OmgGlutton!,

I'm coming to the end of my first week in a bootcamp so I feel like I could offer you help and perspective if that is what you seek.

I am nothing like what you described though, except you got closer there when you started to mention the few superlative types.

Are there waitresses, a cab driver (who also did asset management in South America), teachers, service/retail workers in my bootcamp clsss? Absolutely.

Are there people who think programmers beginning salaries are incredible, and only want to make 80-90k to feel like they made it in life? Definitely.

But there is a small handful of people who are legitimately talented and spending 600 hours in 90 days to learn something is a unique opportunity.

Like most things in life, it is all what you make it. There are people playing micro stakes online and there are people open sitting 50/100. You wouldn't classify all players in the lobby as the same, you shouldn't do it with people who attend these classes.

Also, as the person who is in the bootcamp and having been posting about it recently, if that was some kind of incoherent shot at me specifically and you were trying to flame me, i can recalibrate and provide you with a proper "sup bro" response if that is what you seek.

Nah, not meant at you. Right now I am getting ready for the job hunt so have been doing research and one thing I can do is look at the github/resume/etc of bootcampers for comparison... To look at what people without a CS degree presented themselves as.

I just hope the working class people get jobs, it would suck if they don't after dropping $15k or whatever.

We dont really have anything dedicated like that. They have a set of tasks labeled "n00b" specifically for newbies to dive into, but they have very little info and are very hard to fig out just from whats listed in the issue. I imagine youre supposed to ask ppl to help but Im an introverted wuss so I tend to try and fig stuff out myself for the most part.

Yeah I know itll take some time. Its a bit annoying just from a pride perspective that I started the same day as 2 less experienced devs and I kind of feel like I need to take on bigger and better things quicker. Maybe thats a terrible approach though idk. Ive never had a job in a language I dont know so its definitely a new experience but its pretty exciting.

I guess I dont understand the best approach for "just fixing a bug or adding a feature" though, since as i said I dont have much understanding of the domain. I can hound other ppl with more tribal knowledge, but that leaves me wondering how ppl contribute to open source or dive into new code bases without access to devs with this knowledge

Thats an interesting idea, although very hard in practice with a new language. Everything in Ruby looks kind of "bad" to me, but again Ive only done static typed languages. Seems like variables just pop up out of the blue in Ruby. Hard to trace.

Thats kind of how I feel though. Im not labeled "senior" but I have more exp than a lot of the team so I feel this pressure to get up and contribute more faster.

You penis lol. I love scala

@gluten

From which bootcamps have you been lookin at ppls resumes and gits?

We have a set of tasks labelled similarly. But one important difference is that these tasks are generally fairly simple conceptually. So the implementation might take some work, but its really simple to understand what the task is and why it needs to be done. I think that's really important for 'getting started' type tasks.

I'm sure there are lots of different opinions on this. But my preference isn't to think seniority gets you 'bigger and better things'. We start developers off pretty much the same (to a point...), regardless of experience. Do the things you're assigned well. Figure out the right way to get more responsibility / help out. And go from there.


So in your case I'd start with the 'n00bs' cards and try to pick the best one (however you define that). Then do it. We also have tasks labelled "improve developer life" which are tasks that aren't that important but that would make our lives easier. Maybe see if there are stories like that? Or just talk to someone about something that would make their life better?

For me, my open source development has always been driven by what I need. So it's not really hard to get started because I'm already at least somewhat familiar with the codebase. I think people without that background generally have to figure it out themselves through things like reading past tickets / PRs / etc. Although I'm not really sure there are that many open source developers that start working on a project where they don't know anything about the domain / code.


I realize first impressions are important, but I think long term work is much better for building a reputation. Don't worry about the short term so much.

Also, there's always people better than you. Sometimes a junior person will be one of those crazy-ass good developers. It's cool. Don't stress about it.

Most of your rant is exactly the same for new graduates from college/university too. It's not particularly surprising because schools generally teach the same topics and use the same sorts of projects.

Most self taught programmers also appear the same. Same courses. Same types of projects. Yadda yadda yadda. But again, this isn't that surprising.

Also, I think there are more and more companies explicitly looking for the "not a dick" quality in the people they hire.

