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As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

nytimes.com

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Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#81

Post by fuzzywalrus »

seibelj wrote: post #22

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had n…

Anecdotal: Currently managing two code camp interns and I'm impressed with the amount they cover in a meager 3 months but they're junior level developers for sure. Without some previous experience in software, its hard to believe most are worthy of mid-shelf salaries.

There's certainly a huge skill gap between the code campers vs anyone we've hired with previous experience. Just the day to day tacit skills ticket management, git work flows, variance in tech stacks, client feedback, interfacing with designers, interactions with project managers, ux decisions, and so forth just can't be crammed into such a short period.

I'm impressed by code-camps as web development and software development takes a long time but code campers are green. If you're in a position to take on junior devs, it seems a great way to expand a team and delegate jr level tasks to.

TLDR: I'd hire a code camp graduate to fill junior positions - there's just too many soft skill gaps that code schools don't have time to.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#82

Post by ritchiea »

woah wrote: post #58
seibelj wrote: post #22

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had n…

Another personal anecdote here- I'm self taught so maybe I'm biased. I worked on a side project years ago with a guy who was a proud Stanford alum. He did some kind of data sciencey stuff for his day job, but his ui code in this project was simply horrible. Like 2000 loc jquery spaghetti in a single file. I've also worked with a team of recent bootcamp grads who were highly paid and wrote great ui code quickly. They…

I had a similar experience with an Ivy CS grad with most of his prior work being writing code for financial services companies. Smart guy, easy to work with but tremendously messy code that often failed to take advantage of the language's standard library or the framework's utilities in favor of writing everything himself and not necessarily abstracting functionality out to classes or modules to be re-used.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#83

Post by ryandrake »

duderific wrote: post #72
winter_blue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I found great difficulty finding a mid-career developer for the 130-150k range that it started making an "investment hire" feel like a viable alternative. Wow, are talented developer really that hard to find? (Especially, considering you're offering 130-150k.) Are you insistent on a developer being "mid-career" (I interpret that as having "years of experience") -- or would you accept a highly talented who has just…

Yes, it is really hard to find talented developers. I am a developer who interviews developer candidates at my company, and we only end up giving an offer to maybe one in five candidates. Our standards are fairly high but not ridiculously so. We are desperate for developers, but not to the point where we want to hire someone who we feel like would be dragging us down.

Instead of hiring a developer that would drag you down, did you consider offering more money? When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement.

I was car shopping a few months ago, and I found there's a dire shortage of brand new $10K BMWs.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#84

Post by paulpauper »

Companies cannot hire fast enough. Glassdoor, an employment site, lists more than 7,300 openings for software engineers, ahead of job openings for nurses,

This agree with the post-2008 hollowing out of the middle theme - lots of of opportunities for high-IQ employment (coders) and the polar opposite: low-paid service workers and bedpan changers. It's like if you're IQ is not in the top quartile, go directly to the low-income, do not go pass go, do not collect $60-100k a year.

I'm very suspicious of the claim that these boot camps can turn novices into job-ready professionals in just 3 months. There's too much to learn and unless you're one of those high-IQ people who has an aptitude for math, as the example in the article, you won't be competent enough get a job and, to make things worse, you'll also be out $10,000.

Instead, if you're not smart enough to work in tech, take that $10k and buy Facebook, Google, Amazon or QQQ stock using in-the-money-call options. You can leverage 5-1 and make $30k a year from a $10k account doing this. The tech boom has much further to go. You don't need to be a member of Mensa to ride an obvious bull market trend.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#85

Post by seibelj »

eastbayjake wrote: post #31
seibelj wrote: post #22

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had n…

> He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. Two questions: Are you in San Francisco, and which bootcamp was this?

I'm in Boston, the salaries here are high but not SF levels. I'd rather not say which boot camp to preserve relationships and not malign their organization. They were very helpful, I just simply think hiring straight from boot camps doesn't work for my method of managing software development organizations.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#86

Post by chadgeidel »

_userThrowaway wrote: post #66
chadgeidel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denver developer here. I've participated in the hiring process at several orgs, and I think that with a combination of basic-level skills and a good handle on salary negotiation this is entirely doable. I'm continually shocked at the skill level of people that apply - we don't even do Fizz-buzz level of interview questions, and we constantly have people unable to solve the whiteboard questions. Anyone with aptitude c…

How easy is it to find a decent job with good mentorship and pay without a cs degree? I'm currently a non-traditional student studying computer science, and while I'm enjoying the program, I enjoy work more. Also the education is incredibly costly if I include $80k a year in lost income. I also have family in the Denver area. I have a decent enough resume where I know I would be able to get interviews, and definitely…

It's hard to say. We've hired people where I work currently with little experience outside of college. Not at $80k of course. I would say that with a little bit of AngularJS and some backend (C#/Java) you could get $60k-$80k anywhere in town.

