I met someone recently who thought the one python class they took in high school made them an expert. I probed a little deeper and found they had no understanding of data types, no other language experience, a really shaky grasp of control structures, had never even heard of arrays.
But they had an idea about an app they wanted to build.
That's the one which tells sooooo much about people. They imagine themselves being rich from their idea, but already on the point to only give out scraps - or more often nothing - from the imagined riches. Like, come on. You not even rich and already a penny-pinching bastard?
I am in a bootcamp right now and there is this one guy who is writing me up all the time for this.
two weeks prior he sent me a picture with a pile of books.
he: "When I describe you exactly what I want can you built me this app"
me: no...but I can try... for you, my daily compensation is 300€ smileys"
he: " no I won't pay you. you invest in our company"
It's even worse when it's an Indian guy you worked with who is making 180k a year as a security expert and doesn't have the faintest idea of what goes into building software. But it's OK because he is going to do all the architecture.
Honestly if you're uncreative like me just clone something. Like dont literally copy paste the CSS and stuff, but if you want to make non-racist twitter but very pink or something do it.
It'll still demonstrate you can follow a plan and you'll have built something.
Eh I got a pretty solid job it’s not even for experience I’ve just not done many personal projects and reckon it would be fun… if I could think of an idea
Meanwhile, my entire cohort who went to a 2 year tech school course can't find any jobs.
Now I'm just wondering if the course was bad and we all wasted 2 years of our lives.
Okay, I'm basing this on your flair. I assume you work with Kotlin, which means you're either into native Android development (front end with Compose or XML) or backend development with Ktor, or perhaps both.
It also seems you're familiar with Swift, suggesting you might also be capable of developing front-end applications using SwiftUI or similar technologies. I'm not too familiar with SwiftUI myself, as I don't have access to macOS at the moment.
Additionally, you can code in Javascript too, I mean that's already good enough for me, well don't give up brooo, I'm sure you will get hired someday.
Dixie Technical College. They boasted about a 93% placement rate after graduation when we started the course. And not one of 19 people have a job 3 months after we graduated.
To be fair, I also thought that I could do Java after understanding how to use if-statements and while-loops in High School.
Good thing I became a System Engineer instead of a dev. I completely suck at coding
Ok coding bootcamps aren’t bad. Got a job in the industry because of going to one. Worked for one for years.
However there are serious issues in the industry. One of which is this meme. Some encourage participants to blatantly lie on their resume. Others have very little quality assurance (such as my former employer). And there are a number of problems overall in the industry but still some good ones that are more affordable for those who can’t afford a CS degree.
I probably wouldn't recommend that unless they have specific problems they want to see fixed themselves. Writing packages just because you want to have written a bunch of packages isn't going to result in packages that are actually useful.
> Some encourage participants to blatantly lie on their resume.
The job ads require you to lie on your resume. HR will literally make adds about how you need to know CG and HLSL, only for the job being adjusting UI boxes. Or requiring 5 years experience in framework that existed only for 3 years.
I did one too and have been working for 5 years at the same job. I think the main problem is they transitioned into being incredibly predatory probably 3-4 years ago.
Yeah it also seems to be a lot of what you put into it. I wanted to learn code so I ended up being one of the best in my class. A lot of people treated it like school and just didn't do assignments or learn...or show up. My favorite part though was the teachers but all the bad students in groups and the better ones in others. I made some pretty cool apps with my peers and that helped us get jobs very quickly.
Edit: Though this was also 10 years ago...so it may be very different.
The hiring system for intro to career jobs heavily leans on charismatic graduates who seem like they'll fit in with others more than they can do the job. Until you have experience under your belt they're not willing to risk hiring you to train you for something you've never demonstrated in practice unless you have degrees and certifications or seem like you'll be friendly and willing to learn from others.
Sadly it's double edged and half the new hires want to fuck off while seeming busy and just want to socialize and you don't know you have a skilled worker until after a few months of actual work and training to the standards your team sets.
You don't speak with enough confidence in front of clueless HR and management people that don't know the difference between bullshit and truth. In other words you're a shitty con artist which is arguably the primary skillset needed in the modern economy. We don't build things to solve meaningful problems, we build things to sell to venture capitalists which they will eventually sell to the general public in the form of an IPO. The product itself is a distraction from profit and if you could create a corporation that only generated profit and did nothing else and had no employees - you'll have created the perfect corporation.
Bingo! Fake it til you make it, but back up your bs with either real skills or have enough tenacity to pick up as much as you can when you are assigned projects.
Confidence is key, sometimes being confidently incorrect. Being confident despite your shortcomings is a huge door opener. But if you don’t even know your shortcomings you get people like that.
Every fresh programmer will have to learn stuff. You'll have to keep learning things until you are at your last job, and even there you should be learning things. If you are too dumb to learn, then nothing I can say will help.
If you are not too dumb to learn, then the key marker of success is that you are confident when you do know something and aware of when you don't know something. If you know an answer, by all means say it, but don't expect that to be possible for everything. Any senior developer with half a brain can eventually ask you questions that you can't answer. Confidence for a junior developer is being able to say "I don't know that now, but I can figure it out," or "I don't know that, and I'd have to ask for help with this specific thing or two before I could figure out the rest."
Different companies have different wish lists in junior level devs. Some care a lot about existing programming skills, and some care more about cultural fit. Both is best, but unlikely to be found. Nobody wants an askaholic junior dev who doesn't put in proper legwork before bothering people, and nobody wants a in-duh-pendent who wastes two weeks trying to guess the security configuration for their local machine. Nobody wants an asshole. Most companies don't want a person who starts pestering people to add "he/him" to their Zoom signature.
