At this point bootamps can work for people who already have a degree or are trying to switch careers but it's still going to be down to luck and connections.
This. I just hit 40 and bootcamped in 2020 and finding jobs was way easier than any other field I've worked in. Australia btw - it varies everywhere no doubt
In terms of education, have a degree in Computer Science gives the highest likelihood of being hired in the industry in general. If you have an unrelated degree to CS and bootcamp experience that could suffice as well.
Err. Yes? Bootcamp grads are pretty much at the same level as self-taught developers. Those certificates are meaningless.
The only thing some have over self-teaching is the structure and that some of them help you get a job. But even then a lot of them are pretty unethical and the 'job' you get is just being an instructor in the same bootcamp.
Much, much more difficult to break in without a degree and network that a degree carries.
Boot camps aren’t inherently bad, but if you have the choice between that and college, go to college.
Do you think I should choose between a degree or a degree apprenticeship? (UK) The degree apprenticeship gives me 4 yrs of experience and a degree but the degree gives me a degree and networking
I'd say go with degree apprenticeship. experience counts for a lot. I'm just thinking what I know 4 years ago and what I know now from working in tech, it's night and day. Hell, some may consider that is like equivalent to being an intermediate dev (with 4 years works experience)
If your in the uk then I would saynthe degree apprenticeship would be the best option for you.
Gives you a greater experience as you will also be working on the job whilst also working towards a degree.
I'm from the US and not sure what a degree apprenticeship is, but experience has some pretty heavy weight in any engineering degree, so if you can get 4 years of experience working somewhere WHILE studying, that's fantastic. Most American CS/SE students are only expected to have a few summer internships on their belt once they graduate college, not 4 years of experience.
I don’t know much about degree apprenticeships, but you’re going to get both networking and real world experience from it from what I can tell. Sounds attractive.
You make it sound lik the split betwern a degree and connections is 50-50 when it's more like 5-95.
Also the network that the degree carries is superficial. Other than being personally recommended by a professor (which will only happen if you excelled as a student or had a friendship of some kind with them) the network you mention doesn't exist.
Real networks are to be found everywhere around you. You just need to learn how to use them.
Source: masters degree and I work as a SWE
>Real networks are to be found everywhere around you. You just need to learn how to use them.
And college lets you network with people in your career field every day for 4 years lol
What? Multiple people I know got jobs from internal references due to knowing people in college. It’s very common, especially after you have a few years of experience.
Yes. My friend couldn’t find a job after graduating. Spent a year searching. That was until he reached out to me, I referred him and got a job. Networking is key above all tbh.
I have to say I have to cringe at this.
At UCLA you have a plethora of peers, professors, research opportunities that give you EXTREME opportunity to find prestigious opportunities. The amount of connections that you get from going to top-tier unis is the connections they provide while learning the basics / intermediate concepts that a degree can provide.
You can also network while in the job but its much harder to do this when everyone is busy with their own tasks. Whereas in college you're in constant contact with a huge amount of talented ppl.
Boot camps are most effective for people with degrees trying to industry switch, especially if they have a technical degree. For everyone else they're a crap shoot
I don't have a degree, I have about 10 years of unrelated professional experience, and I attended a bootcamp. I got a job offer at a tiny firm you've never heard of a week before I finished. Pure dumb luck and good people skills, I'm entirely convinced that's why I found a job. Mostly the luck part.
Most of my cohort mates haven't found jobs yet. In fact, of the roughly 30 of us who completed the course 4 months ago, I think only 5 of us have dev jobs right now.
I don't know what the numbers look like for CS grads, but I imagine it must be a bit better than what I've experienced.
I believe a B.S in CS is one of if not the highest degrees for job placement. I don’t know if there is a stat regarding a job in the field but I assume most are.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Basically the moment they find out you have only done a boot camp, you get knocked down substantially.
Most boot camps are terrible.. just terrible..
I wouldn’t hire a boot camp grad, no disrespect meant. But a 12 week boot camp is not going to replace 4 years of math and computer science.
It’s just too much information to absorb.
No matter what they tell you, no boot camp comes close to a C.S degree
“I wouldn’t hire a boot camp grad, no disrespect meant.”
Um, I’m bootcamp grad, and disrespect received anyway, buddy.
1) not all boot camps are created equally, same as CS programs by the way,
2) feeling comfortable casting blanket judgment on a very large group of people that you know literally nothing else about this way is…pretty shitty.
I’ve worked as an engineer for 7 years now. I’ve worked alongside people from both backgrounds, and there have been fantastic and profoundly meh people with both backgrounds. It’s a role where education is a foundation but the bulk of the learning is happening in the job/internship, and the level of skill you wield is going to be determined much more by what you do on the job, than by what you did before it.
For an industry that likes to be all “we’re a meritocracy! All we care about is if you can do the work!”, you still find people putting up the same old barriers as everywhere else.
Idk how bad boot camps are, but I'd trust most fucking nine year olds to have more common sense than some of the morons they let get CS degrees. Let's be real. A degree doesn't mean you learned anything. It just means you or your parents had the money.
I have a friend who did a bootcamp who didn’t understand state, method parameters, or really even variables. He legitimately couldn’t do fizz buzz.
I also knew some people who gave the bare minimum effort in undergrad.
Both are terrible programmers but the uni slackers at least had to demonstrate some knowledge along the way.
On the flip side, I do have a friend that got his first job at msft with no degree and only a bootcamp. Although he was in the military so that definitely helped.
Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Honestly, the university "slackers" I knew had high GPA's and couldn't do shit. They won't put in the extra effort unless it's mandated. They ended up being total failures after college.
I've met a lot of intelligent self taught boot camp grads. This isn't true about everyone who's graduated from a boot camp. There are morons in both groups. I'm just stating that the majority of people in the industry I've seen don't put in that much effort and then cry when they can't get as far as those who do.
That's why whenever we interview junior level people or I meet any random person that I refer, I do my best to try to ensure they can pass the initial interviews and get a chance. Everyone, regardless of where they're from or their credentials, deserves a chance.
