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I've interviewed a few candidates in a similar situation to your partner. My impression is that the bootcamps had very little to do with their success. I would

by tjpnz 5y ago

I've interviewed a few candidates in a similar situation to your partner. My impression is that the bootcamps had very little to do with their success. I would put it more down to personal drive and possibly the programming STEM grads tend to get exposed to.

ctvo 5y ago
Right, I agree. I think that's the problem. Misattributing initial successes to the program, and not the people you filtered in, meant it became progressively harder to achieve the same placement rates year over year. I imagine the above coupled with investor pressure and your own hype / marketing makes for a situation like Lambda School.
cactus2093 5y ago
It's interesting that you call this having "very little to do with" the success. It's a philosophical argument, I guess. If there's boulder at the top of a hill and I give it a little nudge so it rolls all the way to the bottom - did I have very little to do with the boulder rolling down, since gravity did most of the work? Or did I play the most important role? Even if it's true that selection bias is huge and the best qualified people going into a bootcamp are the best performers coming out, that doesn't necessarily mean the bootcamp wasn't useful. These people could have otherwise gone their whole lives always being one small nudge away from becoming a great programmer, but would have never realized it without the right conditions. If a bootcamp simply creates those conditions for them to make it happen for themselves, that still seems important.
ummonk 5y ago
Would they have been given an interview without going through the bootcamp?
- tjpnz 5y ago
  This was for an intern program we run for individuals with non-traditional backgrounds (self taught, degrees in non-CS subjects etc), so I don't imagine it having much impact. We were looking primarily at the coding test and the candidate's Github profile.

by tjpnz 5y ago

ctvo 5y ago

Right, I agree. I think that's the problem. Misattributing initial successes to the program, and not the people you filtered in, meant it became progressively harder to achieve the same placement rates year over year. I imagine the above coupled with investor pressure and your own hype / marketing makes for a situation like Lambda School.

cactus2093 5y ago

It's interesting that you call this having "very little to do with" the success. It's a philosophical argument, I guess. If there's boulder at the top of a hill and I give it a little nudge so it rolls all the way to the bottom - did I have very little to do with the boulder rolling down, since gravity did most of the work? Or did I play the most important role? Even if it's true that selection bias is huge and the best qualified people going into a bootcamp are the best performers coming out, that doesn't necessarily mean the bootcamp wasn't useful. These people could have otherwise gone their whole lives always being one small nudge away from becoming a great programmer, but would have never realized it without the right conditions. If a bootcamp simply creates those conditions for them to make it happen for themselves, that still seems important.

ummonk 5y ago

Would they have been given an interview without going through the bootcamp?

tjpnz 5y ago
This was for an intern program we run for individuals with non-traditional backgrounds (self taught, degrees in non-CS subjects etc), so I don't imagine it having much impact. We were looking primarily at the coding test and the candidate's Github profile.