Hacker News Reader

Comment by ike2792 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with bootcamps right now is that they provide no predictive value. If I hire someone with a CS degree from, say, Stanford that has 2-3 internships and a few semester-long projects under their belt, that gives me reasonable confidence as a manager that the person has what it takes to solve problems with software and communicate well. Bootcamp candidate resumes are all basically identical and the projects are so heavily coached and curated that it is difficult to figure out how much the candidate actually knows.

View on HN

In this hypothetical scenario from the article, it's been years since employers stopped hiring juniors, so depending on when they graduate, there's probably employment gaps or unrelated work to factor into your decision as well.

And after this period, when companies start hiring juniors again, the amount of Stanford-like graduates may still be small because few wanted to go into CS. You have like a 2-4 year wait for people deciding to go into CS again.

If you are FAANG, you can throw money at the problem to get the best, but ordinary businesses probably won't be able to get Stanford grads during a junior-hiring boom.

Most people do not have elite resumes and most people are not hiring people with elite resumes. There's plenty of uncertainty in hiring in general, and that being the case with bootcamps isn't much different than a typical resume with a 4-year degree.

I used Stanford as an example, but plenty of companies focus on CS grads from big state schools like Purdue, Michigan, Ohio State, etc that have similar resumes. In my experience, graduates from 4-year CS programs with some internship experience vastly outperform bootcamp grads as a group. I have hired and worked with some outstanding bootcamp grads, but you would never know that they stood out before actually interviewing them since most bootcamps have standard resume templates they tell their grads to use. In an era of 200+ applicants/day for every junior engineering role, you need to be able to tell that someone probably has what it takes to succeed after a 30 second resume scan.

I agree with the position that most people are not coming from "elite" schools, as someone who hires in the midwest. I still much prefer someone with a four year school (and, as the other poster mentioned, internships) to a bootcamp. I have had one bootcamp graduate of five total that was at a useful starting skill level, compared to probably 90% (don't have a count for this one) "base useful" skill out of college.

You would be wrong. The difference between a code camper (3-6 months) vs a bachelor's in compsci is the difference between a paramedic and a doctor. If all you need is a CRUD dev who can make use of a JS framework and a CSS library then it might be sufficient, but the rigorous fundamentals underpinning a compsci degree (discrete maths, data structures, algorithms, etc.) makes for a far more knowledgable and solid engineer.

As a hiring manager, I can say that the quality of candidates from any sort of degree program versus any sort of bootcamp is really chalk and cheese. It's not a question of only hiring people with elite resumes it's the difference between someone who has had to think deeply about a subject and learn how to solve hard problems versus someone who has had some rote knowledge about a specific tech stack drilled into them by repetition and the minute they get outside their (narrow) zone they really struggle.

That's not to say I never hire bootcamp candidates, it is that going to a bootcamp is not really a positive in my assessment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com