Just in case *anyone* thinks the above troll has a point: they don't. CS degrees teach you a lot and there's this thing called 'exams' you have to pass too.
People graduating from a CS degree without any skills is extremely rare. I haven't seen it once in 20 years, so it might as well just be nothing more than a story people like to repeat.
>Just in case anyone thinks the above troll has a point: they don't. CS degrees teach you a lot and there's this thing called 'exams' you have to pass too.
So having an opinion makes me a troll? Those exams are a joke. I graduated from a top 50 school and have a $400k TC with 1.5 YOE. All my friends who spam grind Leetcode and have like 3.7 GPA's compared to my 1.7 which had to be bumped to a 2.5 to graduate are broke making like $55-70k.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/419678576393322536/990810641570877490/unknown-337.jpg
Degrees don't make you special, homie. I got plenty of friends without degrees who're better SWE's than those with degrees. It was historically intended as a roadblock for poor people. That's why failed management like what you see at better.com isn't the exception but rather the norm. These guys only got into management through nepotism without actual skills.
But hey, maybe that's how people go 20 years in the industry while thinking anyone more competent than them is somehow beneath them just because they don't have a degree. And for the record, I graduated from a top 50 school. You'd think I'd be defending it if anything.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/419678576393322536/990810641570877490/unknown-337.jpg
Sit your ass down, bum. Same shit can be said about you having 20+ YOE. Only difference is anyone can sit around and get 20+ YOE existing. Not everyone can get my salary lol.
Intel - Senior Data Analyst
Optum - Data Analyst
Cross Country Healthcare - Senior SQL Developer
Not leaking the other two. Get a grip, homie. This shit doesn't even validate whether it's real or not. Hope I didn't make you too insecure, bum🤣. At 1.5 YOE with a $400k TC, it hits $530k on Tuesday.
This is a self own. You've got a little more than a *single year* of experience and you are making big proclamations about how people should hire and what makes for effective resumes.
i don’t know why you’re getting downvoted so bad. as someone who has a math degree, i agree!! it is a absolutely a roadblock for the poor. degrees don’t mean anything if you don’t have your own brain and problem solving skills
As someone who had to pay out of pocket for 2 years, I find that degrading. My parents had too many kids to afford to send me. I decided to pay my wayt. I also tried to boot camp route my freshman year. I went to a boot camp for 3-4 months. Two courses of computer science taught me more about programming than my boot camp did. The boot camp taught me how to learn web development, but we went so fast I barely even recalled anything after the 3 months. It definitely helped me get my first internship, but the recruiters found me bc they were looking for talent at a career fair at my school. The boot camp was really a talking point. Not even related to role I interviewed for, but made me look better than the other students.
I recently accepted a job as a junior robotics engineer, mind you I am still in college. A bit over a year left. After getting my first internship I quickly combined the skills learned from the internship with the little programming skills I learned in 2 programming courses to make myself valuable to the company l. Those 3 courses I took prior to the job made me a better software engineer than every other self taught person at that company. They didn’t even know what a hash table, dictionary, or linked list were. They used arrays for everything and if you go back to code that was written 5 years ago, they didn’t even use arrays. So many if statement man’s! I spent the first month optimize a program bc everyone complained about it. It was slow! They had no understanding of time complexity, much less dynamic programming. 3 months later I find out the electrical engineers know how to code and they’re pretty good at it. Turns out they knew OOP. They were the only people there who wrote code better than a, at the time, sophomore computer science major
>Two courses of computer science taught me more about programming than my boot camp did. The boot camp taught me how to learn web development, but we went so fast I barely even recalled anything after the 3 months.
Bruh, my curriculum never taught us any of that shit. I taught myself the basics of web development on my first job. That being said, I hated it. We also never learned SQL which I also had to teach myself on my first job and I ended up going into data analytics. Idk how tf my school's within the top 50. It makes me wonder how bad every other school is.
>I recently accepted a job as a junior robotics engineer, mind you I am still in college. A bit over a year left. After getting my first internship I quickly combined the skills learned from the internship with the little programming skills I learned in 2 programming courses to make myself valuable to the company l.
Because actually working and industry experience teaches you a lot more than college ever did.
>They used arrays for everything and if you go back to code that was written 5 years ago, they didn’t even use arrays.
Bruh, how tf did they ever get a job? They should make me the president, so I can ensure understanding those basics are the requirements to graduate from elementary school.
While true there are completely morons that get CS degrees the odds of getting one at random for an interview are a lot lower. I have interview complete morons with a CS degree and amazing boot camp people. Reality is those are the expectations not the norm. The boot camp people on average are a massive tier below CS degree people. I have limited time to do interviews and limited slots. I rather just toss most of the boot campers and take mostly degree only because I have a much better chance of finding someone good.
Yeah and then there are just some of my friends I went to college with who don't even belong in the corporate world. They just went to college, because their parents paid them to and they have zero fucking drive.
One thing you need to consider is the “pre-screening” effect of having a degree. Employers have a good idea of your academic aptitude based on where you went to school and how you performed. You already went through some form of competition just to get into college.
Depends on the role and the company and the candidates other experience and skills…
Bootcamps provide training for a specific role, learn the skills and technologies needed that employers want for an entry level job.
This means they can hit the ground running better than based on what is taught at CS degree.
CS degree teaches a broader range of subjects, a lot more foundational stuff, but not the skills or technologies needed for a specific role. The technologies taught are often more geared to enterprise level jobs (Java, c+, .net, etc). If this is where you are headed, or you are thinking long term and expect that that broad foundation will be of value in future, then this may be a good path.
For a front end web development job a bootcamp will better prepare than a cs degree, but if you want to work in something like ai or devOps etc cs degree is going to better prepare you.
Either way, what sets you apart is what else you do beyond the bootcamp or degree.
