| I went to a coding boot camp in Omaha, Nebraska of all places. Less than a month out of the school I was offered a job paying $55,000 a year salary at a large insurance company. They primarily use Java and Groovy. The bootcamp taught Ruby on Rails. Maybe I got lucky, but I've found that the ability to code is slightly less important than one's ability to speak about programming/code in general. If you can read and understand documentation, understand fundamental concepts like OO or functional paradigm, and understand what a stack is, a closure, recursion, the difference between an integer and a float, or a character and a string, methods/functions, etcetera, you are more or less hireable. Basically you have to understand how a computer works, and the fundamental concepts in programming, as well as how to apply them. However, you do need to have some sort of experience to put on a resume. For instance, if you go to a coding bootcamp you should be able to develop a simple REST API which sends a blob of json from a DB to a URL. That's a relatively complex task, but with a tool set like Ruby on Rails can be done in < week. Essentially what I am doing at my job is more complex list processing and analysis. Just taking a bunch of data from a db, performing some operations to it, and spitting it back out. Basic stuff. |
I'm sure this is true for many positions, but I'd resist the temptation to cast this across the broader job market. All of my recent interviews went significantly deeper than what you listed (though I'm not sure "functional paradigm" is a fundamental concept), so in my experience the minimum to be hireable, at least in their opinion, was higher than what you indicated.