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I'm a hiring manager and coder. This last 12 months alone, i've interviewed 100+ engineers. Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's pe

I'm a hiring manager and coder. This last 12 months alone, i've interviewed 100+ engineers. Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's perverse incentives: - Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an engineers learning curve looks like. This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find the above to be true. They're not students, they're customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale. I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.

goldcd 5y ago
Exploitative education has been around for decades - I'm just bemused how it manages to survive in IT. And I do blame 'IT' for not snuffing it out. With a computer and an internet connection, there's more education available for free than any one person could ever need. I'm non-technical, but can't see why anybody couldn't take the skills and say contribute to a open source project to build a CV that could be taken seriously, for no expenditure.
- sirsinsalot 5y ago
  It is insecurity. Some people aren't that self directing and can't navigate the quantity of information with confidence. These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence. Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.
roguecoder 5y ago
I find it varies a lot by bootcamp. It seems like the ones coming out of the Ruby community frequently have better pedagogy & more realistic expectations than the ones teaching React & pretending that's all there is to software engineering. React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.
- Joof 5y ago
  If you're hiring, I know an enthusiastic boot camp grad that loves ruby and can't stand react. My company has a react team somewhere, but not ruby...
JJMcJ 5y ago
If the typical ads on YouTube for bootcamps are any indication, I can believe the self worth issue. The clear implication is that you finish the bootcamp and you will be on top of the world.
aunty_helen 5y ago
As a former bootcamp tutor, senior dev, startup founder and now employer of a former student, the inflated sense of self worth is there but I think it's overstated or overemphasised. I would say ~30% of my students had some form of higher than realistic expectations of where they would when they finished the course. I made a point of beating that out of them. But there were very few, maybe only 5% people that really fit your description. But I can remember them very clearly whereas the middle std dev of students I wouldn't recall much of them.
- sirsinsalot 5y ago
  I don't think it is selection bias. I keep notes on every interview I conduct, and went back reviewing the bootcamper grads recently. I would say close to 60% were unsuitable for even junior positions. Their arrogance made them dangerous, and they knew just enough to cause problems. You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Sadly, the people who end up losing out are the people coming out of the other end. It is also a sad fact, that often, regardless of bootcamper incompetence, you can find a more incompetent manager willing to hire that person and validate their skewed world view. As you can tell, i'm tired of it. At least uni grads from CS courses know enough to know they know very little.
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    We all know the tech hiring process is broken and bad at picking performant individuals. In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits. In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded. Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two). I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.
gamblor956 5y ago
That describes someone I know down to a T. Bootcamp graduate, can barely code, but claims he's aced every interview and blames the graphic designers and business suits when he doesn't get an offer. He also expects to be paid like a senior with only 2 years of experience. He has been fired from every coding job he's had, due to difficulties working with others. In a nutshell, he's convinced that he knows more than everyone else. (For example, he once spent 3 hours arguing with a guy who builds rocket systems at JPL about which of them knows more about rockets.) Him and others like him have soured a lot of LA tech companies on hiring boot camp graduates.
- LilBytes 5y ago
  Sounds absolutely insufferable. How do people continue to get by with such little insight.

goldcd 5y ago

Exploitative education has been around for decades - I'm just bemused how it manages to survive in IT. And I do blame 'IT' for not snuffing it out. With a computer and an internet connection, there's more education available for free than any one person could ever need. I'm non-technical, but can't see why anybody couldn't take the skills and say contribute to a open source project to build a CV that could be taken seriously, for no expenditure.

sirsinsalot 5y ago
It is insecurity. Some people aren't that self directing and can't navigate the quantity of information with confidence. These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence. Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.

roguecoder 5y ago

I find it varies a lot by bootcamp. It seems like the ones coming out of the Ruby community frequently have better pedagogy & more realistic expectations than the ones teaching React & pretending that's all there is to software engineering. React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.

Joof 5y ago
If you're hiring, I know an enthusiastic boot camp grad that loves ruby and can't stand react. My company has a react team somewhere, but not ruby...

JJMcJ 5y ago

If the typical ads on YouTube for bootcamps are any indication, I can believe the self worth issue. The clear implication is that you finish the bootcamp and you will be on top of the world.

aunty_helen 5y ago

As a former bootcamp tutor, senior dev, startup founder and now employer of a former student, the inflated sense of self worth is there but I think it's overstated or overemphasised. I would say ~30% of my students had some form of higher than realistic expectations of where they would when they finished the course. I made a point of beating that out of them. But there were very few, maybe only 5% people that really fit your description. But I can remember them very clearly whereas the middle std dev of students I wouldn't recall much of them.

sirsinsalot 5y ago
I don't think it is selection bias. I keep notes on every interview I conduct, and went back reviewing the bootcamper grads recently. I would say close to 60% were unsuitable for even junior positions. Their arrogance made them dangerous, and they knew just enough to cause problems. You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Sadly, the people who end up losing out are the people coming out of the other end. It is also a sad fact, that often, regardless of bootcamper incompetence, you can find a more incompetent manager willing to hire that person and validate their skewed world view. As you can tell, i'm tired of it. At least uni grads from CS courses know enough to know they know very little.
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  We all know the tech hiring process is broken and bad at picking performant individuals. In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits. In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded. Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two). I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.

gamblor956 5y ago

That describes someone I know down to a T. Bootcamp graduate, can barely code, but claims he's aced every interview and blames the graphic designers and business suits when he doesn't get an offer. He also expects to be paid like a senior with only 2 years of experience. He has been fired from every coding job he's had, due to difficulties working with others. In a nutshell, he's convinced that he knows more than everyone else. (For example, he once spent 3 hours arguing with a guy who builds rocket systems at JPL about which of them knows more about rockets.) Him and others like him have soured a lot of LA tech companies on hiring boot camp graduates.

LilBytes 5y ago
Sounds absolutely insufferable. How do people continue to get by with such little insight.