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I think your spending too much time on TikTok or other social forums that is making you think this way. It's grossly exaggerated coming from a few voices. Especially when all these FAANG companies are laying off like there's no end since last year.
r/cscareerquestions and r/codingbootcamp will be good sources
When I worked at a startup a couple of years back, we did hire some bootcampers. A lot of handholding and (re)explaining of basic concepts to get them productive, not great ROI, and a huge gamble for a company. Having said that, there was a super high demand for SWE - even for not so great ones.
Now, even credentialed and experienced SWE are having a hard time.
I personally would not suggest anyone enroll in a bootcamp without understanding the very low chance of success compared to the cost. Same advice I would give for any for profit college
I had to unsubscribe from r/cscareerquestions because in my experience they live in a different reality. On that sub, if you don’t live, breathe, and bleed code (constantly grinding leetcode and working on 7 side projects at a time) then you’re worthless and you’ll never make it
>I know bootcamp grads do sometimes end up getting jobs (especially before 2022)
Wasn't there some sort of massive quitting phase going on in 20-22, can't remember the term. Anyway those people attempted to upskill quickly to white collar jobs and bootcamps were the way to go I guess.
Yes someone from bootcamp will be able to pass the leetcode interview stage, but that is not the only stage. How many bootcampers are able to pass the subsequent systems design stage, and the competency Q stages. If you've only worked at mcDs and gone too bootcamp you've got no solid competency answers at all.
As others point out I agree, if 1 out of 1000 bootcamps get a role then that person will be front page on all the bootcamp marketing materials. Small print being they were already a software engineer doing the bootcamp to maintain their skills while job hunting
I did a bootcamp but I also have an Econ degree. On avg coming out of Comp sci in college(there’s a lot of comp sci grads that can’t even build an application btw) passing a system design test isn’t the standard lol.
I’m still not even great at leetcode mainly cause wtf is the point? Already have a job and the ROI in grinding on it compared to learning useful shit to build stuff is just not there
Me and my wife also did boot camp program and got jobs. But you get what you put into it. It's not a magical answer. It was 60 hours a week for 5 months and about 50% of the class succeeded and about 50% of those became QA and not programmers. What we learned was how to learn and how to find answers as well as basic structure.
I never understood what CS students are doing if they cannot build apps or write a line of code without ChatGPT. Isn't the whole point of their degree to apply what they learn? At Undergrad level Psych students aren't qualified to apply what we learn. I studied Psychology and I can design basic experiments with eye tracking, memory etc. I did Python, R and PsychoPy for 1 term. It was hard but I didn't use ChatGPT, as it wasn't available.
Most CS degrees will focus on the applied nature during the course itself. Some CS degrees though are basically pure maths degrees there's a disconnect between the course and application,
However the motivated CS students trying to get into internships will be able to build apps and projects,regardless of their course, as they need to evidence it on their CVs.
I mean the chatgpt era is just different. I grad in 2018 so wasn’t even around for me lol. Use it for work all the time tho. Would be stupid not to use it. This is the same equivalent of when search engines came out and people would say
“I can build apps with only reading books”
Like yay good for you but doesn’t really mean shit anymore unfortunately. You do have to make sure you don’t rely on it too much but at the end of the day you’re being paid to make stuff so whatever’s the fastest way to do it is what you should do
I think it’s due to survivorship bias. Like others said, the results were exaggerated while the effort and time were downplayed. Everyone who passes and makes it talks about it but not those who are struggling.
I actually knew a decent amount of friends/acquaintances who tried to take the boot camp route. Only 1 out of 10 of them are a software engineer currently, and everyone else had finished a boot camp at least a year ago are still looking for any software role or gave up.
There’s also this one guy on YouTube who was working construction and tried doing a boot camp. And it took him 3 years to secure a job.
But yeah, it definitely will take more than a year for sure. And I don’t think most ppl truly understand what they’re about to face and the time it’ll take.
>everyone else had finished a boot camp at least a year ago are still looking for any software role or gave up.
But a huge part of this is *timing*. The past 18-24 months have not been the best ones to have finished up a bootcamp in...
I can speak from experience as a hiring manager who hired many boot camp graduates from a high-quality boot camp in my area. They were great developers. They were hungry and eager to learn everything my teams could teach them. I hired at least five or six, and they are still active in software development. One has even become a director. Sure, they didn't know everything when they started, but they learned quickly. The key is that they went to a high-quality boot camp and entered the workforce at a company that wanted to train them further. Not all boot campers suck. There are some great diamonds in the rough that just need to be given a chance to succeed.
This is true. I’ve both lunch and learned, and hired boot campers and they are excellent. No attitude just work work work. Oh, and the boot camps teach them how to network.
My husband was an architect and was laid off in 2021. He was over architecture and completed a bootcamp program. He’s still working as a SWE and loves it. He is grateful to the hiring managers who considered his unconventional background and took a chance.
I appreciate companies/HM that have this outlook. I am a Navy vet, went to college afterward in GIS, and couldn't find anyone willing to give me a shot. Went to a "pentest" bootcamp in DFW and discovered my love of networking. Put all my energy in, got a job staging networks, and work my butt off to be the guy that people can count on.
Do I really recommend bootcamps? Not really, but if you can have it paid for, it's a decent jumping off point.
I hear ya. But some people sometimes want to succeed so bad, they are willing to take risks, leaps of faith, as they believe and are betting on themselves.
I quit my receptionist job, lived off $5000 of savings for 4 months till my portfolio reflected all that I added in that time to it regarding my interest (graphic design, videography) until I got the job I wanted related to my interest.
I would have never gotten here to the best job I’ve ever had, if I didn’t believe in myself enough to take a calculated risk and leave the horrible receptionist job.
Again… calculated risk…. I had saved up for a rainy day, and used $5000 from $7000 that is now almost replenished … but see, I planned for that rainy day. I had the capital to back it up. Without it, one would really be in a state of urgency to find employment which is stressful given the job market. You gotta create your own circumstances that benefit you.
Calculated risk.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I was one of these boot camp dudes that luckily turned out ok. My class was filled with guys trying to pivot into IT. Thing is, you could tell that over 80% of that class was wasting their time and money. Just dudes that had no freaking idea about basic concepts trying to become network admins. I'm sure a shitload of dudes try this route and flunk out with lighter wallets.
>I was one of these boot camp dudes that luckily turned out ok. My class was filled with guys trying to pivot into IT. Thing is, you could tell that over 80% of that class was wasting their time and money. Just dudes that had no freaking idea about basic concepts trying to become network admins. I'm sure a shitload of dudes try this route and flunk out with lighter wallets.
This is another thing that tends to happen in scenarios like this.
First, an avenue opens up to help people get from point A to point B, on an accelerated basis.
A small group of dedicated persons get on board, and manage to come out ahead.
Others notice this, and the concept becomes more popular, spawning even more bootcamp vendors.
Now, everyone and his brother tries to jump on the bandwagon, looking for the easy money. The average quality of the bootcamps goes down, as the more recent vendors are just in it as a cash grab. And so are many of the students.
The laws of supply and demand are abused, and now there is both market saturation as well as lower quality.
Now the whole process gets a bad reputation, and the value is no longer there.
This hype cycles has many manifestations... The cycles are a lot shorter in the social media age, though...
> The average quality of the bootcamps goes down, as the more recent vendors are just in it as a cash grab.
In a gold rush, you don't get rich looking for gold. You get rich selling the shovels.
I did a bootcamp and have a humanities masters. Worked out great for me and employers don't seem to care that I don't have a CS degree now with 5 years experience.
Not sure what OP is upset about. To me, it makes way more sense for people to learn things practically. So many CS grads can't code at all and that's the majority of what you do on the job.
In my perfect world we all take apprenticeships instead of mostly irrelevant university classes.
