[farhannyc]

I don't think you can be a developer in 8 - 12 weeks, as mentioned in this article. Software Development is a skill as much as anything else, and there is no time frame. All you can use to assure yourself is if you have practice, and the confidence in yourself by that practice. For some people that confidence comes after a year, maybe even two years. But then again, that confidence can even come in 2 months.

[twic]

You can be a junior developer in 8 - 12 weeks. It's not guaranteed, though.

I worked with a guy who came through a bootcamp. Before he did it, he'd learned enough PHP to build basic sites, so he didn't come in cold. In the bootcamp, he learned Rails, and proper development habits like TDD and source control. He was a good junior developer when he started, and with two or three years of work at Pivotal Labs under his belt, he's a good journeyman developer. He taught me a lot of what i know about iOS development!

However, he mentioned that a lot of other people who came through the bootcamp with him have gone on to work at quite low-skill 'chop shop' web agencies, where they're mostly slinging HTML and CSS to match a photoshop drawing, rather than doing real programming as such. So, it doesn't work for everyone.

[onion2k]

I don't think you can be a developer in 8 - 12 weeks, as mentioned in this article.

8 - 12 weeks spending 8 hours a day in a classroom is between 320 hours and 480 hours learning time, plus whatever additional effort the student puts in during evenings and weekends. It's plausible that a 12 week bootcamp could equate to 1000 hours of structured development time with a decent mentor. There are 3 year CS degrees that give a student far less.

[amorphid]

Sure you can, for a narrow range of things. There's value in getting someone to the point where they can grind away on different bits on a website, prototyping mobile features, diving into bugs, etc.

But in general I agree with you that there's a big jump from enthusiastic newb to experienced veteran. It took me a couple years to figure out all the stuff that came after knowing how to code.

[justacat]

Yea, I went to one of these years ago just when they were starting up. A couple of the students were very impressive at the end of the 12 weeks, but I was not. It is a lot of information at an extraordinary pace. I found that I could not sustain more than 11-12 hours a day of work, taking some of Saturday and all of Sunday off. I had no social life during this period outside of the camp, but did get an beginner level job offered to me at the end of it. It still took years before I felt comfortable saying that I was a developer.