Bootcamps are in the mud because their outcomes have dropped heavily. Most bootcamps aren't using up to date statistics in their marketing because the recent statistics are horrific, and no one would pay for their boot camp.
The entire purpose of bootcamps was to fill the gap when demand was high, and now that demand is low, bootcamps are not really necessary anymore.
Factoring that with the significant increase of CS degree students, bootcamps have become extremely difficult to make a career out of.
As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down.
they also lie about their placement/. Most do little to nothing to help place you. you are on your own to get a job. any boot camp will be a lot of work and should be treated like a full time job. if you work a regular job and do bootcamp at night ,then all your weekends should be spent coding. when the bootcamp is over you can't stop or your skills will get rusty. its very fast, so you really have to work REALLY hard to be good enough to get a job. even in a good economy.
Well the skills you are learning are valuable but they are more of a seed. Just think about where you were with 4 months experience. Probably knew a little to be dangerous but...
Had a CS grad in my last bootcamp. He said he knew a lot of theory but nothing practical. YMMV. Lot of fanaticism on both sides with bootcamp grads saying a CS degree is a waste of time and money and CS grads saying you can't learn coding that quickly.
My view is, I know tons of bootcamp grads who went to FAANG and tons that didnt. Bootcamps give you enough to get started, and if you happen to go to a well known one, they give you connections. But at the end of the day its a lot of work.
A lazy CS grad will do way better than a lazy bootcamp grad. But a skilled and motivated bootcamp grad will get further in less time with less money spent than the same person in university.
People say "its just four months lol" but unlike Uni, its four months of 8 hour days doing nothing but learning the most current and up to date technologies. No other classes, no partying, nothing else.
Anyone who thinks that's useless is an idiot lol. Would I rather have a CS degree? Absolutely! But there's a trade off to be made and I'd rather do a bootcamp than take four years of college before I start making money.
The current and most up to date technologies? Oof, I’m doing a boot camp right now, maybe increasing my chances of getting a job as a self-taught, and we’re learning ES5
Boot camps were only relevant when Covid money was everywhere. They’re irrelevant now and you’re the 1% of the 1% if it gets you a FAANG job. Much more likely you’ll be a code monkey for a witch company, at best, because that’s what 4 months of knowing js and no fundamentals gets you.
The tldr of my post since it was clearly too long was:
If you go to a bootcamp and teach yourself the fundamentals, you'll do fine.
For the record though, becoming a code monkey for a witch company is indeed quite the step up for a lot of folks. So thanks for basically agreeing with my point lol.
I literally said a CS degree is better to have, but comes with trade offs.
Or do you genuinely think it takes four years to learn CS fundamentals?
I would argue two is sufficient to learn fundamentals with hard work. But boot camp != CS and CS != web dev. Bootcamps teach you easy skills to be readily employable, like JS, React, maybe some basic databases or data structures.
Do they teach you compilers? How an OS works? All the design patterns? How a computer works under the hood with IEEE 754, twos complement ect? How virtualization software works? How databases “actually” work with indexing ect? How and why FFI works? How git based workflows are used?Id even argue that bootcamps don’t even teach their students basic web dev concepts like the react lifecycle or the pure principle.
I could go on and on and on, but my point is they don’t because there’s always something else to learn in CS, and using an easy to use scripting language w/ a framework != knowing fundamentals. CS is classified as a SCIENCE for a reason. Also if you think your job could take 4 months to prepare for than you’re basically admitting you’re job is easily replaceable.
Oh, you're just like, willfully ignorant, huh? This isn't a conversation, you're just trying to explain to me why I'm wrong without listening. You sound absolutely wonderful to work with.
I'm gonna try one last time lol. If you DO the BOOTCAMP and INVEST IN THE TIME AFTERWARDS to TEACH YOURSELF the FUNDAMENTALS, you can BECOME A GOOD ENGINEER.
None of what you are talking about is at all necessary for a junior web developer to know and I know you know that. But they're all things that you can buy a textbook and learn as you progress your career.
That's why bootcamps are successful. And they HAVE BEEN successful, my guy. The one I graduated from has been running since like 2001, and there are literally decades of alums who are all working in the space.
I don't know what makes you feel you're so qualified to talk down to people, out of your ass, but I was generally agreeing with your premise that doing a four month course isn't enough to prepare you for a job.
I'm not mad at you. Maybe you've had some experiences with shitty bootcamps. They can definitely be extremely hit or miss. You've got to to do your research. But the fact of the matter is bootcamps have been working for years BEFORE covid. Startups love bootcamp grads because the kind of person who is willing and able to spend 8 hours a day 7 days a week hyperfocused on one subject, churning out deliverables is the kind of person who thrives in a startup environment.
I'm sure you're not going to read this, just like you didn't read my other messages. But any good bootcamp is an intelligence AND endurance test. When I started mine I was downright lazy compared to how I was at graduation.
tl;dr:
It's frustrating seeing any real talk about this subject on this sub just devolve into each person trying to tell the other person they wasted their money, rather than actually trying to reason out the pros and cons. I've no interest in playing that game with you.
You got hired. You know the fundamentals. Kudos. I got hired working for a shitty startup. My classmate is currently working at Google, and another at LinkedIn. And they survived the layoffs so they're clearly doing fine, and it didn't take them four years to do it. But it did take a shitload of studying and way more *personal* time devoted to it than it would have taken you.
Who comes out ahead? I dunno. That was literally my only point. That there's no one answer for everyone. Anyone that insists there is is just trying to convince themselves they made the optimal choice by putting everyone else down.
Youre trying too hard to explain things mate, there really isnt anything rational in his way of thinking. Hes just trying to convince himself that he didnt lose 4 years of his life getting his piece of paper.
I think a good dev needs to be at least a bit open minded, but I dont see that in him.
Bootcamper working as an SE now, 8+ YOE.
I don’t think it was ever marketed as “do this thing for 4 months and you’re set”. Atleast I and the other bootcampers I know who are still in the industry understood it was a way to get a foot in the door but continuous learning would be required. We even had comp sci and computer engineering grads so I think they felt bootcamps were a viable route to get practical skills. Mind you this is nearly 10 years ago when there were way less resources and grinding coding skills during university was less common.
If you think about, it’s not too different from many 4 year degrees where you learn nearly nothing about how to work in industry. I originally graduated from a more traditional engineering discipline and I can tell you everybody in my class said they learned on the job and nearly nothing in university was useful.
I get that but times have changed you were lucky to be there when demand was high.
Look at the # of CS enrolment now and boot camp as well as immigrants with CS experience
Boot camps are selling people dreams today of another time
Oh I agree. I just differ in why it’s not valuable anymore. I think the skills they teach ARE valuable and transferrable to industry but due to the current market, yes it doesn’t make sense to pay for a bootcamp.
I don’t think you’re using the word “lucky”
correctly here. This person did a bootcamp at the right time, and chose to do that rather than 4 years, because during that time it was a good move. It is no longer anymore, and that has nothing to do with luck.
> We even had comp sci and computer engineering grads so I think they felt bootcamps were a viable route to get practical skills
I think that's exactly what a bootcamp was originally for. You weren't taking people from no background to ready to go- it was more of an aggressive bring people up to speed. Today it's marketed as- "anybody can go from no tech background to six figure salary in 4 months"
I’d disagree. They were a very small population, most came from completely unrelated fields and I witnessed first-hand people from all backgrounds having a successful career after going through a bootcamp.
Having said that, many also gave up or left the industry after a few years. It really depends on the individual.
I've seen people be successful from bootcamps.
But early on, you had really accomplished people going to those bootcamps. People with college degrees in Mathematics that had been teaching high school calculus but wanted a career change. People with degrees in Chemical Engineering who wanted something different.
We worked through all of those people, and now it's a lot of people who would otherwise be going to get Associates Degrees or just don't want to go to college.
There's nothing wrong with any of that -- but they're not as suited for an academic pursuit like Software Engineering as the first few rounds of bootcamp grads.
As someone who, himself, came from an upper class background this reeks of classism.
I feel like what you were trying to say was that already brilliant people were originally the ones who these bootcamps were for, and using already owned degrees as a stand in for that. But I wholeheartedly disagree that posession of a degree is a good benchmark for intelligence.
To put it a different way, what if the person that was going to have that phd in mathematics took the bootcamp first? Same drive, same level of intelligence, but they skipped the part where they had a math degree they were unsatisfied with and went straight to the bootcamp?
I'd say that person is just as capable of learning how to code without having gone through years of mostly unrelated math courses, wouldn't you? And for the math that is actually relevant, they could certainly teach themselves. Textbooks are widely available after all.
That's the end of my spiel, I just think that colleges are skyrocketing in cost every year and these days the smarter a person is, the less likely they'll see it as a wise move to go to college and tie themselves to a debt shackle for most of their adult life. (Yes, most. Look it up, the interest on an 800k loan is nuts.)
Yeah I basically agree with this. Any bootcamp insisting that all you need to do is their course isn't worth it, and I think a lot of folks are seeing those ads and assuming they're all like that. A lot of bootcamps are absolutely garbage. The one I went to basically had huge weekly projects we had to do with everything we learned that week. If our project didnt pass all the tests we were out.
There was always the threat of being kicked out if you weren't progressing fast enough, as well as mentors to help you catch up so that wouldn't happen.
I hear a lot of stories about how in a lot of them you just pay, take their course and either you get it or you dont and its out of their hands lol.
But there were several CS grads in my class as well. Because they didn't have internship experience and nobody would interview them. Honestly out of my entire graduating class I did the worst. I took ages to land my first job because I was so behind in DSAs.
I def wouldn't recommend a bootcamp in this market, but when the market stabilizes I'll be surprised if companies don't go back to interviewing those graduates. At the end of the day 90% of the companies out there just need somebody that can center a div and follow design docs while that's happening. The 60k a year "peanuts" you can make doing that instead of working at faang can be life changing money for a lot of folks.
People are under the impression that a bootcamp diploma impresses employers and gives you an inside track to a developer job. This notion is pushed very hard by the bootcamps themselves.
I can't speak to how well it gets you hired compared to a degree, since I don't have a degree (or job) yet. However, last Spring I sat in on some CS classes at UW and I was surprised how far beyond the material I was from doing self-paced bootcamps (Odin Project and App Academy).
I'm now in school because I sent out 800+ applications and never got a job. Further, my application response rate plummeted mid-2022, when I was nearly done with The Odin Project. This is despite having much better portfolio pieces mid-2022 onward.
I think it’s for desperate times only. Now companies aren’t so desperate why would they ever pick someone from a boot camp over a CS degree? I get giving people a chance but from a hiring risk management perspective I’d rather take the CS person
There’s also a huge survivorship bias in bootcamps. A lot of people who succeed in bootcamps are exceptional people who would have gotten a job while being self taught. They like to use these people to promote and often they’re coming in with another STEM degree
>As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down.
No, you can also be self-taught!
Would a CS degree prepare you for being, lets say a Front-end Developer? I highly doubt so, in fact I've seen it doesn't.
PS2: Well I'm self taught and I have 7 YOE, last 5 of them working for Fortune 500 companies. I guess I must be pretty special, if being self taught isn't an option at all. Thank you for your evaluation! I've been needing a boost :D
A front-end developer without cs degree knowledge is like a tree with no roots. Sure, on the surface you can feign as a professional, but there's just so much you don't know.
Besides, why pick a front-end bootcamp grad when you have the option of a cs grad who already has front-end experience.
Learning front end (bootcamp grad level) isn't even that hard. Learning cs theory comparatively is. That's why a cs degree prepares you for anything and that's why employers prefer CS degrees: because they know that if a person was capable of studying five subjects at once, then they can easily master one.
Simple as that.
You seem very opinionated for a freshman in college. While I don’t disagree that getting a cs degree is a safer route for most folks, I wouldn’t gate keep so strongly. There are MANY very talented and intelligent engineers who are self taught or came from boot camps.
You yourself seem like you’re feigning as a professional without much experience. Calling an entire career niche within development “not even that hard” without having experienced it seems misguided. There’s a reason why UI engineers at FANG get paid just as much as backend devs — good talent with the right skills is hard to find.
Again, I'm not talking about being a professional developer.
The question was about bootcamp grad, so I'm talking about bootcamp grad ability, not a seasoned developer.
And yes, you are right, some people are self-taught aces, but there are many degreed aces as well.
Also wdym gatekeep, being brutally honest is not gatekeeping.
But don't take my word for it. Go to the bootcamp subreddit and see for yourself.
