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100% this! The tech world is due an implosion if this continues, you cant have people with ZERO programming experience beyond a guided 12 week bootcamp being offered anything more than a Junior role??

This single sentence terrifies me:

"At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education."

$120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I hope he lasts 2 weeks

This is why you need good screening processes.

I on the other hand got taught to be able humble and make compromises especially when still being a junior. Looking back at my early days, when I wanted a position that I knew would change my career, I purposely asked for a lower salary in the beginning to compensate for my junior level or other skills (language for example when I moved into a country where I wasn't fluent yet), with a clause to bump it up to the level of other people when I can prove that I am on par with them and my lacking skills aren't a problem. It also showed the company that I was serious about wanting to work with them.

But man, 120k for 12 weeks of experience is insane. Sign me up for whatever bootcamp that was

Tip: You need a bootcamp in negotiations and selling yourself. Not in programming ;)

Good thing that's half (~6 weeks) of the curriculum at Hack Reactor!

(citation needed)

120k for 12 weeks of experience is insane. Sign me up for whatever bootcamp that was

It wasn't the bootcamp -- it was the self-study, and more to the point, his ability to reverse-engineer the interview process which got him that offer.

Which probably says a lot more about the current gold standard, "let's see how many hoops you can jump through" interview process than about the merits of bootcamps, per se.

They never said they should get anything more than a junior role. There was no disagreeing with the label.

It's a hack to get around HR auto-filters. The hiring people can then make further assessment.

What world do you live in where you'd not have more than one filter on hiring?

The alarms here are astounding given the other hoops that are likely to exist passed the first marker.

Pretty shocking the response to some advice that is really only "step 1" to getting the job anyway

At HackCorp. We're trained to ask about the education, listen and hear carefully the narratives from the candidates.

Well. Gotta do that when people comes with a degree from the MIT, a degree from their local university and at the same time an internship at Facebook. All in the same year, from the 3 different cities.

Maybe the silver lining will be a switch to a better process for hiring people that doesn't rely on two hours of quizzes or a pressure cooker hazing ritual.

Sure I agree that offering more than a junior role is unreasonable, but all the HR grads I know moved into senior roles very quickly after being hired. I went to Hack Reactor, got a job, and was considered a senior dev by my manager after one and a half years. I'm in my second year now and I'm a team lead. We have a few other HR grads on our team and they are excellent developers that other engineers look up to for advice. Sure, not everyone is like that, but there are plenty of people like this who I know personally.

Now what about CS grads? We've interviewed plenty of people with master's degrees in CS who don't know how to code a binary tree because "you know, I wasn't that into the data structures course..." Or if they have lots of experience they demand more money than the manager makes because, apparently, every company has to compete with Google salaries.

I remember my classmates and I staying after class because there was a guest speaker coming in to talk about quad-trees and b-trees and we were SO EXCITED to learn about these things. We've taken more candidates from Hack Reactor than not because they show this passion for their work that I have personally rarely seen in CS majors. They generally require a few months of ramp-up time, but I think it's worth it, and since they are usually coming over from a different field they bring a lot to the table from their other experiences.

I know companies which hire junior developers for $120k+, so that by itself is not the problem so much as the notion that a bootcamp graduate is not a junior developer.

On the other hand, I do advise the bootcamp graduates I know to drop it from their resume after their first dev job. Programmer with 1 dev job is a much better profile than bootcamp graduate with 1 dev job.

$120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I hope he lasts 2 weeks

The reality, I find, is that (if properly motivated, and possessed of sufficient native intellect) once you get your foot in the door, you can learn the ins and outs of any programming role pretty darn quickly. OK, maybe you won't be able to design a compiler or anything like that. But for most of the standard web development $foobar stuff... you can pretty much pick it up as you go.

The people to be wary for (and weed out) are the outright imposters (those who blatantly lie about their capabilities), or the chronic attitude cases (which includes a great many experienced and ostensibly highly qualified people).

Not the inexperienced.

