Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?

I've made the transition from developer to PM over the last 7 years and it's enabled me to work on progressively larger projects and to set direction.

Being a PM is about making sure the right thing is built at the right time.

Admittedly my technical skills have gone stale and to do any of the really interesting technical things would require 6-12 months of intensive learning if I were to do it on my own. This is with undergrad degrees in Comp Sci and Physics too.

So I decided to hack the problem and join a startup in SF thats doing novel hard tech !(business process automation, ecommerce, apps, small marketplaces etc). Here in Sydney they're few and far between.

I'm pretty excited to be working with them, its an opportunity to work and learn with a smart tight team.

So advice to you would be to is find a smaller business unit in your current company where you are closer to the coal face or go join a 100 person company working on a hard problem. Usually they'll have a team of 5 PM's supporting a tech team of 30.

If you're viewing the decision purely in terms of $$$ (as many other commenters here seem to be doing), it's true that in 10 years you will have earned less money on this path than you would have earned while remaining a PM.

But will you be happier day-to-day? I certainly am. Both careers are well-paid, so why would you pass up a net gain in happiness to earn 15% - 20% more over 10 years? Your happiness is unlikely to change materially because of the extra money, but it could change materially if you start to love your job.

I think a lot of the people giving advice here are software developers who've forgotten what it's like to be unable to build something, with their own hands, that they want to exist in the world. That's such a powerful feeling, especially if you want to start a startup one day.

I did a bootcamp at the beginning of 2013. At that time there were no bootcamps in Australia, so I moved to Chicago for 3 months to do the Starter League (now part of Fullstack Academy). Being in a different city meant I could focus all my energy on the bootcamp. I think this is main advantage of a bootcamp: forced focus for a long period of time, so you learn much faster than you would if distracted by your full-time job.

When I finished the bootcamp, I probably could have been hired as a Junior sometime after an extra month or so of filling gaps on my own, leaning things like TDD and various computer science concepts (algorithms, data structures etc.) My journey personally took longer because I got distracted by travel and other stuff.

As some of the other commenters pointed out, you're probably not going to be able to work on blockchain and machine learning on day #1. You won't have those skills coming out of a bootcamp. You'll probably need to get a job doing Rails or something - don't expect the big 4 or anything like that - and learn that stuff on the side. I would expect you will spend 1 - 2 years doing general software development before you can start working on cutting-edge tech.

But keep in mind that the organisations that do cutting-edge tech are going to be strongly biased toward people with a CompSci degree. Unless you're willing to do a degree, you'll need to learn this stuff really thoroughly on your own and then build some kind of project to demonstrate that you know it. For example, a cool machine learning project. Your bootcamp alone isn't going to get you into these kinds of companies.

You're not going to be able to do a bootcamp and then stop learning. The learning is never going to stop for you. But I think what you're planning to do is doable in a few years. In a few years I went from writing requirements as a PM to writing software to help scientists count mosquito eggs in a lab using image processing. Guess which one was more rewarding?

Feel free to ask me any more specific questions.