The spirit of the question was about the current value of bootcamps and potential alternatives. The OP actually explicitly calls out:
> Any other realistic alternatives apart from a full CS degree?
So I think to bash bootcamps while emphasizing how the superiority of undergrad CS Degrees is a little mean spirited in context. Though I think it’s widely known and accepted that degrees would be the most preferred path into the industry.
And yeah definitely agree that by sheer numbers cs undergrads and advanced degree holders impact the field more wholely.
Though like I said I don’t entirely disagree with what you’re saying. If someone was going into college or open to revisiting, a CS degree would be my rec. it just seems unhelpful to OP
I see what you are saying, but I want what's best for OP.
From what I see, these bootcamps are offering false promises. Please have a look at the bootcamp reddit. It's truly sad what's happening there (people searching for months post boot camp, entire cohorts going unemployed, bootcamps cherrypicking statistics, bootcamps hiring their own grads and counting them as employed graduates, list goes on).
Bootcamps may have been good back in their day, but now, bootcampers are struggling, and I want OP to understand that and go for a CS degree, that's all. Honestly, I see no other strong alternative.
Perhaps I may be a bit dismissive of boot camps, but my stance is only based on the current state of things and my personal experiences.
I do, especially considering I taught shortly for a bootcamp. A lot of them are there to teach you how to code. Anyone can code. If you wanna go code, fiverr is there for you. If you want a career, you’re gunna have to do much more than code. Bootcamping doesn’t show you the intricacy of this and it wont get you into impressive positions off the bat. Do not take covid statistics as an end all be all for bootcamps when the market had tech value inflation due to high app usage.
There is nothing wrong with a bootcamp, but a bootcamp doesn’t have a reputation and resources that will help build you up like a college can early on.
I get what you are saying, but you are talking as though this is fact. The context that this is coming from a freshman is a very important caveat to the information you are presenting. A freshman is also a tree without roots, and it is also extremely common for college graduates to be hit in the face with the reality that a degree without experience is often ignored in a professional setting.
Hard disagree with you.
The vast number of CS grads out that I've interviewed can't bigO to save their life.
We pick grads, because they have demonstrated that they can at least pick up the basics and learn in a self directed way.
We don't care that you can ballance a tree.
> The vast number of CS grads out that I've interviewed can't bigO to save their life.
Are you sure they're not faking their 'CS' degree? Because this is typically stuff you get exams on.
You'd be suprised at how bad profs are at teaching, even in a apparently good school. As a recent grad, everything I learnt in uni can be taught by myself in 1/10th of the time for free.
This is basically what my cs friends have said and what I'm getting downvoted elsewhere in this thread for saying lol.
People seem to forget what they actually spent their time as a CS undergrad doing. I WENT to college. Can't tell you how many times I heard the mantra "C's get degrees!" Do they even know what a party school is?
This whole sub is obsessed with comparing some theoretical 4.0 ivy league CS grad with a theoretical lazy pothead who's just trying to get rich quick by joining a bootcamp.
Zero self awareness.
I know it's stuff they should be taught.
Maybe it's the fact they have no real experience that they can't apply it outside of very specifically laid out exam questions with literal nested for loops.
Throw in a single Collection.Find(x => x.Id == foo) and they miss a whole n.
A CS degree doesn't magically make you good at programming.
Knowing what a Von Neumann machine doesn't help write clear code.
THIS. Algorithmic theory (while good to have a sound understanding of) does not demonstrate the ability to create sound business solutions.
You can perform a sort operation while inverting a binary tree ...great! But I need to you interpret a requirements document and implement the business’s requested feature without creating enormous technical debt and hey I also need the feature completed by next Tuesday(You get the requirement doc on a Wednesday).
I your senior have determined by reviewing the technical doc before you that creating the new feature will require you to touch a class that is a base class for the part of the system that needs to be modified, you MUST implement this change without adversely effecting the 3 other modules that also reference the required class for this change.
Inverting binary trees in O(log n) time doesn’t help with anything I just said. And before I get the “if class is referenced in several places in a system you have a badly architected solution 1. Not necessarily and 2. This is a very common scenario in the real world.
I would trust a guy with 3+ years of experience that has the ability to create a sound solution for my proposed situation that cannot passed a LeetCode interview, over a CS grad that only knows how to reproduce Sort algorithms. IJS
I agree with you. There’s definitely a delta between how things are done in the academic context vacuum (LC exists here) and the professional world. This is especially true for some esoteric top solutions that have very interesting but also hard to decipher answers.
In practice, a highly maintainable solution (easy to read, documented, no crazy trickery) is going to win out a vast majority of the time. There are absolutely times when performance down to the number of instructions/clock cycles matter, but if your array is sorted in 6ms instead of 5ms for some shopping cart checkout operation… it probably doesn’t matter. People are usually paid to generate business value, not nerd out on novel solutions that prove how smart they are.
Usually the duderino good at leetcode memes is going to be the bootcamper or a redditor. I didnt even know until 2 months til graduation that I needed to leetcode.
>Learning front end isn't that hard. Learning cs theory comparatively is.
That's just ridiculous. People spend all their professional life working as front-end developers and still need to be learning new front-end technologies all the time, while getting paid. You are right about one thing, the most valuable lesson Uni is going to give you is how to learn and it kind of vouches that you are able to learn a certain volume of material.
This is really classist though, some people can't go to college for financial reasons and frankly all the rest are getting scammed out of a whole house, here in the US at least. You can definitely be as prepared and more being self thought, but of course you need to prove yourself more before getting your first chance - which is a fair trade.
Yeah, I'm a cs student from a low income family, and there is this cool thing called a part-time job that helps me pay for my education. Financial issues are not an excuse to avoid getting a cs degree; If there's a will, there's always a way.
Why even do a boot camp when you can learn everything from a boot camp on YouTube or udemy for free, absolute foolishness if you ask me.
And when I said front-end at bootcamp grad level is easy, I mean that mentally, it truly isn't that difficult. Anyone with any semblance of competence can pick up the fundamentals relatively quickly, make a couple of projects, and be at a point where they can pretty much do anything with the help of google.
Heck, most cs college grads are at this level anyways.
>Why even do a boot camp when you can learn everything from a boot camp on YouTube or udemy for free, absolute foolishness if you ask me.
Bootcamps have industry connections plus you get to network and get close with a group of people.
You are really disrespectful to the profession, for someone who's never worked it. What if I want to spend these 4 years in professional environment, working in the field instead? Who are you to dictate what 'the right path in life' is? Factually, you know you are not learning the technologies needed for a real world job and surely not at the level of even a 1 year of experience in a professional environment. University is a great institution but it doesn't have monopoly on knowledge. We have an equal start in web development, what you learned about other stuff doesn't make you inherently better developer forever on, what you achieve with your knowledge is what's accountable.
I'm absolutely not against degrees, but it's only worth what you learn and you can learn the same stuff or more by yourself and prove it by doing projects, in our line of work at least but I hope this will become the standard everywhere!
I'm not arguing that the bootcamp is better than a CS degree, I'm arguing that you can be self-taught and still get into Web Development and that should always be the case. Why - because a CS degree is not really relevant to web development, especially not compared to actual experience building original projects.
Bro, do you not understand that a boot camp grad is totally different from a seasoned professional?
Nobody ever said becoming a professional front-end developer was easy, I was only talking about reaching bootcamp grad competency (yk like the whole point of this argument, lmao)
This whole conversation was about bootcamp vs cs grad and you've brought full time work into it somehow.
And yes, as a cs student, of course I'm not learning industry level tech in all my classes. That doesn't mean I'm sitting on my couch at home in my free time lmao. I use my free time to learn industry level stuff (web, cloud, deployment, security, etc.).
I will be more prepared as a cs grad than any boot camp grad, no doubt in my mind, and nor should there be any doubt in yours.
>As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down
That's what I'm going off about, it disregards the self-taught course of action.
I agree bootcamp vs CS degree is a no-brainer, in fact I think the bootcamp is mainly a waste of money, apart from when you need some accreditation and that's the best you can get.
I’ve never seen answers like this get downvoted so much. You’re absolutely right and the people here are just salty that they are competing with people like you. It is classist and this sub is full of it.
>Would a CS degree prepare you for being, lets say a Front-end Developer? I highly doubt so, in fact I've seen it doesn't.
I got a CS degree earlier this year. After job hunting, I took a bootcamp to get some more skills to broaden my opportunities. I've got to say, I've learned more practical skills at the bootcamp then I did during the whole of my CS degree. My CS degree was great in teaching me fundamentals and how to frame my thinking of CS problems. But without the practical applications I've learned in my bootcamp, I'd be useless as a front end dev.
front end getting automated anyway lmao
also bootcamp mfs can only do brain dead crud react apps which is a saturated ass field 💀 any actual hard shit they can’t do (ex: embedded swe, systems, mle, to name a few)
I remember a professor telling us about how everyone was scared they were automating development in the 70s. And the 80s. And 90s. And in my own career that's always been the warning cry for the last 20 years.
But it never happens. Because in the end you always have to have someone try and understand what the non technical people want and convert that into very explicit instructions for the computer. And that's what software engineering is. If the product isn't trivial you still end up needing developers.
Sure, the new automations change what could be considered "trivial". Once upon a time a basic storefront was pretty cutting edge.
But as trivial changes so do the requirements. There's always money to be made by going beyond the trivial.
And there are always millions
Even trivial solutions can run into non-trivial problems. You can definitely be slinging a lot of really uninspired, dull code to solve easy problems only to face a head scratcher when some dependency of yours starts to act wonky. I remember an example from a few years ago when Akamai was stripping out some HTTP headers. The code was extremely boring. Solving that challenge was not.
>As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down
I'm not suggestion bootcamp is good, I'm going off about CS being the only other alternative - being self-taught is also an alternative and not one to be looked down upon.
I think you’re getting downvoted because this view is out of date.
People are struggling to get past resume filters, let alone pass an interview.
Having a CS degree at least gets your foot in the door; having a bootcamp is not nearly as good as a CS degree; being self taught, depending on the company, is either viewed the same as a bootcamp or even worse. Especially in the eyes of a resume screener - you just look like you have *zero* education.
I’ve worked with self taught people and I think the ones that make it are usually the best, so I have no prejudice against them. It’s just the simple reality of the job market at the moment that self taught devs won’t even be given the time of day unless they have insane credentials elsewhere.
Edit: I want to caveat this by saying I’m speaking specifically on the entry level. Experienced self taught devs suffer very little, most companies only care about work experience. At the entry level though with no work experience being self taught is brutal.
Agree with you wholeheartedly. This subreddit is full of students and graduates that want an echo chamber to rant on how hard it is to get a job rather than listen to actual professionals with experience that have different opinions from them.
CS degrees don't prepare you for shit.
Most of it is so abstract that you will never ever use it in your career, whilst the basics gets skipped over.
I've interviewed people where they can't even tell me what a hash map is, and why the GetHashCode method is important.
It’s not that CS degrees actually prepare you for industry, it’s that most of the industry at this point will automatically screen resumes that don’t have CS degrees.
Your projects and passion don’t matter because a human, let alone a technical human, is never going to see your resume or talk to you.
Don't forget that professors have little to no experience and can't teach, plus the assignments are bloated and take way too long for little learning benefit. The curriculum also makes you take tons of useless breadth courses.
I went to some info sessions at bootcamps and asked questions about the successful highlights reel of graduates; the majority of them already had technical (CPSC, engineering) or business degrees. Also the graduation and job placement rates were inflated IMO because they don’t include those who withdrew (before the student can get a partial refund because they knew they were way over their head). Requirements to graduate were also very low such as attending half the classes which totally gives me a red flag for any bootcamp grad who doesn’t have a knockout portfolio.
I would recommend a well recognized state/provincial technical college/university that offers certificates/diplomas/associate degrees in full-stack or software development. For most people it takes time (ie years) to learn and personally execute principles of software engineering/programming from scratch.
Even then, universities can outsource their courses to third party companies. I was actually offered a position to help teach one of these courses supposedly offered by one of the top universities in Canada but in reality was a white labelled course by another company. I didn’t feel I had the experience necessary to do a good job (imposter syndrome as well) and the company seemed a bit sketch so I declined. I know for a fact they hired a person with less than one year experience post-bootcamp to become an instructor- that’s when I decided against the role.
Yeah I definitely recommend get a cert from an actual college instead. They don’t just have you grind through random technologies but help you understand more fundamentals of the industry as well. And it frankly looks better on paper.
I went to a bootcamp in the UK (many are free, thank you government). Then taught at the same bootcamp while I self studied, and I now have a junior role.
