Don't attending a coding bootcamp - from a coding bootcamp grad

It's good you can admit it and share it through a reasonable lens (without flipping a table haha). Thanks.

I agree. I was interviewing bootcamp grads since the first ones in 2012 and it has always been horrible from day 1. It's not because of hiring bias. Bootcamp grads actually performed more poorly in general on the job (not ALL OF THEM, but on AVERAGE). Now that doesn't mean there isn't a place for bootcamps or something wrong with the people. It's just not feasible to prepare someone in 12 weeks for a job and it takes bootcamp grads severals to slowly fill in the missing skills their bootcamps left them with.

+100 to this. I try to call these out, when edge case placements are shoved in your face across TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, simultaneously... and when you look into the details you usually find something specific about their background. Like they were employed already before as a SWE, did tons of CS in college but had a different degree, had internships, their "placement" being highlighted was actually their 2nd or 3rd job, etc... I totally understand everyone is unique and has their own story to tell, but why represent these as the norm? Why not take a normal grad who thought they would get a job in 6 months, it actually took 12 months. They thought they would make $150K and they are making $85K. They are happy overall but want to make sure people are prepared and ready if they would consider a bootcamp.... Because if that message was shared NO ONE WOULD GO and spend $25K. This is just Reddit, and not many people check it out relatively speaking, and based on bootcamp enrollments, I think people are smart enough to figure this out on their own hahaha.

+1. "Hiring risk" is the key term here. At big companies, as an employee, HR sees you as a resume and stack of performance reviews... and they run their numbers on which traits correlate to performance. On average, Stanford, CMU, MIT, Berkeley CS grads perform better, so the company recruits more of them. I had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg with about 10 other top performers and I asked everyone to share their stories of how they got there. Almost everyone has an interesting non-traditional pathway. One was Fidji, the CEO of Instacart, and OpenAI board member, who grew up in rural France and worked her way up the ladder over many years. All of these people remember very well where they came from and that's what I love about Silicon Valley. So hiring risk for HR is why we have the system we have, but people with non traditional backgrounds can earn their seat at the table through years of shed work and relentless drive. Going to a bootcamp for 12 weeks doesn't give you a seat at the table and you don't deserve it.

Yeah I see this kind of thing often. I started doing an analysis of bootcamps grads trajectories and if they still had their first job a year out. I didn't complete it, but it was a shockingly high number of people who changed jobs or didn't have a job within a year or so after their first one. The job is just the beginning. Bootcamps sell you the job as the end because for them that's when they advertise you everywhere and call it a day. There's even a bootcamp Codesmith that after promising support for life after, just launched a cash grab AI followup course for $900 for alumni. A completely untested gamble and having the audacity to charge alumni for it. In all fairness, they don't charge for the classroom part of the course as they offer that in their bootcamp now and retroactively give that to alumni for free, so you are paying $900 for 4 Saturday workshops and a monthly "leadership circle". There are a ton of free AI meetups right now and go to those instead and save your money. Meanwhile inflation was running rampant and average base salaries there are down from $130K in 2021 to $117K now... and they increased the price a couple thousand dollars since then! it's really stressful to try to navigate these changes when bootcamps are marketing hard in the face of collapse.