Bumping this thread to see how everyone's doing - also any one with recent bootcamp experience who wants to share?

larry got a job

I like the dev work. learned angular and redux with typescript and really like that. ofc, now they are trying to move me off my project and over to production support which is incredibly disconcerting and I am likely to look for another jobs.

I specifically told them when I moved to this new department and project that I did not want to do that work. I moved to the project bc I learned Angular and liked it so much.

compensation is very good for my experience level and I was the first out of like 20 hires that got promoted. still, nearly all of my coworkers make more than me and I am easily in the top 20-30% to the point that I am often explaining and teaching ppl 2 levels above me.

Ugh. I assume it's because they just don't need that many developers working on the project itself once it's mostly done? Either way, you should start looking sooner than later.

Awesome, though that's probably another reason to leave - unless you're already working at a great place, you should try to move to a place where you're not too far ahead of others at the same level of experience. I probably asked this before but are you tied to the area or potentially looking everywhere? I feel like you mentioned that you already work at one of the best employers in the area (Cleveland?).

I am in Cleveland area and not tied to this location.

no, there is a ton of dev work left on the project. there are like 12 other teams doing dev work. it was just luck of the draw I think. Our team became available right when they needed to add more support people. we are rolling out the app to a large amount of external users so they anticipate it will need more support and our team's feature work just finished.

my first question to the manager was "why did you choose us?" and she was surprised and legit could not answer the question.

She told us that it would only be for 6 months and maybe less but I do not see how that could possibly be the case. More features are being introduced to the App monthly and the user base is only increasing. why would they move us out of support after we just spent 6 months learning it? like, the demand for support is only going to increase so I absolutely do not believe her, especially after the bait and switch.

Yea I've been meaning to write a more truthful blog post about taking a bootcamp and what to expect, etc.

I don't want to sound like I'm boasting, but I was in many ways a top 1% bootcamp student. They do a career fair at the end and expect on average 1 person to get hired out of it, I was that person.

I'm very very happy that I'm writing code and solving challenges for a living now. But I'm also building for my future and plan to eventually build my own products and start companies. I'm taking my current role as a learning opportunity and trying to become a better software engineer everyday. Coming from 8 years of business has given me a MASSIVE advantage in every type of social and political aspect of my job.

While my day to day is building an admin interface (which ships very soon!), I have made an impact in our marketing dept and our VP of marketing comes to me whenever she needs technical help. Our CTO is very "vision oriented" and works with marketing a lot and whenever they need data from our applications or analytics tools, they usually come to me and I'll make it happen. One such example was building a global map to show unique transactions and their originating locations. This map ended up being shown in partnership meetings with (go.oogle) and to our board of directors.

In my day-to-day I defend myself against meetings and try and spend 90% of my time either coding or improving my coding. While I could clearly try and grow into a more senior role at this company, I have absolutely zero desire to do that, and would much rather me the secret behind-the-scenes guy who is a ringer of sorts. Once I have learned most of what there is to learn here, I'll be looking for another job, but that's still a ways off.

Also, through a bunch of unrelated to me company drama, literally every other front end software engineer (not on supporting existing products) has left over the last 3-4 months, so while at first I was pissed I no longer have a mentor, I've realized I can be completely self sufficient if necessary.

Overall it was a great change, and while I wish I was working in a more prestigious and more competitive environment currently, I'm still pushing myself to improve.

Victor, is your manager not a developer? That's some major BS - there's no need to put up with it if you're talented and can get a better gig else where. SF/SV is obviously an option but if you don't want to live in a tech la-la land, the startup/tech scene in NYC is great and it's a much more well-rounded city with lots of other things going on.

