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

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

#191

They are microwave degrees. CS enrollments are up, so give it a few years and most of these programs will go the way of the for profit technical schools in reputation and there will be a lot of consolidation etc.. For all of the shortcomings with a CS degree there are fundamentals that are taught that can't be replaced with a coding academy. The only one I give any credit to is the Nashville Software School because t…

I can anecdotally verify that this was the case.

When I was 19, I knew HTML and enough Java to make a basic applet. I twice applied for a job over the summer that I was woefully under qualified for (ColdFusion dev) and was hired earning $35/hour+.

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

#192
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Detroit employer running a bootcamp to take Cobol developers and retain them for IOS. I hear its been a big success. Why wouldn't someone with 30-40 years of programming experience and who is motivated not be able to learn a new language?

My take on this: Someone with 30 years of experience does not need a "boot camp" to learn a new language. Actually I find it quite fascinating that these programs exist and seem to be successful. If someone told me to train a productive programmer from scratch in 12 weeks time I would tell them that this is impossible. It took me five years of professional experience and a ton (really LOTS) of spare-time hacking to f…

> Someone with 30 years of experience does not need a "boot camp" to learn a new language.

No, but they could very likely need a "boot camp" to get their resume past braindead gatekeepers or to make contacts that allow them to bypass said gatekeepers.

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

#193
post #94

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…

I'm an instructor at MakerSquare and regularly conduct technical interviews. I just wanted to add to Harsh's response re: people taking other peoples answers. Completing the admissions challenges that are posted online will only get you an interview. Once on site we only spend a few minutes, 10 at the most, reviewing their solutions to the admissions challenges before we move on to other questions. It is very, very apparent within just a minute if the applicant did not actually write their own solution.

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

#194

Yes, I work at Refinery29 (obligatory www.corporate.r29.com/careers/), a large women's fashion website in NYC. Of our 30 person tech team, we have had about 5 people coming out of these bootcamps, and they are all awesome. Although I think your idea of who goes to these bootcamps is pretty off. These aren't people who "had never opened a text editor in their lives." Some of them are people who were working in science…

> The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.

In the web and mobile sections of the industry, maybe.

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

#195
I was the Director of Operations at a NYC startup, applied to Flatiron School and got in. I ended up as a Junior Software Engineer at an early stage NYC startup making 65K a year with in 5 weeks of graduation. I've been here for 18 months and couldn't be happier.

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

#196
post #135

Instructors: do you see people with CS degrees, from 10+ years ago, going to bootcamps to learn new skills? I'm in that situation and mostly worked in network, sysadmin & security and also got an LIS so I'm quite removed from the front-end/back-end relationship on a practical level and would like to start some projects and be able to use things like node.js to solve common/daily issues quickly. Your thoughts? (I'm pr…

I have two friends that did this. One to learn app development, and the other to learn Ruby. The app developer started her own company and is doing pretty well (at least paying her own bills), the ruby guy didn't like it, and went back to his sysadmin job.

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

#197
I work for Change.org and we've had considerable success hiring from these bootcamps/intensives. We will continue to hire from them, though we do use a slightly different hiring procedure.

These are my opinions, and not necessarily those of the company.

Hiring junior engineers is always risky. It's a bet against several factors that are nearly impossible to be certain about in any hiring situation, but there are several up-sides to the candidates that we've seen.

1) These are motivated people. The decision to drop everything and code 12 hours, 6 days per week, doesn't happen lightly. Contrast this to some college graduates who drifted toward a CS major.

2) These are not first-job people. Most are switching careers, but have already ironed out some important pieces of their adult life. You are less likely to encounter over-partying, failures to set an alarm, or other maturity problems that impact work or work/life balance. The end result is a more reliable worker.

3) They have a secondary competency related to their former life. Sometimes you can leverage this in their work. It's handy to have an ex-legal clerk doing TOS compliance or a sales guy helping on the ad system.

4) This tends to be a more diverse pool. The factors that still screw with women and other under-represented groups entering CS and related majors aren't as present here. If you've got a Silicon Valley "White Boys Club" monoculture holding you back, train them to fairly evaluate people not exactly like themselves and give it a try.

There can be downsides, of course. Of note:

1) These are not computer scientists. They know one or two toolkits and little or no theory. This can be mitigated by the maturity and motivation mentioned above.

2) It's up to you to effectively mentor junior employees. If you don't have a few people on staff that have the humility and patience to answer questions of junior folks, you're doubly hosed because of the lack of knowledge depth. But that's your fault, not theirs.

3) If you don't have some overlap between the toolkit they just learned and the work you're going to give them, there will be some major frustration. Don't hire a person out of a Rails bootcamp to write Java.

In the end I think this is a pretty decent, if imperfect, way to add quality junior employees.

Obligatory: http://www.change.org/careers

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

#198

They are microwave degrees. CS enrollments are up, so give it a few years and most of these programs will go the way of the for profit technical schools in reputation and there will be a lot of consolidation etc.. For all of the shortcomings with a CS degree there are fundamentals that are taught that can't be replaced with a coding academy. The only one I give any credit to is the Nashville Software School because t…

I'm an App Academy graduate, and I've also been programming since 8th grade. App Academy targets the shortcomings of a CS degree by teaching people HOW to code. Students are supposed to come out of App Academy with 1000 hours of coding or 1/10 of mastery. App Academy has lectures on algorithms and data structures that aren't equivalent to a CS degree, but graduates can code, and many if not most CS students can not. These programs are very rigorous, and I can tell you without a doubt they are only growing, and certainly aren't going anywhere. If the market correct's itself, it is going to be on the "School" side, because CS degree education is broken.

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

#199
Yes they do. I'm a recent App Academy graduate and everyone gets a job. There are a lot of benefits to doing a program like this versus a classical CS education. I've been programming since 8th grade, and I was a computer science major before I dropped out of college. I remember having CS professors that couldn't code themselves out of a box, but they "taught" the material they were supposed to teach. App Academy and other bootcamps prepare you for real world jobs by teaching you how to code. They also teach you data structures and algorithms- not as much as a computer science degree might, but by learning how to code, you learn how to look things up and apply them. If you're wondering if you should do it or not, it's definitely a yes. If you have any questions I would love to answer them.

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

#200

(Disclosure: I am a cofounder at one of these schools, Hack Reactor.) > Most of the job growth appears to be in academic stuff like AI and data science This is incorrect -- web jobs are growing quickly. > there are companies hiring people at $100k who, twelve weeks ago, had never opened a text editor in their lives. This is rare, but it does happen. The more common case is the student that coded on the side for a yea…

I care about capability, not credentials. That said, a BS from a decent CS program has some value, if only as a filter. And programs like these "bootcamps" have a similar value with a much lower bar. In both cases you need to know the program to really figure out how to scale it in your decision.

Running an educational program is hard, I agree. And if you guys are doing a really excellent job of it over, say, 10 weeks the way I look at it is this: the potential hire is an entry level person who has about a 3 month jump on the approx 2 years it will take to make a developer out of them. If your program is a year long, they're maybe a bit over half way there.

So given that: I'd have no problem hiring these people as entry level (i.e. developer in training), and if I knew something about the program itself that would count in their favor against similarly green candidates.

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