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> But the main advantage of the bootcamp to me was not technical, it was the network. Apart from providing a friend group which will likely end up in referrals

> But the main advantage of the bootcamp to me was not technical, it was the network. Apart from providing a friend group which will likely end up in referrals down the road, the best bootcamps will introduce you to companies and have relationships with them. I’d love to understand this in detail. When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community. I’m convinced there’s massive upside in bringing in more talent - people who learn in their own time or through boot camps. Unfortunately, senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage.

leesec 4y ago
>I’d love to understand this in detail. Whatcha want to know? >When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community. I think because average candidate quality of bootcamp grad probably pretty low, due to shortness of the program and people thinking all they need to do is complete the bootcamp, when really you need to stay learning for years. Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Well, the thing is, if you ever do student interviews you'll realize many people in CS programs appear not to be getting that much from the classes either.
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    That's a problem with the students, not the CS program. "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      Maybe so, but if the argument against entertaining hiring boot camp grads is "many of them aren't good," then one must consider that the argument applies equally well to the other place most people try to source junior devs.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - ByteJockey 4y ago
      I think the implied problem is that the CS programs are passing these people. Someone signing up for a class and not learning anything is a problem. Someone passing a class and not learning anything is a big problem for the signaling power of that degree.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    My CS minor program didn't cover GIT.
    - skeeter2020 4y ago
      A CS course might cover the architecture of git, or the technical underpinnings but probably shouldn't teach you how to do the basics. In my program this sort of skill was expected to be learned on your own, or maybe a single optional tutorial session with the TA
      - the-smug-one 4y ago
        My uni has an on-prem installation of Github and this is where you upload and collaborate on your solutions. This isn't course specific, this is just what you do.
    - garren 4y ago
      It’s odd to me that you’d expect them to. The CS program I was in used github for collaboration on a couple projects, but nothing really covering git tooling. All my classmates were either already familiar with it, or more than capable of figuring it out with a search or two. I’m guessing your program covered material that required a little more effort than a google search to build basic competency in?
      - emteycz 4y ago
        How do you expect people to collaborate if they can't git? Git is not that easy to grok, not even for Ph.d. students who successfuly completed some very complex scientific research (I am trying to teach Git a few of them so it's very visible to me). Making it the only way to send in homework motivates people to learn the absolute basics (I haven't seen anyone learn branching like this), but also pisses them off and a lot of times they don't want to use Git at all after that experience.
        formerkrogemp 4y ago
- naomiajacobs 4y ago
  > Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch. I attended a bootcamp in 2015 and know two people, one in my cohort, and one in the next, who both got jobs at Amazon right out of the bootcamp. At the time, cohorts were every 6 weeks with 80 people/cohort, so that's ~1 out of 80 bootcamp grads who made it into Amazon (granted, with a small sample size), with more in FAANG generally (Google was more open to bootcamp grads than the others).
c3534l 4y ago
Pretty much every company I've worked with not just doesn't care about bootcamps, but actively avoids them. They prefer self-taught over scammed-into-crash-course. In particular, they don't trust that any github projects were completed independently.
- sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
  It's so weird to be reviewing resumes for a entry-level position and you see 3-4 with the same exact project.. I do look though their github and mentioned projects pretty deeply too to find any standouts which they have been once or twice but it's rare
  - leesec 4y ago
    Seems like it'd be pretty easy to ask them about the project and at least if they understand it/have thoughts on why they did what they did? But yeah seems like anyone could just copy a repo and post it as their own. Hmmm.
  - site-packages1 4y ago
    I have walked through github code that a candidate has posted on their resume, asking about choices made as we went, potential improvements, etc. and usually the answers were some version of "the instructor said we should do it that way."
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I’ve done the same and interviewed people whose resume said “interviewed customer to solicit project requirements; implemented them on-time and to-spec; iterated to improve based on customer feedback” only to have the candidate reveal that these were entirely mocks and made up customers and requirements. That, coupled with the horrific performance of the first two classes of grads from the program had us strike that program from our sourcing.
- akhmatova 4y ago
  In particular, they don't trust that any github projects were completed independently. Fortunately it's very easy to suss this out by asking a focused question or two about the code.
