What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by Xyik » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 9:46 PM UTC

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #166

Bartweiss wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The average age in my class was 28. People weren't ex-baristas. They were people from various backgrounds, often technical-related. I was a Math and Econ double major with a minor in applied statistics, then spent 6 years in finance doing equities trading. I was drastically more qualified than the average 22 year old with a CS degree.

Many 22 year olds with a CS degree have been coding since they were 12.

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

#232

Post by cableshaft » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

to3m wrote: post #123

cagataygurturk wrote: post #78

So whoever hired the guy should feel bad. He explains the strategy to boost his payroll, he was hiding the bootcamp he was attending and he was showing himself as experienced dev. And also why would you hire someone if 300 other companies were not interested in that person? Ironically his lack of experience shows itself even in the first fancy function he writes on the blog post. Would not this unnecessary if block b…

I always read that sort of if block as the mark of somebody who's been round the block a few times. Because they know that one day you'll want to place a breakpoint on one case or the other, and they know that one day they'll want to know what the value of the condition is before it's used, and one day they'll want to put some logging in, and so on - and they know they won't thank their old selves for making that har…

While I agree it's often advantageous to set a local variable instead of just immediately returning an expression for breakpoint reasons, there's really no reason to have that if statement in there instead of just returning the local variable, and I think it reads poorly.

It's trivial to add the if statement if it's truly necessary in the future (like if you need to evaluate the variable beyond simply whether to return true or false).

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

#233

Post by NathanCH » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

hn_user2 wrote: post #214

Rainymood wrote: post #115

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…

I was taught: For the first 2 years, live on 50% of your income. Eat Ramen, coupons, live like a begger, and save up 1 year of income. Then divide that by 12 and use that as a salary for a year while collecting another year. Repeat. Steady income, always a year behind. Of course this was back when I was trying to go into film. A bit more unstable than software development.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this before. That said, it's not easy in some cities where rent is 40-50% of your income.

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

#234

Post by Declanomous » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

throwawaysbdif wrote: post #36

goldenbeet wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that the "easier" interviews are from companies that are less competitive/less established. So their offers are going to be lower not because the candidate comes off as less qualified, but because they just don't have the money to pay their employees the 120K+ salaries. So that graphic is also misleading.

This hasn't been my experience in general. Most of my hard interviews were at startups. To sound old and jaded, I think a lot of it has to do with the startup mentality "we only hire the top 0.0001% of coders " . Once you've been in the business for years you realize the fallacy of that thinking and try to hire good coders with a focus on finding people fun to work with. Most big companies I applied at had about half…

I'm a bit jaded about startups myself and I'm not even 30. The couple I worked in seemed like "we are so smart" cults, which drove me absolutely nuts. The people working there were smart, but their definition of intelligence was narrow-minded. I find it very unlikely that you are hiring the "best-of-the-best" if the vast majority of your employees are men under the age of thirty who attended a very specific list of colleges.

Running a company is a team activity. I think there are too many sports metaphors in business, but if you've ever played a team sport you realize that the best teams are usually the ones with the players who play best together, not the ones with the most talented players. I could run this metaphor in to the ground, but the point is that hiring only the "best-of-the-best" is neither a credible claim nor a good methodology for creating a successful business. You might be able to do that when your company is 5 people, but it's probably much better to have good role players who are a cultural fit for your organization in the long run.

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

#235

Post by evonsdesigns » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

ryanmccullagh wrote: post #179

evonsdesigns wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Companies need to know these people can walk the walk. Sure, I don't expect you to know all the spec details. Googling the spec or asking questions is fine. I had one interviewee that went through a similar boot camp. The discussion portion of the interview went exceptionally well; he knew all the topics and had opinions on using certain technologies over others. It seemed like a good fit, until we got hi…

Define the object assignment? Was it really just an assignment statement? I was rejected with almost no feedback from a company this month. I feel I solved their live coding thing correctly using a recursive approach. However, I was told they didn't like my coding style, so they didn't move me forward. They also said I moved the mouse too much.

The structure has the test pre-written and the actual code empty for the interviewee to fill in. As simple as setting person.name = 'Jeff', a trivial test to anyone with even basic JavaScript experience. I'm sorry about your poor experience interviewing. Barring a lack of understanding of any styles, coding style should not matter, that's what linting rules are for. Hopefully future companies you interview with will have a more reasonable interviewing process.

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

#236

Post by sedachv » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #167

mordocai wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call myself full stack and mean what you mean. I typically have to explain that when I say full stack I mean "literally full stack" as in I have a working level of knowledge with every piece of the system from hardware/kernel to networking to databases to application. I do agree that when people use the term though they just mean "I can code in a backend and a frontend language".

>>when I say full stack I mean "literally full stack" as in I have a working level of knowledge with every piece of the system from hardware/kernel to networking to databases to application That seems like an impossible definition to fulfill by most humans today, though. I mean, how "deep" do you take it? Pre-processed code? Assembly code? Object/Machine code? Computers today (especially server-based systems) are so…

> That seems like an impossible definition to fulfill by most humans today, though. I mean, how "deep" do you take it? Pre-processed code? Assembly code? Object/Machine code?

There is a lot of dumb jargon, misleading labels, and wrong analogies borrowed from other fields that are popular in tech right now. You can call yourself whatever you want, but if you have never used gdb and call yourself "full-stack," you are being pretentious.

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

#237

Post by ubernostrum » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

MikeKusold wrote: post #170

ubernostrum wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess that would depend on if you are looking for a programmer or an engineer.

"Engineer" -- and I say this knowing full well it's the title assigned to me by my company -- doesn't entail any meaningful difference I've ever seen. Other than some architecture astronaut types I've worked with who felt that writing code was too dirty a task for them.

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

#238

Post by FT_intern » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

krosaen wrote: post #55

I'm happy for this guy, and there are really good tips in here for managing an application funnel. Like others, I'm surprised offers north of 110 are possible given his experience, and can't help but bristle a bit at him being a self described "full stack" developer when it appears he's a front end developer (does rails really count as being a backend engineer?). But he worked exceptionally hard at the process (guess…

"Full stack" means front end + some work with an ORM to me

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

#239

Post by bhntr3 » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

zengid wrote: post #104

Is anyone else bothered by the code at the beginning of this article? Simply returning the expression would have had the same effect, ie: function getDevJob(studying, hardWork, luck){ return studying && hardWork && luck; } I know that it might not make the code readable to novice javaScripters, but it bothers me anyway..

Yes.

It's a rhetorical device. And some could argue that code is also a rhetorical device.

But the only argument an if else block that returns true or false based on a boolean makes is "I'm not very good at this"

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

#240

Post by evanelias » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 10:04 PM UTC

> He told us to send emails directly to real people with each application. It could be anybody. As long as someone read it.

> For most small companies or C-level executives, the email format is usually firstName@dreamCompany.com. For larger companies, it may be firstName.lastName@dreamCompany.com.

This advice is horribly annoying, and I really wish people would stop recommending this awful email guesswork garbage.

I'm an engineer, and I once had a [firstname]@[company].com email address at a company. Later on, the company hired a recruiter with same first name, followed by a head of marketing with same first name.

Naturally I started getting tons of unsolicited mail, several times per day, from people who simply assumed my email address corresponds to one of the other people with the same first name. This included a lot of resumes from people who graduated from coding bootcamp.

Often the same person would email repeatedly, a few days apart. It definitely did not help their chance of getting hired.