I used to think bootcamp grads were unemployable, until I became their mentor

Photo credit: Lighthouse Labs.

Are bootcamp graduates worth hiring? I didn’t always think so. Imagine the idea that someone can learn how to code after just a few months. Craziness!

I’m self-taught, and it took me years. Most of my co-workers also spent years learning. We’d often discuss, “How can someone be ready to build a sufficiently complex website like ours with so little training?” It was unfathomable. We thought fresh CS graduates still had so much to learn even after years of study. That’s to say nothing of a three-month coding program.

I was a software architect at the time for a name-brand financial company. But I was also in the trenches cranking out code with everyone else. I worked with hundreds of other developers there that built web sites, back end stuff, databases, services, integrations, mobile apps, and other things. We wouldn’t have hired someone with only three months of experience.

The traditional wisdom was to hire someone from a university (maybe) and/or someone with convincing experience. I’m self-taught and I do not factor in whether someone has a CS degree or not. To me, if someone can do the job, then they are qualified. But three months?

A shift in mindset

Not long after I left the company, I met some people at a co-working space who were working on some really cool things. One such project was an app using the city parking sensors to show you a map to not only the nearest available parking spot but, by using historical data, also the statistically most likely one. I was amazed to learn these were students about halfway into their program (six weeks). This, among many other experiences, challenged everything I thought I knew about these types of schools.

Were they seasoned developers? No. Would I hold them to the criteria of someone who is? Never. But they were capable of anything.

I was then invited to interview for a technical mentor role in a company and was subsequently offered a position there. Over the eight or so cohorts that I graduated, I watched these budding coders build one amazing thing after another. In one of these projects, they chose to use a RaspberryPi as a device to control different Bluetooth speakers around the house. Using these in different rooms, the mobile app could control them independently or together. Not bad for their 10th week of coding.

Many of the projects they built weren’t taught at school—that’s the amazing part. We taught them a bit about coding, but the school was mostly a “learn how to learn” program. Google, StackOverflow, and Each Other were all their best friends. They would practice unfathomable numbers of coding and algorithm challenges each day followed by some carefully crafted sprints to expose them to various ideas and the need to deliver the solution. But when it came to the projects, they would choose what to deliver and then go learn beyond anything the curriculum taught. There were ups and downs (as any project has) but they delivered.

Were they seasoned developers? No. Would I hold them to the criteria of someone who is? Never. But they were capable of anything. I often had to re-evaluate what I thought I knew about development. I was used to a lot of planning, framework scaffolding, huge object composition maps, and interfaces that all had to be properly defined before we’d even get “Hello World.”

These students did none of that. They just wrote code and got their products demonstrable. If these projects were a startup, they’d have been profitable before our traditional software process could agree on what the MVP should be and who the team members are. More than that, I had to re-evaluate what I thought was possible to build with so little time.

What bootcamp graduates have

Perseverance

No challenge can be beyond them, as the journey of a software developer is lifelong learning. New ideas come and go, and we must keep current with the trends and challenge old ideas. Bootcamp graduates have so much to learn. Their program gives them just a small taste and, like all of us at the beginning of our journey, we must keep growing.

In my eyes, there is undeniable proof that bootcamp graduates are able to learn rapidly and apply what they have learned.