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Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
161–170 of 229 posts
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mgmt > Mgmt + Dev ?
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#163look around yourself. How many of the SWEs you see came from a coding bootcamp vs. a traditional CS background?
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> # Elixir + Phoenix is the future -- Python/Ruby/Java are too mainstream for us >> vi main.ex >> # No tests needed thanks to BEAM ;) >> git add -A >> # No need for descriptive commit messages; we spend our time on the important stuff ;) >> git commit -m 'New commit' >> # Rockstars push straight to production >> git push origin master Am I doing this right?? /s
Don't forget to git push --force to resolve conflicts!
I do it when I push to staging on Heroku :)
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#165If current tech managers have a hard time over the next decade, it won't be that management is less important. Instead, there will be a growing number of people that have written software and are going into management that will be better at it. They actually understand what's going on around them. Software is an outlier in that front line managers can't do even a little bit of the job their direct reports do. This only happened because the industry grew so fast that the bulk of programmers were so young.
That said, make sure you actually want to write code. Boot camps prepare you to make simplistic websites and mobile apps not the interesting stuff you mention. You'll have years of learning to get into those in a meaningful way.
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#166Wow, a lot of negativity here. To me it seems like this is something you really want to do and, assuming you have the resources to give it a try, why not? Worst case scenario you go back to what you were doing before but with some new skills and experiences.
The two points I think are worth considering are:
1. Coding bootcamp vs postgrad qualification in CS or similar. I'm not in the coding-bootcamps-are-the-devil orthodoxy. In fact, I've seen a lot of great juniors come from bootcamps, but you do have to recognise their limitations. A bootcamp will get you to the point that a self-taught highschool code wizard will be at just before they hit university and realise that they don't know anything. Employable, sure, but lacking in fundamentals. You don't have to learn CS from a university, but one way or another until you learn it there will be a ceiling on how far you can progress as a developer.
2. Part-time vs full-time transition. One thing I will agree with is that you are going to be a way worse software developer than you are a PM, just by sheer weight of hours put in. For that reason if you're looking to make a switch I would do that wholeheartedly rather than learning on the side or moonlighting. Otherwise you'll be pulled in two different directions, and the one that you are better at, have more experience with, and can earn more money from will probably win.
If you genuinely want to be a developer to build stuff, I would do the coding bootcamp, get any job as a developer you can find, then teach yourself CS as quickly as you can while on the job. The CS will mean more and be easier to understand because you already have the practical skills and you'll be able to call yourself a developer sooner. Just be aware that the stuff you build straight out of a bootcamp will not be deep learning blockchain automation algorithms for SpaceX, it'll be web apps with questionable business models.
Another option is to just bite the bullet and get a real CS education up front. This will take longer to get you to a point where you're actually building things, and keep in mind that CS doesn't give you practical skills, so you'll probably still need to start with entry-level dev work, but your trajectory to doing interesting stuff will be steeper from there.
Ultimately it's down to your resources and your priorities. If the drive is to just make stuff then go with the bootcamp, it'll get you there sooner. If you mostly like the cutting-edge ideas and high-level work (and you can afford it) go with CS first. Deep learning isn't bootcamp material.
And keep in mind that either way you're 5-10 years out from being good enough at this stuff to really live up to the picture of it you have in your head, so make sure what you're doing in the mean time is going to make you happy.
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#167PURE INSANITY, even if you are TRULY passionate about it You work at a top 3 tech company. You are in the best place in the world to learn exciting new tech. I'd kill to get a peek at the codebase of a top 3 tech company. Leverage your job as your coding bootcamp. Maybe you can negotiate 1 day/wk for learning CS. If you can, take a sabbatical. If you can't and live in an ethical gray zone, go to a psychologist and ge…
I'm at Facebook, and you already can take a look at our codebase, since many of the most impressive parts of our stack are open-source.
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#168As a programmer, you'll encounter much more ageism than you would as a PM, to the point of being unemployable from 40 or so.
Ageism is definitely a thing, but I'd challenge your assumptions about 40. I turn 40 in April, and make more money, and work on more interesting problems with new tech than ever in my career.. most of the developers I know my age are well employed. Then again, I'm in Texas - it may be a much different story in SV/SF or in "big tech". That said, a 40 year old still using the same stack they used at 30 is probably in trouble. It's less an age thing than one's ability and willingness to learn and grow.
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#169Shit dude. Just code at home for fun and keep doing your job. Save hard for retirement and stick out a decade and some change or so and then you're free!!!
Or, go back and become an expendable framework of the week coder and then find yourself needing to relearn those skills every 5 years to do the same rote job.
Coding is great fun, until it becomes a routine. Then it's just like anything else.
Re: Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?
#170I 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…
You are conflating "not much support for learning to code" and "not much support for bootcamps". I'm sure everyone here would support you learning to code!
Look, teaching yourself programming is not only possible, it's required -- forever. You will never have a job as a programmer where you're not required to learn new things, without anyone else's help, sometimes without even any documentation, and often on tight deadlines.
If you refuse to even try to learn extremely well-documented technologies like HTML, JS, and Ruby on your own without paying someone to spoonfeed it to you, what are the odds you'll survive when your boss tells you you need to figure out how to integrate with some obscure closed-source third-party library by Friday? Or even when working on mainstream technologies, will you do to get unblocked in the (very common) situation where you're the first person in the world to encounter a particular bug, and you can't ask your team about it because they don't know?
It's not that I'm opposed to people learning to code. It's that I think many of those who need a bootcamp wouldn't have the personality to be successful.
Of course there are some successful bootcamp graduates; this isn't an absolute thing. But why not at least try first to learn the way the rest of us did, by tinkering with stuff because you enjoy it?