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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

#141

Post by Bartweiss »

st3v3r wrote: post #73
steve-howard wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not shocked that nobody looks at your GitHub. Reading other people's code takes time and energy that a lot of people aren't going to spend if they have a ton of candidates to sift through.

Yeah, but everyone says, "you need to have a GitHub. You're not serious about coding unless you have a GitHub. That's how you get jobs now."

This is the issue I see.

Every CodingHorror post and list of hiring tips demands a GitHub profile, with the implication that it had better contain useful, quality code. (And with a bit of a threat that you'd better not put any hacked-together, one-off project in there, even though everyone has some.)

That's good, I see the value of it, and I also understand why interviewers don't want to read it. But new devs have every right to be annoyed when the industry-standard wisdom says that you have to have a thing which is never used.

(The real answer is probably "New devs, get ready for the interview gamut. Experienced devs, call a contact and have a GitHub profile." But somehow that never comes up.)

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

#142

Post by hasbroslasher »

I too went to a bootcamp and spent about 3 months searching for a job afterwards. I didn't study anything. I let my bootcamp knowledge get written to disk and freed up more room for new stuff. I drank a lot of beer and went hiking in the woods as much as I could. I worked on my projects ~5-7 days a week but never for 8 hours at a time. Just a constant, undirected exploration and work towards building new things. Granted, I had some background in tech (particularly in data science, stats, college-level programming) so I might be an edge case.

At first I thought I was screwed, but after 3 months I'd completed 3 vastly different projects and it showed in my interviews. I could speak intelligently about 5 or 6 different programming languages and a multitude of database technologies, libraries and had my college-years algo/OO knowledge in the background. I had done everything from front-end design to Machine Learning, low-level algorithms engineering to full scale apps. And then I got an awesome job. I doubled my yearly earnings. People may scoff at bootcamps, but it helped in my case - if nothing else I got half a year to mess around with computers instead of doing that after work like I had been for the last couple of years.

As far as interviewing goes: I got rejected a lot. I rejected a lot of companies, especially those who tried to sell themselves to me. I was picky about not working in a megapolis hell. I didn't bug people if they didn't get back to me. I turned down second interviews if the person who interviewed me was an asshole or was non-technical. And it all worked out.

Unsurprisingly, I landed at a company with a lot of views similar to mine. We all mock Silicon Valley. We don't work around the clock, we like having lives outside of work. Few of us are traditional tech people. All in all, a very life-affirming experience.

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

#143

Post by Sorry_Rum_Ham »

dmitrygr wrote: post #110

> A study by Triplebyte has found that bootcamp grads are weaker in these areas than computer science grads. Really?! Who'da thunk? > At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education. Hm... > Why? Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” And you think that after a few…

I mean, call it what you will, but a lot of these people are getting offers, man. Good ones. Which is more than I can say for myself with my comp sci degree and two years experience. Although my location is likely to blame for that.

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

#144

Post by santoriv »

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…

My sister graduated from Hack Reactor with no previous programming experience and a degree in Oceanography from UC Berkeley. Her salary is 115K. She spent a couple of months applying for jobs. I think it's basically a function of the developer shortage in SF right now.

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

#145

Post by wnevets »

fecak wrote: post #132
savanaly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

Tech recruiter here. 85K even seems like an outlier to me for a bootcamp graduate unless you had lots of other credibility that came along with the bootcamp experience. I don't think I could get 85K for a new bootcamp grad in Philly, which is a couple tiers below NY/SF in terms of salary. More like 60-70K I'd expect.

>More like 60-70K I'd expect.

As a developer in Philly, even that seems too high for someone with only bootcamp experience

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

#146

Post by RGamma »

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…

It probably also has to do with the fact that in SF the super-rich can circlejerk each other in their tech echo chamber (bubble?) unimpeded and cast aside silly concepts such as societal stability or the Leistungsfähigkeitsprinzip ("ability-to-pay-principle"). The USA certainly is a wondrous place...

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

#147

Post by ubernostrum »

endymi0n wrote: post #52
dominotw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero chance of this happening until google/facebook stop doing it. This comment appears in every single interview/hiring thread for past decade. Only change I've seen is actually the opposite now there are 5-10 "rounds" of these quizzes even in a no name enterprise companies.

There is anecdotal evidence they did: http://qz.com/378228/google-is-over-those-ridiculous-brainte...

They weren't "over it" by last fall.

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

#148

Post by ubernostrum »

dmitrygr wrote: post #110

> A study by Triplebyte has found that bootcamp grads are weaker in these areas than computer science grads. Really?! Who'da thunk? > At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education. Hm... > Why? Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” And you think that after a few…

Given the people I've interviewed who had extensive "fundamental" "CS" "education", vs. the people I've worked with who've done bootcamps, I'll take the bootcamp any day of the week and tell the CS folks to get a refund from the university, because the CS folks straight up can't code on average.

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

#149

Post by seangrogg »

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…

The term "full stack" often only seems to denote someone with both front- and back-end experience; anything below the server application is often considered the domain of "operations".

I do think it would be nice if the term carried more meaning, but given most companies are running their systems on top IaaS/PaaS offerings from Amazon/Google/Microsoft/etc and tend not to care about things beneath the application layer until they're making more money than sin it's fine as-is for the time being.

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

#150

Post by chrisseaton »

dood wrote: post #95
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.

London COL is very similar to SF/NY I believe.

Thanks to trains you can commute into London fairly easily from somewhere more affordable. And it isn't driving so you can work or read as well.
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