What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

This single sentence terrifies me:

"At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education."

$120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I hope he lasts 2 weeks

That all said, if your goal is to get the highest paying job possible, this seems like useful advice.

I'm not saying that I was stronger on the data structures and algorithm side than top students who spent four years staying up coding during their nights and weekends but I was definitely ahead of most fresh grads I encountered. I don't know how that is, given what a typical CS curriculum (at least what I saw later on Open Courseware) but my guess is that a lot of CS grads don't actually practice what they're learning enough so that it sticks.

One thing it appears a lot of people on this thread are missing is that it's not a school for complete beginners. There are prep courses for people looking to enter the school. I had been programming simple things for my blog for years before I went. About 1/3 of my class already had CS degrees before entering.

The other factor is that intensity really does matter. The reason focusing on duration of 12 (well actually 13 weeks) is wrong isn't because nearly 1000 hours of instruction and work are packed into those 12 weeks. It's even more wrong because working at double the intensity leads to more than double the progress. I saw the same phenomenon with language learners when I was living in Taiwan. It's very common for someone who did a full four year degree in Chinese to speak poorly compared to someone else who did a much shorter, more intensive study at a top immersion program like ICLP.

Anyway, the degree of animosity here is a little surprising, even considering the cognitive biases that might come from having spent a fortune on a university credential. Large numbers of my peers from Hack Reactor went on to do well at YC companies and/or large companies like Google. One I remember well did both (was an early engineering hire at a YC company that got acquired by Google). I still consider the tuition I paid to HR one of the better investments I've ever made (and one that I easily recouped within the year.

Thank you Marcus and thank you, Shawn. You guys were fantastic instructors and project mentors!

He needs an entry-level position.

By that, I mean that I make a distinction between a Junior dev (who may have a degree and professional experiences through a work and/or internships) and an entry-level/breaking-into-programming dev who's got nothing (no theory, no practise, zero real world experience).

If we did make the distinction, the place of these bootcamps would be much clearer. They train technicians. Specifically software technicians. Their graduates can build things and fix problems using current technology, but they don't have the deep theory and sophisticated understanding of the field that lets them solve really hard problems (at least until they considerably augment their skills.)

The job that most closely fits those is usually called Software Engineer, as distinguished from Senior Software Engineer or Staff Software Engineer. Did the writer really land a job at the Senior level on the strength of ten weeks of instruction and three months of personal study? Sounds weird.

The only situation where I'd hire someone like that into such a position is if they brought a LOT more to the table, meaning probably domain experience. If someone spent ten years as a petroleum engineer and I am hiring a software developer to work on software for the oil industry, then yes, I might be willing to hire them at Senior despite a dodgy background in software.

The article is about hacking the system for networking purposes. He's not saying HR is "wrong" to apply those labels. Just that code camp graduates should watch out for that.

Given that this site has used up many cycles discussing how HR filtering sucks, these hacks are interesting to consider.

As for your specific concerns, calm down. You're giving off a superior tone. There is a lot of shit software out there. A lot of it coming from big companies. This notion that it's only for experts of a given status is elitist.

By your admission you're a smart coder so you have little to be upset about. Everyone works with people that aren't as good. My managers an idiot. Yadda yadda.

I'd work on my propensity for flying off the handle at trivial snippets taken out of context from larger stories. I'd rather work to help bring up a green coder with promise than alongside an elitist asshole

> work that wasn't too complicated

"complicated" is subjective. There are many talents and somebody could be better in for example JavaScript (and not HTML/CSS).

There is "some kind of joke" going on, but it isn't that guy. Its the rest of the industry that turns out script-mungers and form-fillers and calls them 'software engineers'.

My wife is from the UK and has worked in London and NYC and she makes quite a bit more money in NYC. She has told me there's no way she'd make her salary in London and it would probably be quite a bit less. She doesn't work in software either; she works in finance.

I think part of it is it simply costs a whole lot more to employ someone in the UK. All those social benefits have a cost and companies have to pay them. It's also much harder to fire someone in the UK than the USA where you can be fired on the spot for no reason at all. The benefits the company has to pay out are technically none except for some unemployment insurance for a few months which is quite small all things considered.

We've talked about moving to the UK but our lifestyle would change for the negative we believe due to the low salaries and the very high cost of living anywhere near London. Especially with the beating the Pound has taken recently when we convert our dollars to Pounds there's no way we'd get close to our current income.

