Yeah I'm not surprised. I've always thought that the notion that bootcamps are a way that anyone can learn to code was ridiculous. Even when I went there were 3-4 guys that washed out and one more who technically met the criteria to wash out but was allowed to stay because he just barely failed his assessments and his last strike was the last assessment of the course. Those folks at the bottom had a hard time getting and keeping jobs.

Now double the class size and add dozens more camps to the equation and average camper quality is way down.

I'm not entirely sure that coding is the new literacy. Maybe very basic scripting but I don't think the skills required to be a successful developer in today's world are something that can be taught to everyone. At the very least we need new techniques and need to start way earlier if we have any hope of achieving that goal.

Maybe you guys have already done this but could you guys (blackize5 and Baltimore Jones) talk about how your careers have progressed as bootcamp grads? I feel like that may be helpful to people who are looking to get in or trying to land entry-level jobs. Also I'm just interested in hearing how people are doing.

Sure. I'm coming up on 4 years since graduating. I found a job pretty quickly at a startup that does last mile delivery.

I got up and running pretty quickly on a small engineering team (VP of eng and 2 other engineers when I started and one more engineer hired about a month later). My boss is great and quickly recognized that he could turn me loose on stuff. Within a couple months I was being trusted with large important projects. After about 6 months I was starting to be the go-to for everyone outside the engineering team when they needed help with anything. Basically any time someone reported a bug, had a question, or needed help I'd did in as soon as I had time. This led to me basically learning the entire code base.

Over the next year and change I'm responsible for most of the development of our vehicle routing algorithm (still true) and I'm given most of the tricky or time sensitive projects.

Just prior to my 2 year mark I was given responsibility for a project that was a new business initiative and very visible throughout the company. I was involved in the initial discussions that shaped the offering, the user flows, and some of the business processes.

Shortly after its successful delivery, I was promoted to team lead and assigned a group of 4 engineers. I'm responsible for final review of their code, design review, allocation of work, and helping in their day to day success.

That pretty much brings us to today. I'm generally really happy with my job. My gripes are pay and benefits, one particular team member, and nobody clearly better than me to learn from. Pay has been fixed. I could do better at a larger company but I have a lot of stock and cool things are happening right now. Benefits is being worked on, my main issue is that I want continuing education resources to take classes or attend conferences. The guy I don't like does a really ****ty quality of work but I think he's on the outs. And finding someone for me to learn from is a high priority but the importance of this goes down in the continuing education stuff comes through.

I’m seeing ads for a coding boot camp at the Ucla extension.

1. I thought the wave had passed.
2. Looks like it’s going “corporate” now.
3. Pony has to be slow considering how much bureaucracy it is saddled with.

my situation is just so insanely different than yours that it is hard for me to see where you are coming from. like, your entire department is the size of my team and we have over 10 other teams working on this project.

not saying that bigger is better at all. I would much prefer to be in a situation like yours or larrys where I am responsible for delivering important things right of that bat.

yes, of course it would be great if I could get in and pick up the big picture stuff and deal with that. but I am not even close to that level. only a select few at my company are able to work in that capacity.

I am good enough at Angular and javascript/typescript to understand that I have a ton more to learn. I just dont see picking up some of those skills doing support work due to my previous experience. however while working on feature work I pick things up every day and I do not want to lose that momentum.

anyway, I will stop whining now.

blackize, would it be possible to take us through your tech stack beginning with what you learned at bootcamp and then throughout those 4 years? your transition from boot-camper to being the go-to man 6 months in is pretty amazing but what did that entail exactly? can you be more specific on the technologies, stack, responsibilities etc?

Victor, that's a fair point regarding very different environments. My advice likely applies more at small to medium companies.

Sure. At bootcamp I learned Ruby on rails and JavaScript + backbone. I already knew some python from taking a couple edx courses.

At the time my company used Ruby on rails, some vanilla js/jQuery, angular 1 for more complex stuff, python for vehicle routing, Java/objective c for mobile apps. My initial responsibilities were pretty vague and boiled down to implement the assigned features, bug fixes, etc.

Mostly pretty small stuff to start. Then larger pieces but with check-ins with a senior engineer and then I was pretty much just turned loose on stuff.

This whole time we'd get the occasional question or bug report via email. Since I have a bit of OCD with notifications and am only minimally impacted by context switching I was pretty much always first on the scene for those. I'd dig in to the bug, help write a SQL query, or answer whatever question. Before long people just started coming straight to me when they needed answers, help, or a quick fix.

