The market right now is not great for bootcamp grads. FAANG hiring is opening up again for people with 2+ years of SWE work experience, but not for people with none. And you can't fake this work experience or stretch your resume - it's either 2 real YOE or not - faking your resume will just piss off hiring managers that will tell the recruiter that sent you over to never consider candidates from your bootcamp again and waste their time.
The only data I have here is from Codesmith. They had H1 2022 CIRR placements of 80% within 180 days of graduation for people who graduated and were job hunting. I've seen Codesmith's placement numbers for H2 2022 and for recent cohorts and they are hovering around 50% +/- 15%ish (these are not official numbers but from primary data from students and alumni) and are about a 20% drop from H1 2022 in H2 2022 and H1 2023 (which still has a lot of time left for people to find jobs is somewhere much so terrible for people graduating in Q1 2023 specifically that it might drag down H1 2023 to even lower numbers.
I have data from Formation, which is NOT a bootcamp, that hiring number have picked up at the end of Q2 and job openings are popping up, companies are asking for referrals again, etc...
So everything said, it's such a rollercoaster I don't know if anyone can give you a proper answer. The hiring market is hard for bootcamp grads, is improving a bit for experienced engineers, and the top bootcamps are still placing people - despite lower placement numbers.
u/SlowestTriathlete wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Most of us list it as open source experience, not professional paid experience. And it is indeed open source - no lying there.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
We have this discussion a lot and people keep sending me more detailed info that makes me believe otherwise. It's very clear from official instructions to not lie but it's in office hours and 1-1s that the pressures come out in subtle ways. I am far too busy to dive into this but have all the raw ingredients to definitely demonstrate the stats on how every single student ever presents their experience and I have primary evidence of an employee telling people that Codesmith tells people to put 3-4 months of experience for their 3-4 week OSPs.
I showed some people on my eng team in person, without any context whatsoever, a guideline to consider separating OSP from "open source projects" on your resume to make the OSP stand out and how to make a LinkedIn company for that project (while also clearly saying don't lie) and someone very senior said "that's fraud".
u/dlbc9 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
The whole idea of “lucky” is actually just something imposter syndrome tries to convince you of. You can only create your own luck. There is always something that gets you the job over someone else. I would guess 90% is personality, attitude, and teachability. The remaining 10% i
u/michaelnovatireplied·
There's some amount of imposter syndrome but it's not the primary thing holding people back.
Bootcamps grads truly are lacking numerous skills required for jobs. In many ways, everyone lacks some skills or another and not just bootcamp grads, but a significant reason for the challenging market right now is a genuine skill gap and not imposter syndrome.
You are right that attitude is important. People that keep being optimistic and diligent are finding jobs and people that are pessimistic because of the market aren't.
The key is that, while you are job hunting, keep learning so you can address the skills gaps and make them smaller and smaller.
u/metalreflectslime wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
> And you can't fake this work experience or stretch your resume - it's either 2 real YOE or not - faking your resume will just piss off hiring managers that will tell the recruiter that sent you over to never consider candidates from your bootcamp again and waste their time.
Ho
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
They don't actually get away with it all the time, but because they are so small in the grand scheme of things, it works enough to make a difference for individual students. Other than Capital One, which is a very large company that the alumni have a machine to get you into (referring each other to jobs and practicing known questions with them), alumni spread across hundreds of companies. There are some small companies that explicitly love Codemsith grads and no need to use the Codesmith-style resume there. But most people are just slipping under the radar with a recruiter that misses this.
More importantly - Codesmith students are generally wonderful people and perform well enough on the job (even putting in hours of extra work a day to keep up) so that most companies don't look back and question the on paper experience later on.
u/sheriffderek wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'd be curious on the numbers. I read there were \~60,000+ CS grads per year in the US. So you know how many people graduate from CodeSmith per year? I bet they're a very small part of the pie when it comes to boot camps too. General people might have heard of places like Coding
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Rounding up: 7 cohorts X 4 timezones (east, central, west, onsite) + 3 part time is 31 cohorts a year times 35 people is about 1000 as an upper bound.
That said there are about 2000 grads total ever so and from CIRR last year I would peg it at 700 for 2022.
Which makes me realize that Codesmith is actually growing quite fast by adding the NYC onsite.
Enrollment for cohorts has been way slower, numerous people interviewing to start a week later whereas last year it was full months ahead of time.
A cohort has 1 lead instructor, 1 instructor, 1 mentor, and 4 part time TAs. At 150K for lead for 12 weeks and 120K for instructor and mento and $25 an hour for 80 hours a week of TA time. I get $125K a cohort in people cost plus career support, overhead and leadership, etc.. that's shared across cohorts.
But they probably need only 10 people in a cohort paying $210K upfront for a cohort to be profitable.
So they probably won't remove any program any time soon.
We'll see in September 2024 what the numbers actually are.
u/sheriffderek wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I know that they are concentrated larger cities, but just to try and get a visual picture: that would be like 14 grads per US state - per year coming from CodeSmith. (and well - they are in the UK too)
What I'd love to know is how many actual working developers are produced from
u/michaelnovatireplied·
This answers some of the questions: https://careerkarma.com/blog/state-of-the-bootcamp-market-2023/
u/InTheDarkDancing wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
> https://careerkarma.com/blog/state-of-the-bootcamp-market-2023/
I'm not buying that Amazon is one of the biggest bootcamp hires. Is there something I'm not aware of because careerkarma says the following:
> The companies that hired the most bootcamp graduates in 2021 and 2022
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Amazon has the "Amazon Technical Academy" which partners with Kenzie, BloomTech, and more to train people for apprenticeships and entry level roles. BloomTech alone placed 20 people last year, so I could see the sum of people being in the hundreds.
I wish they would explain more on the companies though.
u/thisis-clemfandango wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I wonder if formation takes boot camp grads. They say "1-3" years of experience but that's sort of vague - does that mean work experience?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Hi, we're looking for 1-3+ years of actual work experience as a SWE or SWE-like role. We don't really "teach" people and we are a practice, benchmarking, and feedback-based training model, and we're not a good place to replace classic-style learning.
We work with people as long as it takes to get a job (as long as you keep training and job hunting) but we don't hand you jobs on a silver platter and are NOT a good place to go if you are struggling post-bootcamp and 'desperate' for just any legit job.
We have a small number of people with less than 1 YOE that typically fall into buckets of:
1. Bootcamp grads \~6 months after graduation, who did some contracting or full time teaching at their bootcamp or paid work are are looking to fill in gaps needed for typical bit-tech roles.
2. Self taught - with some contracting work or legit open source contributions - typically at the skill level of entry level engineer already but need some guidance
3. CS grads with a few internships but struggling to get a job, looking for ongoing practice and training
4. SWE-adjacent engineers: e.g. mechanical, data engineering, data analysts, typically with a technical degree and looking to change fields to SWE. also have to meet our technical bar - typically self taught on their own.