I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class.
None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great experience.
Give them about 32 hours of work a week and 8 hours of tutorials on other things. Build them up from there.
I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow. Because the ugly truth is a lot of the bootcampers hit a plateau. I have had a couple push through to my bar for senior, but most cap out in my mid range.
During the shortage the ability to hire and get solid mids out of 65% of them was a net positive. Right now though it is less important given the talent coming into the market.
I've had similar problems. We've had some bootcamp grads who were good to work with and acknowledged that they were still very junior. We've also had some bootcamp grads who felt entitled to mid-range to senior compensation after their first year, while still getting their bearings on basic developer work. It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp after a couple years in the industry.
I dunno, I think what you have right there is pretty good explanation wise, haha.
People who treat the bootcamp as the terminal level of knowledge plateau.
A couple of simple hobby projects and participation in meetups and chats can give both faster ramp-up (beyond very basic) and solid job leads. My 2c.
One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github (though, yes, you should include those).
I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the bootcamps, a way to pad their “successfully employed” rates while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault the candidates for putting those experiences in their resume. They need that money to keep their job searches going, and recruiters are always biasing against gaps on the resume.
If you’re being paid by them for any reason, put it on your resume. (And if you’re not…move it to the education section, where it belongs.)
There might be perfectly legitimate reasons to be employed. Maybe they were aiding instruction of earlier students as they got more experience, akin to a tutor or teaching assistant in colleges. Maybe they took a temporary job because they were unable to find a job right out of bootcamp, and the reasons for not being able to get a job don’t necessarily have to be negative (e.g. they had familial commitments).
Getting a job from a bootcamp is already hard and it wouldn’t quite sit right with me to reject someone outright for something that could be explainable. Perhaps if you are drowning in applicants then you are forced to be harsher out of practicality, but even then surely there’s a better filter then someone reporting what is ostensibly an experience applicable to job they’re pursuing.
If you make this the metric to evaluate on, you're going to end up with the Ivy League scenario where bootcamps only admit people who would have succeeded anyway.
The POINT of education is to give people a chance to succeed who were likely to fail without it, and you have to accept a failure rate for that to work.
I've seen this, too. At some point, everyone coming out of certain bootcamps was an "instructor" rather than just a graduate. I suspect one of them is running a scheme to have their own grads teach their own classes for reduced tuition.
I second the cover letter section. GitHub goes a long way, but it needs something unique. I know exactly what projects are taught at local bootcamps because they're in every single bootcamp grad's GitHub profile. Show me something you worked on by yourself.
And why on earth did you keep the job posting open to accumulate 2000+ applicants? Legal reasons?
I just throw the cover letters in the bin...
I took a coding boot camp when I decided to leave academia to join industry, and it was a useful primer on the “in” technologies that folks would be hiring for, and of the “style” of code that was fashionable at the time. I would not have hired any of my classmates (well, I might have hired one as a junior), but the bootcamp did what I needed it to do, exposing me to the “culture” of programming at tech companies.
I was hired as a mid-level and quickly progressed to senior at a large global tech company. I have been at a few different tech companies now and haven’t run into any major challenges or problems, and have only received positive feedback from my peers and managers.
If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential. I think it helped that I had a number of usable “products” that I had made over the course of my career as a solo programmer that didn’t really fit any mold. I also think it helped that I didn’t have any trouble with basic algorithm brain teasers, finding them sort of fun at the time I was interviewing. I’ve never tried leetcode but I suspect I’ve only seen leetcode “easies.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do any of that for any of my subsequent jobs as I don’t think I’d have the patience for it anymore.
You would be wrong. The most important indicator the hiring manager saw in you is that you worked in academia. Hiring someone who worked in academia and also learned to code on the side is a lot different than hiring a middle aged soccer mom whose MLM scheme didn't work out. Both may have a 3 month bootcamp under their belt, but one has an entirely different work ethic.
By the way, hiring is all about judging people‘s past work, and I‘m sorry to pop your bubble if you think past MLM work or having large gaps in your employment history doesn‘t reflect bad on anyone.
I would love to ask why didn't you pursue programming in the first place, but last time I did that the person explained to me that they have a complex, chronic, hard to diagnose rare digestive tract disease and they went to study nutritional science specifically so that they could at least figure out what to eat to not makes things worse.
Overall, I’ve had a terrible experience with the bootcamp “mills” that cram people though dozens in a batch and where all of them have some bullshit story about how they did customer interviews and then built an inventory manager or CRM or e-commerce site for this (made-up) business. The story rhymes with a story that would be relevant but it’s 100% veneer with no backer.
They’ll have a GitHub link on their resume. On it, you can see the same code as 5 other applicants. All the green days are clustered together and all stop abruptly at the same time as each other.
Those candidates are what a lot of people think of when they think bootcamp.
tl;dr: bad bootcamps are bad. I don't think I've ever crossed paths with a Lambda School/BloomTech grad to have an opinion on their program.