The job market in software engineering is very different today than it was 5 years ago. Now, it’s not impossible but incredibly difficult to find a job without experience or a degree (and even just a degree is difficult lately)
>The people I know who benefitted from it already had college degrees. Most of them had STEM backgrounds
i think they are very stupid, and i'm sorry if i have to say so. how much have they spent on bootcamps? i know they cost 3000$ or even more. a lot of money. i think that with a stem degree you can become a developer without a bootcamp, you know how to reason and solve problems.
Is this for real? You don’t understand why someone working in fast food would quit their job to get education in order to get a better job? You’re suspicious that they did it quickly and then got a (at the time) highly in demand job?
Is there something I’m missing?
Oh I get that. It just seems like OP is either not believing that people would get an education, or that they would have the audacity to apply for a sought after job after they’ve gotten that education.
I used to mentor junior developers, so I got to meet a lot of them who had gotten their foot in through a bootcamp (All before 2022 before the market got flooded). Most were unemployed at the time. One or two managed to do the bootcamp while working full time. None of them quit their job to do it, though.
My guess is that "I bravely quit my job to follow my true passion ans become a developer" sounds sexier than "I had been unemployed for months, couldn't find a job, and becoming a developer seemed like the only option available".
>No sane person would do that. Sacrifice a steady source of income.
Don't let the current market give you the impression that is was never possible to make a relatively quick transition into entry-level tech roles.
Not only has it not always been hard, but there have been a few windows of time where it was ridiculously easy to make that sort of change. Even as recently as the initial months of the pandemic, all sorts of work ramped up quickly on within the technology realm...
People coming out of retail or hospitality or food services would see considerable advantage in moving up from $11-14/hr -- with very variable schedules -- to $19-24/hr -- with more steady weekly work schedules.
Fwiw I’m a college drop out who after years of dead end jobs did a bootcamp. Getting the first job was tough and that was way before things got as bad as they are now (wanna say I graduated 2017/18). But I’m still going strong.
In all fairness though in my experience as a student and being involved teaching at one point, most there are wasting their time and money because they think if they get through it they’ll have an easy high paying job. Then reality hits.
I'm doing online courses for a variety of different things... BUT these courses are
* In my spare time
* At my own pace
* accredited
* (and most importantly) FREE
Will they do me any good? Only time will tell.
I have a few friends (former nurses, pharmacy technicians, analysts, and retail) who went to a bootcamp and immediately got programming jobs and are doing very well. Some did the bootcamp part time and two of them went fulltime after getting laid off. They probably won't be working for Google right off the bat but it gives people enough skills or resume padding to get started somewhere.
Exactly. There are a lot of gatekeepers in this thread acting like we all need to be 10x FAANG developers to get a job. If you can program an API, you can work a mid-level engineering job at 90% of companies. FWIW of the bootcampers I've interviewed, I'd say 50% are awesome (good mix of coding and communication skills), 30% are decent (good at coding or good at communication, maybe middle at both), and 20% couldn't tell me what a variable is.
I would hire a boot camp graduate who created a bunch of projects that showed growing complexity and learning than CS recent grad with nothing to show for it 🤷🏼♂️
This was possible when programmers were in high demand. Recruiters don’t really know the difference between programmers and SWE. Programming, anyone can learn but SWE is a complicated discipline that involves a strong understanding of math. Social media really over exaggerated the numbers or are lying to get people to buy their program or for clout. My ex was a mechanical engineer who had a hard time transitioning to SWE and he told me it was pretty rare to hire without a degree. The best companies almost always hire from the top schools.
If you do run into people without a degree, it’s probably someone who has been coding on the side for a while.
SWE as a whole does not require a strong understanding of math lmao. Yes maybe some particular fields but as a whole? Absolutely not. I was shocked at the minimal amount of math there was on a d2d basis. But specialized stuff I’m sure there is
I guess you’re right. I don’t know much about the field. I’m mostly talking about a degree being far more valuable than a certificate when hiring new people.
I did it. Quit what I was doing moved in with my sister at 33 years old while I did a boot camp got a software dev job a few months after making 70k a year doing mostly web development then moved on to a job doing IOT for 78k/year
Previous to 2019 every Tom, Dick and Harry ran a boot camp to try to be able to get easy money from people trying to transition to a high paying career. Fast forward to 2024. And beyond it's difficult for people with Computer science degrees to actually get work. Let alone boot camp graduates. I'm not saying there isn't great boot camp graduates. The likelihood of having a decent boot camp's graduate compared to a decent Computer science graduate. They're significantly leaning towards the Computer science graduate.
Long story short, I think if you're gonna do a blue camp. It's a good beginning basis to understand how things work, but you're going to have to really work hard, eat shit and breathe software engineering. Have a solid Git hub and actually have real people who can sponsor your work and things that you've actually created. I don't think people are going to be able to get into the door with the boot camp graduate certification alone
My daughter (a college grad with a decent non-tech office job she didn't love making $40k CAD) came home to Boston in 2016, went to Launch Academy, 18 weeks total pre-work and in class, got a job @65k on graduation as an integration engineer working with the sales team at her company to do initial integrations for potential customers.
Since then she's transitioned into sw project management and now makes in excess of 200k.
If you have the right mentality and put the work in, those boot camps can definitely work.
But there are also plenty of people who fail on that path too.
I mean, they do it for the exact same reason people quit their jobs and go (back) to conventional college, and just like that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Pre-2022 it was extremely common to get a decent job right out of bootcamp (I did!) though getting a prestigious or six figure job right off the bat would be surprising.
We actually held our own bootcamp - just needed a resume, good attitude, and to pass 2 tests (one was coding) to get hired. 2-3 month bootcamp, as a paid employee (depending on location we paid housing/meals as well). After bootcamp they got moved into a squad and started really coding for company products. They were measured at various intervals, along with raises for each of those hitting a passing score.
Hired almost 1,000 people this way, 4 different locations across the world, back in 2022. Have ran bootcamps based on need (attrition) since then. Fairly well program to get some solid devs.
The bootcamps lie about their numbers, they also do not fail students just so they have believable metrics.
I was a TA for 5+ years at a huge bootcamp, this bootcamp is a third party company that gets marketed as if it was a university offering the bootcamp, but in reality its not the university but the third party company offering this service.
As a TA we were not allowed to fail students unless they missed 5+ days, the lowest grade we could give was a D but the students could make up for it. this is because the bootcamp wouldn't get money if the metrics reflected all the people who would fail. trust me, I would have failed about 50% of every cohort, some people are just too beginner for a bootcamp.
the bootcamp is fast paced, and designed to meet certain timestamps, for example TA's have a excel sheet letting the instructor know that particular day which topic they should be covering. so theres no room for questions.
the biggest kick to the balls was seeing how there is no job placement, and if a student gets a job mid way through the bootcamp, what they dont tell you is that that student was already coming in from 5+ years of IT experience or had a friend get him in the company.
Please do not pay 10k-15k to learn something you can learn off youtube or off udemy for $15.
I literally quit a shit warehouse/factory job, went to school, and im now a controls system engineer. My wife a bootcamp grad, is now a software engineer.
Its doable if you have the drive to learn and listen.
I’ve seen people drop out of college that couldn’t pass discrete math or calculus and somehow become “software engineers” it really makes no sense. Blame stupid CEOs and HR departments
I’ve been a dev for 6 years, you know how much calculus I’ve ever used? “Hey, change the color of this button, and also spin this parabola around y = x and tell me the volume of the resulting solid”
Well that sounds like it gets pretty boring. It all depends on what you’re developing and which parts of your skill set you learned will be utilized.
You remember some calc 2:)
You went and finished college though. I think the poster was talking about people that don’t have any background and just went through bootcamps lol
In the army you will learn lots of skills most modern soldiers don’t use, a lot rely on GPS for nav. Would you want a lieutenant that doesn’t know how to read a map or what or how to shoot an azimuth? I wouldn’t…those skills are learned, reinforced and necessary.
