It's answer #2 in the article. Nobody's paying huge amounts of money to get a CS degree and then go out with a crippling debt to make the same money as someone who went to a bootcamp and has 1 year experience
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
2 points (100.0% liked)
TechNews
182 readers
1 users here now
Aggregated tech news.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Do people with boot camps really snag the same jobs though? Even with one year of experience, do people really land jobs at big tech companies the way CS grads do? ๐ฒ
I've interviewed a fair number of entry level devs. Someone having gone to college for cs may understand some more abstract concepts within programming more and have a better handle on data structures and things like bitwise math and big O notation. They may fair a bit better on some more gotcha interview questions when the rubber meets the road often didn't offer much more than another junior dev who was self taught or went to a camp. A lot of the concepts are useful but I've found the tasks often handed out to these entry level roles don't benefit from having that depth of knowledge. People going through the camps and self taught have usually had more training on how day to day business may need them to operate and solve problems with ci/cloud orchestration etc. I am usually hiring for people with a strong sense of curiosity more so than someone who can tell me which sorting algorithm is technically more efficient. When it comes to developing I've personally followed the make it work, make i good, make it fast process (usually in that order) if we are being honest businesses more often than not care almost exclusively for the make it work portion.
All of this to say there are absolutely fields the benefit from deeper understanding of math, software engineering practices, etc. I don't think the bulk of development jobs are that though.
Calling out my own bias, I am a college drop out that was a cs major with a focus on game design. Ive got jobs working as a sys admin, developer, cloud engineer, reliability engineer etc. These roles will almost always choose for experience over collegiate accomplishments.
Cs grads don't get those without experience either. Cs grad vs bootcamp guy, both fresh, they are almost the same for most companies. The only difference is seen later with bigger companies, bootcamp guy with 5 years vs cs grad with 5 years is still the same for most, but for a big company that needs better architecture, code quality, leadership skills, etc? They look for the cs grad first. Of course there are outliers and special cases like needing specific tech stack that is only for CS, but overall that's how it goes.
For a student, doing a bootcamp and working already in 6 months beats the hell out of doing a full CS degree, acquiring crippling debt and then find "maybe" a slightly better paying job than what a bootcamp gets you