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Late to the party, but maybe I can help. I've helped in the hiring of many developers. (grain of salt, just my opinion, etc...) * Don't do bootcamps. It's a

Late to the party, but maybe I can help. I've helped in the hiring of many developers. (grain of salt, just my opinion, etc...) * Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me. This can be said for any 100% online college. (again, I'm just being honest). Community colleges are fine. * You having a Github that you've committed stuff to often-ish will most interest me. I don't give a crud if you contribute to open source. But just the fact that you're coding is what I care about. Yes, I will snoop around and see how good it is. No, I won't care if your code sucks. (side note: if your code is actually good, than that's better than a four-year degree at a college I've heard of imo) * Don't get discouraged. I remember I searched for a programming job for two years before I got hired. The 70-ish times I was told "no" didn't matter after the one "yes". * Be honest about where you are at (not programming professionally). I've always been open to hiring people outside the industry for entry-level programming jobs. * Coding challenges are beyond useless to me. I will concede that they are valuable to some. Hope that helped some. 80% of the advice given here is helpful as well. Good luck. Please don't get discouraged <3.

warent 4y ago
I've been a hiring manager for a couple of years now, and have nearly 10 yrs professional dev experience in the industry. Bootcamps are a red flag for you? What? Do you have any rationale for that? Makes zero sense to me. If someone has done a bootcamp, that's a big plus. Online college is neutral. The rest I agree with.
- tinco 4y ago
  I've hired from bootcamps multiple times, it's a great source of junior developers. It is however a show of the absolute minimum amount of skill a person could possibly have before you take them on as a developer. If this person says that they've been coding for years, then that puts them at a way higher level than a recent bootcamp grad. Instead of doing a bootcamp, spend a week or two building simple apps in whatever category you want to work in. If you want to be a web dev, a little node.js backend with a react frontend perhaps, or similar with Django or Rails. Plonk it on your github, make sure you put on your resume that you're a junior that's been coding for years but never put anything in production, and you'll definitely be ahead of the bootcamp grads in my book.
  - foreverCarlos 4y ago
    That still doesn’t make bootcamps a red flag. Also, there are many self-taught programmers who complete a bootcamp just to gain confidence, make connections, etc.
    - champagnepapi 4y ago
      Agreed
    - chaps 4y ago
      I think it's a red flag when it's also attached to a certain kind of confidence that their bootcamp experience was on-par with years of experience or education. As in, the kind of attitude where that they feel that because they went through the exhausting bootcamp stage, everything next is just an application of what came from the bootcamp. It's something I've only seen with programmers from bootcamps.
      - foreverCarlos 4y ago
        Honestly, never encountered that. In my experience bootcampers are usually self-conscious about their background. Maybe they behave differently at small companies/startups (my experience is at a big tech co)?
        chaps 4y ago
        That could be it. I work outside of "tech" these days at smaller orgs that naturally attract people with significantly different personal motivations to those in the tech world.
    - bavila 4y ago
      I know someone who took a bootcamp after completing a college CS degree because he felt that the CS curriculum didn't actually give him enough practical programming experience. Some CS programs are terrible, so I'm not surprised he found the bootcamp to be a benefit.
- drdaeman 4y ago
  Yea, this is weird. Bootcamps can be useful or useless (depending on a course, instructors and a person), but surely they don't do any harm? Not everyone goes there to get technical skills, there are people going there for soft skills (practicing working on assignments, especially group assignments, etc.) and networking (at least some bootcamps advertise they have some relationship with recruiting agencies).
- felipellrocha 4y ago
  His red flag for bootcampers is a red flag for his managerial skills
88913527 4y ago
Contributing to open source can be a valuable sign. It shows the candidate could navigate a large repository, communicate with the maintainers, and successfully merge something-- the ancillary soft skills needed when developing software in a team environment.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rubberband 4y ago
  Sorry if I gave the wrong impression when I mentioned the OSS angle... My (hindsight: almost meaningless) point was that the whole "open / vs closed source ideology" doesn't matter. You could contribute to the Donald Trump C# repo for all I care... It's the contribution that matters to me. If an "amateur" (or whatever) programmer can contribute to OSS... That means so much! You list the implications very well, so thank you. I try to hire based on ability, not qualifications (welcome to Arbitrary Definitions 101?). Boils down to: if you work at a gas station, and get a PR merged into the Linux Kernel... Yeahhhh... We can talk about that senior dev position ;) Is five weeks vacation okay with you?
torben-friis 4y ago
I've been training juniors and taking part in technical interviews for a few years now, and I can say that bootcamp hires were generally the best performant. Particularly those in late twenties/early thirties who were coming from an entirely different field - we had tons of applications from former architects and biologists for some reason - tend to outshine younger software engineers fresh out of school in just a few months. I could understand this opinion to be controversial, but considering bootcamps a red flag vs just a hobbyist programmer with no education? Sounds ridiculous to me.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I think it’s because boot camp graduates often have no experience prior to the boot camp, so they’ll often only have 3 months coding experience total. Whereas most other applicants will have much more experience than that even if they have no professional experience.
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    But in those few months, they were often trained intensively on exactly the tech stack you're looking for, and they built some things, in a team, that look a lot like what's actually done day to day in many businesses. In an up to date way. That helps! We have only one boot camp graduate, who came from a completely different career. He's been productive from day 1, has carefully listened to all advice he's got since and is always working on figuring out better ways to do things, and he's just very good after two years.
    - josephg 4y ago