There are tons of recruiters in the area and companies are always looking for quick learners with some demonstrated talent. We aren't currently hiring, but I could put you in contact with our company recruiter if you are interested.

(EDIT: removed contact email after reply from _userThrowaway)

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#87

Post by Nicholas_C »

ennuihenry wrote: post #32
seibelj wrote: post #22

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had n…

What area are you in? 75k in NY or SF for an inexperienced developer seems high.

I was actually going to say that $75k for a competent developer with two years of experience seemed low, especially if you're in NYC or SF. You can swing that in Dallas with a finance/accounting degree and 2 years of work experience if you're competent and have good work experience. Just my perspective, I am not a developer.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#88

Post by omouse »

bigtunacan wrote: post #33
pyrophane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reaction was more along the lines of "I'd hate to be the person who has to clean all that up)."

Mine was more along the lines of, "I'm going to make so much money cleaning that shit up."

You're going to need a lot of booze or drugs or to cap the time you do that. It can get real frustrating real fast despite the gigantic checks.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#89

Post by ritchiea »

danso wrote: post #54

The lede anecdote talks about a 26-year-old math major who went from $20,000/yr as a writer to $100,000/yr as a data scientist, after a bootcamp. Ignoring the "but what is data science" debate for now...this to me seems totally reasonable. He's a math major . Programming is founded upon math...and at the very least, requires the same kind of mathematical deduction and ability to not be freaked out by symbolic represe…

While I'm sure it helps to be a math major anywhere, anyone who has been trained to be a careful analytic thinker would be a good candidate to become a programmer. For instance if you were a humanities major from a school with a strong academic reputation and you actually took your coursework seriously as an undergrad.

As much as programming is applied math, most companies are not Google or Facebook and have problems that can suffer the inefficiency of a non-expert. A lot of programming jobs ask you to get data from a form or API, do something with it and show some HTML. And that HTML needs to be styled in CSS and have some neat UI elements that are fine tuned in Javascript. There is nothing about that kind of work that favors a math major over English major.

The situation changes if your company is huge, handling thousands of requests a second so small inefficiencies add up and are wasteful on a large scale or even cause the software to break entirely. But assuming you have a smart CTO/Lead you should know where potential pain points in your code are and still be able to hire a relatively inexperienced junior and get good work out of that person. I have a friend who was an Ivy CS grad, worked at Google then worked at Squarespace. He said he was intimidated by designers who knew HTML, CSS & Javascript and were good with forms because a lot of work for developers could be handled as quickly by those type of developers as he could handle it with his vastly more technical background.

Re: As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change

#90

Post by cairo140 »

winter_blue wrote: post #61
cairo140 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sharing my experience here: I've been hiring in SF and found some boot camp grads, usually stronger but still far from mid-career, with expectations around 90-115k. Most of these folks got hired (some of them to us/away from us with offers all in that range). These were folks who were months to years away from hitting the ground running, and the value of the offer was entirely on their future potential. I found…

> I found great difficulty finding a mid-career developer for the 130-150k range that it started making an "investment hire" feel like a viable alternative. Wow, are talented developer really that hard to find? (Especially, considering you're offering 130-150k.) Are you insistent on a developer being "mid-career" (I interpret that as having "years of experience") -- or would you accept a highly talented who has just…

I felt similarly incredulous when we first started searching. I'll add some details for color.

Our hiring needs didn't feel too crazy to me. We were a multi-million dollar a year e-commerce shop, I was the first in-house technical hire, and we wanted to expand the team for personnel redundancy.

Ideally, we wanted someone who would be capable of running a business-critical website. On the technical side, I was hoping for a full stack of skills (top to bottom web app security, server ops, managing technical vendor relationships and integrating third-party modules, zero downtime rollouts, performance and architecture, metrics/instrumentation, and fully-independent backend and HTML/CSS/JS skills to build a secure and pixel-perfect feature beginning to end). Plus, we wanted an early technical hire to be able to work the indirectly technical parts, including technical hiring, capacity planning, and expectations management.

None of this felt to me like we were asking for something crazy unreasonable, but you don't learn a good enough coverage of this to independently steer a ship of this scale until a few years on the job. You can learn bits and pieces on the fly with the documentation around, but it's both risky and slow. Given the hiring climate, it was a risk we ending up being comfortable taking, but it fell short of what would be ideal.

In response to some remarks about adjusting our expectations (remote work, higher salary), our particular situation was not doable for remote---there was zero 100% remote staff among 30+ FTEs and none of our workflow was set up for it---although I wish I had influenced the organization of work in more formative stages of the company to optimize more for remote given the personnel advantages. Regarding salary, it's very hard to increase salary past $150k+ because I found it very hard to publicize it in a way that meaningfully increased the quality of candidates we found entering our funnel. I wish there were a job site for "will pay very well above market for strong candidates".

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