Sorry, but if candybar essentially wants to claim that Leonhard Euler's "single most important" contribution to society was the confusion of computer science students 250 years into the future, while simultaneously masturbating all over himself for pointing out a pretty mundane property of logarithms as something that's "really important" for readers to know, I feel like I have a responsibility to say no for the same reasons. We don't want some poor soul to assume his claim is valid and discard e as a useless number.

Please take this to the logarithm discussion thread. You can fulfill whatever responsibilities you believe you have there. Folks want to discuss bootcamp issues and bootcamp experiences here. You are a smart person who cares about software development. I get that. Thanks.

That's fine with me. I'm assuming leaving that post here was an oversight, although if dave actually felt it had merit to this discussion, it would make sense to discuss it here.

Any update from AA?

Just found out I'm invited if I want in. A few of us who did really well on the first test got full on accepted, which is weird because normally you have to have an interview with the founder guy.

Loads of paperwork to get through. Payment breakdown by default is:

• $5k deposit
• As soon as you get your first check (I think), 25% of 18% of your annual salary is due, or 4.5k assuming 100k salary. Which is odd if it is first paycheck, because the most your first check would be for a two-week pay period is 3.8k, but whatever.
• After that, you pay 12.5% of the 18% until it's paid off. So $2250 using the above numbers.
• The original 5k applies to the 18k you owe, and you're more than half paid off when you do the 4.5k from the first check. Four payments later you're free and clear.

You have to agree to stay within ~50 miles of the a/A you attended, apply to jobs until you get one or go a year without employment, and to come in and do jobs placement training if they think it's necessary. Oh, and you have to apply to web dev jobs, iirc. Think you basically agree not to look for non-dev jobs.

Sounds like sweet deal! Congrats!

Unless they changed it the $5K applies to your first payment or payments, so you'd actually owe very little or nothing.

Why the 50 miles requirement?

That's where jobs are, and places are more likely to hire locals.

Sending pm to bj re: payments for his interpretation.

Congrats, keep us in the loop. Love reading these success stories.

Clarified the 5k deposit does get applied to your first 25% payment.

Think I'm doing this.

interview day at my bootcamp. 20+ companies came in and gave half hour interviews to the students. some companies sent 2 representatives. there were 23 students. i spoke with 9 different companies.

this went well for most students. I gotta say, my bootcamp is excellent at finding jobs for us. many of the students set up follow up interviews, or were contacted via email for another interview. how these companies were able to differentiate the students for a technical position without asking any sort of technical questions is beyond me. but the companies are indeed interested in many of my fellow students.

now, this does not apply to me. it could be the poker thing. it could be that I am too old at 34. I dont know, but they def prefer my cohort mates. this is ofc frustrating to me since I feel I am far beyond many of them. I mean, early in the class, we were given this problem https://projecteuler.net/problem=2. no one else could solve it.

earlier I posted the interview question about converting an int to string without any library methods. the other 4 students were not able to figure it out.

a student who has like 3 job offers already could not figure out this problem:



our last project was a web application in spring mvc with a postgres database. it involved setting up a reservation at a campground. it was pretty involved but i think only 2 other groups finished.

so my conclusion is that, at least in my region, it really doesnt matter what you have learned, or what sort of technical abilities you have. the companies are looking for a certain very low baseline of skills along with a certain type of personality and background. that background does not seem to be playing poker for 7yrs followed by sitting on your ass for 4 more.

and I was actually asked 3 "technical questions." one guy wanted me to write 3 classes. a storage class, a stack class and a queue.

another was a method that would print out my name 3 times with an underscore separating them, except for the final time there would be no underscore.

another wanted 3 principles of object oriented programming.

so ya, this bootcamp is indeed taking these guys from 0 programming knowledge to jobs in 14 weeks. I am certain that no one in this class would be able to get into app academy or the other strong bootcamps. I may be able to if I studied hard for a few weeks.

That's discouraging to hear that you're being discriminated against for your age and/or poker background. How do you plan to overcome this? I'm in a similar boat (though less experienced than you), and was hoping that programming might be one of the few areas I could build a decent career in.

I'm guessing that it's probably just a numbers game for guys like us; it may take a bit longer to get that first job, but once we do, our age/history will become much less of a flag to potential employers.

Yeah sounds like they know what they are doing.

