14 ms·

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to

by seibelj 11y ago

We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had no coding experience other than 12 weeks of study. On the first day, the woman who was QA quit because she wanted to do development, despite being explicitly hired as a QA. 2 months later I had to let one of the developers go because she produced very little and was surfing YouTube for much of the day. The last developer I did not opt to hire at the end of his internship. He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. I used the 75k he wanted and hired a competent developer with a CS degree and a couple years experience. He is orders of magnitude better than the boot camp guy was. It is possible that a boot camp graduate could be useful after several years' experience, but fresh out of school they are extremely raw and need years of training. Therefore I won't be hiring any fresh graduates again.

eastbayjake 11y ago
> He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. Two questions: Are you in San Francisco, and which bootcamp was this?
- wh-uws 11y ago
  Yeah these are vitally important questions. The curriculums and the level rigor of the different bootcamps varies widely. Some have a very high bar for entry and are basically just a way for someone who could quickly become competent (i.e. someone with a deep math or some type of engineering background) to ramp up on coding. Others just let anyone in and teach very basic things so the graduates level would vary widely as well.
- seibelj 11y ago
  I'm in Boston, the salaries here are high but not SF levels. I'd rather not say which boot camp to preserve relationships and not malign their organization. They were very helpful, I just simply think hiring straight from boot camps doesn't work for my method of managing software development organizations.
ennuihenry 11y ago
What area are you in? 75k in NY or SF for an inexperienced developer seems high.
- hifier 11y ago
  75 is not high in NY and SF for entry level. Probably low for even average candidates.
- cairo140 11y ago
  Just sharing my experience here: I've been hiring in SF and found some boot camp grads, usually stronger but still far from mid-career, with expectations around 90-115k. Most of these folks got hired (some of them to us/away from us with offers all in that range). These were folks who were months to years away from hitting the ground running, and the value of the offer was entirely on their future potential. I found great difficulty finding a mid-career developer for the 130-150k range that it started making an "investment hire" feel like a viable alternative.
  - bcassedy 11y ago
    Just curious, how do you define "hitting the ground running"
    - cairo140 11y ago
      Roughly, someone who at the start can work independently on an existing business-critical[1], medium-sized[2] app to first fix bugs without adding major tech debt[3] and then take features from planning to deployment/maintenance, and then ultimately (6-12 months, since we were a very small shop), independently steer architecture and be solo on call. [1] hundreds of thousands in sales a day [2] around 10-50k LOC, but a far cry from the greenfield toy apps that bootcamp devs spend 90% of their time with [3] position: relative and z-index: 100 fixes many UI bugs, but if a dev has that as a main piece of their toolkit, you take on UI code debt or drag down the team to steer solutions in the right direction.
      - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
woah 11y ago
Another personal anecdote here- I'm self taught so maybe I'm biased. I worked on a side project years ago with a guy who was a proud Stanford alum. He did some kind of data sciencey stuff for his day job, but his ui code in this project was simply horrible. Like 2000 loc jquery spaghetti in a single file. I've also worked with a team of recent bootcamp grads who were highly paid and wrote great ui code quickly. They wouldn't necessarily be up on all the newest tech, but if you told them to use something, they would go home, learn it, and implement it pretty well the next day. Could the bootcamp ui coders do the Stanford guy's data science? Not a chance. But I know who's ui I would want to maintain. Does this mean that all Stanford grads are writing spaghetti coasting off an Ivy League degree? Does it mean that all bootcamp grads are technically naive craftsmen? No. Assess coders on their code.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  Stanford isn't an Ivy. ;)
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    People seem very offended by this fact. Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. Wikipedia: The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.
    - arcanus 11y ago
      they shouldn't care: ivy league is just a sports association
- ritchiea 11y ago
  I had a similar experience with an Ivy CS grad with most of his prior work being writing code for financial services companies. Smart guy, easy to work with but tremendously messy code that often failed to take advantage of the language's standard library or the framework's utilities in favor of writing everything himself and not necessarily abstracting functionality out to classes or modules to be re-used.
bargl 11y ago
I actually went through a similar track to what the people you were trying to hire did. I graduated with a minor in CS and a major in Aerospace Engineering. I got screwed on the "Systems Engineering" job I got straight out of school. So after a while started learn to code on my own for a few months then I started applying for jobs. I was actually offered multiple jobs as QA, but I ended up taking the first one that offered me a dev job for around 50k. This was because I knew I wanted to program, and not to be QA. I was lucky. I ended up working at a CRUD factory, where they were using .NET Webforms to create the same thing 100 times in a row. I learned a ton in the 2 years I worked there, enough to realize they were doing things in a way I just didn't like. They produced slow code quickly, which is what they were paid to do. Those two years worked for me to fill in some of the gap I have from not majoring in CS. Now I think I fall in the better than average .NET developer, but I also didn't expect 75k right away. Anyway, I didn't go the route of a code camp, but I did have a CS minor. One note is that many people I worked with had CS degrees and were unmotivated to learn new coding techniques (patterns or even methods within the same language). I'd say they were bad programmers, but they weren't they were just happy with turning the same thing out over and over again. They were smart, good, wrote bug lite code, and it deployed well. They just didn't care to innovate. They were SOLID work horses, and I have nothing against that. It just isn't the environment I like to be in. After 3 years of experience I feel that I can now drop in just about anywhere and be productive, but I definitely couldn't back when I started. Funny thing, the 2 best novice programmers at that place were self taught, one a CS minor and another completely self taught through a PHP side project. These two are still my go to guys for coming up with complex solutions.
fuzzywalrus 11y ago
Anecdotal: Currently managing two code camp interns and I'm impressed with the amount they cover in a meager 3 months but they're junior level developers for sure. Without some previous experience in software, its hard to believe most are worthy of mid-shelf salaries. There's certainly a huge skill gap between the code campers vs anyone we've hired with previous experience. Just the day to day tacit skills ticket management, git work flows, variance in tech stacks, client feedback, interfacing with designers, interactions with project managers, ux decisions, and so forth just can't be crammed into such a short period. I'm impressed by code-camps as web development and software development takes a long time but code campers are green. If you're in a position to take on junior devs, it seems a great way to expand a team and delegate jr level tasks to. TLDR: I'd hire a code camp graduate to fill junior positions - there's just too many soft skill gaps that code schools don't have time to.
omouse 11y ago
How much additional training and mentoring did your organization provide to these juniors? It seems a lot of companies are expecting that fresh grads will be able to be independent or get the job done from the get-go; that's not what universities or bootcamps are there for, they're just a solid foundation to build upon.
ritchiea 11y ago
It definitely matters what bootcamp and what the devs backgrounds were before the bootcamp. But I'm also curious what kind of work they struggled with. For instance so much work is getting data from a form or API, doing something with it and rendering HTML (styled by CSS and maybe adding some jQuery to polish the UI) that I wonder how much advantage a CS major has over someone who is not a CS major but is a good analytical thinker (like an English major who plays chess or an analytical philosopher). Good analytical thinking is not exclusive to CS or to STEM. I don't think CS majors have a big advantage over your typical good analytical thinker until you get to large scale applications where N is huge.
PopeOfNope 11y ago
Do you hire programmers fresh out of college? How do they compare with the boot camp grads?

