Ask HN: Breaking into SWE – Bootcamps or Competitions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Breaking into SWE – Bootcamps or Competitions?

4 pointslegerdemain7 comments

I have had a lot of trouble breaking into software engineering with just a Github portfolio and an unrelated degree. Basically, my applications get no response from companies. I discussed my plans to join a bootcamp-style program with a friend who is a Google engineer. My friend told me that bootcamps are a waste of my time and money and that he believes that anyone can break into SWE with just a few weeks of trying.

His suggestion was to join and score well on programming competitions (such as Google Kickstart), which he describes as a direct funnel to SWE jobs. I have not heard of this option before. I have never tried competitive programming, so I do not know how much effort it takes to win at them. My Google friend says that the effort is minimal and that these competitions have a low bar to score well.

Are code competitions an option you found useful during your job search? Would you recommend this path?

Expect to spend several years of deliberate practice to learn how to program professionally. You can’t learn a complex skill in a few weeks or months. You can decide how you put that time in — 5,000 to 10,000 hours for most people. Some people do it at school, some teach themselves, some get the experience on the job (not so much these days, employers rarely want to invest in training). Coding competitions may help, a bootcamp may help, but ultimately you need to put in the time honing your skills. There’s no shortcut or easy “funnel” into a job at Google.

I have been programming personal projects for the last six years. My question is what to do next, since employers don't seem to care about this fact.

Your career growth is your responsibility, you can’t expect employers to care about it.

In general employers are looking for three traits when hiring:

(1) Can do the work (technical skills).

(2) Can get along with the team (communication and person skills).

(3) Can focus (1) and (2) on meeting business requirements and adding value.

Larger companies usually have hierarchies and processes in place to make sure (3) happens, so they are more interested in technical skills and their perception of how well a candidate can work with other people. The best indicators for those are previous work experience. Hobby/personal projects, bootcamps, coding competitions, and even college degrees are possibly proxies for the desired skills, but employers have learned that credentials and participation are not always good indicators.

As another comment mentioned, networking is very important. One of the main values of attending college is the network of people you spend 4+ years with. Bootcamps should offer that value, though I don’t think that’s the focus. Over time you will find that your network of former colleagues and friends leads to employment more often than your tech credentials. Someone vouching for you or referring you counts for a lot.

Rather than aiming for Google and tech giants like them, I suggest getting some on-the-job experience at smaller companies. Lots of companies that are not tech companies need programming skills, and they are going to care more about business domain expertise and getting along in the organization and a lot less about your ability to balance a binary tree on a whiteboard. A few years actual experience will give you more credibility than hobby projects and boot camps.

Don’t focus so much on tech skills that you ignore the personal and communication skills and domain expertise.

The answer is networking. You want the best way to get a job? Networking. Most bootcamps would be more successful if they spent 95% of the time teaching you how to network then at the end told you to go to CS50x or something.

Note that most HR departments have an automated software that they use with keyword searches.

By that I mean a fancy CV might be really cool, but if you describe your project instead of focussing on the terminology of frameworks they expect, you won't land anywhere.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but HR doesn't understand tech relevant stuff which means they use keyword searches...and when they see a bunch of buzzwords they think this is the candidate for the team.

Even when it's obviously too much or the person has zero experience, this will get filtered out only in the next step when the dev teams get involved.

You gotta SEO your way in :)

When we talk about bootcamps: the disadvantage of bootcamps is the lack of experience that's necessary to understand the underlying technologies. Workers from there might be able to include react components but all hell breaks lose when they have to fix a flexbox related CSS property.

If I knew, I'd tell you. I have a master in CS and no FAANG company invited me. FB invited me after a year worth of experience. So if anything, you've taught me something!

I do see people asking recommendations on Team Blind, but I've never tried that. I think programming competitions help for the data structures and algorithms part based on what I just saw.

In any case, thanks for the Google Kickstart tip. This seems like my jam. Feel free to email me so we can code together (email in profile).

Here's how I did it:

Sysadmin job at low end company --> IT manager job at bigger company ---> Release manager job at software company ---> Software Engineer at the same software company

Basically one step at a time.

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