The Joys and Challenges of Hiring Developer Bootcamp Grads
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It's been a great experience! The developer I hired is moving on because he found a better paying position (as a coder). I view this as a success and I'm happy for him. It took him 8 months to get to this point and I'm sad to see him go.
Things I learned:
- They come in excited but they have so much self-doubt that needs to be tamped down.
- Pair programming with everyone on the team is a must. Even the neckbeard in the corner that hates chit-chat needs to help out. Why? The BG needs to learn it's okay to talk to anyone about problems.
- I had to be on the prowl for condescending talk when the BG asked questions. It needs to feel like a safe environment to ask questions without being ridiculed.
- I noticed a huge jump in productivity when I had the BG design an onboarding presentation for new employees. Basically a "this is how our applications work here" Powerpoint. He loved working on it and it forced him to learn more about all the moving parts.
TL;DR In my experience BGs are great. They need plenty of room to fail and grow, but it's equally important that the whole team plays a role in their growth.
My experience has actually differed slightly from this post, in that many of the bootcamp grads whom we've hired have actually had excellent project management skills, especially coming from IT or PM roles in tech or tech-related industries. The main challenges that I see are around depth of experience - most bootcamps optimize very heavily for building CRUD apps with a bit of frontend sugar on top, so you need to select really carefully along whatever metrics for potential you find valuable. YMWV though.
Specific plug: despite interviewing candidates from many different bootcamps, one bootcamp in particular, App Academy, has consistently stood out. As of when I last checked, App Academy was the only bootcamp to use a conditional payment system, where tuition is contingent upon finding a fulltime software development job. This aligns incentives well - App Academy is encouraged to maximize training and applicant quality - and we've found their alumni to be very solid. I don't have a horse in this race but they turn out very professional and talented graduates.
I am a bootcamp student and from my perspective, you really nailed the points on the Challenges of Hiring Bootcamp Graduates. I worry, however, that many companies will not have the resources or the patience to provide the kind of fostering environment described here. There is perception that the junior developer talent pool is being watered down by sheer number of bootcamp grads and many of them just do not measure up to classically trained CS students often competing for the same jobs. I recently attended a career track hosted by my own bootcamp and the coaches specifically instructed the students to omit the word "bootcamp" from their resume.
I personally believe that bootcamps can be a tremendous opportunity for motivated (and disciplined) students seeking a condensed and immersive learning environment; it's possibly one of the fastest way to learn a new trade. My experience so far is that meeting the boot camp requirements alone is probably not enough to make me competitive and I need to supplement the learning with additional readings, meet-ups (as suggested by my mentor), and further coding practices. Bootcamp curriculum should be the bare minimum.
I did several online "bootcamps" (free code camp, Udacity, and some Udemy/Coursera courses), since I felt like no single curriculum really satisfied what I felt to be necessary.
I just like learning, so I made sure that I practiced every day.
And now I have a job working at a small start-up (4 employees including me). The last dev they hired was from Free Code Camp as well, and he's doing very well. The CEO of the company mentored him, and now the dev is mentoring me.
The interview process is something I think a lot of other companies could learn from--no brainteasers, no tricks, just coding. They asked me to open up a project I worked on during the bootcamp, describe it, then add a new feature. They stepped out while I was working so that I wouldn't be nervous about making a mistake. The CEO himself applauded my use of Google when I ran into road blocks.
It took about an hour total, and during that time, they were able to determine if I was fit for the position.
So I think the viability of hiring bootcamp grads stems from how good the interview process is--if it's terrible, you may be disappointed in your new hire.
On the other hand, it does concern me that this is one step closer in the race to the bottom for developers.
It won't be long before being a developer is just another poorly paying job.
But in both cases, the results were brutal to the companies that jumped in thoughtlessly. I've no doubt the same is true here again. Over the long term I expect we'll see some big changes in career education but I don't think established professionals are going to be overrun with high school dropouts anytime soon.
Also, Thoughtbot has a somewhat good guide to running an apprenticeship: https://github.com/thoughtbot/apprenticeship
It could be adapted without much work to hiring bootcamp grads.
I have no way to wade through the high volume of identical resumes coming out of these programs. Every Hack Reactor grad has the exact same thing as every other grad. Its very difficult to weed out anyone in this scenario without setting up a call with every grad that applies which isn't a scalable model for hiring junior engineers. The single biggest reason I've not given enough BG's a shot is the level of effort needed of finding a good one or one who's the right fit.
Note some programs have started setting up mechanisms to interact with a bunch of grads in a group (we've done this) and this has been a decent way of doing this.
Depends on the choice and depth of curriculum, length of time, the student and the instructor.
Having said that no bootcamp or hacker school can give you 20 years of experience writing and maintaining software. That's really the disavdantage. But natural talent in rare individuals can replace that with intuition, although I'm not sure how people like that do over the long range. I don't know ... But it's wise not to judge people in superficial manner without seeing what they can do.
Neither does a Masters from M.I.T. or Stanford. I only say this because I'm not exactly sure what your point is. What I hear you saying is, "it takes about two decades to code like you've been doing it for 20 years."
I can't see how that makes it a disadvantage. The only thing that gives 20 years of experience writing and maintaining software is... well, 20 years doing just that. No one is claiming that a university, bootcamp, or hacker school can give you that.