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

If someone told me to train a productive programmer from scratch in 12 weeks time I would tell them that this is impossible. It took me five years of professional experience and a ton (really LOTS) of spare-time hacking to feel reasonably fireproof in my profession. Maybe I'm not the smartest guy and it it took me longer but I honestly doubt its doable in 12 weeks.

There is just too many concepts you need to learn. 12 weeks would give you someone who can edit JavaScript code without really knowing what he's doing and how his tool (JS) works imho. He might be able to wire up a dynamic website with some GUI callbacks but I doubt he could actually design a program.

From a proficient programmer, I'd expect that you can give him any programming language and that he can use it after a weekend or two. I'd also expect him to be able to read the language implementations source code. What good are you if you can't debug your tools?

That said, after attending a dozen or more of these hiring events I must admit that the quality is abysmally low. Two of my previous employers decided to hire our entry-level engineers from these "bootcamps" and 6 months later all of them had been fired for poor performance, even after weeks of mentorship and coaching. In my experience the amount of handholding was far greater than the work they could do on their own. I can recall helping people with basic command line navigation, simple git commands, and even things like running rspec. Trivial tasks that should form the foundation of your work as a software engineer required almost constant support.

My personal take is that these schools are great in that they encourage people to pursue engineering but I fear that just like other trade schools (e.g. ITT), it's offer a promise of a big paying job without adequately preparing people for the career ahead.

Like many of the other commenters here, I'm also a co-founder of a trade school (Code Fellows, we're 2 years old) that offers immersive programs for web and mobile developers. We have 13 different offerings to accommodate developers with varying skill levels and interests. Our flagship program teaches students who have on average ~2yrs of experience writing code professionally, and our hiring partners offer them >$75k/yr in Seattle (on average, though the spread is interesting...detailed stats here --> https://www.codefellows.org/alumni-stats)

I've talked with hundreds of hiring managers about this topic, and - to answer your last question - the reason why they want CS degrees is because web/mobile developers often need to design systems and solve complex computational problems (not to mention the need to build well-tested, scalable products). There really is no shortcut to learning the foundations of CS necessary to perform well at these tasks.

Thus, to piggyback off of what others have said here, many students who go through these intensive programs often have CS backgrounds and are looking for intense "polish" to get up to speed on recent industry tools and practices.

Your bootcamp was to produce developers for your own company. They made an investment in you to bring you on board and pay you, and they had a significant vested interest in making sure you were going to be successful. Your company doesn't make money by providing bootcamp services.

When the bootcamp itself has an investment in the attendee, things are likely to be different.

Consulting companies have been doing what you describe for many years - sending new grads to internal bootcamps to teach them a bit and then immediately bill the newly minted junior 'consultants' to clients. This is not a new thing, and I'd argue is very different from what the post questioned.