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Comment by sky_rw | Hacker News Reader

In my previous roles as lead developer at startups in NYC and SF I interviewed roughly 30-40 bootcamp graduates looking for RoR jobs. The bar for a jr. position was extremely low and still none of them were able to pass. Many knew they course material very well, but as soon as you threw any real world problem that required any deviation from their established lane they completely floundered. Eventually we just started filtering out anybody with that background.

Saddest thing is I keep hearing stories of people saving up huge amounts of money to go to these bootcamps with this dream that they can jump from a 30k/year retail job to a $120k/year SWE job with a 4 month bootcamp. I just do not believe it ever happens.

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You don't believe it ever happens? My friend did it 3 months ago.

Is it as common as these bootcamps claim? Who knows. It definitely happens.

I can relate about the interviews, though. At a previous company, we interviewed about 20 or so from several different bootcamps. We were excited for this new opportunity. We needed a few juniors. And we thought it would be super easy to find them now.

I think if they hadn't all been coached to interview with overconfidence, we might have hired a couple. But we just couldn't stomach how they would be so completely wrong, not know a certain data structure or algorithm or whatever, and pretend like they do. They weren't necessarily much worse than other candidates, but we just didn't want to deal with the overconfidence.

We still interviewed bootcamp grads on occasion. We never hired any. The only thing that we screened for were bootcamp students that listed projects on their resume in a way that was misleading and made it look like they had a full-time job. We immediately passed on these candidates. That was the majority of the bootcamp candidates, though.

If I had to guess, "being the kind of person who's friends with a developer in tech" is a very good predictor for "someone capable of being successful in tech". If that was the case, most friends-of-techies that did bootcamps would succeed, leading to a general impression by techies that the programs work - even if they fail horribly for 90% of the people that take them.

The other thing to consider is that if 90% of bootcamp grads get an offer (and accept that offer) after their first interview but the remaining 10% are unhireable and proceed to interview with 100 companies each before giving up, you'd have to interview 10 bootcamp grads to find one worth hiring. (Assuming random distribution, that is - if you're the company that bootcamp grads apply to after failing the first interview, you might never get a good applicant) The applicant pool might not match the graduate pool, in other words.

Good point about the pool.

In my case, the friend was someone I play basketball with. I was his only tech friend before he got his job, so I'm not sure how much that helped.

I have run across the same attitude and it can be very irritating, and often a pretty reliable signal of someone who, if hired, would be a real pain to work with in general.

These bootcamps must be pushing the "fake it until you make it" advice to an extreme.

They'd probably be better off doing FreeCodeCamp, and then spending 1 hour per day on ProjectEuler, blog about their algorithm's, and post 1-2 tutorials per week for 6 months. Eventually they'll cement their understanding as well as get people to 'trust' they know what they know.

Good advice but 100% not sexy.

As a freelancer it's basically my game plan... Keep adding to portfolio. Keep writing articles. Keep building stuff. Keep moving forward. I'm not always as organized as I'd like to be, but as long as your 'body of work' grows you'll become more valuable. It's not sexy, but it DOES work.

It is very not sexy at all, and all the bootcamps don't want you to know that either as they swindle you out of $10k. The cold hard truth is that not everyone has the aptitude to learn software, and there's nothing wrong with that.

FCC is how I got into the game. Someone pointed me in that direction from reddit. That was in late 2015. I went to a bootcamp in the midwest, one of only two or three. While I certianly didn't experience any of the hazing or punishment, per se, the long days and vague projects that don't necessarily teach how to solve problems hit home - I learned how to google well pretty early on and I'm glad I'd been teaching myself prior to the bootcamp because holy hell, it was hard and utterly relentless.I have a great job now, but that's after two years of dipping in and out of positions at other companies because I had no idea what to expect out of a workplace in regards to what I wanted and needed (environment, dev setup, peers, mentors/teachers, remote work, etc). the last three years of my career (graduated April 2017) have been a wild ride and not an easy path, but it's certianly taught me that I am resilient and can find a way to survive.

I thank freeCodeCamp for my career too. I spent around 3 months in 2017 studying full-time solely through freeCodeCamp. Then another 5 months building my own products based on tutorials and official documentation. Then got a good job as a frontend developer.

I'm a few years older than you it sounds like but likewise, I found FCC through reddit and finished my front end cert (back when it was still AngularJS based). It definitely wasn't easy getting my first job, and I was lucky to have helpful bosses/mentors to help me bridge the gap from "self taught" to senior dev, but it showed me that it's definitely possible to make it in this industry with a bootcamp or other non-traditional background. I agree with the tweets that you should take graduating/hiring numbers with a grain of salt and be weary of income sharing, but I think the people in this thread totally dismissing bootcamps as a valid path to development are off base.

