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Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

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Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#61

Post by osipovas »

3pt14159 wrote: post #44
ldd wrote: post #19

so, um, as someone who has considered entering into a bootcamp program, I have a question: Why are there so expensive? (10k is more than what I am paying for my BSc degree at McGill)

Canada genearlly has 3 to 1 subsidies for studies. For my program (Engineering at Waterloo) It cost me $12k per "year" (per two semesters) all in (books, coop fees, tuition, endowment fund, lab fees) and it cost the government about $30k over the same period. Which means the overall cost of my degree was around $170k. I was also able to claim back the taxes on a portion of what I paid, so the total cost is slightly h…

It should also be noted that Ontario has the highest tuition rates in Canada. Also, Waterloo is typically viewed as the most prestigious Engineering school in Canada (the Stanford of Canada).

http://www.macleans.ca/interactive-how-canadian-tuition-fees...

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#62

Post by gxespino »

dlsso wrote: post #54

Bootcamp graduate here. Short story: Took a low paying startup job to get my foot in the door, 2 months later got a much better offer, first place offered me a raise but not match, I said ok bye. Next day I walk in the CTO (who supervises me) says "why are you leaving" I say "no match" he says "Let me smash some heads." An hour later I have a match. tl;dr CTO fights to keep me. Some other notes: I think the quality o…

What camp?

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#63

Post by jowiar »

cynusx wrote: post #33

We have good experiences hiring from dev bootcamps in europe but we take care to hire for attitude rather than technical skills. Junior developers have a lot to learn and showing commitment and openness to be taught is really important when we commit to mentoring them professionally. We are happy to hire more but our local bootcamp is out of graduates :)

This a thousand times. Hire for attitude, pay for skill (and keep pay in line with skill as skill increases).

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#64

Post by eugeneross »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #39

I haven't actually hired anyone from a bootcamp, but I was involved a bit with a local one to a minor degree (a guest lecture once). I do think college in C.S. changed my brain in interesting ways, but the number of really good professors I had was probably small in my major, and smaller outside. I find myself mostly using some very minor bits of discrete math in the end, and college left me with a employeeable but m…

> "On a similar front, C.S. programs don't do a great job of teaching what industry really feels like - if I had known, I might not have gone into C.S."

Just curious, what would you have majored in to know what the industry is like?

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#65

Post by 27182818284 »

securingsincity wrote: post #31

At MaxwellHealth we've hired 5 graduates from the general assembly intensive program, 2 for QA and 3 for Dev. The one take away I've had is that they all are coming with a baseline of knowledge that could let them contribute on day one. For these 5 women, that was in addition to the soft skills necessary to succeed which I assume they all had before going into the program. I absolutely would hire them all again. We h…

>to the soft skills necessary to succeed

That's really interesting to hear, and something I haven't run into. Thus far my experience with developers from bootcamps has been underwhelming and over-hyped. ("We made our own Facebook in the program" is really "You made a guestbook-wall-web-app that saves data to a database using RoR")

I could see how those soft skills could be extremely useful, and it is honestly something on a daily basis I have the most problems with in other developers.

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#66

Post by xiaoma »

securingsincity wrote: post #31

At MaxwellHealth we've hired 5 graduates from the general assembly intensive program, 2 for QA and 3 for Dev. The one take away I've had is that they all are coming with a baseline of knowledge that could let them contribute on day one. For these 5 women, that was in addition to the soft skills necessary to succeed which I assume they all had before going into the program. I absolutely would hire them all again. We h…

Given the gender ratio of students at General Assembly it would be improbable in the extreme that all five candidates you hired from them were women.

Do you have some sort of explicit gender-based filtering in your hiring or recruiting process?

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#67

Post by hamitron »

gchucky wrote: post #45

At a previous job, we hired two people from General Assembly. One was decent; the other far less so. Admittedly, the hire that was less useful had other issues in terms of attitude, which perhaps we should have caught during the interview process.

I am a General Assembly graduate, who was able to interview another GA grad for an open position. He really sucked. I'm really surprised he made it through the course. GA needs to have more stringent qualifications for calling yourself a 'graduate' and not just someone who copied and pasted rails tutorials and called it a personal project.

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#68

Post by binxbolling »

MollyR wrote: post #55

My company hired two bootcamp developers. One stepped up, and the other was fired. They were great for basic web development, but really crashed and burned for anything more than that. They had some issues understanding basic system administration, data modeling, basic algorithms, web architecture, and systems modeling. Our lead developers didn't have time to give them a two year education on these issues. We were al…

"They had some issues understanding basic system administration, data modeling, basic algorithms, web architecture, and systems modeling."

Can you expand on this a bit? As in, what kinds of things within those areas were they not getting or completely ignorant of?

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#69

Post by panorama »

securingsincity wrote: post #31

At MaxwellHealth we've hired 5 graduates from the general assembly intensive program, 2 for QA and 3 for Dev. The one take away I've had is that they all are coming with a baseline of knowledge that could let them contribute on day one. For these 5 women, that was in addition to the soft skills necessary to succeed which I assume they all had before going into the program. I absolutely would hire them all again. We h…

Would you mind leaving your contact info in your profile? I'd like to get in touch.

Re: Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again?

#70

Post by crazypyro »

xiaoma wrote: post #66
securingsincity wrote: post #31

At MaxwellHealth we've hired 5 graduates from the general assembly intensive program, 2 for QA and 3 for Dev. The one take away I've had is that they all are coming with a baseline of knowledge that could let them contribute on day one. For these 5 women, that was in addition to the soft skills necessary to succeed which I assume they all had before going into the program. I absolutely would hire them all again. We h…

Given the gender ratio of students at General Assembly it would be improbable in the extreme that all five candidates you hired from them were women. Do you have some sort of explicit gender-based filtering in your hiring or recruiting process?

Isn't that illegal?
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