[masukomi]

We've phone interviewed a bunch of candidates from a couple of the Rails boot camps here in Boston. The candidates have been very mixed in quality, but we've found 3 that we not only brought in and made it through our in person interview but also got job offers. Usually we offer them a 3 month internship. At the end of which we'll offer them a salaried position if they turned out to be as good as we suspected.

We also treat the internship as a real internship, not a contract-to-hire. We expect to be teaching them.

As others have said here in one way or another. The good ones are ones who were coding anyway and just needed some help leveling / focusing their skills. The ones who didn't have a clue about programming when they started, don't come out much better IMNSHO.