Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's perverse incentives:
- Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an engineers learning curve looks like.
This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find the above to be true. They're not students, they're customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale.
I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.
These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence.
Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.
React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.
My company has a react team somewhere, but not ruby...
The clear implication is that you finish the bootcamp and you will be on top of the world.
I would say ~30% of my students had some form of higher than realistic expectations of where they would when they finished the course. I made a point of beating that out of them.
But there were very few, maybe only 5% people that really fit your description. But I can remember them very clearly whereas the middle std dev of students I wouldn't recall much of them.
I would say close to 60% were unsuitable for even junior positions. Their arrogance made them dangerous, and they knew just enough to cause problems.
You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Sadly, the people who end up losing out are the people coming out of the other end.
It is also a sad fact, that often, regardless of bootcamper incompetence, you can find a more incompetent manager willing to hire that person and validate their skewed world view.
As you can tell, i'm tired of it. At least uni grads from CS courses know enough to know they know very little.
In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits.
In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded.
Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two).
I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.
Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.
The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing.
The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written.
The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.
Not a bootcamper but I think this isn't true. If you put in the effort and you're moderately intelligent you can speedrun pretty much any career in terms of knowledge.
However I do think there's a negative selection bias in the people that end up doing the bootcamps. They're not the self taught people that can teach themselves x in a few weeks. These people don't go to bootcamps, because they already taught themselves x and don't see the purpose in doing a bootcamp for a lot of money that teaches them x and doesn't give them a useful certificate.
The main benefit I see in the classical university track is that you gain more breadth of knowledge. And while you may not need most of it, it often helps in problem solving to know that some things "exist". Just so you can Google the details when you're faced with a similar problem.
The other benefit is of course the signaling value. Bootcamps don't have much of it.
Perhaps, but efficacy is knowledge combined with experience. Experience requires time, diverse challenges, mistakes and so on.
Many bootcampers (and low-level developers generally) seem to think you can jump ahead to being senior/lead without actually gaining the experience, making the mistakes and learning the lessons first-hand.
Sadly, there's plenty of crap low-level companies that will hire them too.
He has been fired from every coding job he's had, due to difficulties working with others. In a nutshell, he's convinced that he knows more than everyone else. (For example, he once spent 3 hours arguing with a guy who builds rocket systems at JPL about which of them knows more about rockets.)
Him and others like him have soured a lot of LA tech companies on hiring boot camp graduates.
How do people continue to get by with such little insight.
If you can afford the time to spend a whole day learning how to solve the problem yourself, it's probably the best way to learn. But if we restrict the industry to those who can afford that time, we'll be poorer for it. Many people can be good developers despite going through a different learning path.
I am not a parent, but I've definitely found as I've gotten older it's harder to self learn sometimes. Having structure and some guidance can make a world of difference.
A good example I had not too long ago was having to go back into Java, something I hadn't written in many many years. Syntactically, I could write basic logic. But I didn't have any feel for how a project should be structured, what sort of libraries exist, and a lot of other things I know implicitly from languages I am working with regularly. I had a friend (who actually happened to be a bootcamp teacher in a previous life) spend a couple hours with me just going through the basics over a screenshare/voice chat. I picked up more in those 2-3 hours than I did in previous 2-3 weeks because I had someone who knew what they were doing, could answer questions, could anticipate what I might be thinking next and could guide me.
A good teacher can be infinitely helpful to learning something, even for someone experienced (I've been writing code for over two decades now). I can't imagine how much more helpful a good teacher could be for someone who is just trying to start learning. We shouldn't be discouraging this style of learning, we should be seeing how to make programming accessible to everyone interested in learning.
At least boot camps I know do job placement as well as the camp itself. An entirely self taught person has all the chips stacked against them.
The QA route - the modern version of the oft vaunted “start in the mail room and work hard” position - is mostly gone too.
I think if you're legitimately smart and dedicated, and put the time in to build knowledge, you'll be able to get a start somewhere. And once you have real work experience, the credential becomes less and less relevant.
FWIW I do find there's value in actual comp sci and software engineering degrees, and I will give those some amount of weight. But as far as bootcamps, if two candidates demonstrate the same level of skill, knowledge, dedication, etc., it makes zero difference to me if one has a boot camp and the other is self taught.
We haven't been able to get our interviewers do that consistently, and a lot of our self-taught hires report that basically no one in the past has ever grilled them about their personal projects, and that we were the first company to do so.