      There are knowledge holes a mile wide with bootcamp curriculums though. The programs I’ve seen don’t teach: - Information security - Anything lower level than Python/Ruby - Unix (streams, files, processes and threads, syscalls, etc) - Debugging. (Except incedentally) Not knowing these things can be fine in a feature factory workplace. But having an engineer on your team who has no idea about infosec is an active danger. “I make a sql query from this string builder” / “we save the passwords in this database table” / “the AWS credential is here in the javascript code in the repository” / etc.
culi 4y ago
Long time hobby programmer. I wasn't able to get into college programs for comp sci because I had transferred under a different major. I decided to do a bootcamp just to get connections It ended up working pretty much exactly as planned. Made some lifelong friends, one of whom seems to know someone in every city in the country. She got me an interview and I'm now making more than many people I know who went through a full 4-year CS degree at my very expensive university
mtnGoat 4y ago
Interesting. I’ve hired At least 100 developers in my career And have never seen coding challenges or boot camps as Red flags, rather I see them as someone going out and trying to learn and improve. On the contrary certain universities and employers certainly are( too much indoctrination(and ego in some cases) to undo). I know a number of boot camp graduates working in FANG level companies. Coding challenges are very important, leetcode questions come up a lot in interviewing loops at most big companies and I think their use is expanding. As much as I hate LC, it’s still a good skill to have if wanting to become a software engineer. I’ve never once looked at a candidates GitHub. There is no proof they wrote anything there. Plus I’ve usually worked in domains that always required tools and knowledge you most likely wouldn’t have anyways, no point in testing, so I hire based on if your a good person with the propensity to learn, grow, and do good things.
- jcpst 4y ago
  I don’t have hiring authority, but I was on a lot of technical interviews at my company for a while. When people put their GH handle on their resume, I definitely checked it out. Sometimes I would even see if I could get it running on the first try. This has been an indicator of some of practices they have. But it’s only ever a small piece of the picture. Some people push their code to github when they are very junior, and it doesn’t represent where their skills are currently at. There is the issue of forgery, but I lump it in the same category as lying on a resume- the deception is equally as serious.
  - mtnGoat 4y ago
    That’s what I see a lot too. Old code from when they were learning stuff, usually not reflective of their current levels. Most things you do for an employer can’t be shared, so that’s why I’ve always given it low credence.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  I absolutely check out somebody's GitHub if they include it on their résumé. Usually I'll pick out some parts of the code during the interview and we'll discuss why they made certain decisions (both architectural and technical). I find that this weeds out forgeries relatively quickly.
rubberband 4y ago
Ah crap, I messed up here, and I'm quite sorry. I was wrong when I said that bootcamps were red flags. When I stated "Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me"... I should have said "Don't have bootcamps be nearly your only source of experience." Like, if a person rolls up with either a super-expensive boot camp, or a side project that they've kept up with for two years... It's no contest. I certainly won't be mad at you taking the bootcamp. The criticism in the replies is valid. Again, sorry. I'll continue to work on that whole "maybe you should type what you mean." thing. As an aside: I forgot to mention how much I care about attitude. I'll take someone with two years of experience and a genuine hunger to learn over a guy with four years' experience who has an attitude. /shrug.
- wenus 4y ago
  > I certainly won't be mad at you taking the bootcamp. Why would anyone expect you to be mad? Weird.
  - slater- 4y ago
    it's an American turn of phrase, possibly related to the Tupac song "I Aint Mad At Cha." Casual sarcasm. See also: "I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers."
neontomo 4y ago
Thank you, a very insightful comment. I've recently started adding to my Github, I will keep it up and be honest about my level of skill. I find it hard to know where my level is though, as I don't have much to compare it to other than seeing Stack Overflow answers and the stuff I find on Github.
- rubberband 4y ago
  Aw crud... I completely forgot about Stack Overflow @.@. I think because I'm off today, and don't have it opened in 17 background tabs... A Stack Overflow profile is another wonderful thing on a resume. It demonstrates you're curious and/or helpful (among other things, I suppose). A note on your Stack Overflow profile... I don't care if you don't have a lot (or any) points from answering questions. Points for asking is just as good (to me). Tips on actually building up rep on the site (hope they're mildly useful; I had a hard time TBH): * If you're legitimately stuck on a problem, and have actually tried finding the answer elsewhere, take 30 minutes (or whatever you can spare) to write up an intelligible question. You [usually] won't be downvoted for asking a question that is well put together and hasn't been asked before. Most of my rep comes from asking esoteric questions about Git or Visual Studio, rather than answering them. * Don't be afraid to answer old questions with new answers. Just make sure it's actually useful, and not a copy/paste (or rewording) of what someone has already said. * Don't feel bad if a reply is blindingly obvious in hindsight (most of mine have been). You're asking an extraordinarily large number of nerds for help. Cheers.
throwaway675309 4y ago
In my experience working as an interviewer I am far more interested in passionate side projects that you've worked on then a checkbox indicating you went to some fly-by-night six week code camp.
pinum 4y ago
>This can be said for any 100% online college. I'm curious about this part. Do such students tend to underperform at interview?
- rubberband 4y ago
  They absolutely do. Without fail.
newshorts 4y ago
Agreed on the boot camp thing. I’ve interviewed more than a few folks who got their start with boot camps but couldn’t answer some basic questions about web development. Not knocking those who are motivated to go through a boot camp, just saying you can’t stop there. The content covered in a boot camp is just a single slice of a much larger pizza.
crespire 4y ago
Fingers crossed I can make it happen this year! Thanks for your tips!
yieldcrv 4y ago
The counterpoints to all of this: No brownie points help as you still have to pass the technical interview, 99% of the time. Places with technical interviews have recruiters. Recruiters are not technical and will not actually be gauging you on any of this, they just need to be able to find you. They look for githubs and linkedin profiles. This person is someone avoiding coding challenges and has just as arbitrary metrics as a replacement.