by seibelj 11y ago

eastbayjake 11y ago

> He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary. Two questions: Are you in San Francisco, and which bootcamp was this?

wh-uws 11y ago
Yeah these are vitally important questions. The curriculums and the level rigor of the different bootcamps varies widely. Some have a very high bar for entry and are basically just a way for someone who could quickly become competent (i.e. someone with a deep math or some type of engineering background) to ramp up on coding. Others just let anyone in and teach very basic things so the graduates level would vary widely as well.
seibelj 11y ago
I'm in Boston, the salaries here are high but not SF levels. I'd rather not say which boot camp to preserve relationships and not malign their organization. They were very helpful, I just simply think hiring straight from boot camps doesn't work for my method of managing software development organizations.

ennuihenry 11y ago

What area are you in? 75k in NY or SF for an inexperienced developer seems high.

hifier 11y ago
75 is not high in NY and SF for entry level. Probably low for even average candidates.
cairo140 11y ago
Just sharing my experience here: I've been hiring in SF and found some boot camp grads, usually stronger but still far from mid-career, with expectations around 90-115k. Most of these folks got hired (some of them to us/away from us with offers all in that range). These were folks who were months to years away from hitting the ground running, and the value of the offer was entirely on their future potential. I found great difficulty finding a mid-career developer for the 130-150k range that it started making an "investment hire" feel like a viable alternative.
- bcassedy 11y ago
  Just curious, how do you define "hitting the ground running"
  - cairo140 11y ago
    Roughly, someone who at the start can work independently on an existing business-critical[1], medium-sized[2] app to first fix bugs without adding major tech debt[3] and then take features from planning to deployment/maintenance, and then ultimately (6-12 months, since we were a very small shop), independently steer architecture and be solo on call. [1] hundreds of thousands in sales a day [2] around 10-50k LOC, but a far cry from the greenfield toy apps that bootcamp devs spend 90% of their time with [3] position: relative and z-index: 100 fixes many UI bugs, but if a dev has that as a main piece of their toolkit, you take on UI code debt or drag down the team to steer solutions in the right direction.
    - 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

