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Former high salaried person who jumped ship for a coding bootcamp here with some quick thoughts.

1) The negative image of coding bootcamps on HN is worse than in industry, not the other way. There are plenty of coders who came from bootcamps now working in industry. I agree that you aren't as well regarded a CS major, but it is definitely better than self taught.

2) The things you listed he should do are pretty much the things you'll do at a coding bootcamp. If you can stay on a good course and keep yourself motivated, it is completely reasonable to think you can be in a similar position in the same time frame (with an extra 10-20k in the bank.) However, you should be very honest about those two qualifications. It's quite easy to get side tracked/not do as much work as you think you will.

3) You're right on about the new tech. The reason that we think it's cool is because it's the thing that everyone is talking about on HN. The reason there is so much traction with all of these topics is because there aren't a lot of applications for them and a lot of people are playing with them. I'd expect an entry level coding job to be writing REST APIs and front ends for CRUD apps. You might be pleasantly surprised, but I wouldn't quit your job expecting otherwise.

a) The thing that isn't frequently talked about wrt bootcamps is that you don't get a job after the bootcamp. I'd expect 30-60 days of applying and interviewing before you get the job, just FYI.

The best software engineers at my company are self-taught.

That is entirely reasonable. I wasn't commenting on how good the programmers are, just how well those specific things are perceived on resumes with no prior coding-as-a-professional experience.

IMHO, if you are self-taught, have been able to build a portfolio of projects showing your skills with several of the latest technologies, your profile is much more valuable than if you have been to a bootcamp.

Going to a bootcamp shows you are just another good student, who can sit in a classroom for 10hours straight in a day, during 12 weeks, and get good marks.

When you are self-taught, you show that beyond your new technical skills, you have the self-discipline, and drive to learn and practice new skills from scratch, without someone holding your hand. This must be a skill that any employer would value highly. Employers would want their SW engineers to be autonomous, and have the self-discipline to initiate to keep learning, because with SW, you need to constantly learn if you want your skills to remain up to date. Teaching yourself SW is hard. If you manage to do that, the proof is there that you are passionate about what you're doing, because I don't believe it is possible to teach yourself SW without being passionate about it.

There are heaps of resources online nowadays to teach yourself SW engineering.

It's clear you have very little knowledge of what happens at bootcamps. I would think of them more as a place where they give you a path to accomplish self study tasks than a classroom. Also, I don't know about other bootcamps, but I came out with a reasonable portfolio. That's a big part of the program.

The portfolio is usually not worth much. Each project has ~4 people working on it, so it's hard to tell how much credit / blame you should get for it. And since you were at a bootcamp motivated to see you finish, how much hand holding did you get from them? Another problem is that I've seen the same, probably 10 projects implemented dozens of times each at this point. They are all almost exactly the same, with very little difference in implementations. When I try to dive in and ask about implementation questions or how they would change it to support a particular feature or why they think this glaringly obvious bug exists, most of the graduates can't answer my questions, often because "oh, I didn't work on that part".

Don't get me wrong, I've met some brilliant and capable bootcampers, who I suspect would've done just as well or better outside of a bootcamp, but my point is that having a bootcamp portfolio isn't much of a signal.

This is more or less false. Most bootcamps don't give 'marks'. Most of them are also not lecture based. Instead, they are likely to assess through assignments and/or projects. They help you progressively build towards a solid base of knowledge while you work on building out a portfolio. I would say the accelerated time span is due to curated resources and the immediate feedback loop. Concepts that normally take a week or longer to grok from searching on the web, can be reduced to a few hours at a bootcamp.

You also seem to think attending a bootcamp automatically precludes a student from being able to provide themselves with continuing education.

There are different motivations for people entering a bootcamp and some are looking for that paycheck. But again, that does not necessarily make them a bad SW engineer. And if those people would like to keep their salary, they will learn soon enough that they will not get very far with stale knowledge.

At good bootcamps, most people are already extremely self-taught. I had basically mastered jQuery, Python, and SQL when I went to a bootcamp (Hackreactor) to get better with algorithms and the latest frameworks.

