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

Full disclosure, I’m both a graduate from a coding bootcamp and an employee at that same company (Bitmaker Labs).

There are quite a few assumptions being made in messages on here. I think that’s partially because coding bootcamps are very different from one another. For instance, the students we have at Bitmaker Labs typically have little-to-no experience coding, whereas shawndrost of Hack Reactor points out that many of their students have coded on the side for a year or two. I can’t speak to how everyone in this industry recruits, but I can share what I’ve seen in my experience with Bitmaker Labs over the past two years:

- The number of open web development positions is exceptionally high and the barriers to entry (i.e. prerequisite diplomas, degrees, etc.) are very low in many cases.

Several people have already touched on this point. Ultimately, a student’s abilities are more important than their credentials. So when you have an industry with a huge number of open positions, and students with practical knowledge and a thirst for learning, it’s no wonder placement rates are so high at many bootcamps. For us, over 90% of our students find industry work within three months of completing the course. Bootcamps also do a lot of work to build relationships with companies that are open to hiring junior developers and tailoring their programs to fit employers needs. This can help open doors that are otherwise very hard to find when you are learning on your own.

- The job openings are for multiple types of programming languages, but the people hired into these positions do not always have experience with those languages. Startups and larger companies are looking for a great cultural fit in combination with decent coding skills.

As I was saying above, many jobs that we are able to find for students are not posted online. Beyond simply opening doors, we work hard with our students to build networking skills and an understanding of the job market so that they also how to create job openings for themselves. Many companies are focused on finding someone they will want to be around long-term – employees who can integrate well into a fast-paced culture and who will be able to adapt to a changing tech stack. I think this is one big reason companies are willing to hire developers with a lower skill level or limited experience. Bootcamp students are really hungry to keep learning, a bootcamp is just the beginning of their coding career.

Hi, I just applied to Bloc.io, any chance I could speak with about it?

It's much harder than you would think for beginners

We've phone interviewed a bunch of candidates from a couple of the Rails boot camps here in Boston. The candidates have been very mixed in quality, but we've found 3 that we not only brought in and made it through our in person interview but also got job offers. Usually we offer them a 3 month internship. At the end of which we'll offer them a salaried position if they turned out to be as good as we suspected.

We also treat the internship as a real internship, not a contract-to-hire. We expect to be teaching them.

As others have said here in one way or another. The good ones are ones who were coding anyway and just needed some help leveling / focusing their skills. The ones who didn't have a clue about programming when they started, don't come out much better IMNSHO.

I can testify to that.

I had done some SharePoint front end design when I was on an editorial team and we needed some features in our SharePoint site in 2008, but had to take any mention of SharePoint out of my resume because I got too many contacts from recruiters looking for a SharePoint architect.

I'm also a Zend Certified Engineer in PHP (don't hate). I'd never worked with Zend Framework, but would get very regular recruiter contacts because they didn't know the difference between "Zend" (a company) and "Zend Framework" (an MVC framework that was just one of their products).