Comment by biznerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by biznerd | Hacker News Reader

I did one.

I HIGHLY suggest vetting the placement "statistics". For me, I just read 95% get a job, went to the open house, listened to a couple "rah rah" testimonials and did it. It was a big mistake.

A friend of mine from the class estimated that only 30-40% of us got actual dev jobs. The rest are either in customer service at a tech company, sales or testing (keep in mind this is people who dropped $15k+ to do the bootcamp), back in our old industry or in the case of one, working at Trader Joes.

I was under the impression that 95% get good jobs. If I had known only 30-40% did I would have never done the boot camp.

How did they manipulate the numbers? I never dug deep but here are my thoughts:

* to qualify as "actively looking" you can't have a job to support yourself. That's right you're supposed to not have an income while job searching, kinda hard when it can take more than six months. If you get a job, you get dropped from career support and your statistic gets placed in the "not actively looking" category

* "industry related jobs". If you go to a dev boot camp, you want to be a dev. You're paying $15k to do it. A customer service job at a tech startup is better than nothing but you don't have to pay $15k to do it. Likewise for sales.

As a positive point, all the females in our cohort got dev jobs, including the only one who actually failed the class. Startups are pretty aware of the gender discrepancy and actively looking to hire those with double x chromosomes. Not complaining about affirmative action, just wanted to give you as full picture as possible

As a dev in Denver who routinely interviews candidates from some of the nations top bootcamps, i can corroborate these claims. Many graduates from these programs are hired by the bootcamp itself, as tutors or web devs. Rarely are these hires profitable to the school, instead the are done strictly to maintain the placement statistics that are paramount to their continued enrollment.

Uh... I don't normally do this, but any chance you guys are hiring? I'm in Denver looking for an entry level position. I can do machine learning

Constructive criticism since you had the courage to publicly inquire: was there something about the commenter that made you feel machine learning was a targeted approach? I can't immediately see anything particular about the commenter or the company (in profile), so my first impression was that you were using a buzz word.

Also I recognize that a forum is really not conducive to this, but perhaps you could quantify what you mean by "do machine learning"...what sort of business deliverable would you contribute?

Overall though, you might want to just aggressively hunt for the person's email and pitch in private :)

I brought it up since his profile pointed me towards a dating site, which is prime ground for predictive analytics. Also, the website didn't have a "careers" section that I could readily find.

Hm, fair enough, that does seem to follow. Good luck :)

Thanks!

You seem like a really intelligent and capable person. I wish you luck in your search for a dev job!

We actually are hiring, but i have no idea how to reach you. If you go to my blog[1], my email is at the bottom of every post.

1: https://blog.benroux.me

Perfect!

Things have changed over the last few years and what was true in 2013 is no longer true.

In 2013, the few bootcamps that existed and the fewer cohorts they each had were much more selective and they were producing in total many fewer candidates. The result is that bootcamp grads were very high quality (albeit very junior) and they got snapped up quickly.

In 2017 there are bootcampers everywhere flooding the market.

So I'm not sure they are outright lying but maybe they are using data to market their programs that is out of date.

On the flipside, there are more total people who want to do bootcamps. So there's definitely more noise, but also more good signal as well

The first two CS courses at my top university are enough to be qualified for your entry-level junior engineer: the intro course "Programming with Java" (recently changed to Python now), followed by the second course, Data "Structures & Algorithms."

All the bootcamp would have to do is be similarly very selective and do the same exact curriculum, and the people who "survive" these two weed-out courses (you needed to score higher than half your classmates in each course to receive a passing grade, otherwise you had to keep re-taking it) would be the ones able to get hired with nearly 100% placement.

> you needed to score higher than half your classmates in each course to receive a passing grade

Was this actually the rule dictated by the professor/curriculum or just a rule of thumb?

This is common in highly ranked programs in the United States. We had the exact same system in my accounting program which was ranked 11th in the nation at the time.

The % of people who get jobs doesn't matter. Those people are not you. Maybe the 70% decided they didn't like coding after all. Or maybe the course was crap. Who knows?

You have a good point but I have to disagree with you when you say that "The % of people who get jobs doesn't matter." It does matter. I'm sure you'd agree if it were 1% and not 70%.

Nope still doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if you aren't looking for a career in that field.

If you are choosing between fields or are looking to increase your income, how many people got good-paying, permanent jobs is highly important. It is also important if you are spending money that might be better invested in something else (such as a reliable vehicle or a down payment on a house if you live in the Midwest).

If you simply want the learning, the money isn't an issue ,and/or you don't actually care to land a job with the knowledge, then the job thing isn't an issue. All depends on perspective and desired outcomes.

Then you need to assess more deeply than % employed because you don't know how motivated they where. For example a ReactJS course could increase your chance of getting a job from 60 to 80% due to your motivation, but only 30% of that class got a job because most of them are just course hopping looking for a career change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com