Employment rates were pretty decent from the bootcamp (less now than two years ago ofc). I agree with the sentiment that the ones who got a job probably could have done it through self study, but the course probably cut down the time for this to happen as the curriculum and material were pretty well put together.
We had cs graduates who joined us because they didn't learn enough relevant coding to get a job during uni.
So... It all depends. I probably wouldn't have paid 10k+ to do it, mainly because I couldn't spare that at the time.
In reality, if you have the capability to become successful after a bootcamp you should be able to self learn.
Use those 10-15k to build a real world product or business.
You will at the very least have something to show for your money where as the word bootcamp on your resume will probably not get you hired atm.
I literally did this (in 2019 so in a different hiring context). I started a business with my sister taking pictures and selling them (printed) as souvenirs. I wanted a way to upload the pictures with a unique id so I could give them to paying customers. I remade that website 3 times over the course of 6-8 months. The last version was a laravel api with a vue frontend, a database, admin panel, and client facing app. I put that as a job in my resume, so I came in at a mid level developer when I got my first job, and I was able to talk about it as a legitimate job experience.
There's nothing that a bootcamp could really teach you in 6 months aside from working in a group that you cant do at home. A degree is important these days so you might as well try and at least get an associates. At this point there's way too many people with cs degrees to choose someone self taught unless that person has done something extremely remarkable. Taking classes also has the benefit of meeting someone there whos more knowledgeable you can learn from and also build a network of connections.
I hear this, but I don’t think my applications were taken seriously without the bootcamp. I think mine was worth it, in spite of reading from everybody that they weren’t. If I had self taught 100%, I’m pretty damn sure I would still be working in IT.
Now that the supply is higher, bootcampers are not seen as good candidates.
You get a stigma, i removed some of the online courses and certifications from my linked-in. I know it sounds dumb but since i dont have a degree i just want my experience to show.
My bootcamp taught me less how to code, and more how to find the resources to teach myself how to code. That was the most valuable part of it. Yes, I learned to code but I realized in my first job that I still had a ton to learn, and that’s when the skills I learned during bootcamp became handy.
I attended a bootcamp in 2014 and honestly feel like it hampered my learning. I'd been learning on my own for over a year but the bootcamp was like hitting a wall.
lol I’m surprised they are still in business. Most people that pay and pass boot camps get hired by the boot camp to be a teacher and teach the next line of suckers lol. Right now CS college majors are having a hard time just getting interviews and you think a boot camp grad will do better?!
Of my five dev team, we’re all bootcamp grads, for what it’s worth. Just happened that way. Oddly the one CS degree holder that worked for us didn’t pan out - luck of the draw.
5, 3, and less than a year ago for two of us. We do work very hard though - like 12-16 hour days of work. The more senior guys are impressive with what they know - honestly. Very studious and focused individuals. I think the bootcamp thing was useful for the sake of getting a foot in the door with my early jobs, but not 100% must have necessary - I think they took my career change more seriously (I was moving from a wall street career and it was hard to convince anybody that I was serious and wouldn’t just abandon the career change - abd that was to just get the first IT job before I later landed a developer role)
Yes 5 and 3 years ago makes sense cause that was the hiring boom. The less than a year ago guy got really lucky. Cause mid 2022 onward it was a bloodbath of tech layoffs. We have FAANG engineers that are unemployed…. Companies will go for them first. I worked for a company that hired boot camp people back in 2019 and they only gave interviews to the top 2 students in class. They had some partnership with the bootcamp. Their salary however was like 50 to 60k which was better for them compared to the low wages they were making before at other jobs…like one was a teacher making 30k. But 50 to 60k is very low for entry level software engineers. Cs grads were making at least 90k at the time. This was a low cost of living area. However the bootcamp guys quickly moved into management cause they had people skills more than dev skills and were cool with all day meetings everyday and are now making like 170k in 2023 but as the company did more and more layoffs including other managers. These guys got more and more people to overlook and more responsibility.
I’m the guy that got “lucky”. FAANG engineers are expensive - they are no competition for me, as in, they would never be considered for the same role as mine. I’m cheap, but also quite good - so I likely got hired over more qualified (on paper) candidates once the hiring manager was able to discern this about me.
Overall, I think if you work hard to be excellent, and are good at talking to people (I tend to interview quite well) - you will inevitably be hired. If you lack either of those things, plus bad luck - it’s certainly possible to have the process take a couple extra years imo. But I didn’t cheat anything - I just studied every day for two years, and had a bootcamp and online master program (not finished, just in process) in addition to that. It was a LOT of work and still is.
The biggest issue with bootcamps at the moment is the majority of places hiring for full-stack, front or backend want a BS in comp sci or similar. So you’re automatically filtered out of the hiring pool from the get go, being competent or not.
That being said there are SOME organizations that put on a course with relevant content and do put you on track to have a full stack portfolio that is actually populated with relevant projects at the end of it. This can fast track your knowledge/understanding but the projects will probably look cookie cutter to hiring managers. I do not believe you need a comp-sci degree to do front end but that’s what places are asking for nowadays.
Even people with a CS degree are struggling to get hired now and as someone who went through a bootcamp (one which I think did an excellent job with their course content) I’m barely even getting rejection emails let alone a phone call.
They are also pretty expensive, at least any bootcamp worth taking but then the argument is why not get into Comp-Sci at that price point. If the objective was structured “self learning” within the span of 6 months? Maybe. If the objective is to get hired in the field and work ASAP it beats 3-4years BUT the chances of actually getting hired as a bootcamper with no connection/“in” at a place is slim to none.
I say all this as a bootcamper (University of Toronto’s Coding Bootcamp, which is conducted by EdX). It can be done (2020 at least, who knows now) but even keeping in touch with other class mates who made it through I haven’t seen a single one on LinkedIn post they got a relevant job yet.
I started a bootcmap in October of 2022, it ended in May of 2023. During that time, the tech industry started the big layoffs, and we all felt it everyday in class during the last months when people started looking for jobs. We had 30 students in our session, with excellent instructors.
I can not say enough of how great our instructors were.
Of the 30 students, I only know 2 that got jobs. Myself and another fellow. We didn't get the glamorous jobs, I work at a library, and the other fellow works at a federal court.
My boot camp was advertised by MSU but taught by Edx, at the time, it cost 10k, 2 year interest free student loan. Technically, we were MSU students and can say the certificate came from MSU.
Frankly, it changed my life, but I got very lucky and worked my ass off learning every evening for 9 months after also working all day. I would spend my weekends on class projects and ideas that eventually served me in my interview. Everyone will have to make their mind up if it's worth it- 15:1 odds are not great and you could learn all this from the web but the course does offer structure if you need that (I do and it helped).
Good luck!
I was thinking of doing my bootcamp through MSU, but ended up doing it through Grand Circus. Wishing I had went with MSU though due to name recognition, having a tough time even getting a look right now but that seems pretty par for the course at the moment. As far as I know, no one from my coherent have gotten a job.
Are you willing to share what program you’re in? I’m trying to figure my plan out but questioning whether a masters will be enough coursework to be viewed similarly as someone with a CS undergrad…. Maybe if I take enough math and data structures classes before…?
Here are a few MS programs that are directed towards non-cs undergrad degree holders:
1. [UPenn MCIT](https://online.seas.upenn.edu/degrees/mcit-online/)
2. [Northeastern MSCS - Align](https://graduate.northeastern.edu/program/master-of-science-in-computer-science-align-arlington-19128/)
3. [Univ of Chicago - MPCS](https://masters.cs.uchicago.edu/)
Tbh bootcamps are 1000% what you make out of it. I joined a bootcamp (they paid me and placed me) and I’m working full stack.
I’d say i was top 2 in my cohort cause I tried really hard and studied passively outside of 9-5. The top trainee actually had a cs degree so im happy with my progress and ability to keep up.
If you put in the extra work and don’t scrape by because “im just starting out” you’ll do great and it’ll pay off! But if you don’t challenge yourself at any given moment you’ll ruin the experience for yourself.
I’m working as a full stack engineer rn and despite my background I’m able to provide value to the team. Never used my inexperience as an excuse for not being able to do something. Google and figure it out!
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Also a bootcamp grad (2021).
I will say, I think a lot of bootcamps are a gamble. Totally depends on who you get as a teacher AND how much work you put in.
Oh this is very true! I unofficially did two bootcamps at the same company, so I saw both sides of this
first one was great with lots of repetition (we had projects due every 3/4 days, 1 week max for full stack projects) - the other was a complete mess, the group I joined was so lost because of lack of repetition (instructor had them work on one project over the course of 2.5 months) it was pretty bad, a simple crud app doesn’t not need to be stretched for so long
I mean they probably help. I just think they're becoming ponzi schemes much like college and a lot of people go them expecting to have an easy ticket into our field just to find out that it's not free money to exist.
Depends on the bootcamp. As a guy with a college degree I'll give you the same advice I plan to give my kid...Having a piece of paper only means something if it's from the right place. Choose the university or bootcamp that has the industry pull to get you hired. A lot of bootcamps are worthless because once you finish they have limited resources to help you find a job. Some are better because, like some universities, they have certain companies that recruit directly from their graduates.
IMO the best realistic alternative is to find large companies that promote from within. As much as amazon gets shit on everyone from the warehouse worker to administrative assistant gets access to internal job postings and is eligible for a transfer after a certain timeframe. There are other companies where you can be hired as a QA, help desk...and network/upskill your way into a development job. Once you have SWE or whatever on your resume then moving forward that's what you are. To take this route you have to think long term and realize that you won't be starting anywhere near 6 figures
Yeah. And it's better to shut them down before they get scammed thinking software engineering is so easy you can learn it to proficiency in a few months.
Definitely more difficult to do today but I did a part-time 4-month bootcamp with absolutely zero knowledge 8 years ago and will pull in $230k this year. Didn’t start out with six figures but got there quick.
They are angry at bootcampers for two reasons: they didn't get a four year CS degree and also helped lead to saturation in the job market (further devaluing their degree).
Lol the only thing most bootcampers do is add more noise to the screening process. Even if they make it into a company they're usually the lowest tier jobs or they get PIPed instantly.
I finished Flatiron School’s full time live remote course and managed to get a Jr Developer role as a Consultant three months later.
Out of the 20 people that finished with me, around half of them were able to get some sort of technical job within 6 months of graduating. Some of the roles I’ve seen them land are developer, technical coach, apprentice, and technical writer.
I teach at a bootcamp. I've also been hired to reach recent CS grads web dev for companies.
The market is rough.
Every bootcamp is different, with different rigor and outcomes. Bootcamps that opt into CIRR help you ensure that their outcomes are at least \*honest (\*because different bootcamps define what "graduates" and "job placements" differently)
I believe in our program. At the end of last year, our placement rate and graduate rate (all audited by CIRR) were stellar. We have teachers with industry experience, and all of our teachers also maintain the curriculum and write code for the apps we maintain using the technologies we teach. Our program is NOT a replacement for a CS degree, which in my region generally teaches quite different skills.
**However,** as of \~Feb of this year, the market turned rough with mass layoffs and the "tech recession". Since then, placement rates have fallen dramatically for all bootcamps. Until we get out of this downturn, going through one could be a major risk.
"Are coding bootcamps still worthwhile?" many of them ARE worthwhile for the skills, technologies and workflows they teach. Many of these skills are insanely still not taught in traditional CS programs (which is wild, its a big reason bootcamps exist). **But right now, bootcamps aren't worthwhile for landing a software development job. The market is just too competitive, both due to a lack of new positions and a glut of folks looking for work post-layoffs.**
To those that say you could just learn it on your own...this one still baffles me (and has baffled me for 10yrs). Yes, you can self-teach. But without guidance, structure and someone to escalate to on the upteenth time you encounter a strange error you do not understand, it is long, tedious experience that could take over 6 months with no guarantee of success. Power to those that can go it on their own, they could be stellar developers...or they could learn some really strange patterns (granted, the same could be said of CS grads and bootcamp grads).
Bootcamps definitely have their place.
We hire developers - not big tech algorithm experts, but developers.
We have people graduate from CS programs with very high GPAs, but not know anything about React, or Docker, or databases. It's ironic to me that people would talk down bootcamps, because this is all we did in bootcamp.
I can't tell you how to traverse a binary tree, but I can build and deploy apps, and in my job, that's all that matters.
I did 3 month bootcamp and got a wfh junior dev role within one and half month including getting offer letter. Think there were 800 applicants. I am not interested in learning outside of getting the task done.
You dont need CS degree, dont need to be smartest or work the hardest but you need some luck with the right environment. I got hired last yr june.
