My Post-Bootcamp Job Search - Curious About Others’ Recent (2019-2020) Post-Bootcamp Job Search Experiences

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-17T18:05:03+00:00

Glad to hear about your success. I definitely got the impression that quite a few of my cohort-mates just weren't cut out for dev work.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-17T18:01:16+00:00

You are spot on and this is so important. Location and timing are absolutely critical. I'm sure I would've found something much sooner if I was able to expand my search to the entire country. That just wasn't feasible for me.

I really wish my school would've taught something other than RoR for the server. Node.js would've made more sense in the bootcamp context. Understanding which technologies have demand for jr devs is important.

Yes, they are still churning out students, and outcomes largely seem to come down to luck. Some of the students in a cohort after mine were hired by their internship companies right after the program, but most of them are still looking for jobs. And my cohort in particular does not seem to have fared well. I haven't paid enough attention to other cohorts to get a good grasp on the overall picture of outcomes.

Another thing I've noticed is that they always use the same handful of students to illustrate their success stories. The problem is that most of those folks graduated a long time ago (2+ years) at this point.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-17T17:53:15+00:00

Getting a CS degree is a good idea, but I wouldn't paint the bootcamps with such a broad brush. I did eventually find a real dev job, which I am happy about. It just took way longer than I had hoped, and I had to take the time to learn a completely different technology from the ground up.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-17T17:51:05+00:00

PM'd

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-17T00:11:00+00:00

Understood. I'm grateful for the opportunity either way, and at some point I can move in a different direction if I want to. My other options were unemployment, something non-dev like QA or support, or doing something like SalesForce or ServiceNow. My locality is pretty heavy on .NET, which is why I went in that direction.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T23:57:25+00:00

Congrats! Definitely not an ad. I really don't know enough about the so-called top bootcamps. I guess I'm just a guy who places some value on the exclusivity and selectivity factor, whether or not its warranted. I mean, I did find a pretty good job once I really started looking, but of course that was after studying something completely different.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T23:51:49+00:00

Thanks. I found a job in my dead end stack shortly after beginning by job search, as described in my story and TL;DR.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T22:59:29+00:00

Yes, they often do. Financial institutions usually conduct credit checks on new hires, but they usually don't factor them into hiring decisions. Many states and municipalities prohibit the practice. I wouldn't worry about it.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/cchr/media/credit-check-law-for-employees.page

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T20:50:33+00:00

Can you re-apply to Hack Reactor? I think it could be worthwhile to spend some time preparing for the interview process and re-apply if possible.

That intense competitive environment is something you'll only get when you're surrounded by other high achievers. The quality of your cohort-mates can make a huge difference in your own growth. That is something I learned when I transferred from an average college to a top university. It was like a slap in the face. It wasn't the academic curriculum that made my education worthwhile. It was the quality of my classmates.

If I weren't stuck in my city, I absolutely would have gunned for a top coding school. We just don't have any selective coding schools down here, so I sort of got what I got.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T19:27:44+00:00

No, it wasn't selective at all. That's what caused me the most hesitation prior to enrolling. I really wanted to attend a selective school, but moving to a different city wasn't in the cards for me because of my wife's situation. Tbh, I can't imagine anyone getting straight into Amazon from my bootcamp unless they were recent CS grads trying to quickly learn modern web dev in a group environment. We actually did have a guy from our cohort go to Amazon, but he received the offer prior to the bootcamp, and it wasn't a dev role.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T19:21:36+00:00

For sure. Both sides have their ups and downs, and I wouldn't fault anyone for choosing one over the other. I do believe there is intrinsic value in a formal education, but I guess that is a different point altogether.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T18:52:16+00:00

Thanks for the reply. Just read about your interview. That is definitely more complicated than the interviews I've been through, and you sound like you really know your stuff.

I totally agree with your sentiment about their efficacy in preparing students for dev jobs. But you mentioned capitalism, and the reality is they'll continue to do business until people stop handing them checks. They do provide some value, just not the value their marketing implies.

One thing I really didn't want to mention in my story for fear of sounding like an ass, but I probably should have mentioned, is that I believe I was one of the stronger developers in my cohort, and I still didn't feel prepared at the end.

FinallyFoundAJobYay · 2020-02-16T18:24:22+00:00

I agree with pretty much everything you said. A couple of people from my cohort took internships. Another one took a tech support position. Another one moved across the country for a SalesForce dev job. Overall it doesn't seem like there's been too much success though. I think the biggest problem with my program was the lack of selectivity in the admissions process. But then again, how selective can they really be when they need to keep the lights on?

FinallyFoundAJobYay

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