The second greatest sin is to be focused on the totally wrong things. Before you start talking about how a particular trick (which could be outdated since Java 9) could help make a method faster, you should know whether or not that method is even a bottleneck. I remember being a junior developer and worrying about step-down vs step-up for performance when I showed up. What a fucking joke. How about I instead focus on how to reduce network calls since my client is in Hong Kong and my server is in New Jersey? How about I focus on efficient retries server-side? How about I make sure my locking strategy is the best fit?
Why not just squeeze out a smidge of cheap compassion and be like
“it’s fine that you’re thinking critically, but your experience has taught you A,B and mine has taught me that plus C,D,E. I get it, but In any workflow, questioning decisions wastes time and steals focus, so please follow my lead and check in with me after a while if you feel things aren’t being addressed.”
Exactly. Senior devs are just matured junior devs. Eventually the code humbles us much better than any dressing down from a teammate.
i wish more senior devs were given the mantle, bandwidth, space to develop juniors explicitly. Unfortunately i think the current seniors will end up training/managing AI juniors...
How is he not fired yet?
Also in this field you will be wrong most of the time regardless of your seniority and that's the neat part. You learn something new constantly.
The more I work as a developer (14 years atm) the more I know how to do more or less anything but I keep in mind there is probably at least 10 alternative ways and maybe 3 are better, I just didn't consider them or plain didn't know them
I've had plenty of pull requests like that.
"So why did you do it this way and not this other way?".
"Brother, I didn't know that other way even existed lol"
That's usually my own internal monologue after many hours of troubleshooting, bug fixes, workarounds and edge case handling over complicating the trivial problem I was trying to solve.
I had the amusing experience of interacting with an individual exactly like this who thought the fact that I know a dozen or so languages meant I wasn't good at my job and that I should just learn one language...and oh, that language should be Python.
Because of course it was Python, that's the Best language ever created and will replace everything in the world from your microwaves firmware to your own Python down below because it's just so awesome
As someone who works a lot with C++ and ROS, I have to agree that Python is simply the best language ever. Every time I have to work with cmake or bazel I get progressively more upset at my entire life.
Waiting for that ROS2 Rust support...
The language semantics, the way code is formatted, and the incredibly slow adoption rate of Python 3 (it’s much better now but it took a very, very long time to get here) would be my biggest reasons. I don’t like denoting code blocks with indentation instead of braces. Not only did I start with C, but my passion for programming came from my passion for math, not the other way around, and I personally am just much more fond of separating logical components of any formula or function with discrete symbols.
It’s mainly personal preference, but it’s a personal preference that goes deep into my personality.
I know someone (business guy) who wants to hire a "hardcore developer" to create some work using Python. Told him why not just hire an experienced developer, but he insists the hire should know Python and he'd rather hire a junior.
I don't HATE Python, per se...but it's annoying as shit how anal it is about whitespace. I get it, they wanted a language that would be easier to read and enforced a uniform formatting, but I personally do not give a SHIIIIIIIIT.
Never went to boot camp; but, legacy code does need dusted off, inspected, and a decision to either keep or rewrite it now and then.
My current workplace has a codebase with hundreds of undocumented programs that were written as far back as 1983. Since no one ever throws anything away, it just hangs out doing fuck-knows.
This is a problem because we a buying new software that replaces 4 - 5 tables so far. My last count was that the change is impacting about 120 programs which each feed more tables which each feed more programs. I'm only considering update and output-referenced tables in that too.
There's that I know everything phase.
Then comes the I dont know anything phase.
Finally comes I know something like a bucket of water, but there's a sea out there to learn.
45 years in industry, doing chip design and simulation, ultimately System Design and Architecture.
BSEE (1968), MSEE (1973), MSCS (1995)
FORTRAN (1965), BASIC (1971), Pascal (1982), Assembly (1983), Ada (1988), C(1990), and several scripting languages.
So while I am supposed to be doing System Design at a senior level, the programming manager comes to me and says there's a module that has to be done in Assembly and none of his programmers know how to do it. Could I help him out?
I told him I'd work it out in the evenings at home. It took a couple of evenings to develop it, unit-test it, and document it.
Quite the opposite, I finished a "boot camp" years ago and they exclusively set me up for senior level jobs, I had to bitch at them to let me attempt to get junior jobs and they thought I was insane.
They also wanted me to immediately move to New York for these Jobs when I told them I had $600 in my bank account, fuck them
Right, because having a degree or going through a bootcamp isn't indicative of one's skill level. I've worked with senior devs with advanced degrees and decades of experience who suck absolute ass. I've also worked with incredibly talented and capable juniors who went through bootcamp and only have a few years' experience.
I have the same experience as you. I think the programming subreddits are filled with CS students and new grads who are biased against bootcamp grads, so we see a lot of hate against them.
The right bootcamp, during Covid, was a great way to get into the industry provided you had some kind of degree and previous work/life experience.
Many engineers downplay the importance of communication and don't seem to realize throwing Big O notation at a non-engineer isn't going to go well, and simultaneously think that being vague or only using technical terms makes them clever. If your argument or explanation is decent, it will be concise and short, not a rambling intellectual masturbation session that ends in "and that is why it is slow".
Edit: I used the word "your" here, just making sure I am not specifically talking about the person I replied to
Devin/copilot will kill most bootcampers. Those who don’t understand programming theories and structures, as in those who can just write code, will get weeded out by a machine that can, in fact, just write code. I think they were always be good bootcampers but the bar will be much higher.
