3 ms·

I'm still uncertain when that was ever so easy. Leetcode, take home exercises, and all of the hiring processes that are the stuff of a hundred irate blog articl

I'm still uncertain when that was ever so easy. Leetcode, take home exercises, and all of the hiring processes that are the stuff of a hundred irate blog articles posted to HN have been around since the late 2000s. And it feels like bootcamp grads were feeling the squeeze as early as ~5 years ago.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
A few decades ago maybe. It is easier compared to the other majors, but easy makes it sound like a firm handshake is the only necessity. Hasn't been like that since 2008 minimum.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  I wonder if any company really only asked fizzbuzz for the technical segment.
  - chucky_z 4y ago
    I used to ask it for a pre-pre screen. It had a maybe 20% fail rate.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    Back in the dotcom boom, most certainly. I had a friend who had taken exactly one programming course in some obscure financial language and she got hired at the, to her, insane amount of $45/hour. At that time, pretty much any warm body that had ever looked at a computer was being hired.
Hermitian909 4y ago
I know someone who founded a bootcamp around 2010. According to him they had a 99% placement rate within 3 months of finishing bootcamp till around 2015, with starting comp in the 80-120k range. The basic setup over 3 months: 1. Crash course in basic dev tooling setup (git etc.) 2. Crash course in data structures and algorithms (e.g. leetcode) 3. Crash course in setting up a production environment 4. Group interview prep sessions post-graduation According to him this worked because: 1. There was very little talent on the market at all 2. Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads 3. There was a backlog of otherwise highly competent people trying to break into tech that just needed guidance on how to get in None of these things are true anymore and he has sinced closed his bootcamp since it began to felt exploitative.
- antonvs 4y ago
  > Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads This sounds like self-serving BS to me, or if it’s at all real, it’s indicative of employers not understanding what’s important in hiring for software development. Even if someone takes longer to ramp up, the depth of knowledge is much more important in the medium to long term. Perhaps if the work being done is just churning out boilerplate, the boot camp grad might have a brief edge, but that’s exactly the kind of thing CS grads can automate out of existence. But anyway, the key phrase in your comment is “according to him”. It sounds like he came up with a maximally rosy-eyed rationale for his failure, but the reality was probably a lot simpler: he just wasn’t creating any value.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    What a weirdly aggressive post about someone you never met, about a situation and company that you know very little about.
    - antonvs 4y ago
      It was a response to a ridiculous claim about the capabilities of bootcamp grads. Sounds like you’ve bought into your friend’s BS. Perhaps he believed it too. But I’m pointing out that it’s much more likely that the bootcamp wasn’t producing quality developers, and became unsustainable once the market became a bit more discriminating.
      - Hermitian909 4y ago
        > a ridiculous claim about the capabilities of bootcamp grads Having met many of these grads, and lived through that phase of hiring, I think it's a lot less ridiculous if you imagine the early bootcamp grads from my friends program as someone who's e.g. a senior mechanical engineer with a degree from good university. These people have strong technical and soft skills and were unusual at the time in that they were already productive in stacks that companies were using. By 2015, you couldn't fill a bootcamp with these kinds of people, so graduate quality is dropping at the same time that universities up their game and start including classes that teach some basic SWE skills. I don't think we actually disagree that the value-add was never that great as the program mostly only helpful to people who already had most of the skills necessary to be a good engineer.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

A few decades ago maybe. It is easier compared to the other majors, but easy makes it sound like a firm handshake is the only necessity. Hasn't been like that since 2008 minimum.

Apocryphon 4y ago
I wonder if any company really only asked fizzbuzz for the technical segment.
- chucky_z 4y ago
  I used to ask it for a pre-pre screen. It had a maybe 20% fail rate.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  Back in the dotcom boom, most certainly. I had a friend who had taken exactly one programming course in some obscure financial language and she got hired at the, to her, insane amount of $45/hour. At that time, pretty much any warm body that had ever looked at a computer was being hired.

Hermitian909 4y ago

I know someone who founded a bootcamp around 2010. According to him they had a 99% placement rate within 3 months of finishing bootcamp till around 2015, with starting comp in the 80-120k range. The basic setup over 3 months: 1. Crash course in basic dev tooling setup (git etc.) 2. Crash course in data structures and algorithms (e.g. leetcode) 3. Crash course in setting up a production environment 4. Group interview prep sessions post-graduation According to him this worked because: 1. There was very little talent on the market at all 2. Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads 3. There was a backlog of otherwise highly competent people trying to break into tech that just needed guidance on how to get in None of these things are true anymore and he has sinced closed his bootcamp since it began to felt exploitative.

antonvs 4y ago
> Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads This sounds like self-serving BS to me, or if it’s at all real, it’s indicative of employers not understanding what’s important in hiring for software development. Even if someone takes longer to ramp up, the depth of knowledge is much more important in the medium to long term. Perhaps if the work being done is just churning out boilerplate, the boot camp grad might have a brief edge, but that’s exactly the kind of thing CS grads can automate out of existence. But anyway, the key phrase in your comment is “according to him”. It sounds like he came up with a maximally rosy-eyed rationale for his failure, but the reality was probably a lot simpler: he just wasn’t creating any value.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  What a weirdly aggressive post about someone you never met, about a situation and company that you know very little about.
  - antonvs 4y ago
    It was a response to a ridiculous claim about the capabilities of bootcamp grads. Sounds like you’ve bought into your friend’s BS. Perhaps he believed it too. But I’m pointing out that it’s much more likely that the bootcamp wasn’t producing quality developers, and became unsustainable once the market became a bit more discriminating.
    - Hermitian909 4y ago
      > a ridiculous claim about the capabilities of bootcamp grads Having met many of these grads, and lived through that phase of hiring, I think it's a lot less ridiculous if you imagine the early bootcamp grads from my friends program as someone who's e.g. a senior mechanical engineer with a degree from good university. These people have strong technical and soft skills and were unusual at the time in that they were already productive in stacks that companies were using. By 2015, you couldn't fill a bootcamp with these kinds of people, so graduate quality is dropping at the same time that universities up their game and start including classes that teach some basic SWE skills. I don't think we actually disagree that the value-add was never that great as the program mostly only helpful to people who already had most of the skills necessary to be a good engineer.