To be honest I'm not sure how you folks do it. The UK is expensive and people simply do with less in general. That's not such a bad thing either.

If Europe can build a few companies that churn out revenue at the scale of Google / Intel/ MSFT, European developer salaries will skyrocket. US companies with offices in Europe have helped salary increases, but really the continent needs a few Googles to really skyrocket salaries.

It looks like Square starts at about 100k for a new grad (uni degree). Seems high but it's more credible than $120k for a bootcamp grad.

Remember that median rent for a 1 bedroom in a non-trendy area is around $2900/month [2,3] and taxes should take about 39% of salary at that level of income. It is far more expensive to live in San Francisco than most of Europe.

1. http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=software&city=SAN+FRAN...

2. https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/...

3. http://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/23/13034910/san-francisco-rent-a...

In my experience $120k is in line with a developer with a 4-year CS degree and 1-2 years of work experience and maybe some OSS work.

If it matters, I was hired through a Who's Hiring post with no personal connections.

The biggest justification for it is probably the idea that you hire people based on their ability to learn rather than their current knowledge. This sort of makes sense if you consider how fast tech tends to change and believe that you'll be able to hold on to an engineer long enough for them to grow into competence. Of course, it also leaves you with the huge problem of trying to evaluate "ability to learn" through a few hours of interviews.

The other thing to consider is that hiring is necessarily an ecosystem. An entry level job at Facebook can net you something like 120k + reliable stock compensation + signing bonus, and a startup that doesn't at least try to compete with that is going to lose out big on engineering talent.

It all ends up having very little to do with "justifying" a 6-digit salary, and a lot more with scarce supply.

This is also why we've seen bootcamps and and online vocational learning (Udacity, Bloc, etc) gain a lot of traction. Paying $18k for 3 months at Hack Reactor might seem insane, but if it lands you a $100k job it very quickly becomes worth it.

I can't speak to a lot of programs, but HR is roughly 800 hours of cultivating people with "enough experience to write higher order functions" into - specifically - web developers. These students implemented a binary tree in their first week, wrote relatively secure chat apps in their third, know React and Angular by the sixth, and have 4 side-projects (one of which over a full month) by the end. Meanwhile, CS grads have been taught that JavaScript is a toy language that can't solve a problem of any reasonable complexity and are instead competing for enterprise Java positions amongst themselves.

Is there a bubble? Probably. But there's also a market for individuals with a set of skills that isn't being met by our university system.

1. Programmers have lower status in the UK relative to the US - UK is more status/class conscious in general whereas US is more about money/productivity/impact.

2. Due to a bigger entrepreneurship culture in the US the opportunity cost for programmers is higher and that drives salaries higher across the board.

This was years ago and I don't know if the bar has slipped as coding bootcamps have gotten more popular, but the bar to entrance for my program seems pretty high in retrospect. None of the folks I knew and learned with there would I expect to go on into the corporate world and be one of those computer engineers who gets by in their career by doing hardly anything or being a net negative. They were to a man and woman very smart and voracious in their learning about programming best practices and languages. If you've got a person like that then does it really matter that they haven't been part of a real corporate project before? They will learn very quickly and likely be one of the most useful people on the team within a year. I'm not saying they should be made team lead without any experience but as a rank and file programmer, the salary is justified in that case, I believe.

Obviously it all depends on the major and other factors, but I'd say simply getting into and graduating from UC Berkeley does mean something.

Of course lots of smart, hard working students simply go to local community colleges to save $ etc. But when a recruiter sees UC Berkeley on resume and they want someone with a degree, it give a good impression.

And let's not forget on HN survey, about half of the working programmers are self-taught.

And who knows, maybe he had side project(s) or examples of code to show.

The sad thing is devs who are out of school for 1-2 years think they have arrived at 6 figures, when they have many years of problem solving and result delivering to give to fully return the value of what they're being paid to their employers.

While those young devs may think they have hit pay dirt, quite often a higher starting salary is meant to keep them as lifers longer, while those who are willing to grind and hustle are adding more meaningful, sustainable, and measurable value.

It's also important to remember when times get tough the first group that are often let go are the overpaid people who add the least value.

In that spirit, I hope students continue to learn how to add value instead of just worrying about what value they receive. In a world where everyone's special, no one's special, except those who can add value.

I was once offered a role of Scala software engineer with £45000 starting salary. I assumed it was a joke, but it wasn't.

