I graduated my bootcamp in 2015 and had a jr developer job with a 50% pay bump within 6 weeks. I had a college degree but in a non-technical field and 0 experience coding before I started the program. In my cohort of ~20 people all but 1 had found gainful employment as software developers within a year, most within 3-6 months.
I completely agree that the value of a bootcamp is having a community to encourage you through the process, everything they teach you can be found online. I also went to a bootcamp that had a good reputation around my city so I think it was legitimizing for someone with no experience and no stories of coding for fun as a teenager.
Even back then hackernews was full of people saying how flooded the market was with bootcampers.
4 years later I grinded leetcode and got a job at a FANG and essentially 6x'd my income from 4 years earlier before I could code. I eventually left that job because I was miserable but thats a whole other story.
Now with 7 years of experience I leave the bootcamp off my resume because of the stigma. I took the specific degree program off my linkedIn and just put "bachelors of science" and let people assume what they want. If anyone asks I just say I'm self taught.
I self-taught myself development by coding 8 hours a day for 9 months. I ended up being much better than majority of people I worked with, including, or I'd rather say especially, engineering grads. I found out that just because you have a degree, doesn't mean you're good at something.
That being said, I still have to vouch for networking being important. In my case it wasn't bootcamp people, but the italian JS community and the one from Rome, where I attended the local JavaScript meetup that got me my first job easier than I would've expected. I still think I would've landed a job without it, but still, it was a good help.
Also, last but not least, I was a chemistry major with 3 published articles on high-impact journals. While nothing about my chemistry curriculum was relevant to software engineering, it definitely helped me into knowing how to study and learn.
I don't think it made any difference on my CV, but it is still making me a much better professional and engineer than majority of my peers who do not learn basics properly to move on in their careers from a techincal point of view.
That's the most important point in this article. That clichéd "everyone should code" line you hear isn't true. Or the standard "you should code" response on Reddit every time someone asks what job they should do. If you can't focus for long periods, coding is not for you. If you can't handle banging your head against a bug for several days straight, it's not for you. If you don't like solitary work, it's not for you.
Bootcamps supposedly used to be good, nowadays even the "best" have largely cashed out and don't care much for education. This is an expected result when the top employers put almost 0 funding into education, no feedback, complain, and outsource their work anyways.
I've met 0 skilled workers who came from bootcamps and plopped down at a job, and I think it is disingenuous to assume this would be the case. Part of me thinks that immediate job skills isn't the goal, and I think pro bootcamp operators know this.
I wouldn't say they are without value or purpose though, a bootcamp is like take-your-friend-to-work-day where people who recognize they might have an interest can have a taste of what we actually do besides wearing hoodies and cashing checks. Sure every day life isn't all laptop stickers and free pizza, but a bootcamp puts your hands in the middle of our work skills, and you get at least some idea of what this trade entails.
When you reframe the 'bootcamp' and remove the expectation that someone is immediately employable after, what you're left with is a classifier to discern who'd warrant further effort, and who's better off checking out a different trade for their mid-life-change.
In my opinion, bootcamps are best for two types of people: new/young folks who may be interested in this field of work, and suits who want to understand more about what their cofounder counterparts are up to when the "please dont knock" sign is on the door.
Is this feedback from people rejecting you? Always be very skeptical of feedback with rejections. People often have reasons to not be exactly honest. I think it’s a YC phrase for fundraising to “listen to the no but not the why”.
The feedback I refer to above was given by other people who saw my cv.
I have been told by people who rejected me without an interview that they were looking for people with "more experience", and "experience with particular technologies". I have also been told that my master's degree didn't matter in the decision. I had a 1 year long contract where I built a custom AutoML system during BSc, a 3 month FT internship after BSc, a 6 month PT internship during BSc.
I have been frequently asked during interviews whether I feel any attachment or have any issues working with a different stack/language, and I don't understand why that question is asked since a language or some tech are just tools that can easily be learned.
I've seen our shop do this. It is not uncommon to run the same set of questions for someone who has been developing on a stack to someone who spent similar time with a masters.. and the person with the masters lacks the deep skills in those specific programing areas. It is reasonable to wonder if that is short sighted, but it definitely happens. Some folks are just intimated. Just keep hunting and hone the tech you want to work with.
You would be surprised on the attachment question.... you have the right attitude. Some don't. It often revels more about a person than one would expect.
I know it's trash advice when you can't find work - but, do you really want to work for some place that thinks you're too academic and too technical? I was always told my resume made me seem like I was too academic, until I found a job working with academics. Non-technical, but the experience is still relevant, I think.
> I took the specific degree program off my linkedIn and just put "bachelors of science" and let people assume what they want.
We had an offer rescinded for something like this when it showed up in their background check (person mislead about a university title). We didn't care about the education or title and we valued self-taught people but not being honest about something in the resume was cause for disqualification (what else should we trust?). Personally, I'd just leave it out, no need to embellish or anything.
> I had a college degree but in a non-technical field and 0 experience coding before I started the program.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation. Been a programmer since I was 14 but ended up pursuing another field. I'm making good money but the USD exchange rate in my country is seriously making me reconsider. If I end up doing this, I'll learn whatever I need to be competitive in the market. I suppose bootcamps are a nice way to streamline this process.
May I ask what made you switch fields? Did you have reasons other than salary?
I was 24 and couldn't find any work in my desired field. I was working stupid office jobs and looking for a better options. I started taking some coding night classes and really enjoyed it, I believed the hype about the market need for developers, so I decided to do the full time bootcamp.
It was setting up schemas in posgress and learning the basics of using a sql database; setting up a web api to auth users and connect to that database and serve json with Node, then building a JS frontend to login users and fetch and display that data with backbone. It was done in the format of building a couple applications in teams of 2-3.
My first job didn't use those specific languages or technologies but everything was close enough to what I had done in the bootcamp that I wasn't completely lost. I knew enough to be a good jr developer and learned 20x in my first 2 years on the job than in the bootcamp.
I've since built/done lots of services, data pipelines, database migrations, devops pager rotations, large/complex frontend applications. The bootcamp was really just a jumping off point. The real learning starts when you get to the job.
Ya that actually sounds like a pretty decent course. I asked because the impression I've got from bootcampers over the last few years has basically been some React based thing and not much else outside that, except probably some basic node stuff
> But the main advantage of the bootcamp to me was not technical, it was the network. Apart from providing a friend group which will likely end up in referrals down the road, the best bootcamps will introduce you to companies and have relationships with them.
I’d love to understand this in detail. When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I’m convinced there’s massive upside in bringing in more talent - people who learn in their own time or through boot camps. Unfortunately, senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage.
>Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.
Have American citizens ever tried to "check their privileges" and imagine how a life of a "visa-slave" changes after crossing the American border? I can give you some hints into my "living experience" of such a crossing.
Yesterday: an American lawyer sent some docs supporting my H1B visa over our Academy institution fax machine. The fax machine ran out of paper. The management asked me to pay for the paper, or buy them some. I couldn't afford the paper, so I borrowed $700, paid for the fax supplies and for a ticket to the US.
Today: I've got $5000 moving bonus, got $30k salary contract and got the first task, like:
- We've sold something to Swedes today, you have 2 weeks to develop it. What do you need?
- A Sun workstation, and an X.25 link to Sweden.
- Done. And give your passport to Olga - you are going to Stockholm when done.
In 2 weeks our part was done, but Swedes were not able to finish their part and asked for 2 more weeks...
I was an employee #27, after that task and some other completed projects my salary was increased, then doubled, then again increased, then again doubled... our company went to #1 in its market, then IPOed, and 4 years after, still on the "slave" H1B visa I've found $1M on my bank account (unfortunately, it was an investment bank, lol, but that's another story).
So, my step through the US border on the H1B visa was not a step into slavery. It was liberation.
You have every reason to take pride in your work and how far you've come, but you're missing the point. "Slave labor" is of course an exaggeration (and an exaggeration that shouldn't be made lightly) but the point is you didn't have as much freedom in that job as your Western colleagues.
You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you. It sounds like you're happy for your time at that company, but a lot of H1B workers find themselves in unpleasant work conditions that they don't have the same freedom to leave as their American counterparts. Their employers know they can subject them to a worse environment because they have more riding on it, whereas an American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway. The problem isn't that it doesn't make anyone's lives better in the end, the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
>you didn't have as much freedom in that job as your Western colleagues.
Very true.
>You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you.
Not very true. I never worked hard in my life. I worked productively. Yes, I've done in my first 2 years in the USA more than in my 15 years in the home country. Because in my home country you had to share a Sun workstation with 10 other teams, and X.25 card? You can order it for the next year delivery, at it may be delivered, but never on time.
Swedes were late because they didn't know that you can implement the needed subset of the ASN.1 encoding using a simple, hand-made stack machine.
>American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
In my days the H1B quota was not immediately exhausted, so there was a window of opportunity each year. Raise the H1B limit - and you'll deliver almost the same amount of freedom to H1B workers.
>That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway.
My point is that it's more complicated than that. The employer - in the present situation - can 1) hire an American worker, 2) hire an H1B employer. My point is that option 2 - in the present world - is actually an increase of liberty in the world, not slavery.
>the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
The ethics of the employer do not concern me that much. I can't change them. I can hope to change your ethics, ethics of a person I am directly talking to. And my concern is that you are labeling H1B program as an "indentured servitude", while it actually increases liberty in the world. That's my concern, or at least that's a paradox I clearly see.
Congratulations. You got lucky. Now say the same thing to the many Indians stuck in a dead end job and unable to leave during probably the best market for software engineers because they're worried about their visa status. Or the engineers worried about upcoming layoffs/recession and being forced to go back to their home country.
It always amazes me how Americans picture the companies doing "H1B" as evil and exploitative. But in reality it's only an opinion that people not using them have.
Any person using an h1b will tell you how happy they are of having it. Its they alternative/escape to their country's reality. But Americans having no idea what that means, are fast to dismiss it.
Reminds me of the comments about China workers working and living in Foxconn or similar manufacturing jobs: everybody was quick to judge how "bad" the conditions are there, while in reality the increase of quality of life for a lot of them was huge compared to their previous life in their rural towns.
As a Mexican living in Mexico I've seen some of those realities, and I'm sure most of the people that go to the USA from Mexico on a TN or h1b visa had it way tougher here.
People who express concern about H1-B "slaves" and evil exploitation are not doing so out of a genuine interest for the well being of immigrants. They are doing so out of fear that those immigrants are taking away jobs that they feel entitled to.
I'm not American and know how great it feels to come to the US. I also know the feeling of getting citizenship and the freedom it gives me. I also know that many of my Indian friends will never see that privilege because of how long they would have to wait before they get a greencard.
I'm advocating for a better path to citizenship that's more reasonable than this insane system of H1B lottery and greencard waitlists that we have currently. I'm not sure why that's such a divisive position.
> I also know that many of my Indian friends will never see that privilege because of how long they would have to wait before they get a greencard.
There's A LOT of Mexicans that go to the US under a TN Visa which will NEVER have that privilege due to the nature of that Visa. They are still very very happy to have the visa and work there.
> Have American citizens ever tried to "check their privileges" and imagine how a life of a "visa-slave" changes after crossing the American border? I can give you some hints into my "living experience" of such a crossing.
