Will the Programming Tutorial Help Me Get a Coding Job?

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Dear Lifehacker, I want to get a job as a programmer, but I have no formal education. I have heard that in boot camps you can find work in just a couple of months. Although they seem complicated and expensive. Are they worth it?

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Dear Programmer, You are definitely not alone in your interest in programming as a career. Programming is one of the highest paying and in-demand professions you can find these days, and it doesn’t require a four-year degree. Programming tutorials promise to get you ready for the job in a relatively short amount of time.

Over the past few years, more than 60 bootcamps have sprung up to meet the needs of those changing careers and those looking to move quickly to a nearly six-figure job in software development. These programs – typically 8 to 12 weeks in duration and costing an average of $ 10,000 – offer hands-on training, career guidance and community support, and the opportunity to work on personal projects that you can showcase to potential employers. They are like vocational schools in the digital age . While they can be a great way to become a professional computer programmer, boot camps are not for everyone. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons.

Boot camps versus self-study and higher education

In terms of cost and time, coding bootcamps fall between self-study and traditional university degrees in computer science.

Self-taught: Many successful and excellent programmers are completely self-taught . Driven by their natural interest, they tinker with and hack other people’s code, and learn by doing – sometimes with their own learning plans or through the many available online coding courses and resources . The advantages of this approach are, of course, $ 0 tuition and flexible hours, but you will need a lot of discipline to learn in your spare time, as well as the skills and understanding to craft your own curriculum, so to speak. … Also, without any formal training, it can be more difficult for you to get a job if you don’t have a solid job to prove your programming skills and experience.

Higher education: On the other side of the spectrum are the formal programs and classes of university education. A computer science degree will give you a broader foundation and open up more jobs for you as employers screen candidates for credentials. After all, some argue that learning to think like a computer scientist is more important than learning to program. However, a college degree is expensive, and for those looking to start their careers as soon as possible in a specific programming role, a traditional degree may seem like an overkill or even a waste of time.

Bootcamps fall between the two, both in terms of cost and time. They offer much more targeted teaching in programming languages ​​or tracks. While bootcamps can get you ready for the job faster than going to college, the industry is unregulated (yet), you don’t get the all-round education you get at a university, you don’t have much time to study, and like admission to vocational school, getting a good job is not guaranteed. The Wall Street Journal reports (emphasis mine):

Entry-level programmers earn less than university-educated programmers who enter the job market. Some of the big IT companies that SeedPaths contacted were not interested in course graduates because they usually don’t have a college degree. And since the training camps appeared recently, the question of whether they produce a successful programmer, is not yet resolved.

“Hiring someone straight from school, from a coding course, or a four-year university is an investment,” said Will Cole, director of product for Stack Overflow Careers, which employs 40 software developers. “We don’t have the infrastructure to train new people without a lot of experience.”

But Mr. Cole said he really enjoyed the boot camps for “getting rid of the mysticism of programming.”

However, compared to self-study, bootcamps offer more support and additional motivation to learn and succeed. After all, you are investing $ 10,000 and 10 sleepless weeks of your life just for this purpose. With this investment and the exciting nature of these bootcamps, you will learn faster and more thoroughly through bootcamp than you probably would on your own. Plus, you will become part of the community of programmers, which is a very valuable resource in itself.

So far, enrolling in boot camp may seem ideal if you are determined to pursue a career in programming, but it costs thousands of dollars and most programs will require you to quit your job and give up everything for a few weeks, so enrollment is not. A decision that can be made easily.

What are boot camps and what will you learn

In short, programming training courses will help you “learn to program” whether you choose a web developer or a mobile developer track, JavaScript or Java program. Most bootcamps seem to have a similar structure – an allotted amount of lecture time followed by hands-on experience. A Lifehacker NH reader tells me:

It was intense. We spent the morning learning a new concept with the instructor, and after lunch we were mostly alone to apply the new concepts to our daily tasks. I rarely left class before 10:00 pm. On weekdays, we mostly woke up, worked in class, went home, went to bed. Even on weekends, although there was no class, there was seldom an offer of reprieve. By the end of 8 weeks, I could no longer imagine that I would be able to continue. But I loved every moment of it.

Due to the 24/7 business hours, boot camps are not ideal for people hoping to keep working (or leading a life) while studying, as most are full-time, scheduled programs. Some online bootcamps, such as Bloc and Career Foundry, offer a lot of flexibility, but even these courses require you to spend a significant amount of time each week – over several weeks – to acquire the skills you are looking for.