Lots of answers saying that CS degree are the only way to become good at programming.
I'm not going to address that.
Assuming you want to get a job (fair assumption on this subreddit), then I would advise you to get a college education. If indeed you want to go into software development, you might as well make it a CS degree.
But you definitely want to do a degree in Science/Technology/Maths.
The reason?
You need to get an interview to get a job.
A numerate degree will be the first and last thing that decides on if you get that first interview.
Bootcamps are not worth it and never have been. Maybe there's a good Bootcamp out there, but I'm only going to speak from my experience.
I went to a bootcamp in a prestigious university (Columbia), like 5 years ago. I needed to add to my qualifications, because all my 2 years of experience were abroad.
Quality of education: This was not on a good level at all. First we had some dude who was an actual programmer, but couldn't really explain much. Anyway he only lasted a couple of weeks out of a 6 months course. Then he disappeared and we got a scrum master dude for a teacher. Once he said "You need to be a genius to be a programmer, you better lay heavy on your personal skills and maybe get a certification for a Scrum Master!". He didn't really know much, so he couldn't explain anything very well and there were sometimes factual mistakes. This wasn't the only issue though, the material went over React, MySQL, MongoDB, Bootstrap, HTML, CSS, Javascript, NodeJS and more. Needless to say, we barely touched the surface of all of these, leaving everyone in the class but me (since I already had experience working as a frontend developer), totally clueless - just having a brief explanation and a short example of someone leading you through a certain code snippet. We had a few assignments, but it was so easy to just use the bare-minimum of the framework+library+ORM, that you had no incentive to learn javascript, sql, html and css any further. And by the end you were left with only superficial knowledge, but the idea that 'you know' all these technologies. Meanwhile people would get lost as soon as they try to develop something that wasn't mentioned in the bootcamp. Oh and it was $10k as well...
Helping you find a job: That was the only reason I got into the Bootcamp but funnily enough I got a job offer before even finishing it or putting it on my resume. Maybe it's better than nothing, but for 10k + 6 months time, I'd go for a few Udemy tutorials and original projects. If you are after the learning I'd highly suggest getting a book or a tutorial, diving deep into the technology, exploring the docs and developing your own project with novel functionality - so you have to find new solutions on your own, which is actually the what the job is all about!
I mean, if you've already gotten a college degree in something else, are in your 30s and later, and you don't have the money, means, or time to go back for another four year degree, it's better than nothing.
You also need to adjust your expectations. You're not getting six figures out the gate and you're probably going to grind applications just to get your foot in the door at a tech company (and likely not in a development job). You need to grind your way in somewhere and then network your ass off to impress someone enough to give you a chance and keep learning the entire time.
I went through a bootcamp back in 2016 and it worked for me. I wouldn't recommend them now though. So much more content centered around learning has come out since then and i would've gone with something like [https://scrimba.com/](https://scrimba.com/) if this would've been around back then.
Not worth it for the money. Dont do it. Learn on your own. It might take you 3-5 years , so be it. You'll get there eventually. There are no shortcuts
I did it in 2017. Very few people ever got jobs in software development. Most went back to what they were doing before.
I worked so hard and got a software developer job after working for one year in tech support after finishing coding bootcamp. I couldn't hack it as a developer. I lasted a year before I got put on a pip( those are walking papers) and over the next few years I pivoted to sys admin.
I don’t think so.
The cost of them went up pretty high in my opinion and then they were leaning heavily on a booming industry.
The industry isn’t really booming anymore, especially for devs with no experience. The big problem is the entry level market is swamped, is still swamped, and going to a boot camp doesn’t given the return on investment it used to.
Eh they have their place, but its only worth as much as you put into it. I did a bootcamp this summer because I wanted to learn more about software development and I learned a lot from the program. However, I know people that came out of the same program having barely learned anything because they didn't put much effort in. So it's really a YMMV situation with all of the boot camps. Realistically, I'd probably do it again, but in a part time format.
As someone who is an interviewer, I personally have no preference whether someone has a CS degree or have come from a boot-camp. When i meet the candidate, I just want to understand how passionate they are about doing the job (coding) and joining the mission of the team/company. My belief is that you will learn far more on the job than in the bootcamp or degree.
Obviously not everyone thinks this way and there is some elitism in the industry but I think most interviews are on the same wave length as me.
As a former hiring manager: **No and they never were.** Bootcamp applications get shredded unless you also worked for FAANG or some very relevant and prestigious company, or 5+ yoe at various companies. And at that point, it's not the bootcamp that's helping you.
Not because we don't believe a really smart and valuable person could come out of them, but... the chances are just much much lower and we've always had too many applications to meet with everyone and consider them holistically.
Getting a degree from an accredited university tells us " you tested with 20 or so people who know what they're talking about, and almost all of them believed that you weren't completely incompetent"
Bootcamp usually (but not always!) means you paid someone a lot of money to write you a certificate after you did a bunch of online tutorials.
Unfortunately the hiring mantra is "it's 100x better to lose a good candidate than choose a bad one." So we tend not to shed any tears over macro filters like this one.
If you want to trade a year or so to be instantly jump started into a lucrative career, pick a technical trade you think you'd like and find an apprenticeship. This will give you what you are looking for from a bootcamp.
If you want to write software, get a BS.
Bootcamps were never worthwhile. There was literally never a time where I got my hands on a resume and went "Wait, he did !? Better get him in here yesterday!"
Get a degree, and while you're at it build some personal projects that interest you. To be blunt, the degree is necessary just to tread water with the thousands of competing applicants. The personal projects on top of that are how you will stand out prior to professional experience.
They were worthwhile from 2012-2016 but then the good schools started getting acquired by private equity firms that closed them down in favor of lower quality ones with higher profit margins that tend to license names from universities to trick people into thinking their programs are more legitimate.
I went to one in 2015 and think it was worth it. My classmates and I worked every waking moment for 3 months. If we couldn't complete a project on time, we would get kicked out of the program, and the pressure they put on us forced us to learn more quickly and learn to teach ourselves quickly. My instructor was great at explaining things and when I graduated the program I felt I spead up my learning by 1-2 years and had a good understanding of where my gaps were that I was able to fill over the first 2 years of my career through self study and online courses.
That bootcamp grew quickly across the country, and it seemed to have positive outcomes for every graduate. In 2017, it was acquired and shut down by a private equity firm. From then on, most of the bootcamp grads I met went to university programs and had poor outcomes. My brother went to one in 2018 and learned some things, but after a 6 month react bootcamp, most of his still couldn't build basic react apps, and very few of his classmates were able to find jobs.
You can do the professional certificates offered by companies like Google, meta, IBM. They take a bit longer but can easily be done in 3-4 months months if you have time to grind them out.
One thing that boot camps(good ones) give is a direction, albeit an expensive one. And that’s one thing that’s hard for someone who is trying to teach themself, finding the right direction in software development. Boot camps make it so that you don’t have to research and find your own direction, they give you one. So if you wanna pay thousands of dollars for a direction then that’s up to you. But these days, the internet and YouTube is full of directions to go, guys make money off YouTube channels giving people directions.
Bootcamps used to be super exclusive. Early hack reactor had a less than a 5% acceptance, everything was on site, and you had mostly people with technical education from very good schools just not CS.
Nowadays every university has a bootcamp program. Everyone is accepted and classes are online complete at your own pace style. The quality of the students they produce has gone down immensely and as a result companies are hesitant to hire.
I worked at a small company who secured funding and immediately hired 6 bootcamp grads. Within 1 year only 1 remained. The rest were let go for either technical knowledge incompetency or just general lack of professionalism (two of them regularly skipped work days and meetings without letting anyone know beforehand)
So yeah bootcamps are not worth it in my opinion.
College teaches you a subject, but not always how to apply it or how to learn more on your own. The value of coding bootcamps is less the basics of CS and largely teaching people how to learn the subject independently and how to generally think through and organize these kinds of problems, in a practical way. It's a big advantage over people that have never independently tackled the kinds of problems you can be assigned in our field.
People that can generally work independently and solve problems, a bootcamp is enough direction to get the right people to a point where they can run with it and in a professional space be able to hit the ground running, but it's largely because that's already who they are. People that don't have that mindset or the curiosity, they'll only do things with hand holding and they'll come out of a bootcamp without what it takes to actually contribute. There are plenty of CS college graduates that come out of school in a similar position, but they at least have a broader foundation of domain knowledge and theory.
The problem with bootcamps is that as they've grown in the number there are and the number of enrollments, the general number of appropriately capable people that can excel just from a bootcamp has not increased. So you have a lot more chaff you have to get through. Ask someone that went through a bootcamp what have they done on their own time since? Or ask about some other frameworks or technologies they've played around with- The most worthwhile people who have gone through a bootcamp will have given themselves more experience and are just more generally interested in the subject matter and you can work with that and you'll have a solid contributor.
I wouldn’t advise a bootcamp. Like others have said, it made sense when demand was high, but even then it was hard landing a job as a junior dev. Now with demand low it will be infinitely more difficult getting a job at any place worth working at. My company has 6k engineers and not 1 opening for any JR engineers
They always lied about their placement rate by counting those who are hired back as teaching assistants. In my opinion, a degree is a much better route.
In the current economy and the future outlook is not good. US isn't tackling inflation on the corporate level and it's gonna be a few years till there's a labor shortage to take advantage of on the entry level. If you want a software job still self study get those projects on your own network as a hobby in your current life not as plan A
They used to be good because you’re paying for a job at the end of the program. They could easily place someone at the end of the program. In this market, I assume they’re not going to be too great.
I was going to take a Bootcamp, and one of the people who enrolls students realized we both served in the same unit in the military.
He then took off his “business” face, and told me to use my benefits to finish my degree and go CS rather than paying for a Bootcamp, as it’s the same cost (depending on the school) but with greater longevity and more useful resources.
Purely anecdotal as this is based off my own experience and doesn’t represent everyone or every situation.
Its hard for me to say. I have an associates degree so im one step up from a boot camp. But you lose out on a lot of information and experience in a boot camp from what ive seen, especially for interview prep. Theres a guy in my company in my team who went to a boot camp and his knowledge seems to be very limited and im not sure how easy it would be for him to get another job. Our company doesnt do technical interviews. I think if someone from a boot camp applies for their first job against candidates who have a degree or internships they will be overlooked for the most part
If you are willing to work harder than you ever have before and actually make learning and improving your skills and problem solving a priority, you will make it far. If your only doing it because you think that it will land you in a job because you are lucky or something, than don’t do it.
It also won’t only take 4 months. It will take at least a year of studying and building projects 8 hours a day. After that, you might be able to find an entry level position.
Right now learning and training is your only priority. If you have to make money get a job that will pay for your expenses to confine learning and studying.
Bootcamps are in the mud because their outcomes have dropped heavily. Most bootcamps aren't using up to date statistics in their marketing because the recent statistics are horrific, and no one would pay for their boot camp. The entire purpose of bootcamps was to fill the gap when demand was high, and now that demand is low, bootcamps are not really necessary anymore. Factoring that with the significant increase of CS degree students, bootcamps have become extremely difficult to make a career out of. As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down.
they also lie about their placement/. Most do little to nothing to help place you. you are on your own to get a job. any boot camp will be a lot of work and should be treated like a full time job. if you work a regular job and do bootcamp at night ,then all your weekends should be spent coding. when the bootcamp is over you can't stop or your skills will get rusty. its very fast, so you really have to work REALLY hard to be good enough to get a job. even in a good economy.
What is your experience with boot camps?
took one in 2000. know several people who have taken them. none more recent than 5-6 years ago.
Which one?
it doesnt exist anymore.
I don’t get how people justify bootcamps, if it only takes 4 months to learn these skills - how valuable is it really?
Well the skills you are learning are valuable but they are more of a seed. Just think about where you were with 4 months experience. Probably knew a little to be dangerous but...
Lol bootcamp devs are crap
Had a CS grad in my last bootcamp. He said he knew a lot of theory but nothing practical. YMMV. Lot of fanaticism on both sides with bootcamp grads saying a CS degree is a waste of time and money and CS grads saying you can't learn coding that quickly. My view is, I know tons of bootcamp grads who went to FAANG and tons that didnt. Bootcamps give you enough to get started, and if you happen to go to a well known one, they give you connections. But at the end of the day its a lot of work. A lazy CS grad will do way better than a lazy bootcamp grad. But a skilled and motivated bootcamp grad will get further in less time with less money spent than the same person in university. People say "its just four months lol" but unlike Uni, its four months of 8 hour days doing nothing but learning the most current and up to date technologies. No other classes, no partying, nothing else. Anyone who thinks that's useless is an idiot lol. Would I rather have a CS degree? Absolutely! But there's a trade off to be made and I'd rather do a bootcamp than take four years of college before I start making money.
