Did you do much research before settling on this one? My largely uninformed impression is that there's a huge range in quality for these things and that some non-negligible fraction of them really are basically scams.
Yes, I did a ton of research, and picked the one that had basically no bad reviews and a reputation for being difficult to get into. People in my cohort were all sharp, and some were very sharp.
I'm surprised it wasn't one of those deals where instead of tuition they take a portion of your first year's salary.
Some places do that, and I agree that's the best way to align incentives. I think that if you get in and can't pay and can't secure a loan, they might still consider it. It's off-menu these days.
By the way, the program I did was remote, and we had students from Brazil and Singapore in my cohort, and one in Japan in another. The guys in Asia don't see the sun for three months, but complaining is not the [bootcamp] way.
Just about. Out of 21 in my cohort, two were women. In the other, simultaneous, cohort that we interacted with, I think three were. There were a bunch of women running the program, but the students are mostly guys.
Was it really a coding boot camp or was it really a premature ejaculation clinic?
If the latter, what do you think he's getting paid for now?
LB, how did the second half of the interview go?
Good, I think. By the end of it the bureau chief was excitedly sketching maps for me to illustrate a particularly neat case he'd done a year or two ago.
Interesting! The chances I'll want to learn to code are very low, but I find all this fascinating. If you ever (or now, even!) want to talk about what the home-to-job change has meant for your family, I'd be interested in that too.
home-to-job change has meant for your family
I think it's not going to be all that big a change. For the past six months or so, I've barely seen the boys, and they've been at school, then in the care of either my mom or my wife's parents (who stayed here for the duration of the bootcamp, which was three months). When I start working, my mom will still see them at least a couple days a week, my wife has one day off, and we'll see about school/nanny/random teenager for the other two days. And they'll actually see more of me on the weekends.
What are you going to be doing at your new You're a Stain on Humanity developer job? Is it Java? Are you going to be doing web development or something else? (And congratulations! Welcome to the ranks of stains on humanity. There's a pinning ceremony on the Google Bus out of the Mission, if you can make it.)
Front-end development, Javascript division. I think a back-end job would have been cool, but even in Chicago there were barely any Node jobs. It's all Java and some Rails.
even in Chicago there were barely any Node jobs.
Sensible!
It's all Java and some Rails.
Sigh.
Am I supposed to guess your preferred framework?
I just don't really like Javascript (and deffo wouldn't want to use it on the backend), and Ruby just doesn't seem interesting. I hear that recent Java versions are ok! And there are decent compile-to-Java languages.
The languages I actually like are not widely used at all, though. I mean I guess I like Python ok, but it would be way preferable if it had a typesystem (other than the optional and mostly just for python 3 mypy).
I would definitely be interested in hearing more about this. My boyfriend is reconsidering grad skool and seriously thinking about doing one of these boot camps, but is also wary about them being scams or low-level IT fodder.
For your program and other higher quality ones, what sort of prereqs are required? Is there an entrance exam?
I guess I've been assimilated, but honestly I find Node/Express pretty easy to use. I've never had to build anything at scale though. But I just saw a talk about WalMart handling the entirety of its mobile Black Friday shopping with Node.
I've reached the point of "fuck frameworks." There are too damn many of them and they come in and out of stye too quickly to keep up.
Is there an entrance exam?
An entrance interview in this case. Email me for details.
Did you end up entertaining multiple job offers? Any general salary negotiation tips?
Also congrats. Also I want to remark that Unfogged quietly hosts the least obnoxious conversations about programming on the internet.
Congrats Ogged! Welcome to the dark side. Curious to hear about the experience and also about how the job feels after a couple months.
26.penultimate is something that I hear a lot but have a hard time wrapping my head around how such a language would be any better than Java.
No multiple offers. It all wrapped up pretty quickly. There were tons of places that never responded, obviously, and a couple of coding challenges I bombed, but I was in later stages with two other places when I took this job.
As for salary, there are three posts that everyone links to. I...didn't read them, but I'm told they're great. It really does help to practice, and know what you're going to say. And the cardinal rule, of course, is never ever give your number before they do.
http://lizmrush.com/on-interviewing/
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
http://www.mgadams.com/2015/06/30/the-software-engineers-guide-to-negotiating-a-raise/
Thanks, Jake! I'm also curious about how I'll feel in a couple of months, and how that will color what I think of the training. I'll revisit, for sure.
I want to remark that Unfogged quietly hosts the least obnoxious conversations about programming on the internet.
We make up for it by having obnoxious conversations about other stuff. (And congrats, ogged.)
Just about. Out of 21 in my cohort, two were women. In the other, simultaneous, cohort that we interacted with, I think three were. There were a bunch of women running the program, but the students are mostly guys.