* this is the type of bootcamp experience that reads to me like the rare positive exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33826116
Most bootcamp students will be young and not know the rules of the game, or the cultural signifiers that make them look 'employable'.
- You have to have an environment where they can learn - You have to have staff who can actually mentor them up
If you don't have either of those (which many startups don't, just due to not simply having the time/bandwidth) then hiring them can be detrimental.
So to answer your question: I know a few, but these companies that can do it are few and far between, and that's the dirty secret here unfortunately. The schools themselves seem to select for "can we place this person here and get our money" rather than necessarily where they can grow.
On the other hand, I dropped out of school and have been programming for a majority of my life. I was never accused of being incompetent or underperforming, but there was a point in my career where I was not going to progress without deeper math skills. That said, it only takes a couple years to learn.
As are many of the college-level lecture notes, assignments, and answer keys.
I mentored another woman in a bootcamp about ten years ago and she later went on to be a senior engineer at HashiCorp. She then got a PhD in Mathematics and eventually got into an academic role in cryptography/security/privacy.
I only have a high school diploma and I've had a successful 20+ year career in software. Honestly, there are people that are driven that go through all sorts of education pathways. I don't see a bootcamp certification being a strong signal towards success or failure. It's just a tool that folks can use.
In my mind, code bootcamps are just like anything else in the realm of professional education - there's a ton of scammy and low quality stuff out there, but there are genuine upsides to the format and some people are served really well and come out as strong engineers.
A number of us has made good careers of it, but yeah the largest % were not capable. It was so bad it made the camp pretty painful at times.
After graduating I was worried about walking into a skeptical audience after they encountered some of my classmates….
Yes and no, because it depends on your expectations. At the last company I worked at, I made sure to have a chat with management to understand what they were looking for before I did my round in the interview loop. I also advised on what potential questions to probe with since I had some insight having worked as a lead instructor at a bootcamp. Sometimes that meant I would thumbs down an otherwise promising bootcamp candidate because they were weaker on say, the frontend when we needed a frontend junior dev. Our VP of Eng had already understood that and we batted way above average… at first.
Then C-level management took that as a sign that all we needed was juniors and cut the budget for hiring mid+ roles in the then hot hiring market. After a long dry spell (rejected offers), we relented and hired more bootcamp grads into junior roles. That eventually flipped the ratio of juniors to non-juniors which will never go well because you end up with an environment that can’t support their growth. On top of that, C-level management expected that more staff == immediate improvements on velocity and were vocally disappointed when we slowed down. We expected it and tried communicating it - ramping juniors sucks up time, they won’t be a net positive until waaaay later, but of course, they knew better.
Looking back on that experience, I learned a lot about the importance of managing upwards and setting very very clear expectations. Because that’s where I see a lot of these hiring situations go wrong. You need to make an honest assessment of both what qualities you need in a junior and of your own environment to know if they work for your company, bootcamp or otherwise.
The curriculum, the teaching style, and the aptitude/ drive of the cohort matters a lot.
This is what drives me nuts. My bootcamp has a legitimately high placement rate (90% hired as SWE or dev within 90 days), that is audited externally, but somehow it is in the same category as something that takes 1/4 the time with a legitimately terrible curriculum.
There needs to be some better differentiator for vocational training.
Something that I learned before I converted fully to SWE is that most other domains of engineering have this class of job I'll call a "tech." In the hardware world they're electricians, or electronics lab techs, in mechanical they're mechanics, and in the other domains you'll call them lab techs or factory techs.
It's a highly technical role with a different entry point that has a harder path to a higher tier of compensation, but also contains a pathway to management and more integration at an organizational level (similar to technical vs management tracks for engineers).
What's different is that domains outside SWE have pretty well-defined ways for people to enter into the "tech" position. Vocational training, like through trade schools, community colleges, the military, etc. We do not have that in software, yet.
Bootcamps are like an experiment into the vocational training to develop a "tech" for software development. Our industry is still very young, so we haven't found a way to define the roles for people that go through that training, and people don't know how it fits in or what the job responsibilities/management should look like yet. I think the model of treating a bootcamp grad like a potential junior engineer is wrong - it's really a separate track for career development.
Like most companies, we hired them into our apprenticeship program and then they worked their way up from there.
Most of them now are senior engineers or moved into management across the globe.
I’d say DevBootcamp seems to have put out some of the strongest students and they’ve done extremely well for themselves with strong representation at FAANG and other “good” tech companies.
Can’t speak for the other camps besides saying I cant think who made it through our apprentice code day.
Some of the other anecdotes in this thread are disheartening, for sure.
Flatiron, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright also had similar reputations early on. A very different landscape now.
There was definitely some bias against it in a few corners of our group but by and large, most didn't care. Ironically, the guy on the team that didn't like her because she came from a coding bootcamp (he had a CS degree) was by far my worst performer.