Why should they? Why should they care about you coming in and dumping their wages?
I don’t think anyone is saying “they took our jobs”. I think it’s not so black and white.
1. There’s a race to the bottom to show infinite growth. This is the way of American capital markets. And this leads to cost cutting, bringing down wages and perverse incentives.
2. H1B and other programs that were intended for people with exceptional skills are handed out in mass to immigrants - particularly Indians - and we can be okay with that.
But the reality is, there are often times no exceptional skills here. The test taking and interviewing has been designed to cater to Indian nationals. They’re great test takers, which doesn’t necessarily translate into productivity or being a top worker or producer of value.
This is a corporation importing foreign workers as a cost cutting measure. An engineer from India will be happy earning 75% of the wage since they also get to move their family to the US, with healthcare and all the benefits.
The tragedy is that existing top talent doesn’t necessarily want to work at a company like Amazon. And so Amazon will import Indian nationals, because they’re willing to put in longer hours. They have little choice. They’re risk averse, and the last thing they want is to get managed out and have to return to India.
Amazon does this at scale. It reflects in the quality of their products and services.
Nice stereotype man. Again, I am Swedish and I consider myself a leftist. Can you argument and not resort to ad hominem?
How is it a fallacy when it is real?
Here is an example from the building sector here:
The Vaxholm Conflict
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/06/swed-j27.html
TL:DR Building company wanted to employ Latvian workers at a lower rate of pay than Swedish workers.
I, personally, was also affected when Polish workers where just plain cheaper in IT so they fired all of us.
Now, I of course blame the companies, the capitalist systems, but I also blame the people. It is only human.
> I, personally, was also affected when Polish workers where just plain cheaper in IT so they fired all of us.
How did that go, for the company? Transferring knowledge about a large software project can be hard ... Almost impossible if everyone gets replaced at the same time?
(I wonder if you were building software or doing more sysadmin things)
Workers and companies will move toward the money. That's a constant. Here's the fallacy: we have only ourselves to blame. We are the voters in these republics. We can set the rules of who gets to come, who gets to work and how they should be treated. The citizens are the only check on this capitalist, free-market system.
We voted Sweden into EU thinking that the Swedish model would persist within. That was false and we had to let the flood of cheap labor in.
The union hostile organization "Svenskt Näringsliv" and companies wanted this of course and lobbied for it. Including calling people in the union racists for not wanting to wage dump.
And high skilled workers should get to come and work, no strings attached. The fact that some people complain of facing legit competition in such high-wage jobs and even call themselves "leftist" is quite sad. I suppose that when you're that privileged, actual equality feels like oppression.
What's the fallacy about pitting your own citizens against foreign workers who must work for low wages and crap wages or face deportation? Jobs are a zero sum game. Don't forget - once you bring in a firehose of foreign workers, the ability for workers to collectively bargain is harmed. I have seen firsthand the drop in quality of life in enterprise software companies over the past decade due to the H1B system producing scores of yes-men, incapable of saying no to their superiors over fears of losing their job.
Not a fallacy at all. USD has extremely favorable exchange rates to the vast majority of currencies. In my country, it's currently 1 USD = 5 BRL. A 40kUSD/year salary will make someone quite rich here. This obviously devalues the work of people operating in the developed nation. They won't pay the normal salaries if they can get away with it.
I’m charactering it that way, although it’s less blatant. Ask any amazon director and they’ll go in and on about hiring being next to impossible in the US. Entire legions of Amazon are either entirely in India or H1B or OPT Indian nationals. It’s no secret their visa situation keeps their hands tied.
> Ask any amazon director and they’ll go in and on about hiring being next to impossible in the US
Everyone I've ever heard talk about working at Amazon has complained about it, one wonders if their reputation as an awful place to work has something to do with why hiring is hard
I don't believe any of that "hiring is impossible in the US" BS. What these companies are really saying is they don't want to reduce the workload that results in needing so many extra hires. And of course, once you introduce foreign workers who now make a majority of the workforce, you also break down the ability for workers to collectively bargain.
Its not about the visa power imbalance, its that a person who graduates a bootcamp today will need about 4 - 5 years of highly focused coding to become as productive as the Indian L4/L5 engineer that they would be compared to in this real comparison. It's easy to hire inexperienced devs in the US, but inexperienced devs are not productive.
> who graduates a bootcamp today will need about 4 - 5 years of highly focused coding to become as productive as the Indian L4/L5 engineer that they would be compared to in this real comparison
First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
A boot camp engineer absolutely can be as productive as any other L4 hire, Indian or not Indian. I think the L4 Indian hires in particular come better prepped for the leet style coding interviews. But in terms of quickly ramping up and becoming productive engineers, there’s absolutely nothing unique about a hire from India in many, if not majority of cases.
There are other stronger incentives for indexing on non resident hires. I could pay you market rate at $200K/year + equity that vests over four years. Or, I can bring a person from India and pay them $140K a year, reduced equity grant, and for the most part, I know that person isn’t going to quit. Especially with certain cultures that are more risk averse, they’re going to think twice, even if another employer is willing to offer sponsorship.
[Levels are confusing, I was using the non amazon leveling where l3 is entry, l4 intermediate, l5 is senior, for this post I'll use amazon leveling, l4 = entry, l5 = intermediate].
> First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
Lets look at this from the perspective of the Director/VP, you're looking at filling headcount in your org, 25 seats. Its May, and you're behind the targets that were given to you in January. You have easy to source from talent pools (intermediate level or fresh masters degree graduate L5 H1Bs from India) and bootcamp graduates (3 months of coding experience). Your budget can pay up to 200k/person, which is much higher than the going rate for either of these profiles, so comp isn't a problem. Your boss (VP/SVP) is largely evaluating you on your ability to staff your org and complete projects. Do you fill these 25 seats using L5 Indian immigrants, or fresh bootcamp grads?
At Amazon, a director would either bring the Indian immigrants. Hell - he will bring them from his own city in India.
But if you’re asking me what I would do - I’d probably look for anyone who is a competent hire, without favoring H1Bs, and try to evaluate them a bit more than a leetcode style interview.
As I was saying, Amazon has entire organizations that are H1Bs. These are stable businesses that I don’t believe are really growth focused in 2022z
If we want to focus on costs, I think there are better options to deprecate and sunset entire services. There’s also significant opportunity at Amazon to trim the fat. Not necessarily firing people but moving off places that aren’t as valuable and moving them onto initiatives with a meaningful ROI.
Could you kindly elaborate on the latter? Are you suggesting Amazon could outsource more of their SDE jobs to India, a huge fear of mine as an engineer in the west
Talent is global now, but culture and time zones still matter. For the top 15% of companies and talent offshoring is less about “pay people less” and it’s more about “hire a team of 80 people in a year”. It’s extremely difficult to hire a team of 80 US based engineers in 12 months, even with top of market pay, even with fancy stock and remote work. It’s much easier to do this in Latam for example because there is more slack in the labor market.
Is it the slack? Or is it the fact that US-based companies have much more to offer this pool than they can offer the comparable group in the US. In particular, much higher pay than locally available and the prestige of working for a US firm.
This is a very accurate hypothesis. I live and work in LatAm and know several CTOs of startups over here. The last 2 years have been ruthless for Engineering leaders around here: lots of turnover of Devs that are being hired by US companies throwing loads of money at them. While the local tech companies cannot afford to get engineers as they are unable to compete on salary.
It's great for ICs but terrible for leaders, particularly of small/starting startups .
It's already happening. Amazon has it's biggest office in Hyderabad. They literally hire tens of thousands of Indian devs for 30-40k dollars per year. The talent pool in India is much bigger than US. A lot of SDE jobs are definitely moving in India. Indians are good at tech due to their STEM focussed education, work harder(due to economic instability), complain less and come cheaper. A perfect opportunity for corporate America to exploit. All American companies from Adobe to Goldman to Intuit have offices in India.
FAANG companies understand full well that that at their scale they cannot go into e.g. the hardware market like ordinary consumers, and demand something that perfectly meets their requirements at minimum cost in the quantities they require off the BestBuy shelf. They're going to have to do some custom R&D, partner with suppliers, grow products either internally or for which they are the first / primary customer, acquire relevant startups, make long term purchase contracts, etc.
I don't see why the same wouldn't be true of the labor market.
I get what you're saying but if you're comparing fresh grads I think that comparison is far too unfavorable. If you mean someone who already has years of experience, sure, but that's not just because of the boot camp.
The huge majority of H1Bs are given to L4+ (aka non entry level) engineers. These directors/VPs have headcount to fill and would prefer a productive L4 to a "needs a lot of training" L3 every day of the week. IMO the real issue here is that there is no rational incentive for any company to take on an L3 engineer now, regardless of H1B or bootcamp status. An L3 is going to join your company, receive 18 months of training where they are genuinely not worth what you are paying them AND they are a drag on your org, then leave in months 20-28 of their employment, usually shortly after a promotion to L4. So you put in 18 months and if you're lucky you get back 2 to 10 months of productivity.
The problem is that you ofent need to job jump to get increases when you get experience. I think companies shot themself in their foot by punnishing "loyalty" in general.
What I have never understood is why don't FANG companies hires local American Programmers/Engineers for trial periods.
Hire them for a few weeks, and fire if necessary. It doesn't take more than a few days to weed out the fakers, and identify the diamond.
I say local because it's cruel to hire a guy from across the country just to be let go.
We all know most degrees, and designations are dubious at best.
Why not try out a bunch of local Americans whom live near the worksite, and keep the best person? (I guess some companies do that with interns, but what I'm proposing is a bit different. The prospective hires will be tested throughly at what they claim they know.
It seems like most younger job applicants would jump at the chance to work for a good company?
I'm not saying don't test them throughly before a temporary hire. Make the test difficult. Testing doesn't cost much with Zoom, and this welcoming technology.
In every job I had the best employee was mainly self-taught, and didn't have a great resume.
It seemed like they worked harder because they didn't have all the spinish behind their name, especially in this relatively new industry.
What I think many here don't understand is from a big tech POV (certainly my experience) Jr swe hires (new grad, L3 at G) barely break even for you, not that much better then interns.
You really only want to hire people who will make it to Sr (L5) in a few years. That is the level where they are fully self sufficient and don't need constant support from someone more Sr.
The perception (that I share) is that most (not all!) boot camp grads that interview as well as new CS grads still have less long term potential to make it to L5. They have done great learning basic programming on their own. Few will go much past that (compared to CS grads).
>What I have never understood is why don't FANG companies hires local American Programmers/Engineers for trial periods.
While many companies, formally or otherwise, have some sort of probationary period, the general understanding is--unless you've really misrepresented your skills and the company probably screwed up the hiring process--you're not going to be let go after a few weeks. (Absent major organizational/financial changes.)
Even for a local job, I would be very unlikely to quit an existing job--or even put interviewing on hold--to take a job with an explicit trial period.
(Now, sure, if I had just graduated from a boot camp or other degree program and didn't have immediate alternatives, maybe.)
I'm not sure if "visa situation keeps their hands tied" is correct. Its certainly more paperwork sure, but given the current job market its quite easy to switch jobs on H1B or even OPT.
> Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job
Think this statement explains the fast success of the writer. The drive to experiment and find solutions is so valuable, and surprisingly in short supply.
As a hiring manager, one of the big hesitations I have re: bootcamp grads is whether they need to be spoon-fed, or have the hunger to move things forward. Especially true for startups that tend to bet more on potential vs. raw experience. For anyone in this boat, https://topstartups.io/ is a good place to start
Thanks for the link. I've been working in old and/or biggish tech for my 4 years so far, and only recently joined a startup and something about it just deeply works for me. The newness and smallness of it all makes me feel paranoid that if I don't do it, it won't get done, so I've been moving fast and making shit happen instead of what I had been doing, which is relaxing into the good work situation and not learning as much as I could.
Pretty much every company I've worked with not just doesn't care about bootcamps, but actively avoids them. They prefer self-taught over scammed-into-crash-course. In particular, they don't trust that any github projects were completed independently.
In my experience they're often not that favorable to self-taught developers either. Even after I had years of experience under my belt I'd have people telling me to take a big demotion to work at their small company, or acting like they were amazed I solved a simple coding problem for them. Not insurmountable but a real phenomenon.
It's so weird to be reviewing resumes for a entry-level position and you see 3-4 with the same exact project.. I do look though their github and mentioned projects pretty deeply too to find any standouts which they have been once or twice but it's rare
I’ve done the same and interviewed people whose resume said “interviewed customer to solicit project requirements; implemented them on-time and to-spec; iterated to improve based on customer feedback” only to have the candidate reveal that these were entirely mocks and made up customers and requirements. That, coupled with the horrific performance of the first two classes of grads from the program had us strike that program from our sourcing.
I have walked through github code that a candidate has posted on their resume, asking about choices made as we went, potential improvements, etc. and usually the answers were some version of "the instructor said we should do it that way."
Seems like it'd be pretty easy to ask them about the project and at least if they understand it/have thoughts on why they did what they did? But yeah seems like anyone could just copy a repo and post it as their own. Hmmm.
I've never hired anyone from a boot camp, but I work with a community college that offers a 16 months program and the juniors out of it have been great. a 8-10 week boot camp feels too much like "cramming for the big exam" to me.
>When I was at Amazon, we didn’t take boot camp grads very seriously, and in recent years the company only looked into this to increase diversity hiring, specifically boot camps oriented towards either women or the LGBT community.
I think because average candidate quality of bootcamp grad probably pretty low, due to shortness of the program and people thinking all they need to do is complete the bootcamp, when really you need to stay learning for years.
Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.
Well, the thing is, if you ever do student interviews you'll realize many people in CS programs appear not to be getting that much from the classes either.
Maybe so, but if the argument against entertaining hiring boot camp grads is "many of them aren't good," then one must consider that the argument applies equally well to the other place most people try to source junior devs.
I think the implied problem is that the CS programs are passing these people.
Someone signing up for a class and not learning anything is a problem. Someone passing a class and not learning anything is a big problem for the signaling power of that degree.
A CS course might cover the architecture of git, or the technical underpinnings but probably shouldn't teach you how to do the basics. In my program this sort of skill was expected to be learned on your own, or maybe a single optional tutorial session with the TA
My uni has an on-prem installation of Github and this is where you upload and collaborate on your solutions. This isn't course specific, this is just what you do.
It’s odd to me that you’d expect them to. The CS program I was in used github for collaboration on a couple projects, but nothing really covering git tooling. All my classmates were either already familiar with it, or more than capable of figuring it out with a search or two. I’m guessing your program covered material that required a little more effort than a google search to build basic competency in?
How do you expect people to collaborate if they can't git? Git is not that easy to grok, not even for Ph.d. students who successfuly completed some very complex scientific research (I am trying to teach Git a few of them so it's very visible to me).
Making it the only way to send in homework motivates people to learn the absolute basics (I haven't seen anyone learn branching like this), but also pisses them off and a lot of times they don't want to use Git at all after that experience.
If a student is technically inclined, presumably anyone in a CS program, then the bare minimum of git should be accessible. At least what is necessary for basic collaboration. Re-basing & cherry-picking, bisecting, etc. and the implementation details of git along with other more advanced bits aren’t remotely necessary for this kind of collab.
A decent grasp of cloning, committing, and pushing seemed to be enough. Conflicts are inevitable, and will present a challenge to someone new to the system, but they’re not insurmountable. Good IDE integrated tooling probably goes a long way on this point.
Git will be a speed bump for a student that hasn’t already encountered an scm before. I didn’t take a poll, but I don’t recall any of my classmates encountering issues that they couldn’t work out.
> All my classmates were either already familiar with it, or more than capable of figuring it out with a search or two. I’m guessing your program covered material that required a little more effort than a google search to build basic competency in?
I did come across this charitable expectation in my CS coursework where you were given tools and expected already to know or to learn on your own. Which is fine if you want to weed people out. I can understand where someone might be frustrated if you hand them a tool and expect them to know or figure it out while they're learning new material.
Problem is, schools expect students to do this with like 100 tools and give no guidance on what to do, and why. It's absolutely overwhelming.
Even as a professional SW engineer for 10+ years, when I join a new job, the amount of new tools and workflows is overwhelming - and that's when I at least understand the descriptions. Dumping all that on a student is just idiotic, not good teaching.
I get what you’re saying. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by git, but I’d been working with it for a couple of years, so there’s a clear bias. I did run into frustration with other tools, though.
Maybe git, in particular, does deserve some specific focus given its unique status and ubiquity in the industry.
Thank you for the acknowledgement. I appreciate your consideration of an alternative view. Not everyone gits it at first and it takes some effort to learn.
CS programs that don't cover version control (as a concept) are a real head-scratcher to me.
Git didn't exist yet when I was in college, but day 1 was still going over version control as a concept and it was made clear you'd get a zero on any assignments if you didn't use it.
> Also Amazon is top tier, wouldn't expect someone with 3 months experience being able to keep up unless they were really top notch.
I attended a bootcamp in 2015 and know two people, one in my cohort, and one in the next, who both got jobs at Amazon right out of the bootcamp. At the time, cohorts were every 6 weeks with 80 people/cohort, so that's ~1 out of 80 bootcamp grads who made it into Amazon (granted, with a small sample size), with more in FAANG generally (Google was more open to bootcamp grads than the others).
bootcamp people should be brought on as interns or some special level, most have only a few months experience. New grads have minimal expectations on them despite in theory having at least 4 years of coding/CS experience, some of them with even more if they took classes during high school.
I tried to get my previous company to start an apprenticeship program. The CEO agreed that it was a good idea, but kept pushing it for well over a year. I left, and it’s doubtful that it’ll ever happen.
But I still think it’s a great idea for companies to try it. There are a ton of benefits. But I think the best one is that you get a much longer view of how someone could perform than you’d get with a traditional interview cycle. And interview judges someone at a single point in time. An apprenticeship would be able to determine their trajectory.
I used to work at a smaller company and they had a relationship with a local boot camp where they would take in a number of their grads in roles that were somewhere between support engineer and software engineer. You have to keep in mind that Amazon challenges with hiring are quite different than those faced by a smaller company. Sometimes it's hard just having enough people in the funnel.
Pretty similar experience at Palantir. The CEO would get up on stage every quarterly on-hands and say, almost verbatim, "Where are the people from the bad schools? The best candidates are at the bad schools!"
We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters."
To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
This has got to be satire. You don't trust schools outside the top 4-5? Harvard is 16. Dartmouth is 49. Maybe if you had said the top 50 or 100 but this is so out of touch lol.
Everybody says the only hire the top 10%, or 5% or 1% but this conveniently tip toes past the fact that the top 80% are rarely looking for jobs and the true top 25% never applies after their first job.
We run high-touch recruiting programs with a small number of schools. We send people to their career fairs. We take multiple years to build a strong presence on campus. Our recruiting team has finite resources and time.
As a result, our hiring program only directly targets Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, UW, UM, and a small set of other US schools. Recently, we dropped Northwestern from our list, because it just wasn't yielding a good number of candidates.
We obviously hire candidates from a variety of other schools and backgrounds, but we don't seek them out. For example, we'll reach out to you if someone already at Palantir makes a strong recommendation. But we are absolutely not looking for you as a first priority ahead of our college hiring.
None of the Thiel Fellow recipients listed on Wikipedia have any mention of a completed undergraduate or postgraduate degree. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them do but being a college dropout is definitely more common than having completed college in any normal terms.
Choosing to use your limited recruiting resources wisely is one thing. Saying that most schools outside the top 4-5 are diploma mills where students hire people to do their classwork is straight up lying, and deserves to be called out.
I thought that the HN crowd, on average, strongly believed that CS programs filled students' heads with theoretical garbage, and that most students just parroted back the textbook to get through assignments and rode each other's coattails to get through group projects.
This is our experience with our candidates. If you think there's an arbitrage opportunity here, best of luck to you in your recruiting endeavours.
> ... believed that CS programs filled students' heads with theoretical garbage
I'm not sure I'd call my algorithms, operating systems, and core CS classes theoretical garbage, but I guess I value not dedicating semesters to the front end framework or GitHub repository of the week. If anything, I now regret not paying more attention during my undergrad.
I don't want to extrapolate this too much for obvious reasons, but did this firm also view math, physics, etc. degrees as full of theoretical garbage?
It's just such a shame to see in practice. It's not like these company's workforces are doing something extremely innovative to warrant 1000s of engineers from elite schools; it's always the same web app, written in the same libraries, interacting with the same type of backends.
I don't know who said the quote but it went like "The best minds of my generation are working to get people to click ads." The same idea plays out here as well. You want all the prestige candidates to work on your CRUD apps.
I kind of understand the political backlash against tech now...
My own grad school happens to have a top 4 CS program (UIUC), but I went there for math (was top 15 at the time, not sure how it has done since). Some of the stories of people I met in my grad program were fascinating, there were people there who were likely smarter than most students at most of the elite universities - one particular extremely smart person I met even turned down top math programs in favor of a full scholarship at a lesser known public school for undergrad. My own personal background is a bit fascinating in some ways as well, but it never comes up in interviews - I'm at a FAANG with most of the achievements notched for a promotion to staff SWE, and my brother was promoted to staff research scientist at another FAANG for an extraordinary business-wide accomplishment. Neither of us coded before trying to get into the tech industry (my brother has a PhD in Chemistry from a reputed program).
I've learned throughout my life that focusing so much on where people went to school might cause you to miss smart and/or revolutionary people. People don't really talk so much about the schools people like Steve Jobs went to. Lots of very smart people are rejected by the likes of the Ivies, or not gotten the head start in life that would've gotten them placed at the most prestigious schools or programs. Some people's lives took a different turn for reasons that may have caused them to miss out on opportunities earlier in life, but life events created resolve & the will to make a switch & become successful. I think it's very unfair/silly to pass judgment on someone just due to what school they went to (I certainly don't really care when I'm interviewing someone) - there are actually a lot of very smart people who never had any such privileged background out there. We should be striving to find them not only because it could be very beneficial for business, but it's also the right thing to do.
Do you only hire from CS programs? I’ve worked with a wide variety of developers, probably only 50% of which had CS degrees, and they weren’t any better than anyone else.
