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>Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No.

>Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No.

>Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really.

This perfectly describes my experience with LaunchCode in the midwest.

Yeah, main difference though is that LaunchCode provides it education for free rather than charging $15k

Same experience here (first DBC cohort). I ended up not being able to make end to end Rails apps, which fortunately didn't matter since it gave enough of a springboard to get into the industry. But I also didn't feel it delivered on what I really needed it to, which was to provide help I can't find on my own and a steady stream of good job leads.

Never underestimate the benefit of being around motivated people.

I think most people hear "Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!" and think "get a job coding" which was pretty accurate in my experience (and those of my friends who attended a bootcamp).

Now, of course, being a "computer programmer" is way more complicated than that.

But I don't know a single person IRL who regretted doing a bootcamp (only know people who went to App Academy and DBC); they all still consider it a) a good investment and b) the reason they have their current jobs.

I don't really think DBC promised more than that. In fact, in my cohort they were all about "will code for food"; the idea being this was the first step and the next one was to find a place to continue learning.

I've had one friend who swore by Dev Boot Camp in Chicago and told me I should be a teacher. He got me in touch with a director in my city, but before I could come in for an in-personal interview, they wanted me to do this really basic web app (CD database with artists, albums, etc.)

If I hadn't been employed I probably would have done it. I was working full-time and then came home to do some more open source work. There was no money on the table for the problem ($200 ~ $400 would seem reasonable for a pre-interview project like this). I sent them an e-mail with 5 major tasks I was working on, all for open source projects or things I would open source. They could pick one, I'd finish it and I'd do a full presentation on it.

They said they had tried to do reviews based off Github pull requests in the past and that, no, I had to do the original problem they gave me. I didn't contact them back.

I really want to teach, but I was weary of these for-profit boot camp programs. They also talked about how they wanted teachers to push/promote the programs at events and such. I have another friend who went through a different boot-camp like program and told me she felt really rushed through it, but she didn't want to swear them off either.

It's cheaper to go to a state community college and get a 2-year programming degree in many places in the US. It will take longer, yes.

I know CS majors with masters degrees who've only written in C/Java and don't keep up with tech. I've know people without degrees at all who have learned BigO notation and learning algorithm development all on their own. You get out of any program what you put into it.

Wait, they didn't teach you data structures and algorithms?

They seriously stop at "hey deploy a CRUD app?"

That's rough. There's no way students are getting jobs with that in this environment. Maybe when they first started that was enough, but now the market is flooded with not-quite-competent junior devs.

They can and they do. Which is somewhat problematics. A lot of companies are trying to scale, and with the demand for software developers being so high (plus the push for diversity), bootcamp "grads" are a pretty popular target.

But companies rarely make the difference between a CS major (especially those with multiple internships or coops often spawning longer than the bootcamp on their own) and bootcamp graduates.

So they both start as SWE or Junior/Associate SWE. Often there's a drastic difference in ramp up and output, and people around them won't always know why (unless people stalk them on linkedin or ask).

That puts a ton of burden on teammates that may not be properly prepared to coach these people (they go through the same hiring process, same onboarding process, etc). Don't get me wrong, its a failing on the companies who hire people they are not prepared to handle, but they're often pressured to.

It's a really awkward situation.

> So they both start as SWE or Junior/Associate SWE

> That puts a ton of burden on teammates that may not be properly prepared to coach these people

You hit the nail on the head. Bootcamp grads will typically require more coaching than 4-year CS grads. Companies that don't realize this are setting themselves and their new hire(s) up for a painful experience.

In my opinion, fresh bootcamp grads are ready to be apprentice developers. Unfortunately, that's not really a role / distinction that any 21st century companies even recognize, probably because that also means recognizing the additional costs involved : apprentices require mentoring, and mentoring costs money. It's simply greedy thinking on the part of a hiring company to believe they can get a 4-year CS grad on the cheap & easy by going the bootcamp route. It's bad management not to account for the latter's steeper learning curve & onboarding requirements.

