I'm a hiring manager and coder. This last 12 months alone, i've interviewed 100+ engineers.

Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's perverse incentives:

- Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an engineers learning curve looks like.

This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find the above to be true. They're not students, they're customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale.

I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.

As a former bootcamp tutor, senior dev, startup founder and now employer of a former student, the inflated sense of self worth is there but I think it's overstated or overemphasised.

I would say ~30% of my students had some form of higher than realistic expectations of where they would when they finished the course. I made a point of beating that out of them.

But there were very few, maybe only 5% people that really fit your description. But I can remember them very clearly whereas the middle std dev of students I wouldn't recall much of them.

I don't think it is selection bias. I keep notes on every interview I conduct, and went back reviewing the bootcamper grads recently.

I would say close to 60% were unsuitable for even junior positions. Their arrogance made them dangerous, and they knew just enough to cause problems.

You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Sadly, the people who end up losing out are the people coming out of the other end.

It is also a sad fact, that often, regardless of bootcamper incompetence, you can find a more incompetent manager willing to hire that person and validate their skewed world view.

As you can tell, i'm tired of it. At least uni grads from CS courses know enough to know they know very little.

We all know the tech hiring process is broken and bad at picking performant individuals.

In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits.

In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded.

Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two).

I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.

"Just pick the cream off the top, even though you're supposed to be their instructor."

Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.

Sorry, can you explain the conflict here and who or what it's conflicting with? I don't think you've thought this out or thought about it from the point of view of the students.

Your recommendation was to teach a bootcamp to find applicants. This, in my mind, reads like a combined internship / interview that the applicant pays the potential employer to partake in.

OK, that's not what I intended. Teaching a bootcamp is pretty full on commitment so using it solely as a hiring funnel would see you ousted via feedback scores pretty quickly if you weren't delivering on the learning aspect.

The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing.

The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written.

The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.

>You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can.

Not a bootcamper but I think this isn't true. If you put in the effort and you're moderately intelligent you can speedrun pretty much any career in terms of knowledge.

However I do think there's a negative selection bias in the people that end up doing the bootcamps. They're not the self taught people that can teach themselves x in a few weeks. These people don't go to bootcamps, because they already taught themselves x and don't see the purpose in doing a bootcamp for a lot of money that teaches them x and doesn't give them a useful certificate.

The main benefit I see in the classical university track is that you gain more breadth of knowledge. And while you may not need most of it, it often helps in problem solving to know that some things "exist". Just so you can Google the details when you're faced with a similar problem.

The other benefit is of course the signaling value. Bootcamps don't have much of it.

> In terms of knowledge

Perhaps, but efficacy is knowledge combined with experience. Experience requires time, diverse challenges, mistakes and so on.

Many bootcampers (and low-level developers generally) seem to think you can jump ahead to being senior/lead without actually gaining the experience, making the mistakes and learning the lessons first-hand.

Sadly, there's plenty of crap low-level companies that will hire them too.

Oh, ok, I thought you were talking about the knowledge part, because most university students come without useful experience, too. But no, obviously nobody should be in a lead position directly after college or bootcamp, except maybe if they had a lot of experience prior and this was only some qualification "on top".

That describes someone I know down to a T. Bootcamp graduate, can barely code, but claims he's aced every interview and blames the graphic designers and business suits when he doesn't get an offer. He also expects to be paid like a senior with only 2 years of experience.

He has been fired from every coding job he's had, due to difficulties working with others. In a nutshell, he's convinced that he knows more than everyone else. (For example, he once spent 3 hours arguing with a guy who builds rocket systems at JPL about which of them knows more about rockets.)

Him and others like him have soured a lot of LA tech companies on hiring boot camp graduates.

Sounds absolutely insufferable.

How do people continue to get by with such little insight.

Exploitative education has been around for decades - I'm just bemused how it manages to survive in IT. And I do blame 'IT' for not snuffing it out. With a computer and an internet connection, there's more education available for free than any one person could ever need. I'm non-technical, but can't see why anybody couldn't take the skills and say contribute to a open source project to build a CV that could be taken seriously, for no expenditure.

