Ask HN: If you worked with a grad from a code bootcamp, how effective were they?

I will say that where I work we appear to have managed to get on a list of "startups to send your resume to" by one or two of these bootcamp shops, and the resumes tend to be severely underwhelming. Here are some of the things that have been negatively affecting my reaction to them (I share in hopes this is useful, not to bash bootcamps or folks that attend them!):

ONLY A GITHUB PROFILE

It seems pretty clear that the bootcamps told you we really care about your github profile, and that sometimes gets interpreted as "to the exclusion of everything else".

APPARENTLY BORN SIX MONTHS AGO

Related to the over-emphasis on github profiles is the exclusion of anything not-code related. I get that code bootcamps attract lots of folks who maybe got a political science degree or spent the last three years in real estate. Tell me that. I'd love to see what you've been up to, we're looking to hire you, not your ability to code. I hope these institutions aren't making folks feel like their past isn't valuable because it didn't involve Rails.

ALSO THE GITHUB PROFILE IS BORING

The profiles tend to have some code camp rails homework in them. It's hard to go from learning to code to having a github profile that's impressive in a short period of time (Hell, I've been working for well over a decade and my github profile isn't impressive!).. That said, if you do want me to care about your github profile I'd rather see signs of enthusiasm in the form of personal gists or projects or thoughtful bug reports or feature tickets on other projects.

DISGUISES THE CODE BOOTCAMP AFFILIATION

Seems like the elephant in the room on these things is where you've been learning to code and how you found us. Many of the resumes seem to avoid being transparent about this. I wanna know which bootcamp you did, what got you interested, and how it went.

THEY TOLD YOU TO EMAIL US

It's clear that we're on a list and plenty of candidates email us without knowing (or maybe caring) about what we do. That's a non-starter. Frankly, I doubt that the people who even put us on the list of shops to mail looked any closer than a crunch-base profile or Who's Hiring post on HN.

RAILS

The resumes I'm seeing clearly come from a bootcamp that emphasizes Rails and JS/HTML. That's great, but we're not a rails shop and the candidate is brand spanking new to this. It's probably better that you continue your investment in Rails before doing a wholesale dive into another platform.

At any rate, I love that camps like this exist. I've long thought our industry needs really good trade education to supplement CS programs which are focused and affordable ways to launch folks who are interested into software development. I just think the packaging and presentation of folks coming out of these things could use some work.

I don't think a survey can quite capture the amount of detail necessary for providing an evaluation for something like this.

In my experience of interviewing, working with and mentoring code bootcamp students, the #1 deficiency I found in every single one of them (a sample size between 10-15), is that for the first year to year and a half after graduation they all lack the ability for trivial problem solving (why am I getting this error?) and finding an answer on their own (read: using Google). It's as if the code in these bootcamps is completely error free and debugging never happens, or my other hypotheses is having mentors/teachers around to hold your hand at any moment doesn't help build the "Just Google It" muscles.

Middle of next week. (I'm leaving town for a wedding tomorrow morning, sorry).

I did not have positive experiences working with the Dev Bootcamp and grads from other camps at my company, which hired a number of them, 4 or so of which I got to know. My two cents is that, like the bootcamps, they are very good at selling themselves, and they are rather charismatic and friendly people at that. But I did not find they were good problem solvers, they are very junior post bootcamp. My team stopped considering resumes from any boot camp participants, unless they had an engineering background.

What I think's going on is that many of them want to found startups, so they want to be technical enough to launch prototypes, give investor confidence, etc. but they don't want to invest much further than that. And I think that's ultimately a problematic approach, as it's not going to be good for the people that hire you, and not good for the startup you found either, thinking of the recent poster who, as a 'technical cofounder', is being squeezed out of his company by the CTO because he's just not good enough.

I read in another comment this survey did not prevent multiple voting, so I'm sharing my opinion here as it's unclear if the survey will be skewed.

It was an intentional choice, based on my (incorrect) impression that it was exclusively more advanced folks. Though now I'll act like vitno's logic was mine, too :)

I think if I were to do it over I might include it, but at this point I'd rather not change anything and risk messing something up in the survey data. Thanks for bringing it up.