[cjaro]

FCC is how I got into the game. Someone pointed me in that direction from reddit. That was in late 2015. I went to a bootcamp in the midwest, one of only two or three. While I certianly didn't experience any of the hazing or punishment, per se, the long days and vague projects that don't necessarily teach how to solve problems hit home - I learned how to google well pretty early on and I'm glad I'd been teaching myself prior to the bootcamp because holy hell, it was hard and utterly relentless.I have a great job now, but that's after two years of dipping in and out of positions at other companies because I had no idea what to expect out of a workplace in regards to what I wanted and needed (environment, dev setup, peers, mentors/teachers, remote work, etc). the last three years of my career (graduated April 2017) have been a wild ride and not an easy path, but it's certianly taught me that I am resilient and can find a way to survive.

[soneca]

I thank freeCodeCamp for my career too. I spent around 3 months in 2017 studying full-time solely through freeCodeCamp. Then another 5 months building my own products based on tutorials and official documentation. Then got a good job as a frontend developer.

[hessproject]

I'm a few years older than you it sounds like but likewise, I found FCC through reddit and finished my front end cert (back when it was still AngularJS based). It definitely wasn't easy getting my first job, and I was lucky to have helpful bosses/mentors to help me bridge the gap from "self taught" to senior dev, but it showed me that it's definitely possible to make it in this industry with a bootcamp or other non-traditional background. I agree with the tweets that you should take graduating/hiring numbers with a grain of salt and be weary of income sharing, but I think the people in this thread totally dismissing bootcamps as a valid path to development are off base.