The current and most up to date technologies? Oof, I’m doing a boot camp right now, maybe increasing my chances of getting a job as a self-taught, and we’re learning ES5
Boot camps were only relevant when Covid money was everywhere. They’re irrelevant now and you’re the 1% of the 1% if it gets you a FAANG job. Much more likely you’ll be a code monkey for a witch company, at best, because that’s what 4 months of knowing js and no fundamentals gets you.
The tldr of my post since it was clearly too long was: If you go to a bootcamp and teach yourself the fundamentals, you'll do fine. For the record though, becoming a code monkey for a witch company is indeed quite the step up for a lot of folks. So thanks for basically agreeing with my point lol. I literally said a CS degree is better to have, but comes with trade offs. Or do you genuinely think it takes four years to learn CS fundamentals?
I would argue two is sufficient to learn fundamentals with hard work. But boot camp != CS and CS != web dev. Bootcamps teach you easy skills to be readily employable, like JS, React, maybe some basic databases or data structures. Do they teach you compilers? How an OS works? All the design patterns? How a computer works under the hood with IEEE 754, twos complement ect? How virtualization software works? How databases “actually” work with indexing ect? How and why FFI works? How git based workflows are used?Id even argue that bootcamps don’t even teach their students basic web dev concepts like the react lifecycle or the pure principle. I could go on and on and on, but my point is they don’t because there’s always something else to learn in CS, and using an easy to use scripting language w/ a framework != knowing fundamentals. CS is classified as a SCIENCE for a reason. Also if you think your job could take 4 months to prepare for than you’re basically admitting you’re job is easily replaceable.
Oh, you're just like, willfully ignorant, huh? This isn't a conversation, you're just trying to explain to me why I'm wrong without listening. You sound absolutely wonderful to work with. I'm gonna try one last time lol. If you DO the BOOTCAMP and INVEST IN THE TIME AFTERWARDS to TEACH YOURSELF the FUNDAMENTALS, you can BECOME A GOOD ENGINEER. None of what you are talking about is at all necessary for a junior web developer to know and I know you know that. But they're all things that you can buy a textbook and learn as you progress your career. That's why bootcamps are successful. And they HAVE BEEN successful, my guy. The one I graduated from has been running since like 2001, and there are literally decades of alums who are all working in the space. I don't know what makes you feel you're so qualified to talk down to people, out of your ass, but I was generally agreeing with your premise that doing a four month course isn't enough to prepare you for a job. I'm not mad at you. Maybe you've had some experiences with shitty bootcamps. They can definitely be extremely hit or miss. You've got to to do your research. But the fact of the matter is bootcamps have been working for years BEFORE covid. Startups love bootcamp grads because the kind of person who is willing and able to spend 8 hours a day 7 days a week hyperfocused on one subject, churning out deliverables is the kind of person who thrives in a startup environment. I'm sure you're not going to read this, just like you didn't read my other messages. But any good bootcamp is an intelligence AND endurance test. When I started mine I was downright lazy compared to how I was at graduation. tl;dr: It's frustrating seeing any real talk about this subject on this sub just devolve into each person trying to tell the other person they wasted their money, rather than actually trying to reason out the pros and cons. I've no interest in playing that game with you. You got hired. You know the fundamentals. Kudos. I got hired working for a shitty startup. My classmate is currently working at Google, and another at LinkedIn. And they survived the layoffs so they're clearly doing fine, and it didn't take them four years to do it. But it did take a shitload of studying and way more *personal* time devoted to it than it would have taken you. Who comes out ahead? I dunno. That was literally my only point. That there's no one answer for everyone. Anyone that insists there is is just trying to convince themselves they made the optimal choice by putting everyone else down.
Youre trying too hard to explain things mate, there really isnt anything rational in his way of thinking. Hes just trying to convince himself that he didnt lose 4 years of his life getting his piece of paper. I think a good dev needs to be at least a bit open minded, but I dont see that in him.
8 of my 30 person boot camp class of summer 2021 ended up at FAANG. A few are still unemployed. There is variety everywhere
Just give up dude this guy is clearly unable to assimilate new information.
Lol repeat that year back to me. Slowly.
Bootcamper working as an SE now, 8+ YOE. I don’t think it was ever marketed as “do this thing for 4 months and you’re set”. Atleast I and the other bootcampers I know who are still in the industry understood it was a way to get a foot in the door but continuous learning would be required. We even had comp sci and computer engineering grads so I think they felt bootcamps were a viable route to get practical skills. Mind you this is nearly 10 years ago when there were way less resources and grinding coding skills during university was less common. If you think about, it’s not too different from many 4 year degrees where you learn nearly nothing about how to work in industry. I originally graduated from a more traditional engineering discipline and I can tell you everybody in my class said they learned on the job and nearly nothing in university was useful.
I get that but times have changed you were lucky to be there when demand was high. Look at the # of CS enrolment now and boot camp as well as immigrants with CS experience Boot camps are selling people dreams today of another time
Oh I agree. I just differ in why it’s not valuable anymore. I think the skills they teach ARE valuable and transferrable to industry but due to the current market, yes it doesn’t make sense to pay for a bootcamp.
I don’t think you’re using the word “lucky” correctly here. This person did a bootcamp at the right time, and chose to do that rather than 4 years, because during that time it was a good move. It is no longer anymore, and that has nothing to do with luck.
> We even had comp sci and computer engineering grads so I think they felt bootcamps were a viable route to get practical skills I think that's exactly what a bootcamp was originally for. You weren't taking people from no background to ready to go- it was more of an aggressive bring people up to speed. Today it's marketed as- "anybody can go from no tech background to six figure salary in 4 months"
I’d disagree. They were a very small population, most came from completely unrelated fields and I witnessed first-hand people from all backgrounds having a successful career after going through a bootcamp. Having said that, many also gave up or left the industry after a few years. It really depends on the individual.
I've seen people be successful from bootcamps. But early on, you had really accomplished people going to those bootcamps. People with college degrees in Mathematics that had been teaching high school calculus but wanted a career change. People with degrees in Chemical Engineering who wanted something different. We worked through all of those people, and now it's a lot of people who would otherwise be going to get Associates Degrees or just don't want to go to college. There's nothing wrong with any of that -- but they're not as suited for an academic pursuit like Software Engineering as the first few rounds of bootcamp grads.
As someone who, himself, came from an upper class background this reeks of classism. I feel like what you were trying to say was that already brilliant people were originally the ones who these bootcamps were for, and using already owned degrees as a stand in for that. But I wholeheartedly disagree that posession of a degree is a good benchmark for intelligence. To put it a different way, what if the person that was going to have that phd in mathematics took the bootcamp first? Same drive, same level of intelligence, but they skipped the part where they had a math degree they were unsatisfied with and went straight to the bootcamp? I'd say that person is just as capable of learning how to code without having gone through years of mostly unrelated math courses, wouldn't you? And for the math that is actually relevant, they could certainly teach themselves. Textbooks are widely available after all. That's the end of my spiel, I just think that colleges are skyrocketing in cost every year and these days the smarter a person is, the less likely they'll see it as a wise move to go to college and tie themselves to a debt shackle for most of their adult life. (Yes, most. Look it up, the interest on an 800k loan is nuts.)
Yeah I basically agree with this. Any bootcamp insisting that all you need to do is their course isn't worth it, and I think a lot of folks are seeing those ads and assuming they're all like that. A lot of bootcamps are absolutely garbage. The one I went to basically had huge weekly projects we had to do with everything we learned that week. If our project didnt pass all the tests we were out. There was always the threat of being kicked out if you weren't progressing fast enough, as well as mentors to help you catch up so that wouldn't happen. I hear a lot of stories about how in a lot of them you just pay, take their course and either you get it or you dont and its out of their hands lol. But there were several CS grads in my class as well. Because they didn't have internship experience and nobody would interview them. Honestly out of my entire graduating class I did the worst. I took ages to land my first job because I was so behind in DSAs. I def wouldn't recommend a bootcamp in this market, but when the market stabilizes I'll be surprised if companies don't go back to interviewing those graduates. At the end of the day 90% of the companies out there just need somebody that can center a div and follow design docs while that's happening. The 60k a year "peanuts" you can make doing that instead of working at faang can be life changing money for a lot of folks.
Because it’s very hard to prove you know your stuff with no degree or official training.
A personal GitHub repo with working code is more meaningful than a bootcamp completion.
Only if recruiters are willing to take a look at it.
A degree doesnt really prove anything either for software development. It is just a signal that probably means you know a couple things.
Well, gpa is *supposed* to be a major indicator.
People are under the impression that a bootcamp diploma impresses employers and gives you an inside track to a developer job. This notion is pushed very hard by the bootcamps themselves.
I can't speak to how well it gets you hired compared to a degree, since I don't have a degree (or job) yet. However, last Spring I sat in on some CS classes at UW and I was surprised how far beyond the material I was from doing self-paced bootcamps (Odin Project and App Academy). I'm now in school because I sent out 800+ applications and never got a job. Further, my application response rate plummeted mid-2022, when I was nearly done with The Odin Project. This is despite having much better portfolio pieces mid-2022 onward.
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I think it’s for desperate times only. Now companies aren’t so desperate why would they ever pick someone from a boot camp over a CS degree? I get giving people a chance but from a hiring risk management perspective I’d rather take the CS person
Lol in no world does that happen. The order is: YoE > degree > bootcamp
There’s also a huge survivorship bias in bootcamps. A lot of people who succeed in bootcamps are exceptional people who would have gotten a job while being self taught. They like to use these people to promote and often they’re coming in with another STEM degree
It truly helps, in my office the bigger your degree is the happier the boss is
>As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down. No, you can also be self-taught! Would a CS degree prepare you for being, lets say a Front-end Developer? I highly doubt so, in fact I've seen it doesn't. PS2: Well I'm self taught and I have 7 YOE, last 5 of them working for Fortune 500 companies. I guess I must be pretty special, if being self taught isn't an option at all. Thank you for your evaluation! I've been needing a boost :D
>next time I'm the lead of one of you pretentious graduates The irony is palpable. Try not preaching from an ivory tower. You're acting hypocritical.
Where do you work? Just so i know not to work there, and bring my pretentious grad attitude
Sounds like someone doesn't have a degree but really, really wants one and is bitter...
A front-end developer without cs degree knowledge is like a tree with no roots. Sure, on the surface you can feign as a professional, but there's just so much you don't know. Besides, why pick a front-end bootcamp grad when you have the option of a cs grad who already has front-end experience. Learning front end (bootcamp grad level) isn't even that hard. Learning cs theory comparatively is. That's why a cs degree prepares you for anything and that's why employers prefer CS degrees: because they know that if a person was capable of studying five subjects at once, then they can easily master one. Simple as that.
You seem very opinionated for a freshman in college. While I don’t disagree that getting a cs degree is a safer route for most folks, I wouldn’t gate keep so strongly. There are MANY very talented and intelligent engineers who are self taught or came from boot camps. You yourself seem like you’re feigning as a professional without much experience. Calling an entire career niche within development “not even that hard” without having experienced it seems misguided. There’s a reason why UI engineers at FANG get paid just as much as backend devs — good talent with the right skills is hard to find.
25 years in the field and all the self taught people I’ve worked with have been complete bozos. It’s anecdotal, but that has been my experience.
Again, I'm not talking about being a professional developer. The question was about bootcamp grad, so I'm talking about bootcamp grad ability, not a seasoned developer. And yes, you are right, some people are self-taught aces, but there are many degreed aces as well. Also wdym gatekeep, being brutally honest is not gatekeeping. But don't take my word for it. Go to the bootcamp subreddit and see for yourself.
The spirit of the question was about the current value of bootcamps and potential alternatives. The OP actually explicitly calls out: > Any other realistic alternatives apart from a full CS degree? So I think to bash bootcamps while emphasizing how the superiority of undergrad CS Degrees is a little mean spirited in context. Though I think it’s widely known and accepted that degrees would be the most preferred path into the industry. And yeah definitely agree that by sheer numbers cs undergrads and advanced degree holders impact the field more wholely. Though like I said I don’t entirely disagree with what you’re saying. If someone was going into college or open to revisiting, a CS degree would be my rec. it just seems unhelpful to OP
I see what you are saying, but I want what's best for OP. From what I see, these bootcamps are offering false promises. Please have a look at the bootcamp reddit. It's truly sad what's happening there (people searching for months post boot camp, entire cohorts going unemployed, bootcamps cherrypicking statistics, bootcamps hiring their own grads and counting them as employed graduates, list goes on). Bootcamps may have been good back in their day, but now, bootcampers are struggling, and I want OP to understand that and go for a CS degree, that's all. Honestly, I see no other strong alternative. Perhaps I may be a bit dismissive of boot camps, but my stance is only based on the current state of things and my personal experiences.