I think there are two very different types of people. The first group is the group that can do what you say and if that works for you go for it. The second group is the group I fall into. I spent 3 months trying to do this and had a very hard time focusing my growth. Then I signed up at General Assembly and it worked out great for me. You definitely get out of it what you put in, and you need to have an aptitude for coding no matter what, but for some people like me the structure of the class is something sorely needed.

If the self-study path takes a few months longer, it probably isn’t worth it from the perspective of opportunity cost.

Spending $10-20k to get that tech job a few months sooner is a good deal.

Except if you spend 10-20k and you STILL don't get that job. There's still no guarantees. Even w/ a 4 year degree. At least self-taught you're not wasting money and you're basically learning the same thing.

I encountered _so many_ "I was a teacher and I wanted a new career" types that quit their jobs and moved in with parents/family/friends to attend bootcamps, only to find that they actually hated programming, and afterwards couldn't find a job and had to return to their original industry.

Of course, the schools don't care, they make their money either way.

“only to find that they actually hated programming”

That’s an important point. A lot of people will find programming very boring and tedious. I wouldn’t recommend this career to most people.

What I ask people is, "Do you like solving puzzles?"

Because as a programmer you get paid to solve new problems, not old ones.

Well, there are a lot of old problems to solve as well, but in general productive developers develop proficiency at using established solutions to them. There is a real skill in being able to find a solution to a similar problem and convert it to fit the new problem as well as being able to break a new large problem down to a number of small old solved problems a few new small problems.

”Because as a programmer you get paid to solve new problems, not old ones.”

In a lot of programming jobs you will repeatedly solve the same problem or a variation of it.

Yep, there’s always the job available of "customer wants a new form" and "make this wordpress site match some designer's PSD" out there

"it's like facebook, but for [X]"

Careful with that question. I have been programming for 25 years and love it, but you won't find me solving just any puzzle just for fun.

I think you are right overall, but depends on how you ask. I like programming puzzles but hate the Rubik's cube, Sudoku, crossword etc...

me too, I think it's probably due to the fact solving a Rubik's cube is pointless and accomplishes nothing as opposed to the puzzles in programming which do. I's rather write an algorithm that solves Sudoku than actually do Sudoku.

The vast majority of the effort in the software development field is essentially writing the exact same code over and over again, dealing with other people, and spending hours tracking down why your implementation of a super common pattern is broken because you misplaced a letter somewhere.

Maybe 1% is actually solving new or "interesting" problems, which is good, because imagine if other fields were like that. Imagine if a plumber had to re-invent the wheel every time they installed a shower or faucet.

Yeah a better way to phrase "do you like puzzle solving" is "do you like starring and tinkering with something for hours just trying to understand a logical reason for its breaking"?. I think that's a better description of what he was going for. Luckily I do legitimately enjoy that.

Even as a kid I was would never let things go that didn't "fit" into my brain's understanding of the world. So I felt well suited for bug hunting once I started doing it. But yeah 90% of my time is spent copying code, finding a missing letter, or meetings/phone calls. To me this is much better than other jobs. But it's not exactly glamours.

Idk what most non-programmers envision programming as, as I honestly couldn't have given someone a remotely accurate description of it before I actually started doing it.

Also no idea what he is talking about solving "new" puzzles. The vast majority of work is already completed by somebody else or at least in a similar manner and can be adapted to your own problem.

I dunno, my friend is an electrician and he said he is constantly solving the problem of how to route the conduit pipe around all the existing stuff in the available space. Every day is a puzzle and he has sent me pics... sometimes progress is less then one foot per hour, after all the bending and planning.

They may not be "inventing" the faucet every day but I wouldn't count tradesman out as not solving problems.

Yeah most of the stories were from people that were lured in by huge salaries and relative "ease" to finding a job.

>Of course, the schools don't care, they make their money either way.

Why should they? They take a bunch of people looking for a shortcut to a career that pays better money, and offer them a shortcut education in exchange for better money than they'd get teaching a curriculum elsewhere.

I've definitely seen it happen in SF.

I've personally been part of hiring at least four dev boot campers. All were green but you could tell they fundamentally understood logic and would eventually figure out the stack given enough mentorship. They all turned out to be great jr hires.

Most previously had compelling careers in other fields before switching. I can remember a lawyer. And one worked for the CIA?

Natasha Murashev was one of them. I see her travelling the world, speaking, and has a large dev following on Twitter. https://twitter.com/natashatherobot

I know a couple folks who did well after bootcamps, but they already knew how to code and were in analytical roles beforehand. I suspect that they probably could have gotten the jobs on their own eventually, but the bootcamp probably didn't hurt except for the cost.

How much real world experience does any new grad have? Unless they happen to have internships, I suspect even most top CS school grads would struggle a good deal with that.

Mind you, the college grads have had 4 years to tinker with side projects in the framework of a traditional college experience (winter breaks, summers, etc). Most of the bootcamp grads have had much less time to do ambient programming and probably have more "real world" obligations.

