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Comment by teaearlgraycold | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had a number of people approach me, at work and elsewhere, asking how they too can get one of those programming jobs. I always mention the timeline I was on, having started learning as a kid, making it a major hobby, getting a CS degree, internships, etc. and people are surprised and disappointed there’s no quick path.

Or is there? Has anyone here done one of those 0 to 1 bootcamps with success?

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I've been programming professionally for 8 years now and came out of a bootcamp. I had taken some programming courses in high school and college for fun but my knowledge was very limited.

The bootcamp stayed true to the name. Core hours were 9-5 but many of us would get in early (usually 7am) and leave late (sometimes 10pm). I would also go in on weekends, sometimes taking Sunday off. I intentionally went to one in a different city so I wouldn't by distracted by a social life.

The focus was in ruby, then javascript. I got a job as an intern in C#/.NET a few months after graduating. I took the intern position because it seemed a tough sell to get a junior dev position right away. I was promoted to junior dev after just 2 weeks.

The school is no longer around, bought by kaplan and dissolved.

Did your peers in the bootcamp have a similar experience?

It differed quite a bit. There were a handful that put in the same effort as I did and the few I've kept contact with are doing quite well. I'd say that just over half of the students stuck to core hours and most of them didn't make it through the bootcamp at all. I recall that many of those that stuck to core hours and graduated had some programming knowledge already or were exceptionally smart.

About a quarter of those that graduated in my cohort are in the IT field, but are project managers or something similar.

The bootcamp was in 3 phases and you had 2 chances to test out of a phase or you'd be kicked out. Of my starting cohort of 16 people, 12 of us completed the bootcamp. Our cohort grew to 22 people though because there were people that had repeated phases to complete it.

The only people I've seen do the bootcamps with success were already very smart and/or coming from technical or heavy math backgrounds.

Glad to see at least another perspective more or less echo my experiences/observations. You can't discount motivation, and bootcamps are filled with either those chomping to learn and explore, or those looking for the next goldrush. Adding to the challenge of differentiating is sometimes they are the same person.

If you're skilled/smart/whatever you're gonna be fine, usually, so let's discount those and set them aside.

There's definitely a cohort of "moderately capable at plugging away" type developer that can successfully come out of a bootcamp, and it's usually something like this path:

bootcamp - headhunter agency that needs bodies - develop familiarity/skill with the toolset - hired directly via some other company.

Less "startup valley next great thing" and more "updating the Java application for a change in the tax code this year" style corporate programming (which is the vast majority of all programming).

I mean I think I'm sorta smart but nah I have a 0 to bootcamp success story and I studied languages at uni and didn't even pass A-level maths in high school. I did a 3 month bootcamp. I was determined to end it with a job so I studied 12 hours a day 6 days a week. By the end I couldn't walk down the road without being out of breath but I had a job. My first year of employment was terrible. I was bad at everything and my employer had agreed to take bootcampers without any preperation of how to deal with that so just kept keeping me away from tickets, stunting my growth. After I wasn't renewed I spent a further 2 months doing intense studying and portfolio building and applied for my current job. They've supported me a bit and now 8 months in I'm a pretty competent junior I'd say. I feel like this is the level I should've been at at my first job but as long as you're willing to work at shitty companies for a bit you can just go from bootcamp to employed immediately and then work up to being good from there.

Edit: Whether I'm really worth the investment to these companies is another thing. I tend to think I'm not because I do sorta suck. But in terms of whether it's possible to go that path, be constantly employed and improve in time, yes it definitely is possible.

Aren't most successful engineers already very smart when they start out? Being very smart seems to be a prerequisite for all successful engineers.

I dropped out of CS after a 3 months, had never programmed before. I sat in my mom's basement for 8 months and taught myself the basics of JS and was able to get a job.

Since then, I've spent a metric fuck-ton of time programming (tens of thousands of hours to date). I've worked on compilers, 3D graphics, semiconductors and game engines.

I guess my experience kind of supports both sides of the coin. I was relatively easily able to get into industry with little experience (circa ~2012), although since then I've put in a ton of work to become a good engineer that people with interesting projects want to hire. Take that as you will :)

Haven't done one, but have hired out of them. Limited data conclusion: just like traditionally trained developers it's hit or miss. Best results: some other "classic training" (like physics or chemistry or engineering) with a desired career change == advanced junior with an accelerated learning curve. If you want to add motivated newbies to the parts of your software where pure programming is not as critical they can be great hires; the standard deviation is huge, but not sure if it's any larger than say a 2-yr diploma grad.

Did a 2-year, there's people that graduated there that to this day can't answer FizzBuzz, in that same group, there was a marine biologist that was looking for a change, I'm saddened that the former will probably be what people think when they see our diploma

If it makes you feel better, past one job or so out of whatever training/college, nobody actually cares, except perhaps the HR automatic resume sorter.

I did a grad scheme where a consultancy trained me for 3 months and then worked for them under contract for 2 years. I studied humanities at university and had never coded before.

The first 2 years were very hard and it felt like swimming upstream the entire time as I didn't have that basis. It was only at the end of the 2 year programme that I actually felt like I could provide value independently.

A lot of my knowledge is very applied and I've noticed that I lack the CS fundamentals which sometimes makes it a bit harder as I'm having to learn 'basics' as I go.

In fairness my role is a Data Engineer now so it's a lot lighter on the more traditional CS areas like Data Structure and Algorithms.

i feel like we did the same scheme lol

I think one of the beauties of programming is that you can be self taught. It doesn't necessarily help on a corporate ladder though, who maybe expect some certificates.

Not sure If you'd count it as a bootcamp but I did something similar.

I taught myself to program Basic aged 11, using the manual that came with the early 80s Dragon 32 home computer (a whole 32k of ram). Wrote some simple games, worked out you couldn't really do anything cool without knowing assembly language, completely failed to learn assembly language, as it was too hard for this 12 year old on his own, armed only with a copy of https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/6809%2...

By the time I was 13 I'd given up programming and basically barely touched a computer for the next 15 years, did a History degree, bummed around as a musician for a few years and then, courtesy of the UK dole office, did a 3 month, 5 day a week, 9-5 course in Visual Basic, followed by a 3 month work placement. The company I worked for employed me when the placement came to an end and I've been working as a programmer for the last 25 years - although the last Visual Basic I did was about 24 years ago...

I think I was lucky that I hit the London job market as the first dotcom boom was starting, it seemed to be pretty easy to get a job back then and no one seemed that bothered if you had a CS degree or not. (I still don't have one)

I have done some academic CS courses (via Coursera) and did learn some interesting and useful stuff - but I think the most important thing to have if you want to be a good programmer is to have a self-directed mindset, you have to want go and figure stuff out and be able to learn on your own, using what ever resources you have to hand.

One of the things I like most about programming/software engineering is the fact that there is always more than one way to solve the problem, always scope for improvement and inovation

> Has anyone here done one of those 0 to 1 bootcamps with success?

My tech lead did this.

You tell people who honestly want to get into professional programming that you have done this your whole life with the implication that this is the way? That anything less is “bootcamp” delusion? No wonder they get deflated. Of course they can’t go back in freaking time to when they were kids and get subliminal Programming Pearls from their wet nurse.

And it’s also just wrong. People get into professional programming with... less experience than that. You might have never met anyone in your particular bubble but they do exist.

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