Standing Out at Dev Bootcamp | Hacker News Reader

Standing Out at Dev Bootcamp

catgrena.de

8 pointstrilobyte7 comments

I don't have any interest in "coding socially" for the same reason that I don't like attending meet-ups and office parties.

I am dismayed at the fact that what used to be a good choice of a career for nerdy and introverted people, where you could surround yourself by technical problems and be left alone to it - has been high-jacked and turned into yet another social networking competition.

Apparently to have a chance at getting a job nowadays I need to have a github profile, contribute to foss, write a blog and speak at the user groups.

I don't think that's entirely true that you need all of those things to get hired. Your resume still speaks volumes about you. It's just that things like github and stack overflow show an interest in engaging in the larger community of software development, and are a strong signal when evaluating a candidate. Having been on both sides of the table it's important to remember that the person hiring you is taking just as much of a chance on you being the right fit. I think anything makes that decision clearer is a positive.

I've encountered a number of studies using randomly put together groups which are rewarded based on performance of some task - organically select a leader based on display of confidence, rather than competence.

I reason that it is not uncommon to assume competence from an extroverted person. I can't really argue with that, it's a fact, use whatever card you got dealt to get ahead.

I am just bemoaning the fact that slowly but surely the field becomes skewed towards that, losing a good amount of original core values in the process.

Hasn't something similar already happened to academia for example?

I don't think you need to be social at all, but it is helpful to have meaningful work samples for potential employers to evaluate. Github's just the easiest place to put those. It's similar to a design portfolio for a designer or writing sample for a writer. Otherwise, people end up making decisions based on their interview impressions, which can be very inaccurate.

I've attended almost every hiring day at DevBootcamp Chicago and I almost always ignore the actual "product" the teams build

As we are there to hire entry level Rails devs from this program I tend to listen for and ask questions around

1 - The technical challenges they faced

2 - How did they solve the technical challenges

3 - What weren't they able to solve some of them and why

4 - What open source technologies and platforms did they embrace, and why

5 - How did they work together to build the software

6 - What testing (if any) did they do, and why?

I'm actually not a fan of the "hackathon" format for presenting the graduating class.

IMO

This is somewhat minor, and a bit tangential to the article, but worth noting nonetheless.

The title on HN is misleading. Dev Bootcamp is a company whose name in the general sense is being used to refer to similar learn-to-code schools ("dev bootcamps"). This article refers to one of the latter, but does not identify as having to do with the Dev Bootcamp.

That's a good point. My capitalization of the title conveyed some meaning other than what was intended.

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