Guy Spent $11,000 On A Coding 'Bootcamp' And Doubled His Salary

Business Insider ^ | 04/12/2013 | Terence Chea, Associated Press

[SeekAndFind]

"Learn to write software in 9 weeks? New coding boot camps promise to launch tech careers"

_______________________________________________

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Looking for a career change, Ken Shimizu decided he wanted to be a software developer, but he didn't want to go back to college to study computer science.

Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the program last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more than twice his previous salary.

"It's the best decision I've made in my life," said Shimizu, 24, who worked in marketing and public relations after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. "I was really worried about getting a job, and it just happened like that."

Dev Bootcamp, which calls itself an "apprenticeship on steroids," is one of a new breed of computer-programming school that's proliferating in San Francisco and other U.S. tech hubs. These "hacker boot camps" promise to teach students how to write code in two or three months and help them get hired as web developers, with starting salaries between $80,000 and $100,000, often within days or weeks of graduation.

[Mr. K]

I got a chuckle out of that too. I have had to go more than once to give our HR weenie a stern talking to about sending me incompetant boobs with a stack of useless ‘certificates’

[Mr. K]

"Maybe these are the guys HP hires to write their great software. :-/ "

That WOULD explain a lot...

[central_va]

New coders are like cowboys who go around messing up everything the leaving the ranch going to a new job and leaving a mess. Then the old hands have to fix their mess, sometimes it takes years.

This new developer was getting his code hammered in production, they pulled his app, and I asked who had reviewed his code. He said no one. I told him if you work in a vacuum then things are going to suck. He was Indian so I don't think he got the pun.

[jwsea55]

Who would hire someone with such limited practical knowledge? The whole problem with hiring guys without the practical foundation is software is usually done in iterations. Introduce some crappy code where does that leave a company the next iteration.

Most of the guys who know how to write great code 'hacked' they way into the world.

[wbill]

:-) I’ll email you a new keyboard.

[jwsea55]

For the most part, HP has great hardware. I would rather shoot my pc full of lead than install their bloatware. At least that way there would be a better chance of it running at a tolerable speed.

[wbill]

Then the old hands have to fix their mess

I know a guy who makes a *very* good living doing remedial coding for companies who outsourced their IT overseas, then brought it back in-house.

[Moonman62]

just curious. how does someone get experience in coding (or anything else) if no one will give them their first job in that field?

Very good question. Have you noticed how entry level jobs mean entry level pay, not experience? Wbill probably gave you as good an answer as you're going to get.

[fireman15]

I agree... it does seem a little like deja-vu to me. I am comingat it from a different perspective however.

I worked as a “computer lab assistant” in the late 1980s. I was a computer “hobbiest” for many years prior to that. I worked on my first “radio shack digital computer IC chip kit when I was in the 5th grade in the early 1970s. I owned several “home computers” and put together a few XT and AT clones. I had also dabbled in programming and actually did have a small amount of formal training.

I had a very easy time helping students with their homework. So by the mid 1980s I had a good understanding of small computers from that time period. The main thing that I helped students with were Word Perfect, Lotus 123, DOS, Basic programming, and a couple of other introductory macro and programming languages. Graphical interfaces had been introduced but were still more of a curiosity to the business community so the community college didn’t really cover them.

I saw a lot of people with good jobs that they didn’t like who decided that they wanted to learn about “computers” and start a new career. Many of them had no understanding and worse... little aptitude for what they thought that they wanted to get into. What is different these days is that computers have become so ingrained in everything that we do that most people have an idea of whether or not they have an interest or aptitude for digging deeper into programming, web design, data entry or any other computer related field.

One of the students that I tried to help was a plumber with a god paying but unfulfilling job. He just wanted to get into “compuuters” and make more money. The poor guy had zero understanding and seemed to be unteachable but then he went on to a highly successful career at Microsoft... just kidding... he failed miserably. There are some people who simply have no aptitude for certain fields and others who can excell with almost no training at all.

I would imagine that most of the people who take these “boot camp” classes have already got some background and know a little about what they are getting into. It is hard to imagine someone spending $10,000 without cracking open a few books or watching a few instructional videos ahead of time.

[Mike Darancette]

If you are going to write business programs you need to know business. It really helps to know how your users do things.