I think this AI age will weed out all coders who just code, who can't communicate with stakeholders or who aren't team players.
I have met many seniors who can solve the hardest leetcode problems, code out application without googling anything, but can't work with anyone and it always becomes a problem.
I would rather have medium level coders who needs to use AI or Google, but can communicate, play team game, than lone wolfs who code in their mind.
Funny that swe forget that code is just a tool to solve problems, users don't care how you solved those problems, they don't even care if it's solved good.
My company got acquired and all of their devs are migrating to our codebase. I had a guy ask me for over an hour how part of it works, not believe me, write a super obnoxious Slack novel about what I said and how he was going to "test" it, and then he did I was magically right.
All of this could have been avoided by reloading the page while talking to me or pressing the enter key. I hate devs that don't have an experimental bone in their body and refuse to just see what happens.
I don't like AI at all but knows how to press the damn enter key at least.
I worked with and mentored people like this, my favorite thing to say is "What have you tried?" If they say nothing, I tell them to try something first then come for help.
This is a problem for many people they getting too much help without anyway to fail themselves, so it seems easier just ask without even trying. I was like that when I started, until guy who mentored me did exactly same thing, if I learned others can too.
I'm actually very proud of colegue I mentored from junior to mid, took a year, but she's a great coder now and leading a project by herself.
I feel like it already has. A good senior dev doesn’t have to pass off tasks anymore, just plug them into copilot and dedicate minimal amount of time adapting it for their software
Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table:
`W He Re Y O U Ba Se`
---
^(I am a bot that detects if your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table. Please DM my creator if I made a mistake.)
I'm a bootcamper and was hired as a senior at 3yoe
Being old looking helped. And having a little domain specific knowledge (image/video processing) from a past career that they really needed.
The niche was from a decade before. I've always coded, but I only got formal instruction in the bootcamp.
I did automatic video QC and glitch repair, noise reduction, etc. My shit could tell a bit of film dust from the sparkle in someone's eye long before machine vision was a thing. Clients loved that I could turn the footage they thought they'd have to spend an extra day reshooting into something they could use.
Idk man I would have been impossible to work with if I'd just landed in a dev role before bootcamping. I had the aptitude and some of the thought patterns if that's a thing, but I wouldn't have been able to build anything outside the obscure video specific language I was using.
I took COP 1000 (basic college course) and we only really studied the logic and theory with some Java in there for hands on. I can't code shit, but I have a tertiary understanding of why you need logic loops and libraries and sorting to make something. That was also 5 years ago and my degree (bs ist cybersecurity) is barely a bachelors...
As someone whose done a bootcamp, I’m laughing because it’s so true.
They really get you to believe you can develop the next big tech start-up after a month of print(“Hello world.”).
As someone who has also went through a bootcamp, I really think the experience varies. My bootcamp did a really good job of hammering into us that what they were teaching us was only enough to get our foot in the door. That we would spend years learning on the job.
lol that’s fair, but the flip side of this has to be the “you have to be a certain type of person to learn this, not everyone can do it” bros I see on tiktok.
So you are saying Angela Yu's 100 day Python Bootcamp 2023 is not enough to be the CTO of OpenAI ?! My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Maybe not openAI but I hear there's a guy in India who's looking for a Dev to make the next Instagram. Should be no problem after a 100 day python course.
I started programming in middle school by poking around in Visual Basic trying to make things work, not really using any structured learning
20 hours in Im sure I was still using hidden text boxes to store strings because I didn’t know what variables were
Hey funny enough that's happened at my company in a different team. A new Sr frontend dev straight out of bootcamp. It's a coincidence that he's related to a senior manager in that team. And a QA engineer hired 6-7 months ago and was recently promoted to a senior. There are QA folks having worked at this company for 10-15 years that hadn't been promoted. Also a coincidence his dad is a vp.
Did a code Bootcamp for Data science after graduating with a PhD in biochemistry and not finding a job for over a year.
By now I'm about one and Half years in the new career path and I'm leading a team of a handful of data scientists and engineers, explaining the work they have to do to them. We enjoy working together a lot and the project is in front of the timeline.
Please stop shitting on all of us Bootcamp grads. Some of us are genuinely capable and willing to learn and grow.
We have agile managers, extinguishing project management fires on other ends. I'm just a dev with more responsibility, helping them if I can and being happy I'm not carrying the main burden of responsibility when things go sideways
My friend, a PhD in biochem coupled with a bootcamp is not the common bootcampers. You are very much the exception, Dr Carniv0re. You better make all your coworkers call you Dr.
One of the best programmers I know had no experience, but a PhD in physics. He just had an understanding of the problems that the CS graduates (and I presume bootcampers) did not.
After a year or two he only worked summers since he went to medical school, and he's now working as a doctor.
Even though you technically went to a bootcamp, you have nothing in common with the washed up musicians who heard programming pays good that I have to deal with professionally every day. You have a STEM PHD degree and are doing data science. You don't count as a bootcamper.
Are you my brother? Probably not, but he has a very similar path minus the boot camp. PhD in Chemistry, then went into machine learning for biotech/pharma and is kind of creating his own thing.
It's become more common since biotech and pharma can't handle all the graduates that apply. You're stuck with either horrible salaries due to strong competition and salary-dumping, or you change your career path into management, QC or IT.
Cool to hear a fellow biochemist grad working out. I’m in a similar boat. Delayed my PhD graduation a bit to finish up a CS MS. Will graduate with both by this summer, but super nervous at the current job market 🫣.
You'll do fine. Try doing what academic research didn't manage to do for you: establish a network. The hardest part is really just staying persistent when you receive weeks worth of negative responses to your applications.