This sounds incredibly annoying but age discrimination is very real.

Yeah there definitely are a lot of "programming" jobs where you're judged mostly based on presentation rather than skills because the gatekeepers are mostly non-technical. At the junior level, these are often not good jobs anyway so you just gotta keep on keeping on.

I would get some resume help from people here if you haven't already - there are different ways to talk about your past and some don't scare off potential employers as much as others. Also, lack of credentials or experience goes away after you have your first job but long resume gaps can be problematic for a little longer so you need a long-term plan to deal with this. Ideally, you want to make it so that someone skimming your resume doesn't even notice it and when it becomes more apparent, say, during an in-person interview, just launch into some well-rehearsed narrative that segues the conversation back to your strengths while addressing their legitimate concerns.

I think you are in Ohio? Do you have ties that force you to stay there?

Hmm I am now halfway into the 3 month job search were 99% are supposed to have jobs by the end of this period. Have not had a single onsite interview and I am not the only one. I am starting to get highly suspicious of the job placement numbers, but I tend to be a bit of a paranoid person. Will report back.

One, how do employers know your age? It's illegal to ask fwiw.

Two, that reminds me of a recent anti-bootcamp article I read where a Midwest employer wanted about how all the bootcamp grads he'd hired couldn't do very basic stuff. Sounds like an issue with the bootcamps in the area.

Three, @penguin, you were from a/A, right? I know their site numbers say 98% employed within a year of finishing. Unless maybe you went to another bootcamp. I just woke up so I may not be remembering well.

Hack Reactor. They claim 99% within 3 months. With multiple people having no on-sites at the halfway point I am starting to doubt their numbers. Maybe they start reaching out to employers on our behalf though as it becomes likely we miss the deadline.

well, I dont know really what is scaring ppl off. I have always been good at interviews. I mean, I have probably over 50% on jobs interviewed for. ofc, that was only 2 "real" jobs.

So I plan on filling in my github page a bit more. I have a few decent projects on there. I can clean them up a bit and then add some other stuff.

ive done a lot more work than the rest of the class has. Ive knocked out like 30 projecteuler problems, some codewars.com and hackerrank stuff. not sure if I should add that stuff to github or not.

but ya, any ideas for side projects would be great. I think if I just have a decent portfolio of work, then that should prove that I know what I am doing.

there is only 1 week of material left, and then we are doing a 2 week capstone project. I cant imagine it will take me 2 weeks so I plan on doing some other projects.

I am decent at Java and can work with Spring MVC. I need to get better at Javascript. then mebbe move on to .net and asp.net mvc as it seems thats what every employer in this region works with. and if still no job, then on to ruby and rails. or mebbe angular.

I can go anywhere. in some ways I would def prefer to move. but I have been focused in this area due to my bootcamp being likely unknown elsewhere.

Ah, gotcha. I know a/A has been saying most offers lately are coming around the three month mark, and there's been a bit of a slow down in tech hiring in the area.

Are you on course to do 500 applications like bj?

Close, I am on track to hit the 400 mark.

Without one on site?

Ouch, sorry man. That's got to be really demotivating. And trust me, as someone who went two years without finding a job after finishing an IT bootcamp-style school, I feel your pain. (Long time ago)

man, you guys are really scaring me too. do you guys know why you arent finding even follow up interviews? surely you have some pretty decent portfolios?

Ah to clarify, I am at 200 without on onsite. Going to hit 400 by the end of the 3 month period. Yeah it is demotivating, especially when people who had engineering backgrounds but no prior programming experience have multiple offers.

Really demotivating is spending hours on a coding challenge and hearing back "we have decided not to move forward" with no explanation. The latest one I did was build a particle system like rain/snow. https://particle-system-asymmetrik.herokuapp.com/

It isn't amazing but I thought it would be good enough for a junior role to at least get an onsite. When I asked for feedback they said it met the basic requirements but it didn't stand out, which seems kind of BS when they said it should take 2 to 4 hours to do. Meh, I mean I could have done more but that would have taken a lot more then 4 hours.

200 in a month and half sounds absolutely crazy - I've probably applied to like 60 companies my entire life, though I guess there are some where a headhunter essentially applied on my behalf and I didn't hear about it. Any stats on that? Like how many of those 200 did you at least get to a phone screen or take-home or whatever?

I have had 3 coding challenges and 6 phone screens.