I've been here just over a decade at this point, I come from Michigan originally. I specialize in iOS, but have had a long string of startup jobs so I can mix it up and get things done in a handful of languages.
getting here -- I got lucky honestly: had one friend who lived here when I was finishing school, who let me crash on his couch and introduced me to some friends of his during that week. I interviewed with a bunch of companies trying as a remote intern with the option to become full time later and one of them was kind enough to give me a shot. I swapped jobs every few years, picking up a broad set of skills on a variety of front and backends that are really useful and sort of rare. I've been at my current job for about 4 years -- my first larger company, which went public during my tenure and has been very good to me.
social dynamics -- I'm on the edge of a few friend groups, wouldn't call myself core to any of them but I have plenty of friends. Getting married to a woman I met here in SF 5 or 6 years ago, she also moved here for tech.
personal connection -- I've tried to not work on anything where I feel like people are actively being exploited. I also try to chase jobs that I think are good for the world, which is a real luxury imo. I also really like programming cuz it exercises the creative and logical parts of my brain.
perceptions -- I was dumb enough to think all of California was like LA, big wake up moment when I realized it's not usually all that warm here. I think it certainly has problems, especially in the last few years the city has gotten excessively dirty and there's so many (more) people that could use a helping hand. There's also a decent size of the population who hate techies, sometimes for valid reasons and that's rough from time to time. I don't know what to do about it, I just try not to be actively part of the problem and help where I can.
unique experiences -- too many haha. Giant burning man parties in warehouses, people pooping standing up in mid afternoon, lifting a car off a lady one time with a crowd of folks, so many great meals. you can find whatever you want in SF, it's a really great city.
industry at large -- I honestly don't know. Some things change, but others jsut seem cyclical. Folks have been wondering when the bubble will pop for the Whole time I've lived here. When I got here Kevin Rose was the meme, now it's Elon Musk. I don't understand how our housing prices can continue to go up and still make a city that's livable for more than just folks making six figure salaries. I don't think tech's going away ever, but I don't know if the world can tolerate things as they are now either.
I grew up in MI, a civil engineer told me that our pothole issues were due to poor road engineering (things like not laying down gravel so that rain wouldn't collect underneath the concrete && would drain)
ohio didn't seem to have the same issues that we did, at any rate.
I like the idea of transparency from these bootcamps, it'd be a great way to vet them before committing $20k and several months of your time. It makes sense that bootcamps wouldn't be willing to divulge that information though, especially if their numbers aren't great.
But it feels a little unfair to hold the bootcamps completely responsible for people not being able to find jobs. Seems like people have this idea that just showing up is enough. It's not enough to just show up with a piece of paper like 'hey I finished a bootcamp/degree, gimme a job!'
I got my first job out of school with a combination of luck (knowing how to implement conway's game of life) and passion (a side project I had just shipped). Most every job after that has been because of passion. Whether or not you went to school for CS (or at all), or finished a bootcamp is completely irrelevant imho. I probably know more about von neumann architecture, big O and sorting algorithms than my friends without CS degrees... but I've worked with or admired plenty of people who never took a CS class and have mastered lots of things that I haven't. And I can definitely recall a few friends in undergrad who I was sure would go far and never found a single job cuz they sat around waiting for Larry Page to call them personally.
So yeah, tl:dr; school doesn't matter all that much if you're not motivated to continue learning. And if you don't enjoy programming enough to learn && experiment/play you're probably not gonna do well.
I almost went through one of the bigger bootcamps in Austin a couple of years ago, and I'm so glad I didn't for several reasons.
Everything about the application process felt like a for-profit university: they constantly blasted their impressive placement and salary figures at me, making it sound almost like I was guaranteed a $100k job right out of the program. A 96% placement rate and an average starting salary of 100+k allows them to paint a certain picture in applicants heads, and most people have no idea how hard it is when they sign up.
Funny enough, this bootcamp had all of their current students use the same job title on LinkedIn to show the bootcamp as work experience, which made finding alums VERY easy. I sent several alums who didn't get jobs quick messages asking about their experiences, and the responses were eye-opening. They were coached on how to go to networking events, where they wound competing against all of their classmates for junior gigs. After a few months, they went down in the bootcamp register as "failures", so they didn't count towards the glowing placement figures.
But the icing on the cake came years later, when this same bootcamp contacted a friend about recruiting some of their students. During the conversation, they disclosed that they were a contingency recruiter for their students: these junior candidates were going to cost the company six figures with the recruiting fee, which was crazy.
These students shell out $20+k for these programs and become unattractive candidates because the school wants a recruiting fee for someone that's been coding for 12 weeks, and the students probably don't even know what's going on.
I agree that its not fair to blame the bootcamps entirely, though I still think releasing better statistics might allow people to make more informed decisions, or at the very least weed out some of the shadier bootcamps.
That said, I think your tl;dr sums it up pretty accurately. If you're not that into learning something, its going to be hard to make a career out of it.