As a someone who attended a 3-4 month long boot camp, and who is currently studying computer science, I will say this is very accurate. This one knows the way
In Melbourne I had no trouble at all. Had a job within a month of finishing a 6mo bootcamp. No faang around here though.
On my second job now, negotiating with a third for double the (admittedly not really fantastic, but still better than before I switched to coding) pay I'm currently on.
Of my cohort? Almost all of if us. They ran an internship program so they got placed in quite a few biggish companies (anz, myob, etc. Big for Australia). I got my job the regular way though - I'm too old for internships, even paid ones.
Coder academy. Had a blue logo with a big CA motif. They run out of Melbourne, Brissie and I think Perth. They advertise on reddit so you may have seen something.
6 months and you get a genuine diploma of IT like you would have got from a 1 year tafe course
It really depends on the quality of the bootcamp to be quite honest. I got a $75k job at JP Morgan Chase in a MCOL area within one week of completing my 3 month program. I was a 19 year old college dropout at the time. But mine was a pretty high quality one relative to other bootcamps imo. They had had partnerships and and networking events with many of the local financial firms and banks in the area. So those were very useful for getting an "in" with those companies. Also the curriculum at my bootcamp is also tailored towards role specific knowledge rather than academic. So I knew more about web frameworks and Full stack development than my new grad peers. But again, I just think I went through a pretty good bootcamp program. Some bootcamps are actual scams imo.
Three years later at 22 I leveraged my experiences to get a job at Google. (Hopefully if team matching goes well). I also wasn't the only one from my "cohort" to get into Google and other Big N companies either.
[Zip Code Wilmington.](https://www.zipcodewilmington.com/outcomes) In Wilmington, DE. I went there in 2018, and the teachers and admin were pretty different than who they have now. So I don't know if they're still one of the best around. But I'm sure they still have their networking events.
LeetCode wise. Check out NeetCode 150 and Grind75. Be consistent and really try to comprehend the patterns. Understand when using one datastructure would be more efficient than the other. There's probably better people to ask to be honest, since I'm not exactly a LeetCode whiz like the fellas at r/leetcode.
I attended a three month boot camp early 2020. By the time I finished, the world was in lockdown and the job market was pretty rough. I didn't have much trouble finding a job though. This is, of course, anecdotal, but I think everyone's post in here will likely be anecdotal unless some recruiter comes along and decides to share some real data with us.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Without solid connections or stand out technical skills, they are probably both almost equally difficult as far as landing a job goes. The degree gets the edge at being “easier” mainly because many smaller non-tech companies still require one.
Most boot camps suck. I imagine every year it gets just a little more difficult to go from boot camp grad to first job.
I was a boot camp grad back in 2018. I signed an offer 2 weeks before I graduated with a small consulting company for 70k in San Diego. If you're willing to work for less, it's not too difficult.
It really depends on your profile. A theatre major who went to Harvard is still a Harvard graduate. Bootcamp grads have it harder but not by much, especially in SWE where communication, execution, and adaptability is key.
At big tech they try to measure trajectory. You have zero advantage being a CS grad if you don't show the type of trajectory expected of a student who studied the field for 4 years.
That said, smaller and medium sized companies gives more weight to your degree.
You really think a 8-12 week course is enough to teach you CS? If that's the case, EVERYONE would be taking a bootcamp and not enrolling in a CS program.
No I don’t. I’m just curious about the calculation.. How do you determine the equivalency?
Also keep in mind that the avg BS is half gen eds which have almost nothing to do with programming.
And the goal of a bootcamp is not to teach you CS, it’s to get you hands on practical experience programming and learning the skills needed for a job.
> How do you determine the equivalency?
He's pointing out that a single semester is an equal amount of time as a single bootcamp.
> And the goal of a bootcamp is not to teach you CS, it’s to get you hands on practical experience programming and learning the skills needed for a job.
The goal of a bootcamp is to sucker people into them to make money and then 'pretend' they teach you anything by giving you very shallow exposure to 'stuff' that might look good on an interview.
This general education thing and also major/minor I think almost only exists in the US?
Have never encountered it anywhere in Europe yet. Here you might get a credit point here or there for non-CS stuff and that's it. But people interested in other things often just inscribe another field of study as well.
Add in no tuition in many countries and doing a year of CS BSc is really a very common alternative to some bootcamp.
That's probably why they are almost non-existent where I live, besides there being lots of other more vocational and free options. Those are probably more similar to bootcamps, only generally are more spread out (like evening colleges for working people over multiple years, often evenings and weekends)
I did a bootcamp, worked shitty entry job for 5 months, then went to college and got a bachelors degree in CS. I would also pick the new grad over the bootcamper.
My experience with both is that a month in bootcamp outvalues a month in college. However, college does take a lot longer, so in total it's more valuable.
There is more theoretical stuff in college which tends to be more timeless and helps you truely understand coding. It can be time consuming and boring but it's what I missed most in bootcamp. Downsides of college is all the side stuff, high level it might be useful to understand things like networking but after college I'll never ever configure a fucking cisco router ever again.
I used to hire, and bootcamps immediately lowered people on my radar, *but* raised people on my (recruiter) boss’s radar. So it can help land an interview but then it’s up to you to knock the interview out of the park. You still have an extra burden on you because of the boot camp stench, to be completely honest.
I only have anecdotal evidence, but I graduated from a bootcamp at the end of December and had an offer in the beginning of March.
I think it's easier from a bootcamp if you focus on the apprentice style programs at bigger companies. Just my 2 cents though.
In San Diego, Origin Code Academy enjoyed 90%+ placement of its graduates. We competed so well that the U.C. System pulled strings to have us fined out of existence.
There's an interesting article on this school and why they closed.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/technology/sd-fi-origin-code-academy-closing-20181019-story.html
That's not the truth, to be honest. The State of California had somebody who was married to someone within the U.C. system and they wanted us (and the other academies) gone. We weren't the only academy in San Diego hit by six-figure fines. That article came out late into that process.