It is insecurity. Some people aren't that self directing and can't navigate the quantity of information with confidence.

These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence.

Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.

If the typical ads on YouTube for bootcamps are any indication, I can believe the self worth issue.

The clear implication is that you finish the bootcamp and you will be on top of the world.

I find it varies a lot by bootcamp. It seems like the ones coming out of the Ruby community frequently have better pedagogy & more realistic expectations than the ones teaching React & pretending that's all there is to software engineering.

React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.

If you're hiring, I know an enthusiastic boot camp grad that loves ruby and can't stand react.

My company has a react team somewhere, but not ruby...

In my teens and early 20s, I had all the time in the world to experiment. As a middle-aged father, I get very few hours to learn, and so have to use them efficiently. Being spoon-fed helps a lot with that. It's an especially acute problem given how much junk info exists on the internet.

If you can afford the time to spend a whole day learning how to solve the problem yourself, it's probably the best way to learn. But if we restrict the industry to those who can afford that time, we'll be poorer for it. Many people can be good developers despite going through a different learning path.

The discrimination against different learning styles is a bit off-putting. Just because some folks can just read and self learn everything doesn't mean everyone can. It also doesn't mean those people aren't capable.

I am not a parent, but I've definitely found as I've gotten older it's harder to self learn sometimes. Having structure and some guidance can make a world of difference.

A good example I had not too long ago was having to go back into Java, something I hadn't written in many many years. Syntactically, I could write basic logic. But I didn't have any feel for how a project should be structured, what sort of libraries exist, and a lot of other things I know implicitly from languages I am working with regularly. I had a friend (who actually happened to be a bootcamp teacher in a previous life) spend a couple hours with me just going through the basics over a screenshare/voice chat. I picked up more in those 2-3 hours than I did in previous 2-3 weeks because I had someone who knew what they were doing, could answer questions, could anticipate what I might be thinking next and could guide me.

A good teacher can be infinitely helpful to learning something, even for someone experienced (I've been writing code for over two decades now). I can't imagine how much more helpful a good teacher could be for someone who is just trying to start learning. We shouldn't be discouraging this style of learning, we should be seeing how to make programming accessible to everyone interested in learning.

I hear you. I'm self taught. I was always the go to guy when there was a problem. I had no one I could ask. Teachers asked me. But no one hired me. So I became self employed. I wonder how much better I would've done if I actually went studying and had a mentor. But I was always on the frontier, always. I also fixed so many bad student projects, aka where someone would hire a student for cheap and the student would abandon the project and I had to step in to finish it. Ah well it is what it is. Nowadays I feel like an outsider, probably because I am. Still being self employed but my projects crashed and income is way below sustainable. So either create something new, but I'm getting old and tired and bored, or find a job, but I'm too used to the comfort of working when I feel like it and not being on a clock. Anyhow I digress and if I had a proper teacher in my young years, how much better could I have done. I'd imagine an increased learning speed of factor at least 5 if not 10. Also not studying means not knowing the language e.g. log(o) or w/e. I never knew what "scalar" meant when I read it, but I knew without having a label "scalar". etc etc

I prided myself on being self taught but once I went to a bootcamp and learned RoR in just 3 months from zero to working products.. it blew my mind how much having a good teacher around for 5 hours or so can do for you. Previously I taught myself js and it took 3 years to become decent at it. Teacher was able fill in the holes, give watch out tips, inform about parts to skip for now, show the big picture and keep momentum going.

I was a decent programmer before my first job but doing something every day for 8 hours is a completely different experience. You don't have this "luxury" in your free time. The moment things stop being interesting or become too difficult you just stop and give up.

I disagree with this hot take and I’m a hiring manager. I know for a fact recruiters aren’t going to be forwarding resumes from single moms who self-teach learn python the hard way purely because there’s no job experience or credential, even a shitty one. They won’t even give her a time of day to send a seedy LinkedIn message. Resumes like that will be sorted out even if she might be brilliant, intelligent, and just needs a chance.