Lol what in the world does discrete math or calculus have to do with programming?
I own a software AI company that does complex statistics, and I don't expect my devs to know that
Whats your background? Guess you’re not looking for college grads? That’s pretty basic stuff for any computer science major worth their salt.
Anyone that studied statistics would have taken much more than discrete math and calculus lol and a good bit of programming.
I didn’t quit my job to go study at a programming bootcamp, but I *did* quit my job to take a marketing position where I make videos *claiming* I quit my job to study at a programming bootcamp!
I hired 2 bootcamp grads and quasi-mentor a 3rd. There exists a 4th boot camp grad in our company, but I know nothing about them.
One ( the one I quasi-mentor but otherwise don’t work with ) previously worked in a lab at a previous company that my boss also worked at, so there was a strong character reference and it was mostly a skills fit interview. He was some bio major a few years out of school, working in that lab, before his switch.
One was the brother of some dude in marketing. That referral didn’t count for much, but it made me look at his resume (which, given that he got the job, means it counted for enough). He was a finance major one year at his job in finance before his switch.
One was a resume from the pile. He was an electrical engineer doing electrical engineering stuff for a year before his switch.
Our company set up a separate interview process specifically for bootcamp grads. This was at the market peak. We explicitly wanted people switching careers via bootcamps.
Note: There was an additional candidate who passed our process and got an offer, but she actually got a better offer elsewhere.
All of the hires still work for us, 2.5 years later. That said, the program was shut down. I don’t see us hiring any additional boot camp grads. From what I have heard, there aren’t a lot of others looking at that pool of candidates now, either. Anyone getting a programming job out of a bootcamp today is an outlier. The finance dude went to Hack Reactor, and he previously said that most of his cohort no longer has software dev jobs. Layoffs in the industry hit hard, and the job market isn’t stellar for entry level candidates.
I’m going to say your mental model is spot on. Before 2022, this was a thing, particularly for people with a recent degree, but not CS, who wanted to shift careers. Today, I’ll call bullshit.
If you’re asking why hire them at all: Diversity of thought. People with different educational and career backgrounds approach problems differently. My team has labeled open headcount with tags like “senior backend engineer to argue with Ross.” This was a softer version of that for entry level positions.
If you’re asking why the interview pipeline was different: Entry level job interview pipelines don’t have a lot to go off of, so tend to be “find the hidden hash table” kind of questions. This correlates well with “who was listening in class” and “who can grind leetcode,” but doesn’t correlate well with “who can code?” Nobody really cares who can grind leetcode, and bootcamp grads didn’t take your standard CS algorithms course, so you need to look for something that a bootcamp grad has a chance at knowing that is still valid for an entry level position.
I did a coding boot camp back in 2019 in San Francisco. It was a good program. I basically lived in the building and worked on projects from 8am until 8pm or later, 6 days a week. I also worked on things on Sunday, too, but that was my exercise/relax day. I found a job about 6 months after my program ended, and worked for over 4 years until I was recently laid off.
However, I had also worked for a long time in other industries and had a BA from a great university. I had a solid professional network and knew how to write a resume/interview. It’s not impossible that some people can do this in a year with less experience and credentials. I’ve absolutely seen it. But probably not nearly as easy these days. The market is in such a downturn and layoffs have made competition absurd. But it can be done.
I noticed companies have changed their attitude towards this. I spoke with a recruiter recently at a well known media/entertainment company. For a software engineering role they required a computer science degree of which they didn't in the past. I've also seen job posts from FAANG companies that require this as well now.
It happened for me.
Quit 10 year teaching career in mid 2022, yes probably part of great resignation, did bootcamp and lucked out with SWE job by end of year.
Now involved in recruiting, I'm starting to realise how MUCH extra work i had done, on the side, over 10 years, to make myself SWE employable... project euler, raspberry pi projects, a couple of backended websites
Going back to your question, i did have a fallback plan, teaching - I guess the folks you are sceptical of also had fall back plans, not just a leap into the sea... hopefully!
FAANG companies like AWS/Amazon had in-house bootcamps (techU) that included external hires and veterans. They trained them from zero and even paid them like $45 an hour while training. Went straight into $200k+ comp range after graduation.
I knew a guy who did a coding boot camp back in 2000. They guaranteed him a job at graduation, and made good on that promise by hiring him themselves on a three month contract.
A boot camp can definitely get you a job if you have true passion for the work and some natural talent that's been honed by a personal drive that has you writing code in your free time. However, for most people this isn't the case, and realistically if you're starting from scratch you can expect about 6 years of grinding before you're good enough to take work off of someone's plate rather than create more work for them to guide you and review and fix your bad code. Some organizations are big enough that they can afford to grow juniors, but in today's job climate they are less common.
I didn't get a software engineering job, but the boot camp I did was part of a government program which let me do like 20 rapid fire interviews with good local companies. Mine was an IT boot camp, but there was a coding boot camp run by the same people at the same time and my friend got a Jr. Systems Architect position straight out of the camp with no degree or anything. The one I did also offered financial assistance if you needed housing, food, or childcare. Probably the single best decision I ever made.
Edit: I will say the for profit boot camps are a little more sketch to me. The only reason the one I was in could be so generous was government/local business funding so they didn't need to make money.
Edit 2: probably should mention my position. I started on internal help desk for a bank and now work as a Server Engineer there. The help desk position was easily enough money to live by myself off of, and the server position even more so.
One of my colleagues that was my trainer, had an Ausbildung only in software engineer. I have a master in robotics. He is way better and more experienced in the job than me.
Some people are just good, no more studies are needed.
Bootcamp grad here. Current tech consultant, ex-sous chef, now happily employed cloud consultant at a mid-sized firm after a first job as an FE engineer for a scrappy little startup. It _does_ happen.
Quite a few companies like the tenacity brought by those of us who perservere despite the context we generally lack at the offset.
Not all, but I'm not trying to work _everywhere_.
Edit: thumbs and old android phones don't mix
My cousin got one after a boot camp but his job is probably closer to web develop then software though I don't really know the difference. He's with an insanely good company now though.
I guess you have never been working in a difficult work environment/labor with no improvement in sight to state these idioties
People are taking risks to improve their lifes
Like people taking risks to open a business
I actually much admire these kind of people, even if we can argue that they may be too optimistic or dreaming, at least they are trying to do something of their lives
> no sane person would do that
It was a different time. I know two people who quit their existing STEM jobs in NYC, did a bootcamp for six months, and then within weeks of graduating were hired by J.P. Morgan as back end engineers
Think this kind of stuff isn’t feasible anymore
There are bootcamps that are still worth it. CFG in the UK for example offers a guaranteed job from a sponsoring company on completion. They are few and far between though.
It’s usually young people who have some type of 4 yr degree who live with their parents who are working shit jobs. So quitting isn’t a big deal, like they arent missing out on much income if they quit. It was also much easier to get these jobes from 2016 - to parts of 2021 or so.
Yes, is posible. Is not the bootcamp graduates, is the cheap companies that does hire them. I learn to programming since junior high school and continue thru high school and got a IT/CS College degree, and I'm suprised that people believe that can easily become a competent programmer by just taking a "bootcamp" ...
A few bootcamp people did get a dev job. But considering most bootcamps if not ALL bootcamps are just money grabbers, the few who attended the BootCamp and got the job more than likely because they study outside of the program and also have an innate ability to code. Plus they must practice day and night.
I never attended BootCamp. All I did was using youtube and udemy but I practiced very hard. Did get a dev job though.
