Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.freecodecamp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–398 of 398 posts

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

#391

Post by kafkaesq »

voycey wrote: post #306
mkurz wrote: post #285

Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…

100% this! The tech world is due an implosion if this continues, you cant have people with ZERO programming experience beyond a guided 12 week bootcamp being offered anything more than a Junior role?? This single sentence terrifies me: "At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education." $120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I ho…

$120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I hope he lasts 2 weeks

The reality, I find, is that (if properly motivated, and possessed of sufficient native intellect) once you get your foot in the door, you can learn the ins and outs of any programming role pretty darn quickly. OK, maybe you won't be able to design a compiler or anything like that. But for most of the standard web development $foobar stuff... you can pretty much pick it up as you go.

The people to be wary for (and weed out) are the outright imposters (those who blatantly lie about their capabilities), or the chronic attitude cases (which includes a great many experienced and ostensibly highly qualified people).

Not the inexperienced.

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

#392

Post by kafkaesq »

dvcrn wrote: post #313
voycey wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this! The tech world is due an implosion if this continues, you cant have people with ZERO programming experience beyond a guided 12 week bootcamp being offered anything more than a Junior role?? This single sentence terrifies me: "At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education." $120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I ho…

This is why you need good screening processes. I on the other hand got taught to be able humble and make compromises especially when still being a junior. Looking back at my early days, when I wanted a position that I knew would change my career, I purposely asked for a lower salary in the beginning to compensate for my junior level or other skills (language for example when I moved into a country where I wasn't flue…

120k for 12 weeks of experience is insane. Sign me up for whatever bootcamp that was

It wasn't the bootcamp -- it was the self-study, and more to the point, his ability to reverse-engineer the interview process which got him that offer.

Which probably says a lot more about the current gold standard, "let's see how many hoops you can jump through" interview process than about the merits of bootcamps, per se.

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

#393

Post by kafkaesq »

harmegido wrote: post #297
mkurz wrote: post #285

Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…

The article does read a lot like the "Psychopath's Guide To Career-Hunting". Honestly, the tone reminded me a lot of some of my undergrad peers who were pursuing investment banking jobs, which I suppose makes sense considering his about section. That all said, if your goal is to get the highest paying job possible, this seems like useful advice.

The article does read a lot like the "Psychopath's Guide To Career-Hunting".

Yup. Which is exactly the mindset that the current interview culture most strongly rewards.

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

#394

Post by hackaway »

pzh wrote: post #338
harmegido wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does read a lot like the "Psychopath's Guide To Career-Hunting". Honestly, the tone reminded me a lot of some of my undergrad peers who were pursuing investment banking jobs, which I suppose makes sense considering his about section. That all said, if your goal is to get the highest paying job possible, this seems like useful advice.

This a 100%! While I was reading his guide, I couldn't shake off that jazz track from "The Talented Mr Ripley"...

This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT-fOr29OfA

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

#395

Post by sandesp »

mkurz wrote: post #360
sandesp wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? We live in a capitalism. With all the things you see happening in the tech world you cannot stand some guy using the system to get a six figures salary. Or are you angry because you are one of those programmers who took years to progress through small promotions and cannot stand this whole world of bootcamp-grads making six-figures after a 3-months training.

I am not angry at all - what I really am is astonished. > ...cannot stand this whole world of bootcamp-grads making six-figures after a 3-months training. Hmm... Why not just get rid of all these annoying CS courses at University? I mean - who needs them anyway if you could just spend 3 months to reach such a badass salary?

What I am saying is the industry will behave with demand and supply. You can only expect bootcamps to get more and more popular with increasing software engineering jobs and increasing number of people changing careers. Bootcamps happen to be a feasible choice for people struggling to learn on their own and looking to find mentorship and structured learning environment without spending years and large tuition fees. However, if you are dissatisfied with the bootcamp education then vilifying someone who is just trying to help other people like him is not the right way.

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

#396

Post by garysieling »

throwawaysbdif wrote: post #379
garysieling wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the interviewer know that you wrote the code on your github?

Because I can explain anything about it. because the module is published on maven central under my name with my private key, hosted on a domain registered to me, on a GitHub account that's literally my name and a domain that's my last name. My primary email is firstname@lastname.com. A common theme with employers not checking GitHub is that the code could be lifted but in some cases it's glaringly obvious that it is…

That's fair. I don't think I've really seen readmes on the github projects people list on their resumes, let alone seeing their stuff published to maven.

I do think the original article suggests that if employers put a lot of stock in github, the coding academy people would quickly have the "best" github pages.

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

#397

Post by crystalPalace »

taneq wrote: post #289
nitrogen wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is... bizarre. He should look at the abandoned internal repos of the average software company's experiments and realign his expectations with reality.

Maybe he thought it was a dedicated portfolio repo rather than just "this is where I keep my stuff"?

I think that was their thought process. My personal Github is a bit of a graveyard/dumping ground but I saw this as a wakeup call and got rid of a bunch of forked repos and combined some unfinished projects into other repos.

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

#398

Post by kafkaesq »

throwawayblah23 wrote: post #292
throwawaysbdif wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too surprised either, but I marvel at the amount of time wasted preparing and asking all the stupid questions when they could just look at my code for 5 minutes. Like, the main file in one of my libraries clearly uses concurrent locking, it even says so in readme.md . These were all last round on site interviews and we spent maybe 30 minutes of 2 devs time going over pointless stuff when they could just skim…

This. A company, that advertised here on the last "Who's Hiring" sent me a code project. Wasn't quite enough to be 'you're doing a sprint item for us', but merited decent effort: - write a log monitoring console program that consumes an actively written to file - parse out specific parts of the log and aggregate them every 15s, display summary data - generate 'alert' notification when log messages/second (over the la…

Last I ever heard.

By all means, please do "out" this company. Preferably as a response their next "Who's Hiring?" posting.

You'll be doing not only your fellow developers a huge favor, but the guilty party as well. Being as they need to get their heads around the fact that it's not in their interest to keep pulling off bad behavior like this -- and if they need a good dose of public shaming for the message to sink in, then so be it.

Post reply on HN