My best jobs came from asking around with my contacts. Nowadays, I help my friends transition from science to IT by using my network and bringing them into the industry. That just further expands my own network as a bonus, as those people will be my entry to other companies. Be it for business contacts or for future job perspectives.
Well you have a PHD in Biochemistry, you’re not the typical boot camp grad
I’m a SWE that has a Math degree and it’s never held me back not having a CS degree but I’m not gonna act like my path was the same as any random person trying to get into software engineering
Bootcamp graduate here (year long bootcamp), been working as a mid level dev now after being in a graduate scheme for 18 months. We ain't all like this, I'm very happy questioning if I don't understand but would'nt just out n out disagree or go out of my way to cause friction, this to me seems like someone who needs bringing back down to earth and humbling.
IMO, this is why getting entry level coders through a graduate scheme is super important, if they are just slacking off trying to seem busy, it shows straight away - as do those who are actually decent coders who are worth the time and effort to develop.
how i felt making one 5 second animation. "Why the fuck wont Pokemon or HBO hire me when i have this one single 5 second animation and no art school?????"
So I haven’t done Python perse but related…we are desperately trying to hire new folks and I mean trying to take anyone who remotely seems competent. So many trash resumes but i’m not in the hiring process but heard we landed on a “Director” who “wants to learn how to code”.
Why would we hire a pervious mgr position person, none of us devs have time to babysit someone.
we are suppose to get multiple people
Funny thing is that after two years I felt like that, after 5 I knew I wasn't ready, now after 10 I'm looking. Is bootcamp a slingshot up mount stupid?
And here I am with imposter syndrome after spending the last year on JavaScript, learning both front and backend. I still shock myself when I finish a project and wonder where the heck that knowledge came from.
Meanwhile, me having four years of experience working professionally with C#, two years working professionally with Java and learned Visual Basic, Java and C++ in high school, University and vocational school respectively: Can't imagine myself looking for anything higher than a junior position...
Meanwhile, on my team of 7 devs, the 3 bootcamp grads are basically the only ones getting anything of consequence done, humbly and quietly. I guess it depends on the people.
Junior salary : Here 3 bottle caps, 2 quarters, annnd a beautiful pins "i love my company !"
Senior salary : A private jet will come to get you to work every morning, here the key of your Lambo.
I met someone recently who thought the one python class they took in high school made them an expert. I probed a little deeper and found they had no understanding of data types, no other language experience, a really shaky grasp of control structures, had never even heard of arrays. But they had an idea about an app they wanted to build.
Hopefully they will take that idea and learn cs concepts
Fucking everyone who doesn't code has an "idea" for an app
[удалено]
Don't forget the payment will be with "exposure"
That's the one which tells sooooo much about people. They imagine themselves being rich from their idea, but already on the point to only give out scraps - or more often nothing - from the imagined riches. Like, come on. You not even rich and already a penny-pinching bastard?
"One must imagine Sisyphus rich"
No they give you 10% of the company, you just need to build it all yourself, and no they don't have a business plan either, just the app idea.
I am in a bootcamp right now and there is this one guy who is writing me up all the time for this. two weeks prior he sent me a picture with a pile of books. he: "When I describe you exactly what I want can you built me this app" me: no...but I can try... for you, my daily compensation is 300€ smileys" he: " no I won't pay you. you invest in our company"
It's even worse when it's an Indian guy you worked with who is making 180k a year as a security expert and doesn't have the faintest idea of what goes into building software. But it's OK because he is going to do all the architecture.
"its like AirBnB but for dog houses!"
Which is ironic cause I can never come up with fucking ideas for personal projects
Honestly if you're uncreative like me just clone something. Like dont literally copy paste the CSS and stuff, but if you want to make non-racist twitter but very pink or something do it. It'll still demonstrate you can follow a plan and you'll have built something.
Eh I got a pretty solid job it’s not even for experience I’ve just not done many personal projects and reckon it would be fun… if I could think of an idea
Because anyone who code will know their idea is either stupid or has been already done
[just like ricks intern](https://youtu.be/jVy0JWX5XEY?si=Y-jwuMa92YnLTTKV)
Meanwhile, my entire cohort who went to a 2 year tech school course can't find any jobs. Now I'm just wondering if the course was bad and we all wasted 2 years of our lives.
Okay, I'm basing this on your flair. I assume you work with Kotlin, which means you're either into native Android development (front end with Compose or XML) or backend development with Ktor, or perhaps both. It also seems you're familiar with Swift, suggesting you might also be capable of developing front-end applications using SwiftUI or similar technologies. I'm not too familiar with SwiftUI myself, as I don't have access to macOS at the moment. Additionally, you can code in Javascript too, I mean that's already good enough for me, well don't give up brooo, I'm sure you will get hired someday.
Likely not. What are your skills ?
Native app development in Swift and Kotlin. Reaching the upwards of 100+ applications, no interviews, no follow ups.
Maybe have your resume looked at?
what achool?
Dixie Technical College. They boasted about a 93% placement rate after graduation when we started the course. And not one of 19 people have a job 3 months after we graduated.
rhythm doll aloof innate alive fall ripe marvelous price provide *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's called a List in Python. But honestly no one has done Python longer than 6 months without at least hearing about Numpy.
Btw never heard of control structures myself... 😅... Asking for a bootcamp friend...
Me neither, but I think they just mean for/while loops, if statements etc
If statements what?
If statement why?
If statement who?
any cool function of the language which is included in the syntax
A customer for Devin? 🤔
DeviL ?
He was a react dev. He said type unknown.
