Just go back to uni

If it's any consolation I hear this story often and you aren't alone. Bootcamps and some Redditors are all too fast to celebrate the job a few months later but they don't talk about the job being the beginning and not the end. It's a local maxima and there are lower lows and higher highs to come that you need to be prepared for, no matter if you went to the best bootcamp or got a six figure job out of it. And you hit the nail on the head. It is impossible for bootcamp grads to compete head to head with top university grads. Imagine the best bootcamp grad had gone to Stanford CS instead of 12 week bootcamp, the Stanford person of the same person would win 100% of the time. The bootcamp version might be done a heck of a lot faster and spent a heck of a lot less, but they are going to take some time on the job, probably at worse jobs with less talented coworkers, to work their way up. Comparing them to the Stanford version 4 years later, a lot of the person's success will depend on their own aptitude and smarts, and the ones who are better off are special edge cases people who didn't need Stanford or the bootcamp. If this wasn't true then bootcamps would have replaced the university by now and universities would pivot. Not a single university I know of has made a single change to their degree programs as a result of the rise of bootcamps.

Well have you been interviewing people at FAANGs I'm sure you've seen that the vast majority of CS grads come in with numerous FAANG internships and that's what really matters more than anything. I know at Meta we were looking for three internships and the most recent one being at FAANG was the bar to even get an interview If I recall. Someone who's done three internships basically has a year of experience under their belt and that's what really mattered. which is why I'm a huge fan of apprenticeship programs because someone who does a boot camp who has the raw aptitude and the drive who does a year-long apprenticeship at a FAANG a might be able to catch up a little more or two those cs grads in much faster time overall. But what I think is absolutely absurd, is just that bootcamp's brand and market themselves as preparing people better than CS degrees do and 12 weeks versus 4 years. It might be a better option than a 3rd tier, diploma mill CS degree, but there's no bootcamp option competing with the best schools and never can be.

How do you feel about internships though? I agree that the school itself doesn't matter if someone has 3 FAANG internships, but it's a chicken and egg problem because you can't systematically get those internships without going to a top school - in your first year, the fact you even GOT INTO STANFORD is a signal the person is exceptional. At Meta it wasn't about feelings, it was about data - people who came from certain top schools (and also not others!), performed better and progressed better and they focused on recruiting from those schools. If bootcamps systematically produced people of that caliber they would have recruited from them too - the data showed the opposite and they stopped! Don't get me wrong - some of the best people I worked with were self-taught or went to not-top schools! It's just the exception and not the norm and thinking it's scalable is survivorship bias and not based on data!

I mean I don't disagree with the rationale for that arguments but I'm just asking for the data! I helped grow Meta from 200 engineers to about 10K engineers and it was about the 3K mark that without a consistent and data based hiring process you start getting variance. Apple is a company that has the complete opposite and has made it work - each small team has complete autonomy over their hiring process (after recs are approved), and each team hires for whatever they want. So like if one engineer insists open source is important, that team might not hire open source people. If your brand is really strong that approach can work too, other companies that have that process have a lot of complains for opaque and unfair interviews that rely on subjectivity of the interviewers. RE: Internships - it can be different things for different companies, not all are the same. Amazon is actually a bit more open minded to people without degrees in general, it's one of the places where historically people with no experience have been able to get into the L4 entry level pipelines. From talking to people, they fire faster than Meta (despite all the headlines) so Amazon is more willing to take an L4 who seems smart and ambitious and PIP them within a year if they don't perform. Which has pros and cons - there is certainly a huge amount of untapped non-traditional talent and we probably agree on that. The unsolved problem is **how to systematically find them.** I also agree that significant contributions to large open source projects is a good signal - those projects are run more rigid than companies because they need strict contribution cultures for randos across the world to be able to contribute - but it's a surprisingly small number of people to start with and even smaller who live near a FAANG office and want to work there - so it's not a large enough supply. If the response is say - how about we mentor people to work on big projects like Firefox - well Launch School is doing that! And it's also not trivial - instead of a having a senior engineer contributing directly to Firefox, you have to pay that person to mentor people and train them how to do it as well. Ultimately, if I was extremely ambitious and smart, I would probably get there on my own on a big open source project and might be one of the handful of people that self teach to a FAANG that way.

Launch School Core + Capstone works but with caveats - no bootcamp works for everyone 1. Try it first and see if the style is a good fit. I advise this for all bootcamps, but each one has its own style of learning and you want to make sure you connect with it instead of relying on others saying it worked for them. 2. They are small. You get personal attention and support in your job hunt that is effective, but it's very hard to scale past a cohort at a time to maintain what makes them special. This isn't a negative thing, it's actually a positive thing for you as a student, but it means that they will likely stay small and selective and aren't the magical answer for the whole industry that 10000 people a year should go to.

Yeah sure, you can also ask the Launch School founder who is on here, u/cglee who would be better than me at answering.