At least boot camps I know do job placement as well as the camp itself. An entirely self taught person has all the chips stacked against them.

Depends on the company and how they hire. Yeah, there are many companies that won't even consider you, but that leaves a lot of excellent candidates for others. Our lead developer joined around 6 years ago as a junior with zero prior experience outside his own side projects. (Which isn't to say it would be normal to go from zero to lead in that time period, but to underline how exceptional he is given he was able to do so.) Many of our other top developers over the years have had similarly non-standard backgrounds. Our screening process is definitely unconventional though; I barely consider resumes until well into the process.

I think if you're legitimately smart and dedicated, and put the time in to build knowledge, you'll be able to get a start somewhere. And once you have real work experience, the credential becomes less and less relevant.

FWIW I do find there's value in actual comp sci and software engineering degrees, and I will give those some amount of weight. But as far as bootcamps, if two candidates demonstrate the same level of skill, knowledge, dedication, etc., it makes zero difference to me if one has a boot camp and the other is self taught.

This is an amazing story and I’m glad you’re open to juniors that are from unconventional backgrounds. But you must recognize you’re an exception; my point still stands that odds are garbage for self-teaching and it’s not as easy as flippantly saying “well, just self-educate then!”

I don’t think I’m an exception. But to the extent that I am, I think it has more to do with people believing that they need a CS degree. They believe they need one, people tell them they need one, so they get one. I didn’t go to college, and I can’t specifically recall that fact ever even coming up.

Curious how you folks screen resumes without education background on them. Do you check out GitHub profiles in detail? That seems incredibly time-intensive.

We haven't been able to get our interviewers do that consistently, and a lot of our self-taught hires report that basically no one in the past has ever grilled them about their personal projects, and that we were the first company to do so.

We include a fizzbuzz-style coding question in the job posting itself, and ask people to include an answer with their application. 90%+ don't bother (the ones who are just spamming resumes) and can be immediately ignored. Of the remainder, at least half can be cut pretty easily based on their submission. Usually the remainder make one of a set of minor mistakes, or if not, there are several ways to approach the problem, so either way there's something straightforward I can write back to ask. Usually manage to whittle the list down a bit further based on those conversations, and usually then I'll look at resumes.

> Resumes like that will be sorted out even if she might be brilliant, intelligent, and just needs a chance.

That sounds like exactly the core of the broken hiring processes. Shouldn't a good hiring manager try to create a process that finds these brilliant, intelligent candidates?

My own experience disagrees. I'm a self-taught engineer (on Python even) and I did have recruiters finding me and passing on my resume when I was first entering the job market ten years ago, and I had hiring managers giving me the shot at the screening (which I passed). I've had a pretty smooth career since then.

The industry has changed in the last decade. There’s enough college (and yes, boot camp) grads, and enough scam artists wasting hiring manager’s time, that someone with no history will need some kind of “in”.

The QA route - the modern version of the oft vaunted “start in the mail room and work hard” position - is mostly gone too.

What are your qualifications? Do they have hiring manager boot camp?

Being an autodidact is not a requirement for being smart enough to become an engineer. Some of the most brilliant people I know happen to have a very hard time with self-teaching.

Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.

Absolutely. I worked without effective teaching for the first five years of my career, and I was okay at my job. But I learned more in the first six months with solid feedback from skilled developers than I had in five years of stumbling around on my own.

There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself, especially how to make code that is easy for other people to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively. People who focus on teaching themselves are doing themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a disservice.

The most important thing about bootcamps, and the reason the best ones produce people who are better-prepared than many CS programs, is because they provide real feedback from skilled coders on the code individual developers are producing.

You can no more replace bootcamps with internet websites than you can replace teachers with books: people need interactive experiences built on sound pedagogy to learn most effectively.