The best software developer I’ve ever worked with was a graduate from an architecture program. A close second was a guy who was a middle school teacher before turning to software. I’ve also worked with some really excellent CS people.
A lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci.
I still look for developers from computer science programs mostly because that’s an easy place to find people who really love creating software and systems.
> lot of software development, even at very high levels, has very little too do with what they teach in Comp Sci.
Indeed, I studied Maths & Philosophy and I always tell people that the Philosophy was a lot more useful to my career as a software developer than the Maths. (Analytic) Philosophy involves a lot of probing people's assumptions until you get to a clear idea of what they truly believe. Which is rather similar to the process of teasing clear requirements out of stakeholders.
>> Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.
This isn't just reporting Palantir's hiring, this is offering a personal assessment that the majority of CS programs are crap and their graduates are likely as not to be cheaters. It's very pretentious and presumably offends most people here, who probably went to "lower-tier schools." Not really surprising that it would provoke a negative reaction.
I was an underachieving ADHD having bad-at-math kid with no prospects for the future. I dropped out of high school and taught myself programming and system administration, by reading two programming books and going through HOWTOs (remember those? Sorry kids they don't exist anymore, you'll have to make do with 1000 random blog posts) to set up server software and networks etc.
Because of my unstructured learning and random hobby type direction it took me a couple years to get proficient, but eventually I knew more about systems admin than people who'd been doing it professionally for years. I got hired for peanuts by a startup, and networked through User Groups to a better job that paid more.
My career's been nearly 20 years with no higher education or any other skillset whatsoever, bad at concentration and memorization, no bootcamps or teachers or mentors. I'm not a genius. If I can do it, you can do it.
An unlimited amount of free information and learning is out there on the internet. Go and get it, learn it, practice it. Network and find someone who wants to pay you chump change and build that resume.
Also remember there are a lot of roles today in tech. Many don't require a ton of technical chops. Figure out what they are and what they entail, and target your learning towards one. Even lower end roles pay better than most other jobs, and you can always pivot to another role later once you have some work on your resume.
It’s under appreciated what having a specific passion - and continuously exercising it over time - can do. It does wonders. It’s essentially finding reward in the journey itself.
ADHD, dropping out, etc are all beliefs that society labels as “non-productive”, but when somebody has passion and determination and a lot of time doing what they enjoy doing with no reward other than feeding this passion, then that’s all it takes. Consider yourself lucky because in my experience a very small number of people can do this, nobody wants to put the time it takes. Sometimes it takes decades. Coincidentally my form of ADHD disappears once I am in the flow, makes me wonder if ADHD is just aka for “I just don’t fundamentally enjoy what I am doing therefore my brain needs to reward itself in other ways”.
Even better if we end up pursuing a nice hobby in a booming field like technology.
Reality is that most people give up, because ultimately they pursue fields they are not deeply interested in to begin with. The ultimate curse: to dedicate our life to something we don’t care because we didn’t spend enough time exploring what we really cared about.
I’ve got basically the identical back story. High school dropout, ADHD/ASD, can’t handle structured learning.. but I sure as hell liked staying up all night playing with code, exploring the depths of the internet and every single aspect of how it all works from hardware to software.
Did freelance stuff for a few years making websites for local businesses, graphic design for nearby restaurants and retail stores, fixing computers from my share-house bedroom, etc. Ultimately got some pretty dead-end tech support jobs in telcos and SMEs which taught me workplace etiquette and how to deal with clients/stakeholders. Then did some 3-6mth contracts with some pretty big companies from there, including government. One of those had a manager who understood ASD and took my under his wing, and I got a full time 6 figure role there founding an internal web team (taking over the main website and intranet from an outsourced company, building/deploying whatever web apps departments needed). Workplace training programs moved me up from there to a variety of roles and into security then management.
Still never finished high school or any tertiary education, I like to say I fell my way upwards. I have no idea what I’m doing professionally, I just like playing with computers.
There's an important caveat that a lot of people overlook: 20 years ago the hiring environment was totally different. Nowadays, you can't even get an interview without a degree unless you have somebody recommend you. The types of low-end work that hire uncredentialed people (help desk and cable grunt mostly) pay about the same as stocking shelves at the grocery store.
Nobody wanted to hire me back then either. I was a kid with no experience or education.
Now I remember! I was also doing home PC repair through my parents' friends for $14/hr. Put flyers in Barnes and Noble. Got hired by a friend to write some Perl scripts. Two different guys who also went to the LUG hired me to fix some Linux servers they had at their small business. I set up a website and organized marketing materials and did project management for my dad's realty business.
All these little gigs I padded my resume with showed I was doing something, showed what tech I used, what I accomplished. It was a hustle for sure. But it convinced a small startup to give me a shot, and that was the gateway to a "real job". But I did start with dozens of tiny one off jobs over a couple years.
For sure, nobody is going to hire you if you can't show that you can apply your skills, that other people have also given you a shot, that you are self-directed and show a willingness to work and learn. But I mean, this is Life! If you can't or won't do those things you're gonna end up a bum. Even back then I didn't imagine anyone would give me anything, I had to do the work and hustle to make it. So maybe I just assumed other people got that part of it... It's definitely work and takes time, but it's also very much something everyone can accomplish if they put a small amount of brain power and a lot of elbow grease into.
I think you may not be appreciating your ADHD hyper focus (speaking from experience). It may be that sysadmin type work was interesting to you in a way that allowed you to use that to your advantage.
Other people, however, may very well not have that same interest. Maybe what gets them hyper-focused is art or literature or who knows what. Not to say of course it is not possible but you may be smarter than you think.
I used to teach at these so called coding bootcamps and I know it can be hard for students psychologically. I still remember the day when the best student there came up to me towards the end of the 6 month bootcamp and showed me his final bootcamp project with a lot of disappointment. I asked him why was he disappointed as he had actually built something nice with react and firebase. He pointed me towards his friend's(who was at a Uni.) assignment project which was built over the weekend and was basically a minimal working version of a react like library.
He asked me why wasn't he able to do that and why wasn't he taught this at the bootcamp. I knew what his friend did in a weekend was probably a culmination of 3-4 years of rigourous learning of computer science concepts that he acquired at the Uni.
Among bootcamp students, There is this constant unhealthy comparison going on in their minds with the people who graduated from a Uni., this is even after years of working in the industry. what doesn't help is, Apart from a few exceptions(students and companies), the way most recruiters and HRs treat them isn't something to talk about and the pay difference is visible.
Also, It isn't easy for them to catch up. You had the privilege of being able to afford to study for 4 years while it is not the same story for most people at/from the bootcamps. To add to this, They also feel left out when you discuss about your days at the Uni or are discussing some computer science concepts.
If you have a colleague or someone around who is self taught or from a bootcamp, be a bit more kind and explain or refer them to reading material on concepts in a subtle way, it doesn't take much to make them feel included.
> Among bootcamp students, There is this constant unhealthy comparison going on in their minds with the people who graduated from a Uni.
I sympathize with that (as someone who never went through uni for CS or a bootcamp), but at the same time, I've interviewed a bunch of bootcamp folks, and this mentality used to go the other way far too often as well. I've had a bunch of them have extremely huge egos and admitting to being told by their bootcamp that people who go to college for CS are less prepared for "the real world" than they are. I had one extremely rude candidate tell me straight up (after being told we're looking for someone with at least 5 years experience) "I went to X Bootcamp, which is like 10 years real world experience!" I can't imagine that was something he made up in his own brain. Most often, I'd talk to candidates who were being told to apply to senior and principal roles because they were told that their bootcamp experience qualified them for that (and it didn't hurt that, you know, the bootcamp stood to make more $$$ from their ISA if they happened to land a higher paying gig).
I think A LOT of that has trailed off as I haven't run up against that in probably 3-4 years as some of the crappier ones have folded (though some of what I shared above came from ones that still going strong...). But, man for a while from like 2013-2015, it was a huge issue to the point where I'd recommending passing on nearly every bootcamp grad unless we knew the bootcamp's graduates from other means.
The whole "grinding" mentality/culture has instilled unhealthy and unrealistic expectations into the minds of the typical boot camp "candidate". It is difficult to compare a 3-6 months boot camp, with consistent working / learning over 3-5 years.
Sure, some students will learn very fast, but on average - there's more to it than just cramming. And the people that manage to "grind" for N months and land a FAANG job are few and far between, not to mention that they're essentially cramming a very, very small portion of the CS curriculum.
Not to mention that some new CS students are already "heavily invested" in the field and spend a lot of time during their youth around computers. All members of my dev team have been already working in IT during high school. This must be so hard to beat for someone starting late. CS graduate can easily enter the market with 5+ years of experience with actual work.
Software Engineering bootcamps are probably the best cost/benefits ratio programs that exist. There is a reason why that is, this isn't a walk in the park.
Should you be paid equal to someone coming out of uni? I don't think so, the ramp-up will be hard and longer for the bootcamps guys, but this will change as you gain experience, after 5 years the difference in pay should be negligible if you properly ramp up!
> If you have a colleague or someone around who is self taught or from a bootcamp, be a bit more kind and explain or refer them to reading material on concepts in a subtle way, it doesn't take much to make them feel included.
About a decade ago I graduated from a technical institute's two year Computer Engineering Technology diploma program, so not a bootcamp, but absolutely not a full CS degree, and I've found this is a really important bit. My technical skills aren't really lacking, but my understanding and terminology still is. For my part I've become comfortable with saying "I'm unfamiliar with that concept, could you tell me more?"
I was the 30 year old that went to night school to study a degree in Computer Science. I got my first real tech role (paying $85k) three years into my six years of study. I've just made my first job switch for a $40k payrise with six months left in my degree. I'll graduate late this year and I'll probably also be close to my next payrise which will put me at $140-150k.
I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult. My life and the life of my children are going to reap benefits from this. If you're reading this and thinking "Can I do this?" then I'd highly recommend you attempt to find a way to make it work.
WGU is a school where you can go at your own pace, pay by the semester instead of credit hour, and test out of almost any class. Can get a full degree for like 7 grand, just a heads up.
If you already have a bachelor's degree, then Georgia Tech's OMSCS is a good option for a CS master's. The tuition is fairly low, especially if you take multiple courses per term (about $10k to $12k, I believe) and it's basically at your own pace
My buddy got a computer science degree from a top 10 school and works at a FAANG and his experience of the GTech program has been that it is _a lot_ of work. Feels to me like it might be overkill, and perhaps too much, for someone without as much of a CS background.
Hmmm, are some FAANG roles just way less onerous than I've always imagined? My experience with OMSCS is that it's pretty straightforward if you can already build stuff, and even more so if you can write too. Without a CS background I can understand it being a challenge, but I'm surprised to hear your friend thought it was a lot to take on.
I completed the OMSCS program last year at a moderate pace (1 course per semester, except for 2 semesters where I took 2 courses). I did not avoid "hard" classes if I thought I'd learn something interesting and some of the courses are legitimately a lot of work. I think in particular Advanced Operating Systems and Compilers Theory and Practice took the heaviest toll on me. The projects for those classes were very time consuming and at a few points I was pulling 40 hours a week after my full time job to get them done.
