Mechanical Engineer Is Bootcamp Worth It?

It depends on you. The bootcamp isn't going to get you a job in 2025, but being very "creative" about your experience will so that you can appear like you have years of SWE experience and get interviews. I've seen a handful of mechanical engineers. If you search on LinkedIn for "oslabs mechanical engineer" you'll find a bunch of bootcamp grads who got jobs in 2020 to 2022. I don't see that many getting jobs anymore though, so even these strategies don't seem to work anymore. You can look through the examples and see some patterns: 1. Call the work "Engineer", "Project Engineer", "Automation Engineer", "Engineering Lead", "Engineering Manager", "Solutions Engineer". And even if that was your real title as a Mech, change the description to focus on all ambiguous work that sounds like it was software-related. 2. List your 3-4 week bootcamp capstone project as Software Engineer work for 1 year that bridges the gap from your previous experience. All of the 4 to 12 month stints you see at things like ReacTime, VNO, Arrow, Trydent, KafkaPeak, DenoGres, OverVue are not actual jobs but 3 week long projects that are framed as a bridge job. These jobs WERE listed as "- Present" when the people got their current job, which also helped a lot! 3. List prior web stuff you did a job. Like if you had a WiX or SquareSpace website in 2020, put yourself down as a Software Engineering freelancer from 2020 to Present. **I don't support this whatsoever but it works** and it's the dirty secret behind the flashy marketing for how bootcamp grads got placed in 2021-2023. Right now though you can see that there are hardly anyone starting a job in 2025 in these.

I'm in your camp on this one. When I interview these people it's apparent in minutes what's going on. There are two strategies: 1. Do this stuff to get the interview but tell the truth in the interview itself and hope the raw technical performance is good enough that they will give you a shot for "potential'. Like a smaller company. 2. Lie and hope to get away with it just one time even if the person typically gets caught. These people aren't getting jobs at good tech companies (it happens but very rarely, a fluke) so pulling one over at an agency in a non tech city where you might only be talking to an engineering manager who doesn't code. I've been studying this for years and at first why mind boggled too. The entry level market is so insane and bootcamp grads look the same on paper so people are doing this just to get noticed. The people who do this aren't bad engineering faking it. They generally have grit and ambition and it's why they are selling their souls to do it. In case it wasn't clear, my personal opinion is that this is super wrong and you shouldn't do it, and even if it does work it just perpetuates the problem. People might have individual reasons for doing this but they are harming all their bootcamp peers on doing so and have to live with that decision.

What are the reasons?