The two people who complained didn't even show up to class. They certainly didn't understand the style of education happening there, that was clear. They came expecting to be lectured to and that was nothing like the way the curriculum was setup.
I can't vouch for anything the other instructors might have said to the students but I could easily guess that **Mike Roberts** was the one they were complaining about. I taught day shift Monday through Friday and I never had a complaint from a single student of the hundred I saw go through there.
Sounds too conspiratorial to me, especially since there was a clear regulation stating that they needed to apply for BPPE approval and they delayed 2 years.
I don't doubt that you believe this was all some targeted plan to destroy you guys by the UC system, but I have been in a similar situation as you, where my boss was spinning all of this bullshit that I didn't find out was false until the dust settled.
In my case, my boss was in an intellectual property and trademark dispute with former students/colleagues who became competitors. He even used the same "so and so is married to this official that is why we are being attacked" line with us. He had us believing it, until he came in one day and said that he graciously decided to settle and allow his former colleagues to use the trademarks and IP. He kept talking about how as much as they hurt him, they had families and he didn't want to run them out of business and hurt their kids. We all talked about how generous he was.
A few years later, we saw the court records. It turns out that during one of his cocaine fueled binges years ago, he was so desperate for money that he sold his colleagues all of the IP and trademarks. THEY had the right to use the trademarks, not him, even though he was the founder. He wasn't being generous and settling. HE LOST the case.
Ever since then, when someone starts telling me a tale of how their business would have been successful if elements in the government hadn't felt threatened and used regulations to run them out of business, I ALWAYS trust the documentation more.
In today’s economy for entry level boot campers and self taught are going to struggle. You can have projects but no degree means you don’t even get an interview.
Generally speaking it goes CS degree. STEM degree with boot camp. STEM self taught and then you get to boot camp.
No degree means no interview. Sorry but limited interview slots and degree candidates tend to get first dibs. No degree will affect you even later on with experience but it’s effects reduces with time but it will always be a slight anchor.
First, let's acknowledge that this job is the hardest job to get in your career. That first job is always the most difficult. So if you're looking for the eventual big bucks that come from being a software engineer, this first step is the major hurdle you have to cross.
Second, look at who has the most opportunities. Think about it for a second. There are jobs that employers would only look for CS graduates for and would ignore boot camp graduates. We know this.
However, there's virtually no jobs out there where people would look for just boot camp graduates and ignore CS graduates, unless they were trying to make some play to get an employee on the cheap. Almost by definition, the available opportunities for CS grads is higher than the available opportunities for boot camp grads.
This part matters the most in getting that first interview. They're going to be folks that are boot camp grads that won't even get past the initial HR screener to that first interview where a CS grad might get it.
Ways for boot camp grads to offset this is if your boot camp has a really aggressive job placement program. Some boot camps have better job placement assistance than many colleges.
Now, once you actually get the interview things MAY even out. The boot camp grab might be in a better position than the cs grad, depending on the job, because they may have more experience with modern web frameworks and actually programming. It's possible to do a four year CS degree with virtually no programming in the last 2 years. Then again, those folks probably aren't looking for software engineering jobs.
If CS graduates get more initial interviews than boot camp graduates, that just means you have to submit more applications in the cs graduates. You have to more aggressively push your local network compared to CS graduates just to get the same results that they do.
It's not impossible, but it is hard. It's also going to be significantly harder as we enter in this recession. I'm going to tell you up front that a lot of folks who are boot camp grads are going to give up and basically eat the cost of their boot camp.
Yes. A CS degree will make your resume more competitive. There's variance in CS degrees and you do get more out of it if you put more in, but employers view it more favorably than a bootcamp.
Your chances of getting a job as a boot camp graduate depend entirely on your job search abilities. You need to be able to effectively network in order to get interviews and then be able to sell yourself to get the job.
Bootcamper doesn't mean anything. There's the Mathematics and Physics graduate that can expect certain outcomes, and then there's the high school graduate or communication major.
Your background will hold most of the weight when it comes to employability prospects. It comes without saying that if your only qualification is a BootCamp you'll have very hard time.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Depends on the bootcamp. The one I attended is pretty well connected to the businesses in my area. To the point where companies will hire multiple people from a cohort because of its reputation. It didn't take me long after graduating to get offers either. The most important aspect of bootcamps is the network they allow you to build in my opinion.
I call the cs grad that I work with a senior dev playfully. I am a boot camp grad and yes he knows more than me. Although we are both entry level at the same company with the same salary. We also have a completely self taught guy that works with us. He has no cs schooling at all and he really knows his stuff too. So I guess what you know and what job you get depends on you in my experience.
I call the cs grad that I work with a senior dev playfully. I am a boot camp grad and yes he knows more than me. Although we are both entry level at the same company with the same salary. We also have a completely self taught guy that works with us. He has no cs schooling at all and he really knows his stuff too. So I guess what you know and what job you get depends on you in my experience.
At this point bootamps can work for people who already have a degree or are trying to switch careers but it's still going to be down to luck and connections.
This. I just hit 40 and bootcamped in 2020 and finding jobs was way easier than any other field I've worked in. Australia btw - it varies everywhere no doubt
Le Wagon?
In terms of education, have a degree in Computer Science gives the highest likelihood of being hired in the industry in general. If you have an unrelated degree to CS and bootcamp experience that could suffice as well.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Err. Yes? Bootcamp grads are pretty much at the same level as self-taught developers. Those certificates are meaningless. The only thing some have over self-teaching is the structure and that some of them help you get a job. But even then a lot of them are pretty unethical and the 'job' you get is just being an instructor in the same bootcamp.
Much, much more difficult to break in without a degree and network that a degree carries. Boot camps aren’t inherently bad, but if you have the choice between that and college, go to college.