May be that’s my own biases speaking (and my degree), but I’ve spent all my professional life in a firm belief that a math degree is way more preferential than a CS degree for an SWE job. Like you should hire a CS graduate only when there is no math graduates willing to take the job (but we never had a shortage of those feeding on the Moscow State).
If forced to rationalize this belief, I would say that CS is just a subset of math, and not that intellectually challenging actually, so a person that has chosen a CS course over a math one has voluntarily agreed to narrow his intellectual perspective in order to possibly get a better pay in the future.
(Hides quickly).
It was rough at first but I had a chip on my shoulder and voluntarily worked 10-11 hours a days for 2 years straight to make up the time difference and learn all the things I needed to learn
I was a good hire (and was also bored AF living in Ohio)
I have worked with bootcamp grads who are amazing engineers and ones who are terrible, same with ivy league CS grads.
Early movers in the space like DevBootcamp and App Academy were able to be quite selective about who they took, often picking primarily non-CS grads from elite universities looking to redeploy high levels of baseline intelligence and communication skills into a more lucrative field than whatever they studied at university. That was definitely my motivation once I realized I might never afford a middle-class lifestyle (e.g. homeownership, children) if I kept going in the scientific field I trained for.
This comment has the same energy as the person I once worked with who told me (a lesbian) with total confidence that they'd never met a gay person before. Just because you aren't aware doesn't mean it's not happening all around you.
It's very common for graduates to not talk about it, precisely because of the attitudes you see in these comments. It's easily left off LinkedIn because the experience only lasts a few months. And after you've had some success at the first job, it's not relevant anyway.
How many people do you know in the industry without CS degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps, whether they cop to it or not.
I considered it a shameful secret for years, and it's only now as I approach my tenth anniversary in the industry that I've become more open about it -- I'm confident my work now speaks for itself.
It doesn't include any information about their education but what I can do is pick a selection of the staff level engineers at random and look them up on LinkedIn.
Here's the highest level of education attained by the first 50 I looked at:
7 had a PhD in Computer Science
1 had a PhD in Physics
1 PhD in Electrical Engineering
12 had a master's degree in Computer Science
1 had a master's degree in Computer Engineering
1 had a master's degree in Information Management
13 had a bachelor's degree in Computer Science
1 had a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering
1 had a bachelor's degree in Information Technology
6 did not list any educational experience
6 I could not find on LinkedIn
I did not see any that mentioned a coding bootcamp explicitly.
People tend to play down their bootcamp experiences because of stigma associated with it. It’s possible that there are bootcamp grads that don’t mention it because a lot of people think lesser of them.
I can see why folks might want to hide their bootcamp path if they already have past non-bootcamp experience they can point to. In all fairness, most engineers, whether top-10 CS school or bootcamper, tend to hit a wall around Senior or Staff. Without knowing the true denominator of bootcampers we've hired, I can't properly answer the question of whether bootcampers tend to do better, the same, or worse at these levels than average.
People without CS degrees or degrees at all are fairly common, including at staff level and above. Many of these people have been in the industry since before bootcamps became a thing.
I had a few friends wash out of their tech jobs, and we certainly had some people that were never very good. Most of us were good enough for and entry role, and a few of us were slightly overqualified.
I’m now at a really great and highly technical company.
Some of these programs have serious problems. I think the ones with ISAs are the worst offenders.
Another tip would be, don't interview a bootcamp grad for mid-level jobs.
My golden 2 pieces of advice to bootcamp grads:
Don’t use the resume template the bootcamp gives you. If 2/3 of your resume is “software projects” you’re probably getting screened out at this point even if you’re actually good, it’s a tell.
Second, since you’ll still need to include one or two, spend time polishing the heck out of them and make sure they are online and working! Best if they’re not a microblog, recipe/beer picker, or pokedex. Do the same polishing for your personal site. If it looks like crap you’re probably getting screened out on this, too.
Yes, but most interview candidates from bootcamps couldn't pass the tech screen, and most of the hires were mediocre. One was stellar.
Personality type tends to trump experience. Unless of course you need a specialist to hit the ground running out of the gate.
In general, I have not hired many bootcamp grads over the years. They tend to present as very non-technical in most cases
bootcamp grads make more sense to be brought on as some sort of intern level hire with similar expectations
They joined a successful small e-commerce site (Javascript), then a few years later joined Loon (Google X) (Python), and sensing the wind switched to another Google X project before Loon shut down.
They're doing pretty well, if I say so myself.
Which in 2018 was bought and integrated into Galvanize!
The interesting thing is that much of the value of a diploma/certification is in the "brand" backing it.
In any case, I don't think my partner was counting on the value of the Makersquare brand as anything other than getting their foot in the industry, so that's done and gone.
Of course, all these programs are what you make of them. The best graduates are people that were really invested in learning and took advantage of the curriculum and mentors. For those that put in the work, they come out punching way above their years of experience.