May I politely say "fuck you" for getting a 120k job after completing a bootcamp. Starting salary of 120k/yr for someone with a 3-month vocational program and an unrelated undergrad degree? That is literally insane.

Hah, you may, it does seem pretty crazy, doesn't it?

I would say that the reason it seems crazy isn't rational, however. If I was forced to break down the reasons that this worked, I would condense it to three:

1. I focused entirely upon a single skill that is highly desired right now (Javascript / Web Development in JS/HTML/CSS/JS Frameworks). I didn't "waste" any time learning other programming languages, systems designs, or even anything beyond the most basic of algorithms and algorithm design. These things are not necessary to build webapps in Angular/Backbone/React/Vanilla. My bootcamp (hack reactor) assisted with a very focused curriculum.

2. I was able to condense this learning to a short period of time by being utterly focused on it and nothing else, all day, every day. I was learning the one skill I needed to be employable from 8a-9p Mon-Sat for 3 months, and then 8a-5p Mon-Fri for another 3 months (when I was a TA).

3. I am a highly sales-trained ex-recruiter, and know through experience and training exactly what I need to do to get a job, fast. This includes being an annoying little bastard ;) but also includes streamlining my processes (never spending more than 10 minutes on a single application, etc) and being very good at turning a "no" into a "oh, ok, let's talk more."

> being very good at turning a "no" into a "oh, ok, let's talk more."

Honestly wish there was a 3 month bootcamp for this.

Be a recruiter for a bit :P or any sales job, really.

Best advice I can give is treat every "no" like a probe from the other side to learn more. They're not saying no, they're saying "I don't know enough about this to want it." Obviously use common sense to avoid harassing someone, and don't waste your time where no opportunity exists (Mark Cuban reacted to the infamous "sell me your pen question" with "Do you need a pen? No? Ok, have a nice day.")

So every "no" has a response -

1. "No, you don't have enough experience."

Response: "I understand that this role requires the right experience. I applied to the job because I'm confident I have the experience you need. What about my background makes you feel otherwise? Do you have a coding challenge I can complete to demonstrate my ability?"

2. "No, we've had issues with bootcamp grads in the past. "

Response: "Hm, I can understand why having an experience like that would make you wary about bootcamp graduates. Was there something specific about why that grad didn't deliver? (choose response based on further information gathered, then: ) Hm, that does sound challenging. I think that my x y or z demonstrates why that issue wouldn't arise with me / I would love to demonstrate via a code challenge why I wouldn't x y z / If you go to myproject.calebjay.com you can see that I have quite a bit of hands-on experience with x y or z, so I'm confident that a b c wouldn't be an issue.

I'm remembering now an old sales training "no" breakdown:

1. Acknowledge the concern. Make the client feel that their concerns are valid, do not challenge or attack them, but at the same time avoid perfectly validating their belief that this is a harbringer that all similar solutions warrant "nos." So: "Yea, it is quite frustrating when recruiters send candidates that aren't even close to a good fit. You should see some of the resumes we people send to us when we open a job!" === good. "Oh man recruiters are so annoying, yea I would definitely never use them" === bad (when you're a recruiter trying to sell your services. Also, "psh, recruiters never act that way, you must have done something to annoy them" === bad.

2. Information gather. Always good all the time anyway. Usually the first "no" gives very little information and you could make some bad assumptions. "We've had bad experience with recruiters in the past" tells you literally nothing. The answer they give you can lead you straight into one of the fifty sells your company has drilled into your head. "What happened with the previous agencies?" "Well, they were sending bad resumes." --> "Oh, we get some hilariously off resumes. We like to think of ourselves as a filter for our clients, so we get maybe fifty resumes for a posting which allows us to hand-pick the best 3 for our clients." "Well, they would have three or four recruiters constantly calling us." "That is frustrating, we decided two years ago to only allow a single recruiter point of contact for our company because of that exact feedback from our clients." Etc.

3. Close. Of course.

> Honestly wish there was a 3 month bootcamp for this.

Please, no.

I'll take someone without a CS degree and an intense rabid desire to solve problems way beyond their current capabilities any day over a pedantic PhD who can't be bothered to even put together Ikea furniture. Yes, I know a couple. They are useless.

Attitude and approach is far more important than knowledge. The latter can be gained in many ways. The former comes from childhood and, generally speaking, is hard to reprogram.

What you're describing is an engineering mindset, or engineering talent. That translates into value in many different domains of knowledge.

Maybe I'm a lazy asshole, but I how can anyone cram-learn like that? 8am-9p everyday? Come on?! I applaud your effort. I really do. As long as your employer, and you, have the proper expectations about your skill set then I guess it's the perfect match.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it for all sorts of learning. It worked for me because I had literally gambled everything on it - if I dropped out or got kicked out, I'd be 17k in debt living in the most expensive city in america with almost no savings. Failure wasn't an option. Furthermore, my fallback options were shitty. 40k/year doing sales or recruitment, busting my ass to reach 6 figures, being stepped on the whole way up the ladder. Maybe teaching english abroad, end up being that 40 year old white dude trapped in Taiwan, stuck every night in the foreigner bar and droning about what could have been. Nope no no thank you.

> Maybe teaching english abroad, end up being that 40 year old white dude trapped in Taiwan, stuck every night in the foreigner bar and droning about what could have been.

