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Comment by progbits | Hacker News Reader

Are any of these bootcamps actually good? Every time I looked into them it seemed like a ridiculously shallow syllabus that would leave you far from being able to do the job they claim. Maybe you could pass HR interview by knowing some keywords and last a month or two before getting fired.

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Some are good, some aren't. The problem is, a Bootcamp student can't tell the difference and there's nothing like an accreditation system for them so it's full on market for lemons[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

This exactly. It reminds me of the "ESL certifications" you can get online - there's no presiding international body for guaranteeing some minimal level of quality / competency.

Well at least for those CEFR and TOEFL exist.

I should have been more clear. Those are for students who are learning, ESL is for people who intend to teach English. There are only two real recognized certificates for it - Trinity which is Oxford, and CELTA which is Cambridge.

I used General Assembly to learn frontend web development about 5 years ago. It was a positive experience, the two types of people I saw succeed were

1. people with some kind of tech background already and

2. people who were really smart but not technically oriented (we had 4 former professional artists and musicians in my cohort, one of whom was a Princeton undergrad).

The people who failed were people who had no curiosity to genuinely grow their knowledge and were just there because they wanted to check a box before getting a better paying job.

I've found that my curiosity drops commensurate with my savings (and therefore the chance I'm going to get kicked out of my home, my belongings repossessed, and find food unaffordable). If people are so insecure that this opportunity to retrain an entire workforce was squandered - the money was there, the desire was there, the expertise was there - it comes off to me as more of a, "If you owe the bank $1 billion...", sort of problem, for society.

No they are not. They are mostly one additional way to take money from people who are desperate and bury them under loans making them believe a sticker on their resume will make it more appealing.

On the other hand, they were a way to get large numbers of people into the field and staff unfilled positions. The market was very hot a couple of years ago.

Sure and a lot of those are being kicked out in the current layoff cycle. So it helped, maybe, companies with their engineering seats beeing filled, but didn't necessarily help at all with getting things done.

Easy come, easy go. Now everyone is looking for machine learning engineers instead of front end for the "current thing".

About 2018 I was helping with Operation Code (tech for vets) and doing their podcast. There was one guy who said he knew people in his bootcamp who got job offers before they were even finished. A number of my interviews got jobs that lasted.

The job market is different now, from what I hear.

At that time people making bootcamps was a way to show that they were willing to learn, a big positive factor when hiring somebody. Today it doesn't mean much, a lot do the bootcamp and believe that they now know everything and that there is no need to do any additional learning effort. And it is difficult to filter those people out to get to the genuinely interesting ones.

> a lot do the bootcamp and believe that they now know everything and that the effort is not necessary to pursue anymore.

I don't understand this. What does "the effort is not necessary to pursue anymore" mean?

That they don't need to study anymore. That they think they've studied enough in bootcamp that they don't need to learn anything else to get a job and be a functional engineer.

fixed it

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