Comment by aczerepinski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aczerepinski | Hacker News Reader

I went to a bootcamp, and I think people are way too fixated on the three month thing. You have to write code to get accepted to a decent school, so the students on day 1 are definitely not "straight out of Starbucks." For me it was 2-3 months of full-time study while I applied and got the school lined up (including pre-curriculum while I waited for my cohort to start).

The program itself was three months of intense 50-60 hour weeks. Then I continued studying full time for a month until I got a job. So by the time I showed up to work, I had put in ~7 months of full time coding.

Since then, I've still been going hard, as have most of my classmates. I've been working in two languages that I didn't learn at school, and using a third one in my side projects. Nine months removed from school, I still spend a lot of my free time studying whatever looks interesting to me at frontendmasters/egghead/pluralsight. I read a lot about programming, and listen to 5-10 podcasts each week on my commute. At some point the three months I spent at a bootcamp or the four years somebody else spent in a CS program are irrelevant. How passionate are you, and how hard are you willing to work?

As with all things, YMMV.

Keen to hear if you think you're an average example of your cohort or in the top x%.

I was definitely in the top x% for some values of x. :)

Kidding aside, I definitely wasn't the best or the worst in my class. The variance from best to worst was pretty large, but that's obviously going to be true for traditional CS degrees or anything else in life as well.

I recently finished out a stint at General Assembly's Web Development course in Atlanta. I'm definitely not an average example of my cohort, though I would like to say that prior experience I brought in really drove up the "average" for many of my peers.

Of a class size of 17 people, many of us had jobs lined up before we finished while several were / are still taking time to "get ready"; There was only one who sort of remained clueless during the cohort, but in spite of that they have worked very hard to keep up in class.

The coding required to get into GA was minimal, and the interview beforehand was not very difficult-- the person I mentioned who was generally clueless actually blew through the admissions process (better than I did, in fact).

I'm not sure where it's appropriate to set that barrier to entry, especially given that most of the early material caters to someone with very limited knowledge-- it would have been interesting to see a course targeted at someone who already has a foundation in basic web technologies.

Living in Atlanta, I've had the opportunity to speak with grads of many other bootcamps both in Atlanta and on the West coast. The biggest difference I really notice is between people who were able/willing to work those 60/70 hour weeks to gain as much as possible and those who couldn't/wouldn't.

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