Over the years I’ve had a number of friends and acquaintances ask me about coding boot camps and getting into developing software for a living without the usual computer science degree. This blog post and the study guide linked at the end are a slightly more polished version of the saved email I keep around for those folks. For context, I did a short Ruby on Rails boot camp in 2013 when I made the jump from hobbyist programmer to doing it for a living. At this point I have mentored over twenty people in the early stages of their software career and seen a variety of results for boot camp attendees. If you are considering a boot camp, or a general career change to software, I hope you find this helpful.
Boot camps can be helpful for picking up technical skills and knowledge, but you should be building those skills primarily on your own with guidance from the boot camp later on. More than teaching technical skills, boot camps should provide opportunities for networking to get a job, learning how to work on a development team, learning how to organize technical projects, polishing best practices, and other aspects of professional software development that are harder to pick up on your own using the internet. Completing a boot camp is rarely enough on its own to find and keep a good job. When you start interviewing for your first dev job it’s best if you’re able to present having done the boot camp as a single chapter in the larger story of your preparation for a career in software.
Start a personal project. Pick something fairly small, like a note-taking website or a simple chrome-plugin. There are a bunch of different resources to get started from scratch with programming (e.g. this book on learning to program with Ruby). Learn-to-program books along with online resources are enough to get a beginner through a first project. For many folks a project takes the form of an interactive, database-backed website deployed to Heroku and written in Ruby, Node.js, or Python in addition to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When you apply for your first dev job, you can put your project as the most recent entry in the Experience section right at the top to say “I have experience doing this work even though I’ve never been employed doing it.”
Evaluating boot camps
Most boot camps are for-profit and many of them are not meaningfully invested in the success of their students. If you are considering taking a boot camp, here are questions to evaluate them:
- What’s the average job search time for graduates?
- What’s the drop out rate?
- What portion of graduates find jobs as salaried developers within six months?
- What’s the student to instructor ratio?
- Where have the instructors worked and what qualifies them to teach?
- Do instructors have teaching experience outside of this boot camp?
- Do they have programming experience outside of this boot camp (many boot camps hire grads directly into instructor roles)?
- How relevant is their work experience to what they’re teaching?
- What’s the average starting salary for graduates?
Here is a self-study guide to get going on knowledge and skills for a long-term career in programming.
