Ask HN: I will quit my job as a PM to join a coding bootcamp. Am I crazy?

This is the best comment so far. Bootcamps make sense if you have spare time and spare money and want to ramp up very very quickly, but they don't provide anything you can't learn on your own. This is doubly so if you are already working in tech and interact with working programmers who can help sanity check what you're doing and help you along in your studies.

I understand how having some social structure helps one learn, but I've often seen this misapprehension from PMs and MBAs that you either "know code" or you don't, and if one can just cross this chasm then all of a sudden you can be the one building things and realize your own vision. But in reality you won't be a good coder unless you have the tenacity to keep learning continuously over years and decades. Self-learning is not only free, but it's a good litmus test for this tenacity, and there's a huge amount of resources out there that make it trivially easy to get started.

This is like a construction foreman deciding to take a step down and become a construction worker because he's insecure about not getting his hands dirty building. It's a bad career move.

If you want to become a dev via this route, right now that is a risky move and a long road to real expertise that would carry you through an economic downturn where very junior people are let go. If it is your passion to be a dev, maybe, but expect it to be difficult. Maybe just consider going back to a proper university for that CS degree you probably should have gotten to begin with?

If you want to become a much better PM and have the tools to start building apps on your own, then yes DO IT! Right now the economy is great, if in 3mo you are back on the job market saying "I'm an awesome PM and I did a coding bootcamp to increase my understanding of the products I manage so I can be an even better collaborator" you will just have increased your value significantly. Probably you could just go back to your old job with a promotion.

>> e.g. block chain, deep learning, etc.

> Most bootcamps that I'm aware of are for training web developers, with a few going into mobile app development.

Yeah, I'd actually be pretty interested in a bootcamp that teaches deep learning. AFAIK that doesn't exist, but it should (?)

As a hiring manager who has interviewed many many bootcamp grads and supervised a couple, I don't think they're are worth it. They're vastly overpromising what skill level you will be at when you graduate and how easily you will be able to find a job.

Because they are trying to compress a lot into a short period of time, and because they are trying to keep it interesting and give students early wins, they seem to not spend nearly enough time on the basics, and jump straight in to using frameworks that do everything for you, the end result being that a bootcamp grad can quickly whip up an ok looking app that has basically no functionality but as soon as you ask them to do something complicated, they get stuck. Sure, that's not true of all grads, but I'd argue that the ones who come out of a bootcamp with serious skills are the passionate ones who would've done just as well or better on their own, so at best they wasted a bunch of money.

You are much better off going the self taught route to start off, maybe take community college classes on the side. If dabbling like that doesn't inspire you and give you the fuel you need to learn what you need to know on your own then software engineering may not be the ideal career for you anyway, what you know is a small part of the job, what you can figure out and learn are also huge factors.