The extreme skew is actually surprising, since you describe it as tailor-made for people currently out of work and being supported by spouses.
The extreme skew is actually
right in line with industry numbers.
Of course, but this sounds like something for people who are switching careers and people who didn't grow up fascinated by computers like every single person who gets a degree in computers did. And still, it's all men.
26.penultimate is something that I hear a lot but have a hard time wrapping my head around how such a language would be any better than Java.
The type system mypy implements is far better than Java's.
The opinion in 40 should be pretty uncontroversial.
I think one of the biggest factors in how you think about types and typing is whether, when you hear "type system", you think "C or Java", or you think "ML or Haskell".
Congrats, ogged! Gainful employment sucks, apart from the gainful bit, but it does seem to be expected.
Congrats. It is pretty crazy to go from 0 to new technically-demanding job in what, 3 months? It makes me feel like I should spend less on my kids' education, but maybe it only works if you're super educated already.
If you really want to spend less, vote Sanders.
Node.js is all right I think, but this is good anecdata about how the event loop don't work for everything.
Bien hecho, ogged.
crazy to go from 0 to new technically-demanding job in what, 3 months?
That's usually not an accurate way to think of it; at least not the program I did. The entrance interview is pretty challenging as these things go, and a fair number of people in the program have already been employed as programmers (and I'd made an unfancy iOS app on my own and dabbled with other stuff). If you were really starting from zero, I'd say two to three months of intensive study to be able to be admitted, then there's a precourse curriculum that you have to complete successfully that they recommend takes you a couple of months, and then the three months of 70-hour weeks begins.
Incidentally, ogged sent me a link to a company with statements of four "homework" problems for applicants to do, and while two of them state the language to use two of them give you a choice. Those are the only two I've done and I used Rust for one and a mixture of shell and Python for the other. Diverting!
Yikes, nosflow, you really do need a girlfriend.
49: nosflow, what do you do professionally?
50: remember, O ladies about to beat down the door to relieve this need of mine, I give good jewelry.
IIRC, that's how it worked with Roast Beef and Molly.
Share the link!
All my co-workers hate on node and they're basically right. Callbacks are miserable, jsfuck should not be possible, left-pad was hilariously awful. Yet... people do useful stuff with it and who wants to hear crazy old people rant about kids these days?
These are the problems; I'm assuming you weren't asking for a link to my solutions. "slcsp" was shell + Python; "proto" was Rust, using nom to generate the parsers.
jsfuck is AMAZING.
Callbacks are miserable
Mostly true, although less and less a part of the language these days, what with promises and the upcoming async/await.
left-pad
There's definitely an over-reliance on npm modules. One of the guys at 37 Signals (who make Basecamp) had a great line on Twitter about overuse of frameworks and dependencies: "burn your steaming pile of complexity to the ground." Amen to that.
Oh I guess I VTSOOBC in 49. And then again in 57. Oops!
A hopeless case, but I'm glad you shared them.
Speaking of hopeless cases, what's a "personal 'outcomes' coach"?
And would one tell me to go to sleep?
I don't know, but I'll tell you to go to sleep. Go to sleep.
But the "Random" button on SMBC is calling.
Congrats ogged and LB! Ogged, can I ask what the rough price range for this course was?
Congrats, Ogged!
67: I believe he took [this course --link redacted], which is [a lot of money].
I'm feeling kind of horrible and hopeless about career stuff right now. The last month and a half I've been completely paralysed at work, and gotten almost nothing done, literally. I was hoping that starting therapy and getting on anti-depressants and talking to my supervisor would help, but I feel like perhaps it's had the opposite effect--now that the words have been said aloud, I feel like I'm fully in the "nonfunctioning person" narrative, and the understanding and sympathy from my supervisor just makes it easier to give up. The stuff I'm not doing isn't even hard. It's trivial, truly. I just ... can't seem to make myself do it. Thursday I ran away into a corner of the building that's empty at the moment and just hid for 8 hours. Then Friday I stayed in bed.
I have this terrible certainty that I'm just incapable of *working*, that I'm just some sort of overeducated decorative bird. The only time I haven't been stressed at a job was when I was temping as a mailroom clerk at Evil Publishing Company, so maybe I should, I dunno, look for a job as a postman, but even if I could get a job like that, I'm probably too arrogant to be content with that forever.
68 gets it exactly right. Trivial tasks are deeply nauseating and stressful. Non-trivial tasks send me spiraling off in monomaniacal pursuit of some ideal. Therapy, medication, an uncountable number of broken resolutions, suffering the consequences of my bullshit, and I'm no more productive than the day I missed my first ever homework assignment.
Sorry, that was too flippant. My sympathies, Eggplant. That sounds awful, and awfully familiar.
69 is me, minus the therapy and medication.
Eurovision is not to be joked about.
