171–180 of 357 posts
I graduated from The Iron Yard in Charleston about a year ago. I had a couple of interviews the week following graduation which didn't turn into anything. Since then I've been continually applying to jobs and trying to put a decent portfolio together. I can't seem to land an interview anywhere. Realistically, I'm aware my lack of a degree and long list of irrelevant jobs are likely getting my resume tossed into the t…
sorhed at gmail
For me, it was a bit less about the technical knowledge ( I think I could have self taught most content, albeit a bit slower) and more about the networking and the structure that forced me to dedicate 8-12 hrs/day. The bootcamp was constantly directing me towards jobs and hosting employers. In fact, my current company came in and spoke at lunch one day and that's how I met them and got my job.
For people saying it's too expensive, I think that's absurd, at least in my case. My bootcamp was 6500, and it paid for itself with my signing bonus + first month of work.
I am still skeptical the model is sustainable, but seems to be working for now.
There needs to be balance to the discussion of code school. I'm kind of saddened to read comments that are either hostile against them, or cheerleaders who ignore the struggles that some students/grads face. Yes, lots of people from my cohort continued to struggle after the program. For a smaller number of them, doing the code school left them worse off. We can't forget about that because industry (and alumni in particular) has a moral obligation to an oversight role to some extent. Same as for conventional universities. Nevertheless, it was a career inflection point for me, and this would have never happened without the code school.
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I am a physician and read HN regularly. Lambda the Ultimate is better but requires effort to read, while this is fairly mindless entertainment.
Lambda the Ultimate? Some FP forum where it's all about Haskell and OCaml? :)
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I'm sure my specific case isn't that common, but I'm fairly confident that there are a non-trivial number of people out there who can code but choose not to as a career path. I'm not questioning the argument about frequency, I'm questioning the underlying assumption that "success" in a bootcamp is only measured by employment as a developer.
Why would someone that doesn't want to code as a career path go to a coding boot camp? I'm sure there are a few managers that want to understand the technology they are managing, but by and large, I can't believe that non-coders make up a significant fraction of attendees. If you don't measure the success of a coding boot camp by "employment as a developer", what would you measure it by?
It's been 4 years since my bootcamp experience and I very, very much doubt I'll ever seek "employment as a developer" again except in the case of failure as an entrepreneur.
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Quite a lot of people are only into tech to make money.. and it's working well for them.
Perhaps, but it's much more difficult to learn what you're not interested in. If your only motive is money... do sales.
In 2013 I attended Epicodus in Portland, OR. At the time, it was a 17-week Ruby on Rails bootcamp. I moved back to my home state of Florida following graduation. Within two months I landed a Junior Rails Developer position at Listen360 - a badass company in Georgia. I relocated and have been with the company for over three years now. In that time I've developed JrDevJobs.com, a job board for junior devs. Built severa…
Good for you! I ask all the interns that I interview to hire, "why do you want this job?" I can pretty much tell by the answer alone whether or not they are going to work out. Those that say, "I didn't know what to study" or "I heard there was a good career in this" I can pretty much write off. They almost never want to learn anything except what they learned for a grade. Often its over for them after school, they'll…
I would be careful about making that assumption - it was only 4 1/2 years ago when I landed my first job as a developer after 2 1/2 years of searching for any career track job after leaving my PhD program in mathematics. I was someone who was willing to do anything and was open to a wide variety of jobs. I put in long hours outside of work early in my career to learn and grow, with the mindset that I was behind and needed to accelerate my learning greatly - I had a work ethic that might be seldom seen in the industry, and a proven intelligence to match.
Fast forward to today, I am right now actively interviewing and being hotly contested by many companies for senior, lead, and management roles, including the likes of Google and Apple with multiple onsites scheduled or being scheduled (4 alone between Google and Apple over the next week or so).
IMO companies should try to tease out characteristics of people - how do they handle difficult situations, how open are they to feedback, how hard are they willing to work (especially earlier on), and how smart are they? Positive answers to these questions when interviewing inexperienced people are probably the biggest factors in determining the likelihood of someone being successful IMO (don't ask these questions directly of course, but the answers should be teased out).
Most folks from my era of the program are still in touch and we're all very supportive of each other from a professional/networking standpoint.
As a dev I've always suspected programming was easy, but never really thought it was this easy. Literally anyone can pick it up in a few weeks. That's surprisingly depressing.