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The most important part is missing from the article: how they found and got accepted for the first job. The hardest part of switching isn’t attending the bootcamp, it’s finding a company that is willing to take a chance on your lack of experience and future growth potential. Doubly so for switching into the industry during Q3 of 2020 and fully remote. Did they get extremely lucky? Did they go to school with the hiring manager? Was it something in between?
Articles like this are appealing because they paint a rosy picture of easily jumping into it, but in reality, it’s usually much harder. Those details matter.
True. I have experience working as an instructor at a bootcamp. I've had the opportunity to learn more about bootcamps as an industry....The best bootcamps (highest placement rates) without fail offer a career services portion as well.
That gives you interview prep, LinkedIn support, resume building and most importantly networking with hiring partners. I have no doubt someone can become a dev in from no experience in 3 months, because I've seen it happen personally hundreds of times. But without the career services it is far more difficult to break in.
Correct. I am self taught but it is only through my somewhat relevant experience as a project manager and in IT that a company would even give me an internship based on a small demo and a recommendation from a lead engineer that I had promise. I have no idea if I would have been able to “break in” otherwise. They paid me next to nothing and I could afford that. It’s a lot of privilege and luck that got me in. I don’t recommend others try to follow my path, but I also wish it were easier to do so.
After a year of experience I was getting legit decent offers - initially almost entirely via referral. I stayed around the initial company because I was still learning a lot. Many years later I am a senior engineer. The world does open after the first job but getting the first one is hell.
Don’t underestimate the class signaling that companies and hiring managers look for. Being some person with a portfolio and no experience almost never seems to make anyone take notice or consider an interview. I haven’t figured out how one would best repeat what I did - there’s lots of very viable and capable (and diverse!) people I know who’ve never been given the chance.
I’d love if there were companies that offered apprenticeships - plenty of people out there would take low pay to get some real experience.
Yep, went to the article curious about that, went back and read it twice to make sure I wasn't missing it, and came here to say this!
They don't say if they actually have found a job yet, which makes a pretty big difference to how we understand "how I successfully became a software engineer"! If they have, I'm curious if the boot camp played a role in placing them and what that was like if so, otherwise how difficult it was to find a job, and either way if the working conditions and salary were what they had hoped for or expected, etc.
Just apply for jobs on indeed for 4 hours a day and go through all the coding challenges and bullshit interviews and rejections. Stop making this an impossible mission. Companies are paying you to solve problems through software and yuo can't solve your own? fuck outta here
Fluff article that seems to be just a dark pattern/undercover advertising for the boot camp. Not a whole lot of actual 'how' other than the basics of anything. Show up, do the work, and out effort into it. But mentions the boot camp six times.
I truly love success stories like this.
We can make fun of bootcamps, but the people going into them are by-and-large trying to make themselves better than they are. Its the human condition and should be our goal.
I would never make fun of bootcamps (my own journey has been ... "non-linear" ...), but I think that it is very important that people that attend them, have a mindset of "This is just the first rung of a very long ladder." I don't really appreciate recent bootcamp grads, lecturing me on how "I'm doing it wrong." The fault for this, usually falls on the bootcamp teachers, who present their information as "The One, True Way, and All Others Are Heathens that Will Burn In Hell." It's a great way to get the students pumped up and engaged, but has ... drawbacks, when in the work world.
It depends on the mindset that we take with us, to our first job, and our eagerness to learn. I feel that bootcamps usually filter for people that are serious about bettering themselves, and also enforce a certain level of Discipline. My own schooling was at a "redneck" EET school. It was exactly the kind of thing that popped up in droves, after Vietnam, to mine the GI Bill, and folded, not too long, after. The school, itself, was no great shakes, but it taught me Discipline, and enforced a work ethic that still pays dividends, to this day, 40 years later.
Welcome to Hell, kid. The learning never stops.
Welcome to Heaven, kid. The learning never stops.
