My experience getting a tech job with no degree or relevant work experience
lowlyswe.substack.com
lowlyswe.substack.com
I completely agree that the value of a bootcamp is having a community to encourage you through the process, everything they teach you can be found online. I also went to a bootcamp that had a good reputation around my city so I think it was legitimizing for someone with no experience and no stories of coding for fun as a teenager.
Even back then hackernews was full of people saying how flooded the market was with bootcampers.
4 years later I grinded leetcode and got a job at a FANG and essentially 6x'd my income from 4 years earlier before I could code. I eventually left that job because I was miserable but thats a whole other story.
Now with 7 years of experience I leave the bootcamp off my resume because of the stigma. I took the specific degree program off my linkedIn and just put "bachelors of science" and let people assume what they want. If anyone asks I just say I'm self taught.
Point is, it's 100% possible.
It's possible even without a bootcamp.
I self-taught myself development by coding 8 hours a day for 9 months. I ended up being much better than majority of people I worked with, including, or I'd rather say especially, engineering grads. I found out that just because you have a degree, doesn't mean you're good at something.
That being said, I still have to vouch for networking being important. In my case it wasn't bootcamp people, but the italian JS community and the one from Rome, where I attended the local JavaScript meetup that got me my first job easier than I would've expected. I still think I would've landed a job without it, but still, it was a good help.
Also, last but not least, I was a chemistry major with 3 published articles on high-impact journals. While nothing about my chemistry curriculum was relevant to software engineering, it definitely helped me into knowing how to study and learn.
I don't think it made any difference on my CV, but it is still making me a much better professional and engineer than majority of my peers who do not learn basics properly to move on in their careers from a techincal point of view.
I wouldn't say they are without value or purpose though, a bootcamp is like take-your-friend-to-work-day where people who recognize they might have an interest can have a taste of what we actually do besides wearing hoodies and cashing checks. Sure every day life isn't all laptop stickers and free pizza, but a bootcamp puts your hands in the middle of our work skills, and you get at least some idea of what this trade entails.
When you reframe the 'bootcamp' and remove the expectation that someone is immediately employable after, what you're left with is a classifier to discern who'd warrant further effort, and who's better off checking out a different trade for their mid-life-change.
In my opinion, bootcamps are best for two types of people: new/young folks who may be interested in this field of work, and suits who want to understand more about what their cofounder counterparts are up to when the "please dont knock" sign is on the door.
I have been told I am "too academic", and that my cv may be "too technical".
So many regrets.
I have been told by people who rejected me without an interview that they were looking for people with "more experience", and "experience with particular technologies". I have also been told that my master's degree didn't matter in the decision. I had a 1 year long contract where I built a custom AutoML system during BSc, a 3 month FT internship after BSc, a 6 month PT internship during BSc.
I have been frequently asked during interviews whether I feel any attachment or have any issues working with a different stack/language, and I don't understand why that question is asked since a language or some tech are just tools that can easily be learned.
You would be surprised on the attachment question.... you have the right attitude. Some don't. It often revels more about a person than one would expect.
We had an offer rescinded for something like this when it showed up in their background check (person mislead about a university title). We didn't care about the education or title and we valued self-taught people but not being honest about something in the resume was cause for disqualification (what else should we trust?). Personally, I'd just leave it out, no need to embellish or anything.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation. Been a programmer since I was 14 but ended up pursuing another field. I'm making good money but the USD exchange rate in my country is seriously making me reconsider. If I end up doing this, I'll learn whatever I need to be competitive in the market. I suppose bootcamps are a nice way to streamline this process.
May I ask what made you switch fields? Did you have reasons other than salary?
My first job didn't use those specific languages or technologies but everything was close enough to what I had done in the bootcamp that I wasn't completely lost. I knew enough to be a good jr developer and learned 20x in my first 2 years on the job than in the bootcamp.
I've since built/done lots of services, data pipelines, database migrations, devops pager rotations, large/complex frontend applications. The bootcamp was really just a jumping off point. The real learning starts when you get to the job.
I’d love to understand this in detail. When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I’m convinced there’s massive upside in bringing in more talent - people who learn in their own time or through boot camps. Unfortunately, senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage.
Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.
Have American citizens ever tried to "check their privileges" and imagine how a life of a "visa-slave" changes after crossing the American border? I can give you some hints into my "living experience" of such a crossing.
Yesterday: an American lawyer sent some docs supporting my H1B visa over our Academy institution fax machine. The fax machine ran out of paper. The management asked me to pay for the paper, or buy them some. I couldn't afford the paper, so I borrowed $700, paid for the fax supplies and for a ticket to the US.
Today: I've got $5000 moving bonus, got $30k salary contract and got the first task, like: - We've sold something to Swedes today, you have 2 weeks to develop it. What do you need? - A Sun workstation, and an X.25 link to Sweden. - Done. And give your passport to Olga - you are going to Stockholm when done.
In 2 weeks our part was done, but Swedes were not able to finish their part and asked for 2 more weeks...
I was an employee #27, after that task and some other completed projects my salary was increased, then doubled, then again increased, then again doubled... our company went to #1 in its market, then IPOed, and 4 years after, still on the "slave" H1B visa I've found $1M on my bank account (unfortunately, it was an investment bank, lol, but that's another story).
So, my step through the US border on the H1B visa was not a step into slavery. It was liberation.
You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you. It sounds like you're happy for your time at that company, but a lot of H1B workers find themselves in unpleasant work conditions that they don't have the same freedom to leave as their American counterparts. Their employers know they can subject them to a worse environment because they have more riding on it, whereas an American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway. The problem isn't that it doesn't make anyone's lives better in the end, the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
Very true.
>You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you.
Not very true. I never worked hard in my life. I worked productively. Yes, I've done in my first 2 years in the USA more than in my 15 years in the home country. Because in my home country you had to share a Sun workstation with 10 other teams, and X.25 card? You can order it for the next year delivery, at it may be delivered, but never on time.
Swedes were late because they didn't know that you can implement the needed subset of the ASN.1 encoding using a simple, hand-made stack machine.
>American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
In my days the H1B quota was not immediately exhausted, so there was a window of opportunity each year. Raise the H1B limit - and you'll deliver almost the same amount of freedom to H1B workers.
>That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway.
My point is that it's more complicated than that. The employer - in the present situation - can 1) hire an American worker, 2) hire an H1B employer. My point is that option 2 - in the present world - is actually an increase of liberty in the world, not slavery.
>the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
The ethics of the employer do not concern me that much. I can't change them. I can hope to change your ethics, ethics of a person I am directly talking to. And my concern is that you are labeling H1B program as an "indentured servitude", while it actually increases liberty in the world. That's my concern, or at least that's a paradox I clearly see.
Any person using an h1b will tell you how happy they are of having it. Its they alternative/escape to their country's reality. But Americans having no idea what that means, are fast to dismiss it.
