I graduated my bootcamp in 2015 and had a jr developer job with a 50% pay bump within 6 weeks. I had a college degree but in a non-technical field and 0 experience coding before I started the program. In my cohort of ~20 people all but 1 had found gainful employment as software developers within a year, most within 3-6 months.
I completely agree that the value of a bootcamp is having a community to encourage you through the process, everything they teach you can be found online. I also went to a bootcamp that had a good reputation around my city so I think it was legitimizing for someone with no experience and no stories of coding for fun as a teenager.
Even back then hackernews was full of people saying how flooded the market was with bootcampers.
4 years later I grinded leetcode and got a job at a FANG and essentially 6x'd my income from 4 years earlier before I could code. I eventually left that job because I was miserable but thats a whole other story.
Now with 7 years of experience I leave the bootcamp off my resume because of the stigma. I took the specific degree program off my linkedIn and just put "bachelors of science" and let people assume what they want. If anyone asks I just say I'm self taught.
I self-taught myself development by coding 8 hours a day for 9 months. I ended up being much better than majority of people I worked with, including, or I'd rather say especially, engineering grads. I found out that just because you have a degree, doesn't mean you're good at something.
That being said, I still have to vouch for networking being important. In my case it wasn't bootcamp people, but the italian JS community and the one from Rome, where I attended the local JavaScript meetup that got me my first job easier than I would've expected. I still think I would've landed a job without it, but still, it was a good help.
Also, last but not least, I was a chemistry major with 3 published articles on high-impact journals. While nothing about my chemistry curriculum was relevant to software engineering, it definitely helped me into knowing how to study and learn.
I don't think it made any difference on my CV, but it is still making me a much better professional and engineer than majority of my peers who do not learn basics properly to move on in their careers from a techincal point of view.
That's the most important point in this article. That clichéd "everyone should code" line you hear isn't true. Or the standard "you should code" response on Reddit every time someone asks what job they should do. If you can't focus for long periods, coding is not for you. If you can't handle banging your head against a bug for several days straight, it's not for you. If you don't like solitary work, it's not for you.
Bootcamps supposedly used to be good, nowadays even the "best" have largely cashed out and don't care much for education. This is an expected result when the top employers put almost 0 funding into education, no feedback, complain, and outsource their work anyways.
I've met 0 skilled workers who came from bootcamps and plopped down at a job, and I think it is disingenuous to assume this would be the case. Part of me thinks that immediate job skills isn't the goal, and I think pro bootcamp operators know this.
I wouldn't say they are without value or purpose though, a bootcamp is like take-your-friend-to-work-day where people who recognize they might have an interest can have a taste of what we actually do besides wearing hoodies and cashing checks. Sure every day life isn't all laptop stickers and free pizza, but a bootcamp puts your hands in the middle of our work skills, and you get at least some idea of what this trade entails.
When you reframe the 'bootcamp' and remove the expectation that someone is immediately employable after, what you're left with is a classifier to discern who'd warrant further effort, and who's better off checking out a different trade for their mid-life-change.
In my opinion, bootcamps are best for two types of people: new/young folks who may be interested in this field of work, and suits who want to understand more about what their cofounder counterparts are up to when the "please dont knock" sign is on the door.
Is this feedback from people rejecting you? Always be very skeptical of feedback with rejections. People often have reasons to not be exactly honest. I think it’s a YC phrase for fundraising to “listen to the no but not the why”.
I know it's trash advice when you can't find work - but, do you really want to work for some place that thinks you're too academic and too technical? I was always told my resume made me seem like I was too academic, until I found a job working with academics. Non-technical, but the experience is still relevant, I think.
> I took the specific degree program off my linkedIn and just put "bachelors of science" and let people assume what they want.
We had an offer rescinded for something like this when it showed up in their background check (person mislead about a university title). We didn't care about the education or title and we valued self-taught people but not being honest about something in the resume was cause for disqualification (what else should we trust?). Personally, I'd just leave it out, no need to embellish or anything.
> I had a college degree but in a non-technical field and 0 experience coding before I started the program.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation. Been a programmer since I was 14 but ended up pursuing another field. I'm making good money but the USD exchange rate in my country is seriously making me reconsider. If I end up doing this, I'll learn whatever I need to be competitive in the market. I suppose bootcamps are a nice way to streamline this process.
May I ask what made you switch fields? Did you have reasons other than salary?
I was 24 and couldn't find any work in my desired field. I was working stupid office jobs and looking for a better options. I started taking some coding night classes and really enjoyed it, I believed the hype about the market need for developers, so I decided to do the full time bootcamp.
It was setting up schemas in posgress and learning the basics of using a sql database; setting up a web api to auth users and connect to that database and serve json with Node, then building a JS frontend to login users and fetch and display that data with backbone. It was done in the format of building a couple applications in teams of 2-3.
My first job didn't use those specific languages or technologies but everything was close enough to what I had done in the bootcamp that I wasn't completely lost. I knew enough to be a good jr developer and learned 20x in my first 2 years on the job than in the bootcamp.
I've since built/done lots of services, data pipelines, database migrations, devops pager rotations, large/complex frontend applications. The bootcamp was really just a jumping off point. The real learning starts when you get to the job.
> But the main advantage of the bootcamp to me was not technical, it was the network. Apart from providing a friend group which will likely end up in referrals down the road, the best bootcamps will introduce you to companies and have relationships with them.
