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At a previous job, we hired two people from General Assembly. One was decent; the other far less so. Admittedly, the hire that was less useful had other issues in terms of attitude, which perhaps we should have caught during the interview process.
I've come across many developers who have been through the bootcamp process. Some were great, some less so. The worst thing that bootcamps can do is to encourage developers to simply "pad" their GitHub accounts with exercises in order to have used as many technologies as possible. I've seen developers bragging solely about the number of repos and commits they have in GitHub. Generally speaking though, some people com…
When I took the course, 4 of my classmates ran their own companies, 2 others were project managers. None of them were looking to become developers. They were trying to gain some knowledge to better communicate with half their company. We had UI/UX designers trying to extend their reach. The vast majority were artsy people looking to apply their design skills to front end web development, while still making sure they knew where the data was coming from (or be able to fall into a full stack role). Out of a class of 25, I think only 5 of us ended up doing any back-end related programming, and I'm the only one that ended up as purely back end(Math/Stats major in college).
I'm also interested in this question, not because of the issue of saturation, but more because I am skeptical that a bootcamp that lasts ~12 weeks could teach someone enough to be a professional software developer.
Unless a bootcamp graduates 100% of those who sign up and has no filters on who may apply, there is some selection effect. Even without these there is some selection effect in just the people having to choose to attend. If you took 100 random people and put them in a coding bootcamp, I would expect far worse results.
Regardless, no hiring manager should expect someone to jump into a professional role. The program teaches you the basics and how to find relevant resources to help you learn. If a hiring manager is expecting more than that, that's on them, not the program.
tl;dr CTO fights to keep me.
Some other notes: I think the quality of instruction was very high at my particular camp. In retrospect I feel I was perfectly well prepared to contribute from day 1. However, I'm a philomath and my skill set and personality are both good fits for coding. I probably would have made it without a boot camp, the boot camp just got me there faster.
Happy to answer any questions about my camp experience, motivations, contribution level, etc.
One stepped up, and the other was fired. They were great for basic web development, but really crashed and burned for anything more than that. They had some issues understanding basic system administration, data modeling, basic algorithms, web architecture, and systems modeling. Our lead developers didn't have time to give them a two year education on these issues. We were all busy building stuff. The one bootcamp developer who survived, from what I found out was basically eat sleep breathing itunes computer science courses. But she eventually resigned from massive burnout.
I personally think there should be a better median between a 10-20wks bootcamp and four year degree.
I think the first 2 1/2 years of my computer science b.s. really really helped me learn the basic mental model for computers, and how to learn new concepts from that model.
I'm also interested in this question, not because of the issue of saturation, but more because I am skeptical that a bootcamp that lasts ~12 weeks could teach someone enough to be a professional software developer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was your programming experience like before the bootcamp, and then after it? What sort of depth did you learn to? Would you feel confident in starting a job at a company that used a language you don't already know?
Before the bootcamp, I new basic HTML and CSS. I'm now working as a rails dev, with lots of work in JavaScript too. That would entirely depend on the company and the language. So I guess that says something. I wouldn't feel confident in a company that mainly uses functional languages, as I'm mainly used to OO principals. In saying that, it's not something I wouldn't want to learn
Thanks!
My company hired two bootcamp developers. One stepped up, and the other was fired. They were great for basic web development, but really crashed and burned for anything more than that. They had some issues understanding basic system administration, data modeling, basic algorithms, web architecture, and systems modeling. Our lead developers didn't have time to give them a two year education on these issues. We were al…
As a self taught developer myself, this pretty much describes how I managed to keep my first job. I'd be working 16 hour days.... itunes U didn't exist at the time, but I made enough to buy as many books as I needed. I'd spend all night learning what I didn't know.
I started programming at 12 (my first dev job was at 18), so going in I had a good idea of how to program, but going from side projects to full time work required that extra effort.