Reminds me of the comments about China workers working and living in Foxconn or similar manufacturing jobs: everybody was quick to judge how "bad" the conditions are there, while in reality the increase of quality of life for a lot of them was huge compared to their previous life in their rural towns.
As a Mexican living in Mexico I've seen some of those realities, and I'm sure most of the people that go to the USA from Mexico on a TN or h1b visa had it way tougher here.
Which to me comes across as an extremely privilegied take!
I'm advocating for a better path to citizenship that's more reasonable than this insane system of H1B lottery and greencard waitlists that we have currently. I'm not sure why that's such a divisive position.
There's A LOT of Mexicans that go to the US under a TN Visa which will NEVER have that privilege due to the nature of that Visa. They are still very very happy to have the visa and work there.
Why should they? Why should they care about you coming in and dumping their wages?
I am not American but EU and it is similar here.
1. There’s a race to the bottom to show infinite growth. This is the way of American capital markets. And this leads to cost cutting, bringing down wages and perverse incentives.
2. H1B and other programs that were intended for people with exceptional skills are handed out in mass to immigrants - particularly Indians - and we can be okay with that.
But the reality is, there are often times no exceptional skills here. The test taking and interviewing has been designed to cater to Indian nationals. They’re great test takers, which doesn’t necessarily translate into productivity or being a top worker or producer of value.
This is a corporation importing foreign workers as a cost cutting measure. An engineer from India will be happy earning 75% of the wage since they also get to move their family to the US, with healthcare and all the benefits.
The tragedy is that existing top talent doesn’t necessarily want to work at a company like Amazon. And so Amazon will import Indian nationals, because they’re willing to put in longer hours. They have little choice. They’re risk averse, and the last thing they want is to get managed out and have to return to India.
Amazon does this at scale. It reflects in the quality of their products and services.
How is it a fallacy when it is real?
Here is an example from the building sector here: The Vaxholm Conflict https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/06/swed-j27.html TL:DR Building company wanted to employ Latvian workers at a lower rate of pay than Swedish workers.
I, personally, was also affected when Polish workers where just plain cheaper in IT so they fired all of us.
Now, I of course blame the companies, the capitalist systems, but I also blame the people. It is only human.
How is it a fallacy when it is real?
How did that go, for the company? Transferring knowledge about a large software project can be hard ... Almost impossible if everyone gets replaced at the same time?
(I wonder if you were building software or doing more sysadmin things)
We voted Sweden into EU thinking that the Swedish model would persist within. That was false and we had to let the flood of cheap labor in.
The union hostile organization "Svenskt Näringsliv" and companies wanted this of course and lobbied for it. Including calling people in the union racists for not wanting to wage dump.
What they are "competing" in is a lower salary. That's it.
Its what they bring to the table and companies love it of course.
I will not comment on the rest of whatever you think of me and how I live.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31235911 explains it better for you :)
Everyone I've ever heard talk about working at Amazon has complained about it, one wonders if their reputation as an awful place to work has something to do with why hiring is hard
First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
A boot camp engineer absolutely can be as productive as any other L4 hire, Indian or not Indian. I think the L4 Indian hires in particular come better prepped for the leet style coding interviews. But in terms of quickly ramping up and becoming productive engineers, there’s absolutely nothing unique about a hire from India in many, if not majority of cases.
There are other stronger incentives for indexing on non resident hires. I could pay you market rate at $200K/year + equity that vests over four years. Or, I can bring a person from India and pay them $140K a year, reduced equity grant, and for the most part, I know that person isn’t going to quit. Especially with certain cultures that are more risk averse, they’re going to think twice, even if another employer is willing to offer sponsorship.
> First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
Lets look at this from the perspective of the Director/VP, you're looking at filling headcount in your org, 25 seats. Its May, and you're behind the targets that were given to you in January. You have easy to source from talent pools (intermediate level or fresh masters degree graduate L5 H1Bs from India) and bootcamp graduates (3 months of coding experience). Your budget can pay up to 200k/person, which is much higher than the going rate for either of these profiles, so comp isn't a problem. Your boss (VP/SVP) is largely evaluating you on your ability to staff your org and complete projects. Do you fill these 25 seats using L5 Indian immigrants, or fresh bootcamp grads?
But if you’re asking me what I would do - I’d probably look for anyone who is a competent hire, without favoring H1Bs, and try to evaluate them a bit more than a leetcode style interview.
As I was saying, Amazon has entire organizations that are H1Bs. These are stable businesses that I don’t believe are really growth focused in 2022z
If we want to focus on costs, I think there are better options to deprecate and sunset entire services. There’s also significant opportunity at Amazon to trim the fat. Not necessarily firing people but moving off places that aren’t as valuable and moving them onto initiatives with a meaningful ROI.
Is it the slack? Or is it the fact that US-based companies have much more to offer this pool than they can offer the comparable group in the US. In particular, much higher pay than locally available and the prestige of working for a US firm.
It's great for ICs but terrible for leaders, particularly of small/starting startups .
I don't see why the same wouldn't be true of the labor market.
Hire them for a few weeks, and fire if necessary. It doesn't take more than a few days to weed out the fakers, and identify the diamond.
I say local because it's cruel to hire a guy from across the country just to be let go.
We all know most degrees, and designations are dubious at best.
Why not try out a bunch of local Americans whom live near the worksite, and keep the best person? (I guess some companies do that with interns, but what I'm proposing is a bit different. The prospective hires will be tested throughly at what they claim they know.
It seems like most younger job applicants would jump at the chance to work for a good company?
I'm not saying don't test them throughly before a temporary hire. Make the test difficult. Testing doesn't cost much with Zoom, and this welcoming technology.
In every job I had the best employee was mainly self-taught, and didn't have a great resume.
It seemed like they worked harder because they didn't have all the spinish behind their name, especially in this relatively new industry.
You really only want to hire people who will make it to Sr (L5) in a few years. That is the level where they are fully self sufficient and don't need constant support from someone more Sr.
The perception (that I share) is that most (not all!) boot camp grads that interview as well as new CS grads still have less long term potential to make it to L5. They have done great learning basic programming on their own. Few will go much past that (compared to CS grads).
While many companies, formally or otherwise, have some sort of probationary period, the general understanding is--unless you've really misrepresented your skills and the company probably screwed up the hiring process--you're not going to be let go after a few weeks. (Absent major organizational/financial changes.)
Even for a local job, I would be very unlikely to quit an existing job--or even put interviewing on hold--to take a job with an explicit trial period.
(Now, sure, if I had just graduated from a boot camp or other degree program and didn't have immediate alternatives, maybe.)
Think this statement explains the fast success of the writer. The drive to experiment and find solutions is so valuable, and surprisingly in short supply.
