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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?

#191

Post by Boromir35 »

shoefly wrote: post #181
drawnwren wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former high salaried person who jumped ship for a coding bootcamp here with some quick thoughts. 1) The negative image of coding bootcamps on HN is worse than in industry, not the other way. There are plenty of coders who came from bootcamps now working in industry. I agree that you aren't as well regarded a CS major, but it is definitely better than self taught. 2) The things you listed he should do are pretty much…

The best software engineers at my company are self-taught.

IMHO, if you are self-taught, have been able to build a portfolio of projects showing your skills with several of the latest technologies, your profile is much more valuable than if you have been to a bootcamp.

Going to a bootcamp shows you are just another good student, who can sit in a classroom for 10hours straight in a day, during 12 weeks, and get good marks.

When you are self-taught, you show that beyond your new technical skills, you have the self-discipline, and drive to learn and practice new skills from scratch, without someone holding your hand. This must be a skill that any employer would value highly. Employers would want their SW engineers to be autonomous, and have the self-discipline to initiate to keep learning, because with SW, you need to constantly learn if you want your skills to remain up to date. Teaching yourself SW is hard. If you manage to do that, the proof is there that you are passionate about what you're doing, because I don't believe it is possible to teach yourself SW without being passionate about it.

There are heaps of resources online nowadays to teach yourself SW engineering.

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

#192

Post by Boromir35 »

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…

So, what's good management ?

A manager who has strong technical knowledge and experience ?

I have seen many managers who know bugger all about the technical stuff, and have zero interest in technical stuff anyway. They are absolutely not inspiring, and are poor leaders. For some reason I don't understand well, these type of managers stay.

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

#194

Post by drawnwren »

Boromir35 wrote: post #191
shoefly wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best software engineers at my company are self-taught.

IMHO, if you are self-taught, have been able to build a portfolio of projects showing your skills with several of the latest technologies, your profile is much more valuable than if you have been to a bootcamp. Going to a bootcamp shows you are just another good student, who can sit in a classroom for 10hours straight in a day, during 12 weeks, and get good marks. When you are self-taught, you show that beyond your n…

It's clear you have very little knowledge of what happens at bootcamps. I would think of them more as a place where they give you a path to accomplish self study tasks than a classroom. Also, I don't know about other bootcamps, but I came out with a reasonable portfolio. That's a big part of the program.

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

#195

Post by nul_byte »

Don't quit your job, and learn coding on the side. That is what I did. I was an architect in a well paid senior role, so I learned to code and got familiar with the modern frameworks and tools and then found a job (or rather it found me) that recognised my professional experience with my knowing the development world and meant I kept my same level of salary. I now get to work more in engineering where things are more creative and their is lots to learn, and not services (which I was growing to dislike, due to the same old bullshit around 'escalations' and dealing with 'customer expectations').

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

#196

Post by Boromir35 »

tigertheory wrote: post #41

Thanks for the responses guys. A few more points of clarification. PM means product manager. Top 3 tech think Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. In terms of my motivation I think today we are where the internet was in 1994-95, at the cusp of the next big technology wave. I think technologies like deep learning and AI more broadly will fundamentally change every single industry and the next big tech companies will be cr…

You seem to care very much about the social appearance : "i work at a top 3 blabla", " i have a MBA from a top 3 school blabla".

Working as a web developer won't get you extra karma points. If you care so much about social appearance and are the kind who enjoy comparing salary income at mundane dinners out, stick to the job you don't enjoy.

If you like programming, you like building things, you like scratching your mind over complex problems, etc... then follow your heart and train yourself for your next career move. Sticking to some kind of social implicit rules isn't necessarily the way to go. Time may prove you right!

I know heaps of people who totally switched career for various reasons : went from a director position to a manager position, went from a PM position to working as a farmer, transitioned to web dev etc... and didn't regret their decision.

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

#197

Post by rorykoehler »

DelaneyM wrote: post #148

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 pr…

>I'm only just now starting to really "get it".

Can you elaborate please?

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

#198

Post by beeforpork »

AtheistOfFail wrote: post #119
tux3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to git push --force to resolve conflicts!

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.

Don't work => don't self-tase.

I am not convinced. Instead, you'd need a reward for every cleanly committed line of code.

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

#199

Post by rorykoehler »

aetherson wrote: post #99
CarpetBench wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did not receive much support either from the HN crowd I think there's a reason for that, and you touched on some of them. There's undoubtedly an ageism to the tech industry, and being an older junior developer is likely to be a huge uphill climb. There's also skepticism around the coding bootcamp industry for the same reason that there's skepticism around University of Phoenix: The certification isn't really usef…

I don't know if it makes sense for the OP, but I'll stick up for coding bootcamps as a general concept. I don't agree that most people can just self-study in the same time period and get as effective an education, and I do think that the credential is important. A friend of mine just did a bootcamp -- from a stalled career as a lab technician in which she was making something around $60k/year (in the Bay Area) -- and…

I'm self-taught. I've been interviewing GA bootcamp grads recently and they seem to have learnt very little during the 12 weeks. At most they are comfortable with hard coding css and html. Anything more complex has them stumped.

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

#200

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

mahyarm wrote: post #184
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #125

PURE 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…

Top 3 code isn't that amazing, a lot of if it's boring stuff. Guy who wrote the events view controller for example. You can also see most of the good stuff in their open source projects like another commenter said. Go look at android or chrome or many others. The API you deal with as a 3rd party developer is usually code that gets a lot of thought put into it, since it's used by everyone at the company and outside th…

Not everything is open source :)
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