This is my experience with OMSCS as well, although I'm only four classes in. My background is in electrical engineering and it hasn't been too challenging (yet) for me to catch up on the CS stuff (although I did take several CS courses at community colleges to help fill in some gaps before enrolling and I've been programming for over years now).
WGU is what colleges used to be: a third party validation of knowledge mastery (along with the teaching). Many traditional universities are debt traps for teenagers.
> I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult.
Over the years I've become a little cynical when I see people asking "should I become a developer?" Because, on one hand, you are right. It changed my life in a positive way. But I've also realized how many people think, essentially, that they take a two-week course and they get a six-figure job where they fuck around all day. Not so much!
Unfortunately there are many companies that allow people to "fuck around all day" and excuse it as "they're still learning". I'm pretty good at being able to spot people who are genuinely trying to learn, or who are just trying to cruise through and be carried by their team. The latter do not last long if I have anything to do with it.
My field is cyber security, not development, but I feel like I get to "fuck around" with computers all day. I'm so lucky that I have a job which I enjoy so much that also rewards so well financially. I still pinch myself when I think that people actually pay me to do this for a living.
I deal with a lot of work that's really similar to puzzle solving. "Why did this occur? Is it normal behaviour or malicious?" and then I get to do deep dives trying to figure out why something happened. If I find malicious behaviour I get to go into incident response mode and boot out a bad guy. If I find a false positive I get to do some engineering to figure out how to avoid this while still maintaining the purpose of the original rules (while also minimising system overhead for the rule processing). The kicker is there are a LOT of companies willing to pay me a LOT of money to do this. I'm so incredibly lucky.
Super cool: security is such a fascinating field. One of the things I love about software is that there's _so many_ interesting and different directions one can go, depending on your own interests and predilections.
Either way though, security is incredibly important. You're doin' the lord's work.
I'm interested in this field, as I relate to your mentality of finding it interesting and losing myself and sense of time trying to solve puzzles. If I wanted to go into cyber security, what would you say one should learn/do?
I also went to night school to earn a bachelor’s degree in CS. It was hard. And to compound the hardness, I started a PhD program the year I turned 30. Definitely a late bloomer. But I am now a professor of CS, and I am satisfied with the choice to follow this path. Long hours, but no boss and great pay!
I have an MA in humanities field, currently spend my days secretly coding at work where I am a receptionist. Was recently very close to being able to move over to the tech team to do some Angular/rails, finally get my feet wet after many years of just doing work on my own time (and a little work time).
One day, I overheard the CTO talking about hiring more devs, and inquired with them about it just briefly. He set up a meeting and we talked shop and I told him my story, the kinds of things I made, what I liked. Already at this point I was elated: I could talk to a real person about technical stuff I am interested in, and they understood me, and even more, they wanted me to join the team! After so much emotional energy and hopes dashed by constant applications with no response, I didn't even care if I wasn't going to get a job, it was enough to just be seen. But I was going to get the job!
Just found out though that it's not going to happen, because they couldn't clear hiring someone to replace my current position; it's a startup and we are not doing well now (home brokerage startup). Will hold on for now, but not too hopeful anymore.
Just really really crazy to me how much I labored over applications and things for so long with just nothing at all back, and all it really took was being able to be in the same room as someone. Equal parts hopeful and frustrating honestly.
> The hardest part of coding is not technical or even getting the job, it’s liking the job. If you do not enjoy the often stressful and thankless role of staring at the computer and doing frustrating logic puzzles, usually alone, eventually you will burn out and wonder why you ever got into the industry.
I even enjoy coding sometimes, damn it does it get demoralizing sometimes
> Important point here: Learning things by yourself is actually much of the job.
This is what separates people that can make it and people who can't. Like when people are asking questions, how do I learn to code or whatever. I think you have already lost.
Do people find this topic of getting into tech in abnormal ways interesting? Maybe ill share mine one day. I was kind of amused by the idea that I failed out of my engineering program, I got a D in my only comp sci class and now Im a sr engineer at a popular tech company lol.
A previous blog post - Find the Hard Work You're Willing to Do
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
The other problem I think is that "software engineer" is such a damn broad role. People try their hand at coding and try some specific niche and either don't love it or get frustrated and then don't really try much else. When in reality there are tons and tons of avenues and flavors and areas requiring more or less technical expertise and different kinds of technical expertise. Some of these people might make excellent QA or cybersecurity researchers, some might be interested in front end development of UI or oldschool low level chip stuff. Or maybe they are more broad, macro infrastructure type people. Without already working in "the industry", however, it is hard to know where to start and what to try.
The last part was the most insightful. Most people, even if they have the aptitude for coding don’t like it. The ones that do are rare.
It’s not really intelligence or grit, it’s just that you actually like staring at a cold unfeeling machine that tells you that you’ve fucked up over and over again.
I'm so happy I actually enjoy programming. I would do it even if I never got paid for it. Enjoying programming feels like such a life hack, considering the generous financial compensations.
I like being able to want something, come up with a solution, do it and use it. Most of it isn't novel but that feeling when you get it to work is great.
100% same. I absolutely love programming, and enjoy my job at least 9 out of 10 days (though my current has a whole lot more meetings than I'd prefer.) I consider myself immensely lucky.
I think the reality is that most of us love programming. The bad part is working on someone elses design and code base - just spending your week figuring out what someone elses weird code does gets exhausting.
> it’s just that you actually like staring at a cold unfeeling machine that tells you that you’ve fucked up over and over again.
I found great comic relief in this characterization, and want to extend the joke, comments like "that sounds 100 times better than my ex" or creating a "YFU as a service" company
Thanks for brightening my day.
Disclosure- it was more often me who was the harsh/unfeeling partner, not the ex.
Try to get a job at one of the Indian or foreign outsourcing companies as an entry level developer . Now I know a lot of people look down on them but these companies have done a good job of training entry level developers and given them projects to get a foothold in the industry . I know plenty of top coders at Google and Amazon who got their first break at an Indian outsourcing firm slinging contract code as an entry job at Infosys and Wipro before moving to US.
For all their faults these companies offer training, apprenticeship and a breakthrough that American companies are often hesitant to offer .
I did this (within the US the whole time, seems like they were hiring a ton of domestic college grads) and it worked out great. They even flew me out to a paid training program for a month at the beginning, free hotel and breakfast. Worked there a few years then doubled my salary taking the next job.
In my experience, they are hit or miss like everyone else. If you wanna pay high wages, you're more likely to get a great dev, like everyone else. Most companies buy the "top quality at cheap price," line that many of them pitch. That's when they get into trouble. I blame the companies for selling in bad faith and I blame the execs for falling for it because they are blinded by cost cutting bonuses.
Those execs then go on to brag about it on their resume and get hired by another company for more money to cause the same type of disaster. Rinse repeat. Good for the outsourcing companies, good for the execs, bad for the existing dev team, bad for the hiring company. This has happened so many times over the last 20+ years, I'm amazed it still works.
Here is a very egregious example but it's still funny:
This is similar to my experience but without a bootcamp. My biggest problem when mentoring people that want to and are capable of learning to code is pointing them towards any avenue of someone who might hire them to code. It seems like the few companies that do "junior" positions only target new grads, and many companies don't even bother with junior devs. As a result, finding the first job can be a larger barrier than being able to code useful things.
Wondering if anyone has any insight as to where I might be able to help people look for a first coding job, especially without a connection to a bootcamp.
Over the last ~5 years many of the "New Grad" recruiting programs in tech companies have pivoted to "Early Career" programs that accept non-traditional candidates. This is partly in a response to diversity requirements.
How these might work is that you come in at a lower level (Associate, "level 1", whatever, varies by company) and generally these are up-or-out roles where a person has a year or so to prove themselves or they would be let go.
Interesting that multiple people here have said that Early Career style programs are aimed at diversity requirements. I guess if you're male and white/asian, you should still make sure to go to university if you have the chance.
Semi-related but I heard of someone - a friend of a founder I worked for a couple years ago - who tried to get into Oxford and failed, so took a gap year to go travelling. Applied again the next year and failed, so took a second gap year and keep travelling. Tried a third time, failed yet again, and spent more time on holidays. On his fourth attempt he ticked a couple diversity boxes as he'd been travelling around strange parts of the Globe for long enough and actually got in haha.
He was a white Etonian but had the privilege to pay for a long enough holiday to move into one of the diversity groups.
I think it’s less that these programs aren’t interested in people from typical backgrounds and more that the candidates from alternative paths are more likely to be of diverse backgrounds, so considering those alternative paths (in addition to the classical ones) is a good way to help diversify your hires. I.e they’re expanding the pool rather than pulling from just one source.
That's not how it worked at Dropbox when I worked there 2015-2019. Only women and URM candidates from bootcamps were interviewed. There's plenty of white and Asian men in those programs, and if you hired them at equal rates as their diverse counterparts it wouldn't help the company's representation.
Not a novel thought but regular attendance of a local meetup or joining an online community like some projects discord will be useful for getting your name out there.
Also generally I think easier to smart smaller. Companies that aren't as tech focused will probably be more lenient.
You can always try to build some websites for local companies or friends gratis as well to get some work experience.
> Not a novel thought but regular attendance of a local meetup or joining an online community like some projects discord will be useful for getting your name out there.
Absolutely. But also do something for yourself with your programming so you can talk about it. If it's important to you, you will be able to convey that to people in your group.
Track your pokemon cards. Record your bikes. Make some decorations that blink. Something. Anything. As long as it's actually relevant to something you want to do, you'll be fine.
Yep. I got a job because I followed comma.ai's self driving car project and then did a port to a new car. I got a lot of help from community and explained this to my employer but they didn't really care, only cared that I was passionate enough to do my own project.
Well, it wasn't just that you were passionate enough ...
Doing a port shows that you can work with an existing codebase and work with others. This is vastly more important to a business than pure programming chops.
Does it really help to be the guy at the meetup who everyone knows because he can't get a job? Not sure anyone's ever told me that an employer reached out to them after they did a 5-minute talk at a meetup or became a regular on Discord.
I already had a job but I literally got an offer without an interview after giving a talk at a meetup. And I just think generally if you keep attending one and get to know some people they'll eventually have referrals for you, a lot of people need talent.
I have recently begun searching for software development jobs as a self-taught programmer. So I too would love to gain some insight on where to look not only for a job, but also for advice on the application process (e.g. my resume and personal website).
When I first graduated (with a BSEE from some shitty local uni), the only CS project I had on my resume was some ML research I published as an undergrad. I did do a lot of hobby projects in Python / some JS, but nothing was presentable in the slightest.
When applying for jobs in a medium-sized but not-very-techy-city, I found the hardest part to be just getting an interview offer. But the interview itself usually ranged from braindead easy to a straightforward take-home exam. So I guess the takeaway is to fluff up your resume and accomplishments as much as possible. It turns out to be much easier to impress someone in an interview than with your resume. And at least for entry-level positions, you aren't really grilled on trivia for whatever you list, maybe just a general "how-does-it-work" question.
Sadly I didn't realize this until my second go-around with job-hunting. The first time I only really got responses for intern positions (was applying for both frontend / backend / fullstack). Luckily I was offered a full-time frontend position after interviewing for an internship and crushing the take-home exam.
Do you have any decently complex open source projects that you can show off to potential employers? If you do you’ll likely not have any trouble finding a job.
