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

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

#111

Post by eachro »

jackess wrote: post #56
ericmcer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty young and it seems stupid to me too, this guy wanted to be a React Dev. If he was ever at work writing a binary search tree by hand, or writing his own quick sort function, then he would be wasting his time and creating a huge potential problem point in the code. This guy claims to have worked ~6 days a week for 3 months not to become a great full stack dev, but to become a great interviewee. Seems kinda…

This is what drives me crazy. I'm a bootcamp grad, and I've been interviewing for 6 months. I've spent EVERY single day of those six months, (besides applying and networking and interviewing), working on coding, design, projects, and leveling up so I can collaborate with a team. This guy spends all of his time working on stuff that is considered "level 2", and he will make double what I end up getting. Frustrating.

Play the game. You know the rules and you know what you need to do to win the game. So just suck it up and do it. It does not take much more than 1-2 hours of dedicated interview prep over the course of a month to be successful in whiteboard style interviews.

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

#112

Post by walshemj »

krosaen wrote: post #64
sfaf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't rails count as a backend engineer? Would you also not count someone who works with Django as a backend engineer?

I would definitely distinguish between html / css / javascript and server side application code, be it in ruby or python, I just didn't think working on the server side application logic completed the "full stack". To me full stack means you are into the systems a bit too and would be capable of setting up the stack itself (and perhaps enhancing it, or setting up custom batch systems), not just working effectively wi…

Id say some one who is comfortable working at all the layers 1-7 ie be able to design spec and set up (or supervise the set up) of a small office network

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

#113

Post by jdminhbg »

ubersoldat2k7 wrote: post #82
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…

Maybe I'm wrong but the salary an American gets is the whole package and they have to figure out their income tax, social security, etc. In Europe a good part of what the company pays for an employee is "hidden" but can account to 50%-100% of the gross salary you receive. So if you're getting 50k company is really paying 75k.

The "all-in" cost of an employee is also much higher than the nominal rate in the US. The employer pays ~8% in social security/medicare taxes, unemployment insurance, most or all of the health insurance premium, etc.

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

#114

Post by Bartweiss »

bertjk wrote: post #26
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.

That's a huge point. "Code bootcamp" can mean a huge variety of things.

At its best, it often means "technical, business experienced, just transitioned into intensive software study", which is an enticing candidate. At its worst, it means something like "paid $50k to learn basic Javascript". Lumping those two together makes it really hard to draw any conclusions about experience.

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

#115

Post by Rainymood »

On a related tangent, this is why it is so important to have a so called "Emergency fund"! An emergency fund is a little bit of money (often 1-6x average monthly expenses) such that if you get canned you can survive for 1-6 months without having to work so you can focus on applying for jobs and getting a new job without having to stress when your next bill is due.

I agree that 6 months living expenses is on the high side, but make sure to get at least >1 month of savings in ... make this a priority! I would argue to even do this before paying off your student loans. Why? Because this is such a 'small' sum of money which can really save your ass in the long run when something DOES go wrong. And if every month has a certain probability p of going down the shitters and you approach it like a geometric distribution then its a simple probabilistic (near) certainty.

Remember this: emergencies come unannounced (else they wouldn't be emergencies).

Get your emergency fund up and running !!

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

#116

Post by seangrogg »

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 would argue that there is a considerable amount of loose change floating around in the bay area tech scene that makes it possible for even young companies to pay large salaries to developers. $100k is pretty common for L1 developers, $120k is roughly average for anyone that can show they've built something before.

I can't speak to a lot of programs, but HR is roughly 800 hours of cultivating people with "enough experience to write higher order functions" into - specifically - web developers. These students implemented a binary tree in their first week, wrote relatively secure chat apps in their third, know React and Angular by the sixth, and have 4 side-projects (one of which over a full month) by the end. Meanwhile, CS grads have been taught that JavaScript is a toy language that can't solve a problem of any reasonable complexity and are instead competing for enterprise Java positions amongst themselves.

Is there a bubble? Probably. But there's also a market for individuals with a set of skills that isn't being met by our university system.

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

#118

Post by grogenaut »

grogenaut wrote: post #45
throwawaysbdif wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you call it out to me during your interview during my standard warm-up question of "what have you done that you are particularly proud of it was challenging" and you don't bomb the rest of the interview then I WILL go look it up. I use things like this to remove any coding skills doubts during a debrief. Just putting it on the resume means there's maybe a 20% chance I'll see it. I'm usually giving the holistic sys…

Note I'm not saying to do interviews in Python and ruby but if you're solid in one of them it's like real working pseudocode compared to Java c# c++. But use your a#1 solidest language. Unless u have more than one and that language makes a particular problem trivial.

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

#119

Post by this-dang-guy »

dohertyjf wrote: post #83
st3v3r wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like it's in the Bay Area, where that level of salary is kind of a minimum, given cost of living.

Precisely. Bay Area is unlike any other.

It is. Of course, I haven't worked anywhere with onshore coders in quite some time.

I can totally get why if little/no-exp devs are expecting six figure salaries.

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

#120

Post by bluedino »

>> I applied to 291 companies, did 32 phone screens, 16 technical screens, 13 coding challenges, 11 on-sites, and received 8 offers.

How much time would that take?

Figure 15 minutes per company - 4,365 minutes, or 72 hours. And that's time just spent finding the company, changing around a cover letter, and then emailing it and responding etc.

32 phone screens? Let's say 30 minutes each, that's 960 minutes, or 16 hours of phone screens. Forget accounting for prep time, etc

16 technical screens, an hour or two, let's go 90 minutes. Again, not accounting for prep or anything else - 1440 minutes, or another 24 hours.

13 coding challenges. From experience companies want you spending no more than 1 day or 8 hours on a coding challenge, so 104 hours here.

11 on-sites. At least 2 hours each, 22 hours, not accounting for travel or anything like that.

Also, I would have targeted applications to a lot less than 291 companies. I guess if I was trying to get my first job I'd be a lot less picky, but the 'ideal' company to work at can be few and far between.

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