The AI future right now: I took a self driving taxi home tonight in San Francisco, like many other nights, and passed by 22 other self driving cars. What this means for YOU is extremely complicated.

I have the perspective of: 1. being a silicon valley outsider who broke in 2. working at Meta from 200 engineers to 10000 and learned a ton about how the sausage is made 3. I started a mentorship program to help engineers prepare for interviews and many people went to bootcamps in the past so I know about them and their pros and cons for your career down the road. The story of why I'm here. It all started when a bunch of people applied to my program claiming to have about 6 months to a year of work experience. When I interviewed them their stories all fell apart quickly and I realized these are all Codesmith graduates and the work experience was actually 3 week long group projects and when I confronted someone they said that they were coached into how to talk about it like it was months of work experience. I did a deep dive and found a Reddit post from 2019 from a tech hiring manager who had the exact same experience. Then in May 2022 I worked with Reddit to do an official site wide AMA and I got barraged with questions about Meta being evil and got a lot of feedback that I handled them very well. So I decided to start engaging about bootcamps to try to give a holistic picture of the good and bad, the pros and cons. Too many people woo'd by marketing promising to make them senior engineers in 12 weeks without understanding how it works, why it works, and what the consequences are later on. Ultimately my goal is to help people find the best path for them in this industry, whether it's a bootcamp or not.