Larry, it's really great to hear you're doing well - I don't think anyone doubted you would be successful as you were already excellent at all the non-technical stuff you need to do to succeed. Though I'm surprised by how much you seem to be enjoying the process. I will add that technical people are not beyond judging people by titles so if there's a way to get promoted at your current gig before you look for the next gig, by all means do that. Unless I misunderstood what you meant by this: "While I could clearly try and grow into a more senior role at this company, I have absolutely zero desire to do that"

so we have "IT managers" that manage the program/app that I am working on. some have been devs and some have not been. we have project managers below these IT managers that manage the dev teams.

then, to be extremely confusing, we have a personal manager that has nothing to do with the project we are working on, nor anything to do with being a developer. the personal manager is in charge of placement, promotions and pay increases. they meet with and solicit feedback from my coworkers and project or program managers to make such decisions. I think it is ludicrous as well but its a huge company.

the IT manager went to my personal manager and told her of my new assignment. my manager should have shielded me but she didnt. I just joined under her purview a few months ago and I have made her aware of my agenda. I joined her team specifically so I could work on the development phase of this project. previously I was in a rotation for new hires to find what kind of work they were a good fit for. I worked on 2 other projects and did a stint of support. I loathed support.

my old manager would at least given a lot of pushback and she did on 2 occasions that I remember. but my new manager just doesnt seem to listen or know what I want nor what I am good at, nor even have a clue where I am in my professional development. she already allowed me to get loaned out to QA for a month last year.

thing is, I dont know if I am exactly talented. Ive only been doing this a few years and I am kind of old at 37. I dont think that I could compete with Cali guys and the stuff Jmakin posts makes me feel lost.

but I am a fast learner and every single day I learn something new. I greatly fear that will change and I will stagnate exclusively doing bug fixes and research for support. it did last time I was on such a team.

thanks for your replies.

What I meant by that was trying to go towards leadership/management. I'm all for more senior titles to do with writing code, but I'm not looking to become a team lead if it means I'm reviewing code more than I'm writing it.

Oh I see, staying on the technical track for at least a few years makes sense, though I would add that at more technical companies, reviews are everyone's job, not just tech leads. Obviously given your background, you probably want to grow technically as much and as fast as possible right now.

Victor, it's obviously impossible to fully assess people over forum posts but you've come very far in a very short period of time - not everyone can do that. Having started late, it's possible you don't appear talented to some others but I know top school grads with 20 years of experience who aren't any better than you seem to be to me. You just have to stay hungry, keep pushing and make sure to consistently put yourself a learning/growing environment.

You've been there almost 2 years now right? Definitely no stigma against jumping at this point - let me know if I can help in any way!

I know of two boot campers without jobs 6 months later, they sent resumes to me which I passed along but were not selected for interviews. We ended up hiring a boot camp grad who already had a job at a different shop.

And don't get me wrong, I get frustrated at times knowing that I feel so close to being able to turn another corner in terms of my abilities, and wanting to have those skills right now.

But, I realize that things take time, and there's some things that come from experience and patterns start to emerge and eventually you will know the things you still don't know that are worth pursuing and what you can ignore.

Victor, just curious what type of stuff does this support role entail?

its bug fixes. but the documentation and the tracking software is just unreal layers of drudgery. Remedy BMC.

also, Im just not that good at bug fixes for software that I didnt build. I understand that this is something I should consider focusing on but I just feel like I learn a ton more by adding features and functionality. I dont want to slow down my growth as I am learning and getting better every single day. last time I was in a similar role, that did not occur and I got really frustrated and it even effected my mood to the point my friends and family noticed. I didnt really notice until I moved to the new team and started learning Angular and it was like emerging from a cave.

theres a possibility of the real bs which is being on call and paying attention to the monitoring of the health of the app and the systems.

Is this something that you've previously handed off to other teams? Who was fixing the bugs before? Does your company treat things differently depending whether something is under development or in production?