As a hiring manager, one of the big hesitations I have re: bootcamp grads is whether they need to be spoon-fed, or have the hunger to move things forward. Especially true for startups that tend to bet more on potential vs. raw experience. For anyone in this boat, https://topstartups.io/ is a good place to start
Fortunately it's very easy to suss this out by asking a focused question or two about the code.
Whatcha want to know?
>When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I think because average candidate quality of bootcamp grad probably pretty low, due to shortness of the program and people thinking all they need to do is complete the bootcamp, when really you need to stay learning for years.
Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.
Someone signing up for a class and not learning anything is a problem. Someone passing a class and not learning anything is a big problem for the signaling power of that degree.
Making it the only way to send in homework motivates people to learn the absolute basics (I haven't seen anyone learn branching like this), but also pisses them off and a lot of times they don't want to use Git at all after that experience.
A decent grasp of cloning, committing, and pushing seemed to be enough. Conflicts are inevitable, and will present a challenge to someone new to the system, but they’re not insurmountable. Good IDE integrated tooling probably goes a long way on this point.
Git will be a speed bump for a student that hasn’t already encountered an scm before. I didn’t take a poll, but I don’t recall any of my classmates encountering issues that they couldn’t work out.
I did come across this charitable expectation in my CS coursework where you were given tools and expected already to know or to learn on your own. Which is fine if you want to weed people out. I can understand where someone might be frustrated if you hand them a tool and expect them to know or figure it out while they're learning new material.
Even as a professional SW engineer for 10+ years, when I join a new job, the amount of new tools and workflows is overwhelming - and that's when I at least understand the descriptions. Dumping all that on a student is just idiotic, not good teaching.
Maybe git, in particular, does deserve some specific focus given its unique status and ubiquity in the industry.
Git didn't exist yet when I was in college, but day 1 was still going over version control as a concept and it was made clear you'd get a zero on any assignments if you didn't use it.
I attended a bootcamp in 2015 and know two people, one in my cohort, and one in the next, who both got jobs at Amazon right out of the bootcamp. At the time, cohorts were every 6 weeks with 80 people/cohort, so that's ~1 out of 80 bootcamp grads who made it into Amazon (granted, with a small sample size), with more in FAANG generally (Google was more open to bootcamp grads than the others).
But I still think it’s a great idea for companies to try it. There are a ton of benefits. But I think the best one is that you get a much longer view of how someone could perform than you’d get with a traditional interview cycle. And interview judges someone at a single point in time. An apprenticeship would be able to determine their trajectory.
We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters."
To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
As a result, our hiring program only directly targets Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, UW, UM, and a small set of other US schools. Recently, we dropped Northwestern from our list, because it just wasn't yielding a good number of candidates.
We obviously hire candidates from a variety of other schools and backgrounds, but we don't seek them out. For example, we'll reach out to you if someone already at Palantir makes a strong recommendation. But we are absolutely not looking for you as a first priority ahead of our college hiring.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2017/03/03/peter-thiel-fellowship-c...
This is our experience with our candidates. If you think there's an arbitrage opportunity here, best of luck to you in your recruiting endeavours.
I'm not sure I'd call my algorithms, operating systems, and core CS classes theoretical garbage, but I guess I value not dedicating semesters to the front end framework or GitHub repository of the week. If anything, I now regret not paying more attention during my undergrad.
I don't want to extrapolate this too much for obvious reasons, but did this firm also view math, physics, etc. degrees as full of theoretical garbage?
I recall one of {Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, Doordash, other similar place} having a drop-down on the application for the university I was attending.
There were roughly 10 universities. I can't remember all of them, maybe Stanford, CMU, Brown, Berkeley, etc. (typical top universities for CS/EE).
At the bottom of the list was "Other".
I was rejected within an hour or two of submitting my application. I don't want to say it was an automatic filter situation, but...
I don't know who said the quote but it went like "The best minds of my generation are working to get people to click ads." The same idea plays out here as well. You want all the prestige candidates to work on your CRUD apps.
I kind of understand the political backlash against tech now...
My own grad school happens to have a top 4 CS program (UIUC), but I went there for math (was top 15 at the time, not sure how it has done since). Some of the stories of people I met in my grad program were fascinating, there were people there who were likely smarter than most students at most of the elite universities - one particular extremely smart person I met even turned down top math programs in favor of a full scholarship at a lesser known public school for undergrad. My own personal background is a bit fascinating in some ways as well, but it never comes up in interviews - I'm at a FAANG with most of the achievements notched for a promotion to staff SWE, and my brother was promoted to staff research scientist at another FAANG for an extraordinary business-wide accomplishment. Neither of us coded before trying to get into the tech industry (my brother has a PhD in Chemistry from a reputed program).
I've learned throughout my life that focusing so much on where people went to school might cause you to miss smart and/or revolutionary people. People don't really talk so much about the schools people like Steve Jobs went to. Lots of very smart people are rejected by the likes of the Ivies, or not gotten the head start in life that would've gotten them placed at the most prestigious schools or programs. Some people's lives took a different turn for reasons that may have caused them to miss out on opportunities earlier in life, but life events created resolve & the will to make a switch & become successful. I think it's very unfair/silly to pass judgment on someone just due to what school they went to (I certainly don't really care when I'm interviewing someone) - there are actually a lot of very smart people who never had any such privileged background out there. We should be striving to find them not only because it could be very beneficial for business, but it's also the right thing to do.
A lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci.
I still look for developers from computer science programs mostly because that’s an easy place to find people who really love creating software and systems.
Indeed, I studied Maths & Philosophy and I always tell people that the Philosophy was a lot more useful to my career as a software developer than the Maths. (Analytic) Philosophy involves a lot of probing people's assumptions until you get to a clear idea of what they truly believe. Which is rather similar to the process of teasing clear requirements out of stakeholders.
This isn't just reporting Palantir's hiring, this is offering a personal assessment that the majority of CS programs are crap and their graduates are likely as not to be cheaters. It's very pretentious and presumably offends most people here, who probably went to "lower-tier schools." Not really surprising that it would provoke a negative reaction.
Because of my unstructured learning and random hobby type direction it took me a couple years to get proficient, but eventually I knew more about systems admin than people who'd been doing it professionally for years. I got hired for peanuts by a startup, and networked through User Groups to a better job that paid more.
My career's been nearly 20 years with no higher education or any other skillset whatsoever, bad at concentration and memorization, no bootcamps or teachers or mentors. I'm not a genius. If I can do it, you can do it.
An unlimited amount of free information and learning is out there on the internet. Go and get it, learn it, practice it. Network and find someone who wants to pay you chump change and build that resume.
Also remember there are a lot of roles today in tech. Many don't require a ton of technical chops. Figure out what they are and what they entail, and target your learning towards one. Even lower end roles pay better than most other jobs, and you can always pivot to another role later once you have some work on your resume.
