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

Only do this if you're comfortable doubling someone's salary quickly after they prove themselves. Most companies aren't.

I took a low offer and had to bust my ass and show up a few $120k/yr bad apples that we hired to get my salary raised to an appropriate level and that still took about 18 months over 3 raises.

It would have been easier if I'd left and gone somewhere else and for most other people it will be too.

I graduated from The Iron Yard in Charleston about a year ago.

I had a couple of interviews the week following graduation which didn't turn into anything. Since then I've been continually applying to jobs and trying to put a decent portfolio together. I can't seem to land an interview anywhere.

Realistically, I'm aware my lack of a degree and long list of irrelevant jobs are likely getting my resume tossed into the trash. I assumed at the very least that I'd be able to land a QA job that I could try to pivot towards development later.

It can be a bit difficult to stay motivated to code/practice/study/apply while also working a 40 hour week at a soul sucking job. I find myself pining for an entry level job so I can at least combine my desire to continue to code with a job. At this point it's the only reason I keep going.

I am a September 2013 SF App Academy grad, and I found exactly the same value as you in the program. Launched programming from a thing I had a good aptitude for and played around with a lot, and gave me an the engine that made me study a lot of marketable skills (as well as interview preparation).

I am now a lead engineer at a small company. I'm grateful for the experience, although I suspect the situation is tougher for current grads. It's pretty amazing seeing 90% of applicants for dev openings be fresh bootcamp grads.

Fwiw I never went to a boot camp (nor have an engineering degree of any kind).

I was lucky enough to have a few opportunities where I was paid to learn. Got my first big boy developer job at a startup in Santa Monica in oct 2014 after working as a scuba instructor. Now I work very part time from a boat sailing around the sea of Cortez. I can only do this because my resume is solid enough that picking up short term freelance work is not impossible.

If you want to learn something (or do something for that matter) I think passion is the first and most important ingredient. If you want it bad enough the opportunities will manifest themselves.

I started to see the market for Rails devs on the junior end nosedive right as my cohort was graduating. Since then AppAcademy has been stricter about who they accept and for a larger cut of salary.

Big chunks of the recent cohorts I've seen are people with STEM degrees, usually from seriously good places, who didn't get much experience writing code in school. a/A is mostly throwing them at the large companies that hire large groups of recent grads.

Switching their JS framework curriculum to React probably helped a lot and most of the people I talk to there lean more on their JavaScript than their Ruby.

I'm grateful for the experience but I'm mixed for recommending it to others. It has to be a certain kind of person in certain lucky situations to begin with. I didn't have to pay rent while I did it, which made it all possible, really.