About 8 years ago I got into tech sales. I was always a bit “nerdy” and interested in leveraging data/automation so a career in sales quickly transitioned into sales operations, but outside of some python and tad bit of SQL all my work has been on no code platforms (mostly Salesforce). The stuff that “real” engineers did seemed totally inaccessible to me, although that inaccessibility has diminished a little after observing the engineers at the startup I was working at.
That startup recently let me go in a round of layoffs. I saw it coming and dad been saving, so I’m entering unemployed with about 6-12 months of living expenses in the bank depending how deep into savings I dug. (Also have nobody depending on my salary as my wife just got a big promotion/raise).
Would it be a horrible idea to finally jump over the imaginary chasm I’ve built in my mind into the world of engineering and enroll in a coding bootcamp? I know in the best of times these programs were tenuous and full of questionable promises despite costing $10k+, what are they like now given the job market and impact of generative AI?
Thanks for the insight!
(For context, I’m 34 and based out of NYC. No kids.)
If the goal is to finish a bootcamp and land your first developer job in that timeframe, yes, it's a horrible idea with a very high probability of failure.
If you don't have expectations of landing a job and you can afford the time and money and you've picked a reputable bootcamp, then it's probably fine.
Given you're not in financial distress I would suggest spending a few weeks or a month learning without a bootcamp to see how you like it. For example https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2024/ is often referenced as a good intro to programming and web development course and it's free.
If you still like it after that then either continue self learning or try to find a bootcamp that has a good deal around employment like you only have to pay them after you land a job or they have a really strong system around helping you find employment.
I'm pretty sure the market for hiring junior / beginner developers right now is going to be brutal, bootcamp or not. Jobs are weird though, there's so much luck involved around being in the right place at the right time. If programming is something you really want to do, being prepared for that type of scenario is of course worth it.
Screw promises.
A coding bootcamp is the best guided way, other than college, of acquiring basic knowledge and skills of a software developer. It will not guarantee that after graduating from it you will find a job; although some bootcamps may have certain arrangements. What a good bootcamp does guarantee though is that after completing it, you will have sufficient knowledge to build, say, a mildly complex website, or do some data analysis tasks. In good market conditions, this makes the graduate somewhat employable as entry-level software engineer.
There are plenty of free online resources that you can use instead. But that requires a lot of discipline; and a curriculum to know what you need to be studying.
I think a bootcamp can be good (depends on the camp) to help you kick start the learning process. A few months in a place doing things daily can be helpful.
This is great if you really want to spend a long time doing this. It takes years to get decent at programming.
The promise that you will find a job right after I don't think is realistic. I am not saying it can't happen but it is very difficult. Companies have a lot of options now and typically won't even look at boot camp grads.
If this is a near life long investment, it could be useful to kick start that. Just with the caveat it will probably take time.
What they usually do is hire you at a grad level, and put you in a bootcamp for couple of months.
In your scenario, doing a BootCamp right now would be a gamble given that you might finish it and not find a job straight after, leaving you with either jumping back into sales (therefore, making it hard to find another dev job).
You could look into bootcamps that are cheaper/free, visit meetups, and try to network while looking for a new tech sales job.
Also, talk to your wife. If becoming a developer is a major goal for you in life, I'd take the gamble but consider doing something that might take a bit longer (+2/3 years) in a university, so you'd get back in tech as soon as the market hopefully would recover.
You could also try to aim for AI-related topics.
Bootcamps may partner with some companies looking to hire juniors so you may have a higher chance to land a job after that, but experience wise, as an unaffiliated company, I'd look at you the same as someone doing comparable projects on his own on github.
Get a backend in node.js running with postgres and redis, get some react frontend. You can build pretty much anything.
Bonus point, you could use sales skills to actually sell the product you are building and make some spare cash.
If it fails, hey at least you didn't spend 10k$ on a bootcamp and still learnt how to build stuff.
AI isn't the problem, it's the saturation of folks like myself with 10+yrs of development who are clawing and fighting to the death for what jobs are out there. Market SUCKS right now.
I am THANKFUL for my current gig, but I wanted to add something my current employer (co-workers) mentioned to me. They were surprised at the high regard that people had only completed bootcamps held themselves.
Those running these organizations are selling a lie. You cannot make a baby with four women in three months. There is no replacement for years of experience in industry. Period.
I think they are an incredibly useful resource, I myself was a TA for one that started locally during their first cohort.
If you want to learn stuff, start building things right away. Don't build too big, find challenges that are appropriate to your skill level (BCs are good at this). Find others who will look at / inspect / find ways to break your work and use these opportunities to learn / grow / figure out what to do differently.
