u/michaelnovati replied ·
Not just bootcamps grads, but there are almost no entry level jobs. The ones that exist at big companies are going through traditional pipelines, i.e. University Recruiting (recruiters go to top schools -> recruit interns and promote brand of company -> interns who do well get full time offers when graduating)
Apprenticeships are the ideal option (in my opinion) but are really slim in this market too. We had someone go to Pinterest and there was a like a dozen or two people chosen out of thousands and thousands (over ten thousand allegedly?) applications. Airbnb and Asana similarly have had fairly small cohorts this year.
Your options are:
1. Try to come across as a more experienced engineer and go to a non-tech company that doesn't really know the difference, and do well on interviews to impress them.
2. Do contract work and try to get by for 2 years until you have enough experience to get mid level jobs.
3. Cross your fingers and get lucky (OR MAKE YOUR LUCK BY NETWORKING WELL) to try to find one-off non-reproducible opportunities. You might be the lucky one to get a job, but how you got it won't be reproducible for a bootcamp in the industry to survive off replicating :S.
4. Holding pattern - keep building projects, maybe turn one of them into a "startup" and keep writing code every day, and jump on any opportunity that shows up. We see some bootcamp grads get jobs > 12 months post graduation and if you keep at it long enough and genuinely don't give up and keep trying every day, eventually some job will popup. But like #3, if you are running a bootcamp, is that the model you want to say is the best way to get a job?
So all of this aside, a reason to not do a bootcamp right now is that while you might have the sheer determination to get a job even if i takes 2 years, the bootcamp you go to might not exist then.