u/michaelnovati replied ·
Good question, of all the people I work with (which as of 2023, require have signficiant SWE work experience already) about 1/3 or so when to bootcamps in the past and are on their second, third, forth, etc... job hunts.
Here are my thoughts:
1. Bootcamps aren't useless for everyone in 2024. SOME people do get jobs. If you are in a different job, doing amazing, want to change careers, have a natural affinity to programming, have a strong network, live in a location with lots of SWE jobs, have 1+ years of savings, ready to work really hard for a few years and possibly have a few false starts (hire and layoff), they consider a bootcamp, there will be no other way to do it.
2. For alumni later on, people are unique so each person you talk to has their own path. Some are very successful, some are struggling. So it's hard to hear just one person story and make decisions based off of it. Definitely one thing to watch out for is recent alumni who are like I just got a job a few months ago, making like 150 K year. Give them time to settle into that job. Yeah, in terms of down the road some people do really well get promoted once or twice make a job leap to a better company and are on their way. Some people don't do so well, they're laid off maybe multiple times have a lot of fall starts get a little lost on what they should work on for the next job, I see a lot of people going into contract jobs or tech adjacent jobs, where they might be the only technical person on their team and they have struggles with progress, becoming a full-blown software engineer in the next job.
The short answer is, it's definitely not easy. It's easy to celebrate a few cases of success, but things can change on a dime. I'm really on top of bootcamps that misrepresent alumni outcomes later on. For every, "I got a job a Google 3 years later!" there are 5 "I got laid off and don't know what to do now because no one wants to hire a laid off bootcamp grad".
Maybe I'm biased because we help people a couple years into their career particularly with these kinds of struggles and I should probably disclose that by us very clearly. But really each case is unique and there are a lot of challenges and gaps and holes that bootcamp leave behind. If things go well, and you're able to find a first rule where you get mentorship support and fill in some of those gaps on the job or on your own through your own efforts, then you can slowly and patiently improve your standing. But if you don't even know what those gaps and holes are, it is very hard and I see a lot of people struggle to make sense of what to do next.
3. I wish I had more data on this, but it is definitely more common now than last year to see bootcamp grads get laid off after six months to even up to three years. And I think that's changed this year is it's not so much people being fired for being bad, it's actually people being let go because they're not progressing anymore and they're being replaced with people who have more upward trajectory. And the reason that they aren't progressing is because of those fundamental gaps they have that they don't really know what they are and companies are trying to run under the "year of efficiency" and are choosing not to spend more time, mentoring those people, and instead removing them.
Anyways, I timebox my answers and these are some quick thoughts.