The reason the VC-funded bootcamps are scams is because they call what they do teaching without having any foundations in pedagogy or instruction and using un-qualified recent students as the only "instructors" looking at students' code.

IME best predictor of "success" is the prestige/brand of the candidates have before they entered the program. It's based on candidate selection, not ability. But with the VC model there is pressure to grow, so they lower the bar and accept people who aren't transitioning from prestige background; PHD's/name brand schools or companies... and shocker they struggle to find a job.

They are scams because they juke the stats. They hire their own graduates to up placement rates & deceptively determine there own exclusion criteria to remove data of people who didn't get placed.

As someone who went to a coding bootcamp (Dev Bootcamp), I have to agree.

Most of what I got out of doing the bootcamp was being surrounded by other coders, collaborating on stuff in person, and being exposed to the bay area tech scene.

I don't regret going and I had some really great times there, but if today someone asked me if they should go to a bootcamp, I would suggest recreating that experience themselves at a fraction of the price.

Here's what I would suggest:

- Take online courses and use Stack Overflow. Everything that's available for cheap or free is better than anything I was taught at bootcamp.

- If you can, move to somewhere that has some semblance of a tech scene, and find the smallest, cheapest cubby hole to live in so you don't have to worry so much about paying rent. At most, have a part time job that won't interfere with your studies, but even better if you don't need to work.

- Go to tech meetups, mixers, etc. Start networking ASAP. Meet other coders. Do presentations, no matter how novice the topic.

- Start blogging about what you're learning.

- Have some project to show for your effort to your potential first employers. Doesn't matter how dumb and impractical it is. I attribute part of my initial success to hammering out a live chat with playlist and rewind control on top of YouTube years before YouTube implemented that themselves.

- Practice working your butt off. If you really want to achieve your goal, you'll stay up late to solve problems when it's necessary.

- Make sure you're having fun at every step of the way and don't let people distract you.

There, I may have just saved you thousands of dollars. Potentially that can all be done for free depending on where you're situated geographically or how much money you're sitting on.

If you know what a shell script is, you probably don't need a bootcamp. That said, if you are completely clueless to tech, maybe a bootcamp would be a good thing. Depending on the bootcamp, of course.

If you want to learn pretty much anything the information is there, but it's not curated, and you don't have the support of a guide. Especially if you're new to the field, you don't necessarily know how to even ask the right questions about where to start or how to get unstuck.

To make an analogy, if you were learning to exercise for the first time, the information is out there, but there's a ton of bad and conflicting information out there too, and if you're not careful you'll make no progress or even get hurt. So it makes sense to hire a trainer or learn from friends, especially in the beginning.

Hot take: there's a thing called unknown-unknowns and it's what separates people with a formal education in the field from everyone else.

Years of experience can make you a competent individual in the subject but even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng.

It's possible to pick up on this if you're 'in the club,' it's impossible to notice it if you're not.

Lol, world's lamest club. Ask one of those super well-rounded Comp Sci guys to write a join query in SQL or create a pleasant user interface or build a modestly robust CI pipeline and see what happens.

This is a weird generalization, I know lots of CS grads who can do those things and have done them professionally. Are you actually suggesting that CS grads can’t write sql queries due to their education?

But you didn't think it was weird that "aunty_helen" above me claimed "the club" of all Comp Sci grads are smarter and more well-rounded than all other practitioners?

>even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng.

Goes both ways, mate. I've always been shocked by (even very experienced) CompSci guys' absolute inability to create a simple state machine. Keep shit orthogonal, guys!

Same thing, but to a lesser extent, when it comes to timing constraints.

Exactly, I did a bit of work in a jet engine test cell as an asside to my main coding duties. The elec eng that I worked under had state machines and labview as far as the eye could see. I wouldn't put myself in a situation where I was relied upon for designing anything. But debugging / technician duties I was fine, hook an oscilloscope up to that engine? Help with thermocouple calibration? No problems.

One thing I will mention though, I've always found elec engineers to have a higher work rate that software devs. Always.