You cannot claim this with any certainty. I would counter-claim that many who go into developing are in it for the gold-rush mentality (I can get paid $$$) which ultimately lowers the quality of software. I'm not doubting there are those who go into it with good intentions but it's not something that is cut out for anyone and those who get into it because it's a bright, shiny object are doing themselves a disservice.
At a very young age I ventured into taking apart my personal computer to better understand it. When I was in my early teens I could build a whole computer with off-the-shelf parts without any help. My older peers would poke at me for being some sort of "tech wizard" because computers were something a lot of the older generation didn't grow up with at the time. I would take every opportunity to show interested parties just how straightforward it was that I did; Certain cards fit in certain slots, cables only fit in one way, and there were a few internals you had to be a little more careful with than others. Many of those people were surprised to see just how simple "building a computer" was, more akin to building Lego than something that needed a college degree and high amounts of technical skill.
Code boot camps tend to be a bit one-dimensional and only give the students a slice of the basics, most often including setting up a work environment and focusing on lessons that produce immediate results and/or feedback. People interested in software development don't realize how easy it can be to get started making small projects, often needing their hand held at that critical entry point. Boot camps can help lift the veil of mysticism and show that software development isn't sorcery.
I don't have formal CS education, but I've been working as a developer for 25 years.
In the firm I've been in that last 15 years, only developers with 10+ years of experience actually make a difference.
Others are either still learning, or just doing menial work.
It makes me a bit sad this trend of "become a developer in 3 months". It's just a dream.
I have a similar background, and my initial path into this job in the late 90s was definitely "become a developer in 6 months" using only books on HTML and Perl (and a pirate copy of Photoshop), so I can easily believe with instruction one can become a developer in 3.
There's a lot I couldn't do, of course, and there will be a lot that bootcamp devs can't do. But it's a start, a foot in the door. And it's also a kick up the ass for anyone who doesn't have the discipline to just sit at home studying for months.
I suspect both you and I made useful contributions before we hit the 10 year mark, if your young devs are just doing menial work either they're just not very good or they aren't being given anything solid to work on.
Respectfully it’s not, and I’ve never heard of needing devs with 10 years of experience to do non-menial work.
Within my first year without a formal education I was shipping major features out to customers. Yes most of that year was big squashing, perf optimization and helping others with features. 10 years later, I am still learning - I hope that part never stops.
There are plenty of web dev work around and you don't need 10+ years of experience to do it.
"Successfully becoming a software engineer in 3 months" is a sign that one is not yet aware of all the things he doesn't know.
If, as it looks like, he's writing this two years after that experience and still does not feel a little bit of that imposters syndrome, than I would argue that he's doing something wrong. I would say part of being a software engineer is being aware that your code could always be better and that are always some areas of knowledge that deserved more research, a context that makes the word success somewhat meaningless.
Software Engineer was already a questionable job title 20 years ago. Now it is even more questionable.
Nothing against immersion bootcamps, but just because someone learned basics of a language and completed a few web pages or some microservices doesn’t mean they are equivalent to someone with a CS degree and years of experience developing side projects while in high school and college, which meets the profile of many CS grads.
It took me 8 months for my first job as software developer when I was 37yo, self-taught. I wrote about the decision, the learning process, the job hunt, if anyone is interested.
Happy for him if that went well and he got a job out of it, but:
>In 3 short months, we learned everything necessary to become software engineers.
Just 'no'. This is a case of not knowing what you don't know.
A lot of people from HN have no CS or engineering background and we can still make a living in the tech world in technical fields.
I think more people should be encouraged to try and jump into tech career if they have the time and resources and encourage them to do; salaries are higher and demand for talents are still pretty high. It can be a life changing experience.
Stop bitching if the OP is a jr / developer or whatsoever. He got a tech job anyway. We should clap for him not be pedantic about it.
Must admit I find it discouraging that I spend years in university years ago when people now just finish some self-learned material in a matter of a few months. It is only getting simpler every year. I don't see the future being bright for this discipline if the sentiment is that that is all it takes.
> I don't see the future being bright for this discipline if the sentiment is that that is all it takes.
