[stale2002]

Yes, I work at Refinery29 (obligatory www.corporate.r29.com/careers/), a large women's fashion website in NYC. Of our 30 person tech team, we have had about 5 people coming out of these bootcamps, and they are all awesome.

Although I think your idea of who goes to these bootcamps is pretty off. These aren't people who "had never opened a text editor in their lives." Some of them are people who were working in science, doing research and matlab programming, and wanted to make a career switch. Others are people who maybe majored in math, or perhaps a completely non-technical major but went to a bunch of hackathons or took some intro programming classes for fun, and then when they realized they loved tech it was to late for them to make the switch in college.

Top programs like the Flatiron school are NOT a walk in the park. They are intensive, 60-80 hour a week programs with a very low acceptance rate.

Of the dozen plus people I know who have gone through one, I can't think of a single person who had never programmed before entering into one of these bootcamps (not that it is not possible!).

"looking around, there don't seem to be many jobs for entry-level Rails or iOS developers. If you look around on job boards, there simply is not much competition for entry-level talent."

What? I get emails every other day from recruiters hiring for their social mobile ruby on rails web app. The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.

[ThrustVectoring]

>Top programs like the Flatiron school are NOT a walk in the park. They are intensive, 60-80 hour a week programs with a very low acceptance rate.

As an App Academy graduate, I can confirm this. Pretty much everyone has some prior programming, technical, or engineering experience. Personally, I had gone through most of an Electrical Engineering program.

Good bootcamps aren't something that takes average people and turns them into good developers. They take talented individuals and fills in the missing pieces for being able to contribute professionally.

[mattquiros]

Hm. So since companies do hire from dev bootcamps, are the candidates quizzed about CS theory during the application process? It seems pretty standard to be asked about data structures and algorithms for engineering positions and I can't imagine someone attending these bootcamps to also be well-versed at those over the course of their quick training.

[stale2002]

Whiteboard coding questions aren't as difficult as people often believe. IMO the hardest part is just getting used to programming without any outside resources on a whiteboard.

The problem is that people don't practice them because they believe that these questions test some sort of intrinsic, unchangeable quality of how smart you are, which is totally false.

But if people practiced them more, they would realized that there is only 10-20 questions that you can be asked, and everything else is just some minor variation of the most common questions, and you don't specialized training to do project Euler or glassdoor.com questions.

[masukomi]

> But if people practiced them more, they would realized that there is only 10-20 questions that you can be asked, and everything else is just some minor variation of the most common questions, and you don't specialized training to do project Euler or glassdoor.com questions.

My gut reaction to this is that you're not asking very good questions if it's such simple variations. Unless you're being excessively reductive in that all of programming can be done in just a handful of compiler operations, and thus only a handful of programming questions could be asked.

[avinassh]

And how do you practice on them? By solving questions on whiteboard? (And appreciate any more advice you have)

[jstultz]

Stated right in the quote you copied "entry-level talent". Are you entry level?

If not, then your recruiting emails mean little.

If yes, then your assessment of other entry-level programmers who happen to have come from bootcamps is perhaps less valuable.

[notwedtm]

Not necessarily. It is possible stale2002 gets emails from recruiters simply because he's on a list somewhere. Recruiters are not known for investigating people thoroughly before bulk sending of emails.

[burgerguyg]

I can testify to that.

I had done some SharePoint front end design when I was on an editorial team and we needed some features in our SharePoint site in 2008, but had to take any mention of SharePoint out of my resume because I got too many contacts from recruiters looking for a SharePoint architect.

I'm also a Zend Certified Engineer in PHP (don't hate). I'd never worked with Zend Framework, but would get very regular recruiter contacts because they didn't know the difference between "Zend" (a company) and "Zend Framework" (an MVC framework that was just one of their products).

[jstultz]

That still wouldn't be evidence that recruiters are trying to hire actual entry level positions. I'm not saying that they aren't, but simply that the post was not really very solid evidence of it if the poster isn't entry level.

[saltmeyer]

Oh hi, which of my (recently former) coworkers are you?

[stale2002]

come bacckkk SMeyer, I have 3 desks to myself now in my row. :P -BCWade

[vonmoltke]

> The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.

In the web and mobile sections of the industry, maybe.

[vonmoltke]

> The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.

In the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.

[vonmoltke]

> The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.

At every level of the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.

[vonmoltke]

> The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.

At every level of the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.

[vonmoltke]

> The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.

In the web and mobile sectors of the industry, maybe.