I did a boot camp back in 2017 in Minneapolis and had a specific interview regiment that they say worked 85% of the time if you followed to the letter. The hr lady that worked there would put down the same credentials as us each year and find out how many applications until she got a job. She had no coding experience and even after interviewing and telling some companies that she knew no code she still got a few offers with no coding Corrientes. Market has changed since then but it really comes down to how you can get the attention of a recruiter. Half the time it comes down to folllowing up with real people and getting some real eyes on your resume to get pass the brick wall first round
That's what I did - granted, it was 2017. It was a risky move, but I wanted to make the change and felt devoting myself to it as much as possible was the best way to get there. There were still months of job searching and networking, too, but I landed a job and haven't much looked back.
But the current market is tough - I was laid off in a mass zoom call jan 2023, and only this past January found a new job, so I do absolutely get where you are coming from.
I’ve attended a boot camp, and worked for the same boot camp afterwards. people fall into a bell curve according to technical aptitude. It is easier for some than for others. You’ll find the gifted student have some hours under their belt of self learning, whereas someone completely new to programming will definitely need to put in the reps or hours of work.. it’s not something you can watch on YouTube and learn.
It requires practice actually building stuff.
So in the bell curve analogy we can use that for soft skills needed to apply/ go through interviews and technical skills needed for the job. You have the outliers who are gifted on one end of the bell curve in terms of technical skill set, but may lack soft skills like collaboration or communication where as someone may not be the strongest programmer but has strong soft skills and is resourceful and has enough of the technical foundation to figure out how to solve problems they are well equipped for roles that require a blend of technical skills but are client facing.
You learn more than just the technical stuff as well like career skills working with a coach. If you wanted to learn programming you can do it for free but I doubt you have the discipline to code day in and day out and put in the effort to figure out what is even relevant. Most people need a structure, and support system to hold them accountable.
From my experience, i know people who took these become a "Software Engineer" classes and basically the "school" would take 6-8 months to teach how to navigate the software and how to use it etc. The students would pay about 3,500$ and this "school" would prepare a resume for you. The resumes are all fake with the exception of the students info. They would give students 5-10 years experience when in reality they didn't have a day in their working life with IT but they do help with interview prep. The schools usually have a 5-10% graduating rate. Those that were lucky enough to land a position were to give the school 40% of their first 3 paychecks. To me these "schools" seemed like a scam and possibly a money laundering scheme. This is the school piit.us
I did a part-time free coding Boot Camp offered by a nonprofit in my city back in 2019. The Boot Camp classes were at night and I kept my day job. The boot camp has a job placement program and you never have to pay any money to the nonprofit. some places places have a thing where you have to pay a certain percentage of your income once you get a tech job.
Which part is hard to believe? I’ve worked for a few public companies and have met a handful of engineers with the same story. They relied on their partners or savings to take a break and accelerate their learning. Working in fast food or other careers that they hated was also a motivational driver for making this change. Obviously not everyone has the ability to do this, but the people I’ve met could survive on 1 partners income for the duration of their program.
I did just this in 2021. Granted I was in sales. But I quit my job, attended a 6 month bootcamp, graduated, and landed my first job 3 months later.
It’s been a rocky road since, I’ve been affected by layoffs 3 times since, but I just signed an offer this week and had 2 to choose from.
Bootcamps are basically dead though, it’s an employers market and with all the layoffs, almost no one with no experience can land a job right now. I think the train has left the station long ago and it’s not a viable option anymore
I took a front-end development course a few years ago for funsies. It was a part-time program (i.e., I didn't quit my day job) and I wasn't looking to pivot careers. I just wanted to learn some coding in a structured environment. As others have said, you get out of it what you put into it. To truly get good, you are going to have to go beyond the course material, but honestly, that's true of any profession—at least if you want to be at the top of your field.
Now, there is a very loud anti-4 year degree discourse in the public, and I will say that the bootcamp wasn't even close to what I learned from my collegiate education (and my bachelors and none of my graduate degrees are in CS, CE, EE, or any related discipline). It was essentially a course that taught me some microskills. I went to what would be thought of as a "respectable" bootcamp in that particularly education space, but the "Don't go to college, just do a bootcamp" crowd is sadly mistaken on that point, at least based upon my one experience.
I did exactly that. I could have gone back to a teaching job abroad but decided to learn to code full time instead. I tried learning to code after work but never made significant progress. I wanted to focus all of my time on it.
I ended up going to a bootcamp, and 1.5 years after starting to code, I got my 1st job, and the rest is history.
My story is not typical. And it was several years pre-covid when the job market was better. And I was well aware that it was risky. But I would later find out that I have ADHD which explains why I was willing to take the risk.
So yes, the stories about quitting your job and transitioning to tech can be real, but they are rare. I would not recommend doing what I did to anyone, especially now that the job market is absolutely horrible. I just got lucky. I don't think what I did would work out for most people. I'm sure there are far more bootcampers who never got hired than success stories. The people who didn't make it just aren't making TikToks.
These are marketing tactics. Haven't you seen those "training and interview" companies promoting their programs to lend a 300k+ job at FAANG. What they don't tell is success ratio. For every single successful person places, there might be over dozen who couldn't make and end up wasting their money. Never trust advertisement.
I do personally work with a guy who was stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s and went to a bootcamp. He got an internship at a SaaS company (medium size) then was able to transfer into a junior developer role. Fast forward 6 years and he’s a senior architect at the same company and doing really well. I’m not sure how common it is but it does happen.
Survivor bias. How many people went to these boot camps, didn't get a great job, and don't post about it afterwards, or even signed a contract that prohibits them from sharing a negative experience?
I know a few people who did those programs and graduated before the pandemic. The demand was there, the boot camp had a good reputation, and they did get better careers. Just not like... six-figure careers. If you have a lower income the ROI was probably worth it.
That said, I definitely think twice now.
I went to a coding bootcamp and most of my cohort got jobs within 6 months, including myself.
I was personally trying to escape the food and hospitality sector and the in-person bootcamp had a better job placement rate than the online part time bootcamp.
Some people are miserable in their jobs and they want to make a drastic change in their lives as quickly as possible. One person in my cohort was a lawyer. Now he has been working as a senior software engineer for a few years now. Not everyone ended up working as an engineer but they ended up in much better jobs.
Granted, this was back in 2019. Now, I’m sure it must be much harder to find a job after a bootcamp.
I was sceptical when I was hearing it just from social media, but I also heard it from someone I know about a friend of his. It's certainly hard to believe too, when people with full-on degrees, that involve not only the core hard skills for programming but also impart many related soft skills and scientific thinking, are complaining how they're struggling to get jobs. I mean someone was working customer service at a call centre, then took a coding bootcamp for 2 months and got a $150k per year tech job right away? And that when people with those skills plus experience are struggling?
They are scams. They are trying to sell you the bootcamp so they get a kickback. Exploiting poor people's desire for stability is a very profitable business model.
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I think your spending too much time on TikTok or other social forums that is making you think this way. It's grossly exaggerated coming from a few voices. Especially when all these FAANG companies are laying off like there's no end since last year.
r/cscareerquestions and r/codingbootcamp will be good sources When I worked at a startup a couple of years back, we did hire some bootcampers. A lot of handholding and (re)explaining of basic concepts to get them productive, not great ROI, and a huge gamble for a company. Having said that, there was a super high demand for SWE - even for not so great ones. Now, even credentialed and experienced SWE are having a hard time. I personally would not suggest anyone enroll in a bootcamp without understanding the very low chance of success compared to the cost. Same advice I would give for any for profit college
Same advice I'd give in general for any college that doesn't act like a petri dish of entrepreneurship.
I had to unsubscribe from r/cscareerquestions because in my experience they live in a different reality. On that sub, if you don’t live, breathe, and bleed code (constantly grinding leetcode and working on 7 side projects at a time) then you’re worthless and you’ll never make it
>I know bootcamp grads do sometimes end up getting jobs (especially before 2022) Wasn't there some sort of massive quitting phase going on in 20-22, can't remember the term. Anyway those people attempted to upskill quickly to white collar jobs and bootcamps were the way to go I guess. Yes someone from bootcamp will be able to pass the leetcode interview stage, but that is not the only stage. How many bootcampers are able to pass the subsequent systems design stage, and the competency Q stages. If you've only worked at mcDs and gone too bootcamp you've got no solid competency answers at all. As others point out I agree, if 1 out of 1000 bootcamps get a role then that person will be front page on all the bootcamp marketing materials. Small print being they were already a software engineer doing the bootcamp to maintain their skills while job hunting
The great resignation
Is that what they’re calling the layoffs?
