Did you go to a coding boot camp? Which one? Was it a success? In what ways specifically? Can we see your portfolio? Are you happy?

a friend went
Don't expect to be a developer after the bootcamp. You'll practically need to intern / junior for 3 years afterwards somewhere in order to have a decent knowledge base to be considered useful.

I went to a camp.

Granted before that I had dorked around with web development anyway... so somewhat self taught (I mean who isn't to some extent) as well.

I have mixed feelings about camps.

You can't really tell who might be a good developer or who might not. Really almost anyone COULD be a good developer. Like in my class a rando high school grad working as a bank teller "just got it" and damn she was good.

At the same time MOST people suck ass at coding and means a lot of folks spend A LOT of money on those camps and don't get anything out of it.

I would say more than half my class was straight up unemployable for any job involving code... just no way.

Another issues is the camps don't know so you end up in a camp with folks who are going nowhere ... slowing things down for you.

Also keep in mind that YOUR EFFORT and YOUR WORK you put in outside of class will be most of what makes you succeed or fail. Nobody can just sit you in a chair and you become good at it.

A lot of being a good dev is about figuring out things for yourself.

My routine was SLEEP - Camp - Take Care of Family - Code every spare moment - back to SLEEP. And that continued after camp...

A camp CAN be a good way to START learning in a structured way, for some folks (me), but your tenacity, your tolerance for frustration... and effort, and metal flexibility is the key.

@N00bPancakes re: other students slowing you down: this is the biggest problems I see with the ISA model. Just being broke / isn’t the best commonality.

I didn't go, I'm self taught. But almost every Code-Camp graduate we hired at a company that rhymes with Goober was fired in the year following, most of them falling off within 6 months.

These camps aren't magic. They exist to separate you from your money and to make you pass an interview. They don't make you a developer.

what? no. why would i?

and no, you can't see my portfolio, i don't have any, 99% of stuff i've ever done is either in some company's intranet and under NDA, or just under NDA.

@junon ... same experience here.

Fired or burn out.

@junon I kinda wonder why a big company that moves fast and presumably has high expectations ... would pick those kinda folks up.

Like I'm one of them, and there's obviously a larger ramp up time for such folks ... can't move fast with those kinda hires and the fail rate gonna be HIGH.

Mixing those folks with high performers ... seems like a recipe for bad results.

@N00bPancakes We could not legally discriminate based on that alone, as far as I understood.

@junon that ... makes no sense.

Like you can absolutely not pick folks based on education.... at least as far as the law goes.

@N00bPancakes Then it was company policy.

That, or the recruiters wouldn't let us.

For whatever reason, it made no difference. I think at the time, code camps were relatively "new" in that I don't think the industry had yet figured out they are bullshit.

@Midnight-shcode Yeah. I get it. I have most of my stuff under NDA or is just like / not on the internet anymore. But the question isn’t for us ; )

@junon

Yeah. I could see taking those folks as a sort of outreach for some ... concept.

But then you really gotta work hard / close with them to move them along / weed some out ... etc. That requires a lot of structure, effort, resources.

Can't just throw them in the mix and pretend they're a CS master...

I’ll have to work on my wording. I wanted actual boot camp grads to answer this question / but this thread will scare them off! Haha.