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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

That's the point -- I didn't. I just needed it to convince someone to give me a chance. Employers would assume someone still in college for CS can program, and so look there. They don't automatically make that assumption for some rando with a different degree.

To be sure, there were also probably some job-searching techniques that would have worked, but they're also hard to learn from reading pointers online if you don't automatically have the skill.

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This was my experience exactly. Aside from helping me pick up a few concepts more quickly than I would have otherwise, I did it purely to get my foot in the door for interviews. It also was a good excuse to just focus on my portfolio for several weeks whereas if I had held a full-time job during this time, it would have easily taken me 4x as long.

It's a super expensive and wasteful way to do this, but I was optimizing for my time.

Did you actually try to interview before the bootcamp though? (Ideally after building a few portfolio projects.)

I ask because I had no trouble getting jobs and freelance work without a degree or bootcamp.

In fact, a bootcamp is usually a strong negative signal for me. I'd much rather hire a self-taught developer than a bootcamper.

I can say with some conviction that I just did not have the self-confidence to be able to do this and pull it off in an interview without going through the bootcamp and (more importantly) meeting several employed junior developers who were significantly behind me in skillset and professional development. I was completely self-taught and had 25 years of programming-as-a-hobby experience behind me going in.

My problem was basically a lack of network and real understanding of my competition in the field and the bootcamp solved that.

I could have saved a ton of money had I quit my bootcamp as soon as I realized this, but I'm still okay with how things turned out.

that works both ways; you hire self taught because you are self taught, just like CS grads tend to prefer hiring other CS grads.

me, i have no preference when i interview a candidate... can you code? and can you solve complex problems? other then that i dont care about how you got your skills.

> you hire self taught because you are self taught, just like CS grads tend to prefer hiring other CS grads.

I like and hire plenty of CS grads as well. I also have a CS degree. It's just bootcamp grads that I steer clear of.

You seem arbitrarily biased against something you think is too "hipster".

In my experience any numerate degree is as good as CS for securing an interview. Mech Eng grad myself.

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