I've done meaningful work in all of those languages and frameworks plus been responsible for the addition of react and elixir.

I outlined my responsibilities with my team but I also do quite a bit of my own development work, am the official point of contact for a few business groups, and am the owner of large sections of our code base which basically means those are the pieces I need to know inside and out as well as I'm the primary person responsible for planning for the future of those features.

Hey blackize5, thanks for sharing! Sounds like you're doing amazingly well and progressing nicely in your career - great to hear! You should definitely consider yourself a role model for what bootcamp grads can aspire to be. What do you think were the important factors in your success so far (whether personal or situational)? What do you see as the next milestones in your career development, whether in terms of skills, accomplishments or positions?

I read this last page and I'm planning to go back and read some more, thanks for the comments about your experiences in the classes.

I'm looking at learning coding now and received some advice that basically said that "boot camp trained" is now a negative quality to have, and being self taught is far more attractive to employers. Does anyone have an opinion on this? It's making me reconsider my original plan to take a bootcamp.

Honestly it seems like there is so much information online right now that self taught is the way to go.

Also if anyone else is interested, I'd love to make a thread for learning python together.

I think if you read this entire thread, you will find me saying something similar earlier but typically, people for whom "bootcamp-trained" is a negative signal won't hire anyone without significant professional experience that doesn't already have a CS (or related, such as EE or SWE) degree, so their opinion doesn't matter. The archetype they tend to find acceptable for junior-level positions is typically recent CS grads in early 20s. It's more important that you fit into a certain archetype and you be attractive to hiring managers who consider that archetype acceptable for their entry-level positions, than try to be everything to everyone which is impossible. Once you do have significant experience, you don't have to keep associating with the bootcamp you graduated from - it's your choice whether you keep that on your resume or not.

In regards to my success:

I positioned myself well to take maximum advantage of the bootcamp by making sure I started with much stronger skills than recommended (taking a few online CS courses)

Joining a startup with a few engineers was perfect for me. There were enough people around to ask for help when I need it and bounce stuff off of. But not so many that there are rigid processes that might have stifled my growth.

I worked super hard. I put in extra hours investigating nearly every bug report, working on my stories, or reading nearly every pull request. Not to mention reading tons of books and articles about new technologies, design patterns, best practices, etc.

As for where I go from here... My code could always be cleaner. There's definitely room to improve my designs. I'm really good at MVP type stuff and figuring out workarounds but could stand to improve on flexibility and extensibility. I've got some natural talents for people management but feel like I need some training in that area. So I think ideally I'd grow into an architect type role over the next few years and then maybe move into management.

I'm not sure that I want to go the management route though. It seems really challenging and thankless in many ways.

That stigma has always been there. It's a non-issue. As candybar said the people that think that way will also reject you for being self taught.

You can absolutely go the self taught route but it will go much slower. A designed curriculum and spending all your time with a bunch of people pushing toward the same goal goes a really long way to keeping you motivated and working hard.

candy, blackize:

Thanks for the response, your points make a lot of sense.

Hey guys, I'm wondering if anyone could help me out here.
I've decided I want to learn how to code. I'm 52 years old, with no programming experience (well unless you include 6 months when I was 14 back in 1979 on a Texas Instuments computer that had BASIC and a cassette drive lol). I can't attend any bootcamps and would be using whatever self-taught resources are available online as well as books. It looks like there are plenty of options in that space.
I don't necessarily need or want to become employable as a programmer, I just want to learn how to code for my own use, mainly to play around with sports betting/horse racing models, build a bot or two for trading on Betfair, maybe build a website sometime in my retirement.
I've heard that learning Python would be a good starting language and so I'd like to get any opinions on whether that would be suitable for someone in my position or whether I should be learning another language as a complete beginner.
Cheers and thanks in advance for any replies.

ruby is designed for developer happiness and great for writing scripts. the truth is that it probably doesn't matter what you pick though.

It doesn't matter too much but python would be great for this.

I agree.

No matter what you pick, there will be that one awesome tool that’s written in the other language that folks in your camp will always lament. At least, that’s how the info sec community of python programmers feel about metasploit being written in ruby.

Also, at daonna, check out this link for some resources

https://lifehacker.com/teach-yoursel...ite-1824287559

Awesome guys. Thanks heaps.
I'd half decided on Python and had ordered a HeadFirst book on that before I posted ITT but glad to get some confirmation.
Thanks for the link Loki.

Any sites that review/discuss regional bootcamps?

coursereport

there must opportunities to apply the bootcamp model to something other than web development.