I’d love to understand this in detail. When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I’m convinced there’s massive upside in bringing in more talent - people who learn in their own time or through boot camps. Unfortunately, senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage.
>Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.
Have American citizens ever tried to "check their privileges" and imagine how a life of a "visa-slave" changes after crossing the American border? I can give you some hints into my "living experience" of such a crossing.
Yesterday: an American lawyer sent some docs supporting my H1B visa over our Academy institution fax machine. The fax machine ran out of paper. The management asked me to pay for the paper, or buy them some. I couldn't afford the paper, so I borrowed $700, paid for the fax supplies and for a ticket to the US.
Today: I've got $5000 moving bonus, got $30k salary contract and got the first task, like:
- We've sold something to Swedes today, you have 2 weeks to develop it. What do you need?
- A Sun workstation, and an X.25 link to Sweden.
- Done. And give your passport to Olga - you are going to Stockholm when done.
In 2 weeks our part was done, but Swedes were not able to finish their part and asked for 2 more weeks...
I was an employee #27, after that task and some other completed projects my salary was increased, then doubled, then again increased, then again doubled... our company went to #1 in its market, then IPOed, and 4 years after, still on the "slave" H1B visa I've found $1M on my bank account (unfortunately, it was an investment bank, lol, but that's another story).
So, my step through the US border on the H1B visa was not a step into slavery. It was liberation.
I’m charactering it that way, although it’s less blatant. Ask any amazon director and they’ll go in and on about hiring being next to impossible in the US. Entire legions of Amazon are either entirely in India or H1B or OPT Indian nationals. It’s no secret their visa situation keeps their hands tied.
> Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job
Think this statement explains the fast success of the writer. The drive to experiment and find solutions is so valuable, and surprisingly in short supply.
As a hiring manager, one of the big hesitations I have re: bootcamp grads is whether they need to be spoon-fed, or have the hunger to move things forward. Especially true for startups that tend to bet more on potential vs. raw experience. For anyone in this boat, https://topstartups.io/ is a good place to start
Thanks for the link. I've been working in old and/or biggish tech for my 4 years so far, and only recently joined a startup and something about it just deeply works for me. The newness and smallness of it all makes me feel paranoid that if I don't do it, it won't get done, so I've been moving fast and making shit happen instead of what I had been doing, which is relaxing into the good work situation and not learning as much as I could.
Pretty much every company I've worked with not just doesn't care about bootcamps, but actively avoids them. They prefer self-taught over scammed-into-crash-course. In particular, they don't trust that any github projects were completed independently.
In my experience they're often not that favorable to self-taught developers either. Even after I had years of experience under my belt I'd have people telling me to take a big demotion to work at their small company, or acting like they were amazed I solved a simple coding problem for them. Not insurmountable but a real phenomenon.
It's so weird to be reviewing resumes for a entry-level position and you see 3-4 with the same exact project.. I do look though their github and mentioned projects pretty deeply too to find any standouts which they have been once or twice but it's rare
I've never hired anyone from a boot camp, but I work with a community college that offers a 16 months program and the juniors out of it have been great. a 8-10 week boot camp feels too much like "cramming for the big exam" to me.
>When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I think because average candidate quality of bootcamp grad probably pretty low, due to shortness of the program and people thinking all they need to do is complete the bootcamp, when really you need to stay learning for years.
Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.
Well, the thing is, if you ever do student interviews you'll realize many people in CS programs appear not to be getting that much from the classes either.
> Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.
I attended a bootcamp in 2015 and know two people, one in my cohort, and one in the next, who both got jobs at Amazon right out of the bootcamp. At the time, cohorts were every 6 weeks with 80 people/cohort, so that's ~1 out of 80 bootcamp grads who made it into Amazon (granted, with a small sample size), with more in FAANG generally (Google was more open to bootcamp grads than the others).
bootcamp people should be brought on as interns or some special level, most have only a few months experience. New grads have minimal expectations on them despite in theory having at least 4 years of coding/CS experience, some of them with even more if they took classes during high school.
I tried to get my previous company to start an apprenticeship program. The CEO agreed that it was a good idea, but kept pushing it for well over a year. I left, and it’s doubtful that it’ll ever happen.
But I still think it’s a great idea for companies to try it. There are a ton of benefits. But I think the best one is that you get a much longer view of how someone could perform than you’d get with a traditional interview cycle. And interview judges someone at a single point in time. An apprenticeship would be able to determine their trajectory.
I used to work at a smaller company and they had a relationship with a local boot camp where they would take in a number of their grads in roles that were somewhere between support engineer and software engineer. You have to keep in mind that Amazon challenges with hiring are quite different than those faced by a smaller company. Sometimes it's hard just having enough people in the funnel.
Pretty similar experience at Palantir. The CEO would get up on stage every quarterly on-hands and say, almost verbatim, "Where are the people from the bad schools? The best candidates are at the bad schools!"
We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters."
To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
This has got to be satire. You don't trust schools outside the top 4-5? Harvard is 16. Dartmouth is 49. Maybe if you had said the top 50 or 100 but this is so out of touch lol.