At 5 years short of 40, doesn't sound half-bad if you cut out both the teaching and the bars =) there's gotta be worse "traps" than Taiwan, it's a comely-enough place, and one of the few capital cities in the region where cycling is as conveniently practical as it is in Western capitals

So I guess you should do something that makes you happy (good for you!), but please do consider that actions actually have other implications than money.

The fact that you can make more money making webpages than teaching some poor kid english is mostly sad.

There's probably not too many "poor kids" in Taiwan.. as for the 20-something "English teachers" roaming the likes of Cambodia, Laos etc, unless actual NGO workers they're overwhelmingly teaching the better-off locals' offspring for comparatively slim pay --- more than accounted for by incredibly low and highly tweakable cost-of-living, lots of public holidays, low-to-zero minimum standards (other than "a proper attire" ie dress shirt, and saving everyone's faces at all times) --- which when motivated gives them great freedom to evolve their own didactic approaches and when not (such things ebb & flow after all) easily let's them approach the task at hand in a very laidback, relaxed, low-effort manner.

Not saying it's the best model for all societies, but it's assuredly not without it's charms for all parties involved. Different flow.

> The fact that you can make more money making webpages than teaching some poor kid english is mostly sad.

You're right in a sense; things that matter the most seem to pay the least. Teachers shape our kids tremendously and yet it's common they need donations just to buy simple school supplies.

Now I'm not sure it's fair to necessarily compare the two but it is still sad.

Yes, it's not fair: I made the comparison because the parent painted the picture of teaching English abroad as a "loser" job.

And that's ok, and you don't need to do that, but please do not assume that people who actually do such things do them out of desperation for money.

At least though it's not without merit that this glaring gap between what people claim to value "most" and where funding flows the most remains as visible as it is. Reality is the best reality-check for most of us. ;)

Well, I won't disparage those that are actually teaching poor kids, but in Taiwan I was teaching the top 25%, aka those that can afford to attend a cram school. I was making 2x the monthly salary working 20 hours a week that your average college educated Taiwanese grad was making working 60-70hrs a week.

So a $120k salary may be on the high range but graduating from a boot camp in the Bay area and going straight into a tech company job is actually crazy common. I work with people who have done it. Now it'll be a junior position most likely but in the Bay area a junior position is typically around $100k.

Also I have yet to interview at a tech company out here that actually cares at all about my degree. Might as well not even put it on my resume at this point and it's only a 2 year degree. Many of the devs I know have similar experiences.

He lives in the Bay Area, 120k starting is standard because devs literally won't be able to live there otherwise.

Plenty of non-devs manage to get by on <120k, especially right after college.

Living on their own or with several roommates in a piece of shit apartment

Just like everyone else.

"spent a month studying Javascript" + 3 months seems surprisingly short; a very large return on investment.

I'm CS undergrad(almost half-way), but by job requirements none of my skills are even close to being employable. I guess I should start Js

If you don't mind sharing, What topics/frameworks did you learn in that time and if not the same, what frameworks/skillets are mostly used day-to-day?

There's about 1,000 Web-dev specific jobs posted to Linkedin, daily, in the SF Bay Area, so yes if you're interested in getting a job fast I recommend it. But if you're a CS undergrad I'd target some of the more niche stuff that you can leverage your degree to get, like Machine Learning, Machine Vision, AI type stuff that are inaccessible to me until I get projects under my belt. If you're halfway, in two years you'll be up against even more bootcamp grads than I was - not something that would be much fun.

We focused on:

Javascript

Node

Express, and building a server/routing

HTML

CSS

Angular

React

Backbone

MVC client-side

Security and XSS basics

Auth basics (I wish they had focused on this more)

Basic algorithms and data structures (your binary search trees and whatnot)

Interview Prep

SCRUM stuff (couple group projects)

Git

Deployment (mostly heroku)

To condense it down, I'd say you should be able to, upon graduation: Build from scratch a functioning web application, with a backend that you wrote, that is accessible via the internet one way or the other. You should definitely have some projects published by the time you graduate, because you'll be going up against bootcamp grads with 2-3, or more, demonstrable projects. A big sell the bootcamps go on is that their grads are actually more "job-ready" than someone fresh out of a CS program, the perception being the CS person will have a spotty knowledge of actual hands on programming and deployment. Obviously your program results may vary, but just be aware that's the perception bootcamps and their grads are exfiltrating into the tech community, so it'd be a very bad idea to fall on that radar.

EDIT: I'm remembering now that a lot of CS applicants to my bootcamp would have projects on github, but would need to be pulled down and compiled to actually work (python projects and whatnot). If you end up with a lot of these from your classes, see if you can use that language's server systems to set up a simple API, with a very basic front-end, that allows interaction via the internet. Being able to, in a job fair, literally pull a project up on my phone and show it to a company rep was a very powerful tool.

I'd say a lot of luck, too? I did the same but my salary is only half that.

Edit: I do get to work remotely though, and the salary is in UK terms

> I'd say a lot of luck, too? I did the same but my salary is only half that.

Depends on the area. In the Bay area it's not uncommon to start at a job as a junior for around $100k. Living expenses really push this up. In the MD / DC / VA area, in my experience, juniors can start at most tech / consulting companies at $65k or higher.