Codename: The Employable Bootcamp Candidate
Lessons from a two-year bootcamp→software engineer→termination journey
Allow me to introduce myself
I am the statistic bootcamps love to have, the crown drool of any for-profit education startup — the student with little-to-no prior engineering experience become employable after just mere months — consider the value…ation.
I am not special nor am I alone in this 21st century gold-rush.
I am simply one in the hundreds-of-thousands data-points fueling the economic trend.
So why bother and waste people’s time with a blog post then missy?
Despite my relative success and monumental failures, I hope that by sharing the experience from a quirky perspective, the lessons learned may be of value to someone considering this journey or is already embarked.
So who are you exactly and why would I continue reading?
Origin stories comes much later in a series (b/c nobody fucking cares…yet) so I’m going to skip and zip to the trendiest topic on everyone’s mind, the gorilla-elephant hybrid in the room, “Getting a Job”.
Topic 1: Getting a Job
Uh-oh, the non-accredited graduation ceremony is approaching and it’s time to face the unavoidable moment of truth.
Did I really piss away a down-payment plus months of my life or can I become a pro-software engineer; can I do it?
What’s the game plan? Do I:
- study more on topics X, Y, and whatever’s trendy?
- cleanup my embarrassing awful GitHub?
- work on my resume?
- work on new projects?
- fucking network, network, and more networking!!! or ???
- attend to my professional social media presence?
These are some of the questions racing through our heads during this pivotal moment and it’s overwhelming.
Priority 1: Get Noticed
Your skills, projects, etc, nobody gives a shit if they don’t know about you so priority uno is to eatecray youryay esumeray and plaster it over social media (AngelList, LinkedIn, any job site).
“if a tree falls down in the forest….” you are the fucking tree falling here.
T.E.B.C Lesson 1: Don’t follow the bootcamps’ template resume advice
This statement may rub the loyalists the wrong way. Someone somewhere just popped a vein while furiously thinking “how can you be so fucking ungrateful, they — “the bootcamp” — took you this far, you have to believe in the process”.
If you are comfortable in competing on the job market with a cookie-cutter “standard” solution, that’s your decision to make.
A standard-issued bootcamp resume == standard-issued military fatigue…it is a bootcamp after all
Once the idea that your resume inadvertently camouflages-your-chance-of-being-noticed sinks in, let’s examine a typical bootcamp resume layout, we are engineers after all…right?
A. List your technical skills (please don’t)
B. List your technical projects (you better do it)
C. List your work experience, education, awards (do it)
D. “Optional” summary (please don’t)
A. List your technical skills (right after your name of course silly)
This is the most commonly abused and source of the urge to trash your resume.
What kills me is often there are companion “skill” badges on their personal website and LinkedIn endorsements as a show-of-collective-force agreeing that a said skill does exists and the emperor really has clothes.
I’m here to break your heart and kindly inform that you’re bloody wrong. These vanity tokens are the equivalents to the 90’s cult classic, RICE-BOY phenomenon.
All show and no-coding go, this is definitely the wrong approach in engineer peacock land. Perhaps my rationale will makes a bit more sense with a multiple-choice word completion game.
“Listing my skills, in a comma-delimited format, is useful for ___.”
A. clear communication of my skill sets to employers.
B. recruiters to quickly locate my resume via keyword search
C. I don’t know, I just do as I’m told
D. making my resume CSV-compliant
My faith in humanity believes that the majority subconsciously picked “C” but am only admits to selecting “A” at this moment.
I’m here to shock your world [again] and say choice “A” is dead wrong.
Based on the assumption that for a one-page resume, it’s a terrible waste of space and creates pointless clutter. I can see how the triple threat of a bootcamp + resume + skill endorsements misrepresented a plausible employment strategy but remember these wise words
all that glitter ain’t gold and that shit is pure glit.
The correct answer is “B” altho choice “D” isn’t exactly wrong (If you’re adamant choice “C” is the correct answer, please do everyone a favor and join an well-disciplined institution where decisions are made on your behalf daily.
Instead, I recommend utilizing the whitespace for your project section and listing your technical skills within a project’s context.
If we think about it for a second, at the very least — if you can construct a sentence using said technical skill, that is also technically-sounded — perhaps I can be convinced of the possibility that someone could have over 10+ years of experience in a technology that emerged 5 years ago.
B. List your projects (most likely second after “skills”)
People understand the situation, no need to go crazy on what your contributions were. How about keeping it simple and:
- List what the project is/problem attempting to solve
- Technology used (maybe a reason on why it was selected)
- A problem you solved during this process
Write just enough to generate a talking point so when you are in that coveted face-to-face interview, minutes may be passionately spent glossing through all the nitty gritty fine details that you desperately wanted to convene on paper.
B-1. Come to terms that your bootcamp CRUD projects are terrible (unless you are that top 5% gift)
People are realistic and understands that you went to a bootcamp spanning across months not years. Nobody expects you to create Visual Studio Code just as you began understanding how callbacks work in the event loop.
Be realistic because everyone else is.
C. List your work experience, education, awards
Quite obvious why its in your benefit to include it.
D. “Optional” summary
Your resume reflects who you are, aka “a summary”. There really is no-rhyme-or-reason to dedicate a section to explicitly state the obvious (think technical skill badges if you’re having trouble understanding)
Conclusion
I’m sure a number of readers who made it this far disagrees and can reference someone who had one of the taboos and is an engineer at a big tech shop despite the fact; and I agree with you, you are absolutely right.
Nothing above is a deal breaker, the same goes for “greeting guests with morning breath” or “showing up late to an interview dressed inappropriately”, these events won’t ever be the deciding factor but it just doesn’t help in any shape or form so why risk it?
You’ve already spent months climbing up the proverbial hill to reach this stage, and in this game of inches, you’re competing against the “bootcamp produces low-quality” stigma, so make every inch count.
Till next time where the topic will be one or all of the following:
a. phone screens
b. code challenges
c. in-person-interviews