My own grad school happens to have a top 4 CS program (UIUC), but I went there for math (was top 15 at the time, not sure how it has done since). Some of the stories of people I met in my grad program were fascinating, there were people there who were likely smarter than most students at most of the elite universities - one particular extremely smart person I met even turned down top math programs in favor of a full scholarship at a lesser known public school for undergrad. My own personal background is a bit fascinating in some ways as well, but it never comes up in interviews - I'm at a FAANG with most of the achievements notched for a promotion to staff SWE, and my brother was promoted to staff research scientist at another FAANG for an extraordinary business-wide accomplishment. Neither of us coded before trying to get into the tech industry (my brother has a PhD in Chemistry from a reputed program).
I've learned throughout my life that focusing so much on where people went to school might cause you to miss smart and/or revolutionary people. People don't really talk so much about the schools people like Steve Jobs went to. Lots of very smart people are rejected by the likes of the Ivies, or not gotten the head start in life that would've gotten them placed at the most prestigious schools or programs. Some people's lives took a different turn for reasons that may have caused them to miss out on opportunities earlier in life, but life events created resolve & the will to make a switch & become successful. I think it's very unfair/silly to pass judgment on someone just due to what school they went to (I certainly don't really care when I'm interviewing someone) - there are actually a lot of very smart people who never had any such privileged background out there. We should be striving to find them not only because it could be very beneficial for business, but it's also the right thing to do.
Do you only hire from CS programs? I’ve worked with a wide variety of developers, probably only 50% of which had CS degrees, and they weren’t any better than anyone else.
I was an underachieving ADHD having bad-at-math kid with no prospects for the future. I dropped out of high school and taught myself programming and system administration, by reading two programming books and going through HOWTOs (remember those? Sorry kids they don't exist anymore, you'll have to make do with 1000 random blog posts) to set up server software and networks etc.
Because of my unstructured learning and random hobby type direction it took me a couple years to get proficient, but eventually I knew more about systems admin than people who'd been doing it professionally for years. I got hired for peanuts by a startup, and networked through User Groups to a better job that paid more.
My career's been nearly 20 years with no higher education or any other skillset whatsoever, bad at concentration and memorization, no bootcamps or teachers or mentors. I'm not a genius. If I can do it, you can do it.
An unlimited amount of free information and learning is out there on the internet. Go and get it, learn it, practice it. Network and find someone who wants to pay you chump change and build that resume.
Also remember there are a lot of roles today in tech. Many don't require a ton of technical chops. Figure out what they are and what they entail, and target your learning towards one. Even lower end roles pay better than most other jobs, and you can always pivot to another role later once you have some work on your resume.
It’s under appreciated what having a specific passion - and continuously exercising it over time - can do. It does wonders. It’s essentially finding reward in the journey itself.
ADHD, dropping out, etc are all beliefs that society labels as “non-productive”, but when somebody has passion and determination and a lot of time doing what they enjoy doing with no reward other than feeding this passion, then that’s all it takes. Consider yourself lucky because in my experience a very small number of people can do this, nobody wants to put the time it takes. Sometimes it takes decades. Coincidentally my form of ADHD disappears once I am in the flow, makes me wonder if ADHD is just aka for “I just don’t fundamentally enjoy what I am doing therefore my brain needs to reward itself in other ways”.
Even better if we end up pursuing a nice hobby in a booming field like technology.
Reality is that most people give up, because ultimately they pursue fields they are not deeply interested in to begin with. The ultimate curse: to dedicate our life to something we don’t care because we didn’t spend enough time exploring what we really cared about.
I’ve got basically the identical back story. High school dropout, ADHD/ASD, can’t handle structured learning.. but I sure as hell liked staying up all night playing with code, exploring the depths of the internet and every single aspect of how it all works from hardware to software.
Did freelance stuff for a few years making websites for local businesses, graphic design for nearby restaurants and retail stores, fixing computers from my share-house bedroom, etc. Ultimately got some pretty dead-end tech support jobs in telcos and SMEs which taught me workplace etiquette and how to deal with clients/stakeholders. Then did some 3-6mth contracts with some pretty big companies from there, including government. One of those had a manager who understood ASD and took my under his wing, and I got a full time 6 figure role there founding an internal web team (taking over the main website and intranet from an outsourced company, building/deploying whatever web apps departments needed). Workplace training programs moved me up from there to a variety of roles and into security then management.
Still never finished high school or any tertiary education, I like to say I fell my way upwards. I have no idea what I’m doing professionally, I just like playing with computers.
There's an important caveat that a lot of people overlook: 20 years ago the hiring environment was totally different. Nowadays, you can't even get an interview without a degree unless you have somebody recommend you. The types of low-end work that hire uncredentialed people (help desk and cable grunt mostly) pay about the same as stocking shelves at the grocery store.
Nobody wanted to hire me back then either. I was a kid with no experience or education.
Now I remember! I was also doing home PC repair through my parents' friends for $14/hr. Put flyers in Barnes and Noble. Got hired by a friend to write some Perl scripts. Two different guys who also went to the LUG hired me to fix some Linux servers they had at their small business. I set up a website and organized marketing materials and did project management for my dad's realty business.
All these little gigs I padded my resume with showed I was doing something, showed what tech I used, what I accomplished. It was a hustle for sure. But it convinced a small startup to give me a shot, and that was the gateway to a "real job". But I did start with dozens of tiny one off jobs over a couple years.
For sure, nobody is going to hire you if you can't show that you can apply your skills, that other people have also given you a shot, that you are self-directed and show a willingness to work and learn. But I mean, this is Life! If you can't or won't do those things you're gonna end up a bum. Even back then I didn't imagine anyone would give me anything, I had to do the work and hustle to make it. So maybe I just assumed other people got that part of it... It's definitely work and takes time, but it's also very much something everyone can accomplish if they put a small amount of brain power and a lot of elbow grease into.
