Comment by carc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carc | Hacker News Reader

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Funny, I have almost the exact same experience. Quit my job as a CPA at a big firm to go to a coding bootcamp, made myself put in the same number of hours coding/learning as I was working my old job (70+/week) until I found a job... got a job at a startup first and 2 years later got a job at one of the "big 4".

I also don't list my bootcamp anywhere mostly because I'm worried about assumptions people will make about my technical knowledge if I do (rather than judging based on my actual performance). I'm also hesitant to recommend it to others because while I have to say it was 100% worth it to me... I've tried to help too many people learn to code who just failed because they weren't willing to fight past the frustrations of the learning curve (which is very steep at first). I just assume now that most people don't have what it takes (and that is NOT intelligence or cleverness... it's mostly just discipline/work ethic/intellectual curiosity).. so I'll never really encourage people to follow my path.

> Funny, I have almost the exact same experience.

I left the world of government contracting to attend a code school on the east coast. Now, I'm on my second year of my second startup, and truthfully, I've learned more here than at code school. Not because the school was terrible, but due to the dynamic environment.

When I left code school, there's zero percent chance I could have successfully deployed one of my applications containerized, secured, scalable, etc. However, after working here, I either (a) know how to do step X or (b) can successfully read documentation and use context clues (or ask peers for help).

To your point, I have trouble recommending code school to friends and family. It's not that I don't value what I learned, but I can't compare my intelligence/persistence/etc to theirs, I wouldn't know how. I haven't worked for one of the "big 4" although I did interview with Google and am in consistent contact with Amazon.

I've always wanted to get together with other code school graduates and develop material for graduates focusing on different areas in more depth, specifically I believe more information on databases, production environments, and open source would be highly beneficial to alumni. After code school, there's a lot of knowing about some topic, but it's so much more important to understand that topic, IMHO.

I also transitioned from a professional services career to programming through a bootcamp. When others ask me for advice, I only recommend the bootcamps that have a rigorous precourse/admissions process. And even then, I tell them it's a really difficult process to graduate and find a job afterwards, and that they better be ready for six to nine months of hard work and financial uncertainty.

In the end, it was totally worth it for me and I couldn't be happier!

It's worth noting that in the military, bootcamp is where you go to get prepared to learn your job; you usually have a separate school afterwards. The specialties that do train at only one station are much longer.

I'd say boot camps are a way to get yourself oriented, so that you can seriously pursue your education, not an end in themselves.

Ya same feeling. I wasn't sure if I got that across in my original post but you summed up what I was trying to say.

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