[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.