ADHD, dropping out, etc are all beliefs that society labels as “non-productive”, but when somebody has passion and determination and a lot of time doing what they enjoy doing with no reward other than feeding this passion, then that’s all it takes. Consider yourself lucky because in my experience a very small number of people can do this, nobody wants to put the time it takes. Sometimes it takes decades. Coincidentally my form of ADHD disappears once I am in the flow, makes me wonder if ADHD is just aka for “I just don’t fundamentally enjoy what I am doing therefore my brain needs to reward itself in other ways”.
Even better if we end up pursuing a nice hobby in a booming field like technology.
Reality is that most people give up, because ultimately they pursue fields they are not deeply interested in to begin with. The ultimate curse: to dedicate our life to something we don’t care because we didn’t spend enough time exploring what we really cared about.
Did freelance stuff for a few years making websites for local businesses, graphic design for nearby restaurants and retail stores, fixing computers from my share-house bedroom, etc. Ultimately got some pretty dead-end tech support jobs in telcos and SMEs which taught me workplace etiquette and how to deal with clients/stakeholders. Then did some 3-6mth contracts with some pretty big companies from there, including government. One of those had a manager who understood ASD and took my under his wing, and I got a full time 6 figure role there founding an internal web team (taking over the main website and intranet from an outsourced company, building/deploying whatever web apps departments needed). Workplace training programs moved me up from there to a variety of roles and into security then management.
Still never finished high school or any tertiary education, I like to say I fell my way upwards. I have no idea what I’m doing professionally, I just like playing with computers.
Now I remember! I was also doing home PC repair through my parents' friends for $14/hr. Put flyers in Barnes and Noble. Got hired by a friend to write some Perl scripts. Two different guys who also went to the LUG hired me to fix some Linux servers they had at their small business. I set up a website and organized marketing materials and did project management for my dad's realty business.
All these little gigs I padded my resume with showed I was doing something, showed what tech I used, what I accomplished. It was a hustle for sure. But it convinced a small startup to give me a shot, and that was the gateway to a "real job". But I did start with dozens of tiny one off jobs over a couple years.
For sure, nobody is going to hire you if you can't show that you can apply your skills, that other people have also given you a shot, that you are self-directed and show a willingness to work and learn. But I mean, this is Life! If you can't or won't do those things you're gonna end up a bum. Even back then I didn't imagine anyone would give me anything, I had to do the work and hustle to make it. So maybe I just assumed other people got that part of it... It's definitely work and takes time, but it's also very much something everyone can accomplish if they put a small amount of brain power and a lot of elbow grease into.
Other people, however, may very well not have that same interest. Maybe what gets them hyper-focused is art or literature or who knows what. Not to say of course it is not possible but you may be smarter than you think.
He asked me why wasn't he able to do that and why wasn't he taught this at the bootcamp. I knew what his friend did in a weekend was probably a culmination of 3-4 years of rigourous learning of computer science concepts that he acquired at the Uni.
Among bootcamp students, There is this constant unhealthy comparison going on in their minds with the people who graduated from a Uni., this is even after years of working in the industry. what doesn't help is, Apart from a few exceptions(students and companies), the way most recruiters and HRs treat them isn't something to talk about and the pay difference is visible.
Also, It isn't easy for them to catch up. You had the privilege of being able to afford to study for 4 years while it is not the same story for most people at/from the bootcamps. To add to this, They also feel left out when you discuss about your days at the Uni or are discussing some computer science concepts.
If you have a colleague or someone around who is self taught or from a bootcamp, be a bit more kind and explain or refer them to reading material on concepts in a subtle way, it doesn't take much to make them feel included.
I sympathize with that (as someone who never went through uni for CS or a bootcamp), but at the same time, I've interviewed a bunch of bootcamp folks, and this mentality used to go the other way far too often as well. I've had a bunch of them have extremely huge egos and admitting to being told by their bootcamp that people who go to college for CS are less prepared for "the real world" than they are. I had one extremely rude candidate tell me straight up (after being told we're looking for someone with at least 5 years experience) "I went to X Bootcamp, which is like 10 years real world experience!" I can't imagine that was something he made up in his own brain. Most often, I'd talk to candidates who were being told to apply to senior and principal roles because they were told that their bootcamp experience qualified them for that (and it didn't hurt that, you know, the bootcamp stood to make more $$$ from their ISA if they happened to land a higher paying gig).
I think A LOT of that has trailed off as I haven't run up against that in probably 3-4 years as some of the crappier ones have folded (though some of what I shared above came from ones that still going strong...). But, man for a while from like 2013-2015, it was a huge issue to the point where I'd recommending passing on nearly every bootcamp grad unless we knew the bootcamp's graduates from other means.
Sure, some students will learn very fast, but on average - there's more to it than just cramming. And the people that manage to "grind" for N months and land a FAANG job are few and far between, not to mention that they're essentially cramming a very, very small portion of the CS curriculum.
Question, how do you get a FAANG job? Common answer, grid leetcode questions.
Not super useful comment, just sayin
Should you be paid equal to someone coming out of uni? I don't think so, the ramp-up will be hard and longer for the bootcamps guys, but this will change as you gain experience, after 5 years the difference in pay should be negligible if you properly ramp up!
About a decade ago I graduated from a technical institute's two year Computer Engineering Technology diploma program, so not a bootcamp, but absolutely not a full CS degree, and I've found this is a really important bit. My technical skills aren't really lacking, but my understanding and terminology still is. For my part I've become comfortable with saying "I'm unfamiliar with that concept, could you tell me more?"
lol we’re not charity cases.
I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult. My life and the life of my children are going to reap benefits from this. If you're reading this and thinking "Can I do this?" then I'd highly recommend you attempt to find a way to make it work.
This is a pretty selective and narrow idea of what a college did or does. Most try to build knowledge before just validating it.
Over the years I've become a little cynical when I see people asking "should I become a developer?" Because, on one hand, you are right. It changed my life in a positive way. But I've also realized how many people think, essentially, that they take a two-week course and they get a six-figure job where they fuck around all day. Not so much!
I deal with a lot of work that's really similar to puzzle solving. "Why did this occur? Is it normal behaviour or malicious?" and then I get to do deep dives trying to figure out why something happened. If I find malicious behaviour I get to go into incident response mode and boot out a bad guy. If I find a false positive I get to do some engineering to figure out how to avoid this while still maintaining the purpose of the original rules (while also minimising system overhead for the rule processing). The kicker is there are a LOT of companies willing to pay me a LOT of money to do this. I'm so incredibly lucky.
Either way though, security is incredibly important. You're doin' the lord's work.
One day, I overheard the CTO talking about hiring more devs, and inquired with them about it just briefly. He set up a meeting and we talked shop and I told him my story, the kinds of things I made, what I liked. Already at this point I was elated: I could talk to a real person about technical stuff I am interested in, and they understood me, and even more, they wanted me to join the team! After so much emotional energy and hopes dashed by constant applications with no response, I didn't even care if I wasn't going to get a job, it was enough to just be seen. But I was going to get the job!
