Ditto! I went to a bootcamp after having worked in aerospace for 6+ years and, I had a mechanical engineering degree. I had programmed for a long time and had no problem with basic algorithm exercises (of the kind they spend the early part of these camps on). [1]

The problem is, there was no easy way -- for someone like me wanting to go into software -- to (convincingly) say, "Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance?"

(If you're going to say, "just contribute to an open source project", there's actually a big gap between being able to code and being able to debug the zillion things that can go wrong in just setting up the builds for a given project. The Open Hatch project c. 2011 was specifically dedicated to helping people contribute, and yet following their instructions would still dump you in a an unnamed text editor with no way to exit.)

[1] Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works.

> Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works.

I suspect that's because they didn't know how or why.

Rails has a lot of magic -- just follow the convention and it works. Magic can be good, because it encourages a standard. Unfortunately, many Rails programmers seem comfortable leaving the magic as a mystery rather than learning how it works and why it was designed as it is.

Magic is great, until it stops working and you have to figure out why.

for that we have stackoverflow

My first attempt or two learning Rails ended up this way, but I really got it once I had SQL down. In a/A we built our own stripped down, minimal versions of ActiveRecord and Rails. This ended up connecting all of the dots for me.

What is "a/A"?

App Academy: http://www.appacademy.io/

this has always been my largest gripe about ruby, i like to understand the magic. frustrating when i cant.

> Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance?

That's more or less all most CS graduates can say though. I personally don't think anyone is qualified to be a professional developer until they've been programming for several years (especially coding in an unstructured way).

I don't want to be combative, but what made you think you needed a bootcamp? I learned to program long before I went to college and was hired for programming projects long before I graduated.

I think structured learning is useful for many - the sad part of being an adult is that for most people, their lives become driven by responsibilities instead by curiosity. Sure, you may want to learn programming (and maybe you even have a good economic reason for that), but there are always "more important" things that need to be done right frakin now. Some people are good at self-organizing and can cut out time for learning, but for many, having an external entity create and enforce a structure for learning is a good way to hack one's problems with prioritizing stuff.

That's the point -- I didn't. I just needed it to convince someone to give me a chance. Employers would assume someone still in college for CS can program, and so look there. They don't automatically make that assumption for some rando with a different degree.

To be sure, there were also probably some job-searching techniques that would have worked, but they're also hard to learn from reading pointers online if you don't automatically have the skill.

This was my experience exactly. Aside from helping me pick up a few concepts more quickly than I would have otherwise, I did it purely to get my foot in the door for interviews. It also was a good excuse to just focus on my portfolio for several weeks whereas if I had held a full-time job during this time, it would have easily taken me 4x as long.

It's a super expensive and wasteful way to do this, but I was optimizing for my time.

Did you actually try to interview before the bootcamp though? (Ideally after building a few portfolio projects.)

I ask because I had no trouble getting jobs and freelance work without a degree or bootcamp.

In fact, a bootcamp is usually a strong negative signal for me. I'd much rather hire a self-taught developer than a bootcamper.

I can say with some conviction that I just did not have the self-confidence to be able to do this and pull it off in an interview without going through the bootcamp and (more importantly) meeting several employed junior developers who were significantly behind me in skillset and professional development. I was completely self-taught and had 25 years of programming-as-a-hobby experience behind me going in.

My problem was basically a lack of network and real understanding of my competition in the field and the bootcamp solved that.

I could have saved a ton of money had I quit my bootcamp as soon as I realized this, but I'm still okay with how things turned out.

that works both ways; you hire self taught because you are self taught, just like CS grads tend to prefer hiring other CS grads.

me, i have no preference when i interview a candidate... can you code? and can you solve complex problems? other then that i dont care about how you got your skills.

> you hire self taught because you are self taught, just like CS grads tend to prefer hiring other CS grads.

I like and hire plenty of CS grads as well. I also have a CS degree. It's just bootcamp grads that I steer clear of.

You seem arbitrarily biased against something you think is too "hipster".

In my experience any numerate degree is as good as CS for securing an interview. Mech Eng grad myself.

I worked in chemical engineering roles for 5 years before deciding to attend a bootcamp. It seems like a refresher/shortcut to get into the webdev or programming industry, so a bit myopic, but it at least gives the added advantage of reducing the amount of time traditional programmers enter and gain traction in software development. Sometimes we only know that we love programming when we hate everything else, at least in my case.

Bear in mind that the tech job market is a lot different than much of the U.S. economy right now. There are fields where experienced candidates with strong resumes can go job hunting and hear crickets. To go from that to not really needing any formal credential is a big mental leap.

When I started work as a professional software developer 10 years ago, I had zero professional or educational experience as a programmer. I had a BA in Philosophy, and my work experience was being a substitute teacher.

I got a great job with my second interview. How did I convince them to give me a chance? I didn't contribute to open source; I just showed them some of my personal projects. I had written a web based baseball simulation game, and I just showed them the code. I did a quick interview, explained how I had taught myself to program as a youngster, and they offered me a job.

In my years since, I have hired people just like me a number of times. Show me some code, if it is good, you are hired.

I think a portfolio is a good thing and suggest it myself, even to people with the educational background. I try not to suggest it as a silver bullet and say it's easy for everyone.