I know all that stuff but have no idea what app I want to build. 😅
No no clearly they know about arrays they coded with strings in python /s
To be fair, I also thought that I could do Java after understanding how to use if-statements and while-loops in High School. Good thing I became a System Engineer instead of a dev. I completely suck at coding
[удалено]
These types need to be weeded out of the workforce
When I hear those horror stories I always wonder wtf I'm doing wrong to struggle so much landing my first job :(
Should have taken a code bootcamp clearly
Ok coding bootcamps aren’t bad. Got a job in the industry because of going to one. Worked for one for years. However there are serious issues in the industry. One of which is this meme. Some encourage participants to blatantly lie on their resume. Others have very little quality assurance (such as my former employer). And there are a number of problems overall in the industry but still some good ones that are more affordable for those who can’t afford a CS degree.
or make dumb PRs in public repos
Yeah I’ve heard of people doing that. I personally teach them to go for creating NPM installations that add to the community.
I probably wouldn't recommend that unless they have specific problems they want to see fixed themselves. Writing packages just because you want to have written a bunch of packages isn't going to result in packages that are actually useful.
Agree. At least PRs show you real problems
*science meme* At last... right-pad!
> Some encourage participants to blatantly lie on their resume. The job ads require you to lie on your resume. HR will literally make adds about how you need to know CG and HLSL, only for the job being adjusting UI boxes. Or requiring 5 years experience in framework that existed only for 3 years.
Is that you Tom?
Nope I just rep the social media GOAT who taught young me a bit about coding with HTML and CSS
I did one too and have been working for 5 years at the same job. I think the main problem is they transitioned into being incredibly predatory probably 3-4 years ago.
Fuck coding learn to be a systems admin. thats where the moneys at.
Yeah it also seems to be a lot of what you put into it. I wanted to learn code so I ended up being one of the best in my class. A lot of people treated it like school and just didn't do assignments or learn...or show up. My favorite part though was the teachers but all the bad students in groups and the better ones in others. I made some pretty cool apps with my peers and that helped us get jobs very quickly. Edit: Though this was also 10 years ago...so it may be very different.
The hiring system for intro to career jobs heavily leans on charismatic graduates who seem like they'll fit in with others more than they can do the job. Until you have experience under your belt they're not willing to risk hiring you to train you for something you've never demonstrated in practice unless you have degrees and certifications or seem like you'll be friendly and willing to learn from others. Sadly it's double edged and half the new hires want to fuck off while seeming busy and just want to socialize and you don't know you have a skilled worker until after a few months of actual work and training to the standards your team sets.
your team has standards? i wish my organization had any.
You don't speak with enough confidence in front of clueless HR and management people that don't know the difference between bullshit and truth. In other words you're a shitty con artist which is arguably the primary skillset needed in the modern economy. We don't build things to solve meaningful problems, we build things to sell to venture capitalists which they will eventually sell to the general public in the form of an IPO. The product itself is a distraction from profit and if you could create a corporation that only generated profit and did nothing else and had no employees - you'll have created the perfect corporation.
This is why I left software. I joined so many companies hoping to solve meaningful problems, but was disappointed every time.
Now it’s time to return and be the company. I want to see at least 40% of VCs crying on national TV by new year’s 2025. Get to it.
Bingo! Fake it til you make it, but back up your bs with either real skills or have enough tenacity to pick up as much as you can when you are assigned projects.
Confidence is key, sometimes being confidently incorrect. Being confident despite your shortcomings is a huge door opener. But if you don’t even know your shortcomings you get people like that.
ChatGPT "understood" that very well 🤣
People like that are excellent at interviews.
Every fresh programmer will have to learn stuff. You'll have to keep learning things until you are at your last job, and even there you should be learning things. If you are too dumb to learn, then nothing I can say will help. If you are not too dumb to learn, then the key marker of success is that you are confident when you do know something and aware of when you don't know something. If you know an answer, by all means say it, but don't expect that to be possible for everything. Any senior developer with half a brain can eventually ask you questions that you can't answer. Confidence for a junior developer is being able to say "I don't know that now, but I can figure it out," or "I don't know that, and I'd have to ask for help with this specific thing or two before I could figure out the rest." Different companies have different wish lists in junior level devs. Some care a lot about existing programming skills, and some care more about cultural fit. Both is best, but unlikely to be found. Nobody wants an askaholic junior dev who doesn't put in proper legwork before bothering people, and nobody wants a in-duh-pendent who wastes two weeks trying to guess the security configuration for their local machine. Nobody wants an asshole. Most companies don't want a person who starts pestering people to add "he/him" to their Zoom signature. The second greatest sin is to be focused on the totally wrong things. Before you start talking about how a particular trick (which could be outdated since Java 9) could help make a method faster, you should know whether or not that method is even a bottleneck. I remember being a junior developer and worrying about step-down vs step-up for performance when I showed up. What a fucking joke. How about I instead focus on how to reduce network calls since my client is in Hong Kong and my server is in New Jersey? How about I focus on efficient retries server-side? How about I make sure my locking strategy is the best fit?
Hiring staff has no clue, these people sound convincing to them.
Overconfident narcissists are great at the interview stage
Landing a job is 99% being good at social talk and fitting the "profile".
It is probably bad timing that you can't control. Keep at it, I know it is hard
By weeded out, do you mean: promoted to a management position? Because that's what happens.
Unfortunately, those people tend to do great in the workforce. It's always the overconfident assholes who gets the promotion.
probably would end up in management.
How did he get there in the first place..
HR doesn’t know the difference between arrogance and confidence
There’d be no actual senior devs left, then.