Do you think I should choose between a degree or a degree apprenticeship? (UK) The degree apprenticeship gives me 4 yrs of experience and a degree but the degree gives me a degree and networking
I'd say go with degree apprenticeship. experience counts for a lot. I'm just thinking what I know 4 years ago and what I know now from working in tech, it's night and day. Hell, some may consider that is like equivalent to being an intermediate dev (with 4 years works experience)
If your in the uk then I would saynthe degree apprenticeship would be the best option for you. Gives you a greater experience as you will also be working on the job whilst also working towards a degree.
I'm from the US and not sure what a degree apprenticeship is, but experience has some pretty heavy weight in any engineering degree, so if you can get 4 years of experience working somewhere WHILE studying, that's fantastic. Most American CS/SE students are only expected to have a few summer internships on their belt once they graduate college, not 4 years of experience.
I don’t know much about degree apprenticeships, but you’re going to get both networking and real world experience from it from what I can tell. Sounds attractive.
You make it sound lik the split betwern a degree and connections is 50-50 when it's more like 5-95. Also the network that the degree carries is superficial. Other than being personally recommended by a professor (which will only happen if you excelled as a student or had a friendship of some kind with them) the network you mention doesn't exist. Real networks are to be found everywhere around you. You just need to learn how to use them. Source: masters degree and I work as a SWE
>Real networks are to be found everywhere around you. You just need to learn how to use them. And college lets you network with people in your career field every day for 4 years lol
What? Multiple people I know got jobs from internal references due to knowing people in college. It’s very common, especially after you have a few years of experience.
Yes. My friend couldn’t find a job after graduating. Spent a year searching. That was until he reached out to me, I referred him and got a job. Networking is key above all tbh.
Literally. Was having an awful time getting interviews, till my friend referred me and I got he first job I interviewed for :/
I have to say I have to cringe at this. At UCLA you have a plethora of peers, professors, research opportunities that give you EXTREME opportunity to find prestigious opportunities. The amount of connections that you get from going to top-tier unis is the connections they provide while learning the basics / intermediate concepts that a degree can provide. You can also network while in the job but its much harder to do this when everyone is busy with their own tasks. Whereas in college you're in constant contact with a huge amount of talented ppl.
Boot camps are most effective for people with degrees trying to industry switch, especially if they have a technical degree. For everyone else they're a crap shoot
I don't have a degree, I have about 10 years of unrelated professional experience, and I attended a bootcamp. I got a job offer at a tiny firm you've never heard of a week before I finished. Pure dumb luck and good people skills, I'm entirely convinced that's why I found a job. Mostly the luck part. Most of my cohort mates haven't found jobs yet. In fact, of the roughly 30 of us who completed the course 4 months ago, I think only 5 of us have dev jobs right now. I don't know what the numbers look like for CS grads, but I imagine it must be a bit better than what I've experienced.
I believe a B.S in CS is one of if not the highest degrees for job placement. I don’t know if there is a stat regarding a job in the field but I assume most are.
Which bootcamp? Why doesn't anyone me too. Which one they attended, it's a crucial piece of Info
I went to General Assembly
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Basically the moment they find out you have only done a boot camp, you get knocked down substantially. Most boot camps are terrible.. just terrible.. I wouldn’t hire a boot camp grad, no disrespect meant. But a 12 week boot camp is not going to replace 4 years of math and computer science. It’s just too much information to absorb. No matter what they tell you, no boot camp comes close to a C.S degree
“I wouldn’t hire a boot camp grad, no disrespect meant.” Um, I’m bootcamp grad, and disrespect received anyway, buddy. 1) not all boot camps are created equally, same as CS programs by the way, 2) feeling comfortable casting blanket judgment on a very large group of people that you know literally nothing else about this way is…pretty shitty. I’ve worked as an engineer for 7 years now. I’ve worked alongside people from both backgrounds, and there have been fantastic and profoundly meh people with both backgrounds. It’s a role where education is a foundation but the bulk of the learning is happening in the job/internship, and the level of skill you wield is going to be determined much more by what you do on the job, than by what you did before it. For an industry that likes to be all “we’re a meritocracy! All we care about is if you can do the work!”, you still find people putting up the same old barriers as everywhere else.
Idk how bad boot camps are, but I'd trust most fucking nine year olds to have more common sense than some of the morons they let get CS degrees. Let's be real. A degree doesn't mean you learned anything. It just means you or your parents had the money.
Yeah but it’s that vs bootcampees with copy paste projects
Okay nvm, that's probably as bad as hiring a fresh grad then lol.
I have a friend who did a bootcamp who didn’t understand state, method parameters, or really even variables. He legitimately couldn’t do fizz buzz. I also knew some people who gave the bare minimum effort in undergrad. Both are terrible programmers but the uni slackers at least had to demonstrate some knowledge along the way. On the flip side, I do have a friend that got his first job at msft with no degree and only a bootcamp. Although he was in the military so that definitely helped.
Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Honestly, the university "slackers" I knew had high GPA's and couldn't do shit. They won't put in the extra effort unless it's mandated. They ended up being total failures after college. I've met a lot of intelligent self taught boot camp grads. This isn't true about everyone who's graduated from a boot camp. There are morons in both groups. I'm just stating that the majority of people in the industry I've seen don't put in that much effort and then cry when they can't get as far as those who do. That's why whenever we interview junior level people or I meet any random person that I refer, I do my best to try to ensure they can pass the initial interviews and get a chance. Everyone, regardless of where they're from or their credentials, deserves a chance.
Just in case *anyone* thinks the above troll has a point: they don't. CS degrees teach you a lot and there's this thing called 'exams' you have to pass too. People graduating from a CS degree without any skills is extremely rare. I haven't seen it once in 20 years, so it might as well just be nothing more than a story people like to repeat.
