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Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

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Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#41

Post by justinhj »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #28
huntermeyer wrote: post #18

In 2013 I attended Epicodus in Portland, OR. At the time, it was a 17-week Ruby on Rails bootcamp. I moved back to my home state of Florida following graduation. Within two months I landed a Junior Rails Developer position at Listen360 - a badass company in Georgia. I relocated and have been with the company for over three years now. In that time I've developed JrDevJobs.com, a job board for junior devs. Built severa…

Good for you! I ask all the interns that I interview to hire, "why do you want this job?" I can pretty much tell by the answer alone whether or not they are going to work out. Those that say, "I didn't know what to study" or "I heard there was a good career in this" I can pretty much write off. They almost never want to learn anything except what they learned for a grade. Often its over for them after school, they'll…

There's another aspect to this though. Programmers have to be smart and get things done. In my experience of interviewing and hiring these qualities can entirely orthogonal. I've hired people who program enthusiastically on side projects and study advanced topics at the weekend but are pain in the workplace; overcomplicating tasks and working slowly while others deliver faster and with better quality. At the same time I've worked with people who express no interest in any realm of computing outside their direct area of expertise. They work hard from 9-5 being extremely productive and I know that they don't think about so much as a bit or a byte until they come into work the next day.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#42

Post by lukedavis »

huntermeyer wrote: post #22
lukedavis wrote: post #5

I did Hack Reactor in 2014 and work at Google now as a software engineer (it's currently 2017).

That's awesome! "Where" in Google are you working? I'm naive to their team structure, but curious if it's in site-reliability, embedded systems, ads, search, etc.

Photos

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#43

Post by pharrlax »

Graduated coding bootcamp 2.5 years ago. Currently on my 2nd developer job, making 750% of my pre-bootcamp salary. Most of my classmates continued on to do development professionally. Most commonly focused on Node and frontend JS frameworks, i.e. Angular 1 and React.

A handful tried and failed to get development jobs, and went back to their old career, or pivoted more or less laterally to a tech-adjacent field that pays less than development. I can tell you that 100% of the people who failed to get development jobs were people who, during the bootcamp, visibly put in the bare minimum of effort to skate by.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#46

Post by nearlynameless »

I went to Dev Bootcamp in 2012. I was self taught beforehand, and had done a little bit of contracting work.

They focused pretty heavily on soft skills, like communication and pairing, and also somewhat on generic software construction ideas, on thinking through a problem and breaking it down into its component pieces. The curriculum used JS and Rails, although I didn’t feel that I had much more than a surface familiarity of either by the end of the cohort.

I think that, in general, if a bootcamp has a decent focus on software construction and doesn't totally fall down on teaching you the technical stuff, you’ll probably be prepared to work, at least, as a junior dev. But, you can't just rely on a bootcamp. You really have to spend a lot of time (like, a ton of time) learning on your own, writing code and reading code others have written.

Since then, I’ve been working steadily as a mostly front-end and sometimes full-stack developer.

My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps. But, I believe most of the people who wanted to be devs are still doing just that!

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#47

Post by proudfoot »

swyx wrote: post #30
bacontacos wrote: post #26

Graduated from Hack Reactor in 2014. I'm a Senior Software Engineer at a large company now. I was prepared enough to not totally screw things up at my first job. I was an expert in Javascript and reasonably knowledgeable at data structures and how to implement basic web stuff. I'm now more focused on back end things...AWS, infrastructure, services, etc. As far as I know, most of my cohort is still working at good job…

bootcamps are pretty light on backend/devops type knowledge which turns out pretty critical for "real" jobs. Do you think this can generally be picked up later or should people in bootcamps do something like an AWS certification (just to pick an arbitrary skill proof point) to be sufficiently well-rounded?

So are new grads though, this is typically learnt on the job.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#48

Post by speaktochris »

Attended a local bootcamp-like program in my area. Afterwards started working at a local startup as a jr dev. The pay increase wasn't as astronomical as they hype at the time suggested but I knew it was expanding my opportunities way more than my previous gig.

The startup then got acquired and I got experience working with a larger company. Left that after a while and now have my dream job as a Developer Advocate! Literally the job I have wanted ever since I got into programming and attended my first hackathon. Can't believe where I am now.

To answer your other questions:

1) Did the bootcamp prepare me for the job? Yes, but only in that it taught me Rails and I could begin working at this startup that did mostly Rails. The startup took a chance on me, I think that's what really prepared me to succeed.

2) What about my cohort? During the program me and some other devs worked on projects outside of the class. We attended community events, hackathons, and worked on OSS with local devs. All of those that participated in stuff like that with me all went on to have successful careers. Those that didn't? I think they're still taking classes or interviewing for jobs.

Re: Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

#49

Post by _e »

handbanana wrote: post #14

Finished bootcamp mid 2014, currently a Software Developer (full stack) making 105k base (110k total package) with some great benefits (and no state income tax). I had zero background before the bootcamp, and the bootcamp itself was pretty shocking. The biggest part of the bootcamp was having it on my resume - giving my limited knowledge "legitimacy". EDIT: My starting salary was mid 40s after I finished bootcamp. An…

Hiring three people at $40k/yr each at the beginning is safer than hiring one experienced person at $120k/yr. Maybe one or two of the three don't pan out but, at least, you didn't invest all your time into one person who might ultimately be the wrong fit.
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