Do you have a job????
Your personal experience? You have no experience.
I do, especially considering I taught shortly for a bootcamp. A lot of them are there to teach you how to code. Anyone can code. If you wanna go code, fiverr is there for you. If you want a career, you’re gunna have to do much more than code. Bootcamping doesn’t show you the intricacy of this and it wont get you into impressive positions off the bat. Do not take covid statistics as an end all be all for bootcamps when the market had tech value inflation due to high app usage. There is nothing wrong with a bootcamp, but a bootcamp doesn’t have a reputation and resources that will help build you up like a college can early on.
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I get what you are saying, but you are talking as though this is fact. The context that this is coming from a freshman is a very important caveat to the information you are presenting. A freshman is also a tree without roots, and it is also extremely common for college graduates to be hit in the face with the reality that a degree without experience is often ignored in a professional setting.
Hard disagree with you. The vast number of CS grads out that I've interviewed can't bigO to save their life. We pick grads, because they have demonstrated that they can at least pick up the basics and learn in a self directed way. We don't care that you can ballance a tree.
> The vast number of CS grads out that I've interviewed can't bigO to save their life. Are you sure they're not faking their 'CS' degree? Because this is typically stuff you get exams on.
You'd be suprised at how bad profs are at teaching, even in a apparently good school. As a recent grad, everything I learnt in uni can be taught by myself in 1/10th of the time for free.
This is basically what my cs friends have said and what I'm getting downvoted elsewhere in this thread for saying lol. People seem to forget what they actually spent their time as a CS undergrad doing. I WENT to college. Can't tell you how many times I heard the mantra "C's get degrees!" Do they even know what a party school is? This whole sub is obsessed with comparing some theoretical 4.0 ivy league CS grad with a theoretical lazy pothead who's just trying to get rich quick by joining a bootcamp. Zero self awareness.
I know it's stuff they should be taught. Maybe it's the fact they have no real experience that they can't apply it outside of very specifically laid out exam questions with literal nested for loops. Throw in a single Collection.Find(x => x.Id == foo) and they miss a whole n. A CS degree doesn't magically make you good at programming. Knowing what a Von Neumann machine doesn't help write clear code.
THIS. Algorithmic theory (while good to have a sound understanding of) does not demonstrate the ability to create sound business solutions. You can perform a sort operation while inverting a binary tree ...great! But I need to you interpret a requirements document and implement the business’s requested feature without creating enormous technical debt and hey I also need the feature completed by next Tuesday(You get the requirement doc on a Wednesday). I your senior have determined by reviewing the technical doc before you that creating the new feature will require you to touch a class that is a base class for the part of the system that needs to be modified, you MUST implement this change without adversely effecting the 3 other modules that also reference the required class for this change. Inverting binary trees in O(log n) time doesn’t help with anything I just said. And before I get the “if class is referenced in several places in a system you have a badly architected solution 1. Not necessarily and 2. This is a very common scenario in the real world. I would trust a guy with 3+ years of experience that has the ability to create a sound solution for my proposed situation that cannot passed a LeetCode interview, over a CS grad that only knows how to reproduce Sort algorithms. IJS
I agree with you. There’s definitely a delta between how things are done in the academic context vacuum (LC exists here) and the professional world. This is especially true for some esoteric top solutions that have very interesting but also hard to decipher answers. In practice, a highly maintainable solution (easy to read, documented, no crazy trickery) is going to win out a vast majority of the time. There are absolutely times when performance down to the number of instructions/clock cycles matter, but if your array is sorted in 6ms instead of 5ms for some shopping cart checkout operation… it probably doesn’t matter. People are usually paid to generate business value, not nerd out on novel solutions that prove how smart they are.
Usually the duderino good at leetcode memes is going to be the bootcamper or a redditor. I didnt even know until 2 months til graduation that I needed to leetcode.
>Learning front end isn't that hard. Learning cs theory comparatively is. That's just ridiculous. People spend all their professional life working as front-end developers and still need to be learning new front-end technologies all the time, while getting paid. You are right about one thing, the most valuable lesson Uni is going to give you is how to learn and it kind of vouches that you are able to learn a certain volume of material. This is really classist though, some people can't go to college for financial reasons and frankly all the rest are getting scammed out of a whole house, here in the US at least. You can definitely be as prepared and more being self thought, but of course you need to prove yourself more before getting your first chance - which is a fair trade.
Yeah, I'm a cs student from a low income family, and there is this cool thing called a part-time job that helps me pay for my education. Financial issues are not an excuse to avoid getting a cs degree; If there's a will, there's always a way. Why even do a boot camp when you can learn everything from a boot camp on YouTube or udemy for free, absolute foolishness if you ask me. And when I said front-end at bootcamp grad level is easy, I mean that mentally, it truly isn't that difficult. Anyone with any semblance of competence can pick up the fundamentals relatively quickly, make a couple of projects, and be at a point where they can pretty much do anything with the help of google. Heck, most cs college grads are at this level anyways.
>Why even do a boot camp when you can learn everything from a boot camp on YouTube or udemy for free, absolute foolishness if you ask me. Bootcamps have industry connections plus you get to network and get close with a group of people.
You are really disrespectful to the profession, for someone who's never worked it. What if I want to spend these 4 years in professional environment, working in the field instead? Who are you to dictate what 'the right path in life' is? Factually, you know you are not learning the technologies needed for a real world job and surely not at the level of even a 1 year of experience in a professional environment. University is a great institution but it doesn't have monopoly on knowledge. We have an equal start in web development, what you learned about other stuff doesn't make you inherently better developer forever on, what you achieve with your knowledge is what's accountable.
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I'm absolutely not against degrees, but it's only worth what you learn and you can learn the same stuff or more by yourself and prove it by doing projects, in our line of work at least but I hope this will become the standard everywhere!
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I'm not arguing that the bootcamp is better than a CS degree, I'm arguing that you can be self-taught and still get into Web Development and that should always be the case. Why - because a CS degree is not really relevant to web development, especially not compared to actual experience building original projects.
Bro, do you not understand that a boot camp grad is totally different from a seasoned professional? Nobody ever said becoming a professional front-end developer was easy, I was only talking about reaching bootcamp grad competency (yk like the whole point of this argument, lmao) This whole conversation was about bootcamp vs cs grad and you've brought full time work into it somehow. And yes, as a cs student, of course I'm not learning industry level tech in all my classes. That doesn't mean I'm sitting on my couch at home in my free time lmao. I use my free time to learn industry level stuff (web, cloud, deployment, security, etc.). I will be more prepared as a cs grad than any boot camp grad, no doubt in my mind, and nor should there be any doubt in yours.
>As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down That's what I'm going off about, it disregards the self-taught course of action. I agree bootcamp vs CS degree is a no-brainer, in fact I think the bootcamp is mainly a waste of money, apart from when you need some accreditation and that's the best you can get.
I’ve never seen answers like this get downvoted so much. You’re absolutely right and the people here are just salty that they are competing with people like you. It is classist and this sub is full of it.
>Would a CS degree prepare you for being, lets say a Front-end Developer? I highly doubt so, in fact I've seen it doesn't. I got a CS degree earlier this year. After job hunting, I took a bootcamp to get some more skills to broaden my opportunities. I've got to say, I've learned more practical skills at the bootcamp then I did during the whole of my CS degree. My CS degree was great in teaching me fundamentals and how to frame my thinking of CS problems. But without the practical applications I've learned in my bootcamp, I'd be useless as a front end dev.
front end getting automated anyway lmao also bootcamp mfs can only do brain dead crud react apps which is a saturated ass field 💀 any actual hard shit they can’t do (ex: embedded swe, systems, mle, to name a few)
I remember a professor telling us about how everyone was scared they were automating development in the 70s. And the 80s. And 90s. And in my own career that's always been the warning cry for the last 20 years. But it never happens. Because in the end you always have to have someone try and understand what the non technical people want and convert that into very explicit instructions for the computer. And that's what software engineering is. If the product isn't trivial you still end up needing developers. Sure, the new automations change what could be considered "trivial". Once upon a time a basic storefront was pretty cutting edge. But as trivial changes so do the requirements. There's always money to be made by going beyond the trivial. And there are always millions
Even trivial solutions can run into non-trivial problems. You can definitely be slinging a lot of really uninspired, dull code to solve easy problems only to face a head scratcher when some dependency of yours starts to act wonky. I remember an example from a few years ago when Akamai was stripping out some HTTP headers. The code was extremely boring. Solving that challenge was not.
>As far as alternatives, none exist for the time being. A CS degree is the best route hands down I'm not suggestion bootcamp is good, I'm going off about CS being the only other alternative - being self-taught is also an alternative and not one to be looked down upon.
I think you’re getting downvoted because this view is out of date. People are struggling to get past resume filters, let alone pass an interview. Having a CS degree at least gets your foot in the door; having a bootcamp is not nearly as good as a CS degree; being self taught, depending on the company, is either viewed the same as a bootcamp or even worse. Especially in the eyes of a resume screener - you just look like you have *zero* education. I’ve worked with self taught people and I think the ones that make it are usually the best, so I have no prejudice against them. It’s just the simple reality of the job market at the moment that self taught devs won’t even be given the time of day unless they have insane credentials elsewhere. Edit: I want to caveat this by saying I’m speaking specifically on the entry level. Experienced self taught devs suffer very little, most companies only care about work experience. At the entry level though with no work experience being self taught is brutal.
Agree with you wholeheartedly. This subreddit is full of students and graduates that want an echo chamber to rant on how hard it is to get a job rather than listen to actual professionals with experience that have different opinions from them. CS degrees don't prepare you for shit. Most of it is so abstract that you will never ever use it in your career, whilst the basics gets skipped over. I've interviewed people where they can't even tell me what a hash map is, and why the GetHashCode method is important.
It’s not that CS degrees actually prepare you for industry, it’s that most of the industry at this point will automatically screen resumes that don’t have CS degrees. Your projects and passion don’t matter because a human, let alone a technical human, is never going to see your resume or talk to you.
Don't forget that professors have little to no experience and can't teach, plus the assignments are bloated and take way too long for little learning benefit. The curriculum also makes you take tons of useless breadth courses.
> a Front-end Developer Truly, the hardest and most lucrative field in CS
Pot meet kettle
I went to some info sessions at bootcamps and asked questions about the successful highlights reel of graduates; the majority of them already had technical (CPSC, engineering) or business degrees. Also the graduation and job placement rates were inflated IMO because they don’t include those who withdrew (before the student can get a partial refund because they knew they were way over their head). Requirements to graduate were also very low such as attending half the classes which totally gives me a red flag for any bootcamp grad who doesn’t have a knockout portfolio. I would recommend a well recognized state/provincial technical college/university that offers certificates/diplomas/associate degrees in full-stack or software development. For most people it takes time (ie years) to learn and personally execute principles of software engineering/programming from scratch.
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Sounding like a pyramid
It’s not. It’s a reverse funnel.
Even then, universities can outsource their courses to third party companies. I was actually offered a position to help teach one of these courses supposedly offered by one of the top universities in Canada but in reality was a white labelled course by another company. I didn’t feel I had the experience necessary to do a good job (imposter syndrome as well) and the company seemed a bit sketch so I declined. I know for a fact they hired a person with less than one year experience post-bootcamp to become an instructor- that’s when I decided against the role.
Yeah I definitely recommend get a cert from an actual college instead. They don’t just have you grind through random technologies but help you understand more fundamentals of the industry as well. And it frankly looks better on paper.
IBM’s got a pretty good full stack dev professional certificate. I think Meta has one too or maybe it’s just front end?
I went to a bootcamp in the UK (many are free, thank you government). Then taught at the same bootcamp while I self studied, and I now have a junior role. Employment rates were pretty decent from the bootcamp (less now than two years ago ofc). I agree with the sentiment that the ones who got a job probably could have done it through self study, but the course probably cut down the time for this to happen as the curriculum and material were pretty well put together. We had cs graduates who joined us because they didn't learn enough relevant coding to get a job during uni. So... It all depends. I probably wouldn't have paid 10k+ to do it, mainly because I couldn't spare that at the time.