I think you may not be appreciating your ADHD hyper focus (speaking from experience). It may be that sysadmin type work was interesting to you in a way that allowed you to use that to your advantage.
Other people, however, may very well not have that same interest. Maybe what gets them hyper-focused is art or literature or who knows what. Not to say of course it is not possible but you may be smarter than you think.
I used to teach at these so called coding bootcamps and I know it can be hard for students psychologically. I still remember the day when the best student there came up to me towards the end of the 6 month bootcamp and showed me his final bootcamp project with a lot of disappointment. I asked him why was he disappointed as he had actually built something nice with react and firebase. He pointed me towards his friend's(who was at a Uni.) assignment project which was built over the weekend and was basically a minimal working version of a react like library.
He asked me why wasn't he able to do that and why wasn't he taught this at the bootcamp. I knew what his friend did in a weekend was probably a culmination of 3-4 years of rigourous learning of computer science concepts that he acquired at the Uni.
Among bootcamp students, There is this constant unhealthy comparison going on in their minds with the people who graduated from a Uni., this is even after years of working in the industry. what doesn't help is, Apart from a few exceptions(students and companies), the way most recruiters and HRs treat them isn't something to talk about and the pay difference is visible.
Also, It isn't easy for them to catch up. You had the privilege of being able to afford to study for 4 years while it is not the same story for most people at/from the bootcamps. To add to this, They also feel left out when you discuss about your days at the Uni or are discussing some computer science concepts.
If you have a colleague or someone around who is self taught or from a bootcamp, be a bit more kind and explain or refer them to reading material on concepts in a subtle way, it doesn't take much to make them feel included.
> Among bootcamp students, There is this constant unhealthy comparison going on in their minds with the people who graduated from a Uni.
I sympathize with that (as someone who never went through uni for CS or a bootcamp), but at the same time, I've interviewed a bunch of bootcamp folks, and this mentality used to go the other way far too often as well. I've had a bunch of them have extremely huge egos and admitting to being told by their bootcamp that people who go to college for CS are less prepared for "the real world" than they are. I had one extremely rude candidate tell me straight up (after being told we're looking for someone with at least 5 years experience) "I went to X Bootcamp, which is like 10 years real world experience!" I can't imagine that was something he made up in his own brain. Most often, I'd talk to candidates who were being told to apply to senior and principal roles because they were told that their bootcamp experience qualified them for that (and it didn't hurt that, you know, the bootcamp stood to make more $$$ from their ISA if they happened to land a higher paying gig).
I think A LOT of that has trailed off as I haven't run up against that in probably 3-4 years as some of the crappier ones have folded (though some of what I shared above came from ones that still going strong...). But, man for a while from like 2013-2015, it was a huge issue to the point where I'd recommending passing on nearly every bootcamp grad unless we knew the bootcamp's graduates from other means.
The whole "grinding" mentality/culture has instilled unhealthy and unrealistic expectations into the minds of the typical boot camp "candidate". It is difficult to compare a 3-6 months boot camp, with consistent working / learning over 3-5 years.
Sure, some students will learn very fast, but on average - there's more to it than just cramming. And the people that manage to "grind" for N months and land a FAANG job are few and far between, not to mention that they're essentially cramming a very, very small portion of the CS curriculum.
Not to mention that some new CS students are already "heavily invested" in the field and spend a lot of time during their youth around computers. All members of my dev team have been already working in IT during high school. This must be so hard to beat for someone starting late. CS graduate can easily enter the market with 5+ years of experience with actual work.
Software Engineering bootcamps are probably the best cost/benefits ratio programs that exist. There is a reason why that is, this isn't a walk in the park.
Should you be paid equal to someone coming out of uni? I don't think so, the ramp-up will be hard and longer for the bootcamps guys, but this will change as you gain experience, after 5 years the difference in pay should be negligible if you properly ramp up!
> If you have a colleague or someone around who is self taught or from a bootcamp, be a bit more kind and explain or refer them to reading material on concepts in a subtle way, it doesn't take much to make them feel included.
About a decade ago I graduated from a technical institute's two year Computer Engineering Technology diploma program, so not a bootcamp, but absolutely not a full CS degree, and I've found this is a really important bit. My technical skills aren't really lacking, but my understanding and terminology still is. For my part I've become comfortable with saying "I'm unfamiliar with that concept, could you tell me more?"
I was the 30 year old that went to night school to study a degree in Computer Science. I got my first real tech role (paying $85k) three years into my six years of study. I've just made my first job switch for a $40k payrise with six months left in my degree. I'll graduate late this year and I'll probably also be close to my next payrise which will put me at $140-150k.
I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult. My life and the life of my children are going to reap benefits from this. If you're reading this and thinking "Can I do this?" then I'd highly recommend you attempt to find a way to make it work.
WGU is a school where you can go at your own pace, pay by the semester instead of credit hour, and test out of almost any class. Can get a full degree for like 7 grand, just a heads up.
If you already have a bachelor's degree, then Georgia Tech's OMSCS is a good option for a CS master's. The tuition is fairly low, especially if you take multiple courses per term (about $10k to $12k, I believe) and it's basically at your own pace
WGU is what colleges used to be: a third party validation of knowledge mastery (along with the teaching). Many traditional universities are debt traps for teenagers.
