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

The former usually have previous experience in the workforce and put in the required effort to really get the most out of a bootcamp to accelerate their career. It does not surprise me at all when I see them in senior roles a few years later. The latter rarely graduate on time and struggle to show any skill growth. They wash out of their new jobs within a few months.

Obviously when categorizing people's behaviors there are a million grey areas in between the black and white, but it has been my experience that these two different groups stand out in interviews. People in the first category would likely succeed no matter what they tried to switch into, they just chose coding bootcamps.

Hypothetical example: Say only 1% of coding bootcamp graduates find the program to be a "success" for them. All of that 1% read hacker news and zero of the 99% read hacker news. If you ask about bootcamp on hacker news you'll only get HN reader's perspective, then you'd believe bootcamps are wildly successful whereas the real number is the opposite.

Finally I decided to get a web developer job. It has been 8 days, we are using React and Redux, and its fantastic. But the senior developer left the team and now with 4 of us left I've realized I am the most knowledgeable developer on the team. This is in SF but not with a tech company. Luckily there is no stress and the hours are great.

For some reason coding on my own projects was only okay but coding for a job is amazing. The day flies by and I get really deep into my work.

Admittedly, I didn't really need to "learn how to learn" as many claim they did. That's fine for them, but I was already going in with that mindset. What I got was mainly an environment where I could study and hack on things with other people wanting to do the same, without all the distractions of everyday life. I could have done similar things without dropping thousands for tuition and a living situation, but I still may not have been exposed to more current technologies. If I had tried to study programming on my own for the same amount of time, I might have still been writing Python 2.4 scripts in Notepad to do boring things with spreadsheets. I would have wasted so much time and avoided diving into Rails, Sublime Text, JavaScript, etc. I was pretty smart before going to bootcamp(I could at least do script kiddie crap) but very inept in many ways.

What mattered after DBC wasn't so much the technologies I learned but my willingness to come up with difficult ideas and say to myself "Sure, I'm gonna learn X (language|framework) to get this thing done". I had too much of an "I'm not that smart" mentality beforehand. I never would have dreamed that I would ever spend a month and a half sitting in Panera Bread with a friend hammering out a streaming video app to show to employers. And it worked! Poorly, mind you. It was pretty awful, but also glorious – it allowed you to build a shared playlist and watch YouTube videos with multiple people, all synchronized, with chat, a vote-skip button, and even a way to draw over videos. It did work, and we both got hired in another few months from writing it. Granted, my first employer was pretty crappy, but now I've ended up working 2 years somewhere that I've been very happy.

From what I can tell, those in my cohort who applied themselves actually made it after graduation. Those who couldn't shake the "knowledge on a silver platter" mentality didn't fare as well. Simple as that. There are so many opportunities in our field that it seems that even in 2017 someone with the drive and even average talent can make it.

EDIT: I forgot to mention where I work! I work at KPCC, a public radio station in Pasadena.

SF / NYC are certainly not, Mississippi certainly is, but where is the threshold? Oregon? Colorado? Vermont? Pennsylvania?