Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 357 posts

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#181

Post by [deleted] »

Johnny555 wrote: post #90
abeyer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#182

Post by hunterjrj »

leesec wrote: post #172

Went to a bootcamp in Detroit 7~ months ago, had a job offer before I finished the bootcamp, started immediately as a Java E-commerce Developer, and am happily working there still. Of the 8 or so people I kept in contact with, all had jobs within 2-3 months. 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 t…

Which bootcamp was this?

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#183

Post by Jimpulse »

leesec wrote: post #172

Went to a bootcamp in Detroit 7~ months ago, had a job offer before I finished the bootcamp, started immediately as a Java E-commerce Developer, and am happily working there still. Of the 8 or so people I kept in contact with, all had jobs within 2-3 months. 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 t…

I'm guessing you graduated from Grand Circus? Congratulations on the new career!

I took the Javascript bootcamp there late 2015. I was under the impression that each subsequent cohort had a harder time finding a job since the market is getting more saturated. Especially with other bootcamps opening around the area.

It took me about 4 months to find a developer job, but I was also working during that time so I didn't have a full work week to devote to learning and job searching.

The bootcamp did give me a good overview of the things I didn't know, so that helped a lot in directing my learning.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#184

Post by crispyambulance »

mabbo wrote: post #35

Note some selection bias may exist in the answers. If you did a tech bootcamp three years ago and it went fantastically, you're probably reading HN today and will see and reply to this. The more success you had, the more likely you're a developer today! If it went terribly, you might still be working at Starbucks and don't read HN very often.

I think its pretty obvious that there will be selection bias in any answers here.

HOWEVER, that doesn't mean the answers are uninteresting or of no value. It is still very interesting to see what what some people who have gone through a bootcamp do with their careers.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#185

Post by scyclow »

Disclaimer: My post-bootcamp experience (Chicago 2014) was probably very different from what I'm seeing today (New York 2017). Every meetup I go to seems flooded with bootcamp grads, and it appears the market is oversaturated with bootcamp grads. Overall, it seems like it's much harder to get that first engineering job

I graduated from Dev Bootcamp Chicago in 2014. Before starting, I was a financial analyst for three years, and had been teaching myself some rudimentary python for about a year.

It took me about two months to get my first job at a start up, where I stayed for a year and pretty much made what I was making as an analyst. After that I moved to New York, where it took me a month to find a (better) job at another start up. Now I'm at a third start up as a senior engineer, which also took me about a month to find.

The program was fun, I met some great people (some of whom I'm still good friends with), I think it helped me get a foot in the door in the industry, and I picked up a lot of good conceptual knowledge and soft skills related to building software.

However, the the technical skills I learned from the curriculum ended up being almost completely irrelevant the second I graduated. They focused primarily on back-end development, with a Ruby/Rails/SQL/jQuery stack. Since then, I've focused mainly on front-end, and worked almost entirely with Angular/React/Node/Mongo. Now I'm am starting to dip my toes into Scala and PureScript and have no intention of ever using Ruby again.

My cohort mates saw mixed (but mostly positive results). All the people who were clearly talented got jobs immediately after graduating. It was more difficult for those who had no prior coding experience, or had trouble picking up the material.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#188

Post by veza »

Disclaimer: East-European hustle version (self-directed and free)

Not really a bootcamp but a combination of udacity, lynda, online books/tutorials.

My Background: tennis coach, basic arithmetic, PC power user.

    May 2013 - Start learning HTML->CSS->jQuery(Codeacademy+other)->Python(Udacity:Intro to CS+Web Dev)
                  ->Javascript(Eloquent JS)->PHP&MySQL(Lynda) (+countless others in between)
             - Went for PHP as I started looking for jobs and there were almost no Python options.

    Apr 2014 - First Job - for a friend of mine who has an online tennis shop 
             - Opencart (mainly front-end templating, some jQuery - mostly plugins usage)

    Jul 2014- Second Job - a web shop (10 people) - still have this one but doing totally different stuff
             - Wordpress theme customizing (still mostly front-end and jQuery, some php)

    Sep 2014 - First 'big' project: 2 person, Codeigniter+Postgres
             - Built the whole front-end (learned that css on a big website is hard and you need some architecture)
             - Ended up doing some CRUD stuff on the admin side too

    May 2015 - d3.js project - a landing page with lots of custom graphs and a custom map 
              (started the project with 0 knowledge of d3 - finished quite well)
             - Interestingly enough I was already 'the javascript' guy at the shop so this was assigned to me

    Jul 2015- Tryout with a remote team in my area working for an american startup 
            - Flask, microservices, aws, data analysis - cool stuff
            - they needed me on the back-end - got rejected, 
            - the lead said I was too inexperienced and that he didn't have time too train me.

    Aug 2015- Built a custom Wordpress theme for a website 

    Sept 2015- Python job - for a US based startup 
             - a LOT of scripts, mainly web scraping, data mining, data cleaning
             - a LOT of sql for all that data
             
    Sept 2016- Started working on a new front-end for the same US based startup
             - React, Webpack, ES6, NPM, Babel, Flux... head-blown, die...

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#189

Post by blablabla123 »

tnolet wrote: post #186

A sincere question: Do people ever NOT graduate from these types of bootcamps? I'm asking as IT Manager / Engineering Manager person. When it's on someone's CV, I never know how t value it.

Actually, when I was still in school I was taking part in a Pascal course. I wonder if that counts as well ;)

I guess the bottom line is that you still need to put in some sort of work to get the necessary qualifications...

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#190

Post by throwzy1234 »

jnmandal wrote: post #180
throwzy1234 wrote: post #178

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.

While thats generally true, it can take years for people to get the hang of developing software, which I would distinguish from just programming.

That distinction clearly doesn't matter to employers.

As this thread demonstrates, anyone can make 6 figures after spending a few weeks learning to program. They have every bit as much market value as long time software developers do.

It's only a matter of time (a year or two at most) before we're all paid slightly more than janitors - the field clearly (demonstrably) has no barrier to entry whatsoever. Literally anyone can become a professional software developer in less time than it takes to pass high school algebra.

Post reply on HN