Ultimately there's no such thing as a free lunch. Even talented people can't magically leapfrog the learning curve by cramming out webapps for 3 months. There will be gaps in their skillset - gaps that are best bridged with hands-on guidance from a senior developer. This applies to all junior devs, obviously, but doubly so for bootcamp grads.

> gaps that are best bridged with hands-on guidance from a senior developer

Yup. Also, there are situations where that gap becomes problematic to fill. As a lot of bootcamp people get hired, you start getting in situations where everyone in the team is a bootcamp grad. Then they don't have someone with an actual CS background to compensate.

I only have an IT degree myself (which, while longer to get, for all practical purpose is just a longer bootcamp). That was fine: I learnt a lot on my own, and 15-20 years ago, everyone else on my team had a CS background. I got coached, i learnt, I went from there.

Fastforward today and people without CS backgrounds might not have someone who does anywhere near. You don't know what you don't know, and have no way to be guided in the right direction. That's bad news.

Huh. I went through devbootcamp 3 years ago and stay in touch with a fair amount of people who did bootcamps. Haven't really heard this one before. The anecdotes I've heard are actually the opposite direction; that the bootcamp grads hit the ground running because they know the framework and general toolset for web dev (plus are usually spending a huge amount of time outside of work leveling up) and the CS majors take longer to be productive.

Of course, as their careers go beyond "junior", the bootcamps grads need to do major lifting to catch up in other areas beyond basic web dev. But early on, I've only really heard good things.

Curious.

People from good universities do co-ops, internships, and side work. They know the frameworks already too. And then you have some who don't, but come from MIT or CMU and pick that stuff up faster than I can link to the tutorial (well, once they're done complaining its not Haskell anyway, lol)

Though it does remind me of a company I worked for that hired a lot of bootcamp peeps, and it was hailed as a giant success by management. Meanwhile the rest of the team was grumbling about having to do 2x the work as they had to pick up the slack.

(Now, obviously, I do know some people who went through bootcamps that do amazing. I also know some 100% self taught engineers who are now Principal engineers or similar at Google or Microsoft. The above is just what I've seen to be the common case). Teaching React or how to build an API controller to someone we just hired is never the bottleneck. Interns pick that up just fine, no matter where they come from.

I think the majority of it is sheer time. A bootcamp grad has generally been coding for three months. A CS grad has (ideally) been programming for four years.

Take a bootcamp grad after 3.5 years of work vs a fresh CS grad and it's (often) a no-brainer, up until you start running into the need for theoretical knowledge a CS grad has. I've never once heard a bootcamp talk about scaling or architecture in any real way.

To be fair, they introduced us to data structures and algorithms, but there was no time to get a strong understanding of them.

Most of the first 3 weeks of the class was focused on writing Ruby programs to do different sorts and searches, and to model and manipulate different objects (suduko boards, battleship boards, etc.).

I left with a good practical knowledge of working with arrays and hashes in Ruby and when I would prefer one structure over the other, but what I mostly learned was how to model data objects for a SQL database and set up a web app to manipulate those objects (and how to integrate w 3rd party APIs).

But if you asked me anything about a Linked List or a Trie or when it was better to use which one, I would not have given you a very satisfactory answer (still might not, about Tries at least...).

And, yeah, getting a job was tricky. Partly because I still had a lot to learn (still do), but also partly because there is a lot of knowledge that every computer science grad has learned backwards and forwards and then forgot about that most bootcamp grads have only barely been exposed to.

I attended a (London-based) bootcamp and all we really covered was developing CRUD apps with a decent-ish UI and API integration. On the one hand it did feel very superficial but then a lot of web development jobs don't require much more in terms of skill.

Everyone on the bootcamp had a list of things they'd have liked to cover as well but there simply isn't time for everything. When planning the bootcamp's curriculum you have a difficult balancing act between giving people a firm grounding and teaching them things that are going to be directly helpful for getting jobs (which is most people's priority, given that they're not earning).

Students on my bootcamp who had been able to put together a portfolio of decent (albeit simple) websites that met users' needs didn't have trouble getting jobs. No, they weren't engineering roles at large tech companies but they're the first step in a new career.