> I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult.
Over the years I've become a little cynical when I see people asking "should I become a developer?" Because, on one hand, you are right. It changed my life in a positive way. But I've also realized how many people think, essentially, that they take a two-week course and they get a six-figure job where they fuck around all day. Not so much!
Unfortunately there are many companies that allow people to "fuck around all day" and excuse it as "they're still learning". I'm pretty good at being able to spot people who are genuinely trying to learn, or who are just trying to cruise through and be carried by their team. The latter do not last long if I have anything to do with it.
My field is cyber security, not development, but I feel like I get to "fuck around" with computers all day. I'm so lucky that I have a job which I enjoy so much that also rewards so well financially. I still pinch myself when I think that people actually pay me to do this for a living.
I deal with a lot of work that's really similar to puzzle solving. "Why did this occur? Is it normal behaviour or malicious?" and then I get to do deep dives trying to figure out why something happened. If I find malicious behaviour I get to go into incident response mode and boot out a bad guy. If I find a false positive I get to do some engineering to figure out how to avoid this while still maintaining the purpose of the original rules (while also minimising system overhead for the rule processing). The kicker is there are a LOT of companies willing to pay me a LOT of money to do this. I'm so incredibly lucky.
I also went to night school to earn a bachelor’s degree in CS. It was hard. And to compound the hardness, I started a PhD program the year I turned 30. Definitely a late bloomer. But I am now a professor of CS, and I am satisfied with the choice to follow this path. Long hours, but no boss and great pay!
I have an MA in humanities field, currently spend my days secretly coding at work where I am a receptionist. Was recently very close to being able to move over to the tech team to do some Angular/rails, finally get my feet wet after many years of just doing work on my own time (and a little work time).
One day, I overheard the CTO talking about hiring more devs, and inquired with them about it just briefly. He set up a meeting and we talked shop and I told him my story, the kinds of things I made, what I liked. Already at this point I was elated: I could talk to a real person about technical stuff I am interested in, and they understood me, and even more, they wanted me to join the team! After so much emotional energy and hopes dashed by constant applications with no response, I didn't even care if I wasn't going to get a job, it was enough to just be seen. But I was going to get the job!
Just found out though that it's not going to happen, because they couldn't clear hiring someone to replace my current position; it's a startup and we are not doing well now (home brokerage startup). Will hold on for now, but not too hopeful anymore.
Just really really crazy to me how much I labored over applications and things for so long with just nothing at all back, and all it really took was being able to be in the same room as someone. Equal parts hopeful and frustrating honestly.
> The hardest part of coding is not technical or even getting the job, it’s liking the job. If you do not enjoy the often stressful and thankless role of staring at the computer and doing frustrating logic puzzles, usually alone, eventually you will burn out and wonder why you ever got into the industry.
I even enjoy coding sometimes, damn it does it get demoralizing sometimes
> Important point here: Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job.
This is what separates people that can make it and people who can't. Like when people are asking questions, how do I learn to code or whatever. I think you have already lost.
Do people find this topic of getting into tech in abnormal ways interesting? Maybe ill share mine one day. I was kind of amused by the idea that I failed out of my engineering program, I got a D in my only comp sci class and now Im a sr engineer at a popular tech company lol.
A previous blog post - Find the Hard Work You're Willing to Do
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
The other problem I think is that "software engineer" is such a damn broad role. People try their hand at coding and try some specific niche and either don't love it or get frustrated and then don't really try much else. When in reality there are tons and tons of avenues and flavors and areas requiring more or less technical expertise and different kinds of technical expertise. Some of these people might make excellent QA or cybersecurity researchers, some might be interested in front end development of UI or oldschool low level chip stuff. Or maybe they are more broad, macro infrastructure type people. Without already working in "the industry", however, it is hard to know where to start and what to try.
The last part was the most insightful. Most people, even if they have the aptitude for coding don’t like it. The ones that do are rare.
It’s not really intelligence or grit, it’s just that you actually like staring at a cold unfeeling machine that tells you that you’ve fucked up over and over again.
I'm so happy I actually enjoy programming. I would do it even if I never got paid for it. Enjoying programming feels like such a life hack, considering the generous financial compensations.
I like being able to want something, come up with a solution, do it and use it. Most of it isn't novel but that feeling when you get it to work is great.
100% same. I absolutely love programming, and enjoy my job at least 9 out of 10 days (though my current has a whole lot more meetings than I'd prefer.) I consider myself immensely lucky.
I think the reality is that most of us love programming. The bad part is working on someone elses design and code base - just spending your week figuring out what someone elses weird code does gets exhausting.
> it’s just that you actually like staring at a cold unfeeling machine that tells you that you’ve fucked up over and over again.
I found great comic relief in this characterization, and want to extend the joke, comments like "that sounds 100 times better than my ex" or creating a "YFU as a service" company
Thanks for brightening my day.
Disclosure- it was more often me who was the harsh/unfeeling partner, not the ex.
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I completely agree that the value of a bootcamp is having a community to encourage you through the process, everything they teach you can be found online. I also went to a bootcamp that had a good reputation around my city so I think it was legitimizing for someone with no experience and no stories of coding for fun as a teenager.
Even back then hackernews was full of people saying how flooded the market was with bootcampers.
4 years later I grinded leetcode and got a job at a FANG and essentially 6x'd my income from 4 years earlier before I could code. I eventually left that job because I was miserable but thats a whole other story.
