CS Grads who Also Did Bootcamps? Was it Worth It?

This question has been coming up a lot more often recently. I would suggest looking into interview prep and career accelerators instead of bootcamps. I'm the co-founder of Formation (.dev), which is one option, and other things to look into are Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Exponent, Coachable....a lot of very different options here! Specifically at Formation, 11% of engineers who got jobs in 2022 were CS grads with no experience, so it's a smaller case for us but a reasonable option. The idea is to work on bringing your fundamental skills to the top tier tech bar through adaptive practice, benchmarking, several sessions a week with senior engineers and tons of feedback, and mock interviews. All of these programs cost the same as a bootcamp but are much more useful IMO than doing a bootcamp. I work with all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many who did bootcamps way back when. Codesmith is a bootcamp with a super high entrance bar for both skills, intelligence and communication that claims to have 1/3 of people with a CS degree or related degree. So you can also look into that. I know many people who have gone there and people with CS degrees tend to be the top students and get good jobs, but they find the course material not super valuable, and find the community and environment very valuable.

Leetcode isn't niche and more than 5 million people have signed up for it. Data structures and algorithms are the most fair and consistent way to evaluate skills at scale. People can have practical skills in thousands of different frameworks and languages and no company can fairly evaluate those coming in without coming up with small, practical problems, where you can demonstrate your problem solving and coding abilities... i.e. data structures and algorithms The problem is that the way every bootcamp I've seen teaches people is really broken for teaching fundamental skills that the truly tech driven top companies need. Rather they focus on day to day practical skills that non-tech (e.g. banks) and 2nd/3rd tier tech companies need on day one of the job. That's where most graduates end up, so it makes sense! It takes the best graduates from the best bootcamps that I work for several more months alone to improve those fundamentals skills... and no bootcamp has that kind of time for a job that is not likely. If someone is at UC Berkeley and can't get an internship I would NOT recommend a bootcamp over the summer. I would recommend: 1. Volunteer with a professor 2. Find a small startup with Berkeley grads/students and volunteer internship there. 3. Try getting a unpaid internship with a startup in SF by reaching out to founders of YC backed companies based on the area. 4. Make a "startup" yourself. Build something useful for school, like a study tool or a scheduling tool or something and try to get some other students to use it and put that on your resume. More people will use it than will use your bootcamp projects...

I know at least one person that has done recurse simultaneously with Formation, doesn't have to be either or, as Formation works entirely on your schedule.