That sounds like exactly the core of the broken hiring processes. Shouldn't a good hiring manager try to create a process that finds these brilliant, intelligent candidates?
Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.
There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself, especially how to make code that is easy for other people to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively. People who focus on teaching themselves are doing themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a disservice.
You can no more replace bootcamps with internet websites than you can replace teachers with books: people need interactive experiences built on sound pedagogy to learn most effectively.
The reason the VC-funded bootcamps are scams is because they call what they do teaching without having any foundations in pedagogy or instruction and using un-qualified recent students as the only "instructors" looking at students' code.
They are scams because they juke the stats. They hire their own graduates to up placement rates & deceptively determine there own exclusion criteria to remove data of people who didn't get placed.
Most of what I got out of doing the bootcamp was being surrounded by other coders, collaborating on stuff in person, and being exposed to the bay area tech scene.
I don't regret going and I had some really great times there, but if today someone asked me if they should go to a bootcamp, I would suggest recreating that experience themselves at a fraction of the price.
Here's what I would suggest:
- Take online courses and use Stack Overflow. Everything that's available for cheap or free is better than anything I was taught at bootcamp.
- If you can, move to somewhere that has some semblance of a tech scene, and find the smallest, cheapest cubby hole to live in so you don't have to worry so much about paying rent. At most, have a part time job that won't interfere with your studies, but even better if you don't need to work.
- Go to tech meetups, mixers, etc. Start networking ASAP. Meet other coders. Do presentations, no matter how novice the topic.
- Start blogging about what you're learning.
- Have some project to show for your effort to your potential first employers. Doesn't matter how dumb and impractical it is. I attribute part of my initial success to hammering out a live chat with playlist and rewind control on top of YouTube years before YouTube implemented that themselves.
- Practice working your butt off. If you really want to achieve your goal, you'll stay up late to solve problems when it's necessary.
- Make sure you're having fun at every step of the way and don't let people distract you.
There, I may have just saved you thousands of dollars. Potentially that can all be done for free depending on where you're situated geographically or how much money you're sitting on.
If you know what a shell script is, you probably don't need a bootcamp. That said, if you are completely clueless to tech, maybe a bootcamp would be a good thing. Depending on the bootcamp, of course.
To make an analogy, if you were learning to exercise for the first time, the information is out there, but there's a ton of bad and conflicting information out there too, and if you're not careful you'll make no progress or even get hurt. So it makes sense to hire a trainer or learn from friends, especially in the beginning.
Years of experience can make you a competent individual in the subject but even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng.
It's possible to pick up on this if you're 'in the club,' it's impossible to notice it if you're not.
Goes both ways, mate. I've always been shocked by (even very experienced) CompSci guys' absolute inability to create a simple state machine. Keep shit orthogonal, guys!
Same thing, but to a lesser extent, when it comes to timing constraints.
One thing I will mention though, I've always found elec engineers to have a higher work rate that software devs. Always.
Problem 1: it's too easy to apply to jobs. Unqualified people blast resumes at you. If each resume takes you 2-3 minutes for a fast discard, and 15+ minutes to really look at, but only a handful of seconds for someone to send to you...
Problem 2: interviews aren't all that useful, and junior people don't have a track record to rely on. When I hire someone, I'm investing piles of senior eng time onboarding, etc. A bootcamp is a useful filter for candidate being worth the effort (time, $, opportunity cost) to hire and train.
To quote you,
> People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb
A bootcamp -- much like a college degree -- shows drive, motivation, and the ability to execute over time. Is this exclusive to bootcamp or college graduates? Absolutely not, and I've hired people with neither. But again, hiring is very time expensive.
Don't be condescending. People switching careers don't know all the information is already online. That's what makes predatory boot camps that much worse.
They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and "can only repeat from memory".
I wish there were more opportunities for pure UX CSS jobs, without the complexity of frontend coding. Just make pretty themes and charge for that. A gentler learning curve than HTML JS React Node Express SQL and on and on and on.
The boot camps are wrong in teaching rotary, where they might benefit from selective regiments.
Learn to learn as I've heard it put.
All of the information in the world is available in the library, but no one will ever memorize every book in it. The internet has a trillion libraries worth of information, but no one can absorb enough of it without structure and guidance to make something useful out of it.
Schools start everyone at the same starting point and guide them through to the same end point, so that companies can rest assured that the lowest graduate of their school is at a specific minimum competency level. Without the school structure, most people would Dunning-Kruger themselves into thinking that they are either vastly better or immensely worse than they actually are.