Comment by kevc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevc | Hacker News Reader

I know the author would chalk my experience up to 'survivorship bias', but my bootcamp experience was life-changing and 100% positive. I don't know if the quality of bootcamps have gone down, but I did one ~5 years ago, and was very impressed by the talent of my classmates and felt lucky to be with them.

Backgrounds were extremely diverse, from Ivy-league graduate math majors to a former horse trainer. The graduation rate was around 85%, and among the graduates, the 'true' job placement rate was probably around 90%. I was able to hit the ground running in my first software engineering job at a well funded startup, and was on par with other fresh cs degree graduates. Over the next few years I was the first among that class to be given a team leadership role.

Looking at LinkedIn, the other graduates from my bootcamp seem to be having their own successes at FAANG jobs and other strong positions. While I believe my experience was somewhat typical for my bootcamp cohort, (like college) I think quality can vary greatly based on the bootcamp, and I am sure some are bad deals in the ways Zed has outlined.

edit: For those who are wondering if the successful bootcamp grads would have been successful anyways without the bootcamp - 100% no way for me. I had already been self-studying programming before the bootcamp and it was a night and day difference. It would have taken years of self study to learn what I did, and with a good chance that life would have derailed me along the way.

5 years is a long time in tech, software and bootcamps, i imagine much has changed since your bootcamp experience.

I did one 5 years ago as well and while I don't regret it, I don't think it was quite as life-changing for me and whether I'd recommend one, the answer is 'it depends'.

For me it really just accelerated my learning - forced me to quit my job and study full-time. 12k for a two month program at the time, it took me about 9 months to find a job afterwards.

Admittedly I had a couple of interviews early on but performed pretty poorly on them - was not well-prepared but they helped me learn and prepare for the job I eventually landed.

I think about 90% of my class graduated and sadly only 50% or so have found careers as engineers or in tech - Ruby/Rails just wasn't a great choice of stack for the area imo (at least vs js, c#/.net or java - which the bootcamp now offers)

Fast forward to today and I'm a tech lead at a "unicorn" and feel very capable in my skills and ability to continue learning - always be coding :)

The most obvious way to unify your experience with the details in the original thread is that they have gone down in quality over the past 5 years. Given the massive number of new bootcamps that have launched (and shut down) it seems natural that not all of them would be up to the quality standard you enjoyed at the time.

That would suggest that choosing a bootcamp that was around 5 years ago would be a far better choice than one started more recently.

Alternatively you could look at quality directly instead of using a proxy. At least use a better proxy, like length of program.

And when do you look at quality directly (from the outside, as an applicant), given the way some programs misleadingly report their placement numbers?

You look at audited placement numbers, consistently measured across multiple boot camps.

https://cirr.org/

> CIRR standards are transparent. We've fixed the problem of schools manipulating or hiding their outcome data, by requiring that for CIRR members, the outcomes of every enrolled student must be reported in a single, simple, clear report. How many graduated on time? How many accepted a full-time job in the field for which they trained within six months? How many secured part-time jobs? Did the school itself hire any graduates? How many students jobs are in fields outside of what they studied for? What are the salaries of grads who started jobs in their field of study? In addition, schools must annually have their numbers – and the records they keep to prove them – verified by an independent auditor.

Seems reasonable, although that would limit you to just the handful of programs that report to CIRR. What about the rest of them?

Or that the demand has changed, perhaps in accord with macroeconomic factors related to debt. Consider the ipo’s last year.

Mind if I ask what bootcamp you went to? I went to Dev Bootcamp back in 2013 and it was a blast and a life-changing experience for me. I've not doubt that there are very scammy bootcamps out there, but the one I went to was an example of how a bootcamp can really work for people.

I didn't go through a bootcamp but I know plenty of folks who have, and in my experience the overall average quality of bootcamps did seem to be significantly higher several years ago.

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