IRT OmgGlutten! and bootcamps:

Congratulations if you can self-teach, but the reality is that self-learning is extremely difficult, a skill that takes many years to get right. Someone who never did it before will not do well with self-learning a complex topic such as programming. The proof is in the failed MOOC model. Even Codecademy is a corpse pile of failed autodidacts.

A bootcamp or college gives you two valuable assets that you can never get as an autodidact: a 3rd party input on the lion's share of your work, and a network. Good luck getting that 6fig job without either. If you are a self-taught, you are at a massive disadvantage to a bootcamp grad.

It's hilarious to me that anyone would down-talk the "typical" bootcamp or college grad project. A typical self-taught project is probably a mess of disorganized, untested, and glacially slow code, maxing out at 1KLOC (which probably should have been 250 LOC).

This is all very good advice, ty.

Probably the most important part lol

I can definitely understand this perspective, but I think there is also a level of "resetting" that you have to do once you get the job and are past the interview/negotiation part.

You may end up working with way more senior people who you are better than at many or most things, and some junior people who are better than you at many things. The job title, salary, years of experience, etc. don't always matter that much.

I think your approach and mindset completely makes sense from a social hierarchy perspective, and is only natural for most people to feel that way, but I would not let it become too important and let it weigh you down. In time, you will surely gravitate toward interesting and complex work that you are comfortable with.

PJ, your comment had me thinking last night about how I love working with a system that I really understand well. I'd say about 1/3 of my time is spent with a pretty complex distributed system built over the past ~5 years where I've personally coded about half of it.

It's awesome. When something goes wrong I know all of the different lever and knobs to use to quickly fix the issue. Almost anything that even semi-regularly goes wrong is self-healing with retries and ****. I'll be sad when either it or me moves on.

cant say enough about the bolded. bootcamps essentially pre-vet potential hires for a company.

and a good bootcamp will already have relations with area employers.

and I also generally agree with your ideas about self-learning. I tried to teach myself many times but never really got into it. I needed a bit more direction. I dont think I am creative enough to just think up some programming idea or implementation. but the bootcamp gave me exercises and projects that I could build on.

and while I did a lot of stuff on my own and even a few side projects, I absolutely needed that direction, esp initially.

very true.

i'd add that the purpose of clean code and good architecture is to minimize the time it takes to achieve that kind of mastery of the code base. at one extreme, you have code so clear that what it does and how to change it is obvious upon first reading; at the other, code so opaque that no amount of time and familiarity will enable you to safely make changes.

I definitely agree about networking. The boot camp around here stopped teaching rails cause there weren't enough jobs but I am also planning on hunting down the people who did the rails program to see what companies hired them, etc

You can still network by going to meet ups or just hitting people up via their contact information.

That is going to be the most frustrating things switching jobs, losing all the system knowledge I had. Particularly since as a support / product owner / caddy a lot of the value I brought to the company was due to knowing how the product worked. That technology power from knowing more than someone else is very addicting.

I've always argued that this is the fatal flaw, much to the chagrin of everyone who says this is how to do it.

I am a senior dev because I say I am a senior dev.

Also I have "mastered" my stack to the point where in the rare events that something comes up that I don't know I almost certainly know how to know it.

As far as how I jumped to senior, I applied for a senior job and got it. Presumably I appeared to be more senior than the other people who applied. Whatever that means.

Today I learned that we have a customer with 260 million records in a single table in a MySQL database.

Surprisingly, there's some problems :P

Damn. What is that customer's GDP, if you don't mind sharing?

260m rows should be fine, but has to be designed well. What were the issues?

Their annual revenue is probably not large enough to describe as GDP

Gullanian: the table in question probably should never have more than about 10mm, given the design. AFAIK (I was hearing about this more or less off hand) one of their major problems is taking product upgrades that make schema changes, but I think given the design it causes problems with cascading deletes on related tables and things like that. The mainly amusing thing is its just a design failure on our part. Probably 90% of the rows don't really need to be in a primary transactional db, they should be in a data warehouse, they are basically just historical data

Ah yeah that would be a headache!

at my last company we used mysql cluster and had a table with 120 million rows and it worked like a champ

Having to write some java, for my sins. Suppose I have an ArrayList, say, of objects, and they have a property, let's say Date. Is there a non horrible way for me to get a distinct list of dates? Because in C# it's:

But what I've found for java so far looks like disgusting babble. (Huge props to anyone who gets that reference).