Just found out though that it's not going to happen, because they couldn't clear hiring someone to replace my current position; it's a startup and we are not doing well now (home brokerage startup). Will hold on for now, but not too hopeful anymore.
Just really really crazy to me how much I labored over applications and things for so long with just nothing at all back, and all it really took was being able to be in the same room as someone. Equal parts hopeful and frustrating honestly.
Also I bet they would be able to find someone to replace you a lot quicker if they thought you were leaving
> The hardest part of coding is not technical or even getting the job, it’s liking the job. If you do not enjoy the often stressful and thankless role of staring at the computer and doing frustrating logic puzzles, usually alone, eventually you will burn out and wonder why you ever got into the industry.
I even enjoy coding sometimes, damn it does it get demoralizing sometimes
> Important point here: Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job.
This is what separates people that can make it and people who can't. Like when people are asking questions, how do I learn to code or whatever. I think you have already lost.
Do people find this topic of getting into tech in abnormal ways interesting? Maybe ill share mine one day. I was kind of amused by the idea that I failed out of my engineering program, I got a D in my only comp sci class and now Im a sr engineer at a popular tech company lol.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018... // https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541
It’s not really intelligence or grit, it’s just that you actually like staring at a cold unfeeling machine that tells you that you’ve fucked up over and over again.
I found great comic relief in this characterization, and want to extend the joke, comments like "that sounds 100 times better than my ex" or creating a "YFU as a service" company
Thanks for brightening my day.
Disclosure- it was more often me who was the harsh/unfeeling partner, not the ex.
And I like programming.
For all their faults these companies offer training, apprenticeship and a breakthrough that American companies are often hesitant to offer .
Those execs then go on to brag about it on their resume and get hired by another company for more money to cause the same type of disaster. Rinse repeat. Good for the outsourcing companies, good for the execs, bad for the existing dev team, bad for the hiring company. This has happened so many times over the last 20+ years, I'm amazed it still works.
Here is a very egregious example but it's still funny:
Wondering if anyone has any insight as to where I might be able to help people look for a first coding job, especially without a connection to a bootcamp.
How these might work is that you come in at a lower level (Associate, "level 1", whatever, varies by company) and generally these are up-or-out roles where a person has a year or so to prove themselves or they would be let go.
He was a white Etonian but had the privilege to pay for a long enough holiday to move into one of the diversity groups.
Also generally I think easier to smart smaller. Companies that aren't as tech focused will probably be more lenient.
You can always try to build some websites for local companies or friends gratis as well to get some work experience.
Absolutely. But also do something for yourself with your programming so you can talk about it. If it's important to you, you will be able to convey that to people in your group.
Track your pokemon cards. Record your bikes. Make some decorations that blink. Something. Anything. As long as it's actually relevant to something you want to do, you'll be fine.
Doing a port shows that you can work with an existing codebase and work with others. This is vastly more important to a business than pure programming chops.
When applying for jobs in a medium-sized but not-very-techy-city, I found the hardest part to be just getting an interview offer. But the interview itself usually ranged from braindead easy to a straightforward take-home exam. So I guess the takeaway is to fluff up your resume and accomplishments as much as possible. It turns out to be much easier to impress someone in an interview than with your resume. And at least for entry-level positions, you aren't really grilled on trivia for whatever you list, maybe just a general "how-does-it-work" question.
Sadly I didn't realize this until my second go-around with job-hunting. The first time I only really got responses for intern positions (was applying for both frontend / backend / fullstack). Luckily I was offered a full-time frontend position after interviewing for an internship and crushing the take-home exam.
Write them up like you believe they are important. Put the code on your GitHub. Advertise. Get pics of the KVM up and write something like a blog post about it. Remember - your competition doesn't have the self-motivation to be creative like this.
We've seen such ridiculous "grade inflation" in tech and it's really going to hurt us all at some point. Software development struggles for credibility as real engineering work, and a boot camp, 4 years of experience and a couple of jobs is not a senior level engineer.
If your company has >$100B market cap, there is literally no reason why you shouldn't be paying juniors $100k starting at least. If you work on a platform bringing in billions of dollars of revenue per quarter, you deserve to reap the rewards.
I'm not trying to be mean... The title inflation is just absolutely amazing (not in a good way)
And almost every time I get a response, it turns out that the poster is located in a depressed market outside the US (like southern Europe or the Canadian prairies), and also not actively hiring.
If you’re older your experience was that all really good coders were self-taught coders. They were people who learned by cracking or modifying software or working out how their computer worked the hard way in a very deep way. For awhile most really great coders were either out of a very small number of schools or were entirely self-taught.
I think this dynamic died though by 2000 at the latest.
I will say that a lot of self taught people that I have interviewed and not hired had this - well, attitude. But that’s the wrong word for it.
Let me give an example. Not long ago I interviewed a self-taught python guy who spent part of the interview explaining how hard pointers are. I am a lifetime c programmer. Pointers are maybe hazardous but they are not hard, they are such a simple construct that people effectively reinvent them over and over and pointer-like objects show up over and over. It was just the weirdest interview, he was quite adamant about it, like he was confused that I wasn’t instantly agreeing, almost like visiting a forum for people who only know python. It was very off putting once I realized that most of it was bluster to explain that he knew python and only python and that was a kind of mantra that he’d learned made him sound more thoughtful than he was. I don’t think he knew.
Another typical example is “I could learn the CS degree stuff if I wanted to but I don’t need to” aspect by candidates that don’t know basic algorithms or analysis.
I’m not opposed to self-taught. I was, myself, a self-taught paid professional coder before I got my CS degree. I did discover a world of stuff I didn’t know doing the CS degree though and the dismissiveness is unfortunately common. A lot of CS has zero to do with industry but unfortunately not all of it.
I guess my point here is that, unfortunately, interviewers build mental stereotypes due to experience that you’re unfortunately exposed to. I’m still game to hire self-taught coders but I now aggressively filter that set to avoid the kind of limited mentality I’m trying (and failing) to describe above.
It's definitely possible to do but it's not a quick journey and I think you have to genuinely enjoy programming. As in, if you didn't work in tech, you'd still play with code for fun. Saying this if you do enjoy it I think it's fairly easy to do assuming you take the long slog of a route, focus on experience over salary, and have reasonable expectations at the beginning. Your first job may not be development - it could be IT support, or manual testing, but you start writing code to automate small bits and try move into a developer role after a year or twos experience. FWIW, my first full-time job in 2014 paid 13k GBP (around $16k I think).
That will buy you success, no matter the industry. It’s kind of amazing what self-discipline and delayed gratification buys you.
As a hiring manager, I looked for exactly the type of thing this person did. They would have definitely been someone I would have hired. I had an interesting team.
I have no opinions on bootcamps. I’m a high school dropout with a GED, along with a redneck technician school, and whole lot of short seminars and individual classes (but no college). I did OK.