That's what I though as well until we offered £100k to 3 different guys in London.

They all refused saying it was a substantial drop. One actually standed up and left the room :D

And you're really just talking about the bay area where competition is STIFF for talent. The hardest thing is finding people who can actually do the job - degree, experience or side project aside.

I think the salary gap between US and UK programmers in the last decade has definitely increased.

One reason is exchange rate, only a few years ago GBP/USD is 1.5x, now it's 1.2x.

Another reason is that tech sector boomed in the US, big companies like google and Facebook are doing really well, there are also more successful small companies, fuelled by VC money. together they drive programmer salary up.

However, the UK economy is totally dominated by finance. And the banks are not doing particularly good after 2007.

I mean fair play to the guy for landing a salary like that with basically zero experience but it wont end well for him or the company if he is put into a position of responsibility where he has to make strategic decisions.

Or maybe there is too much supply and not enough demand in London. Maybe it's cultural. But I've noticed that salaries in London are pretty terrible. It's even worse than New Zealand, which doesn't (didn't?) have a lot tech jobs.

Example with made-up numbers: Suppose you spend $2000/mo, you have an unused line of credit of $10000 @ 10%, your student loans are at 5%, and you are taking home $4000/mo. If you have an emergency that costs $2000 that hits your line of credit, that ends up roughly being an extra month servicing $2000 of debt at 10% instead of 5%. If you keep $2000 in cash instead of paying down student loan debt, that ends up meaning you service $2000 of debt at 5% instead of paying it down. These are roughly the same thing, so you wind up ahead if the LoC is sitting empty ~50% of the time.

Granted, these are much more favorable numbers than typical use of credit card debt, but the point remains - if you have access to credit on good terms, and you won't need it often, and you have good illiquid returns on excess cash, you ought to take a look at using credit to handle emergencies instead of cash.

For the first 2 years, live on 50% of your income. Eat Ramen, coupons, live like a begger, and save up 1 year of income.

Then divide that by 12 and use that as a salary for a year while collecting another year. Repeat. Steady income, always a year behind.

Of course this was back when I was trying to go into film. A bit more unstable than software development.

Not at all. Whatever causes the emergency is likely to come with unexpected costs of its own, so 6 months salary is more of a minimum in my opinion.

I've done it twice, and there's nothing like having that fund (and also being unsecured debt-free) backing you up. Each time I made my choice to leave my employer, I had a new job lined up within a couple of months - and I had negotiated a higher salary to boot.

The best way to go about getting such a savings set up is to first plan a realistic budget. Then, pay down any unsecured debt, starting with the smallest debt owed first. Roll that payment, once the debt is paid back, into the next debt, until you have all your debt paid off.

At that point, you should be left with no unsecured debt; a mortgage can be considered OK (as it is secured by your equity) - but if you can pay that off too, so much the better. Usually, though, it's better to keep it for tax deduction purposes.

Don't have a car payment - if you aren't paying cash for a used (but reliable) car, and paying for it in full - you are likely wasting your money.

There's more tips out there than just the above, but them's the basics - basically. Once you become "debt free" in this manner - a great burden will be lifted from your shoulders. I'm serious.

And once you get your FU savings set up (bank for at least 6 months to a year - but ultimately, just keep building the savings as you have available cash - you may never know when you'll need it) - you'll be free to do as you please with your career and goals.

Edit: easier to do

I quickly found out that nobody looks at your GitHub, maybe 10% max. didn't matter that I had code from two weeks ago that did complex segmented locking on a concurrent hashtable. still got asked "what is threading" level questions at every place.

After botching my first spate of interviews to stupid trivia I gave in and and read through a bunch of CSCI 100 course notes and "beginners guide to language x". My performance improved significantly.

Ironically the most useful tutorials were the most basic "write a string to a file", as I had forgotten the classes for opening raw files in my three languages of choice (since nobody in their right mind has any business using those classes in a well designed WebApp). Doesn't matter that I could look it up in 5 minutes, they want it on the whiteboard with no googling.

It's really easy to game such interviews as they require very little domain specific knowledge. If you say you know Cassandra or MVC, they'll just take your word for it... as long as you remember the classes for opening a raw file in r+w mode

This guy claims to have worked ~6 days a week for 3 months not to become a great full stack dev, but to become a great interviewee. Seems kinda backwards to me.