warent 4y ago

I've been a hiring manager for a couple of years now, and have nearly 10 yrs professional dev experience in the industry. Bootcamps are a red flag for you? What? Do you have any rationale for that? Makes zero sense to me. If someone has done a bootcamp, that's a big plus. Online college is neutral. The rest I agree with.

tinco 4y ago
I've hired from bootcamps multiple times, it's a great source of junior developers. It is however a show of the absolute minimum amount of skill a person could possibly have before you take them on as a developer. If this person says that they've been coding for years, then that puts them at a way higher level than a recent bootcamp grad. Instead of doing a bootcamp, spend a week or two building simple apps in whatever category you want to work in. If you want to be a web dev, a little node.js backend with a react frontend perhaps, or similar with Django or Rails. Plonk it on your github, make sure you put on your resume that you're a junior that's been coding for years but never put anything in production, and you'll definitely be ahead of the bootcamp grads in my book.
- foreverCarlos 4y ago
  That still doesn’t make bootcamps a red flag. Also, there are many self-taught programmers who complete a bootcamp just to gain confidence, make connections, etc.
  - champagnepapi 4y ago
    Agreed
  - chaps 4y ago
    I think it's a red flag when it's also attached to a certain kind of confidence that their bootcamp experience was on-par with years of experience or education. As in, the kind of attitude where that they feel that because they went through the exhausting bootcamp stage, everything next is just an application of what came from the bootcamp. It's something I've only seen with programmers from bootcamps.
    - foreverCarlos 4y ago
      Honestly, never encountered that. In my experience bootcampers are usually self-conscious about their background. Maybe they behave differently at small companies/startups (my experience is at a big tech co)?
      - chaps 4y ago
        That could be it. I work outside of "tech" these days at smaller orgs that naturally attract people with significantly different personal motivations to those in the tech world.
  - bavila 4y ago
    I know someone who took a bootcamp after completing a college CS degree because he felt that the CS curriculum didn't actually give him enough practical programming experience. Some CS programs are terrible, so I'm not surprised he found the bootcamp to be a benefit.
drdaeman 4y ago
Yea, this is weird. Bootcamps can be useful or useless (depending on a course, instructors and a person), but surely they don't do any harm? Not everyone goes there to get technical skills, there are people going there for soft skills (practicing working on assignments, especially group assignments, etc.) and networking (at least some bootcamps advertise they have some relationship with recruiting agencies).
felipellrocha 4y ago
His red flag for bootcampers is a red flag for his managerial skills