The article does read a lot like the "Psychopath's Guide To Career-Hunting". Honestly, the tone reminded me a lot of some of my undergrad peers who were pursuing investment banking jobs, which I suppose makes sense considering his about section.

That all said, if your goal is to get the highest paying job possible, this seems like useful advice.

This a 100%! While I was reading his guide, I couldn't shake off that jazz track from "The Talented Mr Ripley"...

This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT-fOr29OfA

The article does read a lot like the "Psychopath's Guide To Career-Hunting".

Yup. Which is exactly the mindset that the current interview culture most strongly rewards.

Hey, there. I also went to Hack Reactor. It's not a joke.My first job out of the program was Groupon and the algorithm-heavy style of the interview wasn't a problem. The hardest thing for me while there was CSS (because they supported some old versions of IE).

I'm not saying that I was stronger on the data structures and algorithm side than top students who spent four years staying up coding during their nights and weekends but I was definitely ahead of most fresh grads I encountered. I don't know how that is, given what a typical CS curriculum (at least what I saw later on Open Courseware) but my guess is that a lot of CS grads don't actually practice what they're learning enough so that it sticks.

One thing it appears a lot of people on this thread are missing is that it's not a school for complete beginners. There are prep courses for people looking to enter the school. I had been programming simple things for my blog for years before I went. About 1/3 of my class already had CS degrees before entering.

The other factor is that intensity really does matter. The reason focusing on duration of 12 (well actually 13 weeks) is wrong isn't because nearly 1000 hours of instruction and work are packed into those 12 weeks. It's even more wrong because working at double the intensity leads to more than double the progress. I saw the same phenomenon with language learners when I was living in Taiwan. It's very common for someone who did a full four year degree in Chinese to speak poorly compared to someone else who did a much shorter, more intensive study at a top immersion program like ICLP.

Anyway, the degree of animosity here is a little surprising, even considering the cognitive biases that might come from having spent a fortune on a university credential. Large numbers of my peers from Hack Reactor went on to do well at YC companies and/or large companies like Google. One I remember well did both (was an early engineering hire at a YC company that got acquired by Google). I still consider the tuition I paid to HR one of the better investments I've ever made (and one that I easily recouped within the year.

Thank you Marcus and thank you, Shawn. You guys were fantastic instructors and project mentors!

Comparing a bootcamp to random schools in developing countries is laughable. It's well known that CS degrees from most of these schools are worthless.

Having been to school and coded for most of my life, there is no possible way you know as much after bootcamp as someone from a decent 4 year school. It was probably over 1000 hours of just studying alone. Code camps are comparable to an associate's degree or certificate.

>"Comparing a bootcamp to random schools in developing countries is laughable."

First of all, your characterization of Taiwan is both laughable and offensive. It's a developed democracy of 23 million, a stronger economy than many EU countries and a better transit/medical/internet infrastructure than I've seen in any western country. In terms of educational attainment, Taiwan is world-class.

Secondly, it looks like you misread my comment. I wasn't even comparing a boot camp to "random schools in developing countries". I was comparing one of the very best programming immersion schools, Hack Reactor, with one of the very best language immersion schools for Mandarin, ICLP (which was started by Stanford FWIW).

>"Code camps are comparable to an associate's degree or certificate."

No. It's not about credentialing. It's about what you can do. I got no credential whatsoever and I wouldn't have respected it if I had. Nobody had ever graduated when I started and when I finished, my prospective employers had never heard of the school. It's about the education, not some stamp of approval.

At least in my own opinion, there is no evidence whatsoever that our centuries-old model of higher education (or our k-12 educational system based on Prussia's model) are the pinnacle of efficiency. There are many ways to learn more quickly, ranging from working through OCW on one's own to getting help from experts while studying in an immersive school.

I'd argue that he's not Junior.

He needs an entry-level position.

By that, I mean that I make a distinction between a Junior dev (who may have a degree and professional experiences through a work and/or internships) and an entry-level/breaking-into-programming dev who's got nothing (no theory, no practise, zero real world experience).

Good point.