68 also basically me, though I've not yet been quite that bad. (At work. University was in that territory.) Are you still working remotely from Europe? FWLIW I'm now teaching English as a second language, and basically enjoying it. It doesn't have any of the deadline/project/procrastination horrorshow it sounds like we share. (Though school setups vary).
Not working remotely anymore; I started as a software developer at the institute where my wife's a professor in October. It's a fairly relaxed work environment with some nice perks--once-weekly German classes, good location for bike commuting, 95% of our friends are at the institute so it's easy to stop by the institute bar after work for a drink--but the fact that all the projects are divided up to for individual developers to take 100% ownership of was always likely to be a problem, and has in fact been a disaster.
I think I need to just accept that I'm already in "I give up, just fire me already" mode and quit. It sucks that I haven't been working long enough to qualify for unemployment, but oh well.
Anyway, time to go for a short bike ride before finishing up Eurovision party preparations. Woo springtime!
I pulled myself out of my failure spiral at work! I think! May qualify as a real accomplishment. So I may have to give up my status as an authority on the above pathology, a status which I think I've richly earned anyway. (Yeah, I got my PhD, but I torpedoed my academic career anyway: that's a legitimate major failure, even in a dysfunctional system.)
I'm focusing now on my total failure to make any fucking progress on becoming a better guitarist. Any advice? This seems like one of these "need to give yourself permission to do it" mental blocks, but also that I decide every way of practicing is stupid and boring and plodding and the only really rewarding thing would be to be good at it instantly. (Before I felt this way, I learned enough to play kind-of-competently at a low-intermediate level, when I was a kid.)
My seventh-grade science teacher wrote on my report card at the end of the year: "You will fail if you want to, and be good at it, so be sure that that is what you really want to do. It seems to be the skill you have learned best." I think, in judging the wisdom of leaving me this bracing advice, she underestimated how much it would make me want to punch her in the face.
DON'T QUIT, TRAPNEL. Punch it in the face.
This all sounds familiar though I've kicked it up to sort of good for a bit now. Maybe we could start a Eurovision band based on surprisingly low productivity.
I failed to arouse enough interest for a Eurovision watching party (especially hamstrung, of course, by its starting at noon here), but perhaps some livecommenting?
68/69: this sounds very familiar. for what it's worth, adderall made a huge difference. dunno if it's worth it to you, but maybe worth looking into.
I made some redactions to 68. Sorry. Trying to not explicitly link/identify the program.
Congratulations, Ogged!
the fact that all the projects are divided up to for individual developers to take 100% ownership of was always likely to be a problem, and has in fact been a disaster.
I'm guessing the answer is "no", but is there any means organizationally to temporarily bring in engineers from other projects when you'll have blockers? Half the increase in job happiness/sanity from freelancing a year ago to my current place (which is in many ways a shitshow) is the ability to do that.
Trivial tasks are deeply nauseating and stressful. Non-trivial tasks send me spiraling off in monomaniacal pursuit of some ideal.
There but for the grace of [something] go I . . .
It's funny, my reaction to the OP was a mixture of "congratulations" with a bit of jealousy -- my job is quite good in all sorts of ways, and I'm making fairly good money, but it's still quite possible that ogged will start out earning more than I do, and I've got 15+ years of experience.
But, it occurs to me, that one of the things I should appreciate about both my current job and my prior experience is the ways in which they've helped me avoid the sort of mental dysfunction that Eggplant describes above (and which is certainly familiar to me). I've always been doing a mix of programming, support, and working with customers to plan and spec out improvements and new projects, and I like that mix.
It helps me avoid getting stuck to have direct contact with the end-users and to have a clear sense of, "here's what they will be doing, here's how my part will be valuable, and here's what they're willing to pay for it." It makes it easier to have a sense of accomplishment and closure to projects -- even if they aren't perfect I can tell if (and how well) they do what they need to do.
Based on Criminally Bulgur's comment that doesn't work for everybody, but it's a good fit for me.
Ugh, 68/69: sadly me. Also 81. No useful advice but lots of sympathy.
Women who are out of work and supported by spouses around here seem to become yoga instructors. Far less lucrative but you're in great shape.
75: Solo responsibility is my personal hell, basically.
77: Congrats lurid!
OP: Ogged, what were the Asian contingent like? Where were they, where and for who were they planning to work?
Ugh. A pathology like the above was what cost me my job a year and a half ago, with bonus excessive drinking etc. leading to a divorce. I managed to cobble together contract work for about 9 months after moving back to Minneapolis, but have essentially been unemployed for the last eight months. I'm now in a position (fingers and toes crossed, etc.) where it looks like one or both of two options may come to fruition, one permanent and one long-term contract. I'm terrified that I won't get one, but I'm also terrified that the same old pattern of fucking up will occur once I'm re-employed. TL,DR: I feel your pain.