Isn't the actual material covered in these camps secondary? What people want is a certificate to put on their resume and some help with networking/placement. I mean I also think these programs are just as ripe for shady dealings as places like ITT Tech, but that's why people are paying into them.

Everyone still has to jump through the Leetcode/whiteboard/design hoops to get in the door. My impression from working with bootcamp grads is that they are well-prepared for this trial, better than CS grads. The bootcamps don't teach them any theory that will "never" be used on the job.

While true they still need a certification to put on a resume to get past recruiters. It's fine to think they shouldn't but IRL they probably do.

I've hired plenty of engineers; most hiring managers know that.

Problem 1: it's too easy to apply to jobs. Unqualified people blast resumes at you. If each resume takes you 2-3 minutes for a fast discard, and 15+ minutes to really look at, but only a handful of seconds for someone to send to you...

Problem 2: interviews aren't all that useful, and junior people don't have a track record to rely on. When I hire someone, I'm investing piles of senior eng time onboarding, etc. A bootcamp is a useful filter for candidate being worth the effort (time, $, opportunity cost) to hire and train.

To quote you,

> People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb

A bootcamp -- much like a college degree -- shows drive, motivation, and the ability to execute over time. Is this exclusive to bootcamp or college graduates? Absolutely not, and I've hired people with neither. But again, hiring is very time expensive.

You presume that one's time is free, which for many people, especially single moms, is simply not true. Time to spare is probably the single resource that they have the least of - so paying to save some time can mean a difference between being able to pull it, or simply not having a chance at all.

Cost effective use of time is also important thing. That is spending the couple hours to actually researching subject before engaging in relatively long and expensive undertaking. Maybe it is just my engineer mindset to actually first evaluate and do some basic research.

I’d say I have always been conspicuously amazing at learning in isolation, from written text alone. However, it is still the case that I learn even better in a room with other people and some direction. So I can understand why it helps people. Also, it’s a kind of credential.

>who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn

Don't be condescending. People switching careers don't know all the information is already online. That's what makes predatory boot camps that much worse.

yes, if if just surf can resolve it, we should not have any education problems in today :(

There's also the people who just need a bit of guidance before they can improvise.

They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and "can only repeat from memory".

Ok but the argument is that the people who don't need that bit of guidance are probably better hires than those who do need guidance.

Yes, however spoon feeding provides focus. A poor newbie could spin their wheels for a long time traveling down the wrong coding avenues.

I wish there were more opportunities for pure UX CSS jobs, without the complexity of frontend coding. Just make pretty themes and charge for that. A gentler learning curve than HTML JS React Node Express SQL and on and on and on.

Well that's the problem, is that the incentives for instruction are misaligned and the ramp to excellence are ill-defined.

The boot camps are wrong in teaching rotary, where they might benefit from selective regiments.

Learn to learn as I've heard it put.

Would you apply the same logic to a 4-year bachelor's degree?

No. I was aware during my CS undergrad that I wasn't learning how to be a software engineer. I was learning the theories of computation from professional computer scientists. There were plenty of warnings on HN and the rest of the Web that internships, side projects, and Leetcode grinding would be required to land a job. A CS degree does not guarantee a job.

And yet everything I learned in my CS degree could have been done on my own time without paying a massive amount of tuition. That doesn't make the degree worthless. Same can be said for bootcamps.

I'll give you props for having a divisive opinion that you were able to state without vitriol, but the real thing that schooling brings is structure.

All of the information in the world is available in the library, but no one will ever memorize every book in it. The internet has a trillion libraries worth of information, but no one can absorb enough of it without structure and guidance to make something useful out of it.

Schools start everyone at the same starting point and guide them through to the same end point, so that companies can rest assured that the lowest graduate of their school is at a specific minimum competency level. Without the school structure, most people would Dunning-Kruger themselves into thinking that they are either vastly better or immensely worse than they actually are.

All information for any job or position is available online or in books. Why do people think coding is special in this regards?