legerdemain 4y ago
Pretty similar experience at Palantir. The CEO would get up on stage every quarterly on-hands and say, almost verbatim, "Where are the people from the bad schools? The best candidates are at the bad schools!" We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters." To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Do you only hire from CS programs? I’ve worked with a wide variety of developers, probably only 50% of which had CS degrees, and they weren’t any better than anyone else.
  - criddell 4y ago
    The best software developer I’ve ever worked with was a graduate from an architecture program. A close second was a guy who was a middle school teacher before turning to software. I’ve also worked with some really excellent CS people. A lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci. I still look for developers from computer science programs mostly because that’s an easy place to find people who really love creating software and systems.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      > lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci. Indeed, I studied Maths & Philosophy and I always tell people that the Philosophy was a lot more useful to my career as a software developer than the Maths. (Analytic) Philosophy involves a lot of probing people's assumptions until you get to a clear idea of what they truly believe. Which is rather similar to the process of teasing clear requirements out of stakeholders.
ren_engineer 4y ago
bootcamp people should be brought on as interns or some special level, most have only a few months experience. New grads have minimal expectations on them despite in theory having at least 4 years of coding/CS experience, some of them with even more if they took classes during high school.
- baron816 4y ago
  I tried to get my previous company to start an apprenticeship program. The CEO agreed that it was a good idea, but kept pushing it for well over a year. I left, and it’s doubtful that it’ll ever happen. But I still think it’s a great idea for companies to try it. There are a ton of benefits. But I think the best one is that you get a much longer view of how someone could perform than you’d get with a traditional interview cycle. And interview judges someone at a single point in time. An apprenticeship would be able to determine their trajectory.
bspear 4y ago
> Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job Think this statement explains the fast success of the writer. The drive to experiment and find solutions is so valuable, and surprisingly in short supply. As a hiring manager, one of the big hesitations I have re: bootcamp grads is whether they need to be spoon-fed, or have the hunger to move things forward. Especially true for startups that tend to bet more on potential vs. raw experience. For anyone in this boat, https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/ is a good place to start
- john-radio 4y ago
  Thanks for the link. I've been working in old and/or biggish tech for my 4 years so far, and only recently joined a startup and something about it just deeply works for me. The newness and smallness of it all makes me feel paranoid that if I don't do it, it won't get done, so I've been moving fast and making shit happen instead of what I had been doing, which is relaxing into the good work situation and not learning as much as I could.
throwaway_1928 4y ago
> senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage. Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.
- ozzythecat 4y ago
  I’m charactering it that way, although it’s less blatant. Ask any amazon director and they’ll go in and on about hiring being next to impossible in the US. Entire legions of Amazon are either entirely in India or H1B or OPT Indian nationals. It’s no secret their visa situation keeps their hands tied.
  - truncate 4y ago
    I'm not sure if "visa situation keeps their hands tied" is correct. Its certainly more paperwork sure, but given the current job market its quite easy to switch jobs on H1B or even OPT.
  - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
    Its not about the visa power imbalance, its that a person who graduates a bootcamp today will need about 4 - 5 years of highly focused coding to become as productive as the Indian L4/L5 engineer that they would be compared to in this real comparison. It's easy to hire inexperienced devs in the US, but inexperienced devs are not productive.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      I get what you're saying but if you're comparing fresh grads I think that comparison is far too unfavorable. If you mean someone who already has years of experience, sure, but that's not just because of the boot camp.
      - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
        The huge majority of H1Bs are given to L4+ (aka non entry level) engineers. These directors/VPs have headcount to fill and would prefer a productive L4 to a "needs a lot of training" L3 every day of the week. IMO the real issue here is that there is no rational incentive for any company to take on an L3 engineer now, regardless of H1B or bootcamp status. An L3 is going to join your company, receive 18 months of training where they are genuinely not worth what you are paying them AND they are a drag on your org, then leave in months 20-28 of their employment, usually shortly after a promotion to L4. So you put in 18 months and if you're lucky you get back 2 to 10 months of productivity.
emodendroket 4y ago
I used to work at a smaller company and they had a relationship with a local boot camp where they would take in a number of their grads in roles that were somewhere between support engineer and software engineer. You have to keep in mind that Amazon challenges with hiring are quite different than those faced by a smaller company. Sometimes it's hard just having enough people in the funnel.