I'm a little differently functional/dysfunctional from 68 and following, but it's all very familiar. This is where downward mobility really pays off. I live where housing costs nothing and I can do an undemanding and reliable job. Plus parenting means I can never do anything interesting on my own, so life is stable and not impossible. I think at the moment my tendencies to self-sabotage are kept in check by how much work it takes to mitigate my ex's failing-all-over-the-place mode, but with a little luck that won't last forever and then I'll have to sink or swim on my own without excuses.
Oh, and cats! My advice is cats! Zamzam is nursing beside me while her mother bats at my hand and my life is so much better with them in it.
Also I'd be game for any sort of mutual support/nudges/whatever that others here might be interested in. It's much easier to help others than do things for oneself (I'll happily generalize from my own experience) but sometimes doing that is also a push to do better personally.
68 et seq. definitely resonate with me too, although I recently seem to have pulled myself out of a period of that sort of thing with the help of a series of things that needed to be done with short-term hard deadlines that other people were relying on. Things that are completely my responsibility with no everyday oversight are much harder for me to motivate myself to do. This is one of the many reasons academia would have been a terrible career choice for me.
Congratulations, ogged! That's fantastic. Well done!
(And wow, that seems fast. Well, maybe it doesn't seem fast to you, since you're the one who took the course. But it seems like you just started this thing the week before the last).
90 last: preach it, my brother.
Congrats. It is pretty crazy to go from 0 to new technically-demanding job in what, 3 months? It makes me feel like I should spend less on my kids' education, but maybe it only works if you're super educated already.
The parenting lesson in this story is "dont spend money on your child's education. Have them marry a doctor."
marrying a doctor > marrying a lifeguard
Until Sanders nationalizes health care.
Until Sanders nationalizes health care.
Yeah, right after the union of the Green Mountain soviets, and the nationalization of Ben & Jerry's.
But marrying a doctor or a lawyer is always a good strategy! Your mother was right about that, and so too was mine.
I'm thinking I should encourage my son to marry a Mormon. They're the only people who still have children nowadays, so I figure this is my best shot at ending my days in the loving embrace of a dozen or more grandchildren.
Have you seen what happened to the legal market lately? You can just marry any old doctor, but you need to get an ambitious lawyer from a good school.
But just marrying any doctor you get along with should work.
97: So close-minded! Why shouldn't I aspire to a Mormon daughter-in-law; or, barring that, at least to a doctor or a lawyer in the family?
(And in response to this admittedly tongue-in-cheek question, you're not allowed to get all judgy if you currently earn a living as a white-collar professional).
98: Speaking personally, I wouldn't recommend it. But YMMV.
(And in response to this admittedly tongue-in-cheek question, you're not allowed to get all judgy if you currently earn a living as a white-collar professional).
WTF does this mean and what connection does it have to Mormons?
I'm living as a white collar professional because they won't do the surgery until I've done that for two years.
Hey, does anybody know anything about physics engines? Like, if I wanted to model the oscillation of a mass of power and telecommunications lines hanging from utility poles during an earthquake to figure out how and why they break, whats the best way to go about that?
You probably need to find the guy who programs breast giggle in video games. Rotate 90 degrees.
Yeah, I was thinking a video game engine. But I need one with real physics, not video game boob physics.
http://bulletphysics.org/wordpress/ maybe
That looks cool. I may not be smart enough to figure it out, though. "Step 1: Learn Physics."
Congrats, ogged, that is really exciting.
I do think there's a lot to be said for the fancy degree x bootcamp amplifying effect. With prior tech work as a potential additional amplifier. I remember the homeless coder after bootcamp was still homeless.
http://www.businessinsider.com/leo-the-homeless-coder-2014-5?IR=T
Related, my heart goes out to all the procrastination spiralers on the blog. Scary to hear about losing jobs. I definitely avoided my way out of one plum job, but I've bounced back. In a way, recognizing and accepting the cycle of anxiety and self-hatred has helped me learn to go through it and out the other side more quickly each time.
I'm thinking I should encourage my son to marry a Mormon. They're the only people who still have children nowadays
Counterexample: heebie is almost certainly not a Mormon and has 752 children.
105: Maybe one of the bridge building games?
105 You may have your choice between two physics models.
One is video game boob physics.
The other is Time Cube.
105 You may have your choice between two physics models.
One is video game boob physics.
The other is Time Cube.
Xtrapnel, et al, I know a guy who's very good at helping people in the kind of spiral you're describing, which I know from experience feels awful. Email me if you want his address. i wouldn't presume to suggest it, but he really is good, and relatively fast.
You probably need to find the guy who programs breast giggle in video games.
Hello giggles!