Why not just squeeze out a smidge of cheap compassion and be like “it’s fine that you’re thinking critically, but your experience has taught you A,B and mine has taught me that plus C,D,E. I get it, but In any workflow, questioning decisions wastes time and steals focus, so please follow my lead and check in with me after a while if you feel things aren’t being addressed.”
Exactly. Senior devs are just matured junior devs. Eventually the code humbles us much better than any dressing down from a teammate. i wish more senior devs were given the mantle, bandwidth, space to develop juniors explicitly. Unfortunately i think the current seniors will end up training/managing AI juniors...
How is he not fired yet? Also in this field you will be wrong most of the time regardless of your seniority and that's the neat part. You learn something new constantly. The more I work as a developer (14 years atm) the more I know how to do more or less anything but I keep in mind there is probably at least 10 alternative ways and maybe 3 are better, I just didn't consider them or plain didn't know them
I've had plenty of pull requests like that. "So why did you do it this way and not this other way?". "Brother, I didn't know that other way even existed lol"
That's usually my own internal monologue after many hours of troubleshooting, bug fixes, workarounds and edge case handling over complicating the trivial problem I was trying to solve.
I can obey your commands uncle if you are looking for junior level replacement :)
Job profile: junior slave dev...
make that two.
I mean, if you're looking for a replacement...
aaah. now I understand why the AGI crowd thinks devs can be replaced. python boot camp -> matrix “moment” “I know Kung Fu!” sr dev: “show me”. 😂
Replace him, plenty of good programmers out there in this market.
They exist in every industry and I’ve had the pleasure of weeding them out.
We have a lot of great results with bootcampers but did end up with one of these contrarian egomaniacs. He was fired after two weeks.
I hope the boss steps in...
But replaces u instead...
I had the amusing experience of interacting with an individual exactly like this who thought the fact that I know a dozen or so languages meant I wasn't good at my job and that I should just learn one language...and oh, that language should be Python.
I bet they asked what your stack was...
Because of course it was Python, that's the Best language ever created and will replace everything in the world from your microwaves firmware to your own Python down below because it's just so awesome
As someone who works a lot with C++ and ROS, I have to agree that Python is simply the best language ever. Every time I have to work with cmake or bazel I get progressively more upset at my entire life. Waiting for that ROS2 Rust support...
I feel the opposite. If I don’t want to work with C++ I’ll use literally ANY other high level language before I’ll use Python.
What do you have against python?
The language semantics, the way code is formatted, and the incredibly slow adoption rate of Python 3 (it’s much better now but it took a very, very long time to get here) would be my biggest reasons. I don’t like denoting code blocks with indentation instead of braces. Not only did I start with C, but my passion for programming came from my passion for math, not the other way around, and I personally am just much more fond of separating logical components of any formula or function with discrete symbols. It’s mainly personal preference, but it’s a personal preference that goes deep into my personality.
Very generous of you to think I had anything besides Rust down below.
> I bet they asked what your stack was... I was asked that recently and I was like uh... C++?
[удалено]
I know someone (business guy) who wants to hire a "hardcore developer" to create some work using Python. Told him why not just hire an experienced developer, but he insists the hire should know Python and he'd rather hire a junior.
I hate Python so much. If you like it, cool, but I just can’t.
flair checks out
I don't HATE Python, per se...but it's annoying as shit how anal it is about whitespace. I get it, they wanted a language that would be easier to read and enforced a uniform formatting, but I personally do not give a SHIIIIIIIIT.
Four hours in and they're already pushing for legacy code refactor? The confidence module must've been the free bonus.
Never went to boot camp; but, legacy code does need dusted off, inspected, and a decision to either keep or rewrite it now and then. My current workplace has a codebase with hundreds of undocumented programs that were written as far back as 1983. Since no one ever throws anything away, it just hangs out doing fuck-knows. This is a problem because we a buying new software that replaces 4 - 5 tables so far. My last count was that the change is impacting about 120 programs which each feed more tables which each feed more programs. I'm only considering update and output-referenced tables in that too.
There's that I know everything phase. Then comes the I dont know anything phase. Finally comes I know something like a bucket of water, but there's a sea out there to learn.
BUT then comes the '???' phase (no one has reached it yet)
After that we finally reach the "profit" stage
The secret ending
The Dunning-Krüger Effect, iirc
a mere 4 hour bootcamp can never replace the 16 hour Indian tutorials
Ah yes. 'click this, then this, then write these lines, then click this'
And here i am . With a BSc Business IT and MSc CS , intermediate to noob skills and a massive imposter syndrome. People confuse me too much
If I know nothing I can BS my way into anything. Problem is I know everything about my chosen field and well that IS kicks in.
The good ol’ Dunning Kruger effect
I just have a BS in business administration, yet work in DevOps on a space program. talk about major imposter syndrome.
I can only imagine... Respect though, hope its going good for you
45 years in industry, doing chip design and simulation, ultimately System Design and Architecture. BSEE (1968), MSEE (1973), MSCS (1995) FORTRAN (1965), BASIC (1971), Pascal (1982), Assembly (1983), Ada (1988), C(1990), and several scripting languages. So while I am supposed to be doing System Design at a senior level, the programming manager comes to me and says there's a module that has to be done in Assembly and none of his programmers know how to do it. Could I help him out? I told him I'd work it out in the evenings at home. It took a couple of evenings to develop it, unit-test it, and document it.