The problem with suggesting this to people who are learning on their own is that building a portfolio takes time. Sure, if you're young and single, you could wait tables and learn to code. But it's more difficult to find the time as you take on more obligations with age.

The other problem is picking the right projects and languages that hold some appeal to the rare employers who will give you a chance. People are also less likely to cut someone some slack for sloppy code, due to lack of experience and knowledge, and other early coder problems.

The last problem is not being able to network successfully to find those less common employers who will give you a chance. And avoiding the bad employers who promise experience, but ultimately have them working as an on-call contractor who just reboots the printers.

Having any college degree helps a lot, but without it many doors remain closed even with a portfolio.

Interesting. I went through a bootcamp recently. We started with sinatra (a slimmed down ruby application framework), then went into rails, and lastly used node+express.

If we had only done rails, I'd probably have little idea how it worked, but doing all three definitely shored up some weak points.

It also helped that the teachers were genuinely knowledgeable and we had short lectures on deeper-level stuff (we had one hour lecture on how to build a tcp server from scratch in ruby, one on how the internet actually works - from the link layer up, and so on).

Good point. About 50% of the bootcamp folks we work with have some sort of technical background before the bootcamp. The other 50% do not, however, which is really interesting! (I have no idea how this compares to the bootcamp population as a whole. I would guess that folks with a tech background are overrepresented in the group that passes our screening step)

Definitely. I had a wide range of classmates. We had several people that were project managers looking to gain some technical knowledge/communication skills. They had no intention of becoming programmers. A good chunk were designers who had html/css knowledge that were looking to expand their reach. A couple were a drain on my education. My greatest criticism of the programs is that it's an educational boom, so there isn't a stronger filtering process in place yet.

It depends on the school. Some bootcamps have very low acceptance rates to keep their placement numbers high - as that is their main marketing point. They bring in people who can demonstrate they already have the mindset but don't have the knowledge.

Other bootcamps just need you to be able to use your computer and you're in.

That's a path I've been considering as well - had a lot of CS background, hated running Unix compilers instead of working with HTML & C++ (already learned some in HS) - so ditched the major. Went with English, which, you know, is another language 'n all. Got into the working world, still have tech savvy...

So to me I have to question the ROI of walking away from 5+ years of professional advancement and jump into software development again - by way of an in-person bootcamp. I'm not going back to a Uni or interested in online learning settings. However, I do recall the concepts and am certainly excited by the developments in languages and technology since watching some of the roots take hold.

Being a "creative" person who can speak "engineering" is one of my strongest, and often the most unusual of my professional strengths.

Have you heard of CAR (computer assisted reporting)? The field of data journalism requires people who are good at storytelling combined with technical savvy to be able to pull out stories from lots of (usually messy) data - http://www.poynter.org/2005/a-guide-to-computer-assisted-rep...

No I have not and I thank you very, very much for sharing that! I will most certainly look into it. I love the concept as you've described and if I've got an aptitude that sounds like the kind of stuff I'd wake up every day wanting to jump in and work on. Will check it out, thanks again!

I took a pretty significant pay cut switching from an equities trader to a junior developer. I'm more than happy with the lifestyle change. I still find it funny, given my life quite literally revolved around ROI.

It goes to show there are more returns than just financial :)

Right, all else being equal I would expect bootcamp grads to be significantly more valuable than CS majors, since presumably they're also experts in design, marketing, product management, or some other area.

In addition to being able to contribute in a non-development capacity, even in terms of software being good at coding is probably at most 20% of what makes a good developer.

Being good at coding, in the sense of making robust software products that can stably support components of a business, is way more than 20% of the value of a developer.

Additionally, in my experience, it's way easier to teach non-development skills to thoughtful programmers than it is to teach adequate programming skills to thoughtful non-programmers.

Some of the best designers, managers, product analysts, business intelligence analysts, marketing strategists, and client engagement managers I've ever met all came from heavily theoretical CS backgrounds and spent a lot of their early careers mostly coding.

Understanding the interrelationships between business components and business needs often has many similarities with designing quality software. And many of the pitfalls of software (e.g. monolithic classes, no separate interfaces, no solid tests) are directly analogous to non-software organizational problems as well.

Plenty of people who gain technical credential through a bootcamp will go on to do a great job, and their other skills will be of tremendous value.

But it just seems absurd to me to try to make some kind of rank ordering between bootcamp grads and CS degree holders. You're discounting just how highly effective CS degree holders are at translating their very general skill set into other domains of work. Generally speaking, they are very good at this -- so good that it's often threatening to non-technical people who would prefer if there was an easy stereotype suggesting that CS people should be siloed away from non-tech work.

> Generally speaking, they are very good at this -- so good that it's often threatening to non-technical people who would prefer if there was an easy stereotype suggesting that CS people should be siloed away from non-tech work.

It's almost like having a degree in abstract thinking, designing systems, and discovering hidden requirements makes you good at designing systems to solve complex problems.

Which is what most non-technical work is. Taking an ill-defined problem, and defining+solving it.

>I think one key aspect that is missing is that boot camp graduates aren't straight off the barista lineup.

It seems like everyone is forgetting this.

Since coding is becoming important for a tech driven World, no matter what our backgrounds are. We come in with whatever skills we've gathered from our personal journeys and then learn to code.