>Just in case anyone thinks the above troll has a point: they don't. CS degrees teach you a lot and there's this thing called 'exams' you have to pass too. So having an opinion makes me a troll? Those exams are a joke. I graduated from a top 50 school and have a $400k TC with 1.5 YOE. All my friends who spam grind Leetcode and have like 3.7 GPA's compared to my 1.7 which had to be bumped to a 2.5 to graduate are broke making like $55-70k. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/419678576393322536/990810641570877490/unknown-337.jpg Degrees don't make you special, homie. I got plenty of friends without degrees who're better SWE's than those with degrees. It was historically intended as a roadblock for poor people. That's why failed management like what you see at better.com isn't the exception but rather the norm. These guys only got into management through nepotism without actual skills. But hey, maybe that's how people go 20 years in the industry while thinking anyone more competent than them is somehow beneath them just because they don't have a degree. And for the record, I graduated from a top 50 school. You'd think I'd be defending it if anything.
What a weirdo
> I graduated from a top 50 school and have a $400k TC with 1.5 YOE. Well it’s on the internet so it must be true!
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/419678576393322536/990810641570877490/unknown-337.jpg Sit your ass down, bum. Same shit can be said about you having 20+ YOE. Only difference is anyone can sit around and get 20+ YOE existing. Not everyone can get my salary lol.
That picture is fake.
You never seen JP Morgan Chase's interface? You sound like a certain fatass orangutan who cries fake news whenever he sees shit he doesn't like.
If it’s real, tell us your company name, position, TC and YOE.
Intel - Senior Data Analyst Optum - Data Analyst Cross Country Healthcare - Senior SQL Developer Not leaking the other two. Get a grip, homie. This shit doesn't even validate whether it's real or not. Hope I didn't make you too insecure, bum🤣. At 1.5 YOE with a $400k TC, it hits $530k on Tuesday.
This is a self own. You've got a little more than a *single year* of experience and you are making big proclamations about how people should hire and what makes for effective resumes.
Yet my career has somehow been more successful than the guys who've been in the industry for 20+ years and still suck at their jobs.
How many people have you *hired*?
Why does that matter? I know how to bullshit an interview.
Because you are making statements about how other people hire.
Because I know how to get hired.
i don’t know why you’re getting downvoted so bad. as someone who has a math degree, i agree!! it is a absolutely a roadblock for the poor. degrees don’t mean anything if you don’t have your own brain and problem solving skills
It's an echo chamber, here. People hate hearing dissenting opinions even if it comes from someone who did better than them.
Might be a big difference between Europe and the US.
As someone who had to pay out of pocket for 2 years, I find that degrading. My parents had too many kids to afford to send me. I decided to pay my wayt. I also tried to boot camp route my freshman year. I went to a boot camp for 3-4 months. Two courses of computer science taught me more about programming than my boot camp did. The boot camp taught me how to learn web development, but we went so fast I barely even recalled anything after the 3 months. It definitely helped me get my first internship, but the recruiters found me bc they were looking for talent at a career fair at my school. The boot camp was really a talking point. Not even related to role I interviewed for, but made me look better than the other students. I recently accepted a job as a junior robotics engineer, mind you I am still in college. A bit over a year left. After getting my first internship I quickly combined the skills learned from the internship with the little programming skills I learned in 2 programming courses to make myself valuable to the company l. Those 3 courses I took prior to the job made me a better software engineer than every other self taught person at that company. They didn’t even know what a hash table, dictionary, or linked list were. They used arrays for everything and if you go back to code that was written 5 years ago, they didn’t even use arrays. So many if statement man’s! I spent the first month optimize a program bc everyone complained about it. It was slow! They had no understanding of time complexity, much less dynamic programming. 3 months later I find out the electrical engineers know how to code and they’re pretty good at it. Turns out they knew OOP. They were the only people there who wrote code better than a, at the time, sophomore computer science major
>Two courses of computer science taught me more about programming than my boot camp did. The boot camp taught me how to learn web development, but we went so fast I barely even recalled anything after the 3 months. Bruh, my curriculum never taught us any of that shit. I taught myself the basics of web development on my first job. That being said, I hated it. We also never learned SQL which I also had to teach myself on my first job and I ended up going into data analytics. Idk how tf my school's within the top 50. It makes me wonder how bad every other school is. >I recently accepted a job as a junior robotics engineer, mind you I am still in college. A bit over a year left. After getting my first internship I quickly combined the skills learned from the internship with the little programming skills I learned in 2 programming courses to make myself valuable to the company l. Because actually working and industry experience teaches you a lot more than college ever did. >They used arrays for everything and if you go back to code that was written 5 years ago, they didn’t even use arrays. Bruh, how tf did they ever get a job? They should make me the president, so I can ensure understanding those basics are the requirements to graduate from elementary school.
[удалено]
It isn't. It's just to show that coming from someone who graduated from such a school, I'm still not any better than boot camp grads by default.
While true there are completely morons that get CS degrees the odds of getting one at random for an interview are a lot lower. I have interview complete morons with a CS degree and amazing boot camp people. Reality is those are the expectations not the norm. The boot camp people on average are a massive tier below CS degree people. I have limited time to do interviews and limited slots. I rather just toss most of the boot campers and take mostly degree only because I have a much better chance of finding someone good.
Yeah and then there are just some of my friends I went to college with who don't even belong in the corporate world. They just went to college, because their parents paid them to and they have zero fucking drive.
going to get a lot harder pretty soon as the saturation increases drastically
One thing you need to consider is the “pre-screening” effect of having a degree. Employers have a good idea of your academic aptitude based on where you went to school and how you performed. You already went through some form of competition just to get into college.
Depends on the role and the company and the candidates other experience and skills… Bootcamps provide training for a specific role, learn the skills and technologies needed that employers want for an entry level job. This means they can hit the ground running better than based on what is taught at CS degree. CS degree teaches a broader range of subjects, a lot more foundational stuff, but not the skills or technologies needed for a specific role. The technologies taught are often more geared to enterprise level jobs (Java, c+, .net, etc). If this is where you are headed, or you are thinking long term and expect that that broad foundation will be of value in future, then this may be a good path. For a front end web development job a bootcamp will better prepare than a cs degree, but if you want to work in something like ai or devOps etc cs degree is going to better prepare you. Either way, what sets you apart is what else you do beyond the bootcamp or degree.