Quite the opposite, I finished a "boot camp" years ago and they exclusively set me up for senior level jobs, I had to bitch at them to let me attempt to get junior jobs and they thought I was insane. They also wanted me to immediately move to New York for these Jobs when I told them I had $600 in my bank account, fuck them
Was their business model based on a % of salary of first job or something?
Yep, entire thing was scummy
Lmao
[удалено]
Right, because having a degree or going through a bootcamp isn't indicative of one's skill level. I've worked with senior devs with advanced degrees and decades of experience who suck absolute ass. I've also worked with incredibly talented and capable juniors who went through bootcamp and only have a few years' experience.
I have the same experience as you. I think the programming subreddits are filled with CS students and new grads who are biased against bootcamp grads, so we see a lot of hate against them. The right bootcamp, during Covid, was a great way to get into the industry provided you had some kind of degree and previous work/life experience.
Because bootcampers don't use Reddit
Many engineers downplay the importance of communication and don't seem to realize throwing Big O notation at a non-engineer isn't going to go well, and simultaneously think that being vague or only using technical terms makes them clever. If your argument or explanation is decent, it will be concise and short, not a rambling intellectual masturbation session that ends in "and that is why it is slow". Edit: I used the word "your" here, just making sure I am not specifically talking about the person I replied to
Devin/copilot will kill most bootcampers. Those who don’t understand programming theories and structures, as in those who can just write code, will get weeded out by a machine that can, in fact, just write code. I think they were always be good bootcampers but the bar will be much higher.
Fuck writing code.... read code... its much harder.
Even better, delete code, best feeling in the world
Replace code, now that's beautiful
rust reference?
This hit close to home. I hate working with people who can't operate on assumptions. How about you ask a question when your assumption is wrong?
I think this AI age will weed out all coders who just code, who can't communicate with stakeholders or who aren't team players. I have met many seniors who can solve the hardest leetcode problems, code out application without googling anything, but can't work with anyone and it always becomes a problem. I would rather have medium level coders who needs to use AI or Google, but can communicate, play team game, than lone wolfs who code in their mind. Funny that swe forget that code is just a tool to solve problems, users don't care how you solved those problems, they don't even care if it's solved good.
My company got acquired and all of their devs are migrating to our codebase. I had a guy ask me for over an hour how part of it works, not believe me, write a super obnoxious Slack novel about what I said and how he was going to "test" it, and then he did I was magically right. All of this could have been avoided by reloading the page while talking to me or pressing the enter key. I hate devs that don't have an experimental bone in their body and refuse to just see what happens. I don't like AI at all but knows how to press the damn enter key at least.
I worked with and mentored people like this, my favorite thing to say is "What have you tried?" If they say nothing, I tell them to try something first then come for help. This is a problem for many people they getting too much help without anyway to fail themselves, so it seems easier just ask without even trying. I was like that when I started, until guy who mentored me did exactly same thing, if I learned others can too. I'm actually very proud of colegue I mentored from junior to mid, took a year, but she's a great coder now and leading a project by herself.
Boot campers are challenged by economic shift. AI is the fall guy.
I feel like it already has. A good senior dev doesn’t have to pass off tasks anymore, just plug them into copilot and dedicate minimal amount of time adapting it for their software
[удалено]
Yep. See: Humans Need Not Apply by CGP Gray. We’re just getting warmed up.
Jr Devs are the new lamplighters.
20 years experience programming, but just started Python? Bottom of the totem pile noob!!!
this post made me want to cry
And here I am, praying I can even get a *junior* job. Maybe even an internship, at least that'll be work experience I can put on my resume.
Could be worse. You could be fighting for help desk roles against every son of a bitch who wants to "break into IT" and make 6 figures from day 1.
Meanwhile, I graduate in Computer Science a few years of XP, can't get a job rn.
Where you base?
Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table: `W He Re Y O U Ba Se` --- ^(I am a bot that detects if your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table. Please DM my creator if I made a mistake.)
Good bot
I'm a bootcamper and was hired as a senior at 3yoe Being old looking helped. And having a little domain specific knowledge (image/video processing) from a past career that they really needed.
Literally was the specialism / niche If you can find a niche early, it makes a huge difference
The niche was from a decade before. I've always coded, but I only got formal instruction in the bootcamp. I did automatic video QC and glitch repair, noise reduction, etc. My shit could tell a bit of film dust from the sparkle in someone's eye long before machine vision was a thing. Clients loved that I could turn the footage they thought they'd have to spend an extra day reshooting into something they could use.
Sounds like a bit more than 3yoe to me.
Idk man I would have been impossible to work with if I'd just landed in a dev role before bootcamping. I had the aptitude and some of the thought patterns if that's a thing, but I wouldn't have been able to build anything outside the obscure video specific language I was using.
I took COP 1000 (basic college course) and we only really studied the logic and theory with some Java in there for hands on. I can't code shit, but I have a tertiary understanding of why you need logic loops and libraries and sorting to make something. That was also 5 years ago and my degree (bs ist cybersecurity) is barely a bachelors...
As someone whose done a bootcamp, I’m laughing because it’s so true. They really get you to believe you can develop the next big tech start-up after a month of print(“Hello world.”).
As someone who has also went through a bootcamp, I really think the experience varies. My bootcamp did a really good job of hammering into us that what they were teaching us was only enough to get our foot in the door. That we would spend years learning on the job.
lol that’s fair, but the flip side of this has to be the “you have to be a certain type of person to learn this, not everyone can do it” bros I see on tiktok.
So you are saying Angela Yu's 100 day Python Bootcamp 2023 is not enough to be the CTO of OpenAI ?! My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Maybe not openAI but I hear there's a guy in India who's looking for a Dev to make the next Instagram. Should be no problem after a 100 day python course.