Thank you for the kind words. I suppose my answer depends on our definitions of decently complex.
My primary two projects are a multi-user painting program via the internet, and what is effectively a network KVM switch, sans video.
> I suppose my answer depends on our definitions of decently complex.
Write them up like you believe they are important. Put the code on your GitHub. Advertise. Get pics of the KVM up and write something like a blog post about it. Remember - your competition doesn't have the self-motivation to be creative like this.
I would try to contribute to open source and put a volunteer section on your resume, if you contribute to an open source app used by a company, I would think getting an interview would be doable
> 4~ years and 4 jobs later I now make 175,000 dollars as a senior software engineer.
We've seen such ridiculous "grade inflation" in tech and it's really going to hurt us all at some point. Software development struggles for credibility as real engineering work, and a boot camp, 4 years of experience and a couple of jobs is not a senior level engineer.
No, these people are being paid what they're worth. It's everyone below them that is getting stiffed for pay.
If your company has >$100B market cap, there is literally no reason why you shouldn't be paying juniors $100k starting at least. If you work on a platform bringing in billions of dollars of revenue per quarter, you deserve to reap the rewards.
This dude doesn't even have four years experience, he has more like one year experience four times. You're jumping ship well before you see the results of your architectural and technical decisions so you can't learn from them.
I'm not trying to be mean... The title inflation is just absolutely amazing (not in a good way)
I monitor threads like this one every time they get to the front page, which is once a month or so. Whenever someone says "I am a hiring manager and we 100% hire self-taught and inexperienced candidates," I try to reach out to them.
And almost every time I get a response, it turns out that the poster is located in a depressed market outside the US (like southern Europe or the Canadian prairies), and also not actively hiring.
I can attest that I’ve personally hired low experience people as well as a small handful self taught. I will likely be hiring again in a few months.
If you’re older your experience was that all really good coders were self-taught coders. They were people who learned by cracking or modifying software or working out how their computer worked the hard way in a very deep way. For awhile most really great coders were either out of a very small number of schools or were entirely self-taught.
I think this dynamic died though by 2000 at the latest.
I will say that a lot of self taught people that I have interviewed and not hired had this - well, attitude. But that’s the wrong word for it.
Let me give an example. Not long ago I interviewed a self-taught python guy who spent part of the interview explaining how hard pointers are. I am a lifetime c programmer. Pointers are maybe hazardous but they are not hard, they are such a simple construct that people effectively reinvent them over and over and pointer-like objects show up over and over. It was just the weirdest interview, he was quite adamant about it, like he was confused that I wasn’t instantly agreeing, almost like visiting a forum for people who only know python. It was very off putting once I realized that most of it was bluster to explain that he knew python and only python and that was a kind of mantra that he’d learned made him sound more thoughtful than he was. I don’t think he knew.
Another typical example is “I could learn the CS degree stuff if I wanted to but I don’t need to” aspect by candidates that don’t know basic algorithms or analysis.
I’m not opposed to self-taught. I was, myself, a self-taught paid professional coder before I got my CS degree. I did discover a world of stuff I didn’t know doing the CS degree though and the dismissiveness is unfortunately common. A lot of CS has zero to do with industry but unfortunately not all of it.
I guess my point here is that, unfortunately, interviewers build mental stereotypes due to experience that you’re unfortunately exposed to. I’m still game to hire self-taught coders but I now aggressively filter that set to avoid the kind of limited mentality I’m trying (and failing) to describe above.
I got my first entry level role in tech at 19 in a small city in England and currently have a decent life in the Bay Area at 28. No degree, although I've tried several before remembering I dislike school, and have also taken various certificates in my spare time. Made a good six-figure rate by 26 in the UK, and most importantly I've worked on projects I've found interesting in stacks I've found interesting.
It's definitely possible to do but it's not a quick journey and I think you have to genuinely enjoy programming. As in, if you didn't work in tech, you'd still play with code for fun. Saying this if you do enjoy it I think it's fairly easy to do assuming you take the long slog of a route, focus on experience over salary, and have reasonable expectations at the beginning. Your first job may not be development - it could be IT support, or manual testing, but you start writing code to automate small bits and try move into a developer role after a year or twos experience. FWIW, my first full-time job in 2014 paid 13k GBP (around $16k I think).
This person sounds like they have an outstanding work ethic, and the ability to quickly adapt, combined with the capacity to play the long game (sacrifice today, for gains tomorrow).
That will buy you success, no matter the industry. It’s kind of amazing what self-discipline and delayed gratification buys you.
As a hiring manager, I looked for exactly the type of thing this person did. They would have definitely been someone I would have hired. I had an interesting team.
I have no opinions on bootcamps. I’m a high school dropout with a GED, along with a redneck technician school, and whole lot of short seminars and individual classes (but no college). I did OK.
I did attend a one-week “bootcamp” for ObjC iOS programming, once (Big Nerd Ranch), but that was a very different thing from something like Flatiron School. It was a “springboard.”
> I was a jazz pianist in a restaurant in my teens.
I have known many musicians in the industry (I was one). I think musical aptitude is probably a good indicator of software development aptitude.
Not to mention, working a tough gig, in your teens.
> ...As a hiring manager, I looked for exactly the type of thing this person did. They would have definitely been someone I would have hired...
As did I when i was a hiring manager (I'm taking a several year break from leading people)...but, wow, those individuals are difficult to find...at least it was for me. In my own life i have been given a couple of chances by bosses who might otherwise not hire me (based on my resume at the time)...and i was always able to keep them happy. So thank you for whatever you do/have done by giving people that chance! Kudos to you!
Thanks for the write-up. I would like to hear more about your experience in switching jobs so fast. When you started looking for a new position, did you try to maximize pay, or did you feel that you could really stay at each of these companies in the long run?
I am currently thinking of switching jobs, but I don't know if I should be playing a numbers game or genuinely looking for a good fit, or somewhere I could grow internally.
I hopped to anywhere that would take me! It depends on how stable you are though. Fastest way to more money is hopping, but theres alot to be said for working at places you like/will be able to grow.
Hey, and thanks for being available to answers questions. Here's one: Aren't you concerned that new employees will pickup that you're a job hopper and think that you're not to be trusted to stay at their company for long either?
I really really need to do this more - usually stay at least 2 or 3 because I am lazy - market is so hot right now I could see one or two hops getting me to a nice spot
Yes, but not everyone has the talent to learn quickly, get good enough to get a job, and to keep that job.
I'll give a metaphor. I always wanted to learn how to kickflip as a kid, but I sucked at skateboarding. It took me 10 years, many pairs of shoes, and tens of thousands of tries later to land a kickflip. Can I kickflip? Yes, barely. But does that mean it would be worth my time to pursue skateboarding beyond doing kickflips? Probably not. I just don't have the talent for it. Other people learned to kickflip their first few months of skateboarding.
Just as with writing, there's some disabilities that will make it impossible or impractical, but otherwise, with sufficient effort, yes.
Also just as with writing, not everyone can be good enough to have a job centering the skill, especially on the strength of that skill alone (some will be able to leverage moderate skill in the target area plus skill in some other area.)
Like writing, but perhaps somewhat less so than writing, it may be useful even in jobs that don't formally center the skills (subprofessional writing skills are useful in jobs that aren't “writer”, subprofessional programming skills in jobs that aren't “programmer”.)
The difference between a complex spreadsheet and an application program isn't all that large, and with no-code / low-code platforms as a stepping stone lots of people who otherwise would never get into programming because the first level abstractions are too far away from what they want to accomplish now find themselves drawn into coding.
Programming is difficult, possibly unnecessarily so. If we made programming easier more people could do it. To some extent there is gatekeeping, to some extent it really is a hard to acquire skill if you want to be able to do it at a very high level. But just like talking, everybody can program at some level, but not everybody has the interest to want to do so at the level of low level code.
Aside from a few weeks training on an unrelated Masters I'm IT-unqualified, but got a job with an IT company making software for an industry. I started out coding, but knew I was never going to be great at it - although it can be really satisfying to make something 'elegant' that's yours.
Then moved into a more customer-facing role, trying to capture what they wanted the software to do. Learnt elegance was maybe of less importance, than solving real world problems.
Then moved into Product Management, which was maybe the first time I felt a 'good fit'. Gave me the opportunity to come up with 'big vague ideas/themes', and defer the implementation to the architects and devs who were actually good at the job.
You try to break it down into consumable chunks - but it's on you to make it all come together.
Final thought is just that even outside of dev, I now realize there's a massive spectrum of people within it. Some want you to absolutely nail-down the down criteria and will deliver against it. Others want to understand why, and if you can explain it relatively succinctly, will come back with suggestions on how stuff can be improved.
I guess my point is that excellent coders are required - but the "rockstar coder trope" overlooks the vast majority of people working in IT.
e.g. If you've say spent a decade serving food in or running a restaurant, you've got a way better understanding of what the requirements of a POS system are, than the people creating it.
If you want to move to IT, you need to learn the vocab and grammar, but you don't have to be fluent - bring in your experience. IT can only solve an understood problem, and being able to articulate that is a prerequisite to a solution.
Definitely. There needs to be QA's and Designers and PM's and all sorts of roles within tech. Even having a little technical experience in some of these roles will be a big advantage.
I can only speak for myself, but I think the answer is "No.. sortof.. it depends.. maybe?"
Writing an epic and a dozen US is definitely a lot quicker for one person to do, than it is for a team to implement it. So from that side, PM does a lot less work. Plus there's dev work like platform architecture, upgrading, platform, change management, automated test-cases etc, that I don't even have to think about. There's a massive multiplier there.
Maybe 1 day a week writing requirements can keep a team busy and another day for answering questions, sprint ceremonies etc (story review, signing off demos) - but I'd say less than half my time is dealing with the actual productive work.
Dev team just functions on 2-week sprints and the commitments they've given - so hard for it to go too-sideways, and they're safely insulated.
Majority of my time goes on the "meta-work" - trying to manage what goes into those sprints.
Customer requirements/placation - they don't (and shouldn't) have to give a toss about our internal sprints - so somebody has to ensure they'll be happy/not-going-to-sue in 18 months. Also the budget side is a complete Pain-in-the-arse.
Your Agile trainer imagines there's some single pot of money to splash about however you choose to spend most efficiently.
Reality is you're fighting for little top-down piles on internal accounts and then trying to fit the work you've done to them.
Like pretty much any skill, anyone can learn to do it, but some will have more natural aptitude than others. I find coding easy and improvised comedy nightmarishly difficult, for others it will be the other way around.
I don't think so. Maybe 20-50% of people can learn to be decent at programming. Maybe less than 10% can be really good. The simple fact that you're on this website makes me think you can probably learn if you put in the effort.
Counterpoint, I've been on this site for over a decade now and am not a good programmer. But yes, I guess effort, experience, talent, and luck are the best cocktail for a really good programmer.
Not everybody on this site would make a good programmer but if I picked a random person here I would have better results than if I picked a random person from the rest of the population. Choosing to spend personal time somewhere like here indicates a few personality traits.
