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Comment by JCzynski | Hacker News Reader

>Don't get me wrong, most of the skills gap is for capable engineers, and if you understand data structures, algorithms, architecture, memory management, etc. you'll get a job very quickly. We're talking within a week.

Empirically, that's totally false. The people I knew who went to the same bootcamp (App Academy) as me and had the strongest skills took longer, not shorter, to get jobs. The average was around 9 months.

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The opposite was true for my cohort. There seems to always be at least one or two of the top students that are dead set on making as much money as possible so they take the extra time to brush up skills and projects to land interviews with and be successful at the absolute top tier companies (Google/Facebook + Unicorns).

a/A also really pushes the idea that students should leverage offers against each other. I suspect that combined with the success of Haseeb's article is that top students are now more likely to push very hard to get top dollar for their worth instead of taking ~10k less and getting to work sooner.

How deep doesn't App Academy go into stuff like data structures, algorithms, memory management, architecture, scaling, etc.? I see mention of algorithms on the site, but not much else that would lead me to believe developers understand more fundamental CS concepts.

Not very; about 10 hours is spent on that with instructors, plus more time practicing it in the form of whiteboard questions. Which means there was a wide variance from most knowledgable to least.

Ya that'll do it

As deep as you can go in 13 weeks while also covering tooling, best practices, and example projects in 2 languages.

i.e., not very deep.

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