Ask HN: Those who hired bootcamp graduates, would you hire them again? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by dreaminvm » Thu, May 28, 2015, 10:29 PM UTC

27182818284 wrote: post #65

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 somethi…

I interviewed a bootcamp graduate recently that had similar claims but couldn't answer basic algorithm and design questions that high school students are being taught.

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

#72

Post by securingsincity » Thu, May 28, 2015, 10:46 PM UTC

crazypyro wrote: post #70

xiaoma wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It certainly would be.

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

#73

Post by securingsincity » Thu, May 28, 2015, 10:51 PM UTC

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?

Certainly not, more just coincidence. I believe we made offers to men through GA but they had already lined up positions.

However, depending on the class they can be pretty close to even on women to men. 2 of 3 hiring events i've been to in the last year were half men/women, one i'm pretty sure was more women then men (7/4? something like that) but that was in Boston at specific time so YMMV.

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

#74

Post by mpdehaan2 » Fri, May 29, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

eugeneross wrote: post #64

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?

I don't think it's possible.

Internships or co-ops I highly recommend along the way, but when you're that inexperienced you really won't see much of the organizational-structure/politics/churn/team-dynamics that can often exist.

I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying the creative burst of coding awesomeness that I so much love about tech has a lot of other things around it all of the time, and you don't usually see that in college.

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

#75

Post by frandroid » Fri, May 29, 2015, 9:07 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #43

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)

McGill is subsidized right?

Yes.

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

#76

Post by gchucky » Sun, May 31, 2015, 9:07 PM UTC

ldd wrote: post #51

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.

Could you clarify what you mean by 'attitude problems'? I assume something like 'unwillingness to learn new things and admit mistakes, etc' but I'd like to know an employers point of view.

Sure. It was a sense of arrogance and inflated ego more than anything else. Just because you went through ten weeks of boot camp doesn't mean that you're a master at your craft. Huge mistakes were made left and right without any sense of responsibility, accountability, or willingness to learn from one's mistakes.