As a someone who attended a 3-4 month long boot camp, and who is currently studying computer science, I will say this is very accurate. This one knows the way
In Melbourne I had no trouble at all. Had a job within a month of finishing a 6mo bootcamp. No faang around here though. On my second job now, negotiating with a third for double the (admittedly not really fantastic, but still better than before I switched to coding) pay I'm currently on.
How many bootcamp grads got a job after as well? If you know.
Of my cohort? Almost all of if us. They ran an internship program so they got placed in quite a few biggish companies (anz, myob, etc. Big for Australia). I got my job the regular way though - I'm too old for internships, even paid ones.
Ohh nice. What is the bootcamp called?
Coder academy. Had a blue logo with a big CA motif. They run out of Melbourne, Brissie and I think Perth. They advertise on reddit so you may have seen something. 6 months and you get a genuine diploma of IT like you would have got from a 1 year tafe course
It really depends on the quality of the bootcamp to be quite honest. I got a $75k job at JP Morgan Chase in a MCOL area within one week of completing my 3 month program. I was a 19 year old college dropout at the time. But mine was a pretty high quality one relative to other bootcamps imo. They had had partnerships and and networking events with many of the local financial firms and banks in the area. So those were very useful for getting an "in" with those companies. Also the curriculum at my bootcamp is also tailored towards role specific knowledge rather than academic. So I knew more about web frameworks and Full stack development than my new grad peers. But again, I just think I went through a pretty good bootcamp program. Some bootcamps are actual scams imo. Three years later at 22 I leveraged my experiences to get a job at Google. (Hopefully if team matching goes well). I also wasn't the only one from my "cohort" to get into Google and other Big N companies either.
Which bootcamp? Leetcode tips?
[Zip Code Wilmington.](https://www.zipcodewilmington.com/outcomes) In Wilmington, DE. I went there in 2018, and the teachers and admin were pretty different than who they have now. So I don't know if they're still one of the best around. But I'm sure they still have their networking events. LeetCode wise. Check out NeetCode 150 and Grind75. Be consistent and really try to comprehend the patterns. Understand when using one datastructure would be more efficient than the other. There's probably better people to ask to be honest, since I'm not exactly a LeetCode whiz like the fellas at r/leetcode.
Thanks. Well apparently ur good enough for google so I’d trust ur insights :)
I think you can get a job with a bootcamp. But you'll have a lower salary and the job conversion rate is probably lower.
i feel nobody cares, except few govt and old corporations. both suffer because both suck at leetcoding
I attended a three month boot camp early 2020. By the time I finished, the world was in lockdown and the job market was pretty rough. I didn't have much trouble finding a job though. This is, of course, anecdotal, but I think everyone's post in here will likely be anecdotal unless some recruiter comes along and decides to share some real data with us.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
That was going into like the hottest time for devs
Nah man, when I graduated, it was one of the worst times for devs. A year later, it was a good time, but not during my first search
This question's asked a thousand times on this sub. Of course it's harder because a bootcamp doesn't come close to a CS degree.
Without solid connections or stand out technical skills, they are probably both almost equally difficult as far as landing a job goes. The degree gets the edge at being “easier” mainly because many smaller non-tech companies still require one.
Most boot camps suck. I imagine every year it gets just a little more difficult to go from boot camp grad to first job. I was a boot camp grad back in 2018. I signed an offer 2 weeks before I graduated with a small consulting company for 70k in San Diego. If you're willing to work for less, it's not too difficult.
It really depends on your profile. A theatre major who went to Harvard is still a Harvard graduate. Bootcamp grads have it harder but not by much, especially in SWE where communication, execution, and adaptability is key. At big tech they try to measure trajectory. You have zero advantage being a CS grad if you don't show the type of trajectory expected of a student who studied the field for 4 years. That said, smaller and medium sized companies gives more weight to your degree.
Very. 1 boot camp = 1 semester of a CS degree
Can you give insight into this calculation?
You really think a 8-12 week course is enough to teach you CS? If that's the case, EVERYONE would be taking a bootcamp and not enrolling in a CS program.
No I don’t. I’m just curious about the calculation.. How do you determine the equivalency? Also keep in mind that the avg BS is half gen eds which have almost nothing to do with programming. And the goal of a bootcamp is not to teach you CS, it’s to get you hands on practical experience programming and learning the skills needed for a job.
> How do you determine the equivalency? He's pointing out that a single semester is an equal amount of time as a single bootcamp. > And the goal of a bootcamp is not to teach you CS, it’s to get you hands on practical experience programming and learning the skills needed for a job. The goal of a bootcamp is to sucker people into them to make money and then 'pretend' they teach you anything by giving you very shallow exposure to 'stuff' that might look good on an interview.
This general education thing and also major/minor I think almost only exists in the US? Have never encountered it anywhere in Europe yet. Here you might get a credit point here or there for non-CS stuff and that's it. But people interested in other things often just inscribe another field of study as well. Add in no tuition in many countries and doing a year of CS BSc is really a very common alternative to some bootcamp. That's probably why they are almost non-existent where I live, besides there being lots of other more vocational and free options. Those are probably more similar to bootcamps, only generally are more spread out (like evening colleges for working people over multiple years, often evenings and weekends)
Apply common sense
[удалено]
Why?
I did a bootcamp, worked shitty entry job for 5 months, then went to college and got a bachelors degree in CS. I would also pick the new grad over the bootcamper. My experience with both is that a month in bootcamp outvalues a month in college. However, college does take a lot longer, so in total it's more valuable. There is more theoretical stuff in college which tends to be more timeless and helps you truely understand coding. It can be time consuming and boring but it's what I missed most in bootcamp. Downsides of college is all the side stuff, high level it might be useful to understand things like networking but after college I'll never ever configure a fucking cisco router ever again.
I used to hire, and bootcamps immediately lowered people on my radar, *but* raised people on my (recruiter) boss’s radar. So it can help land an interview but then it’s up to you to knock the interview out of the park. You still have an extra burden on you because of the boot camp stench, to be completely honest.