woah 11y ago

Another personal anecdote here- I'm self taught so maybe I'm biased. I worked on a side project years ago with a guy who was a proud Stanford alum. He did some kind of data sciencey stuff for his day job, but his ui code in this project was simply horrible. Like 2000 loc jquery spaghetti in a single file. I've also worked with a team of recent bootcamp grads who were highly paid and wrote great ui code quickly. They wouldn't necessarily be up on all the newest tech, but if you told them to use something, they would go home, learn it, and implement it pretty well the next day. Could the bootcamp ui coders do the Stanford guy's data science? Not a chance. But I know who's ui I would want to maintain. Does this mean that all Stanford grads are writing spaghetti coasting off an Ivy League degree? Does it mean that all bootcamp grads are technically naive craftsmen? No. Assess coders on their code.

santaclaus 11y ago
Stanford isn't an Ivy. ;)
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  People seem very offended by this fact. Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. Wikipedia: The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.
  - arcanus 11y ago
    they shouldn't care: ivy league is just a sports association
ritchiea 11y ago
I had a similar experience with an Ivy CS grad with most of his prior work being writing code for financial services companies. Smart guy, easy to work with but tremendously messy code that often failed to take advantage of the language's standard library or the framework's utilities in favor of writing everything himself and not necessarily abstracting functionality out to classes or modules to be re-used.

bargl 11y ago

I actually went through a similar track to what the people you were trying to hire did. I graduated with a minor in CS and a major in Aerospace Engineering. I got screwed on the "Systems Engineering" job I got straight out of school. So after a while started learn to code on my own for a few months then I started applying for jobs. I was actually offered multiple jobs as QA, but I ended up taking the first one that offered me a dev job for around 50k. This was because I knew I wanted to program, and not to be QA. I was lucky. I ended up working at a CRUD factory, where they were using .NET Webforms to create the same thing 100 times in a row. I learned a ton in the 2 years I worked there, enough to realize they were doing things in a way I just didn't like. They produced slow code quickly, which is what they were paid to do. Those two years worked for me to fill in some of the gap I have from not majoring in CS. Now I think I fall in the better than average .NET developer, but I also didn't expect 75k right away. Anyway, I didn't go the route of a code camp, but I did have a CS minor. One note is that many people I worked with had CS degrees and were unmotivated to learn new coding techniques (patterns or even methods within the same language). I'd say they were bad programmers, but they weren't they were just happy with turning the same thing out over and over again. They were smart, good, wrote bug lite code, and it deployed well. They just didn't care to innovate. They were SOLID work horses, and I have nothing against that. It just isn't the environment I like to be in. After 3 years of experience I feel that I can now drop in just about anywhere and be productive, but I definitely couldn't back when I started. Funny thing, the 2 best novice programmers at that place were self taught, one a CS minor and another completely self taught through a PHP side project. These two are still my go to guys for coming up with complex solutions.

fuzzywalrus 11y ago

Anecdotal: Currently managing two code camp interns and I'm impressed with the amount they cover in a meager 3 months but they're junior level developers for sure. Without some previous experience in software, its hard to believe most are worthy of mid-shelf salaries. There's certainly a huge skill gap between the code campers vs anyone we've hired with previous experience. Just the day to day tacit skills ticket management, git work flows, variance in tech stacks, client feedback, interfacing with designers, interactions with project managers, ux decisions, and so forth just can't be crammed into such a short period. I'm impressed by code-camps as web development and software development takes a long time but code campers are green. If you're in a position to take on junior devs, it seems a great way to expand a team and delegate jr level tasks to. TLDR: I'd hire a code camp graduate to fill junior positions - there's just too many soft skill gaps that code schools don't have time to.

omouse 11y ago

How much additional training and mentoring did your organization provide to these juniors? It seems a lot of companies are expecting that fresh grads will be able to be independent or get the job done from the get-go; that's not what universities or bootcamps are there for, they're just a solid foundation to build upon.

ritchiea 11y ago

It definitely matters what bootcamp and what the devs backgrounds were before the bootcamp. But I'm also curious what kind of work they struggled with. For instance so much work is getting data from a form or API, doing something with it and rendering HTML (styled by CSS and maybe adding some jQuery to polish the UI) that I wonder how much advantage a CS major has over someone who is not a CS major but is a good analytical thinker (like an English major who plays chess or an analytical philosopher). Good analytical thinking is not exclusive to CS or to STEM. I don't think CS majors have a big advantage over your typical good analytical thinker until you get to large scale applications where N is huge.

PopeOfNope 11y ago

Do you hire programmers fresh out of college? How do they compare with the boot camp grads?