I did a mechanical engineering bachelor's straight outta highschool, took 4 years, got a job doing CAD work, didn't like it, got a job teaching mech eng as an assistant instructor (fun and fulfilling but bad pay). Learned to code in my free time, made lots of unique projects (online codenames clone, vehicle sensor visualizer, android app) then worked on a website that got fairly popular and started making money with it. During this time I was actively applying to places, getting no responses. Then out of the blue, got an interview, went well, was hired. Now I'm a backend developer and have my foot in the door. But boy did it take time and work.
I have a lot of respect and admiration for many programmers (I'm not one), but I'm genuinely troubled hearing some of the stories of people in this thread grinding jobs to a Nx times payout and a miserable endgame. Let me be clear I don't think this is true of most programmers. But it seems part of the software industry is following the history of the financial industry (and of course those two are intertwined going back decades) and I don't think this bodes well for society overall.
I see tons of these people doing bootcamp because they essentially want tech compensation despite having previously chosen a different career.
I think bootcamps are a suboptimal choice. You are investing months of hard work teaching yourself real world skills which at best will land you a decent junior developer job in some mid of the pack company (maybe 50-60k€ if you pick UK, Switzerland or one of the nordic countries - maybe something short of 100k$ in the US tech area?).
I did exactly that when I was 15 and passioned about creating and it was hard; that also meant that by the time I was out of computer science I had already been working in senior capacity with a senior level salary (roughly 100k€, again, for mid of the pack company - which was roughly equivalent to fang junior total compensation).
Given you are investing months and money is an important factor, I'd recommend you just grind leetcode without learning frontend programming or whatever is popular at the moment. After being good at leetcoding without knowing how to code, you can just go and ace fang interviews and land a much better starting salary.
I know people who did the above and just learned web programming on the job at a fang while they were juniors and being paid to do so.
The hardest part of learning a new skillset is deciding that you can do it and then finding the motivation to do it. The rest is just work. But it requires a certain attitude of "Of how hard could this be? Let's do it.". A lot of people chicken out of doing that work with some lame excuses about how they have better things to do, they are not good enough, etc.
Too many people self select themselves out of things they could be doing by simply deciding that they could never do it.
I studied computer science. I've taught myself lots of other stuff over the years including a lot of things that have nothing to do with computers. I'm a decent photographer. I can bake some nice sourdough breads. I'm not a bad cook and I definitely like eating my own food. I can repair stuff. Etc. Nobody ever taught me any of these things. I just started doing them and then figured out how to do them better. If I'm interested in it, I'll find a way.
Professionally, anything you put your mind to you can be the world's leading expert in just a few years. But you have to dedicate yourself. That's a bit of wisdom my professor gave me when I started my phd. He was not wrong.
As a senior software engineer in Sweden (.net stack) working in finance, 175k sounds amazing. Here we make around 70k/year. Getting a remote job is starting to look very appealing…
It's not going anywhere. Programming is becoming larger, and the problems it can reasonably (as well as unreasonably) solve are increasing in scope as business managers try to leverage a more socially-acceptable field.
Additionally hybrid developer/business folk are becoming a thing, diversifying the demand as well as the skillset. To say nothing of the "CEO Compensation" halo effect Silicon Valley wages have on the industry.
Next to sales it is increasingly becoming the most valuable aspect of many industries that are critical to modern western economies (finance, insurance, technology), and AI is 'always' on the horizon as a future cost cutter, so I expect the trend to stick around.
Honestly the market is crazy. I have a guy in my team who has a masters in CompSci from a great university and gets about 140k and I know is struggling to get a new job. 175k is probably average or above average for an experienced developer in normal companies here in NY. I see some specializations earn more but I dont understand how so many young people are earning multiples of that. I guess I'm out of touch.
I was super lucky to live near a call center that handled front line support for Microsoft. A few of my nerdier friends got jobs there before me. When I was 20, I applied for the Win32 MSDN group. Devs called with questions about anything Win32, I triaged them. I was hired on the strength of my C++ knowledge. I hopped from that job after 9 months, directly to my first app development job, and I’ve never had any trouble finding work. For the first ten years I had to settle for mildly interesting things, but for the next ten, I picked where I wanted to work and what I wanted to do.
If I was compelled to summarize how I did it, 1) devoted enormous quantities of free time, from age 12 to mid-career, to getting good; 2) pretty smooth talker; 3) actually wanted to do #1, as in couldn’t drag myself away from it.
Getting a tech job with no degree or relevant work experience just requires you to have skills and proof of those skills. Keep improving your skills and strengthening your proof until you land a job. The only cost is time and effort.
I would like bootcamps if the people that course them were more passionate about technology. I see them as courses for people that want to get a job quickly and don't care much about technology.
A computer-related job can be really burning for people that don't like technology.
I don't see a technology-passionate person with technology and computers cursing a bootcamp instead of a degree when you are going to learn in a much deeper way.
+1 for the bootcamp route! I did a bootcamp in 2015 and never looked back - even though some are definitely scammy, when they work they work. If anyone's interested, I recently wrote up my experiences here https://naomiajacobs.com/Should-You-Go-To-A-Coding-Bootcamp/
I've been working in the computer industry for over 30 years and I never went to school I was self-taught and never took any boot camp and never went to a diploma mill either so I know that those resumes generally get thrown in the trash, but if you're going to talk the talk, you got to walk the walk too so the real test is on the interview(s)....if you can pass the interview(s) then generally you can get the job but you also have to be able to do the job so whatever it is that you're claiming that you're an expert in you should really try to be one. This goes with any trade, especially the ones that don't require licenses by law.
Prior to the web in the 1990s I would say it was a lot harder than it is today to try to figure out and become the guru kind of person that you needed to be in the early 1990s and it was a lot of it was because the just there was not a lot of material about the subject matter like Unix and software engineering and just the web was not available there was no PDF so today it's a lot easier than it used to be for sure, I'm saying to become self-taught. anybody can download a PDF about some subject matter read it spend a lot of time and become an expert, compared to anything prior to the early 1990s. The way that I became an expert in the early 1990s was by reading source code and figuring things out because there was just no documentation for anything. as a matter of fact the reason why I got into software engineering in the first place was because so much stuff was broken and just never worked that I spent more time debugging software than I did actually using it...
as far as experience, you can get experience just by volunteering or doing internships and then using that as leverage on your resume to get real jobs when you don't have experience. When I was in my early teens I volunteered at random internet/BBS providers to fix their broken systems, and this turns into experience that you can put on your resume.
> First jobs’ the hardest — once you’re in, you’re in. A mere 4~ years and 4 jobs later I now make 175,000 dollars as a senior software engineer.
Congrats! You earn more than me after 10 years of experience and a bachelor and masters degree (Computer Science) in Western Europe (my current salary is: 95K eur gross/year)
> The hardest part of coding is not technical or even getting the job, it’s liking the job. If you do not enjoy the often stressful and thankless role of staring at the computer and doing frustrating logic puzzles, usually alone, eventually you will burn out and wonder why you ever got into the industry.
I really wish this was the thing that was most difficult about the jobs I’ve had. I really wish it was.
Instead - I’d say the promise of autonomy, ownership, and craftsmanship but in reality none of that is what bothers me most about the industry. On top of this - extremely bad managers are not just common but the standard. This is talked to death on HN and elsewhere but it’s quite insane that people who make $500k+/yr cannot learn how to be slightly less of an asshole and more empathetic as a human being. It’s weird to me that most managers I’ve had are borderline sociopaths when it comes to the workplace. It’s a weird thing too because if they were just honest about why they did things - people wouldn’t be as upset with them. But most managers I guess think it’s better to lie to reports or maybe they’re too ashamed to say, “well we’re doing this because I might get a good perf review and a promo out of it.” It’s never said but it’s clearly the subtext for anyone noticing.
I just dislike the dishonesty that is so rampant in the industry and the completely insane amount of mixed incentive structure going on that ultimately hinders many companies. I am not surprised that some of the companies I’ve worked at that have over 1000 engineers seem to get even less done than when they had 100. Mixed incentives causing roadblocks everywhere.
I find the technical, the code, and other “programming” like aspects of software dev to be completely boring - and if I’m being honest - a bit below me. They’ve always been… busy work.
> If you do not enjoy the often stressful and thankless role of staring at the computer and doing frustrating logic puzzles, usually alone, eventually you will burn out and wonder why you ever got into the industry.
I'm happy to say I find coding extremely fun. I like everything in it, even the most irritating bugs ( some of these will turn into stories down the line, we all remember THAT bug).
It was just surprised by the description. I never even considered there could be people in the computer engineering businees who'd legitimately could not like coding.
You do have to zoom in to a specific part of the economy to get these salaries. It’s jobs in the “tech” industry (places like startups, FAANGs, etc) rather than software dev in general. (So not programming stuff for an electric company.) And you have to have a few years experience; it’s not normal to get paid that much for entry level even at some of the biggest tech companies.
So that excludes the Midwest for the most part, except remote tech companies are changing that. Places like Automattic or Airbnb (from their recent announcement) don’t pay based on location anymore, and won’t dock your pay if you move to the Midwest.
These higher salaries are driven by VC money and demand for sure. In my personal experience and network, small startups, midsize startups, and massive tech companies are are all hiring as much as possible. Plus, the classic startup approach is to use VC money to fund product development by quickly increasing the number of devs, and then figuring out profitability down the road after you have tons of users.
This leads to an environment where smaller startups don’t need to cut dev teams or hiring to increase profit margins — the main goal is to build the product asap and grow users. And that means hiring lots of decent devs. And then big companies like Amazon just have loads of money and tons of products that need constant improvement, which only happens with devs.
So with significant competition and need to hire devs and lots of available money, developers have space to negotiate pretty great salaries.
Again, this varies everywhere and maybe isn’t the same for “non-tech” companies quite as much (because that VC money and massive scale might not exist as much outside of tech).
It's a global company but not particularly known for being Tech-y. It's also my first position that's entirely globally remote, I'm currently working from Montenegro for a month, then Greece. Pay has really jumped in the last year or so as demand has risen.
Around that salary is getting pretty normal for big companies, even if they are not 'tech'. I think it's a combination of inflation, lack of competent supply, and old school companies realizing their dependence on technology.
Is it really that hard to get an entry level job these days? I graduated community college a few years after the dot com bubble burst, and was able to land a 30k job easily, it was less pay than my waiter job.
Did those really low paying job go away? Or has it become really competitive to even get those?
YMMV but I recently earned a doctorate in mathematics with a perfect (4.0) GPA in all my degrees and I have only received rejections in the tech world due to 'lack of experience'. In fact I have not been invited to a single interview.
This includes jobs for newcomers that indeed pay just 30k --- and it's worth noting just how low that salary is in these days: 25k of that goes to taxes, rent, and paying off debt.
I'm turning towards finance instead as the entry barrier seems signifcantly lower.
I'd suggest you post some contact details in your HN signature.
Your background is highly attractive, and there are enough people here with the clout to get you started on a more positive interview track.
Also perhaps some coaching; you might have some tactical errors in how you approach.
With that said, finance may also be a really good option for you. At the right bank, the strong math background + top GPA is the hiring requirement. They also like people with Ph.D.s in technical physics.
You should have some coding experience, but you'll be working in their custom setups anyway -- if you're good at math, you can pick up APL (it's a language, look it up) programming quickly. Otherwise, bank python is pretty divergent from python, or you are looking at Matlab/R.