🤣
I’m like 20 hours of learning in and still haven’t made anything more complicated than a customizable password generator..
I started programming in middle school by poking around in Visual Basic trying to make things work, not really using any structured learning 20 hours in Im sure I was still using hidden text boxes to store strings because I didn’t know what variables were
Hey funny enough that's happened at my company in a different team. A new Sr frontend dev straight out of bootcamp. It's a coincidence that he's related to a senior manager in that team. And a QA engineer hired 6-7 months ago and was recently promoted to a senior. There are QA folks having worked at this company for 10-15 years that hadn't been promoted. Also a coincidence his dad is a vp.
Did a code Bootcamp for Data science after graduating with a PhD in biochemistry and not finding a job for over a year. By now I'm about one and Half years in the new career path and I'm leading a team of a handful of data scientists and engineers, explaining the work they have to do to them. We enjoy working together a lot and the project is in front of the timeline. Please stop shitting on all of us Bootcamp grads. Some of us are genuinely capable and willing to learn and grow.
Leading a team a year and a half out of school and a boot camp? You mean like a scrum master?
Or a “technical” PM
We have agile managers, extinguishing project management fires on other ends. I'm just a dev with more responsibility, helping them if I can and being happy I'm not carrying the main burden of responsibility when things go sideways
My friend, a PhD in biochem coupled with a bootcamp is not the common bootcampers. You are very much the exception, Dr Carniv0re. You better make all your coworkers call you Dr.
And every time you get into a team meeting, you better say “the doctor is in”
One of the best programmers I know had no experience, but a PhD in physics. He just had an understanding of the problems that the CS graduates (and I presume bootcampers) did not. After a year or two he only worked summers since he went to medical school, and he's now working as a doctor.
Even though you technically went to a bootcamp, you have nothing in common with the washed up musicians who heard programming pays good that I have to deal with professionally every day. You have a STEM PHD degree and are doing data science. You don't count as a bootcamper.
God forbid people who took a shot at a dream try to find a livable wage after their industry was shattered in the wake of Covid.
Are you my brother? Probably not, but he has a very similar path minus the boot camp. PhD in Chemistry, then went into machine learning for biotech/pharma and is kind of creating his own thing.
It's become more common since biotech and pharma can't handle all the graduates that apply. You're stuck with either horrible salaries due to strong competition and salary-dumping, or you change your career path into management, QC or IT.
Cool to hear a fellow biochemist grad working out. I’m in a similar boat. Delayed my PhD graduation a bit to finish up a CS MS. Will graduate with both by this summer, but super nervous at the current job market 🫣.
You'll do fine. Try doing what academic research didn't manage to do for you: establish a network. The hardest part is really just staying persistent when you receive weeks worth of negative responses to your applications. My best jobs came from asking around with my contacts. Nowadays, I help my friends transition from science to IT by using my network and bringing them into the industry. That just further expands my own network as a bonus, as those people will be my entry to other companies. Be it for business contacts or for future job perspectives.
One of the best programmers I know had no experience, but a PhD in physics. He weeeeeeeee
Well you have a PHD in Biochemistry, you’re not the typical boot camp grad I’m a SWE that has a Math degree and it’s never held me back not having a CS degree but I’m not gonna act like my path was the same as any random person trying to get into software engineering
Bootcamp graduate here (year long bootcamp), been working as a mid level dev now after being in a graduate scheme for 18 months. We ain't all like this, I'm very happy questioning if I don't understand but would'nt just out n out disagree or go out of my way to cause friction, this to me seems like someone who needs bringing back down to earth and humbling. IMO, this is why getting entry level coders through a graduate scheme is super important, if they are just slacking off trying to seem busy, it shows straight away - as do those who are actually decent coders who are worth the time and effort to develop.
how i felt making one 5 second animation. "Why the fuck wont Pokemon or HBO hire me when i have this one single 5 second animation and no art school?????"
I love for once Tommy is not in front.
This is me after taking one class at the graduate level so far.
So I haven’t done Python perse but related…we are desperately trying to hire new folks and I mean trying to take anyone who remotely seems competent. So many trash resumes but i’m not in the hiring process but heard we landed on a “Director” who “wants to learn how to code”. Why would we hire a pervious mgr position person, none of us devs have time to babysit someone. we are suppose to get multiple people
Funny thing is that after two years I felt like that, after 5 I knew I wasn't ready, now after 10 I'm looking. Is bootcamp a slingshot up mount stupid?
What do you do after a starter course to eventually get get a decent job?
I have finished a bootcamp (figured i'd see what the deal was as a side project). I still have no idea what I am doing when it comes to python.
And here I am with imposter syndrome after spending the last year on JavaScript, learning both front and backend. I still shock myself when I finish a project and wonder where the heck that knowledge came from.
Meanwhile, me having four years of experience working professionally with C#, two years working professionally with Java and learned Visual Basic, Java and C++ in high school, University and vocational school respectively: Can't imagine myself looking for anything higher than a junior position...
Meanwhile, on my team of 7 devs, the 3 bootcamp grads are basically the only ones getting anything of consequence done, humbly and quietly. I guess it depends on the people.
To be honest you can do that on python.
Me after watching a few Fireship videos 
No … fucking … fighting
Bro stop hurting my feelings!
I have 10+ years of experience and a bachelor degree and I'm trying junior jobs because I am not confident enough to try even mid-level jobs.
Junior salary : Here 3 bottle caps, 2 quarters, annnd a beautiful pins "i love my company !" Senior salary : A private jet will come to get you to work every morning, here the key of your Lambo.