Ask HN: Have you ever hired bootcampers?

[vladimirsvsv77]

We’re searching for junior developers and thinking about hiring graduates from bootcamps and online schools. We think that it could be useful that most bootcampers have previous experience with other jobs.

For example, ex- HRs and recruiters may be super useful for our HR startup as they have knowledge in both HR and programming. A better understanding of this field will help them to better understand the product. Also, this may increase our workplace diversity.

What do you think? Do you have any experience hiring people who switched their career?

[avitzurel]

Yes!

We hired multiple bootcampers. I can definitely say the experience this time was good and the employees are successful.

It does take time and patience (and a path), it includes quite a bit of mentoring and guidance.

It's also about expectations. You can't expect them to be "in the know" of everything and it requires more management resources in the beginning. If the company is committed to it and not doing it as a means to save money, it can most definitely work.

[vladimirsvsv77]

Got it, thank you. Yes, I think we are ready to invest time in mentoring grads

[chasingthewind]

At my old company (in a small east coast market) the leadership had supported a local boot camp wholeheartedly and highly encouraged teams to bring in junior candidates from each graduating cohort. In the round I participated in we interviewed four candidates for my team. (I was the tech lead.)

Of the four candidates, two were essentially extremely under-prepared on multiple levels. We simply could not even convince ourselves that they had rudimentary coding skills or problem solving intuition. One candidate was marginal but seemed intelligent and possibly able to handle the role.

One candidate was previously working in IT doing helpdesk and project management work and wanted to break into software development. She did quite well on the fizz buzz level coding task and we had a strong belief that she would be able to perform and get up to speed so the company hired her.

She was very intelligent and hard working and she did slowly begin to learn the applications and the tech stack (Java + Spring) but I can't emphasize how much hand-holding, mentoring, and knowledge transfer it required on our part. She was assigned a mentor to do pairing with her and I personally spent a lot of time with her going over the systems and pairing with her. A short time later I moved to another team and then later left the company but my former coworkers report she's doing ok. It worked out but it was definitely a slow and time consuming process.

I think the key challenge is that when a very junior engineer like this gets 12-24 months under their belt they're going to be very attractive to other companies and are very likely to leave. I do not currently believe that the investment that any single company would put in on some of these folks is likely to pay off. The productivity that these folks contribute minus the effort spent on them in 12-24 months is very likely to be a wash unless the person is exceptionally talented.

I get the weird sense that companies recognize that they won't get too much benefit out of mentoring any specific person but that they've collectively decided that they want to increase the number of junior candidates badly enough that they're willing to "take one for the team" in a sense. Perhaps the expectation is that for every junior candidate they train but quickly leaves they'll just get a junior-mid candidate that somebody else trained.

In conclusion, not all candidates from these schools are good and the good ones probably won't stay all that long. It doesn't seem to be an obviously great bargain but companies are clearly willing to take those risks.

[protonimitate]

>In conclusion, not all candidates from these schools are good and the good ones probably won't stay all that long

I think this could be said about candidates from traditional CS degree backgrounds as well, no?

Companies are creating self-fulfilling prophesies by trying to hire juniors for as cheap as possible and then refusing to implement decent raise/retention strategies. I can't imagine that it's cheaper in the long run to constantly have to interview, hire, and on-board mid-level engineers than it is to just give a junior an decent raise of a year or two.

[jtchang]

I think you nailed it when you mentioned how it is a risk/reward type of play. Senior devs are expensive and if you are willing to gamble there is a chance you can get a really solid dev for way below market price. However you have to be pretty sure that your hiring process is solid. Most companies think they are good at hiring and thus are willing to gamble. The reality is probably that they end up breaking even when they do a mediocre hire, train them for 12-24 months, and they end up finding a new position.

[gusmd]

That is why once they get 12-24 months under their belt and are attractive to other companies, you adjust their compensation to reflect that so that staying at their current job is attractive.

We have this huge problem in this industry where companies hire junior people, pay them below market (completely justified), but then don't bring them up to market rates once they are no longer junior. Fix your compensation and they won't (have as much reason to) jump ship.

[godot]

My previous company hired a lot from bootcamps (specifically Hack Reactor). For a dev team of < 15 people, we had at least a handful of them from bootcamps. I was one of the senior engineers and interviewers on the team so I was part of the hiring decision, so I have some insights on why. Although I didn't call that shot (of deciding to hire from bootcamps), I can see the reasoning behind it.

Like many startups, it was on a node/react stack. And like many startups, we were not tackling particularly hard algorithm problems. A lot of the problems we face were just about building out lots and lots of features on the consumer-facing site and managing a rather large and unwieldy codebase. The skills we needed were not FAANG style algorithm-solving and having computer science degrees. We needed people who really knew node and especially react, and just build out those features that product management and the business wanted efficiently.

Incidentally, outside of the core of 4~5 senior engineers on the team (who've been there pretty much since the beginning), these bootcamp recruits had the highest retention in that engineering team, among many others who had come and go. Your regular CS-educated software engineer tends to get a bit bored doing that kind of work for a couple of years. I left as well, but for mostly other reasons (though that was a small part of it).

To answer more directly to your question of interest though -- it's probably quite hard to pinpoint bootcamp candidates with specific backgrounds you're looking for, though. For example, the backgrounds of the bootcamp hires I mentioned varied widely, from things like chemical engineering to business majors and entrepreneurs of small local businesses who wanted to become a software engineer.

[linkel]

At my current company, it seems like about half the folks here are from bootcamps (generally career switchers). On my team specifically, out of 6 developers 4 are bootcampers, including me. My company is currently hiring more software engineers, and it seems like every other candidate interviewed is a bootcamper, and they vary in skill. The folks I work with are all very enjoyable to work with, so I think the interview process seems to work in our case to bring in excellent people regardless of the presence of a CS degree.

Speaking personally, I am continuing to self-study CS topics by taking online courses and going to universities' class websites and doing their assignments if they put them online. This won't compare to actually having been in that class environment with peers and mentors and grading feedback, so I have to maintain my learning to discover and fill in the gaps I have in my knowledge. I think if you're able to find two people who are equivalently good at communication and soft skills and one has a CS degree and the other is a bootcamper, generally speaking I'd expect the CS degree holder to have superior technical skills.