I did attend a one-week “bootcamp” for ObjC iOS programming, once (Big Nerd Ranch), but that was a very different thing from something like Flatiron School. It was a “springboard.”
> I was a jazz pianist in a restaurant in my teens.
I have known many musicians in the industry (I was one). I think musical aptitude is probably a good indicator of software development aptitude.
Not to mention, working a tough gig, in your teens.
As did I when i was a hiring manager (I'm taking a several year break from leading people)...but, wow, those individuals are difficult to find...at least it was for me. In my own life i have been given a couple of chances by bosses who might otherwise not hire me (based on my resume at the time)...and i was always able to keep them happy. So thank you for whatever you do/have done by giving people that chance! Kudos to you!
I am currently thinking of switching jobs, but I don't know if I should be playing a numbers game or genuinely looking for a good fit, or somewhere I could grow internally.
I'll write another quick one on this topic later.
I'll give a metaphor. I always wanted to learn how to kickflip as a kid, but I sucked at skateboarding. It took me 10 years, many pairs of shoes, and tens of thousands of tries later to land a kickflip. Can I kickflip? Yes, barely. But does that mean it would be worth my time to pursue skateboarding beyond doing kickflips? Probably not. I just don't have the talent for it. Other people learned to kickflip their first few months of skateboarding.
Just as with writing, there's some disabilities that will make it impossible or impractical, but otherwise, with sufficient effort, yes.
Also just as with writing, not everyone can be good enough to have a job centering the skill, especially on the strength of that skill alone (some will be able to leverage moderate skill in the target area plus skill in some other area.)
Like writing, but perhaps somewhat less so than writing, it may be useful even in jobs that don't formally center the skills (subprofessional writing skills are useful in jobs that aren't “writer”, subprofessional programming skills in jobs that aren't “programmer”.)
The difference between a complex spreadsheet and an application program isn't all that large, and with no-code / low-code platforms as a stepping stone lots of people who otherwise would never get into programming because the first level abstractions are too far away from what they want to accomplish now find themselves drawn into coding.
Programming is difficult, possibly unnecessarily so. If we made programming easier more people could do it. To some extent there is gatekeeping, to some extent it really is a hard to acquire skill if you want to be able to do it at a very high level. But just like talking, everybody can program at some level, but not everybody has the interest to want to do so at the level of low level code.
Aside from a few weeks training on an unrelated Masters I'm IT-unqualified, but got a job with an IT company making software for an industry. I started out coding, but knew I was never going to be great at it - although it can be really satisfying to make something 'elegant' that's yours.
Then moved into a more customer-facing role, trying to capture what they wanted the software to do. Learnt elegance was maybe of less importance, than solving real world problems.
Then moved into Product Management, which was maybe the first time I felt a 'good fit'. Gave me the opportunity to come up with 'big vague ideas/themes', and defer the implementation to the architects and devs who were actually good at the job. You try to break it down into consumable chunks - but it's on you to make it all come together.
Final thought is just that even outside of dev, I now realize there's a massive spectrum of people within it. Some want you to absolutely nail-down the down criteria and will deliver against it. Others want to understand why, and if you can explain it relatively succinctly, will come back with suggestions on how stuff can be improved.
I guess my point is that excellent coders are required - but the "rockstar coder trope" overlooks the vast majority of people working in IT. e.g. If you've say spent a decade serving food in or running a restaurant, you've got a way better understanding of what the requirements of a POS system are, than the people creating it. If you want to move to IT, you need to learn the vocab and grammar, but you don't have to be fluent - bring in your experience. IT can only solve an understood problem, and being able to articulate that is a prerequisite to a solution.
Writing an epic and a dozen US is definitely a lot quicker for one person to do, than it is for a team to implement it. So from that side, PM does a lot less work. Plus there's dev work like platform architecture, upgrading, platform, change management, automated test-cases etc, that I don't even have to think about. There's a massive multiplier there. Maybe 1 day a week writing requirements can keep a team busy and another day for answering questions, sprint ceremonies etc (story review, signing off demos) - but I'd say less than half my time is dealing with the actual productive work.
Dev team just functions on 2-week sprints and the commitments they've given - so hard for it to go too-sideways, and they're safely insulated.
Majority of my time goes on the "meta-work" - trying to manage what goes into those sprints. Customer requirements/placation - they don't (and shouldn't) have to give a toss about our internal sprints - so somebody has to ensure they'll be happy/not-going-to-sue in 18 months. Also the budget side is a complete Pain-in-the-arse. Your Agile trainer imagines there's some single pot of money to splash about however you choose to spend most efficiently. Reality is you're fighting for little top-down piles on internal accounts and then trying to fit the work you've done to them.
I think bootcamps are a suboptimal choice. You are investing months of hard work teaching yourself real world skills which at best will land you a decent junior developer job in some mid of the pack company (maybe 50-60k€ if you pick UK, Switzerland or one of the nordic countries - maybe something short of 100k$ in the US tech area?).
I did exactly that when I was 15 and passioned about creating and it was hard; that also meant that by the time I was out of computer science I had already been working in senior capacity with a senior level salary (roughly 100k€, again, for mid of the pack company - which was roughly equivalent to fang junior total compensation).
Given you are investing months and money is an important factor, I'd recommend you just grind leetcode without learning frontend programming or whatever is popular at the moment. After being good at leetcoding without knowing how to code, you can just go and ace fang interviews and land a much better starting salary.
I know people who did the above and just learned web programming on the job at a fang while they were juniors and being paid to do so.
Too many people self select themselves out of things they could be doing by simply deciding that they could never do it.
I studied computer science. I've taught myself lots of other stuff over the years including a lot of things that have nothing to do with computers. I'm a decent photographer. I can bake some nice sourdough breads. I'm not a bad cook and I definitely like eating my own food. I can repair stuff. Etc. Nobody ever taught me any of these things. I just started doing them and then figured out how to do them better. If I'm interested in it, I'll find a way.
Professionally, anything you put your mind to you can be the world's leading expert in just a few years. But you have to dedicate yourself. That's a bit of wisdom my professor gave me when I started my phd. He was not wrong.
You don't have to look to Sweden for cheaper devs. You could settle for UK. Or Eastern Europe who have a totally different cost of living.
Additionally hybrid developer/business folk are becoming a thing, diversifying the demand as well as the skillset. To say nothing of the "CEO Compensation" halo effect Silicon Valley wages have on the industry.
Next to sales it is increasingly becoming the most valuable aspect of many industries that are critical to modern western economies (finance, insurance, technology), and AI is 'always' on the horizon as a future cost cutter, so I expect the trend to stick around.
If I was compelled to summarize how I did it, 1) devoted enormous quantities of free time, from age 12 to mid-career, to getting good; 2) pretty smooth talker; 3) actually wanted to do #1, as in couldn’t drag myself away from it.