I've personally known a number of people where exactly this thing happened -- from very low paying job to SWE. And on the hiring side of things have hired a few myself (with varying degrees of workplace success admittedly, but I think that's more on us than them, from a mentorship perspective).

>> but as soon as you threw any real world problem that required any deviation from their established lane they completely floundered. Eventually we just started filtering out anybody with that background.

I don't think this is the measure of people new to coding.

If 40 people have gone to the trouble and effort and cost of doing a bootcamp and not a single one of them is good enough for you then maybe it's you who are wrong.

The correct measure for people new to coding is work ethic/effort and enthusiasm and energy and friendliness and ability to communicate about ordinary non technical things. Pretty much nothing else counts. If someone works really really hard at learning to program then they'll get there eventually.

Tell me who it is that starts to learn to program and can instantly "get real world things done"? It would make no sense if someone was both new to programming and also could "get real world things done".

People develop their ability to get real world things done over time - it means nothing if a newly minted programmer comes out of the gate without an impressive ability to get "real world things done".

Programming starts with fumbling around finding your feet, then struggling with syntax, then after lots of enthusiasm time energy practice and effort people develop the skills to get stuff done.

So sorry I do not agree with your assessment of 40 coding camp graduates being unemployable - you just don't know how to assess brand new programmers.

You're making some big assumptions about their interview process. Maybe new CS grads from 4 year programs are passing the interviews (and being successful on the job), in which case their filter may be working well.

None of the graduates I talked to could handle CS grad level questions, especially the typical ones you get at any given tech startup large or small (sorting, binary search, etc), and I never approached my interviews with them that way.

Here is a real-world way I would try to asses somebody's capabilities fairly given their experience. Each candidate generally has a capstone project. Some kinda small app like a todo list or something written in Rails. I would have them walk me through the app they built, explaining some things that they did and asking why they made decisions a certain way. This was an incredibly soft test just to make sure THEY actually wrote it, as frequently code would be shared or TA's would help a lot. I wanted to know that they knew why they did something. If that went well, which it often didn't, I would give them a small feature to add. Something like "how would you expand your authentication to have a password reset", then hold their hand while we walked through adding this feature.

I'm all for non-traditional educations especially when it comes to SWE, but at the end of the day you are applying to a 6-figure job in a competitive market. The failure here is on the Bootcamps that convinced these people that 3 months of study can qualify your for ANY 6 figure job. Compare this to a traditional vocational school. I get the spirit of the parent comment, trust me I really do. But I can sign up for a 28-week metal fabrication course and be guaranteed that I will learn how to weld and get a $60k/year job as a welder. Startup bootcamps are marketing to the same people, with the same vocational messaging. It just is not the same, and it's bad for everybody.

Questions such as pseudocode a "(sorting, binary search, etc)" algorithm on the whiteboard are BS questions used to haze interviewees and make the interviewer feel like the big man on campus. Almost no working programmer ever implements any of this BS unless they are doing very specialized work.

I've interviewed 100s of programmers for several very well known tech company and specifically tried to get tech interviewers to tone that down. Doing so allowed us to hire some great non-CS JR programmers who are now team leads and even CTOs at other companies.

I completely agree

Sorry, but if some "brand new programmer" can't get any real work done, then it is not a programmer at all. There can be even excellent students or someone to invest further time and resources, but professionals, they are not.

>> but professionals, they are not

This is exactly correct. And if you're interviewing juniors/graduates trying to find "professionals" then you really don't understand hiring.

"We're looking for professionals with no commercial experience." It's a contradiction in terms.

So you want to pay someone to train them.

Why not? That's how it used to work. Provided they can demonstrate a minimum of CS fundamentals, things like tools (git, ssh, etc.), how to work with a large code base, good style, and any number of things that a new grad needs to know to become a competent junior engineer can be taught.

I think this is exactly what the original comment was taking issue with for the bootcampers.

>but as soon as you threw any real world problem that required any deviation from their established lane they completely floundered

He quoted it himself, but failed to notice the issue. I myself have noticed people who went through 4 year programs tend to be much more adaptable as the universities tend to do a better job of building a solid foundation.

BS.

For a corporate setting that may have the resources to hire people for the potential and long term maintenance of their cogs, sure, hire "recent graduates" with zero ability to produce any value to the company.

But don't tell me that you can't find young people with little to no experience that are talented enough to run circles on any "experienced professional" and actually be useful from the start. I've done it myself more than once.

Absolutely agree. Juniour doesn't mean "without experience". I will venture far enough as to say that a juniour developer should have very solid tech skills and real world experience.

I've known many people myself included who had 1-2 years of professional experience by the time they graduated from university. And naturally these folks would hit the ground running when hired post graduation, which is as it should be.

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