u/KarmicReasoning wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
This was beautiful, my person 👏🏽👏🏽
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Can you elaborate on your background :). I agree and disagree with some of these and curious what your background and experience is.
u/KarmicReasoning wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
With the bootcamp that I attended, I was marketed as a “junior”. Which now in my experience in a F500, I was not a junior leaving out of bootcamp. Nowhere near a junior. The projects that we did were quite mediocre, but instilled the concept of OOP which was I guess nice/decent.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Thanks for sharing your background, appreciate your openness <3
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I appreciate the perspective and thanks for sharing. For everyone reading though this is one perspective on the industry and there are a range of experiences and advice to consider before taking action.
u/TheEgosLastStand wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Which points do you disagree with?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I don't agree with not marketing yourself as junior and "faking it until you make it". I believe this attitude is why entry level jobs say they have four years of experience requirements sometimes now, because people with no experience are "faking it".
If you don't have experience, you don't have experience. You can't just make it up and hope that somehow you show up on the job like an experienced engineer. You will have holes and a lot to learn. Learning quickly and performing well might make the company not feel misled, but that doesn't happen in a lot of cases, hence the every growing entry level requirements to weed these people out.
I'm a big fan of apprenticeships at the top tech companies as a pathway for your first job. Clear expectations, expected ramp up, turns into great top tier first job.
This isn't advice for everyone, some people are exceptions and can get those full time jobs off the bat.
u/newnewyorker03 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It seems you’ve been removed from the weeds quite a while. The technical assessments and screenings determine where you’re leveled at. In some cases it tests for a specific thing by only optimizing for algorithm/data structures knowledge. Some people don’t care for that grind and
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah the top tier apprenticeships are EXTREMELY competitive. I am absolutely biased, as is everyone, and I can share my experience having run hundreds of interviews at FB for everything from interns to directors, having a team that has done thousands of interviews, and been involved with hiring and career progression decisions for hundreds of engineers at FB. Yeah our network is all FAANG, Google, Airbnb, Figma, Meta, Stripe, etc... and we talk all the time about this stuff! But it's very biased and most bootcamp grads are not aiming for these kinds of roles and your advice might apply better for them. I do think my argument about the neverending experience race for entry level positions is valid regardless of bias.
u/No-Butterscotch5467 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Lots of things I very much disagree with from this post. First off, as a hiring manager, I absolutely look at the code and that is 99% of the reason most bootcamp grads don’t even get an interview. I have almost never seen a bootcamp portfolio project that includes a single test,
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I agree more with this view than the OP as well. Codesmith has a very heavy emphasis on open source projects but for Codesmith students, I've looked through the code for 10 or so OSPs and these don't qualify as the open source commitments this commenter is mentioning. Codesmith OSPs are of the quality level of any other group bootcamp projects, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Significantly below the standard of true open source software. Look for projects with a lot of usage, lots of documentation (sometimes more than the code itself as it's critical for open source), well thought out processes for reporting bugs and making contributions (not a sentence but a whole process), and look for projects with paid contributors on them (via their companies or because the project is run by a funded company). MUI is a good one with lots of opportunity if you like React.