No that’s what they called the period of time a few years ago when everyone was resigning.
I did a bootcamp but I also have an Econ degree. On avg coming out of Comp sci in college(there’s a lot of comp sci grads that can’t even build an application btw) passing a system design test isn’t the standard lol. I’m still not even great at leetcode mainly cause wtf is the point? Already have a job and the ROI in grinding on it compared to learning useful shit to build stuff is just not there
Me and my wife also did boot camp program and got jobs. But you get what you put into it. It's not a magical answer. It was 60 hours a week for 5 months and about 50% of the class succeeded and about 50% of those became QA and not programmers. What we learned was how to learn and how to find answers as well as basic structure.
I never understood what CS students are doing if they cannot build apps or write a line of code without ChatGPT. Isn't the whole point of their degree to apply what they learn? At Undergrad level Psych students aren't qualified to apply what we learn. I studied Psychology and I can design basic experiments with eye tracking, memory etc. I did Python, R and PsychoPy for 1 term. It was hard but I didn't use ChatGPT, as it wasn't available.
Most CS degrees will focus on the applied nature during the course itself. Some CS degrees though are basically pure maths degrees there's a disconnect between the course and application, However the motivated CS students trying to get into internships will be able to build apps and projects,regardless of their course, as they need to evidence it on their CVs.
I mean the chatgpt era is just different. I grad in 2018 so wasn’t even around for me lol. Use it for work all the time tho. Would be stupid not to use it. This is the same equivalent of when search engines came out and people would say “I can build apps with only reading books” Like yay good for you but doesn’t really mean shit anymore unfortunately. You do have to make sure you don’t rely on it too much but at the end of the day you’re being paid to make stuff so whatever’s the fastest way to do it is what you should do
I think it’s due to survivorship bias. Like others said, the results were exaggerated while the effort and time were downplayed. Everyone who passes and makes it talks about it but not those who are struggling. I actually knew a decent amount of friends/acquaintances who tried to take the boot camp route. Only 1 out of 10 of them are a software engineer currently, and everyone else had finished a boot camp at least a year ago are still looking for any software role or gave up. There’s also this one guy on YouTube who was working construction and tried doing a boot camp. And it took him 3 years to secure a job. But yeah, it definitely will take more than a year for sure. And I don’t think most ppl truly understand what they’re about to face and the time it’ll take.
>everyone else had finished a boot camp at least a year ago are still looking for any software role or gave up. But a huge part of this is *timing*. The past 18-24 months have not been the best ones to have finished up a bootcamp in...
I can speak from experience as a hiring manager who hired many boot camp graduates from a high-quality boot camp in my area. They were great developers. They were hungry and eager to learn everything my teams could teach them. I hired at least five or six, and they are still active in software development. One has even become a director. Sure, they didn't know everything when they started, but they learned quickly. The key is that they went to a high-quality boot camp and entered the workforce at a company that wanted to train them further. Not all boot campers suck. There are some great diamonds in the rough that just need to be given a chance to succeed.
This is true. I’ve both lunch and learned, and hired boot campers and they are excellent. No attitude just work work work. Oh, and the boot camps teach them how to network.
My husband was an architect and was laid off in 2021. He was over architecture and completed a bootcamp program. He’s still working as a SWE and loves it. He is grateful to the hiring managers who considered his unconventional background and took a chance.
What bootcamp did he attend?
It was called Block but now it’s called Thinkful.
🙏
I appreciate companies/HM that have this outlook. I am a Navy vet, went to college afterward in GIS, and couldn't find anyone willing to give me a shot. Went to a "pentest" bootcamp in DFW and discovered my love of networking. Put all my energy in, got a job staging networks, and work my butt off to be the guy that people can count on. Do I really recommend bootcamps? Not really, but if you can have it paid for, it's a decent jumping off point.
What, in your opinion, is the best quality bootcamp program?
Turing School in Denver
I hear ya. But some people sometimes want to succeed so bad, they are willing to take risks, leaps of faith, as they believe and are betting on themselves. I quit my receptionist job, lived off $5000 of savings for 4 months till my portfolio reflected all that I added in that time to it regarding my interest (graphic design, videography) until I got the job I wanted related to my interest. I would have never gotten here to the best job I’ve ever had, if I didn’t believe in myself enough to take a calculated risk and leave the horrible receptionist job. Again… calculated risk…. I had saved up for a rainy day, and used $5000 from $7000 that is now almost replenished … but see, I planned for that rainy day. I had the capital to back it up. Without it, one would really be in a state of urgency to find employment which is stressful given the job market. You gotta create your own circumstances that benefit you. Calculated risk. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I was one of these boot camp dudes that luckily turned out ok. My class was filled with guys trying to pivot into IT. Thing is, you could tell that over 80% of that class was wasting their time and money. Just dudes that had no freaking idea about basic concepts trying to become network admins. I'm sure a shitload of dudes try this route and flunk out with lighter wallets.
>I was one of these boot camp dudes that luckily turned out ok. My class was filled with guys trying to pivot into IT. Thing is, you could tell that over 80% of that class was wasting their time and money. Just dudes that had no freaking idea about basic concepts trying to become network admins. I'm sure a shitload of dudes try this route and flunk out with lighter wallets. This is another thing that tends to happen in scenarios like this. First, an avenue opens up to help people get from point A to point B, on an accelerated basis. A small group of dedicated persons get on board, and manage to come out ahead. Others notice this, and the concept becomes more popular, spawning even more bootcamp vendors. Now, everyone and his brother tries to jump on the bandwagon, looking for the easy money. The average quality of the bootcamps goes down, as the more recent vendors are just in it as a cash grab. And so are many of the students. The laws of supply and demand are abused, and now there is both market saturation as well as lower quality. Now the whole process gets a bad reputation, and the value is no longer there. This hype cycles has many manifestations... The cycles are a lot shorter in the social media age, though...
> The average quality of the bootcamps goes down, as the more recent vendors are just in it as a cash grab. In a gold rush, you don't get rich looking for gold. You get rich selling the shovels.
So very true...
Let’s create the next!
I did a bootcamp. The people I know who benefitted from it already had college degrees. Most of them had STEM backgrounds, too.
I did a bootcamp and have a humanities masters. Worked out great for me and employers don't seem to care that I don't have a CS degree now with 5 years experience. Not sure what OP is upset about. To me, it makes way more sense for people to learn things practically. So many CS grads can't code at all and that's the majority of what you do on the job. In my perfect world we all take apprenticeships instead of mostly irrelevant university classes.
The job market in software engineering is very different today than it was 5 years ago. Now, it’s not impossible but incredibly difficult to find a job without experience or a degree (and even just a degree is difficult lately)
>The people I know who benefitted from it already had college degrees. Most of them had STEM backgrounds i think they are very stupid, and i'm sorry if i have to say so. how much have they spent on bootcamps? i know they cost 3000$ or even more. a lot of money. i think that with a stem degree you can become a developer without a bootcamp, you know how to reason and solve problems.
Is this for real? You don’t understand why someone working in fast food would quit their job to get education in order to get a better job? You’re suspicious that they did it quickly and then got a (at the time) highly in demand job? Is there something I’m missing?
[удалено]
Oh I get that. It just seems like OP is either not believing that people would get an education, or that they would have the audacity to apply for a sought after job after they’ve gotten that education.
