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Comment by amigoingtodie | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good bootcamp?

I have an employee (graphic design) that has shown an aptitude in web development, but I do not have the time to devote to mentoring him.

I can afford to send him to a bootcamp, but stories like this make me hesitant.

Also, I have a front-end guy and a CS intern, who both could benefit from a SQL bootcamp (as another poster mentioned, team development, source control, and SQL do not seem to be emphasized in the CS curriculum). Is there such a thing?

I am only interested in on-site, immersive experiences for all of them.

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Hack Reactor in SF is great. I did to enable my own career switch, and it was the most intellectually challenging and stimulating experience of my life. (Definitely more so than my college and grad school). It's a 12 week course with focus on full-stack web development, with the final four weeks dedicated to team projects. I recommend the program to anyone who's interested in bootcamps.

Hack Reactor recently merged with the Maker Academy, which had locations in SF, LA, and Austin. Not sure what the quality of the other campuses are, but I know that they all use the same syllabus / course material now. Hack Reactor on Market St is the original location.

No SQL bootcamp that I'm aware of, however.

I did AppAcademy, which seemed to deliver on the job placement rates when I attended (early 2015).

They spend about a week on SQL, mostly going through SQL Zoo, and later on you build your own toy clone of ActiveRecord.

For me, it was probably the best part of the whole curriculum -- it was the only part that I didn't already have experience in.

That said, I have sort of mixed feelings about that bootcamp and the industry as a whole right now. For the right people, on a short schedule, it's great. If you gave those same people the same curriculum for self study, they'd probably get the same out of it though. If your employee is motivated, I'd spend that same money on books and time in their schedule (or pay them for the extra study hours) and the promise of a pay bump if they can get through it and show competence.

I recently hired several graduates from General Assembly and several from CodingDojo in Washington DC to be junior engineers on a team including intermediate and senior engineers. I would hire them again in a heartbeat.

Many years ago I was consulting when HungryAcademy graduated 24 engineers into the ranks of a large Washington DC based company. And they were all excellent as well. That program was run by Jeff casimir, who has also started several other programs, not at Turing School in Colorado.

I'd recommend any of those programs based on first hand experience hiring their graduates.

1. https://www.freecodecamp.org/ 2. https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/introduction-to-sql 3. https://www.pluralsight.com/ Has lots of great concise courses. You can even speed up or slow down the play back. Especially would be good to get started now, vs in a few months.

if you are only interested in onsite you should probably state where you are. i'm at a NY bootcamp and you can get the full details at impostor-syndrome.org

I am willing to send them out of state, so as long as we are in the contine tal US, it is a possibility.

The answer is Hack Reactor or bust. Don't bother with any of the tier 2/3 Bootcamps such as general assembly, ect.

How is GA "tier 2/3" ?

Was that too high of a rating? We could call them tier 4 I guess. There isn't really any definition of how many tiers there are, so I didn't want to be too specific.

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