of a bootcamp seems unlikely. And that's OK! Money is nice, but my main motivation is that I love programming.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#103

Post by steveklabnik »

selllikesybok wrote: post #6
rememberlenny wrote: post #2

Yes. I work at Conde Nast. I helped work with a bootcamp program to create a "internship" program for new graduates. We took eight students after attending a recruiting event and invited them to work on a cycling program. From the eight, we hired four. We cycled the students through four of Conde Nast's brands/responsibilities. Currently, we have junior developers from this program working on GQ magazine, Glamour, an…

>Our experience was good. We wouldn't do it again. If the experience was good, why not?

Sometimes, you just don't need that many new people. This is one of the things that happened with Hungry Academy and Living Social back in the day. A sudden influx of 24 new people doesn't mean you're immediately ready as an organization to pick up 24 more, even if they are good entry-level engineers.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#104

Post by notwedtm »

jstultz wrote: post #96
stale2002 wrote: post #24

Yes, I work at Refinery29 (obligatory www.corporate.r29.com/careers/), a large women's fashion website in NYC. Of our 30 person tech team, we have had about 5 people coming out of these bootcamps, and they are all awesome. Although I think your idea of who goes to these bootcamps is pretty off. These aren't people who "had never opened a text editor in their lives." Some of them are people who were working in science…

Stated right in the quote you copied "entry-level talent". Are you entry level? If not, then your recruiting emails mean little. If yes, then your assessment of other entry-level programmers who happen to have come from bootcamps is perhaps less valuable.

Not necessarily. It is possible stale2002 gets emails from recruiters simply because he's on a list somewhere. Recruiters are not known for investigating people thoroughly before bulk sending of emails.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#105

Post by joeshepmedia »

>Does anyone get hired? Yes. I did. I attended Nashville Software School, a full-time 6-month full stack bootcamp. I now work as a front-end dev and am very happy with how things turned out. I did not have any type of CS background before attending NSS. It is not a stretch to say that anyone who really applied themselves to getting hired after leaving NSS has gotten a job. They have graduated over 100 students in the last 2 years.

>If you look around on job boards, there simply is not much competition for entry-level talent. Do not rely on job boards for indication of what's out there. Out of the dozens of NSS grads who have been hired, the vast majority found their opportunities through networking or from companies that have relationships with the school and reach out directly for their junior position needs. The rapid establishment of my network was one of the unexpected, but most beneficial, results of attending NSS.

>Average starting salaries of 100k or more That seems like a stretch, at least anywhere outside of the west coast. Starting salaries around here have been about half of that, but the opportunity to get to six figures within a few years is certainly there.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#107

Post by malditojavi »

Never participated in a bootcamp, but I participated in a RailsGirls event, and I learned a ton. At least, it motivated me that much to keep learning on my own. I commited myself to get something up and running in a server in 2 months, and I did it (http://petithacks.com)

Best ways of learning have been: 1.the study groups done almost twice per month during 3 months after that RailsGirls event, 2. Learn how to get answers in StackOverflow, 3. Ask around to devs in the internet and even my colleagues (I do marketing in a software company).

I don't know how good are these bootcamps, and I'm not sure if all the comments here included are real or just bootcamps trying to defend their business. I'm pretty sure there are good teachers out there, but dont know necessarily if they are in bootcamps. Seeing that many of these bootcamps either they implied to commit full-time, either they were USA-based, either their curriculums were super-easy, I tried to look for specific help in places like Codementor (https://www.codementor.io/r/5HXQM64N3R referral link!), much flexible and I don't feel 'scammed' paying for really basic stuff that you can learn with time + internet.

In http://petithacks.com/posts/how-i-learned-to-build-a-rails-a... I gave more explanations about my learning.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#108

Post by jplahn »

kschmit90 wrote: post #91

I went to a coding boot camp in Omaha, Nebraska of all places. Less than a month out of the school I was offered a job paying $55,000 a year salary at a large insurance company. They primarily use Java and Groovy. The bootcamp taught Ruby on Rails. Maybe I got lucky, but I've found that the ability to code is slightly less important than one's ability to speak about programming/code in general. If you can read and un…

> "If you can read and understand documentation, understand fundamental concepts like OO or functional paradigm, and understand what a stack is, a closure, recursion, the difference between an integer and a float, or a character and a string, methods/functions, etcetera, you are more or less hireable."

I'm sure this is true for many positions, but I'd resist the temptation to cast this across the broader job market. All of my recent interviews went significantly deeper than what you listed (though I'm not sure "functional paradigm" is a fundamental concept), so in my experience the minimum to be hireable, at least in their opinion, was higher than what you indicated.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#109

Post by _inm2 »

I went to a demo day at the Iron Yard in Atlanta with the intent to find junior developers. Several of the RoR guys had some previous programming experience and did the bootcamp to learn RoR (unfortunately we weren't hiring Rails engineers). The iOS developers showed some promise, but definitely weren't quite hirable. They had a really great start and I asked several of them to contact me in about a year.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?

#110

Post by VLM »

JohnInArizona wrote: post #90

I know this is WAY off subject, but as many people reading this thinking of getting into this field, I see so many options and have no idea which way to start, or more accurately to find out if I have the aptitude (Barely made it past college algebra 2nd year, diagnosed ADHD guessing is why I'm horrific at math) for programming. My thinking so far is I should probably take an online programming course like udemy,udac…

You're talking about jumping into the pool in the middle or deep end, or climbing into a completely different pool. But you haven't ever been in a pool. And that's OK. My suggestion would be wade into the extreme shallow section of the pool at:

http://www.codecademy.com/learn

then click on the "learn to program in ruby" or maybe alternative.

In a couple days you'll have run thru all the free lessons and either have sworn off this programming stuff forever, or be ready to invest more than a couple hours in something a little more formal, like a semester long class or a whatever.

If you really hate the ruby class, obviously there's something wrong with you (no wait just kidding), seriously just try another language, maybe you're better off starting in python or the php class. Its like joining band class, if you hate the clarinet, that doesn't mean you can't be a excellent drummer.

Good Luck!

(also edited to add, its not totally off subject as you suggest. Just kind of appearing on the step of a bootcamp having never done anything is going to be more difficult than having "some" experience.)

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