Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'? • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by shayanjm » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:46 PM UTC

Thought I'd give a contrarian perspective here.

I was hiring for a telehealth startup based in NYC and got some referrals to some recent General Assembly grads. I bit and went ahead and scheduled some interviews. It was a total joke, honestly. The graduates glossed over the entry-level interview questions with a lot of handwaving (I would ask them things like "How would you do x given y?") and quoted rates upwards of $100/hr even though their total experience was the 10 week course @ GA campus.

I was so turned off by that experience that I just never even considered hiring from a 'hacker bootcamp' again. I'll echo what others have been saying as well: You can hire them, and maybe they'll perform for a while - but the amount of time you'll need to spend to get them up to speed on CS basics will more than likely not be worth the investment. You're better off hiring a recent college grad whose only experience is working with Java - at least they have the fundamentals and can build on top of them instead of backtracking.

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

#142

Post by tenementfunster » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:50 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #117

wlesieutre wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion here probably comes from the past tense phrasing. "We wouldn't do it again" strongly implies "If we were in the same situation as before we wouldn't do the same thing." It'd be more clear to say "We probably won't do it again," I think. And if you did end up needing multiple entry-level hires, it sounds like you would be open to a similar approach?

> The confusion here probably comes from the past tense phrasing. Possibly pedantic, but, that's the simple conditional (which, in this particular context without an explicit condition, has the implicit condition of "in similar circumstances"), not the past tense.

He writes it that way for a reason and clarity is not one of them. Only a fluent speaker would catch the tidbit of 'humor' in the way he wrote it so who cares if non-natives get confused?

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

#143

Post by yongjik » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #117

wlesieutre wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion here probably comes from the past tense phrasing. "We wouldn't do it again" strongly implies "If we were in the same situation as before we wouldn't do the same thing." It'd be more clear to say "We probably won't do it again," I think. And if you did end up needing multiple entry-level hires, it sounds like you would be open to a similar approach?

> The confusion here probably comes from the past tense phrasing. Possibly pedantic, but, that's the simple conditional (which, in this particular context without an explicit condition, has the implicit condition of "in similar circumstances"), not the past tense.

Apologies for out-pedanting you, but I believe it is still called the past tense. English past tense (a grammatical form) can be used in several situations, the dominant being signalling past time, but also used to signal conditionals.

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

#144

Post by m1keil » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

Etsy are running scholarship sponsorship program together with Hacker School, focused on bringing more women into engineering jobs. From what I heard they recruited few employees from there.

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

#145

Post by schurch820 » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

I came from one of these bootcamps, GA specifically. I have a job at a large tech company in NYC as an junior developer and have been here for almost a year. GA set up good expectations for us and they definitely did not promise us 100k a year! There is also no commission that my company had to pay to hire me. I spent about a month looking for a job. Everyone in my class had a job by 2 months after class was over, so I think the demand is still high for junior talent. I think it works for companies that want to hire developers that they can really shape but have proven their ability to learn. I really loved my time at GA and I have a totally different life than I did a year ago.

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

#146

Post by fleitz » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

wclittle wrote: post #136

Hey Ruskick, 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 of…

I've never understood the whole thing about CS foundations...

For the most part you're never discovering new datastructures, the rest of it is just knowing which data structure to pick, 50/50 dictionary/arrays, once in a while a set, and use a tree every year or two.

Even then if it's an esoteric data structure you'll still use an off the shelf implementation.

Even in data science it's mostly off the shelf R packages.

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

#147

Post by thumbtackthief » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

m1keil wrote: post #144

Etsy are running scholarship sponsorship program together with Hacker School, focused on bringing more women into engineering jobs. From what I heard they recruited few employees from there.

Hacker School has people of all ability levels. I was a total novice, and I got a paid internship with a startup after I finished. Now two years later, I'm still not making 100K, but I'm pretty happy as a full-time developer! (side note: Hacker School would probably object to being called a Dev Bootcamp--their model is very different than the examples you cited and maybe not the best choice for an answer to the OP's question)

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

#148

Post by lighthousedev » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

fecak wrote: post #140

lighthousedev wrote: post #120

I went through an internally-run 12-week bootcamp at my current company. I was hired by the company fresh out of college after I had graduated with a BBA in IT Management. I had some exposure to .NET technologies and basic database design in a few classes in college, but I did not have any real-world development experience other than an internship on a database team. The bootcamp was designed by the company to bring…

Your experience is interesting to read, but not quite valid to the original post. The poster was referring to developer bootcamps like Flatiron or General Assembly that have a primary revenue derived from tuition (or recruiting fees for some), and are trying to produce developers to be hired by other organizations. Your bootcamp was to produce developers for your own company. They made an investment in you to bring y…

Fair, although my experience is still relevant because clients are still hiring developers that have gone through a bootcamp. There is full transparency that the clients are getting developers with limited experience, and they are still willing to pay a premium because of the bootcamp. The underlying concept is still the same - a company trains competent developers and gets a premium for doing so. The only difference is that my company is contracting out the talent instead of looking to get a commission from placements.

"If it's really possible to build a rails developer from scratch in 10 weeks, why not just just do it in-house through an internship program and avoid paying commission to these schools?"

The organizations I have worked with do not have the talent in-house to train competent software developers in a short period of time.

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

#149

Post by SEMW » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

Data-point: I went to Makers Academy (in London) and was hired eight days after telling their hiring advisor that I was ready to start looking for a job.

$100 (£65k) is very unrealistic for a junior dev in London. I was hired at £35k, which is pretty good for a junior.

Caveat: as part of a maths degree (and as a hobby) I'd done a good few chunks of (self-taught) programming, so was a long way from "never opened a text editor".

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

#150

Post by harshoninternet » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:07 PM UTC

hirsin wrote: post #94

harshoninternet wrote: post #73

Heads up: I run one of these schools in SF and Austin, MakerSquare. >But if the stats that these bootcamps throw out are true, there are companies hiring people at $100k who, twelve weeks ago, had never opened a text editor in their lives. This is a very extreme case. As part of the admissions process for most great schools, people who have never opened a text editor are shown tutorials, books, and videos to prepare…

> mks.io/ac2 This is an interesting setup. What stops someone from creating a PR or fork with the answers? Also, what kind of answers are you looking for from a candidate? When giving interview advice after seeing things like this, I'm not sure if "the" answer involves data hiding. Would that go beyond what you expect of a candidate? If not, I can appreciate how hard it would be to juggle the various incoming skill l…

Nothing stops them from doing that. We had that happen in the past, and just changed the requirements around a bit. However, immediately after completing the coding challenge, applicants are given a Technical Interview, and you can't really hide behind someone else's answer when you're asked to explain the code you wrote. We also have them create a new application during the technical interview, which we don't publish on the web. They pair with one of the interviewers on creating another toy application.

What we are looking for is not necessarily one given answer, instead, we look for how well someone can explain the answer they wrote. If they can take someone through their thought process for whatever decisions they made, they're likely going to be a good programmer.

Juggling various incoming skill levels is always a challenge. You can't perfectly line up every student, but you can plan for it in the curriculum. The admissions process helps us identify people who can already teach themselves programming.