Hey, author of the article here. I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody's got any.
I told him that moment that there was no way those statistics were honest, at the very least they were surely either maintaining ludicrous acceptance standards (only accepting experienced developers who already had hiring potential) or were using loose interpretations of the words "employment" and "salary" where a job was a gig and perks got attributed dollar sign values etc.
I did not go the bootcamp route and to this day maintain the same opinion, the value of bootcamps is dubious at best and a cash grab similar to for-profit education in the United States at worst.
And finally I'm extremely cynical of "that one success story that proves x was a good idea and you should do it too". Although I found your article very thoughtful, I can't help but draw connections between "That one new dieting trick that helped Larry lose 20 lbs in six weeks!", and "That coding boot camp that directly led me to make more then my doctor friend".
Any thoughts on my skepticism, given that you've actually done one? Again thoughtful article, it makes me feel bad for shooting down bootcamps.
[1]: http://www.skilledup.com/articles/bootcamps-san-francisco
Sometimes a little guidance and networking enables an individual to excel where they might otherwise find themselves lost. Boot camps can provide this stability, as long as the program isn't misguided.
In the end, it's down to the individual to make their career. I would never hire blind from a boot camp.
They aren't perfect. There are cheaper ways to learn. Instructor quality is uneven, and the tendency to hire their best students as instructors means that many instructors never see real-world applications.
But the cynicism about their intentions is misplaced. The people who run bootcamps are generally passionate about changing students' lives.
The students I know all said the bootcamp was a great educational experience.
Rather than pump up the employment numbers with fluff, our bootcamp was careful not to inflate numbers (for instance, not counting the people we hired internally towards the placement rate).
That's just my experience with one bootcamp, and I'm not saying it would have been right for you.
But that level of cynicism is totally off-base.
My motive with this article isn't to encourage more people to go to bootcamps, but help those who want to go do bootcamps do better research before they apply, as there are a lot of bad bootcamps out there.
Given the lack of web developers and demand for the skill, I don't doubt that some schools have 90 percent hiring rate.
I don't blame bootcamps for not getting everyone hired, but touting these ridiculous figures with hooks like "our avg dev grad makes $75k straight out of our program" seems to incentivize people into thinking there's a short path to solid pay, and not emphasizing how hard the work is. It just felt so much like a miniature for-profit program that I pulled my application and got a job after building some stuff on my own.
Subsequently it tanked the value of being an actual employee there.
In addition - what's a typical day, an "awesome" day, and a "dreadful" day in your job?
Awesome day: I get to start building a whole new feature on our product, features that'll make a difference for our customers.
No days are actually dreadful, but it's not very fun get assigned to bug fixing. This normally involves digging through old code I know nothing about (in various different files) and trying to understand the functionality and struggle my way through fixing it.
What I learned at FAC is well documented in this article: https://medium.com/learning-new-stuff/from-non-technical-to-...
Though the transition was a bit hard, as our product & codebase is much bigger than what I was used to. Plus there's so much setup and various tools being used in the codebase which I don't really know anything about.
Compared to my projects at Founders and Coders, where I pretty much knew most of the codebase of our projects.
As for the actual coding; my React & Javascript learning curve has been steep, but manageble. If you'll get from 0 to half professional, you're also able to go from half professional to professional.