leesec 4y ago

>I’d love to understand this in detail. Whatcha want to know? >When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community. I think because average candidate quality of bootcamp grad probably pretty low, due to shortness of the program and people thinking all they need to do is complete the bootcamp, when really you need to stay learning for years. Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.

emodendroket 4y ago
Well, the thing is, if you ever do student interviews you'll realize many people in CS programs appear not to be getting that much from the classes either.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  That's a problem with the students, not the CS program. "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    Maybe so, but if the argument against entertaining hiring boot camp grads is "many of them aren't good," then one must consider that the argument applies equally well to the other place most people try to source junior devs.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ByteJockey 4y ago
    I think the implied problem is that the CS programs are passing these people. Someone signing up for a class and not learning anything is a problem. Someone passing a class and not learning anything is a big problem for the signaling power of that degree.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  My CS minor program didn't cover GIT.
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    A CS course might cover the architecture of git, or the technical underpinnings but probably shouldn't teach you how to do the basics. In my program this sort of skill was expected to be learned on your own, or maybe a single optional tutorial session with the TA
    - the-smug-one 4y ago
      My uni has an on-prem installation of Github and this is where you upload and collaborate on your solutions. This isn't course specific, this is just what you do.
  - garren 4y ago
    It’s odd to me that you’d expect them to. The CS program I was in used github for collaboration on a couple projects, but nothing really covering git tooling. All my classmates were either already familiar with it, or more than capable of figuring it out with a search or two. I’m guessing your program covered material that required a little more effort than a google search to build basic competency in?
    - emteycz 4y ago
      How do you expect people to collaborate if they can't git? Git is not that easy to grok, not even for Ph.d. students who successfuly completed some very complex scientific research (I am trying to teach Git a few of them so it's very visible to me). Making it the only way to send in homework motivates people to learn the absolute basics (I haven't seen anyone learn branching like this), but also pisses them off and a lot of times they don't want to use Git at all after that experience.
      - formerkrogemp 4y ago
naomiajacobs 4y ago
> Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch. I attended a bootcamp in 2015 and know two people, one in my cohort, and one in the next, who both got jobs at Amazon right out of the bootcamp. At the time, cohorts were every 6 weeks with 80 people/cohort, so that's ~1 out of 80 bootcamp grads who made it into Amazon (granted, with a small sample size), with more in FAANG generally (Google was more open to bootcamp grads than the others).

c3534l 4y ago

Pretty much every company I've worked with not just doesn't care about bootcamps, but actively avoids them. They prefer self-taught over scammed-into-crash-course. In particular, they don't trust that any github projects were completed independently.

sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
It's so weird to be reviewing resumes for a entry-level position and you see 3-4 with the same exact project.. I do look though their github and mentioned projects pretty deeply too to find any standouts which they have been once or twice but it's rare
- leesec 4y ago
  Seems like it'd be pretty easy to ask them about the project and at least if they understand it/have thoughts on why they did what they did? But yeah seems like anyone could just copy a repo and post it as their own. Hmmm.
- site-packages1 4y ago
  I have walked through github code that a candidate has posted on their resume, asking about choices made as we went, potential improvements, etc. and usually the answers were some version of "the instructor said we should do it that way."
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I’ve done the same and interviewed people whose resume said “interviewed customer to solicit project requirements; implemented them on-time and to-spec; iterated to improve based on customer feedback” only to have the candidate reveal that these were entirely mocks and made up customers and requirements. That, coupled with the horrific performance of the first two classes of grads from the program had us strike that program from our sourcing.
akhmatova 4y ago
In particular, they don't trust that any github projects were completed independently. Fortunately it's very easy to suss this out by asking a focused question or two about the code.

legerdemain 4y ago

Pretty similar experience at Palantir. The CEO would get up on stage every quarterly on-hands and say, almost verbatim, "Where are the people from the bad schools? The best candidates are at the bad schools!" We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters." To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.

