Holy hell that hurt


Scala:

Yea this is pretty funny and I think is accurate up to the last two paragraphs. That "hacked together with Ruby on Rails and oolong tea" bit especially makes me gag and is absolutely true of the bootcamp/self-taught culture. Still, it's kind of a young-people thing in general. College kids act like morons and get excited about their degrees too, and like 80% of the time those degrees probably aren't even valuable.

When I see tweets now from bootcamp industry people I followed "way back when" I sometimes cringe or eyeroll.

Just do your thing and present yourself professionally.

I agree with the 3rd party input, and being forced along a learning path instead of floundering on your own. I disagree with the second; while my bootcamp connections did lead to *some* referrals and such, they weren't significant and my job was landed through my company's /careers site. (I absolutely needed the bootcamp, and even unsuccessful referrals still added to my experience, but things can still easily work out without the network.)

The bootcamp *did* give explicit, clear instructions on how to apply, how much to apply, and how to manage the process. This information isn't really readily available online that I've seen. Even if I'd somehow learned everything on my own, I wouldn't have really had an understanding of how to approach job hunting if I hadn't learned it from the bootcamp, and I likely would not have succeeded.

I know this was the case for you, but I don't think it's the case at the vast majority of bootcamps - at least not in the SF area, unless some boutique bootcamps have opened up. The big names AA and HR do not have networks that auto-get you a job in 30 days.

May be more common at the top bootcamps in smaller cities.

Weird, I'd expect it to be in their interest to get something like this together.

Re: college degrees I find it odd how much the US education system seems to diverge from the US labor market needs. It seems like people all over claim to be getting college degrees and no work. Anecdotally I even had a friend get a masters and had trouble getting work placement. Understandably there may be other factors outside of that which influenced his ability to get a job like labor market demands and personality.

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Historically, I think obtaining a college degree was more about getting a general Liberal Arts education rather than vocational training. Culturally, this link hasn't been severed. In the past this may have worked well because most jobs didn't require degrees and in getting one you signaled something different in the labor market.

Further, I think there is a culture in the US that tells kids that they can "be anything you want to be". Some people really take it to heart I think. They major in areas that don't have strong job markets.

You should feel lucky if you have an aptitude and interest in something that is so marketable like software.

not saying they should "auto-get" you a job. they should be able to land you a number of interviews on the name and reputation due to already cultivated relationships and previous hires.

it seems completely absurd that those big name bootcamps are not proactively reaching out to all area employers and showing off their system and their grads.

ya moving from Java to C#, Linq just blew my mind with how simple it was filter and find and list.

Pretty much all of the bootcamps I know of do this, and for the obvious reason that all of the resumes look the same: so if you'd talk to one person...

But it's a small subset of "all area employers" that can take essentially rank beginners whose main qualifications are having studied for an interview for a few months and make good use of them.

In my group there are some people who will have completely irrelevant backgrounds so will thus be focusing on primarily this 12 week course and work done here.

But there are several people who have technology experience, one guy was doing software QA at a major financial company.

There are probably 5-7 people in my class of 20 who I see having a really hard time getting even an internship, as they are being blown away by the content as it comes.

But then I think to all the ridiculous things I've seen from "serious" tech companies. Such as the VP of engineering at a series B startup with 30M thinking using varnish caching (and any other layer of caching) on their website was "a bandaid for poorly designed code" and was also insistent they launch our code themselves. They spent a week ddos'ing themselves and freaking out everytime their marketing team sent an email directing to the site (which was multiple times a day).

Then finally I found out they scheduled a call to talk **** about us to a major company in the industry to try and find a different solution, so I prepped the other company to let them vent about us, and then push them toward caching on the call. It worked and they accepted our release with caching functionality. To this day they have no idea I was behind the scenes trying my hardest to help them and push them toward the correct decision. My reward was them badmouthing us around town and not being able to use them as a client reference publicly.

Don't forget that financial incentives aren't the only incentives. For lots of people getting a degree that will take them into a field they actually want to go into - even knowing it may take awhile to get a job or that there is no guarantee of getting a job - is still a +EV life decision.

One concrete example is teaching in Ontario. It use to take 5 years of schooling to qualify for a job and the average time from graduation to a full time job was something like 2-4 years (and during this time you might have to put in a lot of volunteer hours). Obviously, lots of perks once you got a full time job, but for lots of people it's a -EV financial decision. It was still worth it though to lots of people that wanted to be a teacher.

If the average time to get a job after graduation is 2-4 years, doesn't that mean that a lot of people are trying and failing to be teachers? Definitely not life +EV for them.

Wouldn't this be something more like:

Not necessarily. Could be a stable number of jobs and just at some point in the past there was too many applicants and now it takes 2-4 years to get the experience/volunteer hours to get a position.

Although I think you're looking at this wrong. Let's say you want to be an astronaut really really really badly. For some number of people its +LEV to try, even though a large number of them will ultimately fail.

The EV decision is made w/o knowing the results.

At least from what I rememeber, it's even worse than what maxtower implied or what you're getting at here. At many top schools, people were encouraged to pick majors without much regard for future careers because there wasn't supposed to be a lot of correlation between what people studied and what people did afterwards and we were given examples of top students majoring in subjects like Art History, Classics, Anthropology, etc going into desirable professional fields such as investment banking and management consulting, or getting into top law schools. The general feeling was that you could have it all - spend 4 years doing what you like and have a great career of your choosing afterwards. Looking back, this seems to have been terrible advice and there seems to be some correlation between positive life outcomes and majoring in STEM fields.

One thing I did miss was that they were doing this in part to counterbalance the advice and the pressure students were likely getting from their parents and relatives, which taken en masse would have been bad for general campus diversity and departmental constraints. I didn't have anyone in my family giving me any kind of advice so I probably took that more literally than most.

Before the STEM fields exploded in the 90's I don't think there were that many fields that college actually trained people for, teaching, law, architecture, engineers, doctors and not a lot else. A liberal arts degree was to teach you how to learn and how to not believe stupid things and rarely had much to do with your career. You didn't need to know how to work a computer to get a job so there was much more OJT and much less credentialism.

Yeah even in college in the late 80s/early 90s - it was obvious to me that creative writing was something I could learn through practice and life experience (I guess On The Road helped shape that view), whereas physics was something I probably wasn't going to pick up on my own wandering the earth in my 20s.

Good article in WSJ about how companies use a degree as a "blunt proxy" for success for all kinds of jobs that in no way require a degree. https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-neede...06000?mod=e2fb

Yeah, if you can't suffer through a history class writing stupid papers you're never going to make it in an insurance office writing stupid reports.

Yeah, probably. But definitely use hash functions, IMO:

much cleaner to read and easier to fuss around with.

Oh, I think there's definitely correlation here. But I think that goes way down if more people had picked STEM fields purely because of the money and not because its a field that actually interested them or that they had aptitude for.

I'm in love with LINQ in C#. LINQ to SQL abstracts away joins as well which is really nice imo

Would love to hear more about this!

The tldr is ignore experience or education or experience requirements and apply everywhere. Put minimal effort into each application and send hundreds of them.

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I came across this recently: Step by step tutorial to build a modern JS stack

It feels like a full-time job (at least, to me, whose normal job has nothing to do with JS/web dev) to learn how all these tools/packages work to mess around with side projects. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong by trying to learn what babel and webpack are before diving in and making something that sucks at first, idk.

That seems just super obvious to whatever HR person is doing the initial screening.