Highly recommended advice for bootcamps grads and the job market from Gergely (The Pragmatic Engineer)

Highly recommended advice for bootcamps grads and the job market from Gergely (The Pragmatic Engineer) Full post released today is a goldmine of great advice: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-junior-software-engineers/ Transparent Disclosures: I am not affiliated with Gergely, I’ve briefly chatted with him and I have contributed to a piece about Facebook work culture and engineering levels. He mentions Launch School and I am not affiliated with them either. I am the co-founder of Formation.dev which could introduce bias as we help people with 1 - 3 years experience get top tier roles, and we work with a smaller number of bootcamp grads to get jobs and hence we help people overcome the challenges Gergely describes. I don’t want to steal his thunder so read the post but some additional points I would like to call out… these might not make sense without reading. 1. I disagree that 2021/2022 was already chilly before recent freezes. The first half of 2022 felt very frothy with salaries continuing to climb to compete for engineers. And engineers from all the top bootcamps we’re getting pretty good jobs compared to during COVID especially. 2. Agree about survivor bias. Especially here on Reddit, where people give far too much weight to one anonymous person’s opinion who was extremely successful and extrapolate. 3. Super bias, but top tier companies are approachable if you can find the right paths. I completely agree with hiring freezes it is hard and you shouldn’t only be applying to them. I also agree that zero experience roles get flooded with so many applications it’s like the lottery. Sometimes you win the lottery, but there are pathways to many companies off the beaten track and if you have dream companies, don’t be afraid to look for the path to them. 4. Putting in extra effort to get seen. I built something integrating with the Facebook API back in 2009 and that moved be to the top of the resume pile and led to me getting the job. 5. Meaningful open source contributions. This one is a great point. He’s not talking about doing small group projects in 4 weeks and making them open source on paper and then never touching them again. He’s talking about meaningfully contributing to existing open source projects. You get to work with a larger community of engineers on fairly large scale projects and it can be a very valuable experience. It’s very intimidating to jump into these projects but if you can find the courage and the grit to get started, this is a fantastic option. Please share your own thoughts and will try to discuss.

Nice! Can you explain more what you changed?

Hi, I've found this subreddit has a tremendous amount of support for Codesmith, many people claiming right off the bat that it's the top bootcamps, in a league of it's own, etc... but the concrete reasons tend to come down to CIRR reports. Launch School's capstone has extremely strong outcomes as well and I feel like you are fairly transparent about them in your Twitter updates. Myself, I think there is a right program for the right person so I don't pick a favorite and quite frankly Formation does well if all bootcamps do well, but while you're here do you have anything to say about what types of people looking for a top bootcamps might be good for Launch School over other programs?

Yeah he's not an expert in bootcamps, most of his writing is about insider news for very experienced engineers, but it was interesting he called them out specifically. I don't think he has an affiliation to them as he is very clear about his ethics.

Random, but if you have a Mac, "Preview" has a "redact mode" to just like drag over stuff and immediately remove it. Saves a lot of time.