4 ms·

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 oversta

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.
  - metadat 5y ago
    "Just pick the cream off the top, even though you're supposed to be their instructor." Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.
    - aunty_helen 5y ago
      Sorry, can you explain the conflict here and who or what it's conflicting with? I don't think you've thought this out or thought about it from the point of view of the students.
      - 29083011397778 5y ago
        Your recommendation was to teach a bootcamp to find applicants. This, in my mind, reads like a combined internship / interview that the applicant pays the potential employer to partake in.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        aunty_helen 5y ago
        OK, that's not what I intended. Teaching a bootcamp is pretty full on commitment so using it solely as a hiring funnel would see you ousted via feedback scores pretty quickly if you weren't delivering on the learning aspect. The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing. The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written. The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.
- carlmr 5y ago
  >You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Not a bootcamper but I think this isn't true. If you put in the effort and you're moderately intelligent you can speedrun pretty much any career in terms of knowledge. However I do think there's a negative selection bias in the people that end up doing the bootcamps. They're not the self taught people that can teach themselves x in a few weeks. These people don't go to bootcamps, because they already taught themselves x and don't see the purpose in doing a bootcamp for a lot of money that teaches them x and doesn't give them a useful certificate. The main benefit I see in the classical university track is that you gain more breadth of knowledge. And while you may not need most of it, it often helps in problem solving to know that some things "exist". Just so you can Google the details when you're faced with a similar problem. The other benefit is of course the signaling value. Bootcamps don't have much of it.
  - sirsinsalot 5y ago
    > In terms of knowledge Perhaps, but efficacy is knowledge combined with experience. Experience requires time, diverse challenges, mistakes and so on. Many bootcampers (and low-level developers generally) seem to think you can jump ahead to being senior/lead without actually gaining the experience, making the mistakes and learning the lessons first-hand. Sadly, there's plenty of crap low-level companies that will hire them too.
    - carlmr 5y ago
      Oh, ok, I thought you were talking about the knowledge part, because most university students come without useful experience, too. But no, obviously nobody should be in a lead position directly after college or bootcamp, except maybe if they had a lot of experience prior and this was only some qualification "on top".

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.
- metadat 5y ago
  "Just pick the cream off the top, even though you're supposed to be their instructor." Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    Sorry, can you explain the conflict here and who or what it's conflicting with? I don't think you've thought this out or thought about it from the point of view of the students.
    - 29083011397778 5y ago
      Your recommendation was to teach a bootcamp to find applicants. This, in my mind, reads like a combined internship / interview that the applicant pays the potential employer to partake in.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - aunty_helen 5y ago
        OK, that's not what I intended. Teaching a bootcamp is pretty full on commitment so using it solely as a hiring funnel would see you ousted via feedback scores pretty quickly if you weren't delivering on the learning aspect. The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing. The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written. The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.
carlmr 5y ago
>You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Not a bootcamper but I think this isn't true. If you put in the effort and you're moderately intelligent you can speedrun pretty much any career in terms of knowledge. However I do think there's a negative selection bias in the people that end up doing the bootcamps. They're not the self taught people that can teach themselves x in a few weeks. These people don't go to bootcamps, because they already taught themselves x and don't see the purpose in doing a bootcamp for a lot of money that teaches them x and doesn't give them a useful certificate. The main benefit I see in the classical university track is that you gain more breadth of knowledge. And while you may not need most of it, it often helps in problem solving to know that some things "exist". Just so you can Google the details when you're faced with a similar problem. The other benefit is of course the signaling value. Bootcamps don't have much of it.
- sirsinsalot 5y ago
  > In terms of knowledge Perhaps, but efficacy is knowledge combined with experience. Experience requires time, diverse challenges, mistakes and so on. Many bootcampers (and low-level developers generally) seem to think you can jump ahead to being senior/lead without actually gaining the experience, making the mistakes and learning the lessons first-hand. Sadly, there's plenty of crap low-level companies that will hire them too.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    Oh, ok, I thought you were talking about the knowledge part, because most university students come without useful experience, too. But no, obviously nobody should be in a lead position directly after college or bootcamp, except maybe if they had a lot of experience prior and this was only some qualification "on top".