Depending on the boot camp, intensive courses can also teach you more subtle job skills that can prove invaluable when starting a new job. Victoria Barr, who had little technical experience before joining the Makers Academy and was just starting her first development job, said:

I’m by no means a software expert, but the Makers definitely prepared me for a number of aspects of my job: diving into code, learning on the fly, asking the right questions to get where I need to be. I was able to dive into the legacy code that I will be working with and find out what I am looking at.

Boot camp is incredible because you can learn by doing. There are many great online resources, but things like Codecademy exist in a vacuum. When you first start practicing on your own, you don’t even know what you don’t know and what you should learn. The creators taught me not only the syntax of programming languages. He taught me the principles of TDD, SOLID, how to take fuzzy programming logic and turn it into something concrete like a website with many moving parts. You can also learn pair programming with others by working together. It’s better than studying alone. We’ve had very long days. Many of us were at the office from 9 am to 9 pm. But we had lunch together, played a lot of ping-pong, drank some beer after hours. It was difficult, but fun and educational. I will definitely do it again.

More important than learning a specific language is the basic ability to quickly master new technologies – graduates of training courses should be able to easily prove to employers. Sienna Aguayo, who attended the Hackbright Women’s Academy, says:

As soon as I started working, I was put on our iOS team, which was a stack that I had no experience with (iOS is programmed in Objective-C and Hackbright taught me Python, and mobile app programming has a different set of problems than programming for the spider web). But I proved I could learn a ton in 10 weeks and was ready to do it again – I was part of the team that released our first iOS app last July and then dived to do it again for Android, released in December. … I am currently working on our website, writing mostly Angular and Rails, so I almost completely change my tech stack every 6 months. There is a lot you can learn in a 10 week boot camp, but the important thing is that you prove that you can learn new technologies quickly, which is an essential skill for a software engineer as the landscape changes all the time. This way, I really felt ready for someone who had been really genuinely programming for less than 5 months. I still had a lot to learn at work, but mostly these were things that can only be learned by working with a team in a professional environment, and not something that you can learn on your own.

The ultimate goal for most boot campers is to come in and come out in a few weeks with the coding skills and the confidence to not just get a job as a full-time software engineer, but make a career out of it. And some bootcamps offer job search as part of their curriculum, which is one of the reasons Curtis Mitchell chose Hack Reactor :

Around the middle of their program, the emphasis shifts from teaching programming to actually creating web applications for creating a portfolio, followed by interviews and preparing for a job search. HR had employees and former alumni who helped students find work. They taught us how to market ourselves and our skills, talk about our portfolios, and find the right companies and suitable positions. In the process of looking for work, they often met with students and alumni.

All but one of the 15 or so people who shared their bootcamp experiences with me were very positive about it, although some people are not working as programmers now, but instead working as project managers and founders of their own startups. The majority entered it already having some programming experience and, nevertheless, were completely confident in their decision. This guarantee seems to be very important.

How to determine if training camp is right for you

As with other education and career options, making this important decision comes down to what you hope to achieve. According to Jesse Farmer, co-founder of CodeUnion , the ideal boot camp candidates meet four criteria :

  1. They want to change careers and become a full-time (junior) software engineer.
  2. They can afford missed opportunities, i.e. they can quit their jobs, move around the country, etc.
  3. They can afford training.
  4. They know they can thrive in harsh conditions.

While anyone can attend boot camp (if accepted), due to the high tuition fees and the need to give up everything you do for a full day and a week, boot camps are best for people who are dedicated to their career. change and are confident that they want to do programming.

Most of the people who spoke to me about the reasons for attending boot camp had a similar background: they had little programming experience, but they knew that if they wanted to take it to the next level, they needed to do something radical.

Not everyone needs to have some coding experience to get into boot camp, but it helps. You don’t want to invest thousands of dollars, quit your job, and devote yourself entirely to one of these programs only to drop out halfway when you realize it’s not for you. So if you don’t have a lot of coding experience or are not sure about it as a career, first: try one of the many free options like Codecademy, to see if you really enjoy coding, join the Meetup group like Girl Develop It or Railsbridge , and take an online class, organized the community to test the water, – recommends Skillcrush . (Skillcrush offers a free, career-focused 10-day boot camp as an introduction to boot camps, at least online.)

NH says:

Everyone I spoke to since then who was interested in attending this bootcamp, I said the same thing: you have to want to. Like, I REALLY want it. You can’t just hope to scrape together enough of him to find a new job. It will defeat you. You have to want to learn for the sake of learning, otherwise you will never succeed. If you don’t have a passion for it, boot camps are not for you. You will get upset, you will give up, you will tell yourself that this is just not for you or that you are not good enough. I saw this happen in my cohort. I had a little previous experience that gave me a little leg up compared to others coming fresh, but I don’t think that’s why I succeeded. I got what I wanted out of it, because I wanted it more than anything, so I put everything I had into it. So I tell people that if they can do the same, then they will get whatever they want from this experience, and then a little more.