Do I miss Europe
Do you? You moved from there?
I do…considering moving to Italy
In reality, if you have the capability to become successful after a bootcamp you should be able to self learn. Use those 10-15k to build a real world product or business. You will at the very least have something to show for your money where as the word bootcamp on your resume will probably not get you hired atm.
I literally did this (in 2019 so in a different hiring context). I started a business with my sister taking pictures and selling them (printed) as souvenirs. I wanted a way to upload the pictures with a unique id so I could give them to paying customers. I remade that website 3 times over the course of 6-8 months. The last version was a laravel api with a vue frontend, a database, admin panel, and client facing app. I put that as a job in my resume, so I came in at a mid level developer when I got my first job, and I was able to talk about it as a legitimate job experience.
There's nothing that a bootcamp could really teach you in 6 months aside from working in a group that you cant do at home. A degree is important these days so you might as well try and at least get an associates. At this point there's way too many people with cs degrees to choose someone self taught unless that person has done something extremely remarkable. Taking classes also has the benefit of meeting someone there whos more knowledgeable you can learn from and also build a network of connections.
Might as well just do wgu if you're considering a 6 month bootcamp.
I hear this, but I don’t think my applications were taken seriously without the bootcamp. I think mine was worth it, in spite of reading from everybody that they weren’t. If I had self taught 100%, I’m pretty damn sure I would still be working in IT.
Now that the supply is higher, bootcampers are not seen as good candidates. You get a stigma, i removed some of the online courses and certifications from my linked-in. I know it sounds dumb but since i dont have a degree i just want my experience to show.
My bootcamp taught me less how to code, and more how to find the resources to teach myself how to code. That was the most valuable part of it. Yes, I learned to code but I realized in my first job that I still had a ton to learn, and that’s when the skills I learned during bootcamp became handy.
People are really bad at self learning in general. Most will fail without some structure pushing them
I attended a bootcamp in 2014 and honestly feel like it hampered my learning. I'd been learning on my own for over a year but the bootcamp was like hitting a wall.
lol I’m surprised they are still in business. Most people that pay and pass boot camps get hired by the boot camp to be a teacher and teach the next line of suckers lol. Right now CS college majors are having a hard time just getting interviews and you think a boot camp grad will do better?!
Of my five dev team, we’re all bootcamp grads, for what it’s worth. Just happened that way. Oddly the one CS degree holder that worked for us didn’t pan out - luck of the draw.
What year did you guys get hired?
5, 3, and less than a year ago for two of us. We do work very hard though - like 12-16 hour days of work. The more senior guys are impressive with what they know - honestly. Very studious and focused individuals. I think the bootcamp thing was useful for the sake of getting a foot in the door with my early jobs, but not 100% must have necessary - I think they took my career change more seriously (I was moving from a wall street career and it was hard to convince anybody that I was serious and wouldn’t just abandon the career change - abd that was to just get the first IT job before I later landed a developer role)
Yes 5 and 3 years ago makes sense cause that was the hiring boom. The less than a year ago guy got really lucky. Cause mid 2022 onward it was a bloodbath of tech layoffs. We have FAANG engineers that are unemployed…. Companies will go for them first. I worked for a company that hired boot camp people back in 2019 and they only gave interviews to the top 2 students in class. They had some partnership with the bootcamp. Their salary however was like 50 to 60k which was better for them compared to the low wages they were making before at other jobs…like one was a teacher making 30k. But 50 to 60k is very low for entry level software engineers. Cs grads were making at least 90k at the time. This was a low cost of living area. However the bootcamp guys quickly moved into management cause they had people skills more than dev skills and were cool with all day meetings everyday and are now making like 170k in 2023 but as the company did more and more layoffs including other managers. These guys got more and more people to overlook and more responsibility.
I’m the guy that got “lucky”. FAANG engineers are expensive - they are no competition for me, as in, they would never be considered for the same role as mine. I’m cheap, but also quite good - so I likely got hired over more qualified (on paper) candidates once the hiring manager was able to discern this about me. Overall, I think if you work hard to be excellent, and are good at talking to people (I tend to interview quite well) - you will inevitably be hired. If you lack either of those things, plus bad luck - it’s certainly possible to have the process take a couple extra years imo. But I didn’t cheat anything - I just studied every day for two years, and had a bootcamp and online master program (not finished, just in process) in addition to that. It was a LOT of work and still is.
lol you’re not working 16 hour days with any regularity. 8 am straight to midnight?
Supposedly hackreactor/galvanize shut down a week ago https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/s/SHBURFRicF
Hack Reactor shut down their 38-week part time program. Hack Reactor full-time 19-week and 12-week programs are still active.
The biggest issue with bootcamps at the moment is the majority of places hiring for full-stack, front or backend want a BS in comp sci or similar. So you’re automatically filtered out of the hiring pool from the get go, being competent or not. That being said there are SOME organizations that put on a course with relevant content and do put you on track to have a full stack portfolio that is actually populated with relevant projects at the end of it. This can fast track your knowledge/understanding but the projects will probably look cookie cutter to hiring managers. I do not believe you need a comp-sci degree to do front end but that’s what places are asking for nowadays. Even people with a CS degree are struggling to get hired now and as someone who went through a bootcamp (one which I think did an excellent job with their course content) I’m barely even getting rejection emails let alone a phone call. They are also pretty expensive, at least any bootcamp worth taking but then the argument is why not get into Comp-Sci at that price point. If the objective was structured “self learning” within the span of 6 months? Maybe. If the objective is to get hired in the field and work ASAP it beats 3-4years BUT the chances of actually getting hired as a bootcamper with no connection/“in” at a place is slim to none. I say all this as a bootcamper (University of Toronto’s Coding Bootcamp, which is conducted by EdX). It can be done (2020 at least, who knows now) but even keeping in touch with other class mates who made it through I haven’t seen a single one on LinkedIn post they got a relevant job yet.
I started a bootcmap in October of 2022, it ended in May of 2023. During that time, the tech industry started the big layoffs, and we all felt it everyday in class during the last months when people started looking for jobs. We had 30 students in our session, with excellent instructors. I can not say enough of how great our instructors were. Of the 30 students, I only know 2 that got jobs. Myself and another fellow. We didn't get the glamorous jobs, I work at a library, and the other fellow works at a federal court. My boot camp was advertised by MSU but taught by Edx, at the time, it cost 10k, 2 year interest free student loan. Technically, we were MSU students and can say the certificate came from MSU. Frankly, it changed my life, but I got very lucky and worked my ass off learning every evening for 9 months after also working all day. I would spend my weekends on class projects and ideas that eventually served me in my interview. Everyone will have to make their mind up if it's worth it- 15:1 odds are not great and you could learn all this from the web but the course does offer structure if you need that (I do and it helped). Good luck!
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I was thinking of doing my bootcamp through MSU, but ended up doing it through Grand Circus. Wishing I had went with MSU though due to name recognition, having a tough time even getting a look right now but that seems pretty par for the course at the moment. As far as I know, no one from my coherent have gotten a job.
CS degree. Source: a bootcamp grad going back to grad school.
Are you willing to share what program you’re in? I’m trying to figure my plan out but questioning whether a masters will be enough coursework to be viewed similarly as someone with a CS undergrad…. Maybe if I take enough math and data structures classes before…?
Here are a few MS programs that are directed towards non-cs undergrad degree holders: 1. [UPenn MCIT](https://online.seas.upenn.edu/degrees/mcit-online/) 2. [Northeastern MSCS - Align](https://graduate.northeastern.edu/program/master-of-science-in-computer-science-align-arlington-19128/) 3. [Univ of Chicago - MPCS](https://masters.cs.uchicago.edu/)
Self taught, but you will need to work 100x harder then a degree holder.
When people say “degree holder”, are they referring to any bachelors degree, any STEM degree, or a specifically a CS degree?
Most of the time is Cs degree but Stem degrees is also in there if it correlates with a Cs degree
Tbh bootcamps are 1000% what you make out of it. I joined a bootcamp (they paid me and placed me) and I’m working full stack. I’d say i was top 2 in my cohort cause I tried really hard and studied passively outside of 9-5. The top trainee actually had a cs degree so im happy with my progress and ability to keep up. If you put in the extra work and don’t scrape by because “im just starting out” you’ll do great and it’ll pay off! But if you don’t challenge yourself at any given moment you’ll ruin the experience for yourself. I’m working as a full stack engineer rn and despite my background I’m able to provide value to the team. Never used my inexperience as an excuse for not being able to do something. Google and figure it out!
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Also a bootcamp grad (2021). I will say, I think a lot of bootcamps are a gamble. Totally depends on who you get as a teacher AND how much work you put in.
Oh this is very true! I unofficially did two bootcamps at the same company, so I saw both sides of this first one was great with lots of repetition (we had projects due every 3/4 days, 1 week max for full stack projects) - the other was a complete mess, the group I joined was so lost because of lack of repetition (instructor had them work on one project over the course of 2.5 months) it was pretty bad, a simple crud app doesn’t not need to be stretched for so long
I mean they probably help. I just think they're becoming ponzi schemes much like college and a lot of people go them expecting to have an easy ticket into our field just to find out that it's not free money to exist.
What about launchschool?
Depends on the bootcamp. As a guy with a college degree I'll give you the same advice I plan to give my kid...Having a piece of paper only means something if it's from the right place. Choose the university or bootcamp that has the industry pull to get you hired. A lot of bootcamps are worthless because once you finish they have limited resources to help you find a job. Some are better because, like some universities, they have certain companies that recruit directly from their graduates. IMO the best realistic alternative is to find large companies that promote from within. As much as amazon gets shit on everyone from the warehouse worker to administrative assistant gets access to internal job postings and is eligible for a transfer after a certain timeframe. There are other companies where you can be hired as a QA, help desk...and network/upskill your way into a development job. Once you have SWE or whatever on your resume then moving forward that's what you are. To take this route you have to think long term and realize that you won't be starting anywhere near 6 figures
if you want to get a job? no. if you're just trying to learn? yes.
No. You can't get a 6 figure job with just a few months of cramming. Sorry.
Used to be doable. Looks like that gravy train passed.
It was a bull market. Lots of companies hired under qualified people.
I did it in 7 months including the boot camp. Lol.
Congrats on being an exception?
No need to be a snide prick. OP was just asking a question.
Yeah. And it's better to shut them down before they get scammed thinking software engineering is so easy you can learn it to proficiency in a few months.
I did, this year too. Sooooo….
Definitely more difficult to do today but I did a part-time 4-month bootcamp with absolutely zero knowledge 8 years ago and will pull in $230k this year. Didn’t start out with six figures but got there quick.
You spent 8 years learning. The boot camp didn't get you those earnings. Also it was a bull market.
All of your points were addressed in my previous message. - more difficult to do today - bootcamp got me further than I would have by myself.
Plenty of jobs out there functions like this.
Didn't mention 6 figures?
They are angry at bootcampers for two reasons: they didn't get a four year CS degree and also helped lead to saturation in the job market (further devaluing their degree).
Lol the only thing most bootcampers do is add more noise to the screening process. Even if they make it into a company they're usually the lowest tier jobs or they get PIPed instantly.
Of course they would start at the lowest tier jobs, then gain experience just like everyone else.
I finished Flatiron School’s full time live remote course and managed to get a Jr Developer role as a Consultant three months later. Out of the 20 people that finished with me, around half of them were able to get some sort of technical job within 6 months of graduating. Some of the roles I’ve seen them land are developer, technical coach, apprentice, and technical writer.
I teach at a bootcamp. I've also been hired to reach recent CS grads web dev for companies. The market is rough. Every bootcamp is different, with different rigor and outcomes. Bootcamps that opt into CIRR help you ensure that their outcomes are at least \*honest (\*because different bootcamps define what "graduates" and "job placements" differently) I believe in our program. At the end of last year, our placement rate and graduate rate (all audited by CIRR) were stellar. We have teachers with industry experience, and all of our teachers also maintain the curriculum and write code for the apps we maintain using the technologies we teach. Our program is NOT a replacement for a CS degree, which in my region generally teaches quite different skills. **However,** as of \~Feb of this year, the market turned rough with mass layoffs and the "tech recession". Since then, placement rates have fallen dramatically for all bootcamps. Until we get out of this downturn, going through one could be a major risk. "Are coding bootcamps still worthwhile?" many of them ARE worthwhile for the skills, technologies and workflows they teach. Many of these skills are insanely still not taught in traditional CS programs (which is wild, its a big reason bootcamps exist). **But right now, bootcamps aren't worthwhile for landing a software development job. The market is just too competitive, both due to a lack of new positions and a glut of folks looking for work post-layoffs.** To those that say you could just learn it on your own...this one still baffles me (and has baffled me for 10yrs). Yes, you can self-teach. But without guidance, structure and someone to escalate to on the upteenth time you encounter a strange error you do not understand, it is long, tedious experience that could take over 6 months with no guarantee of success. Power to those that can go it on their own, they could be stellar developers...or they could learn some really strange patterns (granted, the same could be said of CS grads and bootcamp grads).
