Comment by danreedx86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danreedx86 | Hacker News Reader

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I like the idea of transparency from these bootcamps, it'd be a great way to vet them before committing $20k and several months of your time. It makes sense that bootcamps wouldn't be willing to divulge that information though, especially if their numbers aren't great.

But it feels a little unfair to hold the bootcamps completely responsible for people not being able to find jobs. Seems like people have this idea that just showing up is enough. It's not enough to just show up with a piece of paper like 'hey I finished a bootcamp/degree, gimme a job!'

I got my first job out of school with a combination of luck (knowing how to implement conway's game of life) and passion (a side project I had just shipped). Most every job after that has been because of passion. Whether or not you went to school for CS (or at all), or finished a bootcamp is completely irrelevant imho. I probably know more about von neumann architecture, big O and sorting algorithms than my friends without CS degrees... but I've worked with or admired plenty of people who never took a CS class and have mastered lots of things that I haven't. And I can definitely recall a few friends in undergrad who I was sure would go far and never found a single job cuz they sat around waiting for Larry Page to call them personally.

So yeah, tl:dr; school doesn't matter all that much if you're not motivated to continue learning. And if you don't enjoy programming enough to learn && experiment/play you're probably not gonna do well.

I almost went through one of the bigger bootcamps in Austin a couple of years ago, and I'm so glad I didn't for several reasons.

Everything about the application process felt like a for-profit university: they constantly blasted their impressive placement and salary figures at me, making it sound almost like I was guaranteed a $100k job right out of the program. A 96% placement rate and an average starting salary of 100+k allows them to paint a certain picture in applicants heads, and most people have no idea how hard it is when they sign up.

Funny enough, this bootcamp had all of their current students use the same job title on LinkedIn to show the bootcamp as work experience, which made finding alums VERY easy. I sent several alums who didn't get jobs quick messages asking about their experiences, and the responses were eye-opening. They were coached on how to go to networking events, where they wound competing against all of their classmates for junior gigs. After a few months, they went down in the bootcamp register as "failures", so they didn't count towards the glowing placement figures.

But the icing on the cake came years later, when this same bootcamp contacted a friend about recruiting some of their students. During the conversation, they disclosed that they were a contingency recruiter for their students: these junior candidates were going to cost the company six figures with the recruiting fee, which was crazy.

These students shell out $20+k for these programs and become unattractive candidates because the school wants a recruiting fee for someone that's been coding for 12 weeks, and the students probably don't even know what's going on.

There's absolutely a need for transparency here.

I agree that its not fair to blame the bootcamps entirely, though I still think releasing better statistics might allow people to make more informed decisions, or at the very least weed out some of the shadier bootcamps.

That said, I think your tl;dr sums it up pretty accurately. If you're not that into learning something, its going to be hard to make a career out of it.

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