Quote:
Originally Posted by iversonian
Larry, what do the best students in your class have in common? Something that I might be able to tell from talking with them for an hour?
This is something I've been thinking a lot about.
I'm not sure if all bootcamps are similar to General Assembly, but I think they likely are.
If I was interviewing someone from a bootcamp I would look to make the discussion conversational and not really let them realize the questions I'm asking conversationally are the things I am looking for, but people who 'get it' will understand why you are doing it.
What you want to find out is if they are one of the people who others go to for help. There are 4-5 people in our class who are helping others a lot. The other day we had 2:30 of free time to work on whatever and I ended up using the majority of it helping the guy next to me.
When the 4-5 helper people need help they read the documentation, ask each other, and ask instructors, in that order. These same people are also the ones who are continuing to improve their projects after it was due. On average, these are the people who I would target if I'm hiring from a bootcamp. Someone who can explain how they built things, "built a few functions, one that does X, Y, Z, etc. etc." Some thought process about why they built them that way, ways they might be able to improve them.
There are then 2-3 people who work more independently and figure out ways to get things done quickly, can explain why their stuff works, but may not be able to look at someone else's code and understand exactly how it works. These people impress me because when I'm not sure what to do I end up writing things out and reading to get ideas. They seem to just brute force right away and end up with lots more code, that isn't efficient, but that does provide a solution. I think these people might be hard to distinguish but would be potentially great hires. You have to help them build things in a way that conforms to your team, but they have natural ability to solve problems that is awesome.
There are then about 50% of the population who probably intern/very junior level. They will be coached up on what to say but it's going to be very superficial. A lot of these people probably shouldn't be straight up developers/engineers. I can't imagine you would really be tricked that they are one of the other groups. It should be pretty clear.
The final 10-20% are kinda hopelessly lost and would be good at like a .edu where the department has a website that hasn't been upgraded in 10 years and they are looking to build or maintain a new one.