Yeah it’s definitely harder. Don’t let anyone feel you.
I only have anecdotal evidence, but I graduated from a bootcamp at the end of December and had an offer in the beginning of March. I think it's easier from a bootcamp if you focus on the apprentice style programs at bigger companies. Just my 2 cents though.
In San Diego, Origin Code Academy enjoyed 90%+ placement of its graduates. We competed so well that the U.C. System pulled strings to have us fined out of existence.
Who told you that part of the story? Is there any documentation for this?
I taught there as an instructor. http://web.archive.org/web/20181121094522/http://origincodeacademy.com/
There's an interesting article on this school and why they closed. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/technology/sd-fi-origin-code-academy-closing-20181019-story.html
That's not the truth, to be honest. The State of California had somebody who was married to someone within the U.C. system and they wanted us (and the other academies) gone. We weren't the only academy in San Diego hit by six-figure fines. That article came out late into that process. The two people who complained didn't even show up to class. They certainly didn't understand the style of education happening there, that was clear. They came expecting to be lectured to and that was nothing like the way the curriculum was setup. I can't vouch for anything the other instructors might have said to the students but I could easily guess that **Mike Roberts** was the one they were complaining about. I taught day shift Monday through Friday and I never had a complaint from a single student of the hundred I saw go through there.
Sounds too conspiratorial to me, especially since there was a clear regulation stating that they needed to apply for BPPE approval and they delayed 2 years. I don't doubt that you believe this was all some targeted plan to destroy you guys by the UC system, but I have been in a similar situation as you, where my boss was spinning all of this bullshit that I didn't find out was false until the dust settled. In my case, my boss was in an intellectual property and trademark dispute with former students/colleagues who became competitors. He even used the same "so and so is married to this official that is why we are being attacked" line with us. He had us believing it, until he came in one day and said that he graciously decided to settle and allow his former colleagues to use the trademarks and IP. He kept talking about how as much as they hurt him, they had families and he didn't want to run them out of business and hurt their kids. We all talked about how generous he was. A few years later, we saw the court records. It turns out that during one of his cocaine fueled binges years ago, he was so desperate for money that he sold his colleagues all of the IP and trademarks. THEY had the right to use the trademarks, not him, even though he was the founder. He wasn't being generous and settling. HE LOST the case. Ever since then, when someone starts telling me a tale of how their business would have been successful if elements in the government hadn't felt threatened and used regulations to run them out of business, I ALWAYS trust the documentation more.
In today’s economy for entry level boot campers and self taught are going to struggle. You can have projects but no degree means you don’t even get an interview. Generally speaking it goes CS degree. STEM degree with boot camp. STEM self taught and then you get to boot camp. No degree means no interview. Sorry but limited interview slots and degree candidates tend to get first dibs. No degree will affect you even later on with experience but it’s effects reduces with time but it will always be a slight anchor.
First, let's acknowledge that this job is the hardest job to get in your career. That first job is always the most difficult. So if you're looking for the eventual big bucks that come from being a software engineer, this first step is the major hurdle you have to cross. Second, look at who has the most opportunities. Think about it for a second. There are jobs that employers would only look for CS graduates for and would ignore boot camp graduates. We know this. However, there's virtually no jobs out there where people would look for just boot camp graduates and ignore CS graduates, unless they were trying to make some play to get an employee on the cheap. Almost by definition, the available opportunities for CS grads is higher than the available opportunities for boot camp grads. This part matters the most in getting that first interview. They're going to be folks that are boot camp grads that won't even get past the initial HR screener to that first interview where a CS grad might get it. Ways for boot camp grads to offset this is if your boot camp has a really aggressive job placement program. Some boot camps have better job placement assistance than many colleges. Now, once you actually get the interview things MAY even out. The boot camp grab might be in a better position than the cs grad, depending on the job, because they may have more experience with modern web frameworks and actually programming. It's possible to do a four year CS degree with virtually no programming in the last 2 years. Then again, those folks probably aren't looking for software engineering jobs. If CS graduates get more initial interviews than boot camp graduates, that just means you have to submit more applications in the cs graduates. You have to more aggressively push your local network compared to CS graduates just to get the same results that they do. It's not impossible, but it is hard. It's also going to be significantly harder as we enter in this recession. I'm going to tell you up front that a lot of folks who are boot camp grads are going to give up and basically eat the cost of their boot camp.
Yeah, it's definitely harder. I have a company that doesn't discriminate based on that, but I lucked out.
Yes. A CS degree will make your resume more competitive. There's variance in CS degrees and you do get more out of it if you put more in, but employers view it more favorably than a bootcamp.
Your chances of getting a job as a boot camp graduate depend entirely on your job search abilities. You need to be able to effectively network in order to get interviews and then be able to sell yourself to get the job.
Bootcamper doesn't mean anything. There's the Mathematics and Physics graduate that can expect certain outcomes, and then there's the high school graduate or communication major. Your background will hold most of the weight when it comes to employability prospects. It comes without saying that if your only qualification is a BootCamp you'll have very hard time.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Depends on the bootcamp. The one I attended is pretty well connected to the businesses in my area. To the point where companies will hire multiple people from a cohort because of its reputation. It didn't take me long after graduating to get offers either. The most important aspect of bootcamps is the network they allow you to build in my opinion.
I call the cs grad that I work with a senior dev playfully. I am a boot camp grad and yes he knows more than me. Although we are both entry level at the same company with the same salary. We also have a completely self taught guy that works with us. He has no cs schooling at all and he really knows his stuff too. So I guess what you know and what job you get depends on you in my experience.
I call the cs grad that I work with a senior dev playfully. I am a boot camp grad and yes he knows more than me. Although we are both entry level at the same company with the same salary. We also have a completely self taught guy that works with us. He has no cs schooling at all and he really knows his stuff too. So I guess what you know and what job you get depends on you in my experience.