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What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

medium.freecodecamp.com

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Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#21

Post by throwawaysbdif »

Slackwise wrote: post #7

This whole hardcore quizzing and testing during interviews has to go. As far as I can see, all it does is create selection bias for people who memorize things or like to practice interview questions. Maybe that's just me being too old for that kinda' crap.

I have been interviewing the last couple months and have the same opinion. I've been coding for years and have some pretty complex stuff up on my GitHub.

I quickly found out that nobody looks at your GitHub, maybe 10% max. didn't matter that I had code from two weeks ago that did complex segmented locking on a concurrent hashtable. still got asked "what is threading" level questions at every place.

After botching my first spate of interviews to stupid trivia I gave in and and read through a bunch of CSCI 100 course notes and "beginners guide to language x". My performance improved significantly.

Ironically the most useful tutorials were the most basic "write a string to a file", as I had forgotten the classes for opening raw files in my three languages of choice (since nobody in their right mind has any business using those classes in a well designed WebApp). Doesn't matter that I could look it up in 5 minutes, they want it on the whiteboard with no googling.

It's really easy to game such interviews as they require very little domain specific knowledge. If you say you know Cassandra or MVC, they'll just take your word for it... as long as you remember the classes for opening a raw file in r+w mode

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#22

Post by drewrv »

Slackwise wrote: post #7

This whole hardcore quizzing and testing during interviews has to go. As far as I can see, all it does is create selection bias for people who memorize things or like to practice interview questions. Maybe that's just me being too old for that kinda' crap.

I'm gonna put on my tin foil hat and say: maybe companies interview like this in order to filter out the people who are too old for this kinda crap.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#23

Post by walshemj »

dood wrote: post #6

Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing. In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. I must be missing something here (some sort of bubble?) because I can't see how businesses can be profitable paying those sor…

That's over £90k in our terms you can see why Google and othe reengineering companies set up in the UK as we are cheap

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#24

Post by mighty_warrior »

AlexC04 wrote: post #2

well first thing - that code at the top can be simplified. function getDevJob(studying, hardwork, luck){ return study && hardwork && luck; } But more seriously - I actually really like point #2. I firmly believe that job interviews have a strong bias towards people with experience doing job interviews. Your "offer-ladder" seems to confirm that for me. It reminds me of that freakonomics article about how real estate a…

All I could think about after that first image was giving the author a code review.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#25

Post by blunte »

goldenbeet wrote: post #3

TL;DR: The barchart can be misleading. Increasing # of applications can decrease the rate at which they mature into offers. I like some of your points like get through to real people. That's an incredibly important part of landing a job. However I do have an issue with the graphic at the beginning. I think it's misleading, because you shouldn't really be applying to 200+ companies. When you take that kind of approach…

I'm not surprised by this, neither by the methods and approach he employed nor by the results and education he received from his efforts.

The fallacy that "programming" is just learning tools and syntax and processes has unsurprisingly led to an expectation that, in continuing fashion, one can just run through a defined routine and get a solution.

In short, the whole thing is misunderstood, and thus the approach is all wrong.

Whether in IT or business (or life in general), opportunity is more easily gained through human interaction - networking (but substantive, not superficial).

Go to meetups on a particular language or stack or tool. Become involved in open source projects or communities that are centered around some shared interest. Get to know people, and let them see who you are. Then the jobs will come to you.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#26

Post by bertjk »

dood wrote: post #6

Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing. In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. I must be missing something here (some sort of bubble?) because I can't see how businesses can be profitable paying those sor…

His profile indicates that he graduated from UC Berkeley and previously pursued I-banking, so I wouldn't exactly call that "no degree, no experience." Also, a good coding bootcamp, properly applied, can easily be worth more than a typical random "side project", IMO.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#27

Post by drewrv »

rtets wrote: post #11

"At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education." Assuming most people who do bootcamps are changing careers, how do you explain suddenly becoming a developer after years of another career?

Some people spend a few years in some enterprise java job going nowhere and attend a bootcamp to learn iOS development, github, data science, etc. In other words it's a career change within the industry. Not everyone likes to learn alone on evenings and weekends.

But the thought of spending thousands to attend a school and you're encouraged to hide said school from your resume looks really bad.

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#28

Post by ericmcer »

Is it still a huge deal to have an encyclopedic knowledge of data structures and algorithms? This guy was applying for jobs doing React/Node, which is what I do, and two years after school I cant remember all the details of the sorting algorithms. Would it be so bad to tell the interviewer that if I do anything other than call browser APIs to sort data I am failing at my job and wasting time?

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#29

Post by nogbit »

Wow, instead, get 100% response rate from only the 5 jobs one should really apply for because they have a personal story to tell that is a great match for the work being asked. I've done that twice. Throwing your name against the wall results in a whole lot of wasted time. You got some offers, great, but next time be picky!

Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

#30

Post by savanaly »

dood wrote: post #6

Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing. In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. I must be missing something here (some sort of bubble?) because I can't see how businesses can be profitable paying those sor…

I went to one of these programs in America and my starting salary was "only" 85k, mainly because I took a job that wasn't in New York or SF. Most of my classmates who took one in one of those high cost of living cities did 90-110k I believe. I would call 120k+ an outlier on the high side, but not inconceivable.

This was years ago and I don't know if the bar has slipped as coding bootcamps have gotten more popular, but the bar to entrance for my program seems pretty high in retrospect. None of the folks I knew and learned with there would I expect to go on into the corporate world and be one of those computer engineers who gets by in their career by doing hardly anything or being a net negative. They were to a man and woman very smart and voracious in their learning about programming best practices and languages. If you've got a person like that then does it really matter that they haven't been part of a real corporate project before? They will learn very quickly and likely be one of the most useful people on the team within a year. I'm not saying they should be made team lead without any experience but as a rank and file programmer, the salary is justified in that case, I believe.

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