[andrewzah]

All bootcamps are a sham. They make lots of promises, but end up just churning out candidates who can barely reason about the material that was foisted upon them in rapid-fire succession.

I don't see bootcamp experience as being useful for a hiring metric. You can get the same exact results by independently studying yourself, and save yourself the stress and money. You're better off finding peers/mentors to talk to through programming meetups/conferences.

[AlchemistCamp]

I completely disagree. I went to Hack Reactor in 2013 and the ROI was fantastic.

I really leveled up my JavaScript and coding skills in general and ended up dramatically increasing my earning power. I was hired about a week after graduating and just the signing bonus paid most my tuition.

If I ever see a similar kind of school for the next skill I want to build, I'll probably enroll.

That said, I've heard some of the Lambda School claims and don't believe they're honest. Vincent Woo did some solid reporting on Lambda.

[andrewzah]

I don't disagree that some of these bootcamps teach some knowledge and lead to jobs afterwards. But what you're really paying for is networking. Even junior development work requires a fairly robust set of knowledge, that isn't going to be grokked within 6 weeks or even 3 months (unless they were already familiar with computing/unix etc). That model only works for companies that are willing to onboard -very- green junior developers and mentor them long-term.

You can accomplish the same thing by following courses/books online, making a handful of projects on github to show interviewers, and networking at conferences/meetups. That's how I landed my first part-time job with programming, and then my first full-time job.

[greenie_beans]

People learn differently. Not everybody can learn on their own, especially not when encountering something like programming.

I went to a bootcamp and the network isn't what I paid for. The network hasn't given me much at all. I had a mix of previous self-learning experience, and decided to do a bootcamp to get more serious about it. It was definitely beneficial and the investment paid of 5x within two years.

[AlchemistCamp]

> But what you're really paying for is networking.

When I went, there was no network. Nobody had ever graduated from the school yet.

Nearly 100% of what I got from the school was hard skills.

[dghlsakjg]

I disagree. Many bootcamps overpromise/underdeliver. Some are fantastic:

I went to Turing a few years ago. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm happy to claim that a Turing grad will be able to be competitive with most CS grads in a a junior position. In a lot of ways they will be more prepared.

I also disagree that you can get the same education on your own. Good bootcamps have an incredibly short feedback loop, and there are actual professionals in the loop. You simply won't get daily feedback about best practices, code reviews, git training, etc. from an experienced professional if all you do is watch youtube and read books.

[prepend]

I think boot camps are useful to programmers who are good self starters and want some credential to signal to hirers that they have some training.

I started coding in the 90s and learned solely from books, friends, web sites. I was lucky to get a job without a degree or anything on paper to show that I could do what I was doing.

I did some certifications and doubled my salary in a year. It was funny to me that they didn’t teach that much to make me 2x productive, but it fit into my org’s salary band structure because now I had some certs.

I think the challenge is that it sucks for people who need more help and actual experience. Now that so many people are taking them, the signaling is less useful.