They'll want someone who can translate complicated math into a model. You are less likely to find that in most tech companies.
Thanks for the input, I appreciate it the insight.
I agree that I may be making tactical errors. I've confined myself to job adverts through e.g. LinkedIn for the lack of knowing where else to look. I also lack the connections that most others at my stage of career have.
I know my way a bit around coding though I'm entirely self-taught so I have no degrees to back up that claim. I have considered throwing my projects on Github as a kind of 'proof of work' to employers.
Could you perhaps name some specific directions that would be suitable for someone with my background? People around me mentioned quantitative finance as an example of a direction for math PhDs to go into --- but I'd frankly be open to any job that lets me make use of my skills.
This is surprising to hear. I have a similar background, albeit my GPA was not quite as good and I terminated by mathematics education with a master's. I work with lots of PhDs that have transitioned from other STEM fields.
Are you good at math competitions? Competitive programming is basically the same thing. This is how I transitioned in the field. If you can do these, interviews will be a breeze.
I suppose I'm good at them though I never enjoyed that kind of competetiveness. To me, math is a social activity.
I like to think that I could get through interviews quite easily too; if applications start with a cognitive test I invariably make it through. My applications tend to die at the HR layer (which is usually the first stage) so I haven't actually made it to a real-life interview.
This is true for literally as little as 0.1% of the entire worlds tech entry level positions. Probably even less. The world is a little larger than the stops of the Caltrain. FWIW, based on Glassdoor, Salary.com, and a couple other sources they all suggest the average salary of an entry level role in the Bay Area is 90k, so not only is 100k not a reasonable global salary it's not even the expected rate unless you're above average in the Bay.
I think several companies have gotten burned hiring bootcamp grads and are less willing to take risks on it, but I can't imagine all junior roles have gone away.
I did this. And I'm one of the more successful people in this endeavour.
I studied mechanical engineering from a Tier 3 college in India. I wanted computer science but I didn't qualify for the program because of my scores in the exam. I joined mechanical engineering and kept coding as a hobby for the first year. I abandoned it in the second year. The only thing closely related to tech that I had going for me was that I'd just started using Linux in my second year. This was 2007 and I started using Linux Mint 7 Gloria.
I completed my engineering with decent scores, but that didn't matter since I could only get a job at a motorcycle factory after some tarnished dreams of studying for my master's. I worked in a factory for 3 years and finally ended up working for a monster who made me loathe the field. I left that field and moved to an e-commerce website that needed a content writer. I had aspirations of being a published writer, having written 2 books, and I thought this was a fine way to segue into the field. I was hired as a content writer for the books team at Flipkart. I joined, and began to love my job.
I was more computer savvy than most of my peers already. The others were struggling with some work related to Google Spreadsheets and I took it upon myself to improve the process. I didn't realize what an effect that would have on me.
I learnt how to write Excel macros. But that didn't scale for the catalogue dumps we would get every 15 days. So i learnt Python after talking to a friend at IBM, and I built a smallish desktop application using PyQt4 and MySql. It was super fun and I learnt a lot.
I left the company because they wouldn't give me a chance to be a real developer, and I worked for a mechanical engineering company called GKN where I began writing small tools for mechanical engineers to use. I stayed there for 3 years and worked myself to the bone. I was in a silo since I was the only developer there. I mostly did Python and React.
I eventually moved out, and joined Visa, with a huge imposters syndrome. And as I joined Visa, I also started going to meetups and conferences. It was in this time that I discovered just how good a programmer I am.
My salary today, 10 years later, is 400x my first salary. It has grown ridiculously to say the least.
Yes it is possible. And no you do not need to pay a thing to pivot. All you need is time, and dedication.
The only things going for me were an insatiable need to learn, and an interest in computers.
I was fortunate to make this jump too. I still remember mopping the floor at some restaurant listening to my podcasts (dev/entrepreneur related). Eventually made it. Still poor atm (personal choices) but definitely at a better place opportunity wise.
i make slightly less than the op, am self taught and have 15yrs of professional coding experience(only 7 i would classify as actual engineering - the rest being flash bang wiz prototype in production bc market cap potential - but hey, thats show business). the difference however is i work ablut 28hrs a week(i am not self employed). my point being is you can make as much as you want if you try - i like my time off and still consider myself one of the lucky few degenerates of the golden age
how about adjacent tech roles? Product manager, solution architect, business analyst, etc? are those more willing to hire alternative background candidates?
in the past ive had zero luck even getting interviews for dev jobs so ive thought about getting some AWS/Azure certificates to have some kind of proof I can put on paper and check boxes. otherwise i could grind leetcode but it'll be for nothing if I cant even get called back?
It's not always perfect though! I struggle with motivation occasionally like anyone. But mostly some innate work ethic keeps me from failing or quitting lol.
I've actually been documenting stories of self-taught and bootcamp developers on my website for 3 years. It's amazing the variety of backgrounds that people have had before getting into programming. Just last week I interviewed a woman who was a Beauty Therapist until Covid hit and they wanted a career change. I also have a job board for self-taught and bootcamp-friendly positions: www.nocsdegree.com
If anyone in this thread wants to be featured, let me know.
All right, behold my idiotic story about the time I got a job for one of the major tech companies.
It's the late 00's. I am in my early 20s. I have an associate's degree from the local community college, and I have been messing around with programming since I was 8 years old. I am unemployed, having not long before been laid off from a minimum-wage job at a failing retail establishment. I am living at my parents' house, spending most of my time messing with code and hanging out on IRC.
I am contacted on IRC, one day, by a recruiter for one of the major tech companies. He tells me that I sound like I know what I'm talking about, and would I like to interview for a job?
Well, yes, of course I do.
This major tech company has an office in a city a few hours' drive from where I live. I go there for the interview process, which is somewhat grueling.
I don't get the job. I had a brain fart and whiffed some basic question about computational complexity; I'd forgotten what O(n log n) means. So it goes.
Perhaps a week later, the recruiter calls me back, saying that, out of the blue, a different subsidiary of the major tech company would like to interview me. This subsidiary is an acquired startup, a major website in its own right, and would I be interested in interviewing there?
Well, yes, of course I am.
This subsidiary's office is located in the Bay Area, which is a somewhat greater journey, but I fly there and do the interview process again.
I got the job, that time. I aced the interview, in fact. Pro tip: It is a good sign if you manage to blow through all of an interviewer's prepared questions, and force him to resort to asking riddles, and then manage to answer the riddle correctly, too.
It was only later, after I started to work there, that I learned the full story. The website's ops team needed to hire someone. Although this subsidiary was owned by the major tech company, it was still in many ways a separate company, not yet assimilated into the greater corporate entity. Thus, they basically just walked over to HR, and asked to poke around in their resume database.
They did a simple keyword search, and my resume popped up. It was a total coincidence. One of the keywords they used was the programming language they used, which I had also happened to use in some open-source stuff. Another keyword was related to the subject of the subsidiary's website, which, entirely unrelatedly, also happened to be a word used in the name of the retail job I had recently been laid off from.
My resume was very nearly a blank sheet of paper, aside from these things. I was told that the site's lead architect, on seeing it, reacted along the lines of, "Oh, we have got to interview this guy."
So they did, and I spent the next several years working there.
This is an incredibly stupid story. There is absolutely no part of this process which I would point to as advice for other people. To the extent that this has led to my success, it was blind, stinking luck, and I doubt it would ever happen again.
I'm not sure what moral you could take from this. "Know your shit" seems patronizing. I would like to think that possessing technical know-how with no relevant degree, certifications, or experience is still a state which can lead to success, but I suspect that such extraordinary luck is still a necessary component as well.
I think people massively underestimate “being in the right place at the right time” factor in their lives.
My current job - company gets big contract m, desperately needs to scale up. I was fed up with previous job, and just happened to have used Django. Got headhunted and got a huge pay rise. Got to company to find that they literally couldn’t find Django developers for love nor money locally. I’d only really taken on a tiny side project in the last job - had I not used it, they probably wouldn’t have been interested in me here.
It’s time - now I’m here, we’re training existing people up, but if they’ve not god a good mental model of backend development then it’s going to be a challenge.
So, I'm sure I've posted my relevant experience before and will likely post it again.
Graduated with a STEM (only partial comp-sci though) degree from a state school in NY. The uni prepared me zero for how to interview, as a result I bombed most of my coding ones (I remember being asked in one "Tell me about yourself", and having never heard of an elevator pitch before saying something like "Uhh, I think Buddhism is pretty cool..." and remember seeing the light go out of my interviewer's eyes.) Took some tech-adjacent contract jobs, and eventually ended up doing helpdesk for seven years.
Hated it, knew I wanted to program, eventually left my job to attempt solo Android development but had no idea how to manage my own time. Finally heard about coding bootcamps from the friend of a friend, did some research, and joined one (was lucky to have enough money saved for tuition, something like 15k.)
Was one of the only people in the cohort with any prior CS experience, but almost everybody was dedicated and did quite well. Was a great experience, though stressful (actually developed shingles midway through, which for someone in their early thirties generally indicates serious stress.) Graduated, and landed my first programming job in about three months.
It was hard, and my entire team was remote which wasn't great, as I didn't really feel empowered to ask as many questions as I should have (which is extremely important.) Was a great experience though, and everyone there was fantastic. Was downsized out after about 13 months, landed another job six months after, and stayed there for almost three years before we were acquired.
The tl;dr is that bootcamps worked amazingly well for me, and I've never been happier in my current job – it's night and day from what I was doing before, and pays a whole hell of a lot better. I keep hearing that the bootcamp ecosystem is different now, which is a damn shame because it worked a miracle for me. I was lucky too: our cohort lead instructor was a phenomenal teacher, which obviously isn't always the case. But it's a trade-type school which, in a perfect world, is available for people who want to attempt this transition.
Oh, my school also provided something invaluable (as is mentioned in the article): they hustled to connect me with companies looking to hire new devs. Both of my positions originated through connections my bootcamp made for me (I did a lot of work to land interviews myself, but both times ended up taking positions the bootcamp facilitated.) A really good business development department (or whatever they call it) is incredibly important in a bootcamp, imo.
Did you not have any jobs prior? Other than throwing in some coding questions, I have found interviews to be interviews.
> Both of my positions originated through connections my bootcamp made for me
I got my first part time programming job when I was a sophomore in undergrad through a friend I met in the CS program. He already worked at a small local company, needed help, and connected me with his boss.
The importance of connections I think is missed by many. It's not about someone giving you a job (though that does happen), but giving you a chance to interview.
I completely agree that the value of a bootcamp is having a community to encourage you through the process, everything they teach you can be found online. I also went to a bootcamp that had a good reputation around my city so I think it was legitimizing for someone with no experience and no stories of coding for fun as a teenager.
Even back then hackernews was full of people saying how flooded the market was with bootcampers.
4 years later I grinded leetcode and got a job at a FANG and essentially 6x'd my income from 4 years earlier before I could code. I eventually left that job because I was miserable but thats a whole other story.
Now with 7 years of experience I leave the bootcamp off my resume because of the stigma. I took the specific degree program off my linkedIn and just put "bachelors of science" and let people assume what they want. If anyone asks I just say I'm self taught.
Point is, it's 100% possible.