To be fair, the general trend at tech companies is for bug fixes, operations and feature development, etc all to be done the same team - having this as an ideal state was what I believe was originally meant by devops. If you don't have to deal with the operational issues, it's going to lead to holes in your knowledge, especially when it comes to designing complex systems.

dev teams test and fix their own bugs during development. but some bugs get through to production. my new assignment is to fix these production bugs.

it will likely be pretty bad as we are increasing the user base 10x from 2-4k along with continuously adding features. and management is pushing to get things done so that doesnt leave much testing time for the dev teams. and its a really big project with like 12 dev teams working simultaneously and somewhat in silos.

and I realize I have holes in my knowledge, but I would prefer to stick with the area that I can grow the fastest and have shown the most aptitude.

It is crazy talk to have someone aside from the dev team fixing production bugs. The devs that wrote the code are going to be 10x more efficient at diagnosing and fixing them.

at this stage I agree.

but we have software that is in use for 10-15 years so its not really feasible.

what is crazy is that there are designated teams for app and program maintenance. but they just arent "ready" to "own" it yet. so they want the ppl with knowledge to work exclusively on this and rotate in the maintainers. thats garbage to me.

put the ppl who will be charged with long term maintenance on the dev teams. rotate them onto the support team at whatever 2 or 4 week intervals so they get experience outside of their dev team. hell rotate those ppl through the other dev teams too. as the app matures, the maintenance ppl should have enough knowledge to own the support.

in no situation should they just randomly assign a dev team to production support. if they need bodies then pull the long term ppl and make them learn and get up to speed.

and yes, the bugs should be kicked back to the dev teams as often as possible. I was given access to the bugs on their board and we had 8 that could be assigned to my current dev team. no one on our team (well maybe our product manager) knew about them. I fixed 3 in one day.

but if there are bugs in 5 years, I dont think its really realistic to track down the original programmers or keep them on for that long.

and yes, I could be way wrong about how to approach this. its just what Ive seen and what works for me. I can fix bugs in my space. if its in another space, then it takes me way longer and my approach is much more superficial. like, I will look for what seems like differences or misconceptions with other code and then just "poke the bear" and readjust. but if there is a bug on code that I am familiar with, then I can step through the whole process because I understand the underlying structure.

in other words, I can start at the bottom and work up. if its code I have not seen, then I need to start at the top and work down which is much harder. and really what happens is I just change stuff that looks wrong and assess how it reacts and work from there.

I meet with my manager tomorrow for presumably the final decision. I previously met with her on the Wed when this was thrust upon me/us and she said "dont lose sleep over it."

so I think Victor's posts about the current state of his job is interesting from two different aspects:

1. What is most enjoyable from an "I do this 40rs (?) a week" perspective?

2. What is most beneficial for your future prosperity as a developer?

I personally think focusing only on new feature work is going to be bad in the long term. Learning angular or whatever is easy. Basic feature work is also easy. It's the big picture and the problems that only show up at scale that are hard to deal with.

Unless you plan to stay at this company forever you're going to have to learn how to learn a code base and dive in.

i actually ended up going to a boot camp, but it wasn't a coding boot camp, it was for security. Ended up touching on a couple scripting languages, C, and assembly, as well as some secure coding practices. (and how to exploit badly written code) Was employed in less than 2 months and still get to script tools for my own and my team's consumption.

think finding a job was easier because i had a fair amount of IT/coding background. Have been incredibly successful so far, even getting raises above what I should technically be able to make.

pretty hot field atm, so if anyone is considering boot camps, has some tech background, but isn't sure pure coding is their jam, could be something to consider.

Talked to a newcomer at my company from one of the top SF bootcamps where you pay only after getting a job. He estimated "only" 60-70% (he may have said 50-60 actually) of his class had jobs, and it was over a year already (past the contract date, so those people presumably will not have to pay).

Bootcampers may still be getting hired in the same raw numbers, but now there's many more of them (38 or something graduated my class, now it's 70-80+). Or maybe they're being overlooked due to there being hundreds of applicants with identical crappy resumes and projects.

It's certainly not what it was in mine and blackize's day, where we (or me at least) felt confident that we were "set" as soon as we got into a top bootcamp.

they should relocate to northeast ohio