Coding Academies?

Everything else
21

I’m based in Sweden, but I don’t think there’s that much of a culture difference in the IT sector compared to the UK, based on people I’ve met and worked with from there. I just want to add that the advice I’ve seen here so far match my experience as a senior developer / consultant / lead.

If I was to pick one thing above all others, it would be:

Very much this! When I am interviewing applicants, I am looking especially for the ability to reason about code, and technical solutions. I’ll never ask anyone to write code on the spot, because I don’t think that’s a relevant test, but I love it if they bring in something from their portfolio that we can have a discussion about how they solved it.

I think coming from a bootcamp background could be a bit harder to get that first job compared with a university level education, but certainly quite possible, and a portfolio helps a lot. Once you’ve worked for a while, actual job experience and recommendations from colleagues will be worth much more than a fancy degree. (I’m biased the other way from @strategy since I got started without any kind of degree :)

22

You’re UK based, IIRC?

I spent most of 10 years, until the middle of 2020, in the London web development market. My impression is that there’s still a real shortage of developers. I see a couple of possible clouds on the horizon in the near future; the delayed shakeup to contracting rules, and the post-Brexit and post-COVID affects on the economy both might change the job market this year. But it’s as good a bet as one can make in these uncertain times that web developers will still be in demand in the long term.

I’ve also recruited and worked alongside Bootcamp grads and it’s been an almost entirely positive experience. It’s clear to me, at least, that the good ones can definitely teach what’s needed to kickstart a career. (In fact, I think in some ways they have the advantage over most CS degree courses).

I’d second Strategy on how much a differentiator testing skills are. Any hack can write a bit of working code; but anyone I want to be working alongside sees automated testing as an essential part of the job. If the course you’re looking at doesn’t include automated testing at every stage, I’d strongly advise looking at the alternatives.

However strong the market demand is, getting the first job can still be really hard. Too many web development teams are extremely reluctant to recruit junior staff, or commit to real training and development. I’ve worked with teams who have been desperate to recruit, have constantly had open positions unfilled, and yet would not bring themselves to lower their recruitment criteria. The more desperate they are, the more they persuade themselves that they can’t afford to wait for a new junior to ramp up to full productivity. It’s maddening, but it seems to be a feature of the industry. Which emphasizes the point that Adam made about industry contacts. The good bootcamps have already found the minority of companies willing to employ juniors in their first job, and have the contacts to get their graduates decent interviews.

(If you want to PM me for London-specific details - if you’re planning on working in that part of the country - please feel free. I was always a terrible networker, but I might still be able to provide a few contacts.)

23

Great points about testing. I’m extremely fortunate in that my first two jobs really hammered it and made me a believer; my bootcamp skipped it entirely.

24

I’ll keep that in mind :).

25

We always explicitly ask if they can bring something from their portfolio that they are allowed to show us if we take a second interview with them. Often they can’t - but if they have work experience, they can usually talk enough technical details about past projects that you don’t really need that litmus test. For a “freshman” though, it’s super-useful.

Very, very much this. There is always going to be a hurdle getting that first job - we explicitly go for “freshmen” in addition to experience because we have a philosophy that diversity is good - but I’ve been at places where zero experience on your CV would be a guaranteed no-go. Once you have that experience, though, nobody sensible cares about what your degree is - only how good you (can show) you are.

The thing to keep in mind whenever you’re going into a tech job is that the company is always taking a big risk on you. Not in terms of your salary - even in Scandinavia with its strong unions - they can fire you if they are not satisfied. But simply in time and training. The usual rule of thumb is that it takes 3-6 months of work before you can expect a new hire to be actually productive. Even an experienced developer will take many months to become productive if they are moving into a new domain, and obviously the calculus for “junior” staff is even worse, not least because of the time required for senior staff to mentor and train the new employee. It’s just an immense investment from most companies perspective.

So although the job prospects are good, that first job is difficult. On the other hand, it also means that any sensible company will work hard to retain its developers, because replacing a skilled developer is immensely costly.

Which again makes the behavior of some segments of the game industry quite insane (to segue back to where this discussion originated).

26

So, I’ve been doing their sampler.

I’ve covered basic html, adding images, making websites responsive (e.g. to smaller screens) and using JavaScript. That last bit looks complicated but I’ve been dabbling in android development for a few months, so when I saw that code, it just sort of made sense.

edit:

So I believe I shall take the plunge!

Also, It’s obviously not a big thing, but i feel a little happy with myself for using < em > and < strong > tags in the making of this post :)

27

Yeah man! Do it!

Honestly I vastly prefer the code side of things (JavaScript) to the HTML/CSS side of things. Others feel the opposite. Good news is that there are a ton of jobs for either or both.

28

Good luck.

Strongly recommend that you work hard on the coding side; firstly, it means that you can build far more advanced things, and secondly, if you master that, handling more advanced HTML/CSS when you need to, should be easy to learn. More importantly, most employers will tend to assume that you can do that (you’re unlikely to find employers quizzing you about whether you can do HTML, if you master Javascript, while the opposite may often be the case).

If the bootcamp does not offer a course on React (though I’d assume it does), look into that.