88913527 4y ago

Contributing to open source can be a valuable sign. It shows the candidate could navigate a large repository, communicate with the maintainers, and successfully merge something-- the ancillary soft skills needed when developing software in a team environment.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rubberband 4y ago
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression when I mentioned the OSS angle... My (hindsight: almost meaningless) point was that the whole "open / vs closed source ideology" doesn't matter. You could contribute to the Donald Trump C# repo for all I care... It's the contribution that matters to me. If an "amateur" (or whatever) programmer can contribute to OSS... That means so much! You list the implications very well, so thank you. I try to hire based on ability, not qualifications (welcome to Arbitrary Definitions 101?). Boils down to: if you work at a gas station, and get a PR merged into the Linux Kernel... Yeahhhh... We can talk about that senior dev position ;) Is five weeks vacation okay with you?

torben-friis 4y ago

I've been training juniors and taking part in technical interviews for a few years now, and I can say that bootcamp hires were generally the best performant. Particularly those in late twenties/early thirties who were coming from an entirely different field - we had tons of applications from former architects and biologists for some reason - tend to outshine younger software engineers fresh out of school in just a few months. I could understand this opinion to be controversial, but considering bootcamps a red flag vs just a hobbyist programmer with no education? Sounds ridiculous to me.

nicoburns 4y ago
I think it’s because boot camp graduates often have no experience prior to the boot camp, so they’ll often only have 3 months coding experience total. Whereas most other applicants will have much more experience than that even if they have no professional experience.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  But in those few months, they were often trained intensively on exactly the tech stack you're looking for, and they built some things, in a team, that look a lot like what's actually done day to day in many businesses. In an up to date way. That helps! We have only one boot camp graduate, who came from a completely different career. He's been productive from day 1, has carefully listened to all advice he's got since and is always working on figuring out better ways to do things, and he's just very good after two years.
  - josephg 4y ago
    There are knowledge holes a mile wide with bootcamp curriculums though. The programs I’ve seen don’t teach: - Information security - Anything lower level than Python/Ruby - Unix (streams, files, processes and threads, syscalls, etc) - Debugging. (Except incedentally) Not knowing these things can be fine in a feature factory workplace. But having an engineer on your team who has no idea about infosec is an active danger. “I make a sql query from this string builder” / “we save the passwords in this database table” / “the AWS credential is here in the javascript code in the repository” / etc.

culi 4y ago

Long time hobby programmer. I wasn't able to get into college programs for comp sci because I had transferred under a different major. I decided to do a bootcamp just to get connections It ended up working pretty much exactly as planned. Made some lifelong friends, one of whom seems to know someone in every city in the country. She got me an interview and I'm now making more than many people I know who went through a full 4-year CS degree at my very expensive university

mtnGoat 4y ago

Interesting. I’ve hired At least 100 developers in my career And have never seen coding challenges or boot camps as Red flags, rather I see them as someone going out and trying to learn and improve. On the contrary certain universities and employers certainly are( too much indoctrination(and ego in some cases) to undo). I know a number of boot camp graduates working in FANG level companies. Coding challenges are very important, leetcode questions come up a lot in interviewing loops at most big companies and I think their use is expanding. As much as I hate LC, it’s still a good skill to have if wanting to become a software engineer. I’ve never once looked at a candidates GitHub. There is no proof they wrote anything there. Plus I’ve usually worked in domains that always required tools and knowledge you most likely wouldn’t have anyways, no point in testing, so I hire based on if your a good person with the propensity to learn, grow, and do good things.