[wbill]

MMMMmmmmmm. Hardcore PC geek. My story is much the same. I cut my teeth on a TI99/4A that was plugged into the families' B&W TV in the living room. The rest is history.

What I've seen of people who do the bootcamps is that they're "Get rich quick" types. They see "yada yada yada yada 100 Thousand a year yada yada". No commitment (cliche, but true), no concept of what's involved in IT.

Any fool can plug in a PC and make it work...and get paid a fool's wage. To pull down six figures designing million dollar systems that run corporations takes some aptitude, experience, and more knowledge than you'd get out of a 10-week crash course, I think.

[freeandfreezing]

teach students how to write code in two or three months and help them get hired as web developers, with starting salaries between $80,000 and $100,000, often within days or weeks of graduation

Sounds like evidence of a bubble in web related programmer salaries in California. And its completely inconsistent with the going rates for freelance coders. I doubt its true.

[freeandfreezing]

just curious. how does someone get experience in coding (or anything else) if no one will give them their first job in that field?

A good question, and one of the interesting things about the computer industry. Unlike many jobs which require specialized resources, anybody can write software if they have a computer. Assuming you've got a PC or a Mac and access to the internet (even occasionally) you can download all the tools you need to write software for free. If, for example you want to write code for a Windows environment you can download the free Express versions of Microsoft's development tools and start writing code.

There are vast amounts of free training materials, including courses that range from what a beginner would want to graduate level courses at MIT and Stanford that you can take for free if you have access to the internet.

And one of the side effects of the open software movement is that you can, for free, read, learn from, and use the very software used in major systems. For example, you can easily read and learn from the source code to the Android system used in cell phones and tablets, or the Apache web server source used as the server code for most large websites, or even the code used to build the Linux operating system.

One reason open source software exists is that students and others work on it without getting paid, often to learn and improve their own career potential.

When I used to hire software developers I found some of the best candidates had taught themselves and written significant programs on their own. Including a kid I hired who had dropped out of high school. He came to the interview with a stack of games he had written. We took one look at the quality of the coding and hired him on the spot.

Unlike other skills, a program itself shows how good a programmer you are. So in many cases a prospective employer can tell just from what you have written how good a programmer you are. The open source community provides an even better way to demonstrate how skilled you are as a developer - without having to be an employee, or ever having been hired to do software engineering.

Of course the do it yourself nature of software development is also a reason that programmers here have to compete with other developers from all over the world. Just as a kid here can use his time learning to program without any expense but his time, so can kids in China, India, Russia, and everywhere else where personal computers and the internet are available.

[Mr. K]

But yes, I have a corporation too. (Millennium Data Services, Inc.)

Got any contract work you want to farm out?

[Kid Shelleen]

>>Just curious. how does someone get experience in coding (or anything else) if no one will give them their first job in that field? <<

Try and get your foot in the door as a tester or system integrator. Once you get hired in by a company take advantage of the corporate training and continuing education programs.

I found a good niche writing device drivers in “C” because at the time not many hardware engineers wanted to write code and not many software engineers understood hardware. I learned a lot of engineering by mixing with people of different skill sets. The great thing about high tech is there’s always something new to learn, tools, languages, protocols, etc, etc.

[BushCountry]

I doubt that the people that take these courses have a technical background. There is nothing they could learn in these $10,000 HTML Boot-camp courses that is not freely offered on the web. Apply P. T. Barnum’s famous quote here.

[SendShaqtoIraq]

Thank you all for your replies and the info. Sorry to say, it’s all over my head. :) i was not asking specifically about IT stuff, i was referring in general to all the job ads that say “experience required.”

[Kid Shelleen]

>> i was referring in general to all the job ads that say “experience required.” <<

Use the want adds to find which companies are hiring. Lots of times job descriptions are inaccurate or don’t reflect the latest manpower requirements. To get by the HR screeners you might want to compose a cover letter explaining how your background is relevant to the position. You may land an interview even if your experience does not completely qualify you.

Computer programming is probably not a good example because it is so specialized but there are lots of other corporate positions that require good dependable workers who can pass a background test. I was told by many recruiters that a candidate who really wants the job can sometimes trump a more experienced and more expensive candidate.

GOOD LUCK !!! Don’t give up and don’t be intimidated by all the high tech jargon.