Repeat until job. Either the work you will do can attract some attention, or you will inadvertantly prepare yourself for the opportunity you didn't see coming. Stay busy. Keep working. Share what you are doing.
You don't need to pay 10k for the education you seek. It's just going to take every bit of effort, mental acuity and sanity you have left. You CAN do it but there is risk of burnout. Read my comment history if you wanna know what that looks like.
For a bootcamp that announces 95% of students finding a job in the field you will see that in reality they remove from their numbers the students that:
- Did not finish the bootcamp,
- "Chose" to get a job out of the field of the bootcamp after the end (as if it was a choice and not because nobody wants to hire them in the field),
- Missed a single of their monthly status check meetups (regardless of the reason),
- Missed the target (even just once) that their "career advisors" give them like applying to a minimum of 10 jobs in the field every single day,
- Refused a job offer they received (a lot are offered a very low-pay job to become an instructor at the same bootcamp).
If you do the total, they basically eliminate 80% of their students from the final calculation to reach those 95%.
I did a dive-deep during the height of the hiring frenzy and if you only looked at "got a job in the field / were students at the bootcamp", the success rate was at best 20% (for "top tier" bootcamps).
And of those that do find a job, it is almost always insanely low pay (I don't think a single one was above $100K in NYC for the bootcamps I looked at).
Needless to say that nowadays you simply have not chance to get a job after a bootcamp. The whole industry is a scam.
With limited funds as a constraint, it isn't a good idea to pay thousands for a bootcamp that doesn't have a high probability of placing you in a job.
Instead, you can save your money and learn mainstream Python/SQL/Javascript/etc for free with resources like Youtube, blogs, StackOverflow, etc. Some more tutorials that are not free but still low cost include subscriptions to Pluralsight, Lynda/LinkedinLearning, etc.
If I was hiring, I'd prefer Candidate A that used the unemployed time to self-teach from 2 months of Youtube videos and developed a few projects on Github that he/she can explain -- over Candidate B that just graduated from a 2 month bootcamp.
In addition to all the tutorials on "Youtube University" being free ... it lets you gauge your true motivation and determination on the programming topics. This self-assessment could give you more evidence to reject (or enthusiastically enroll in) a coding bootcamp.
Could I have kept learning on my own? Sure. But the butt-in-seat for 9 hours a day at a bootcamp accelerated my learning quite a bit. Was it worth the $14,000? For me, yes. I got to being a hireable junior developer many months faster, so just in terms of runway, it was worth it. You'll have to make your own assessment about how much shorter of a runway you'll have, and how much quicker you'll get to takeoff with a bootcamp for yourself.
Still, it's tough to recommend a bootcamp in 2024. I did some writing about it. https://james07.bearblog.dev/how-to-keep-coding-bootcamps-re.... It isn't so much, will gen-AI take all the junior jobs (though, to some extent, yes, it has)? It is more, only gen-AI-wielding juniors will be worth hiring. At the very least, the bootcamp you're considering should have their story straight about how they will help you learn with gen-AI. They've had a year to figure this out, or not. If they seem lost about it, stay far away.
One piece of advice I would give, the certificate from a bootcamp is pretty worthless. You want to really prioritize learning as much as possible and engaging as much as possible. Don't feel bad about asking questions, "annoy" the lecturers or whatever. Make sure you understand what they are teaching and try to understand the deeper concepts and not just the surface level "this is how you make a button red".
When I went to university, my attitude was the complete opposite. I did the absolute minimum to get A's and slacked off a lot. I was there for the piece of paper (degree) and learning was secondary. Attitudes have shifted a lot and degrees aren't as highly regarded nowadays(which is good), bootcamp certificates aren't really taken into consideration at all.
- you learn better in a focused, scheduled program
- you want access to an instructor that can answer your questions 1:1
IMHO, that isn’t worth the $8k or whatever these places charge. Work on it yourself, get active in online communities, go to dev meetups, make friends with more experienced devs that are willing to help you with questions.
I enjoyed instructing and my students, but I quit because I felt like I was complicit in a scam and I didn’t agree with how they approached the curriculum.
I did this myself a few years years ago over lockdown. I had a lot of down time and worked on teaching myself web development full time 5 days a week for about a year. I was then able to land a job at a FAANG company through an apprenticeship scheme that they offer in the UK (I'm not sure if these kinds of schemes are available in the US) where I stayed for a year and a half and I am now working for a startup in a position I found through connections I made at my previous job. At the time I did have other offers for non-apprenticeship roles at other companies so don't let the absence of apprenticeships put you off if they aren't on offer in the US. The job market was definitely better when I was applying for my first job so the process might be more drawn out now. The main resource I used for self teaching was The Odin Project (https://www.theodinproject.com/). I also did a batch at The Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/) which was a great experience in general, especially for getting some hands on time working on projects with other people. I would say be curious, reach out to people who are working on things you find interesting to ask them for a chat and just persevere with the applications as you will definitely get a lot of rejections.