This comment appears in every single interview/hiring thread for past decade. Only change I've seen is actually the opposite now there are 5-10 "rounds" of these quizzes even in a no name enterprise companies.

People ask the 'quiz' stuff, successfully throw out some bad candidates who talked a good game on experience/theory, and assume its a good way to go.

The ideal middle ground is probably to offer ultra-basic code problems, ideally before an onsite. It's awkward, but it really is necessary to filter the non-programming applicants. And by not trying to be clever, you don't create an incentive to memorize Rabin-Karp and generally acquire useless interview-only skills.

Even for those still doing testing interviews, that's a good rule of thumb: if it was a paper-worthy insight originally, it's a ridiculous thing to make someone derive in an interview.

> companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles

in other words, correctly categorized

But the thought of spending thousands to attend a school and you're encouraged to hide said school from your resume looks really bad.

It's a rhetorical device. And some could argue that code is also a rhetorical device.

But the only argument an if else block that returns true or false based on a boolean makes is "I'm not very good at this"

On a similar note, another thing novice programmers do often is rewrite min and max using if-else.

And part of me thinks that a full stack dev should be able to use a soldering iron.

I haven't really applied for jobs since getting my first - just keeping communication open with recruiters generates more than I can keep up with all the time.

Finding the company: approximate amount of time spent here is 5 seconds. You have a spreadsheet, just go to the next one on the list.

Changing the cover letter: template it with variables. Should end up being a single bash command, most of the time is locating and properly formatting company name, person of contact, and filling out a couple sentences about why you're interested. 90 seconds when you're in the flow of things, tops.

Replying to emails and the like properly counts as part of the organization for the phone and technical screens.

There's time costs for when the application process includes forms that take a bunch of time to fill out. Not because you finish ~20 minute applications, though, but a certain percentage of the ones you look at you wind up having to abort due to those barriers, so you amortize the cost in there.

If you can handle really boring repetitive work, and you're not doing much else that day, you can wind up sending out a hundred applications in a day without too much fuss. For scheduling phone screens, set up a Google Calendar and/or a youcanbook.me and let the other party pick a time that works for them. Prep for phone and technical screening has little marginal cost - mostly it'll be spending a few minutes grabbing notes on business models and tech stacks so you can look good, along with jotting down notes afterwards about follow-up and ideas to improve on.

On-site basically counts as a full day.

>Also, I would have targeted applications to a lot less than 291 companies. I guess if I was trying to get my first job I'd be a lot less picky, but the 'ideal' company to work at can be few and far between.

It's a numbers game. You want to look at as many as possible, so you can pick after you have information about them. Basically, it's probably easier to filter out companies based off of actually talking to people there, rather than going down the rabbit hole of figuring out your desiderata and researching how companies fit it.

tl;dr - the actual application process looks like it could've been done over 5 weeks, given prep work was complete. One week sending out a giant pile of applications, one week doing phone screens, technical screens, coding challenges, then just over two weeks of doing on-site interviews.

Regardless, I'm glad to see that developers who go to bootcamp can get phenomenal salaries. I have a few friends going through them now.

That being said, we're currently in a time where most of the "development talent" that we have actively employed are working on little more than glorified CRUD applications. The few that are working on more specialized tasks tend to be safer from such commoditization.

they are already doing that with machine learning.

This sort of hard-won experience is how you get the high salaries, you know...

As for the company side, I have directly heard from many a company that they don't like dealing with recruiters because of the cost involved. But then, it seems it has become necessary to many job seekers because experience suggests that if you want a response from a company about a position you must go through a recruiter.

I think the most phone screens a single recruiter ever got me is two in a single week....maaaaybe three. And only one in-person interview at a time. It took a lot longer than 2-3 weeks to find the next job through them.

Also, they had many companies that were just plain old slow to schedule interviews. One in particular took two months to get around to scheduling an in-person, and I had found another job in the meantime.

I say as much when people try to pull that stuff on me now. There's a copy of TAOCP on the shelf for a reason, if I need to know a good algorithm, Mr. Knuth's are certainly better than mine.

I find it very unlikely the person interviewing you would "see the errors in his ways" and go "ok you are right, dumb question".

It is a human flaw that when we interview, we project. If we are really good at X, we want to deep dive on that topic. Perhaps it is important for the job. Perhaps we are just trying to show off to a candidate. Who knows.