Now with 7 years of experience I leave the bootcamp off my resume because of the stigma. I took the specific degree program off my linkedIn and just put "bachelors of science" and let people assume what they want. If anyone asks I just say I'm self taught.
Point is, it's 100% possible.
It's possible even without a bootcamp.
I self-taught myself development by coding 8 hours a day for 9 months. I ended up being much better than majority of people I worked with, including, or I'd rather say especially, engineering grads. I found out that just because you have a degree, doesn't mean you're good at something.
That being said, I still have to vouch for networking being important. In my case it wasn't bootcamp people, but the italian JS community and the one from Rome, where I attended the local JavaScript meetup that got me my first job easier than I would've expected. I still think I would've landed a job without it, but still, it was a good help.
Also, last but not least, I was a chemistry major with 3 published articles on high-impact journals. While nothing about my chemistry curriculum was relevant to software engineering, it definitely helped me into knowing how to study and learn.
I don't think it made any difference on my CV, but it is still making me a much better professional and engineer than majority of my peers who do not learn basics properly to move on in their careers from a techincal point of view.
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I wouldn't say they are without value or purpose though, a bootcamp is like take-your-friend-to-work-day where people who recognize they might have an interest can have a taste of what we actually do besides wearing hoodies and cashing checks. Sure every day life isn't all laptop stickers and free pizza, but a bootcamp puts your hands in the middle of our work skills, and you get at least some idea of what this trade entails.
When you reframe the 'bootcamp' and remove the expectation that someone is immediately employable after, what you're left with is a classifier to discern who'd warrant further effort, and who's better off checking out a different trade for their mid-life-change.
In my opinion, bootcamps are best for two types of people: new/young folks who may be interested in this field of work, and suits who want to understand more about what their cofounder counterparts are up to when the "please dont knock" sign is on the door.
I have been told I am "too academic", and that my cv may be "too technical".
So many regrets.
We had an offer rescinded for something like this when it showed up in their background check (person mislead about a university title). We didn't care about the education or title and we valued self-taught people but not being honest about something in the resume was cause for disqualification (what else should we trust?). Personally, I'd just leave it out, no need to embellish or anything.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation. Been a programmer since I was 14 but ended up pursuing another field. I'm making good money but the USD exchange rate in my country is seriously making me reconsider. If I end up doing this, I'll learn whatever I need to be competitive in the market. I suppose bootcamps are a nice way to streamline this process.
May I ask what made you switch fields? Did you have reasons other than salary?
My first job didn't use those specific languages or technologies but everything was close enough to what I had done in the bootcamp that I wasn't completely lost. I knew enough to be a good jr developer and learned 20x in my first 2 years on the job than in the bootcamp.
I've since built/done lots of services, data pipelines, database migrations, devops pager rotations, large/complex frontend applications. The bootcamp was really just a jumping off point. The real learning starts when you get to the job.
I’d love to understand this in detail. When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I’m convinced there’s massive upside in bringing in more talent - people who learn in their own time or through boot camps. Unfortunately, senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage.
Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.
Have American citizens ever tried to "check their privileges" and imagine how a life of a "visa-slave" changes after crossing the American border? I can give you some hints into my "living experience" of such a crossing.
Yesterday: an American lawyer sent some docs supporting my H1B visa over our Academy institution fax machine. The fax machine ran out of paper. The management asked me to pay for the paper, or buy them some. I couldn't afford the paper, so I borrowed $700, paid for the fax supplies and for a ticket to the US.
Today: I've got $5000 moving bonus, got $30k salary contract and got the first task, like: - We've sold something to Swedes today, you have 2 weeks to develop it. What do you need? - A Sun workstation, and an X.25 link to Sweden. - Done. And give your passport to Olga - you are going to Stockholm when done.
In 2 weeks our part was done, but Swedes were not able to finish their part and asked for 2 more weeks...
I was an employee #27, after that task and some other completed projects my salary was increased, then doubled, then again increased, then again doubled... our company went to #1 in its market, then IPOed, and 4 years after, still on the "slave" H1B visa I've found $1M on my bank account (unfortunately, it was an investment bank, lol, but that's another story).
So, my step through the US border on the H1B visa was not a step into slavery. It was liberation.
Think this statement explains the fast success of the writer. The drive to experiment and find solutions is so valuable, and surprisingly in short supply.
As a hiring manager, one of the big hesitations I have re: bootcamp grads is whether they need to be spoon-fed, or have the hunger to move things forward. Especially true for startups that tend to bet more on potential vs. raw experience. For anyone in this boat, https://topstartups.io/ is a good place to start
Fortunately it's very easy to suss this out by asking a focused question or two about the code.
Whatcha want to know?
>When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I think because average candidate quality of bootcamp grad probably pretty low, due to shortness of the program and people thinking all they need to do is complete the bootcamp, when really you need to stay learning for years.
Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.
I attended a bootcamp in 2015 and know two people, one in my cohort, and one in the next, who both got jobs at Amazon right out of the bootcamp. At the time, cohorts were every 6 weeks with 80 people/cohort, so that's ~1 out of 80 bootcamp grads who made it into Amazon (granted, with a small sample size), with more in FAANG generally (Google was more open to bootcamp grads than the others).
But I still think it’s a great idea for companies to try it. There are a ton of benefits. But I think the best one is that you get a much longer view of how someone could perform than you’d get with a traditional interview cycle. And interview judges someone at a single point in time. An apprenticeship would be able to determine their trajectory.
