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

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

#141

Post by busterarm »

dilemma wrote: post #121
tschwimmer wrote: post #92

Yes you are. I'm a PM and researched this decision myself a few months back. Most of the "well regarded" bootcamps teach basic front skills (HTML/CSS/JS). You're going to struggle to get a job in any of the the exciting technologies you've listed with this skillset. It's also not widely talked about, but I get the sense that there's a bit of negative signal associated with these boot camps a la ITT/University of Phoe…

Management is becoming more, not less, important. Good management is the number one competitive advantage an enterprise has. Management essentially means running the corporate machine and directing the efforts of its tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. If poorly directed, effort is wasted. As the world is seemingly centralizing into a handful of large corporations, good management is more important than ever…

This. And if you do end up programming and you demonstrate any experience managing projects, you will end up in that role again, just with less respect for it and less money.

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

#142

Post by ianai »

ianbicking wrote: post #50
ageitgey wrote: post #21

A coding bootcamp is fine, but it won't get you much closer to doing block chain or deep learning work. The analogy is you wouldn't necessarily take the Olive Garden line cook training class if you wanted to be a French chef. Sure, it won't hurt to learn how to use a knife and it might be a decent Step 0, but it won't get you much of the way towards your goal. You should really consider a more in-depth CS education,…

My uninformed opinion on bootcamps here is that they are probably a good way to learn about finishing a project (something which CS is poor at). Deep learning or blockchains are cool, but if you can't finish something then you aren't going to make something cool (even just cool to you), and without that it's hard to keep going with self-learning.

I don't think a PM should quit his/her job to learn how to finish a project. Your comment has me thinting OP should drill through an online course. That way s/he can relatively quickly add marketable skills and background to his/her resume while employed. It might not be as sexy and intense as a "boot camp", but it's probably way more sane and productive.

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

#143

Post by toothbrush »

ajmurmann wrote: post #126
AtheistOfFail wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a company taser for people who do this. You have to self-tase one second for every commmit you blew away. Top score is 4 seconds.

I'm not a fan of complicated git flows, but are there really people who force push to resolve conflicts? I mean professional developers who do this on real projects?

Nothing wrong with doing that on a feature branch after rebasing, as long as you are sure no-one else has pushed any changes to that branch in the meantime. Although personally i prefer --force-with-lease, which will warn you if that's happened.

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

#144

Post by olegious »

Maybe you're in a place where Product Management (I'm assuming that's what you mean by "PM") is done poorly? If most of what you're doing is project management and coordination, then you're not really doing Product Management. PM work is about knowing your market, knowing your customers and their problems, knowing the tech that can be used to solve those problems, building a strategy to deliver validated solutions to the problems and then delivering the solution, all while considering company and stakeholder goals. It is a incredibly fun, sometimes, incredibly frustrating job.

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

#145

Post by busterarm »

throwthisawayt wrote: post #89
VonGuard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is entirely accurate. Yes, enterprise coding can be really boring and mundane, but just as often it can be interesting and challenging and involve new technologies. As an entry level programmer, sure, you'll do Jira tickets and HTML fixes, but once you get just a touch of seniority, depending on the organization, you can get some neat opportunities. Lots of enterprise coders are tasked with evaluat…

I'm going to disagree with the bootcamp grads don't do interesting work. My company employees a couple bootcamp grads including myself. All of them work on what are considered the most critical teams in our company. I work on search, which has some of the best engineers in our company. I will be working on elastic search, building our first angular 2 app, and I might even get a little exposure to machine learning / n…

I was a lifelong hobbyist programmer that went to a (well-regarded) bootcamp for reasons that only really make sense to me. I do a lot of the mission-critical work for my team/company. I've been solo dev on big ETL projects that my company depended on -- they don't teach you that kind of stuff in bootcamps, but some do give you enough database experience to figure it out.

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

#146

Post by rwallace »

soneca wrote: post #63

I am on a similar path, if with a much lower opportunity cost. I am 37 years old, one failed startup as a founder, a few marketing roles on other modest startups and some years as social project manager on the resume. I decided to quit my last job and study full time to become a developer. Not through a bootcamp, but through cheap or free resources online. I chose freecodecamp.com to go for now. I did an Ask HN too a…

> I was expecting much more support here for people wanting to learn to code.

I think if you said "my current job is packing bags in the supermarket, I want to learn to program, should I go for it?" there would be plenty of support. The issue here is that OP will be giving up a better job than that of entry-level programmer, which is what makes the proposed career switch irrational. I mean sure, it's your life, at the end of the day you have to do as you think best, but if you already have a good job and you ask for advice, the advice will be to keep it.

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

#147

Post by fullshark »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #97
fullshark wrote: post #34

This is like a construction foreman deciding to take a step down and become a construction worker because he's insecure about not getting his hands dirty building. It's a bad career move.

>It's a bad career move. // But might be a good life move!?

True, if you don't like spending 40-60 hours a week doing your job, money/job security is a weak comfort.

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

#148

Post by DelaneyM »

I'm a CTO and active developer with a Harvard MBA, and I think you're nuts.

Not because the opportunities you see aren't there; they are. Not because management isn't losing its lustre in tech companies; it is. But because coding is hard.

I have a great software education (top school, top program), I've had tremendous opportunities to learn from the best and build amazing things from scratch, and I've been coding professionally for 20 years next year. I'm only just now starting to really "get it".

Having a top-3 MBA (I assume you mean Wharton) puts you pretty advanced on the product/management track, one it will take a decade to catch up with as a developer. Embrace that, dive in, enjoy it.

Here's an alternative suggestion: you don't need to code to understand crypto/blockchains/AI/etc. Those are complicated and sparsely understood, and they are math. Knowing what you can do with them and how to apply them in products is much more rare than being able to implement the algorithms. Why not focus on the theory beyond the code?

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