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Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

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Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#81

Post by ecspike »

daxfohl wrote: post #31

As an employer I'd look at bootcamp participation as a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago. If you truly don't know how to program but want a coding job, then here's a $0 class. Start with JavaScript. Why? The entire internet is based on JavaScript, it can do anything, it runs on any OS, and it's easy to lear…

I took the SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer) exam back in the day. You did come out of it knowing details of the Java language very well. The Microsoft certs at the time were mostly how to use Visual Studio. The SCJP opened a few doors (many moons ago not in Silicon Valley), not bad for a $150 test. Once I had a few jobs, the cert disappeared from my resume.

One minor nitpick, it wouldn't be Sun née Oracle. The right side is the maiden or former name.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#82

Post by teh_klev »

daxfohl wrote: post #31

As an employer I'd look at bootcamp participation as a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago. If you truly don't know how to program but want a coding job, then here's a $0 class. Start with JavaScript. Why? The entire internet is based on JavaScript, it can do anything, it runs on any OS, and it's easy to lear…

> a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago.

That's unfair. Don't tar everyone with vendor qualifications with the same brush. Many of us obtained them because the companies we worked for needed minimum numbers of vendor "qualified" staff to attain or maintain the various levels of partner status available. For example, I worked at a consultancy that needed to maintain a pool of Microsoft and Cisco qualified staff to maintain the levels of official vendor partnership (Gold was the top MS partnership back in the day, don't remember what the Cisco one was) that would keep opening doors at blue chips.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#83

Post by invaliduser »

teh_klev wrote: post #82
daxfohl wrote: post #31

As an employer I'd look at bootcamp participation as a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago. If you truly don't know how to program but want a coding job, then here's a $0 class. Start with JavaScript. Why? The entire internet is based on JavaScript, it can do anything, it runs on any OS, and it's easy to lear…

> a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago. That's unfair. Don't tar everyone with vendor qualifications with the same brush. Many of us obtained them because the companies we worked for needed minimum numbers of vendor "qualified" staff to attain or maintain the various levels of partner status available. For e…

I guess the wrong signal is not that you have a cert, it's when you highlight it in your résumé.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#84

Post by ajhurliman »

analognoise wrote: post #14
shawndrost wrote: post #9

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.) It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!) Here's a bit of inside baseball: This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less s…

"we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise" Horseshit alert if I've ever heard one.

Code Fellows grad here. I went from a $50k mechanical engineering job to a $130k web dev job (consulting) directly after completing the program.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#85

Post by sportanova »

seangrogg wrote: post #68
nbclark wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of my concern with bootcamps is the sentiment expressed above that you need it to get exposure to some arbitrary technology. In my experience, the best indicator to success in an industry or technology is a desire to learn that technology. Not someone giving exposure. I a happy it is working out for you, but as Node falls out of fashion, it will be on you to learn the next wave.

I hate when people make the assumption that learning JavaScript is somehow a limiting factor. It hasn't stopped me from picking up Java, Ruby, Python, or PHP. I still have some trouble with Go structs and I still have some learning to do on Rust lifetimes... but seriously. What "next wave" of server application development does Node.js leave me so woefully unprepared to deal with? Are people really having issues mars…

haha seriously.. whether it's rails, larvel, express, play, or django it's all basically the same. let's not pretend like java is string theory

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#87

Post by flangloria »

paulmd wrote: post #15
49531 wrote: post #6

Honestly I feel like the golden age of bootcamps is coming to an end. A lot of schools jumped into the market and it just seems like quality is dropping. Having worked at a bootcamp as an instructor and having hired multiple bootcamp grads I've noticed that typically you'll have 2 or 3 really great students and then 20 who got little value from the program. Bootcamps work wonders for that small percentage of students…

I didn't have any ability to follow my students' earnings but that '2-3 really great students per class' also correlates with my experience TA'ing CS110 students.

Exactly. I feel this is being overlooked a lot.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#88

Post by hrgrad »

shawndrost wrote: post #9

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.) It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!) Here's a bit of inside baseball: This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less s…

This post shows a lack of owning up to mistakes and makes me question whether things are moving in the right direction. It wasn't that people were gaming admissions, the admissions process was broken. I took the admissions challenge twice, my second test was virtually identical to the first one. People I talked to from cohorts before and after me took basically the same test.

If you use the same test for months the fact is the answers will leak. People that take it again will do well the second time, regardless of whether they are qualified. This is a failure on your part, not on the applicants part. You need to own up to this and not blame applicants for gaming the admissions process.

It is understandable that we didn't know who you were and couldn't trust you. I have never seen you in my life. I saw Marcus one time in the first week. Talking about how you are going to change things for the future is fine, but it doesn't help those who went through the "troubled period".

It just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth when things go south that you rush to blame people "gaming the admissions process" and not we screwed up, we are fixing it for the future, and here is how we are helping those affected.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#89

Post by aczerepinski »

dragonwriter wrote: post #61
aczerepinski wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most bootcamp students already have college degrees. Many have families and mortgages, etc. Dropping from the workforce for four years to do another college degree isn't a realistic option. Tuition isn't the biggest cost of education at a certain point in life; lost wages is.

A second bachelor's is unlikely to take four years of full-time work; e.g., Oregon State's online second bachelor's in CS is a 1-year full time program.

That's cool and an option I didn't know about. Still, an entire year of lost wages is way more expensive than a bootcamp. I couldn't have made that work.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#90

Post by forthefuture »

paulcole wrote: post #71
forthefuture wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I took the technical interview ~3 months ago there were very specific questions about functional programming ("implement foreach" kind of questions). Makersquare had the same exact questions, so I assume someone just posted them online and people could easily prepare without understanding.

If that's the case, the lack of follow up questions to identify that kind of faking it is pretty horrifying. Was there nothing like, "explain this technical concept as if you were talking to your grandpa/non-technical person?"

I think even with follow up questions there's only so much you can ask. It was entirely possible to design a response such that your solution takes a good 20 minutes and doesn't leave much time for discussion. I ended up going over time on a recursion problem but still got in.

I actually liked the problems but it seems like there weren't enough different kinds of questions to filter out people with the answers beforehand.

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