A computer-related job can be really burning for people that don't like technology.
I don't see a technology-passionate person with technology and computers cursing a bootcamp instead of a degree when you are going to learn in a much deeper way.
If it matters, I have a Computer Engineering BSc and I don't regret it. Although I might have if it had costed me a kidney.
Prior to the web in the 1990s I would say it was a lot harder than it is today to try to figure out and become the guru kind of person that you needed to be in the early 1990s and it was a lot of it was because the just there was not a lot of material about the subject matter like Unix and software engineering and just the web was not available there was no PDF so today it's a lot easier than it used to be for sure, I'm saying to become self-taught. anybody can download a PDF about some subject matter read it spend a lot of time and become an expert, compared to anything prior to the early 1990s. The way that I became an expert in the early 1990s was by reading source code and figuring things out because there was just no documentation for anything. as a matter of fact the reason why I got into software engineering in the first place was because so much stuff was broken and just never worked that I spent more time debugging software than I did actually using it...
as far as experience, you can get experience just by volunteering or doing internships and then using that as leverage on your resume to get real jobs when you don't have experience. When I was in my early teens I volunteered at random internet/BBS providers to fix their broken systems, and this turns into experience that you can put on your resume.
Congrats! You earn more than me after 10 years of experience and a bachelor and masters degree (Computer Science) in Western Europe (my current salary is: 95K eur gross/year)
I really wish this was the thing that was most difficult about the jobs I’ve had. I really wish it was.
Instead - I’d say the promise of autonomy, ownership, and craftsmanship but in reality none of that is what bothers me most about the industry. On top of this - extremely bad managers are not just common but the standard. This is talked to death on HN and elsewhere but it’s quite insane that people who make $500k+/yr cannot learn how to be slightly less of an asshole and more empathetic as a human being. It’s weird to me that most managers I’ve had are borderline sociopaths when it comes to the workplace. It’s a weird thing too because if they were just honest about why they did things - people wouldn’t be as upset with them. But most managers I guess think it’s better to lie to reports or maybe they’re too ashamed to say, “well we’re doing this because I might get a good perf review and a promo out of it.” It’s never said but it’s clearly the subtext for anyone noticing.
I just dislike the dishonesty that is so rampant in the industry and the completely insane amount of mixed incentive structure going on that ultimately hinders many companies. I am not surprised that some of the companies I’ve worked at that have over 1000 engineers seem to get even less done than when they had 100. Mixed incentives causing roadblocks everywhere.
I find the technical, the code, and other “programming” like aspects of software dev to be completely boring - and if I’m being honest - a bit below me. They’ve always been… busy work.
I'm happy to say I find coding extremely fun. I like everything in it, even the most irritating bugs ( some of these will turn into stories down the line, we all remember THAT bug).
It was just surprised by the description. I never even considered there could be people in the computer engineering businees who'd legitimately could not like coding.
I'm in shock at just how underpaid I am as a gov't contractor. Is this 175k salary in a tech hub or the Midwest?
So that excludes the Midwest for the most part, except remote tech companies are changing that. Places like Automattic or Airbnb (from their recent announcement) don’t pay based on location anymore, and won’t dock your pay if you move to the Midwest.
These higher salaries are driven by VC money and demand for sure. In my personal experience and network, small startups, midsize startups, and massive tech companies are are all hiring as much as possible. Plus, the classic startup approach is to use VC money to fund product development by quickly increasing the number of devs, and then figuring out profitability down the road after you have tons of users.
This leads to an environment where smaller startups don’t need to cut dev teams or hiring to increase profit margins — the main goal is to build the product asap and grow users. And that means hiring lots of decent devs. And then big companies like Amazon just have loads of money and tons of products that need constant improvement, which only happens with devs.
So with significant competition and need to hire devs and lots of available money, developers have space to negotiate pretty great salaries.
Again, this varies everywhere and maybe isn’t the same for “non-tech” companies quite as much (because that VC money and massive scale might not exist as much outside of tech).
There’s someone in Pittsburgh on L3 (entry level) at Google, earning $158K total compensation. https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Pittsburgh...
That’s substantially below what Google usually pay for entry level, $195K but that’s the joy of living in the Midwest, right? https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
Did those really low paying job go away? Or has it become really competitive to even get those?
This includes jobs for newcomers that indeed pay just 30k --- and it's worth noting just how low that salary is in these days: 25k of that goes to taxes, rent, and paying off debt.
I'm turning towards finance instead as the entry barrier seems signifcantly lower.
Your background is highly attractive, and there are enough people here with the clout to get you started on a more positive interview track.
Also perhaps some coaching; you might have some tactical errors in how you approach.
With that said, finance may also be a really good option for you. At the right bank, the strong math background + top GPA is the hiring requirement. They also like people with Ph.D.s in technical physics.
You should have some coding experience, but you'll be working in their custom setups anyway -- if you're good at math, you can pick up APL (it's a language, look it up) programming quickly. Otherwise, bank python is pretty divergent from python, or you are looking at Matlab/R.
They'll want someone who can translate complicated math into a model. You are less likely to find that in most tech companies.
I agree that I may be making tactical errors. I've confined myself to job adverts through e.g. LinkedIn for the lack of knowing where else to look. I also lack the connections that most others at my stage of career have.
I know my way a bit around coding though I'm entirely self-taught so I have no degrees to back up that claim. I have considered throwing my projects on Github as a kind of 'proof of work' to employers.
Could you perhaps name some specific directions that would be suitable for someone with my background? People around me mentioned quantitative finance as an example of a direction for math PhDs to go into --- but I'd frankly be open to any job that lets me make use of my skills.
Are you good at math competitions? Competitive programming is basically the same thing. This is how I transitioned in the field. If you can do these, interviews will be a breeze.
I like to think that I could get through interviews quite easily too; if applications start with a cognitive test I invariably make it through. My applications tend to die at the HR layer (which is usually the first stage) so I haven't actually made it to a real-life interview.
I studied mechanical engineering from a Tier 3 college in India. I wanted computer science but I didn't qualify for the program because of my scores in the exam. I joined mechanical engineering and kept coding as a hobby for the first year. I abandoned it in the second year. The only thing closely related to tech that I had going for me was that I'd just started using Linux in my second year. This was 2007 and I started using Linux Mint 7 Gloria.
I completed my engineering with decent scores, but that didn't matter since I could only get a job at a motorcycle factory after some tarnished dreams of studying for my master's. I worked in a factory for 3 years and finally ended up working for a monster who made me loathe the field. I left that field and moved to an e-commerce website that needed a content writer. I had aspirations of being a published writer, having written 2 books, and I thought this was a fine way to segue into the field. I was hired as a content writer for the books team at Flipkart. I joined, and began to love my job.
I was more computer savvy than most of my peers already. The others were struggling with some work related to Google Spreadsheets and I took it upon myself to improve the process. I didn't realize what an effect that would have on me.