nicoburns 4y ago
Do you only hire from CS programs? I’ve worked with a wide variety of developers, probably only 50% of which had CS degrees, and they weren’t any better than anyone else.
- criddell 4y ago
  The best software developer I’ve ever worked with was a graduate from an architecture program. A close second was a guy who was a middle school teacher before turning to software. I’ve also worked with some really excellent CS people. A lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci. I still look for developers from computer science programs mostly because that’s an easy place to find people who really love creating software and systems.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci. Indeed, I studied Maths & Philosophy and I always tell people that the Philosophy was a lot more useful to my career as a software developer than the Maths. (Analytic) Philosophy involves a lot of probing people's assumptions until you get to a clear idea of what they truly believe. Which is rather similar to the process of teasing clear requirements out of stakeholders.

ren_engineer 4y ago

bootcamp people should be brought on as interns or some special level, most have only a few months experience. New grads have minimal expectations on them despite in theory having at least 4 years of coding/CS experience, some of them with even more if they took classes during high school.

baron816 4y ago
I tried to get my previous company to start an apprenticeship program. The CEO agreed that it was a good idea, but kept pushing it for well over a year. I left, and it’s doubtful that it’ll ever happen. But I still think it’s a great idea for companies to try it. There are a ton of benefits. But I think the best one is that you get a much longer view of how someone could perform than you’d get with a traditional interview cycle. And interview judges someone at a single point in time. An apprenticeship would be able to determine their trajectory.

bspear 4y ago

> Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job Think this statement explains the fast success of the writer. The drive to experiment and find solutions is so valuable, and surprisingly in short supply. As a hiring manager, one of the big hesitations I have re: bootcamp grads is whether they need to be spoon-fed, or have the hunger to move things forward. Especially true for startups that tend to bet more on potential vs. raw experience. For anyone in this boat, https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/ is a good place to start

john-radio 4y ago
Thanks for the link. I've been working in old and/or biggish tech for my 4 years so far, and only recently joined a startup and something about it just deeply works for me. The newness and smallness of it all makes me feel paranoid that if I don't do it, it won't get done, so I've been moving fast and making shit happen instead of what I had been doing, which is relaxing into the good work situation and not learning as much as I could.

throwaway_1928 4y ago

> senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage. Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.

ozzythecat 4y ago
I’m charactering it that way, although it’s less blatant. Ask any amazon director and they’ll go in and on about hiring being next to impossible in the US. Entire legions of Amazon are either entirely in India or H1B or OPT Indian nationals. It’s no secret their visa situation keeps their hands tied.
- truncate 4y ago
  I'm not sure if "visa situation keeps their hands tied" is correct. Its certainly more paperwork sure, but given the current job market its quite easy to switch jobs on H1B or even OPT.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  Its not about the visa power imbalance, its that a person who graduates a bootcamp today will need about 4 - 5 years of highly focused coding to become as productive as the Indian L4/L5 engineer that they would be compared to in this real comparison. It's easy to hire inexperienced devs in the US, but inexperienced devs are not productive.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I get what you're saying but if you're comparing fresh grads I think that comparison is far too unfavorable. If you mean someone who already has years of experience, sure, but that's not just because of the boot camp.
    - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
      The huge majority of H1Bs are given to L4+ (aka non entry level) engineers. These directors/VPs have headcount to fill and would prefer a productive L4 to a "needs a lot of training" L3 every day of the week. IMO the real issue here is that there is no rational incentive for any company to take on an L3 engineer now, regardless of H1B or bootcamp status. An L3 is going to join your company, receive 18 months of training where they are genuinely not worth what you are paying them AND they are a drag on your org, then leave in months 20-28 of their employment, usually shortly after a promotion to L4. So you put in 18 months and if you're lucky you get back 2 to 10 months of productivity.

emodendroket 4y ago

I used to work at a smaller company and they had a relationship with a local boot camp where they would take in a number of their grads in roles that were somewhere between support engineer and software engineer. You have to keep in mind that Amazon challenges with hiring are quite different than those faced by a smaller company. Sometimes it's hard just having enough people in the funnel.