[namocat]

After deeming the academic science career path too exploitative and fraught with landmines, I decided I wanted to being a transition into the tech industry as a software engineer. Only trouble was... I didn't have any of the necessary modern web development skills to actually get hired and it would have probably taken me over a year working 'on the side' to gain them. Having just completed a PhD, I was not in the state where I could have justified going BACK to school for a masters in computer science either. So for my level of experience, place in life, and motivation, the coding bootcamp I attended (Hack Reactor) was the best thing I could have ever hoped for. I worked hard during the program and got a great job as a software engineer only a couple weeks after graduating the program and have been happily employed in my new role for ~7 months so far.

I'm torn on this issue though, because even though I feel that Hack Reactor was worth every penny, I can acknowledge that the "coding bootcamp" space could potentially be littered with shysters and people trying to make a quick buck, taking advantage of students by promoting false hiring stats. I'd welcome for a light to be shined on those programs, but would lament if Hack Reactor specifically gets thrown under the bus or that the tech industry sours on grads of good schools like Hack Reactor because they are labeled as simply "bootcamp grads".

[analog31]

I'd wager that with a science PhD under your belt, you're not the typical green programmer.

Back in the early 80's, my mom taught the intro programming course at the local community college, after learning it herself a year prior. Her students came from all walks of life, and many of them got good jobs after a couple of semesters. Her observation was that someone with a science or math background could learn programming in a jiffy.

[Kalium]

From what I've seen of bootcamps, they can be very useful for someone with a decent amount of software and computers already under their belt. For someone completely green, it's dicier.

That said, either way the real tests come later. Things like adapting to new technologies and new ideas, or self-teaching all the theory that bootcamps inevitably skip over.

Is your average bootcamp grad who had no real experience going in able to have a normal software engineering career trajectory? There's no good data, and there won't be for a while, but I have my doubts.

[namocat]

Because the bootcamp industry hasn't been around very long, you're right, there is no good data. But from my experience and the experience of my peers in my class, I believe that adapting to new technologies/new ideas is actually one of our main strengths. Those skills are essentially a pre-requisite to getting through the program.

Your question about the potential to have a normal software engineering career trajectory is a good one (one that I am particularly interested to hear the answer to) and that's why I wish that more employers would speak to this issue. I would venture to guess that my employer would speak highly of Hack Reactor and how prepared HR grads are because they have continued to hire from there, but it would be nice to see how employers actually review these schools and not just the students.

[Kalium]

One of the common hazards in entering a field is that the neophyte tends to see everything through the lens of what they grasped first. In a traditional CS curriculum, this is intended to be a formal and mathematical understanding of computers.

When you start by learning a language, that becomes the basis for your understanding of computing. This isn't always a strength. Imagine someone who learned programming via C but now has to learn Lisp - they're going to have a hard time.

I've heard very mixed reviews of hiring from bootcamps. For people who needed the exact skillset the bootcamp taught, it was perfect. For those without that exact alignment, ran into the limits of the person's knowledge pretty fast.

[FLUX-YOU]

>For those without that exact alignment, ran into the limits of the person's knowledge pretty fast.

That seems natural. They only have 3 months of experience. The company is simply going to have to help with that, along with ample googling and reading.

I think the expectations of those doing the hiring may have been out of line, possibly due to bootcamps selling them something they simply can't deliver reliably, possibly due to hiring managers not knowing the field.

[Kalium]

A lot of it was that the bootcamp grads didn't have a good grasp of what they actually knew. They would claim to know a language, but in actuality only know one particular framework in that language.

[jared314]

> Because the bootcamp industry hasn't been around very long, you're right, there is no good data.

The training industry has been around for a long time. I would suspect there is years, perhaps decades, worth of data, just not under the name "bootcamp".