[brightball]

Several of the best developers I know have no degree at all. I know one guy who did a boot camp 2-3 years ago and since then has self taught himself so much that he's one of the most knowledgeable people I've been around.

He was recently told in an interview that he otherwise passed with flying colors that, "someone with a boot camp education couldn't be seriously considered."

It's mind blowing to me that anyone in charge of hiring for technical positions can be dense enough to think that your education stops when your career starts.

[commandlinefan]

> "someone with a boot camp education couldn't be seriously considered."

Ok, wait a minute - they brought him in for a full interview, knowing that he didn’t have a degree, made him jump through all the hoops and then told him that he was never actually under consideration at all? That’s douche behavior no matter how you feel about college degrees.

[brightball]

Yes. It was as if they brought him in to fill an interview requirement and didn't actually think he would qualify.

[commandlinefan]

Well, that’s inexcusable behavior BUT - we can safely assume they ended up hiring somebody else, who had a degree. In other words, somebody who was as qualified as he was, but who also had a degree. In other other words, somebody more (maybe only slightly more, but still more) qualified. Requiring some sort of a degree is still reasonable, up until the point where a position actually goes unfilled due to it.

[mrkstu]

Why is that a safe assumption?

You're assuming that he wasn't, in fact, the best candidate that interviewed based on what?

Since they didn't seriously consider him they may have left behind the best candidate available to them. The original poster said "he's one of the most knowledgeable people I've been around."

Assuming that poster has a wide exposure to developers, its highly possible that the position didn't get a better applicant.

[x0x0]

You're going to find any stupid choices in a wide enough pool. That's not representative: I know boot camp grads at FAANGs.

At smaller companies -- like mine -- it's not that we won't hire out of boot camps. We do, and have. But we're very conscious of search and training costs. Search costs can be somewhat fixed with money by using internal recruiters; training costs are horrific. Bootcamp grads are nearly useless in a professional environment without enormous amounts of senior / staff eng time.

[zebraflask]

If the boot camp is used as a get up to speed mechanism by someone with a previous technical background of some kind, even tangential, I guess it could work out sometimes.

I tried to look for a junior dev recently and was flooded with boot camp resumes from career changers. The code samples were all more or less cut and paste type stuff where you could tell immediately that even if the candidate were a fairly bright and motivated person, the degree of handholding needed to ramp them up would be just impossible.

[bsder]

> Bootcamp grads are nearly useless in a professional environment without enormous amounts of senior / staff eng time.

To be fair, this is also true for standard undergrads.

The difference between a cooperative engineering student and a standard undergrad is quite staggering--9-12 months of working experience causes a vast differential.

[x0x0]

Our experience is similar. The skills gained in the first year -- how to actually use git, basic db skills, bash skills, bundler/nvm/etc, better debugging, better problem solving, working outside of greenfield projects, etc make a huge difference.

[wolfspider]

I’ve had to change my thinking about this to adapt to modern times. I used to think like this about internal recruiting however there is a bias — to avoid anything they do not know. There are recent grads and outsider devs that are really good actually. Top engineers are not immune to saying somebody is bad and lying about it because what they believe is good only means “never question tribal judgement”. They aren’t immune to creating networks across various companies to take hiring managers for the proverbial ride either. Dig deeper because what you may believe is hand-holding is an unwillingness by the team to disclose basic info to get the job done. It happens way more than we want to admit but people are still just people despite the fancy job titles.

[nick_]

I definitely believe you and I think plenty of good devs have just a boot camp education, but I've also had a conversation with someone who came out of a dev boot camp and was very upset that they weren't treated like any other dev in the job market. Meanwhile, it was quite obvious they had no foundational experience/knowledge in terms of technical problem solving skills.

[brightball]

No argument there. It's not a wholesale endorsement of boot camps or anything...more that you need to judge the person and not the piece of paper.

[Jyaif]

In my experience in France, all of the genius-level developers I know come from a prestigious school.

Not surprising as the prestigious schools pretty much exclusively take in the top ~2000 students of the country every year.