One of the odd things about our industry is that we don't distinguish between technicians (who build and maintain things) and engineers (who analyze and design things). We tend to call everyone engineers, and muddy the distinction between building and analysis.

If we did make the distinction, the place of these bootcamps would be much clearer. They train technicians. Specifically software technicians. Their graduates can build things and fix problems using current technology, but they don't have the deep theory and sophisticated understanding of the field that lets them solve really hard problems (at least until they considerably augment their skills.)

The job that most closely fits those is usually called Software Engineer, as distinguished from Senior Software Engineer or Staff Software Engineer. Did the writer really land a job at the Senior level on the strength of ten weeks of instruction and three months of personal study? Sounds weird.

The only situation where I'd hire someone like that into such a position is if they brought a LOT more to the table, meaning probably domain experience. If someone spent ten years as a petroleum engineer and I am hiring a software developer to work on software for the oil industry, then yes, I might be willing to hire them at Senior despite a dodgy background in software.

If there's one thing I've learnt, it's that "years of SW experience" is a downright shitty indicator of what someone is capable of. Facebook 1.0 was built by a bunch of Harvard undergrads with 0 degrees and 0 work experience. I'd take someone with 90th percentile IQ, a history of delivering professional results regardless of industry, and a drive to become a great SW engineer, over an average engineer with 10 years of SW-experience. Any day of the week.

Good luck with that. The next Google will be yours - that's for sure.

By the way: Mark Zuckerberg was a huge geek in is earliest years already and in no way he had "0 work experience". Have a read through the "Early Years" in his Wikipedia article and you may find http://www.letsintern.com/blog/4-thing-mark-zuckerberg/ interesting. He didn't start Facebook with 0 experience right after taking a 12 weeks seminar because he wanted to "change career".

Are you serious? We live in a capitalism. With all the things you see happening in the tech world you cannot stand some guy using the system to get a six figures salary. Or are you angry because you are one of those programmers who took years to progress through small promotions and cannot stand this whole world of bootcamp-grads making six-figures after a 3-months training.

I am not angry at all - what I really am is astonished.

> ...cannot stand this whole world of bootcamp-grads making six-figures after a 3-months training.

Hmm... Why not just get rid of all these annoying CS courses at University? I mean - who needs them anyway if you could just spend 3 months to reach such a badass salary?

What I am saying is the industry will behave with demand and supply. You can only expect bootcamps to get more and more popular with increasing software engineering jobs and increasing number of people changing careers. Bootcamps happen to be a feasible choice for people struggling to learn on their own and looking to find mentorship and structured learning environment without spending years and large tuition fees. However, if you are dissatisfied with the bootcamp education then vilifying someone who is just trying to help other people like him is not the right way.

Such angry rhetoric toward statements that are supposedly so "obvious".

The article is about hacking the system for networking purposes. He's not saying HR is "wrong" to apply those labels. Just that code camp graduates should watch out for that.

Given that this site has used up many cycles discussing how HR filtering sucks, these hacks are interesting to consider.

As for your specific concerns, calm down. You're giving off a superior tone. There is a lot of shit software out there. A lot of it coming from big companies. This notion that it's only for experts of a given status is elitist.

By your admission you're a smart coder so you have little to be upset about. Everyone works with people that aren't as good. My managers an idiot. Yadda yadda.

I'd work on my propensity for flying off the handle at trivial snippets taken out of context from larger stories. I'd rather work to help bring up a green coder with promise than alongside an elitist asshole

They gave him shitty work that nobody wanted to do, and you are surprised that guy had no motivation for do it?

> work that wasn't too complicated

"complicated" is subjective. There are many talents and somebody could be better in for example JavaScript (and not HTML/CSS).

Sometimes its about demonstrated skill. We all know about the FizzBuzz debacle - how most folks we interview can't write a simple loop and test? Well that guy was actually educated and demonstrated skills way up the bell curve.

There is "some kind of joke" going on, but it isn't that guy. Its the rest of the industry that turns out script-mungers and form-fillers and calls them 'software engineers'.