We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters."
To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
My own grad school happens to have a top 4 CS program (UIUC), but I went there for math (was top 15 at the time, not sure how it has done since). Some of the stories of people I met in my grad program were fascinating, there were people there who were likely smarter than most students at most of the elite universities - one particular extremely smart person I met even turned down top math programs in favor of a full scholarship at a lesser known public school for undergrad. My own personal background is a bit fascinating in some ways as well, but it never comes up in interviews - I'm at a FAANG with most of the achievements notched for a promotion to staff SWE, and my brother was promoted to staff research scientist at another FAANG for an extraordinary business-wide accomplishment. Neither of us coded before trying to get into the tech industry (my brother has a PhD in Chemistry from a reputed program).
I've learned throughout my life that focusing so much on where people went to school might cause you to miss smart and/or revolutionary people. People don't really talk so much about the schools people like Steve Jobs went to. Lots of very smart people are rejected by the likes of the Ivies, or not gotten the head start in life that would've gotten them placed at the most prestigious schools or programs. Some people's lives took a different turn for reasons that may have caused them to miss out on opportunities earlier in life, but life events created resolve & the will to make a switch & become successful. I think it's very unfair/silly to pass judgment on someone just due to what school they went to (I certainly don't really care when I'm interviewing someone) - there are actually a lot of very smart people who never had any such privileged background out there. We should be striving to find them not only because it could be very beneficial for business, but it's also the right thing to do.
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Because of my unstructured learning and random hobby type direction it took me a couple years to get proficient, but eventually I knew more about systems admin than people who'd been doing it professionally for years. I got hired for peanuts by a startup, and networked through User Groups to a better job that paid more.
My career's been nearly 20 years with no higher education or any other skillset whatsoever, bad at concentration and memorization, no bootcamps or teachers or mentors. I'm not a genius. If I can do it, you can do it.
An unlimited amount of free information and learning is out there on the internet. Go and get it, learn it, practice it. Network and find someone who wants to pay you chump change and build that resume.
Also remember there are a lot of roles today in tech. Many don't require a ton of technical chops. Figure out what they are and what they entail, and target your learning towards one. Even lower end roles pay better than most other jobs, and you can always pivot to another role later once you have some work on your resume.
ADHD, dropping out, etc are all beliefs that society labels as “non-productive”, but when somebody has passion and determination and a lot of time doing what they enjoy doing with no reward other than feeding this passion, then that’s all it takes. Consider yourself lucky because in my experience a very small number of people can do this, nobody wants to put the time it takes. Sometimes it takes decades. Coincidentally my form of ADHD disappears once I am in the flow, makes me wonder if ADHD is just aka for “I just don’t fundamentally enjoy what I am doing therefore my brain needs to reward itself in other ways”.
Even better if we end up pursuing a nice hobby in a booming field like technology.
Reality is that most people give up, because ultimately they pursue fields they are not deeply interested in to begin with. The ultimate curse: to dedicate our life to something we don’t care because we didn’t spend enough time exploring what we really cared about.
Did freelance stuff for a few years making websites for local businesses, graphic design for nearby restaurants and retail stores, fixing computers from my share-house bedroom, etc. Ultimately got some pretty dead-end tech support jobs in telcos and SMEs which taught me workplace etiquette and how to deal with clients/stakeholders. Then did some 3-6mth contracts with some pretty big companies from there, including government. One of those had a manager who understood ASD and took my under his wing, and I got a full time 6 figure role there founding an internal web team (taking over the main website and intranet from an outsourced company, building/deploying whatever web apps departments needed). Workplace training programs moved me up from there to a variety of roles and into security then management.
Still never finished high school or any tertiary education, I like to say I fell my way upwards. I have no idea what I’m doing professionally, I just like playing with computers.
Now I remember! I was also doing home PC repair through my parents' friends for $14/hr. Put flyers in Barnes and Noble. Got hired by a friend to write some Perl scripts. Two different guys who also went to the LUG hired me to fix some Linux servers they had at their small business. I set up a website and organized marketing materials and did project management for my dad's realty business.
All these little gigs I padded my resume with showed I was doing something, showed what tech I used, what I accomplished. It was a hustle for sure. But it convinced a small startup to give me a shot, and that was the gateway to a "real job". But I did start with dozens of tiny one off jobs over a couple years.
For sure, nobody is going to hire you if you can't show that you can apply your skills, that other people have also given you a shot, that you are self-directed and show a willingness to work and learn. But I mean, this is Life! If you can't or won't do those things you're gonna end up a bum. Even back then I didn't imagine anyone would give me anything, I had to do the work and hustle to make it. So maybe I just assumed other people got that part of it... It's definitely work and takes time, but it's also very much something everyone can accomplish if they put a small amount of brain power and a lot of elbow grease into.
Other people, however, may very well not have that same interest. Maybe what gets them hyper-focused is art or literature or who knows what. Not to say of course it is not possible but you may be smarter than you think.
He asked me why wasn't he able to do that and why wasn't he taught this at the bootcamp. I knew what his friend did in a weekend was probably a culmination of 3-4 years of rigourous learning of computer science concepts that he acquired at the Uni.
Among bootcamp students, There is this constant unhealthy comparison going on in their minds with the people who graduated from a Uni., this is even after years of working in the industry. what doesn't help is, Apart from a few exceptions(students and companies), the way most recruiters and HRs treat them isn't something to talk about and the pay difference is visible.
