[ChristopherM]

I would see participation at a bootcamp as a negative, if you can't pick up a couple of books and use online resources to figure it out; how are you going to manage once you get into a work situation that requires more than trivial common patterns and solutions?

If you want to further your education. Build applications, websites or whatever thing makes sense for your field of interest. Proof of your abilities is the application. Other than prior work experience it is the only thing that validates your knowledge.

A bootcamp is nothing more than a vocational school, it teaches just enough to be dangerous but will never make you a serious software engineer. That requires a much deeper background which would allow you to pick up any language and any framework that might be required. After going to a bootcamp you will have to spend years "practicing" and learning on your own to even be considered a junior developer as far as I'm concerned.

[xiaoma]

This is a very ignorant view. Just as instructors are an invaluable resource at a (human) language immersion school, the same is true of instructors at an immersive coding school.

At least at the particular school I attended, I got a great deal out of time and money I invested. It's true you can find great lectures online. However, I found the that having a better than 2:1 student teacher ratio and having instructors around while I was actually in the process of writing software to be very helpful. Ditto for code reviews. While I could have learned everything on my own with books and other resources, it would have probably taken closer to 4,000 instead of 1,000 hours. It's also worth pointing out my classmates did generally end up with the kind of background that let them confidently jump into another language and framework. Quite a few did in their first jobs out of the program.

>"After going to a bootcamp you will have to spend years "practicing" and learning on your own to even be considered a junior developer as far as I'm concerned."

Fortunately for my friends and fellow alum, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber and many, many start-ups don't subscribe to this point of view. The average salaries of fresh grads of the program are higher than those of Stanford CS grads. The gap after a year is even greater.

I certainly can't claim that every immersive school is worth it, but some definitely are.

Update: The class hours were 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for 12 weeks (total of 864 hours). I generally stayed a couple of hours late and kept working on things and/or playing around with things from previous lessons. During that time I was technically on my own but the instructors were actually still around. I truly don't know when they slept. I also put in about 25 hours during the break week halfway through.

[mcintyre1994]

Just to clarify - did you have 1000 hours of time at this immersive school/bootcamp or is that including individual time building on things etc? I'm just wondering because I don't imagine they come cheap (albeit I'm sure cheaper than Stanford CS) and if you pay by the hour or something that's way more expensive than I envisioned them to be. Also longer than I expected them to be, 1000 hours presumably quite compressed sounds intense.

[cblock811]

I just look at bootcamps as part of starting your education. I would never consider a graduate to be a serious software engineer. I have been building apps for the company I work with and definitely realize that it takes years of dedication.

On my end I think I need to find something outside of work that I want to build. There are so many neat things out there. I just need to figure out what excites me as I get more into the industry.

[ChristopherM]

If you need that push to jump into learning something completely new, like programming. A bootcamp can certainly get you started. Although I would consider it to be a very expensive way to get started. My other concern is the false sense of confidence that one now has a thorough understanding of the subject.

What languages, frameworks do you now have experience with? Ruby on Rails? Are you primarily interested in web development? Software development is a huge field with many specialties. Web development is completely different from native application development, server development is completely different from GUI applications. Firmware and device drivers yet again are very, very different from the already mentioned specialties. Then there are specialties like algorithm development, encoding, artificial neural networks, encryption, compression, game logic AI, etc. Pick one thing, because you will quickly lose your focus if you keep bouncing from topic to topic.

I'm currently finishing up my first app for the Apple Itunes store. Things I had to learn to accomplish this: Objective-C, Cocos2D framework, openGL, Adobe Illustrator, Quartz 2D, Cocoa Touch, XCode, Git, FreeBSD (to host my custom game server), TCP/IP, UDP, mono. And that's just the programming stuff. I had to create a very intelligent algorithm to handle the computer player AI.

Prior to taking on such a monumental project, I had over 20 years of experience with x86 assembly, C/C++/C#, desktop application development experience using MFC and .Net, firmware development for ARM processors, device driver development on windows, simulator development for an engineering shop, manufacturing operations and testing software with database backend, reverse engineering of cell phones for forensic analysis, software development management, and the director of software engineering for a medical device company.

What are you most intersted in? The topic you are MOST interested in. Start there. If you tell me more about what you are looking to do, I can certainly point you in the right direction.

[cblock811]

I know Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Analyzing data is fun for me. Luckily I work for a company that has a distributed processing platform and copies of the web to crawl. I've built some simple data apps in Ruby, but and planning to learn Python as well soon.

Good advice on being focused. When I was self teaching I felt like I was getting great exposure, but not direction. My bootcamp was meant to solve that issue, which it did. To be fair my bootcamp was Bloc.io and is online, making it cheaper than most bootcamps. There were some tradeoffs because of that type of curriculum but it got me started. Now I work with a team that is super supportive of me wanting to learn more. Super helpful to have people to support you and answer questions.

[aspir]

I agree with you, except for viewing the bootcamp as a negative. Self driven exploration and learning is key, but attending a bootcamp is itself indicative a good traits. In the "best" bootcamps applicants have to:

- Quit their old job to go to school full time. This is huge in indicating seriousness of their career change.

- Pay real cash to attend. Again, this shows that an attendee is serious about their new career.

Both of these require significantly more commitment than _just_ buying books, going to meetups, and finding more experienced friends. It's not mutually exclusive -- when hiring, I want to see if the bootcamp grad has done these things. But, attending a school is definitely a positive.

Source: I've hired 3 bootcamp grads, and the result has been so good I'm actively continuing to do so.