In other words, like all the other Bootcamp experiences (think Navy SEAL training and Kids Bootcamp ), this is not a random experience and you will need to invest in it completely.

Will you have work in boot camps?

If you are committed to the business, boot camp can turn you into a software engineer in a couple of months, but the bigger question may be: Will it help you get a better job?

Bootcamp alumni surveyed by Course Report saw an average 44% increase in earnings after completing bootcamp. (The survey involved 432 alumni from 48 programming schools.) Before attending boot camp, 48% were employed full-time, and after attending boot camp, 63% were employed full-time. Most bootcamps surveyed offer career development services such as resume assistance or internship / apprenticeship placement.

If your goal is to pursue a career in programming, you probably want to take a close look at the employment and career services rates in each boot camp. According to Launch Academy co-founder Evan Charles on Quora :

There is currently no standardized calculation of rates for accommodation among bootcamps (we will try our best to help the consumer with this over the next few months). At Launch Academy, employment rates are calculated as applicants who earn paid positions in companies within 90 days of graduation, where “job seekers” refers to graduates who actively communicate with our talent director, attend and / or participate in scheduled interviews. any of the various career resources we offer during the postgraduate support program phase.

Published rates for popular bootcamps

Hackbright’s employment rate is 90% within 3 months .

Placement rates of 85-96% are not bad! But you would not want to be among the 4-15% of those who pay tuition and are still looking for a job.

Some schools offer a job offer guarantee: you get a job within a specified number of months of graduation in certain locations (you must be prepared to relocate to technology-friendly cities), or your tuition will be reimbursed. Code Fellows and Viking Code School offer a guarantee or tuition refund if you are not hired. Many schools also offer partial refunds of several thousand dollars for tuition fees if you take a job with one of the boot camp partner companies.

While most of the people who have emailed me about their experiences said they received job offers before or shortly after completing the program, unless the program offers a 100% job guarantee, there is no guarantee that your time and financial investment will lead to receiving work. One of the boot camp alumni told me:

I haven’t got a job yet and have been looking for over a month. I’m starting to worry. The recruiter told me that at first, web development bootcamp graduates had great success in hiring because it was new, but now it is not. I wish I had some work experience to show that I am a developer. I was simply denied the job because I had no experience with Rails.

So while a coding training course looks like a promising fast track to a career as a programmer, the graduate itself probably shouldn’t be your biggest argument for potential employers. In addition, despite the high level of employment, it can take months after the end of a boot camp to find a job.

How to choose and pay for a programming training course

Perhaps the most important decision is choosing the right boot camp. When choosing a specific boot camp, you should first look at the success rate of the program and the curriculum (for example, if the program has a strong emphasis on JavaScript and this is what you want to learn), but there are other considerations, such as location and network graduates. A few tips:

  • Check out this list of factors to consider when choosing a Jeff Lee Bootcamp, from the technical and non-technical skills they teach to equipment, payment plans, typical schedule and program culture.
  • Check the list of schools using boot camp catalogs from Course Report , Bootcamps.in, or Skilledup
  • Read reviews on Thinkful and Switchup to see what others have to say about the programs. Read all the reviews you can find on Quora and Hacker News because you can find horror movies like this one.
  • Ask alumni, program managers, or teachers about the program, such as how many students are in each class, what types of assistance they offer, what experience students should have upon admission, how they help students with difficulties, and what is the day-to-day life at boot camp

To pay the high price, some bootcamps offer payment plans and deferred payment (like a percentage of your first year salary after graduation), but otherwise you need to defer or fund those tuition costs in the same way you would other similarly large ones. costs. Several Codex schools offer scholarships for veterans / military personnel, women, minorities and other select groups.

Not all boot camps are the same, and you need to make sure you pick the best one before spending tens of thousands of dollars on it. But it can change your life and be the easiest way to start a career in computer science if you haven’t already graduated from college with a degree in computer science. Makers Academy alumnus Christopher Batts adds:

Probably the most surprising thing about the course that I have seen throughout this course, and which is often not discussed, is that for many, this is the last chance for a career change. Indeed, it is very difficult to break into the world of technology as a coder without doing programming. Typically, programmers are self-taught from a young age or study computer science in a department store. If the Makers didn’t exist, I’m sure a lot of the guys who went through this would still be stuck in a role they hated doing something that didn’t challenge them. The creators really were one of the only career options for them.

Just know what you are getting yourself into and get ready to dive.

Love, life hacker

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