Also, It isn't easy for them to catch up. You had the privilege of being able to afford to study for 4 years while it is not the same story for most people at/from the bootcamps. To add to this, They also feel left out when you discuss about your days at the Uni or are discussing some computer science concepts.
If you have a colleague or someone around who is self taught or from a bootcamp, be a bit more kind and explain or refer them to reading material on concepts in a subtle way, it doesn't take much to make them feel included.
I sympathize with that (as someone who never went through uni for CS or a bootcamp), but at the same time, I've interviewed a bunch of bootcamp folks, and this mentality used to go the other way far too often as well. I've had a bunch of them have extremely huge egos and admitting to being told by their bootcamp that people who go to college for CS are less prepared for "the real world" than they are. I had one extremely rude candidate tell me straight up (after being told we're looking for someone with at least 5 years experience) "I went to X Bootcamp, which is like 10 years real world experience!" I can't imagine that was something he made up in his own brain. Most often, I'd talk to candidates who were being told to apply to senior and principal roles because they were told that their bootcamp experience qualified them for that (and it didn't hurt that, you know, the bootcamp stood to make more $$$ from their ISA if they happened to land a higher paying gig).
I think A LOT of that has trailed off as I haven't run up against that in probably 3-4 years as some of the crappier ones have folded (though some of what I shared above came from ones that still going strong...). But, man for a while from like 2013-2015, it was a huge issue to the point where I'd recommending passing on nearly every bootcamp grad unless we knew the bootcamp's graduates from other means.
Sure, some students will learn very fast, but on average - there's more to it than just cramming. And the people that manage to "grind" for N months and land a FAANG job are few and far between, not to mention that they're essentially cramming a very, very small portion of the CS curriculum.
Question, how do you get a FAANG job? Common answer, grid leetcode questions.
Not super useful comment, just sayin
Should you be paid equal to someone coming out of uni? I don't think so, the ramp-up will be hard and longer for the bootcamps guys, but this will change as you gain experience, after 5 years the difference in pay should be negligible if you properly ramp up!
About a decade ago I graduated from a technical institute's two year Computer Engineering Technology diploma program, so not a bootcamp, but absolutely not a full CS degree, and I've found this is a really important bit. My technical skills aren't really lacking, but my understanding and terminology still is. For my part I've become comfortable with saying "I'm unfamiliar with that concept, could you tell me more?"
lol we’re not charity cases.
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I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult. My life and the life of my children are going to reap benefits from this. If you're reading this and thinking "Can I do this?" then I'd highly recommend you attempt to find a way to make it work.
Over the years I've become a little cynical when I see people asking "should I become a developer?" Because, on one hand, you are right. It changed my life in a positive way. But I've also realized how many people think, essentially, that they take a two-week course and they get a six-figure job where they fuck around all day. Not so much!
I deal with a lot of work that's really similar to puzzle solving. "Why did this occur? Is it normal behaviour or malicious?" and then I get to do deep dives trying to figure out why something happened. If I find malicious behaviour I get to go into incident response mode and boot out a bad guy. If I find a false positive I get to do some engineering to figure out how to avoid this while still maintaining the purpose of the original rules (while also minimising system overhead for the rule processing). The kicker is there are a LOT of companies willing to pay me a LOT of money to do this. I'm so incredibly lucky.
One day, I overheard the CTO talking about hiring more devs, and inquired with them about it just briefly. He set up a meeting and we talked shop and I told him my story, the kinds of things I made, what I liked. Already at this point I was elated: I could talk to a real person about technical stuff I am interested in, and they understood me, and even more, they wanted me to join the team! After so much emotional energy and hopes dashed by constant applications with no response, I didn't even care if I wasn't going to get a job, it was enough to just be seen. But I was going to get the job!
Just found out though that it's not going to happen, because they couldn't clear hiring someone to replace my current position; it's a startup and we are not doing well now (home brokerage startup). Will hold on for now, but not too hopeful anymore.
Just really really crazy to me how much I labored over applications and things for so long with just nothing at all back, and all it really took was being able to be in the same room as someone. Equal parts hopeful and frustrating honestly.
Also I bet they would be able to find someone to replace you a lot quicker if they thought you were leaving
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> The hardest part of coding is not technical or even getting the job, it’s liking the job. If you do not enjoy the often stressful and thankless role of staring at the computer and doing frustrating logic puzzles, usually alone, eventually you will burn out and wonder why you ever got into the industry.
I even enjoy coding sometimes, damn it does it get demoralizing sometimes
> Important point here: Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job.
This is what separates people that can make it and people who can't. Like when people are asking questions, how do I learn to code or whatever. I think you have already lost.
Do people find this topic of getting into tech in abnormal ways interesting? Maybe ill share mine one day. I was kind of amused by the idea that I failed out of my engineering program, I got a D in my only comp sci class and now Im a sr engineer at a popular tech company lol.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018... // https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541
It’s not really intelligence or grit, it’s just that you actually like staring at a cold unfeeling machine that tells you that you’ve fucked up over and over again.
I found great comic relief in this characterization, and want to extend the joke, comments like "that sounds 100 times better than my ex" or creating a "YFU as a service" company
Thanks for brightening my day.
Disclosure- it was more often me who was the harsh/unfeeling partner, not the ex.
And I like programming.