How-to guide: Choosing a Coding BootCamp
How to pick the school that is right for you..
Why Am I speaking about this
Back in 2018, I worked as a quality inspector for an air plane manufacturer. The work schedule was 14 days straight with one day off in between, and 10+ hour shifts a day. My daughter was 3 years old at the time and I wasn’t able to spend much time with her due to this schedule and my fluctuation shifts. I wanted to make a change and began learning to program on my own time. After a while of cutting out 2 hours of sleep every night to learn on my own, I realized that I needed more structure and a focused curriculum. My options were to either attempt to go back to school, accumulate a lot of debt, and spend 4+ years on the education or attend a code bootcamp for a fraction of the time and cost. After months of saving up, researching, and planning; I made the leap to go to Lambda School. It was an extremely challenging 9 month immersive fully remote program which covered web development and computer science fundamentals. You can see a huge portion of my time there here if you’re interested. I graduated in 2019 and a few months later, I landed my dream job working for an amazing company. I’ve gained the ability to spend more time with my family, and a great salary doing something that I enjoy every day.
Why choose a bootcamp
First let’s talk about why you should consider a bootcamp over a traditional 4 year college education. While college is a great way to gain entry into the software development field, it isn’t the only way to do it. Oftentimes, college can be too expensive making it inaccessible to some people. With the current COVID-19 situation, many colleges are reporting that they’ll be moving to fully remote but will continue to charge the same amount. Bootcamps however, will generally take a different approach to getting you where you want to go.
- The price tags on bootcamp education is usually much lower than that of a college degree.
- The time to complete a bootcamp only a fraction of what it would take you to get a degree.
- Many top level tech companies have decided that they don’t care about a degree when recruiting and assessing potential candidates anymore.
- Bootcamps are more like trade schools that aim to teach specialized skills that you will need to get a job.
- Some bootcamps will invest a lot more into helping you find a job. This can include helping with resumes, LinkedIn profile, organizing your Github dashboard, giving tips on portfolios and even placing you in front of hiring partners for interviews.
So Why would you not choose a bootcamp?
If bootcamps are so great, why do people still pay all of that money and spend so much time going through college? This is an excellent question, and one that you should ask yourself when first researching which avenue of approach you will be taking. Computer Science degrees are still required by many companies, though a lot of them started relaxing these requirements in recent years. Most bootcamps will only teach you web development fundamentals but won’t go into other lower level studies. While a lot of this can be learned on your own, this is a trade off that you face when cutting down the price and time for an education. College is the tried and proven method while Code BootCamps are still a mostly new concept to a lot of people. Most employers don’t really care what the name of your bootcamp is or much less actually recognize it by name. So you‘ll have to wow them with your resume and other credentials.
So How do You know if a particular code bootcamp is right for you?
While this is often relative to the person who is searching, we often share common concerns when comparing schools. We can place these concerns in a list and sort them by importance. I’ll put the concerns that I had when I was researching in no particular order, we can go over them in detail shortly.
- Cost.
- Time for Completion.
- Career Assistance (Job Search).
- Scam?
- Reviews.
- Remote or Online
- Tech Stack
- Community
Cost
A lot of people end up having to do a full time course which would require them to quit their jobs. Most bootcamps that require upfront payment have options that you can pick from. This can help make it easier to attend without pushing out too much money before writing any code. Some Code Schools are adapting an Income Share Agreement model which would have you pay nothing until you land a job, then you’ll pay a percentage of your paycheck.
Time for Completion
The time that you will spend in a code bootcamp varies from school to school. Some have programs as short as just a few weeks, others 3 to 6 months and some go as far as a year or longer. Oftentimes, the part time versions of the program you’re trying to go into will be double the length of the full time course. We should probably also tack in some extra time as in some cases, you might end up having to redo a section or take a break for personal reasons. Some schools also allow students who are more advanced in the course work to apply for team leads/mentor position to guide newer students. This can be a great way to make some money and revisit a lot of concepts you’ve learned, but it can also extend your time.
