I on the other hand got taught to be able humble and make compromises especially when still being a junior. Looking back at my early days, when I wanted a position that I knew would change my career, I purposely asked for a lower salary in the beginning to compensate for my junior level or other skills (language for example when I moved into a country where I wasn't fluent yet), with a clause to bump it up to the level of other people when I can prove that I am on par with them and my lacking skills aren't a problem. It also showed the company that I was serious about wanting to work with them.
But man, 120k for 12 weeks of experience is insane. Sign me up for whatever bootcamp that was
It wasn't the bootcamp -- it was the self-study, and more to the point, his ability to reverse-engineer the interview process which got him that offer.
Which probably says a lot more about the current gold standard, "let's see how many hoops you can jump through" interview process than about the merits of bootcamps, per se.
It's a hack to get around HR auto-filters. The hiring people can then make further assessment.
What world do you live in where you'd not have more than one filter on hiring?
The alarms here are astounding given the other hoops that are likely to exist passed the first marker.
Pretty shocking the response to some advice that is really only "step 1" to getting the job anyway
The reality, I find, is that (if properly motivated, and possessed of sufficient native intellect) once you get your foot in the door, you can learn the ins and outs of any programming role pretty darn quickly. OK, maybe you won't be able to design a compiler or anything like that. But for most of the standard web development $foobar stuff... you can pretty much pick it up as you go.
The people to be wary for (and weed out) are the outright imposters (those who blatantly lie about their capabilities), or the chronic attitude cases (which includes a great many experienced and ostensibly highly qualified people).
Not the inexperienced.
Now what about CS grads? We've interviewed plenty of people with master's degrees in CS who don't know how to code a binary tree because "you know, I wasn't that into the data structures course..." Or if they have lots of experience they demand more money than the manager makes because, apparently, every company has to compete with Google salaries.
I remember my classmates and I staying after class because there was a guest speaker coming in to talk about quad-trees and b-trees and we were SO EXCITED to learn about these things. We've taken more candidates from Hack Reactor than not because they show this passion for their work that I have personally rarely seen in CS majors. They generally require a few months of ramp-up time, but I think it's worth it, and since they are usually coming over from a different field they bring a lot to the table from their other experiences.
On the other hand, I do advise the bootcamp graduates I know to drop it from their resume after their first dev job. Programmer with 1 dev job is a much better profile than bootcamp graduate with 1 dev job.
Well. Gotta do that when people comes with a degree from the MIT, a degree from their local university and at the same time an internship at Facebook. All in the same year, from the 3 different cities.
This single sentence terrifies me:
"At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education."
$120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I hope he lasts 2 weeks