One more thing (might be UK specific as well) but I would check to see if there are any government funded bootcamps you might be able to get a place on. I know multiple people in the UK who got the job center to pay for them to do a bootcamp while they were on universal credit and now work in the industry.
You need to know your own learning style, and then compare it to what a bootcamp would offer - would that work for you? Or would you need one on one coaching? Or could you just read tutorials and ask on StackOverflow? Or should you do a course somewhere? It's really a matter of what you know would drive you, personally, and then - if appropriate - finding a reasonable bootcamp and sticking with it.
Also, definitely don't assume that programming is some magic profession with Google-2020 salaries for all and very little output required - even Google isn't like that anymore. It's just a job, so you need to reflect a lot on if it's actually a job you would want to do all day for years.
On the other hand, don't over-analyse - if you decide "yes, I could do that for years" and then change your mind, that's fine too.
I’ll also say that programming is more a mindset than anything. Willingness to learn, try things, fail, and grow. Languages themselves are also tools more than things to dedicate your life to, so pick the one that works best for your problem if it makes sense. So in that respect the wall you mention is perhaps more one the media has built up.
Happy to help more with advice/ideas if you want to reach out.
Get a freelance job. Do something on fiverr. Get yourself solving real problems for people. Figure it out, by doing the job itself.
If you’re not confident you can do it, try searching and doing a freelance request on your own.
If you can stick with it to the end, you can build confidence for the next thing.
Best case you end up with more cash and connections for work. Worst case you realize you’re not into the work.
* layoffs.fyi -- the market is pretty rough, and that will show you just how bad
* you're already in tech (sorta) / tech adjacent, and you already have been around the engineers. you're not a waiter or truck driver starting from scratch, and have some context. a boot camp might work, but you could just as easily pick up some of this on your own.
* consider free online programs like free code camp or the odin project. shoot for just 2 hours a day, and then spend the rest of your time looking for another job.
* tech sales, esp. sales guys who are sorta technical (or very technical, e.g. sales engineers), and who can close deals, are still in demand.
* a bootcamp will eat a lot of that 6-12 months living expenses
* also, do you want to be coding, or in some sort of tech? there may be paths into DevOps or IT that might flow faster. starting from scratch it's best to go closer to the machine -- at uni the joke was "IT is for I Tried (but washed out of CS / engineering)" -- but pure coding may not be something you're into. There are happy mediums and certain IT roles might be a great fit.
I was in a similar position where i could not stand my accounting job, but loved programming which i had been learning on the side. I quit my job, went to a bootcamp, and it was the best decision i ever made. It's not going to be easy, but if you stick with it it can be extremely rewarding, and not just financially speaking.
OP, if your motivations are largely economical, you're probably best off leveraging your existing skillset and experience. Sales is a very valuable skill, and engineering/tech, while valuable in isolation, truly shines when applied to a domain. Building your own product while learning how to code could propel you forward in your current field.
On the other hand, if this is something with a more intrinsic motivation behind it (which it sounds like it could be the case given your post) then it might be worth considering doing the "slow" path. Have you looked into community college courses that you might take nearby? This might allow you to work your learning into the other obligations in your life. I chose a similar path (my original background was in consulting/sales) after I realized I loved the subject of computer science. I really benefited and appreciated a more formal academic setting. Funnily enough, I discovered this love after building my own product. (Which was terribly constructed, but a great experience!)
In the end to truly achieve a high level of proficiency takes time. I'm coming up on six years and only recently feeling exceedingly competent.
Remember that no bootcamp or university "owns" the knowledge and satisfaction of programming, it's out there accessible for anyone willing to put in the time. =) You'll have to have a deep look at your motivations and decide what is best for you. For me, learning programming and computer science was one of the best things I ever did.
This article is a classic and might be a nice read for you: https://norvig.com/21-days.html
Edit: Another great resource to self-study: https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf
I don’t know if they look for bootcamp on your resume in the US, but here it would be nothing but a giant waste of money unless you cannot do self study
Try online courses first and see if the 5% is there. It's going to be an uphill battle otherwise.
Does anyone know of a coding bootcamp that guides you through more advanced projects, like how to build a NES emulator, a database, and things like that?