I know I am a fullstack guy, but light on React. If the interview before me was a webdev and asked you a bunch of React questions, I could not add anything of value there. So I would poke around algos and linux and testing and CD and all of the other things I know about, to see where you fall. Not really to show off how leet my algos knowledge is... but I personally would rather hire a guy who knows big O, all things else equal.

I do doubt most jobs are so specialized you only need 1-2 frameworks, and nothing else. Knowing what memory is isn't a terrible thing to understand for any programming job...

I'd rather have this vs. the 'where did you go school' bias that finance strongly has.

If I were being interviewed I would have no problem taking advantage of any standard APIs I would expect to have available to me, which includes browser APIs if it were a front-end role. Why waste valuable interview time writing a sorting algorithm instead of just using .sort()?

[0]: http://www.askamanager.org/2013/06/a-job-applicant-stopped-b...

We're all "kind of" in it for the money. I have to support a full-time teacher salary for three months, administrative overhead, software/hardware licensing, curriculum development, and have enough left over to make it worthwhile to continue teaching these classes in the future. But we're all driven to fill a need that we see in the market (not enough engineers/devs available) and most of us perceive the shortcomings of traditional formal education and think we have an approach that can improve things.

As an example, I've been the lead engineer / director of engineering for the past five years and have realized that all of the junior engineers that we hire out of college generally take 2-4 months to get spun up on regular software development practices. We've got to teach them version control, team work habits, peer reviews, requirement solicitation, design document writing, etc. And all of those skills are on top of our industry-specific requirements.

I'd much rather hire someone that was passionate enough to pay for a bootcamp, wants to be an engineer, and has learned enough to start contributing fairly quickly.

And while we're going to be coaching our students on how to kick ass in interviews, we're certainly not going to advocate lying. We're going to focus on confidence, proper responses for things they don't already know about, and even get in to the "submitting your resume" process.

Don't be so cynical. Computers have only been an integral part of everyone's lives for the past 15 years or so. The entire world is trying to figure out how to train people how to be productive members of a post-labor society.

(That's a slight exaggeration to make a cynical point, but not far from the truth.)

The fallacy that "programming" is just learning tools and syntax and processes has unsurprisingly led to an expectation that, in continuing fashion, one can just run through a defined routine and get a solution.

In short, the whole thing is misunderstood, and thus the approach is all wrong.

Whether in IT or business (or life in general), opportunity is more easily gained through human interaction - networking (but substantive, not superficial).

Go to meetups on a particular language or stack or tool. Become involved in open source projects or communities that are centered around some shared interest. Get to know people, and let them see who you are. Then the jobs will come to you.

More seriously, most people are scared of changing jobs and hate the application process, to their own peril. If you could really own this whole process you'd win on every level.

It's been a while since I looked at it, but I've recommended it to people as one of the better sources of actually free content, and not just upsells, and would like to know if that's not the case anymore.

1) free healthcare

2) free education for you and your children

3) better work/life balance*

4) better overall life quality*

Sum that up and you shouldn't feel that bad after all.

*unless you live in London or other overcrowded city, but you've mentioned you live in your own house, so that's probably not the case.

Making scads of money in SF is (or can be) kind of like getting constant blood transfusions so you don't bleed out. It doesn't necessarily translate to a great quality of life.

Managing the process wasn't too hard. I simply kept a spreadsheet updated with contacts as rows, and columns with dates for every step of the process including first contact, second contact, phone interview (s), coding challenges, on-site interviews.

However, you're right when you say "once you hit the 20 applications mark, it's impossible to know to which companies you applied for." Early on in my application process, I wasn't applying to nearly enough places, because I wanted to hear back from someone before moving on to the next. A good friend of mine gave me the advice "You should be reaching out to so many people, that when you get a response, you'll need to go back to research who it was from." It's a weird mode to operate in, but once you realize that as a new-ish dev the process of getting a job is very much a funnel like the one in this post, it's a strategy that makes a lot of sense.

I would highly recommend anyone looking for a job to follow the advice in this article, it matches very closely with my experience. Especially resonant were the points about making contact with real humans, and also to push tons of companies into the pipeline.

No seriously, that's what they were using at HR when I graduated.

To your point, any small typing mistake or mouse movements shouldn't be judged. Interviewers know you will be nervous during the interview. If they are discrediting candidates over that, they shouldn't be interviewing.

That being said, tech interviewing in almost all current forms sucks and we need a better method. As has been said for years now.