jcpst 4y ago
I don’t have hiring authority, but I was on a lot of technical interviews at my company for a while. When people put their GH handle on their resume, I definitely checked it out. Sometimes I would even see if I could get it running on the first try. This has been an indicator of some of practices they have. But it’s only ever a small piece of the picture. Some people push their code to github when they are very junior, and it doesn’t represent where their skills are currently at. There is the issue of forgery, but I lump it in the same category as lying on a resume- the deception is equally as serious.
- mtnGoat 4y ago
  That’s what I see a lot too. Old code from when they were learning stuff, usually not reflective of their current levels. Most things you do for an employer can’t be shared, so that’s why I’ve always given it low credence.
throwaway675309 4y ago
I absolutely check out somebody's GitHub if they include it on their résumé. Usually I'll pick out some parts of the code during the interview and we'll discuss why they made certain decisions (both architectural and technical). I find that this weeds out forgeries relatively quickly.

rubberband 4y ago

Ah crap, I messed up here, and I'm quite sorry. I was wrong when I said that bootcamps were red flags. When I stated "Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me"... I should have said "Don't have bootcamps be nearly your only source of experience." Like, if a person rolls up with either a super-expensive boot camp, or a side project that they've kept up with for two years... It's no contest. I certainly won't be mad at you taking the bootcamp. The criticism in the replies is valid. Again, sorry. I'll continue to work on that whole "maybe you should type what you mean." thing. As an aside: I forgot to mention how much I care about attitude. I'll take someone with two years of experience and a genuine hunger to learn over a guy with four years' experience who has an attitude. /shrug.

wenus 4y ago
> I certainly won't be mad at you taking the bootcamp. Why would anyone expect you to be mad? Weird.
- slater- 4y ago
  it's an American turn of phrase, possibly related to the Tupac song "I Aint Mad At Cha." Casual sarcasm. See also: "I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers."

neontomo 4y ago

Thank you, a very insightful comment. I've recently started adding to my Github, I will keep it up and be honest about my level of skill. I find it hard to know where my level is though, as I don't have much to compare it to other than seeing Stack Overflow answers and the stuff I find on Github.

rubberband 4y ago
Aw crud... I completely forgot about Stack Overflow @.@. I think because I'm off today, and don't have it opened in 17 background tabs... A Stack Overflow profile is another wonderful thing on a resume. It demonstrates you're curious and/or helpful (among other things, I suppose). A note on your Stack Overflow profile... I don't care if you don't have a lot (or any) points from answering questions. Points for asking is just as good (to me). Tips on actually building up rep on the site (hope they're mildly useful; I had a hard time TBH): * If you're legitimately stuck on a problem, and have actually tried finding the answer elsewhere, take 30 minutes (or whatever you can spare) to write up an intelligible question. You [usually] won't be downvoted for asking a question that is well put together and hasn't been asked before. Most of my rep comes from asking esoteric questions about Git or Visual Studio, rather than answering them. * Don't be afraid to answer old questions with new answers. Just make sure it's actually useful, and not a copy/paste (or rewording) of what someone has already said. * Don't feel bad if a reply is blindingly obvious in hindsight (most of mine have been). You're asking an extraordinarily large number of nerds for help. Cheers.

throwaway675309 4y ago

In my experience working as an interviewer I am far more interested in passionate side projects that you've worked on then a checkbox indicating you went to some fly-by-night six week code camp.

pinum 4y ago

>This can be said for any 100% online college. I'm curious about this part. Do such students tend to underperform at interview?

rubberband 4y ago
They absolutely do. Without fail.

newshorts 4y ago

Agreed on the boot camp thing. I’ve interviewed more than a few folks who got their start with boot camps but couldn’t answer some basic questions about web development. Not knocking those who are motivated to go through a boot camp, just saying you can’t stop there. The content covered in a boot camp is just a single slice of a much larger pizza.

crespire 4y ago

Fingers crossed I can make it happen this year! Thanks for your tips!

yieldcrv 4y ago

The counterpoints to all of this: No brownie points help as you still have to pass the technical interview, 99% of the time. Places with technical interviews have recruiters. Recruiters are not technical and will not actually be gauging you on any of this, they just need to be able to find you. They look for githubs and linkedin profiles. This person is someone avoiding coding challenges and has just as arbitrary metrics as a replacement.