[loudin]

My gut reaction is that these boot camps are fueling some employment at early-stage start-ups because the graduates are far less expensive than more seasoned developers and the code they write is probably okay enough for a short while. Why would larger tech companies hire from this pool? I would imagine that there are enough CS grads in the market for them already.

Does anyone here hire graduates from these schools? If so, what has been your experience? If not, why not?

[mgirdley]

If you look at the open dev job postings, experienced developers are where the shortage is. Companies hire bootcamp graduates to take workload off of the experienced (3+ yrs) developers plates.

Interestingly enough, if you look at job postings you'll also see that a disproportionate number of job listings want 3-5 yrs experience. Companies want people who someone else has trained for 3 years but don't want to pay the prices that people with 5 or 10 years experience command.

Disclaimer: I run a bootcamp in San Antonio called Codeup.

[w1ntermute]

Yeah, they all want 3-5 years experience, but they're more than willing to hire someone with less once they realize that someone with 3-5 years experience is probably not available at the salary they're willing to offer.

[mgirdley]

There's an argument to be made that the vast majority of developers are underpaid in the US.

[w1ntermute]

They definitely are. If more developers knew how to negotiate, weren't so meek, and knew how to persuade/explain to managers that outsourcing is going to cost them a lot more in the long run, then the average developer would probably make a lot more money. But bargaining doesn't work so well on an individual level unless a lot of (good) developers are willing to bargain.