Ask HN: Did you go to a 3 month coding school? Did it work?

What about doing both? I've spent about 5 years in college, including 3 years of time-wasting on an economics/applied communications/English degree, then a 2 year diploma in Computer Systems Technology, which covered programming and hardware as well as other useful stuff such as technical writing and public speaking. I did co-ops and got my current job through the college job board. So I think I've had the full college experience. I also have on the job experience as a programmer. However, I want to learn more, get out of web development and into business software, learn some new programming languages. I do best in a classroom environment, but all the "hacker boot camps" and the like that I've seen seem much too basic for where I'm at right now. What route should I take?

I did MakerSquare last fall, with a couple of the other commenters here.

I had worked on learning by myself with all the usual free online resources, and it wasn't enough for me. I learn best when I can have a conversation with another human about WHY something works the way it does after I read the tutorial and practice the syntax.

Lacking funding and other resources I'd have needed to go to school full time for 2-4 years, I chose to sink what funding and resources I did have into MakerSquare. I graduated in November and have been working fulltime as a front end developer since the start of December.

Some points to consider:

- A good bootcamp comes with teachers and mentors who teach in multiple styles depending on the lesson and student. I was able to seek out the mentorship I needed for my learning style. This is something that is difficult to do in my experience of normal college, and nearly impossible to do while learning on one's own. - In addition to being a sort of "education accelerator," as another commenter has mentioned, MakerSquare was also a "networking accelerator." I left the program with a robust network of professional contacts, all in different stages of their career and parts of the local tech scene.

- I also made a fair-sized handful of new best friends, and we continue to provide both educational and emotional support for each other on a regular basis. Going through a bootcamp-style education experience, no matter how good a programmer you become, has a pretty profound effect on one's life and worldview, and sometimes the only people who really get it are the ones who've gone through it with you. - I definitely learned far more quickly than I would have had I continued to self-tech in spurts between work, life, and my financially unsustainable attempts at traditional education.

- I didn't learn everything I needed to know to work at my job. In fact, since MKS teaches Ruby/Rails and I work in a PHP shop, I learned very little. What I did learn at MKS was enough to figure the rest out. No bootcamp OR school will teach you everything. Without MKS, there is flat out no way I would have been able to have this job that I have maintained for going on a year now, while some others in my office with more experience than I've got have been fired for sucking at their jobs. I may not be a great programmer (yet), but I at least don't suck at it and I know how to learn and get better.

- Yes, the quality of graduates is inconsistent. Some people go in with some programming knowledge, and are going to get more out of any program than most people who start at nothing. Some people simply don't get as much out of their chosen program as others, regardless of their starting points. I'm sure this is just as true for a traditional CS program, and I'm equally sure that the difference in skills levels between graduates of the same group is more stark than that of a CS cohort's. - Quality of programs varies so much. Hell, the quality of one program can vary based on how developed their curriculum is at a given time, who's teaching that curriculum, and who a student works with to learn it. But hey, see my above comment about CS degrees.

- We chose our own projects, by the way. I would say at that least most of my cohort could point to a bit of code that we personally wrote and are proud of.

- Yes, we had interview coaching, and the teachers and founders did their best to boost our confidence levels. Impostor Syndrome is a known thing for programmers who've been programming for a long time. Can you imagine what it must be like to feel years behind other programmers your age because you really actually ARE years behind a large group of people who've been programming since childhood? Even the best of us sometimes need a "you can do it, buddy!" from someone they respect.

Thank you all so much for the responses. Very much appreciated. I want to take the time to read through each of them and understand them so I may take a while to respond. Thank you so much again! I hope this will also help others :)

I graduated from Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco a couple months ago, and have since been working at SaaS startup in the city. My background prior to the bootcamp was in business and finance, so it was a big career jump.

The variety of backgrounds and skill levels are enormous so it's honestly hard to say if a bootcamp is better for you vs. just learning on your own. There were people in the program who really could have just learned all the material by themselves - they were very quick learners and even had experience in programming. There were other people who couldn't fully grasp the subject matter even after going through the whole program.

Also the people who got the jobs they wanted after the program had to take a lot of initiative and put a ton of effort to overcome the 'Imposter Syndrome' of feeling like we weren't ACTUALLY coders and couldn't compete with some of the more traditional programmers in the workforce who had majors in Computer Science.

More than the material itself, Dev Bootcamp's big takeaway for me was helping us be comfortable with confusion and having the confidence to fight through and try to understand things that we had never seen before. 9 weeks doesn't sound like a long time, but when you are faced with something brand new and confusing every single day, surrounded by others in the same boat as you, and have the resources around you (teachers, coaches and Google) to fight through and understand the material, you come out of it really having the confidence that you can learn anything with some effort and time.

As an example, the entire length of Dev Bootcamp was focused on Ruby on Rails, but for our final projects my group made a client-side web application completely in JavaScript and HTML5 using technology we didn't learn in the bootcamp at all. The bootcamp had drilled a level of confidence into us that we could pick up any technology (something common in the actual workplace), and that was a level I couldn't seem to get to on my own using online resources.

Sorry, just saw your question. I don't want to say specifically, but the school is an ASP.NET MVC (mostly) shop in Houston. They teach some front end UI also using various frameworks (jQuery, Backbone, etc) and backend is all C# (using Razor in the CSHTML). Lots of folks in the program have never coded in their life, so it's mostly exposure to what programming for the web is like, but the folks have difficulty putting it into practice.