Also, if you find the time at some point, do keep dabbling in Android development. Learning more than one programming language makes you a much better coder, because you get much better at understanding concepts rather than being stuck on syntax. You will also increase your job opportunities - even if you are not a master of Java or Kotlin, simply being able to claim some fluency in other languages might give you an edge compared to other candidates.

29

So my experience here is that the basics that you will pick up in a bootcamp are absolutely important – you need to know how the DOM fundamentally works, you need to understand CSS selectors and hierarchies, you need all those things.

And then you mostly won’t use them because if you’re working frontend (aka building the views with HTML and CSS and such) you’re mostly going to be working with whatever your framework(s) provide, not like manually coding <p style="font-weight: bold"> tags or whatever.

On that note…

Oh yeah, this. React is a huge thing. And IMO a great one – burn Facebook to the ground, absolutely, but not before saving React from the incipient conflagration.

31

Oh, hundred percent. You need to be able to easily work with abstract logical concepts intuitively, in your brain, with no visual or textual aids. Layers of them.

Turns out I’m really good at that. I can’t draw a freakin’ five-pointed star without it looking like it came from a seven-year-old’s offhand, but I can mentally model microservices like whoa.

You can absolutely use the knowledge of how these things more or less work, and the structures around them, to have a very successful career as a UX designer (if you’re good at that), or a product owner (if you’re good at organization), or a QA tester, or a business analyst, or any number of other things. But you do for sure need to be able to intuitively twirl mental models of abstract concepts around to be more than a career mid-level software developer.

Lucky for me, my aptitude is something that pays well.

Sorry you had such a shitty experience, @JMR :(

32

I already paid for a suitable course on Udemy for that a while back, may as well use it.

Also, from said Udemy course we had to build a very simple currency converter, and last night I realised I have the skills to make a tax calculator, for my own use, so will probably go ahead and do that.

See, information like this is golden, so I can quiz the course provider, show I am a serious student, and also study well

33

Please don’t fall for the ‘full stack developer’ bullshit that is fucking everywhere. Next to nobody is actually ‘full stack’, though of course there is absolutely no shortage of people claiming to be all that (and more!), and of course no shortage of jobs asking exactly for that, either.

There is simply no chance you will emerge from any bootcamp being competent enough across the entire breadth of what is involved with full stack to be a sensible hire for such a position. That’s not a slight against you or anyone else here; I’ve been at this shit for over a decade, I’m a consultant with the day rate to match and I am still slightly embarrassed every time I’m made to call myself full stack.

There is still a mountain of stuff I don’t know in certain areas, and every time I seem to make progress all that really changes is that I see that said mountain is even taller than it was before. Man I tell ya, that imposter syndrome is a bitch and that’s despite not really working with anyone with as broad a skillset as myself in the past 5 years.

What I’m getting at, is that there is a vast, yawning chasm between being able to write something that kinda sorta works to writing some that works, is maintainable, is performant and is secure. I’ve worked with and cleaned up the messes of too many overconfident full stack devs that have written and/or architected utter garbage as a result of being weak in one or more areas of the stack.

Achieving competence in any one area will take years. So there is no shame in focussing on one area specifically for the first few years of your career. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it is the only sensible path forward. At least the bootcamp may give you an idea of each involves, and if you see a preference then stick to it. But I’d recommend working that out beforehand and finding one to better match your preferences.

That said, the only thing worse than the wide-but-shallow full stack developer is the blinkered developer with zero knowledge or interest in the surrounding tech to make the disparate parts of the modern web stack stick together in a coherent manner. Full stack should be regarded as being something to aspire to, albeit perhaps unattainable.

I will forgive you for putting it on your CV though. As we all must. (sigh)

34

I like everything they are offering. I’m using this to get my foot in the door, then specialise.

36

I took the into to comp sci course at Harvard in the late 90’s in person. It was excellent, but it is much more about how to think the right way (as they put it “How to think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently”) as opposed to really learning any one programming language.

The thing is, once you learn to think the right way, you can express that in any number of languages, so having that basis is very very useful. Even if you were to never write computer code, I think it’s a valuable course.

37

Yeah I’m.noticing that!

Yeah, JavaScript lol. :O

I’d extend that to any skill.

Learning the concepts making the nitty gritty come easy/easier.

I’m about 75% done with this course and I am finally quite comfortable with dissecting html and CSS and figuring out where things are going wrong.

I’m much less confident with making JavaScript or Python work, or databases.

Which is annoying as the next Project (Project 3) I have to hand in is all about data creation, reading, updating and deleting.

The CRUD stuff.

Having to use Jinja formatting and templating, Flask apps, connecting that to MongoDB and then getting it all hosted on Heroku has been a big challenge, and the end result of my many hours of coding is a risibly simple website.

At least it works lol, and across multiple resolutions.

I have to submit it on Friday though, so am ruthlessly binning all the nice to have stuff I wanted to have in, and instead getting the readme done, because the assessors insist on quite detailed readmes.

My 2nd website project was JavaScript focussed and I spent so much time getting that working that I neglected the html, so it isn’t so responsive.

But I passed that assessment and learned alot.

I’m starting to understand why GoDaddy and Ionos are so popular.

Drag and drop once you’ve found the template you want.

Speaking of which, my sister wants me to build her a website on Ionos but man I’ve had barely 2 hrs spare the last week, and the editor interface of Ionos is a bitch.