It's really about how much money you have. If you've got significant savings like I did, it makes sense to pay as time becomes more valuable than money in your life plan.

Bootcamp != self taught.

> you don't get a job after the bootcamp. I'd expect 30-60 days of applying and interviewing before you get the job, just FYI.

It completely boggles my mind that someone can just go and do a "bootcamp" and then land a job two or three months later. Is there really that much demand for coders out there? Such a person could easily do more harm than good.

I suspect alot end up in intern or QA roles or and some less than reputable company looking good for warm bodies.

A company I know of (in a not-so-hot city in the U.S.) was so desperate for coders that they hired a Physics student with basically no coding experience.

He was a disaster, they'd have been much better off with a bootcamp graduate.

Management is becoming more, not less, important.

Good management is the number one competitive advantage an enterprise has.

Management essentially means running the corporate machine and directing the efforts of its tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. If poorly directed, effort is wasted.

As the world is seemingly centralizing into a handful of large corporations, good management is more important than ever because the power of organizations is so much larger.

This. And if you do end up programming and you demonstrate any experience managing projects, you will end up in that role again, just with less respect for it and less money.

Mgmt > Mgmt + Dev ?

yes. there is a mental cost of doing management on development, and if you try to keep both, you'll consume yourself. and managers do get more respect, it's probably universal.

As a mostly technical consulting resource, I agree so much. There is a lot that needs to be held in my brain at once, and every release of the software just adds to that. Every new client adds to that. Every new technology adds to that.

I seriously struggle to keep the non-tech side of the house in order by myself. I can handle client interactions and emails and task tracking and mentoring new hires and performing my technical job. I'm even on a project supporting an install of our product that's 8 versions out of date, that was released in 2013. That's pulling in skills I haven't used in over two years, but I can still remember what commands worked on that release and what commands were introduced in later versions.

What I don't have time or mental capacity for is making sure we're within budget, both in terms of hours and in terms of dollars. I don't have capacity to sit on every advisory board meeting, of which there are six hours worth internally every week, and at least two hours per client per week (I have 10 clients). I don't have capacity to put my project on hold while I track down an updated billing code.

I thank god every day for project managers. Some people complain, but I love them. Sure, they take a bit of my time and they don't always understand what I do, but they save me even more time and I sure as hell don't always understand what they do.

As an aside, I think the most annoying thing in the world is when a PM thinks they're a technical resource and starts telling me how to do my job. "Hey can you log into Client X's system and run the command 'xyz' with the flags '-yVx' and send me the output?" Uh, no... I know what you're looking for and the better way to get it is directly from the database. Don't worry, I know the command. Stop using Stack Overflow and do your job.

So, what's good management ?

A manager who has strong technical knowledge and experience ?

I have seen many managers who know bugger all about the technical stuff, and have zero interest in technical stuff anyway. They are absolutely not inspiring, and are poor leaders. For some reason I don't understand well, these type of managers stay.

Good managers help you navigate the weeds and surface what works. Bad managers claim to know it all and spend their time trying to do your job to set an example vs doing their job of actually managing

I don't believe anyone who says management is becoming less important. If anything it's good management that is becoming vastly more important. Like software engineering, software engineering management is evolving.

> the best way to ensure you're working with cool technologies is to start your own company.

And, I would add, experience as a PM is very valuable when starting your own company. Project management and coordination are the sorts of skills that many people starting companies do not have and do not realize they need.

This! But for slightly different reasons.

Yes, you would probably find value in picking up coding skills. Foundational rather that practical as you're unlikely to deliver more value than someone who has dedicated 100% of their training and work experience to practical coding.

The new coding knowledge isn't going to be where you deliver value though. Most of the new value you create in yourself will be as "an experienced PM who also knows how to code", so start thinking about what kinds of opportunities might be a good fit for that future you. There will always be fewer people with your synergy of skills than there will be with experience in each individual skill domain you posses.

Deep learning is already being monetized, e.g., at Google.