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

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

#201

Post by specialist »

abeyer wrote: post #65
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.

You can't work at Starbucks and read HN? Seriously, though, after some early career burnout I did a stint at a restaurant job to pay the bills while I decided what I wanted to do with my life...and that was by far my most productive period of time as far as keeping up on general tech news, personal projects, academic research/reading/conferences, etc... A non-code day job can be a great way to have the mental energy…

A buddy moonlighted in the kitchen of a 4-star DC restaurant. There's more to life than coding.

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

#202

Post by tannhauser23 »

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.

My bootcamp (Hack Reactor) had a big assessment test at the end of six weeks. If you didn't pass, they would ask you to leave or redo the first six weeks.

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

#203

Post by tashoecraft »

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.

My only experience is with one bootcamp, but people rarely don't graduate. That wasn't because they just pushed people through, but filter people out at the beginning. A month of online prework helped filter out those who couldn't handle it, as well as a test at the end of it.

If you were someone who wasn't keeping up, they might hold you back (there was two sessions, junior/senior phases). And in a rare case, you may get asked to leave.

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

#204

Post by lando2319 »

lucaspiller wrote: post #132
lando2319 wrote: post #117

Bootcamps have a lot of haters who want to nitpick the details, it makes me glad I didn't think about it too much when I signed up, I just thought, "hey I want to code, they teach coding... I'm in" first bootcamp (web dev) 5 years ago, second one (mobile dev) 3 years ago. Unlike most in my CoHort, I had no interest in a dev job, I wanted to provide contract work and perhaps join a startup for equity. > What are you d…

Out of interest, what were you doing before the code camp? Being CTO needs people and management skills which a lot of developers don't have.

I started providing wordpress websites in college (Economics Degree), custom solutions via code, was an extension of that. As others have mentioned, my CTO role could also be described as "Lead Dev".

The Startup started out as a Client, I made their MVP, and the app did well, got some traction, so here we are.

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

#205

Post by zerkten »

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?

You could be strict and limit this conversation to formal boot camps, but the reality is that this training is happening in a lot of different places.

I've been mentoring a number of our senior support folks on coding, and they've been doing something along the lines of a boot camp. My management finds that support team are able to better understand how things work, attempt to debug things they'd have been afraid of, and ask better questions of software engineers. Support engineers get to do something different and are building skills. They have seen "coders" move quickly through support to the engineering team. Another group manages our tools, but I hope they'll be able to hack on some tools for our team. Some people will stay in support, but it should be less stressful because they can understand how things work better. From a distance you can see how the online communications have changes between the two organizations.

From my past experience in Pharma I know there was similar interest from scientists to learn to code (if they didn't already). I also know that some of the designers working on electronic detailing apps for sales at the time really wanted to learn to code because they had to transition from Flash to HTML 5 and JS.

For these reasons, I think that the make up of coding boot camps may surprise some. A differentiation may be related to where someone is in their career. Someone laid off, or without a job is probably more like to jump to a boot camp than someone who has a job. Quitting to take part in a boot camp is probably a huge jump for people, if they are in the tech sector because they may have more awareness of what is involved, or other means to make the jump to coding.

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

#206

Post by specialist »

xiaoma wrote: post #175
Johnny555 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I was running a brick and mortar business. I just wanted the coding skills for more leverage. After finishing a bootcamp, I did take a job at a large tech company and then one at a YC startup but I never had any intention of a "coding career". I just wanted to continue learning and see the industry from the inside and to assess what the level of competition truly was in SF/SV. It's been 4 years since my bootcamp expe…

I just met two vets at a makers faire. One was a cop for 8 years, the other doing sales for his small biz. They both are now enrolled in a local code camp (sorry, spacing name). They LOVE it. They're both deeply chagrinned they had never tried that "math geek" stuff before.

Now they're talking about starting code camps targeting other vets, help with transitioning to civilian life, build community, mitigate PTSD, work with kids, etc.

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

#207

Post by _e »

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.

If it went fantastic then you probably have a real interest in computers and technology in general versus the pay potential.

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

#208

Post by bootcamper18 »

Bootcamp grad from 2014 in Boston. Struggled for 2-3 months to get a job (probably did 40 interviews), got 3 offers in different states ranging from 30k-50k/yr. I took the 50k job and moved to a LCOL area but had a good tech market.

Before that I was 9 credits short of a degree and I was working in account management at a tiny start up in California. I chose the bootcamp in Boston because I didn't have any money saved up to live anywhere but with my mother. I was 30, swallowed my pride and moved home for 6 months. In hindsight that was one of the smartest decisions I made.

> What are you doing now?

Now I'm a senior software engineer at PayPal. I also finished my degree.

> Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got?

I went from couch to employable in 3 months so yes. I worked 60hrs a week on my craft for 2 more years though - now I'm one of the top contributors across teams.

> Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?

I think so but I have been really bad at keeping in touch. Our cohort was unfortunately competitive with each other so friendships and bonding was not easy to come by.

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

#209

Post by tannhauser23 »

swyx wrote: post #30
bacontacos wrote: post #26

Graduated from Hack Reactor in 2014. I'm a Senior Software Engineer at a large company now. I was prepared enough to not totally screw things up at my first job. I was an expert in Javascript and reasonably knowledgeable at data structures and how to implement basic web stuff. I'm now more focused on back end things...AWS, infrastructure, services, etc. As far as I know, most of my cohort is still working at good job…

bootcamps are pretty light on backend/devops type knowledge which turns out pretty critical for "real" jobs. Do you think this can generally be picked up later or should people in bootcamps do something like an AWS certification (just to pick an arbitrary skill proof point) to be sufficiently well-rounded?

You pick that up at work or on your free time. I'm less than a year out of a bootcamp. Just this month I made a small webapp for a project that my team's working on. I wanted to learn how to deploy something from scratch (using Docker -> AWS), so I read about that for a bit, peppered our DevOps people with a few questions, and then went and did it. I learned a ton! Just seek out opportunities at work to learn new skills.

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

#210

Post by nemacol »

I have been a sys admin for ~5.5 years (in IT for 7). I took a MEAN stack boot camp Jan2015 - Mar2015. I am still a sys admin.

If I had to do it over again I would still take the class.

I know that is not 3+ years ago.

Even though I am not a developer I read hacker news because the article selection is usually of a high quality and the comment sections are full of reasonable conversations. People trying to find answers or make a point instead of flame wars. Usually.

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