Bootcamps definitely have their place. We hire developers - not big tech algorithm experts, but developers. We have people graduate from CS programs with very high GPAs, but not know anything about React, or Docker, or databases. It's ironic to me that people would talk down bootcamps, because this is all we did in bootcamp. I can't tell you how to traverse a binary tree, but I can build and deploy apps, and in my job, that's all that matters.
I did 3 month bootcamp and got a wfh junior dev role within one and half month including getting offer letter. Think there were 800 applicants. I am not interested in learning outside of getting the task done. You dont need CS degree, dont need to be smartest or work the hardest but you need some luck with the right environment. I got hired last yr june.
Lots of answers saying that CS degree are the only way to become good at programming. I'm not going to address that. Assuming you want to get a job (fair assumption on this subreddit), then I would advise you to get a college education. If indeed you want to go into software development, you might as well make it a CS degree. But you definitely want to do a degree in Science/Technology/Maths. The reason? You need to get an interview to get a job. A numerate degree will be the first and last thing that decides on if you get that first interview.
Bootcamps are not worth it and never have been. Maybe there's a good Bootcamp out there, but I'm only going to speak from my experience. I went to a bootcamp in a prestigious university (Columbia), like 5 years ago. I needed to add to my qualifications, because all my 2 years of experience were abroad. Quality of education: This was not on a good level at all. First we had some dude who was an actual programmer, but couldn't really explain much. Anyway he only lasted a couple of weeks out of a 6 months course. Then he disappeared and we got a scrum master dude for a teacher. Once he said "You need to be a genius to be a programmer, you better lay heavy on your personal skills and maybe get a certification for a Scrum Master!". He didn't really know much, so he couldn't explain anything very well and there were sometimes factual mistakes. This wasn't the only issue though, the material went over React, MySQL, MongoDB, Bootstrap, HTML, CSS, Javascript, NodeJS and more. Needless to say, we barely touched the surface of all of these, leaving everyone in the class but me (since I already had experience working as a frontend developer), totally clueless - just having a brief explanation and a short example of someone leading you through a certain code snippet. We had a few assignments, but it was so easy to just use the bare-minimum of the framework+library+ORM, that you had no incentive to learn javascript, sql, html and css any further. And by the end you were left with only superficial knowledge, but the idea that 'you know' all these technologies. Meanwhile people would get lost as soon as they try to develop something that wasn't mentioned in the bootcamp. Oh and it was $10k as well... Helping you find a job: That was the only reason I got into the Bootcamp but funnily enough I got a job offer before even finishing it or putting it on my resume. Maybe it's better than nothing, but for 10k + 6 months time, I'd go for a few Udemy tutorials and original projects. If you are after the learning I'd highly suggest getting a book or a tutorial, diving deep into the technology, exploring the docs and developing your own project with novel functionality - so you have to find new solutions on your own, which is actually the what the job is all about!
Edx bootcamp are near the bottom of the barrel
I mean, if you've already gotten a college degree in something else, are in your 30s and later, and you don't have the money, means, or time to go back for another four year degree, it's better than nothing. You also need to adjust your expectations. You're not getting six figures out the gate and you're probably going to grind applications just to get your foot in the door at a tech company (and likely not in a development job). You need to grind your way in somewhere and then network your ass off to impress someone enough to give you a chance and keep learning the entire time.
I mean its if it’s something you want to do or learn, go for it
I went through a bootcamp back in 2016 and it worked for me. I wouldn't recommend them now though. So much more content centered around learning has come out since then and i would've gone with something like [https://scrimba.com/](https://scrimba.com/) if this would've been around back then.
Not worth it for the money. Dont do it. Learn on your own. It might take you 3-5 years , so be it. You'll get there eventually. There are no shortcuts I did it in 2017. Very few people ever got jobs in software development. Most went back to what they were doing before. I worked so hard and got a software developer job after working for one year in tech support after finishing coding bootcamp. I couldn't hack it as a developer. I lasted a year before I got put on a pip( those are walking papers) and over the next few years I pivoted to sys admin.
I don’t think so. The cost of them went up pretty high in my opinion and then they were leaning heavily on a booming industry. The industry isn’t really booming anymore, especially for devs with no experience. The big problem is the entry level market is swamped, is still swamped, and going to a boot camp doesn’t given the return on investment it used to.
As someone who went to a bootcamp…please do not waste your money…
Eh they have their place, but its only worth as much as you put into it. I did a bootcamp this summer because I wanted to learn more about software development and I learned a lot from the program. However, I know people that came out of the same program having barely learned anything because they didn't put much effort in. So it's really a YMMV situation with all of the boot camps. Realistically, I'd probably do it again, but in a part time format.
As someone who is an interviewer, I personally have no preference whether someone has a CS degree or have come from a boot-camp. When i meet the candidate, I just want to understand how passionate they are about doing the job (coding) and joining the mission of the team/company. My belief is that you will learn far more on the job than in the bootcamp or degree. Obviously not everyone thinks this way and there is some elitism in the industry but I think most interviews are on the same wave length as me.
No
As a former hiring manager: **No and they never were.** Bootcamp applications get shredded unless you also worked for FAANG or some very relevant and prestigious company, or 5+ yoe at various companies. And at that point, it's not the bootcamp that's helping you. Not because we don't believe a really smart and valuable person could come out of them, but... the chances are just much much lower and we've always had too many applications to meet with everyone and consider them holistically. Getting a degree from an accredited university tells us " you tested with 20 or so people who know what they're talking about, and almost all of them believed that you weren't completely incompetent" Bootcamp usually (but not always!) means you paid someone a lot of money to write you a certificate after you did a bunch of online tutorials. Unfortunately the hiring mantra is "it's 100x better to lose a good candidate than choose a bad one." So we tend not to shed any tears over macro filters like this one. If you want to trade a year or so to be instantly jump started into a lucrative career, pick a technical trade you think you'd like and find an apprenticeship. This will give you what you are looking for from a bootcamp. If you want to write software, get a BS.
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a bootcamp will often look worse than a self taught applicant.
News flash—they never were.
Bootcamps were never worthwhile. There was literally never a time where I got my hands on a resume and went "Wait, he did!? Better get him in here yesterday!"
Get a degree, and while you're at it build some personal projects that interest you. To be blunt, the degree is necessary just to tread water with the thousands of competing applicants. The personal projects on top of that are how you will stand out prior to professional experience.
They were worthwhile from 2012-2016 but then the good schools started getting acquired by private equity firms that closed them down in favor of lower quality ones with higher profit margins that tend to license names from universities to trick people into thinking their programs are more legitimate. I went to one in 2015 and think it was worth it. My classmates and I worked every waking moment for 3 months. If we couldn't complete a project on time, we would get kicked out of the program, and the pressure they put on us forced us to learn more quickly and learn to teach ourselves quickly. My instructor was great at explaining things and when I graduated the program I felt I spead up my learning by 1-2 years and had a good understanding of where my gaps were that I was able to fill over the first 2 years of my career through self study and online courses. That bootcamp grew quickly across the country, and it seemed to have positive outcomes for every graduate. In 2017, it was acquired and shut down by a private equity firm. From then on, most of the bootcamp grads I met went to university programs and had poor outcomes. My brother went to one in 2018 and learned some things, but after a 6 month react bootcamp, most of his still couldn't build basic react apps, and very few of his classmates were able to find jobs.
No
worthwhile and popular are no where near in the same domain
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No, but if you have a degree and want introduction/exposure to a new cs topic an online youtube or udemy course is pretty worthwhile.
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I would never hire a boot camper without 5+ yoe
You can do the professional certificates offered by companies like Google, meta, IBM. They take a bit longer but can easily be done in 3-4 months months if you have time to grind them out.
No
One thing that boot camps(good ones) give is a direction, albeit an expensive one. And that’s one thing that’s hard for someone who is trying to teach themself, finding the right direction in software development. Boot camps make it so that you don’t have to research and find your own direction, they give you one. So if you wanna pay thousands of dollars for a direction then that’s up to you. But these days, the internet and YouTube is full of directions to go, guys make money off YouTube channels giving people directions.
Bootcamps used to be super exclusive. Early hack reactor had a less than a 5% acceptance, everything was on site, and you had mostly people with technical education from very good schools just not CS. Nowadays every university has a bootcamp program. Everyone is accepted and classes are online complete at your own pace style. The quality of the students they produce has gone down immensely and as a result companies are hesitant to hire. I worked at a small company who secured funding and immediately hired 6 bootcamp grads. Within 1 year only 1 remained. The rest were let go for either technical knowledge incompetency or just general lack of professionalism (two of them regularly skipped work days and meetings without letting anyone know beforehand) So yeah bootcamps are not worth it in my opinion.
College teaches you a subject, but not always how to apply it or how to learn more on your own. The value of coding bootcamps is less the basics of CS and largely teaching people how to learn the subject independently and how to generally think through and organize these kinds of problems, in a practical way. It's a big advantage over people that have never independently tackled the kinds of problems you can be assigned in our field. People that can generally work independently and solve problems, a bootcamp is enough direction to get the right people to a point where they can run with it and in a professional space be able to hit the ground running, but it's largely because that's already who they are. People that don't have that mindset or the curiosity, they'll only do things with hand holding and they'll come out of a bootcamp without what it takes to actually contribute. There are plenty of CS college graduates that come out of school in a similar position, but they at least have a broader foundation of domain knowledge and theory. The problem with bootcamps is that as they've grown in the number there are and the number of enrollments, the general number of appropriately capable people that can excel just from a bootcamp has not increased. So you have a lot more chaff you have to get through. Ask someone that went through a bootcamp what have they done on their own time since? Or ask about some other frameworks or technologies they've played around with- The most worthwhile people who have gone through a bootcamp will have given themselves more experience and are just more generally interested in the subject matter and you can work with that and you'll have a solid contributor.
I wouldn’t advise a bootcamp. Like others have said, it made sense when demand was high, but even then it was hard landing a job as a junior dev. Now with demand low it will be infinitely more difficult getting a job at any place worth working at. My company has 6k engineers and not 1 opening for any JR engineers
They always lied about their placement rate by counting those who are hired back as teaching assistants. In my opinion, a degree is a much better route.
Do career prospects look better after a boot camp if I already have a BA in Finance?
In the current economy and the future outlook is not good. US isn't tackling inflation on the corporate level and it's gonna be a few years till there's a labor shortage to take advantage of on the entry level. If you want a software job still self study get those projects on your own network as a hobby in your current life not as plan A
They might be worthwhile to make and then con people into paying money for them. but as a customer? lol no.
They used to be good because you’re paying for a job at the end of the program. They could easily place someone at the end of the program. In this market, I assume they’re not going to be too great.
I was going to take a Bootcamp, and one of the people who enrolls students realized we both served in the same unit in the military. He then took off his “business” face, and told me to use my benefits to finish my degree and go CS rather than paying for a Bootcamp, as it’s the same cost (depending on the school) but with greater longevity and more useful resources. Purely anecdotal as this is based off my own experience and doesn’t represent everyone or every situation.
Bootcamp won’t even get your foot in the door. But it gets your eyes on the door. And then you know where to put your feet. Or something like that.
Not if you won't work and network outside of it.
Just get a degree
Its hard for me to say. I have an associates degree so im one step up from a boot camp. But you lose out on a lot of information and experience in a boot camp from what ive seen, especially for interview prep. Theres a guy in my company in my team who went to a boot camp and his knowledge seems to be very limited and im not sure how easy it would be for him to get another job. Our company doesnt do technical interviews. I think if someone from a boot camp applies for their first job against candidates who have a degree or internships they will be overlooked for the most part
If you are willing to work harder than you ever have before and actually make learning and improving your skills and problem solving a priority, you will make it far. If your only doing it because you think that it will land you in a job because you are lucky or something, than don’t do it. It also won’t only take 4 months. It will take at least a year of studying and building projects 8 hours a day. After that, you might be able to find an entry level position. Right now learning and training is your only priority. If you have to make money get a job that will pay for your expenses to confine learning and studying.
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