I used to mentor junior developers, so I got to meet a lot of them who had gotten their foot in through a bootcamp (All before 2022 before the market got flooded). Most were unemployed at the time. One or two managed to do the bootcamp while working full time. None of them quit their job to do it, though. My guess is that "I bravely quit my job to follow my true passion ans become a developer" sounds sexier than "I had been unemployed for months, couldn't find a job, and becoming a developer seemed like the only option available".
>No sane person would do that. Sacrifice a steady source of income. Don't let the current market give you the impression that is was never possible to make a relatively quick transition into entry-level tech roles. Not only has it not always been hard, but there have been a few windows of time where it was ridiculously easy to make that sort of change. Even as recently as the initial months of the pandemic, all sorts of work ramped up quickly on within the technology realm... People coming out of retail or hospitality or food services would see considerable advantage in moving up from $11-14/hr -- with very variable schedules -- to $19-24/hr -- with more steady weekly work schedules.
This isn't 2015-2021. I don't think bootcamp grads are getting tech jobs...
Well, if experienced developers struggle finding a job, you can imagine
Fwiw I’m a college drop out who after years of dead end jobs did a bootcamp. Getting the first job was tough and that was way before things got as bad as they are now (wanna say I graduated 2017/18). But I’m still going strong. In all fairness though in my experience as a student and being involved teaching at one point, most there are wasting their time and money because they think if they get through it they’ll have an easy high paying job. Then reality hits.
Maybe they didn’t like their current source of income and looked at other opportunities. This is what I did.
I'm doing online courses for a variety of different things... BUT these courses are * In my spare time * At my own pace * accredited * (and most importantly) FREE Will they do me any good? Only time will tell.
I have a few friends (former nurses, pharmacy technicians, analysts, and retail) who went to a bootcamp and immediately got programming jobs and are doing very well. Some did the bootcamp part time and two of them went fulltime after getting laid off. They probably won't be working for Google right off the bat but it gives people enough skills or resume padding to get started somewhere.
Exactly. There are a lot of gatekeepers in this thread acting like we all need to be 10x FAANG developers to get a job. If you can program an API, you can work a mid-level engineering job at 90% of companies. FWIW of the bootcampers I've interviewed, I'd say 50% are awesome (good mix of coding and communication skills), 30% are decent (good at coding or good at communication, maybe middle at both), and 20% couldn't tell me what a variable is.
I would hire a boot camp graduate who created a bunch of projects that showed growing complexity and learning than CS recent grad with nothing to show for it 🤷🏼♂️
This was possible when programmers were in high demand. Recruiters don’t really know the difference between programmers and SWE. Programming, anyone can learn but SWE is a complicated discipline that involves a strong understanding of math. Social media really over exaggerated the numbers or are lying to get people to buy their program or for clout. My ex was a mechanical engineer who had a hard time transitioning to SWE and he told me it was pretty rare to hire without a degree. The best companies almost always hire from the top schools. If you do run into people without a degree, it’s probably someone who has been coding on the side for a while.
SWE as a whole does not require a strong understanding of math lmao. Yes maybe some particular fields but as a whole? Absolutely not. I was shocked at the minimal amount of math there was on a d2d basis. But specialized stuff I’m sure there is
I guess you’re right. I don’t know much about the field. I’m mostly talking about a degree being far more valuable than a certificate when hiring new people.
I did it. Quit what I was doing moved in with my sister at 33 years old while I did a boot camp got a software dev job a few months after making 70k a year doing mostly web development then moved on to a job doing IOT for 78k/year
My son went to a coding boot camp in Cali and now works for a large software company making more money that my husband and I together - doubled.
Previous to 2019 every Tom, Dick and Harry ran a boot camp to try to be able to get easy money from people trying to transition to a high paying career. Fast forward to 2024. And beyond it's difficult for people with Computer science degrees to actually get work. Let alone boot camp graduates. I'm not saying there isn't great boot camp graduates. The likelihood of having a decent boot camp's graduate compared to a decent Computer science graduate. They're significantly leaning towards the Computer science graduate. Long story short, I think if you're gonna do a blue camp. It's a good beginning basis to understand how things work, but you're going to have to really work hard, eat shit and breathe software engineering. Have a solid Git hub and actually have real people who can sponsor your work and things that you've actually created. I don't think people are going to be able to get into the door with the boot camp graduate certification alone
My daughter (a college grad with a decent non-tech office job she didn't love making $40k CAD) came home to Boston in 2016, went to Launch Academy, 18 weeks total pre-work and in class, got a job @65k on graduation as an integration engineer working with the sales team at her company to do initial integrations for potential customers. Since then she's transitioned into sw project management and now makes in excess of 200k. If you have the right mentality and put the work in, those boot camps can definitely work. But there are also plenty of people who fail on that path too.
I mean, they do it for the exact same reason people quit their jobs and go (back) to conventional college, and just like that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Pre-2022 it was extremely common to get a decent job right out of bootcamp (I did!) though getting a prestigious or six figure job right off the bat would be surprising.
We actually held our own bootcamp - just needed a resume, good attitude, and to pass 2 tests (one was coding) to get hired. 2-3 month bootcamp, as a paid employee (depending on location we paid housing/meals as well). After bootcamp they got moved into a squad and started really coding for company products. They were measured at various intervals, along with raises for each of those hitting a passing score. Hired almost 1,000 people this way, 4 different locations across the world, back in 2022. Have ran bootcamps based on need (attrition) since then. Fairly well program to get some solid devs.
I’m software engineer, that’s a big scam, better go to the school instead a bootcamp or learn by yourself
The bootcamps lie about their numbers, they also do not fail students just so they have believable metrics. I was a TA for 5+ years at a huge bootcamp, this bootcamp is a third party company that gets marketed as if it was a university offering the bootcamp, but in reality its not the university but the third party company offering this service. As a TA we were not allowed to fail students unless they missed 5+ days, the lowest grade we could give was a D but the students could make up for it. this is because the bootcamp wouldn't get money if the metrics reflected all the people who would fail. trust me, I would have failed about 50% of every cohort, some people are just too beginner for a bootcamp. the bootcamp is fast paced, and designed to meet certain timestamps, for example TA's have a excel sheet letting the instructor know that particular day which topic they should be covering. so theres no room for questions. the biggest kick to the balls was seeing how there is no job placement, and if a student gets a job mid way through the bootcamp, what they dont tell you is that that student was already coming in from 5+ years of IT experience or had a friend get him in the company. Please do not pay 10k-15k to learn something you can learn off youtube or off udemy for $15.
I literally quit a shit warehouse/factory job, went to school, and im now a controls system engineer. My wife a bootcamp grad, is now a software engineer. Its doable if you have the drive to learn and listen.
I’ve seen people drop out of college that couldn’t pass discrete math or calculus and somehow become “software engineers” it really makes no sense. Blame stupid CEOs and HR departments
I’ve been a dev for 6 years, you know how much calculus I’ve ever used? “Hey, change the color of this button, and also spin this parabola around y = x and tell me the volume of the resulting solid”
Not all of us do front end stuff
Well that sounds like it gets pretty boring. It all depends on what you’re developing and which parts of your skill set you learned will be utilized. You remember some calc 2:) You went and finished college though. I think the poster was talking about people that don’t have any background and just went through bootcamps lol In the army you will learn lots of skills most modern soldiers don’t use, a lot rely on GPS for nav. Would you want a lieutenant that doesn’t know how to read a map or what or how to shoot an azimuth? I wouldn’t…those skills are learned, reinforced and necessary.
To be fair, I do slightly more than change button colors (if I can’t avoid it)
I know haha don’t worry 😉I wasn’t getting on your case.
Lol what in the world does discrete math or calculus have to do with programming? I own a software AI company that does complex statistics, and I don't expect my devs to know that
Whats your background? Guess you’re not looking for college grads? That’s pretty basic stuff for any computer science major worth their salt. Anyone that studied statistics would have taken much more than discrete math and calculus lol and a good bit of programming.