Career Assistance
Making a career change as someone who does not have prior experience will be difficult. Your job is to prove to hiring managers that you can do what you say you know how to do. Without assistance with a resume, how to interview or even how to network, this can be extremely challenging. A lot of code schools might not have much for job placement assistance while others will have a network of hiring partners that they will put you in front of for interviews.
Scam?
While we would like to believe that everyone is out to make the world a better place, not all schools will have your best interest in mind. Most of these bootcamps will be for-profit schools and will expect you to pay in one way or another. If you find yourself interested in a school, it couldn’t hurt to also try to find out if there have been any legal issues like student law suites floating around. Bootcamps are not colleges or universities, so they won’t be accredited or have any transferable credits unless they have a connection to a college. This is normal as accreditation tends to come with its own draw backs and no real benefits to the bootcamp or its students. Take the outcomes numbers that you find with a grain of salt as well. A lot of them will boast 80% to 90% placement for grads within the first few months, but those numbers aren’t always audited for accuracy.
Reviews
Alumni reviews are a powerful tool that can assist potential students in deciding if this school is right for them. Some great sites to see these reviews for code schools are coursereport.com, switchup.org, and careerkarma.com. Another great source is Youtube, you can type in the name of the school you’re interested in and see if there are any student videos. These often will come up with daily or weekly vlogs that current or alumni students will post to share their experiences. I personally recorded weekly vlogs while attending my code school and from what I’m told, it helped a lot of people make up their minds about going there. I highly recommend doing this on your own as well, it will help you get used to talking about technical subjects and recite what you’ve learned that week.
Remote or Online
While I was searching, I needed a remote school as my choice. A lot of schools require you to be there in person which might not be ideal for everyone. In some cases however, you might find that your school of choice is not too far from you. Some schools have multiple offices around the US or in other countries. If you’re deciding to go through the remote version of a school that also has on-campus courses, a concern would be if there is any difference between the two experiences. I was once accepted into a school that had both remote and on-campus classes. I noticed that the on-campus had brown bag lectures done by industry professionals and were able to present their capstone projects in front of local hiring partners. The remote students did not get access to that at that time.
Tech Stack
This one may not seem that important right now as you would just want to jump in and learn something then get hired. However, there are a few factors to take into account when dealing with tech stacks. There is separate research that should be done with care when thinking about the stack that you would like to learn. A lot of code schools are still teaching JQuery as their JavaScript framework or Ruby on Rails. JQuery is still great to know as you might see it or even use today on some legacy code, but most companies will want knowledge in something newer. Ruby on Rails is also still used in a good number of projects that you’ll find in the wild, but it’s popularity isn’t as high as other backend languages like node, python or Java. Research the type of companies you would like to work for and see what they’re using. Go through their job listings and see what basic requirements they would like their candidates to have. While some knowledge can transfer over from one framework/language to another, it would give you a bit of a head start if you are using a popular set of tools that have a huge job market.
Community
This might not be so important right now, but it will be later down the line. At my code school, alumnus have given brown bag lectures, helped students with programming problems, and remain active in some slack channels answering questions. This also allows students to create a network of hired professionals that they can reach out to for guidance and in some cases, even job offers that are floating around. Being able to network with other students who aren’t a part of your cohort can also be a plus as you can mentor each other. When I was going through one of the other code schools, their slack had no staff to help answer student questions. It was mostly students answering each other as best as they could. The school that I ended up joining however, had assigned staff and team leads for the purpose of helping out new students.
In Conclusion
Choosing a code school can be a big decision and you shouldn’t just settle for the first one that accepts you. I was accepted into 2 schools before settling on a 3rd choice. This doesn’t mean that the other schools were horrible, mainly just that the 3rd choice checked off a lot more of my boxes at the time. While there is no “sure thing” when changing or starting a new career, you can help mitigate the negative effects with some research into the school and job market. I work with a good mix of bootcamp and college grads, some of which did not attend school for computer science. Everyone has their path and different methods of learning. Once you settle on a path, keep going until you see the finish line then go even further.
