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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

#191

Post by enraged_camel »

willhslade wrote: post #151
Practicality wrote: post #90

3 months of applying? Wow. Seems like whatever he got was well-earned to me. I really stick to projects too, but this is massive. I just don't have the time/patience for 3-months of searching while I am currently working. Kind of makes me think that the market is selecting people who have someone else supporting them so they can do all this interview research. Seems backward in my opinion. I keep hearing "interviewin…

Confidence is a proxy for competence, which, through the interview process, we are imperfectly testing.

>>Confidence is a proxy for competence

I take it you've never heard of Dunning-Kruger effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Or its opposite, Imposter Syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

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

#192

Post by taurath »

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…

No, almost nobody is getting that for "nothing". However you can get that with just one of those. I'd say 3-4 years experience in the right field with the right learning that would be a very easy ask. Or a substantial side project applicable towards the place they're applying.

And you're really just talking about the bay area where competition is STIFF for talent. The hardest thing is finding people who can actually do the job - degree, experience or side project aside.

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

#193

Post by poikniok »

sushid wrote: post #189
thatswrong0 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people I know have roommates though and pay between $1300 and $2000/month, ranging from decent Mission apartments to a nice Castro house. For $2900 a month you can easily live in a luxury two bedroom apartment.

The first part sounds about right. The second part is definitely wrong. For $2900 you won't be able to afford even a 1BR (unless we're talking about place far out from the main parts of the city). For instance, places around me in SoMa have 2BRs listed above $4,500.

I think he means with a roommate, at least that is how I understood it. 5.8k for 2 bedroom luxury apartment sounds about right.

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

#194

Post by camtarn »

patricklynch wrote: post #126
_petronius wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is that it's just a good way to annoy people whose job isn't hiring. At best, you're risking annoying someone who is busy (and your email being deleted with no reply), at worst, you're actively penalizing yourself if you are demonstrating that you aren't willing to go through the standard hiring process that the company uses. (For other terrible ways that job applicants try to "stand out", Ask A Manager is a…

The fact that his response rate when from If anything, assuming most companies have an 'employee referral' program, emailing a random non-recruiter may have the additional advantage that, for no cost to you, someone at that company becomes incentivized for several thousand dollars to lobby for you.

It's very much a tragedy of the commons scenario, though: if one person emails a random within the company, they're going to stand out, maybe even get put in as a blind referral. If everybody starts doing this, then it's just spam, and the emails are more likely to get dropped on the floor.

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

#195

Post by taurath »

gpjt wrote: post #48
virmundi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no familiarity with the UK tax practices, but what kind of burden are you for an employer? The US has 7.5% tax per employee. There are a few others such as health insurance.

There's an extra tax paid by the employer, technically "employer's National Insurance contributions", which is about 10% (up to a limit). So that's comparable to US payroll taxes. Because the National Health Service is generally considered to offer a decent-enough level of care, there's normally no private health insurance in most tech jobs -- so no extra costs there.

Add 30% of salary for each employee in the US to get "total compensation" which means health/dental/life/vision/retirement benefits.

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

#196

Post by scirocco »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #102
jmeister wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a combination of two factors: 1. Programmers have lower status in the UK relative to the US - UK is more status/class conscious in general whereas US is more about money/productivity/impact. 2. Due to a bigger entrepreneurship culture in the US the opportunity cost for programmers is higher and that drives salaries higher across the board.

I'd say that is true for most of Europe. The status system is a big burden, and it makes personal interactions less pleasant.

Hard to go to UK and not hear parents bragging about what school their children go to...

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

#197

Post by enraged_camel »

sakopov wrote: post #61

3 months of boot camp and we call ourselves "engineers" (not this guy. I'm generalizing). I can't even begin to imagine what licensed engineers feel like when they read stuff like this.

At my company we make a clear distinction between developer and engineer. The former title is for juniors who are mostly just writing code, whereas the latter title is reserved for senior team members who demonstrate solid system design and engineering skills.

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

#198

Post by civilian »

jmeister wrote: post #46
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 think it's a combination of two factors: 1. Programmers have lower status in the UK relative to the US - UK is more status/class conscious in general whereas US is more about money/productivity/impact. 2. Due to a bigger entrepreneurship culture in the US the opportunity cost for programmers is higher and that drives salaries higher across the board.

Yeah, it's the lack of supply that drives salary, benefits and status for American software engineers.

I do wonder about the positions that are at or below my salary that have higher status. Like the non-profit public policy lawyer I know, or medical students / doctoral residents, or the business-side people who get to _make decisions_ while I'm kind of just implementing their business decisions.

Last winter I dated a writer who has some local celebrity (definitely has some status), and she was getting down on herself about how little she's paid, and how she works a part-time job to make ends meet. I was also kind of depressed that winter, but more for reasons that I never make super impactful decisions where I'm at. I'm not steering the company's decisions much; the best I can do is be involved in architecture and be a faster/better coder. And the code I write is read by, at best, 6 other people. My PRs are usually just read by 1-2 other people. Whereas, what my ex was writing would be read by thousands of people easily.

I don't mind the idea of emptying out my own biases to try to absorb the craft as much as possible. But I do feel like, because engineers are in such high demand, it's not efficient for businesses to let engineers think about product/business decisions, even though engineers would have good intuition for those areas. Being at the end of a waterfall kinda sucks.

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

#199

Post by blister »

lllorddino wrote: post #105

I just hate how these "bootcamps" are only in it for the money and then they have the audacity to tell their students to LIE on interviews. How about you actually pick a language YOU love, make projects, improve. Node.js LUL

That seems a little bit extreme, in my opinion. I'm writing the curriculum for a full-stack web developer bootcamp that we're launching in the early part of next year.

We're all "kind of" in it for the money. I have to support a full-time teacher salary for three months, administrative overhead, software/hardware licensing, curriculum development, and have enough left over to make it worthwhile to continue teaching these classes in the future. But we're all driven to fill a need that we see in the market (not enough engineers/devs available) and most of us perceive the shortcomings of traditional formal education and think we have an approach that can improve things.

As an example, I've been the lead engineer / director of engineering for the past five years and have realized that all of the junior engineers that we hire out of college generally take 2-4 months to get spun up on regular software development practices. We've got to teach them version control, team work habits, peer reviews, requirement solicitation, design document writing, etc. And all of those skills are on top of our industry-specific requirements.

I'd much rather hire someone that was passionate enough to pay for a bootcamp, wants to be an engineer, and has learned enough to start contributing fairly quickly.

And while we're going to be coaching our students on how to kick ass in interviews, we're certainly not going to advocate lying. We're going to focus on confidence, proper responses for things they don't already know about, and even get in to the "submitting your resume" process.

Don't be so cynical. Computers have only been an integral part of everyone's lives for the past 15 years or so. The entire world is trying to figure out how to train people how to be productive members of a post-labor society.

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

#200

Post by poikniok »

merpnderp wrote: post #174
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…

In a tiny town in the middle of nowhere middle america, where the cost of living is 90% the national average, we can't keep college grads starting at $75k with an assured 10% bonus. This is a town where all marble 4,000 square foot McMansions start at $240k. bestplaces.net puts this as a comparable salary to around $280K in San Fran.

No surprise when those same college grads get comp packages of 200k / year at top places.
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