The truth about coding boot camps

Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash

A few years ago I was making $38,000 per year working at a nonprofit in the San Francisco Mission District. I had recently graduated from college with a B.A. in History and Education with full intentions of becoming a high school History teacher. However, I couldn’t afford the Master’s degree I needed to become certified so I decided not to go through with it.

So, there I was, working 40+ hours per week at a small (though rewarding) nonprofit, making barely enough to keep up with my bills and the notorious cost of rent in San Francisco. My student loans were accumulating interest and my career trajectory didn’t look too promising.

I had always been interested in how websites worked. As a kid I followed along with the HTML code in my MySpace layouts, matching up the strings of letters with the shapes and colors on my screen. I took a couple of digital media classes in college and my post-college internship involved me in web content management where I learned how to navigate a CMS. I even dabbled in a couple of personal Wordpress sites of my own.

Partly driven by financial necessity and partly driven by my desire to learn more about websites, I spent several nights researching coding boot camps in San Francisco after coming home from work. App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright were some of the first ones out there. After considering cost, program length, and class times, I ultimately landed on the 6-month program at the UC Berkeley Extension, mostly because class took place on evenings and weekends (meaning I could keep my full-time job while attending the program) and it was the most affordable option. In the months leading up to my first day of class, I saved up all the money I could to cushion myself against the 6 steep monthly payments ahead.

The first day of my Web Development coding boot camp was April 17th, 2017. The first 4-ish weeks of the program we learned all the front-end stuff. HTML, CSS, JQuery, Bootstrap, wireframing tools, etc. Around the 5th week, we dove into JavaScript and began learning how to build and query SQL databases, make API calls and build very, very simple web applications. Since the languages and tools in web development change so frequently, I won’t go into more detail about the topics we covered, but I will tell you the key takeaways.

Based on my experience, here’s the truth about coding boot camps.

1. It’s not a golden ticket. Even though I devoted 6 months of my life to this program that is advertised to make you a software engineer in less than a year, the truth is you will always be competing with thousands of people who have CS degrees and look better than you on paper. These boot camps are only designed to give you the foundation upon which you’ll need to put in the hard work to continue building your skillset. It isn’t a magic pill that makes you an engineer overnight. In fact, most of the work happens after, when you use the things you learned to build cool stuff and show the world what you can do.
2. It is FAST. What stood out the most to me is that we never spent more than a week learning a concept. Because it’s a boot camp, duh! This can be frustrating, but pay attention in class and don’t get hung up on previous assignments. You can always come back and clean up your Github later.
3. Your experience will only be as good as your instructional team. Fortunately, I was extremely lucky to have THE BEST instructional team. My instructor built his career working at giant tech companies like Apple and Pandora and my TAs worked overtime to piece together their knowledge and industry experience to answer our endless strings of questions. My advice to you, make sure you know your instructional staff is going to be qualified to do the job. Even though each cohort technically receives the same curriculum, your instructors are the ones that will (or won’t) make your experience worth your time and money.
4. You can’t take out a student loan to finance it. Because boot camps are not traditional programs from accredited universities, banks won’t qualify you for a private student loan. I got around this by arranging a payment plan with my student success manager. Before knocking the program because you think you can’t afford it, make sure to ask the program recruiters what your payment options are.
5. Companies are starting to become skeptical of boot camps. Since I completed my boot camp, I influenced some of my friends to do it too. However, an interesting thing one of my friends heard from his career coach is to avoid using the phrase “boot camp” on his resume… I guess now that boot camps are more popular, for whatever reason, tech company recruiters are less enthusiastic about people who graduate from them. The thing with boot camps is, although you may gain a lot out of it, there is no way for employers to know the quality of education you received from your program. Just make sure you do well on your projects and have a killer portfolio — which leads me to my next point.
6. Your project partners are everything. Over the 6-month course, I participated in a total of 3 group projects. Out of the 3 groups, 2 of them were phenomenal to be a part of, and the other was an absolute waste of time. If a team member is not pulling his/her weight, don’t be afraid to speak up to your instructional staff. Try to pair up with people with good work ethic and that you know you work well with. Remember, these are the projects that you will use as your portfolio when you apply to jobs! Don’t be afraid to ask to be paired with another group if you know you are not going to gain anything from working with them.
7. It’s okay if you don’t want to be a software engineer. To be honest, going into the program, I didn’t have particularly strong feelings about what I wanted to do with the certification. I just knew that I had a friend from college who recently graduated from the same boot camp and got a job as a software engineer…and she must have been making eons more than I was making at my little nonprofit job. After I graduated, I did some serious thinking about how I could combine the skills I already had with my new skill set to do something that was truly going to be a good fit for me. I’m a writer, I like educating people, and I love learning about software. So I applied to Technical Writer positions and got in at a self-driving car company in San Francisco. I was able to use what I learned in my boot camp to read code and write documentation. And guess what, I absolutely love it. Figure out how you can combine your existing skills and interests with your newly acquired coding skills to find what makes you happy.

I can’t say that the coding boot camp is for everyone. Every program and every cohort is so different and you’ll need to do your own research. I can say that within that first year at my new tech job, I busted my butt, continued building my new skillset, and tripled the salary I was making at my nonprofit job. I’m finally paying off my student loans and grad school is in my near future again. :)

Needless to say, without the boot camp, I wouldn’t be where I am today.