Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 357 posts

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

#51

I went to Dev Bootcamp in 2012. I was self taught beforehand, and had done a little bit of contracting work. They focused pretty heavily on soft skills, like communication and pairing, and also somewhat on generic software construction ideas, on thinking through a problem and breaking it down into its component pieces. The curriculum used JS and Rails, although I didn’t feel that I had much more than a surface famili…

> My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps

I think that's really funny about the first ~3 DBC cohorts. A few grads of those first cohorts went on to start App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright Academy (I think) and others like it.

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

#52
I graduated from App Academy NYC in January 2014.

I'm in my 2nd post-bootcamp developer job at a small-ish company, making double my previous salary before a/A. I love what I do and attending the bootcamp was the hardest and most rewarding thing I've done in my professional life.

I keep in touch with some friends of the bootcamp (my cohort and others), and they have gone to work at various companies like Spotify, Google, Thoughtbot, Bloomberg, Capital One, Vimeo, Tumlbr, WeWork, and lots of smaller companies.

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

#53
post #30

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?

I've never done an AWS class or have any certs, so I can't say for sure if its worth doing. In my case, I've mainly learned on the job and have had some really fantastic mentors to work with who have trusted me to make decisions and let me run with them.

I also read a ton of books on design patterns, architecture, deployment, ops, etc.

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

#54
Since most people responding here have some sort of technical job, what sort of stuff are you working on? All of the bootcamps I'm aware of focus on web development. Do you still do strictly web stuff? Frontend or backend? Anything else?

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

#57
Most of the people I bootcamped with do not religiously read HN, but of those who do, most of us have solid jobs.

This is obviously an anecdote, but I think it's logical those who had bad experiences and did not end up developers most likely do not read HN.

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

#58
I went to The Iron Yard, their very first offering in Atlanta, back in 2014. My cohort was focused on full-stack development; it started with Ruby, Sinatra, and finally Rails.

I graduated that summer and immediately began doing contract work with a couple fellow graduates. By the end of 2014, I had moved my family to Chattanooga to work for a startup in the eSports space. It was a Rails shop and they had grand plans but the senior developer left and our CEO decided I could take the lead. To be blunt, I wasn't ready, obviously, and knew it. I wanted to be a part of a team and have room to make mistakes (plus be mentored); you can'd do that when you're the only developer then lead developer. So, by spring of 2015, I joined a wellness startup (awesome team) in town and have remained there ever since.

In the beginning, all I did was write tests. I started to contribute to features on both the front and back ends. Now, I own entire features, make design decisions (re: database, code, and the stack), implement CI/CD, review code, and randomly build things in other tech (like an iOS app for testing Firebase Cloud Messaging integration). There's no way I could have done much, if any, of this fresh out of bootcamp.

Bootcamp got my toes wet and taught me, beyond introductory full-stack concepts, both how to read documentation and to accept that programming is hard. Those two lessons are what really helped me to become a professional developer. My team accepted me because I was still passionate even after learning so much so fast. They also were confident that when presented with a problem I would either have a solution, know how to go find one, or be smart enough to ask for direction (that last one took more time to develop than the others).

To be fair, I was an intelligence analyst by trade prior to bootcamp, so I definitely had previously developed skills useful to programming. However, as others have said, bootcamp was/is a springboard that provides structure to the process.

As for my peers from the cohort, I think MAYBE half are still developers and a few own companies.

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

#59

In 2013 I attended Epicodus in Portland, OR. At the time, it was a 17-week Ruby on Rails bootcamp. I moved back to my home state of Florida following graduation. Within two months I landed a Junior Rails Developer position at Listen360 - a badass company in Georgia. I relocated and have been with the company for over three years now. In that time I've developed JrDevJobs.com, a job board for junior devs. Built severa…

Your site looks good. It reminds of Seek.com.au. I wish more general job boards looked like this. I hate Indeed.

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

#60
I went to Hackbright in 2012 and in 2013 started a kids coding education company First Code Academy (firstcodeacademy.com) in Asia, covering Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan today. We have taught over 4000 students since 2013 and growing strong :)

Hackbright paved the foundation for me to start my own company. Couldn't be more grateful for that!

Post reply on HN