I learnt how to write Excel macros. But that didn't scale for the catalogue dumps we would get every 15 days. So i learnt Python after talking to a friend at IBM, and I built a smallish desktop application using PyQt4 and MySql. It was super fun and I learnt a lot.
I left the company because they wouldn't give me a chance to be a real developer, and I worked for a mechanical engineering company called GKN where I began writing small tools for mechanical engineers to use. I stayed there for 3 years and worked myself to the bone. I was in a silo since I was the only developer there. I mostly did Python and React.
I eventually moved out, and joined Visa, with a huge imposters syndrome. And as I joined Visa, I also started going to meetups and conferences. It was in this time that I discovered just how good a programmer I am.
My salary today, 10 years later, is 400x my first salary. It has grown ridiculously to say the least.
Yes it is possible. And no you do not need to pay a thing to pivot. All you need is time, and dedication.
The only things going for me were an insatiable need to learn, and an interest in computers.
in the past ive had zero luck even getting interviews for dev jobs so ive thought about getting some AWS/Azure certificates to have some kind of proof I can put on paper and check boxes. otherwise i could grind leetcode but it'll be for nothing if I cant even get called back?
So obvious and yet so rare.
You wouldn’t know you hate it until you really hate it.
I've actually been documenting stories of self-taught and bootcamp developers on my website for 3 years. It's amazing the variety of backgrounds that people have had before getting into programming. Just last week I interviewed a woman who was a Beauty Therapist until Covid hit and they wanted a career change. I also have a job board for self-taught and bootcamp-friendly positions: www.nocsdegree.com
If anyone in this thread wants to be featured, let me know.
My turn to follow on these footsteps.
It's the late 00's. I am in my early 20s. I have an associate's degree from the local community college, and I have been messing around with programming since I was 8 years old. I am unemployed, having not long before been laid off from a minimum-wage job at a failing retail establishment. I am living at my parents' house, spending most of my time messing with code and hanging out on IRC.
I am contacted on IRC, one day, by a recruiter for one of the major tech companies. He tells me that I sound like I know what I'm talking about, and would I like to interview for a job?
Well, yes, of course I do.
This major tech company has an office in a city a few hours' drive from where I live. I go there for the interview process, which is somewhat grueling.
I don't get the job. I had a brain fart and whiffed some basic question about computational complexity; I'd forgotten what O(n log n) means. So it goes.
Perhaps a week later, the recruiter calls me back, saying that, out of the blue, a different subsidiary of the major tech company would like to interview me. This subsidiary is an acquired startup, a major website in its own right, and would I be interested in interviewing there?
Well, yes, of course I am.
This subsidiary's office is located in the Bay Area, which is a somewhat greater journey, but I fly there and do the interview process again.
I got the job, that time. I aced the interview, in fact. Pro tip: It is a good sign if you manage to blow through all of an interviewer's prepared questions, and force him to resort to asking riddles, and then manage to answer the riddle correctly, too.
It was only later, after I started to work there, that I learned the full story. The website's ops team needed to hire someone. Although this subsidiary was owned by the major tech company, it was still in many ways a separate company, not yet assimilated into the greater corporate entity. Thus, they basically just walked over to HR, and asked to poke around in their resume database.
They did a simple keyword search, and my resume popped up. It was a total coincidence. One of the keywords they used was the programming language they used, which I had also happened to use in some open-source stuff. Another keyword was related to the subject of the subsidiary's website, which, entirely unrelatedly, also happened to be a word used in the name of the retail job I had recently been laid off from.
My resume was very nearly a blank sheet of paper, aside from these things. I was told that the site's lead architect, on seeing it, reacted along the lines of, "Oh, we have got to interview this guy."
So they did, and I spent the next several years working there.
This is an incredibly stupid story. There is absolutely no part of this process which I would point to as advice for other people. To the extent that this has led to my success, it was blind, stinking luck, and I doubt it would ever happen again.
I'm not sure what moral you could take from this. "Know your shit" seems patronizing. I would like to think that possessing technical know-how with no relevant degree, certifications, or experience is still a state which can lead to success, but I suspect that such extraordinary luck is still a necessary component as well.
My current job - company gets big contract m, desperately needs to scale up. I was fed up with previous job, and just happened to have used Django. Got headhunted and got a huge pay rise. Got to company to find that they literally couldn’t find Django developers for love nor money locally. I’d only really taken on a tiny side project in the last job - had I not used it, they probably wouldn’t have been interested in me here.
It is insane how much companies pay for refusing to pay for training.
Graduated with a STEM (only partial comp-sci though) degree from a state school in NY. The uni prepared me zero for how to interview, as a result I bombed most of my coding ones (I remember being asked in one "Tell me about yourself", and having never heard of an elevator pitch before saying something like "Uhh, I think Buddhism is pretty cool..." and remember seeing the light go out of my interviewer's eyes.) Took some tech-adjacent contract jobs, and eventually ended up doing helpdesk for seven years.
Hated it, knew I wanted to program, eventually left my job to attempt solo Android development but had no idea how to manage my own time. Finally heard about coding bootcamps from the friend of a friend, did some research, and joined one (was lucky to have enough money saved for tuition, something like 15k.)
Was one of the only people in the cohort with any prior CS experience, but almost everybody was dedicated and did quite well. Was a great experience, though stressful (actually developed shingles midway through, which for someone in their early thirties generally indicates serious stress.) Graduated, and landed my first programming job in about three months.
It was hard, and my entire team was remote which wasn't great, as I didn't really feel empowered to ask as many questions as I should have (which is extremely important.) Was a great experience though, and everyone there was fantastic. Was downsized out after about 13 months, landed another job six months after, and stayed there for almost three years before we were acquired.
The tl;dr is that bootcamps worked amazingly well for me, and I've never been happier in my current job – it's night and day from what I was doing before, and pays a whole hell of a lot better. I keep hearing that the bootcamp ecosystem is different now, which is a damn shame because it worked a miracle for me. I was lucky too: our cohort lead instructor was a phenomenal teacher, which obviously isn't always the case. But it's a trade-type school which, in a perfect world, is available for people who want to attempt this transition.
Oh, my school also provided something invaluable (as is mentioned in the article): they hustled to connect me with companies looking to hire new devs. Both of my positions originated through connections my bootcamp made for me (I did a lot of work to land interviews myself, but both times ended up taking positions the bootcamp facilitated.) A really good business development department (or whatever they call it) is incredibly important in a bootcamp, imo.
Did you not have any jobs prior? Other than throwing in some coding questions, I have found interviews to be interviews.
> Both of my positions originated through connections my bootcamp made for me
I got my first part time programming job when I was a sophomore in undergrad through a friend I met in the CS program. He already worked at a small local company, needed help, and connected me with his boss.
The importance of connections I think is missed by many. It's not about someone giving you a job (though that does happen), but giving you a chance to interview.