Building web apps isn't rocket science lol. You're just positioning divs on a screen and building basic CRUD apps.
You can indeed learn most of what you need in 3 months. The rest is learned with experience in the real world.
Not sure why you find it discouraging. Having a degree means you probably went through a more formal process and were exposed to a more academic-way of studying things which can benefit your career as well as your personal life. Knowledge is always good!
Code monkeys are different than programmers (or "software engineers").
Nobody is learning, actually learning, all these topics in a condensed 3-month program.
Good programmers are always going to have work, because there simply aren't enough good programmers.
This guy has a degree and worked in commercial real-estate. He's intelligent and capable of working in tech. Bootcamps are retraining programs, not degree programs. They're not going to turn dummies into software engineers.
Most programming these days is just a very shitty version of configuration management.
> I believe everyone can be a developer if they put in the time and effort
For a non-FAANG, absolutely. But for a FAANG after browsing Blind for a while, it's more about grinding Leetcode a few hours a day for 3-6 months :yikes:
There’s a difference between
“How I successfully became a software engineer in 3 months”
and
“How I became a successful software engineer in 3 months”.
I wouldn't think that 3 months is enough time to decide if success has been reached
>I am 24 years old and I'm ashamed to say my goal used to be to make as much money as possible.
Why do workers feel and express this shame, but owners are no target of it outside of blatant abuse cases? It's a sick trick against workers
> In 3 short months, we learned everything necessary to become software engineers. I felt like I could achieve anything I put my mind to.
Am I the only one who cringed at this? Dunning-Kruger would like a word. I've been developing for near a decade and am just realizing what it means to become a software engineer; and it's a whole lot more than just hands on keyboards.
> In 3 short months, we learned everything
I've met, and worked with, people who thought like this - they always had a mind-boggling blind spot for their own failures. If they actually encountered something they were unable to do, or made a mistake, their brains would just seemingly erase any memory of the experience.
The problem I see, especially for someone who is entering the field of software development, is the lack of critical thinking.
If you think that you've learned everything needed to become a software engineer in three months, wouldn't it cause you to wonder why four-year programs exist? Has this ever occurred to OP?
I know several software engineers who look longingly at real-estate management and it’s default literal rent-seeking monetary rewards. Some have even taken the plunge.
Nice to hear about someone going the other way.
I notice the 'success' is in the wrong place. More laudable would be 'How I became a successful software engineer in 3 months'.
to me, seems like an app academy social ad
you should probably avoid the term engineer and use "developer" instead, and "junior"
As a non-computer "real" engineer - what is the actual designation between these two terms in the CS world?
In my experience the title "Engineer" is a legally protected one, and those using it without proper licensure can suffer penalty - take a look at the Strongtowns case for one example. But those in the programming world seem to be able to throw around the title on a whim. Any discussion/history/insight would be appreciated.
> I was hired as a junior software engineer at a tech startup
He says ‘Junior’ later on, and if his job role says software engineer he can use the term.
As far as I can tell, the only US states that care about the software engineering distinction are Texas and Florida. And it's for legacy bureaucratic reasons more than anything. I'm not personally concerned about someone incorrectly assuming I, software engineer, am the right person to design a bridge.
Why? Are the people that drive trains(original engineers) going to be upset?
If he writes code he's an engineer.
It's just his imagination..
Why?
Easy to get in. Hard to get out.
Let's just say that it's a difficult path towards woodworking.
"How I successfully became a civil engineer in 3 months"
Brrrrr.
Why the hell this is allowed when talking about software is beyond me.
Because the term [junior/senior] software engineer doesn't mean anything.
If you have a laptop, congrats you're now a software engineer.
Because people expect bridges to work and software to fail.
Because you can't really teach yourself civil engineering. A degree is more or less mandatory so all civil engineers have at least 3 years of learning behind them.
There's no qualification required to become a "software engineer", so you can absolutely become one (maybe not a very good one) in 3 months.
My thoughts exactly.