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

Here is my reasoning:

* 2 years of college is just to finish core curriculum/elective stuff (history, foreign language, writing, philosophy, etc)

* 2 years of college is used to finish computer science major

* Each year, students study for 40 weeks. So in total he studies for 80 weeks.

* Each week, he takes an avg around 3.5 courses a week.

* Each course takes him an avg 4 hours a course (remember college kids waste a lot of time...a lot of time).

Total= 2 years * 40 weeks/year * 3.5 courses/week *4 hrs/course = 1120 hours

Conclusion: If you put in bootcamp hours, which is 80-100 hours a week, it's only 11-14 weeks. That's the avg length of a bootcamp. Bootcamp = college degree in CS (from a mediocre program) minus the core curriculum and minus the 2-3 internships you would do in college.

Many people here are saying that bootcamp alums aren't as good as college grads. I don't have enough data, but I would agree with that statement. While bootcamp grads aren't as good as CS grads, I wouldn't say the bootcamp education is worse than a poor/mediocre CS program, because of some unaccounted for variables:

1) Internships are still vitally important! 2-3 internships is basically a full year of programming on a very diverse set of problems!

2) Selection bias: Better programmers tend to start earlier in their career, hence they don't have to go to bootcamps.

3) Confidence issues: It takes years for people to be comfortable with engineering. I would not be surprised if people don't have confidence issues going into interviews + work after a 12 week bootcamp.

That may be true, but are there also some things that you might miss doing this versus a traditional CS track? I don't mean this as a leading question, but I've been pondering it for a while in the context of things I've seen in my career and I've come to the conclusion that for the entry level "hack and get this done" job, the CS degree really doesn't matter and may even be something of a hindrance compared with a self- or bootcamp-taught developer who takes a practical-focused approach.

Later along the "career path", though, is sometimes where the value of a CS education (which is not === a CS degree) presents - in the form of fitting the more abstract goals and problems one encounters with patterns, structures and practices one learns in CS. I've seen too many "non-technical" or "technical dabbler" managers blow through too many millions of dollars on systems that were easily recognizable as "solved problems" in the CS space to completely write off the value of a good CS education. Now that I'm at the point in my career where I'm the more senior person often making those decisions and decisions about who to hire and how to screen, that is basically how I parse a CS degree - as a potential signal that the person who holds it might have a CS education that allows them to grow more easily into a role where they can provide a valuable opinion about architecture and higher-level system direction... And also, that they might be marginally more capable at sticking through the frequent sea-changes in tech because they have a base that isn't tied to PERL or whatever language they fell in love with... I'm not sure degrees work that way in any other field - where the things you learn only really come into play at the higher / more abstract / later levels of work and are of almost no (perhaps even negative?) value for Junior & Mid-level things.

(Disclaimers: 1. Yes, you can get a CS education without a CS degree, but it would be more difficult. 2. There's nothing wrong with PERL.)

I would just assume you get false positives doing that... I would almost consider it malpractice of the bootcamp not to cover that test the day before considering that it it so widely proliferated. I sometimes use it, I'll admit, but always with some kind of twist like "do it as a web server".

We've graduated both Web and iOS students and, well, I'm just going to come out and say it: We have a 100% placement/hiring rate of our graduates. Most students secure dev roles within a month of graduating, a few even before they graduate.

That's right. 100% in a country where with 1/10 the population, fewer companies and jobs generally, and no real "valley" comparable to speak of, we are able to have ALL our grads find DEV roles, mostly WITHIN Canada. While I can't speak to whether or not we can maintain that 100% for years to come, I can speak to why and how it's like this now.

While it's easy to argue that 4 or 5 year CS degrees are too long and often not "current" enough, the idea of a 8, 9 or 12 week program that claims to give BETTER or even equal results still seems off.

Being a CS grad who doesn't have strong displeasure with College programs like some others do, I feel that our philosophy is a bit different.

If you ask most professionals where they picked up their skills and expertise, they don't refer to any of their schooling. Instead they'll likely say "on the job". So, you don't grow as much from lectures, exercises, homework readings and online video as much as you do from "DOING". And no form education will ever replace that.

Here's another thing, Instead of comparing a bootcamp grad to a college grad, we should be comparing an bootcamp grad that continues to work as a dev for about 3.9 years to a CS grad coming out of a 4 year program. Who do you think will generally come out ahead?

If you do compare a fresh college grad with a fresh bootcamp grad, I feel that the CS grad does have better and definitely deeper understanding of COMPUTER SCIENCE. Of course they do, you're comparing 0.1 years of CS to 4 or 5 years of study.

Anyway, coming back to our crazy 100% placement of Jr Devs... I think this comes back to our more "humble" take on what our grads are truly capable of and need after graduation. The 8 weeks at our bootcamp prepares most of our students for a 3 month paid internship, which usually translates into full-time Jr. Dev employment at that same company.

So while most bootcamps tout "entry-level ready" developers, we suggest that most bootcamp grads are almost junior ready. They need a few months of mentorship within a company before I would feel comfortable calling them a Junior dev. Owning/Running a dev shop that hires most of it's juniors (as interns) from bootcamps helps me be more realistic about this.

As for salary comparables, Canada (East and West coast alike) is noticably lower than US. Post-internship, our grads make between 40K and 60K. There are definitely a few outliers that will make more than 70K, but that has more to do with their prior experience and what else they bring to the table.

Historically, the clients had little choice who showed up for their projects when working with larger consulting shops. Has that changed? Clients weren't usually vetting Jen and Bill and Joe, but rather they ordered bodies and got "3 bootcamp grads".

Are you and your fellow bootcamp grads interviewed and vetted by clients before joining their projects, or do the clients get whoever the consulting firm decides should be on the team?