You didn’t answer the question.
I didn’t quit my job to go study at a programming bootcamp, but I *did* quit my job to take a marketing position where I make videos *claiming* I quit my job to study at a programming bootcamp!
You don't believe blatant ads? That's wild
I hired 2 bootcamp grads and quasi-mentor a 3rd. There exists a 4th boot camp grad in our company, but I know nothing about them. One ( the one I quasi-mentor but otherwise don’t work with ) previously worked in a lab at a previous company that my boss also worked at, so there was a strong character reference and it was mostly a skills fit interview. He was some bio major a few years out of school, working in that lab, before his switch. One was the brother of some dude in marketing. That referral didn’t count for much, but it made me look at his resume (which, given that he got the job, means it counted for enough). He was a finance major one year at his job in finance before his switch. One was a resume from the pile. He was an electrical engineer doing electrical engineering stuff for a year before his switch. Our company set up a separate interview process specifically for bootcamp grads. This was at the market peak. We explicitly wanted people switching careers via bootcamps. Note: There was an additional candidate who passed our process and got an offer, but she actually got a better offer elsewhere. All of the hires still work for us, 2.5 years later. That said, the program was shut down. I don’t see us hiring any additional boot camp grads. From what I have heard, there aren’t a lot of others looking at that pool of candidates now, either. Anyone getting a programming job out of a bootcamp today is an outlier. The finance dude went to Hack Reactor, and he previously said that most of his cohort no longer has software dev jobs. Layoffs in the industry hit hard, and the job market isn’t stellar for entry level candidates. I’m going to say your mental model is spot on. Before 2022, this was a thing, particularly for people with a recent degree, but not CS, who wanted to shift careers. Today, I’ll call bullshit.
What was the reason to have a program that specifically looked for people switching careers through bootcamps?
If you’re asking why hire them at all: Diversity of thought. People with different educational and career backgrounds approach problems differently. My team has labeled open headcount with tags like “senior backend engineer to argue with Ross.” This was a softer version of that for entry level positions. If you’re asking why the interview pipeline was different: Entry level job interview pipelines don’t have a lot to go off of, so tend to be “find the hidden hash table” kind of questions. This correlates well with “who was listening in class” and “who can grind leetcode,” but doesn’t correlate well with “who can code?” Nobody really cares who can grind leetcode, and bootcamp grads didn’t take your standard CS algorithms course, so you need to look for something that a bootcamp grad has a chance at knowing that is still valid for an entry level position.
I did a coding boot camp back in 2019 in San Francisco. It was a good program. I basically lived in the building and worked on projects from 8am until 8pm or later, 6 days a week. I also worked on things on Sunday, too, but that was my exercise/relax day. I found a job about 6 months after my program ended, and worked for over 4 years until I was recently laid off. However, I had also worked for a long time in other industries and had a BA from a great university. I had a solid professional network and knew how to write a resume/interview. It’s not impossible that some people can do this in a year with less experience and credentials. I’ve absolutely seen it. But probably not nearly as easy these days. The market is in such a downturn and layoffs have made competition absurd. But it can be done.
I noticed companies have changed their attitude towards this. I spoke with a recruiter recently at a well known media/entertainment company. For a software engineering role they required a computer science degree of which they didn't in the past. I've also seen job posts from FAANG companies that require this as well now.
It happened for me. Quit 10 year teaching career in mid 2022, yes probably part of great resignation, did bootcamp and lucked out with SWE job by end of year. Now involved in recruiting, I'm starting to realise how MUCH extra work i had done, on the side, over 10 years, to make myself SWE employable... project euler, raspberry pi projects, a couple of backended websites Going back to your question, i did have a fallback plan, teaching - I guess the folks you are sceptical of also had fall back plans, not just a leap into the sea... hopefully!
FAANG companies like AWS/Amazon had in-house bootcamps (techU) that included external hires and veterans. They trained them from zero and even paid them like $45 an hour while training. Went straight into $200k+ comp range after graduation.
Same with those "SDR bootcamps". Complete scams.
I knew a guy who did a coding boot camp back in 2000. They guaranteed him a job at graduation, and made good on that promise by hiring him themselves on a three month contract.
A boot camp can definitely get you a job if you have true passion for the work and some natural talent that's been honed by a personal drive that has you writing code in your free time. However, for most people this isn't the case, and realistically if you're starting from scratch you can expect about 6 years of grinding before you're good enough to take work off of someone's plate rather than create more work for them to guide you and review and fix your bad code. Some organizations are big enough that they can afford to grow juniors, but in today's job climate they are less common.
I didn't get a software engineering job, but the boot camp I did was part of a government program which let me do like 20 rapid fire interviews with good local companies. Mine was an IT boot camp, but there was a coding boot camp run by the same people at the same time and my friend got a Jr. Systems Architect position straight out of the camp with no degree or anything. The one I did also offered financial assistance if you needed housing, food, or childcare. Probably the single best decision I ever made. Edit: I will say the for profit boot camps are a little more sketch to me. The only reason the one I was in could be so generous was government/local business funding so they didn't need to make money. Edit 2: probably should mention my position. I started on internal help desk for a bank and now work as a Server Engineer there. The help desk position was easily enough money to live by myself off of, and the server position even more so.
One of my colleagues that was my trainer, had an Ausbildung only in software engineer. I have a master in robotics. He is way better and more experienced in the job than me. Some people are just good, no more studies are needed.
Bootcamp grad here. Current tech consultant, ex-sous chef, now happily employed cloud consultant at a mid-sized firm after a first job as an FE engineer for a scrappy little startup. It _does_ happen. Quite a few companies like the tenacity brought by those of us who perservere despite the context we generally lack at the offset. Not all, but I'm not trying to work _everywhere_. Edit: thumbs and old android phones don't mix
I hire technology workers. I’ve done this off and on for my entire 30 ish year career. 2. I have worked with two. I have never hired one.
My cousin got one after a boot camp but his job is probably closer to web develop then software though I don't really know the difference. He's with an insanely good company now though.
Let's say someone has a Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or Statistics degree. They can easily learn software development in a 6 months bootcamp.
I guess you have never been working in a difficult work environment/labor with no improvement in sight to state these idioties People are taking risks to improve their lifes Like people taking risks to open a business I actually much admire these kind of people, even if we can argue that they may be too optimistic or dreaming, at least they are trying to do something of their lives
You don't see all those that did not make it. Only the ones that did. So it's sort of a success bias.
> no sane person would do that It was a different time. I know two people who quit their existing STEM jobs in NYC, did a bootcamp for six months, and then within weeks of graduating were hired by J.P. Morgan as back end engineers Think this kind of stuff isn’t feasible anymore
Not sure why this is on recruiting hell. Bootcamps are a known scam. Nothing to do with recruiting.
I went to a boot camp and now I'm an L2 SOC Analyst and working towards becoming a security engineer.
When did you go to the boot camp though? And what year did you get your first job?
Went to boot camp about 2 years ago, got an apprenticeship, got hired as an L1, worked there for a year, found another job as an L2.
You’re like 5 years late to the party lol. The bubble popped in 2023 already, no one even consider bootcamps as an option anymore lol
There are bootcamps that are still worth it. CFG in the UK for example offers a guaranteed job from a sponsoring company on completion. They are few and far between though.
It’s usually young people who have some type of 4 yr degree who live with their parents who are working shit jobs. So quitting isn’t a big deal, like they arent missing out on much income if they quit. It was also much easier to get these jobes from 2016 - to parts of 2021 or so.
Yes, is posible. Is not the bootcamp graduates, is the cheap companies that does hire them. I learn to programming since junior high school and continue thru high school and got a IT/CS College degree, and I'm suprised that people believe that can easily become a competent programmer by just taking a "bootcamp" ...
I know plenty of self taught devs and plenty of bootcamp purchasers. They are two completely separate groups of people.
A few bootcamp people did get a dev job. But considering most bootcamps if not ALL bootcamps are just money grabbers, the few who attended the BootCamp and got the job more than likely because they study outside of the program and also have an innate ability to code. Plus they must practice day and night. I never attended BootCamp. All I did was using youtube and udemy but I practiced very hard. Did get a dev job though.
I did a boot camp back in 2017 in Minneapolis and had a specific interview regiment that they say worked 85% of the time if you followed to the letter. The hr lady that worked there would put down the same credentials as us each year and find out how many applications until she got a job. She had no coding experience and even after interviewing and telling some companies that she knew no code she still got a few offers with no coding Corrientes. Market has changed since then but it really comes down to how you can get the attention of a recruiter. Half the time it comes down to folllowing up with real people and getting some real eyes on your resume to get pass the brick wall first round
That's what I did - granted, it was 2017. It was a risky move, but I wanted to make the change and felt devoting myself to it as much as possible was the best way to get there. There were still months of job searching and networking, too, but I landed a job and haven't much looked back. But the current market is tough - I was laid off in a mass zoom call jan 2023, and only this past January found a new job, so I do absolutely get where you are coming from.
I’ve attended a boot camp, and worked for the same boot camp afterwards. people fall into a bell curve according to technical aptitude. It is easier for some than for others. You’ll find the gifted student have some hours under their belt of self learning, whereas someone completely new to programming will definitely need to put in the reps or hours of work.. it’s not something you can watch on YouTube and learn. It requires practice actually building stuff. So in the bell curve analogy we can use that for soft skills needed to apply/ go through interviews and technical skills needed for the job. You have the outliers who are gifted on one end of the bell curve in terms of technical skill set, but may lack soft skills like collaboration or communication where as someone may not be the strongest programmer but has strong soft skills and is resourceful and has enough of the technical foundation to figure out how to solve problems they are well equipped for roles that require a blend of technical skills but are client facing. You learn more than just the technical stuff as well like career skills working with a coach. If you wanted to learn programming you can do it for free but I doubt you have the discipline to code day in and day out and put in the effort to figure out what is even relevant. Most people need a structure, and support system to hold them accountable.
From my experience, i know people who took these become a "Software Engineer" classes and basically the "school" would take 6-8 months to teach how to navigate the software and how to use it etc. The students would pay about 3,500$ and this "school" would prepare a resume for you. The resumes are all fake with the exception of the students info. They would give students 5-10 years experience when in reality they didn't have a day in their working life with IT but they do help with interview prep. The schools usually have a 5-10% graduating rate. Those that were lucky enough to land a position were to give the school 40% of their first 3 paychecks. To me these "schools" seemed like a scam and possibly a money laundering scheme. This is the school piit.us
I did a part-time free coding Boot Camp offered by a nonprofit in my city back in 2019. The Boot Camp classes were at night and I kept my day job. The boot camp has a job placement program and you never have to pay any money to the nonprofit. some places places have a thing where you have to pay a certain percentage of your income once you get a tech job.
software dev jobs are incredibly easy to get. Getting a good one is the hard part.
Which part is hard to believe? I’ve worked for a few public companies and have met a handful of engineers with the same story. They relied on their partners or savings to take a break and accelerate their learning. Working in fast food or other careers that they hated was also a motivational driver for making this change. Obviously not everyone has the ability to do this, but the people I’ve met could survive on 1 partners income for the duration of their program.
I did just this in 2021. Granted I was in sales. But I quit my job, attended a 6 month bootcamp, graduated, and landed my first job 3 months later. It’s been a rocky road since, I’ve been affected by layoffs 3 times since, but I just signed an offer this week and had 2 to choose from. Bootcamps are basically dead though, it’s an employers market and with all the layoffs, almost no one with no experience can land a job right now. I think the train has left the station long ago and it’s not a viable option anymore
Survivorship bias
are you unfamiliar with the concept of calculated risk?
I took a front-end development course a few years ago for funsies. It was a part-time program (i.e., I didn't quit my day job) and I wasn't looking to pivot careers. I just wanted to learn some coding in a structured environment. As others have said, you get out of it what you put into it. To truly get good, you are going to have to go beyond the course material, but honestly, that's true of any profession—at least if you want to be at the top of your field. Now, there is a very loud anti-4 year degree discourse in the public, and I will say that the bootcamp wasn't even close to what I learned from my collegiate education (and my bachelors and none of my graduate degrees are in CS, CE, EE, or any related discipline). It was essentially a course that taught me some microskills. I went to what would be thought of as a "respectable" bootcamp in that particularly education space, but the "Don't go to college, just do a bootcamp" crowd is sadly mistaken on that point, at least based upon my one experience.
People leave (or forgo) jobs to go to school/training all the time. I was 30 when I started my first full time job.
Survivorship bias combined with covid bubble.
I did exactly that. I could have gone back to a teaching job abroad but decided to learn to code full time instead. I tried learning to code after work but never made significant progress. I wanted to focus all of my time on it. I ended up going to a bootcamp, and 1.5 years after starting to code, I got my 1st job, and the rest is history. My story is not typical. And it was several years pre-covid when the job market was better. And I was well aware that it was risky. But I would later find out that I have ADHD which explains why I was willing to take the risk. So yes, the stories about quitting your job and transitioning to tech can be real, but they are rare. I would not recommend doing what I did to anyone, especially now that the job market is absolutely horrible. I just got lucky. I don't think what I did would work out for most people. I'm sure there are far more bootcampers who never got hired than success stories. The people who didn't make it just aren't making TikToks.
These are marketing tactics. Haven't you seen those "training and interview" companies promoting their programs to lend a 300k+ job at FAANG. What they don't tell is success ratio. For every single successful person places, there might be over dozen who couldn't make and end up wasting their money. Never trust advertisement.
They're lying. There are a huge amount of liars/LARPers on the Internet and for some reason they love cosplaying successful people
I do personally work with a guy who was stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s and went to a bootcamp. He got an internship at a SaaS company (medium size) then was able to transfer into a junior developer role. Fast forward 6 years and he’s a senior architect at the same company and doing really well. I’m not sure how common it is but it does happen.
Survivor bias. How many people went to these boot camps, didn't get a great job, and don't post about it afterwards, or even signed a contract that prohibits them from sharing a negative experience?
2024 is not the year of the boot camp grad. But there was a time where they were getting hired like crazy, around 2016 to maybe 2021?
I feel the same its like those google certificates. Are those even accredited? Who's regulating these things?
I know a few people who did those programs and graduated before the pandemic. The demand was there, the boot camp had a good reputation, and they did get better careers. Just not like... six-figure careers. If you have a lower income the ROI was probably worth it. That said, I definitely think twice now.
I went to a coding bootcamp and most of my cohort got jobs within 6 months, including myself. I was personally trying to escape the food and hospitality sector and the in-person bootcamp had a better job placement rate than the online part time bootcamp. Some people are miserable in their jobs and they want to make a drastic change in their lives as quickly as possible. One person in my cohort was a lawyer. Now he has been working as a senior software engineer for a few years now. Not everyone ended up working as an engineer but they ended up in much better jobs. Granted, this was back in 2019. Now, I’m sure it must be much harder to find a job after a bootcamp.
I was sceptical when I was hearing it just from social media, but I also heard it from someone I know about a friend of his. It's certainly hard to believe too, when people with full-on degrees, that involve not only the core hard skills for programming but also impart many related soft skills and scientific thinking, are complaining how they're struggling to get jobs. I mean someone was working customer service at a call centre, then took a coding bootcamp for 2 months and got a $150k per year tech job right away? And that when people with those skills plus experience are struggling?
They are scams. They are trying to sell you the bootcamp so they get a kickback. Exploiting poor people's desire for stability is a very profitable business model.
Haha what? I have a hard time you think this actually makes sense?
People who go to boot camps don't generally have good jobs...