For anyone here, that went through one of these CodeSchools/Bootcamps/training.jargon[2] courses, I have a question:
At any point in these camps was there a section on interviewing and job seeking?
I'm asking as both a hiring manager who has seen a very fair share of...sorry, BAD resumes coming from people who finished a local code school, who struggled through the interview (only one made it to a technical assessment, he struggled on the syntax but seemed to grok the concepts. He ultimately did not get hired)and as a friend of someone who went through a code school and has absolutely zero interview skills,.
Their resume-upon reading-would have you wondering if they've applied for a "Junior React Developer" by mistake (restaurants, service industry jobs, stints at hotels, and at the very bottom: "React Bootcamp, Chicago - 2017-2018"). The generic cover letter this friend had me read jumped from topic to topic and was at least 5 paragraphs and two pages long, their only portfolio item was a single page "Hi I'm Bob" they made in the class.
It just makes me wonder what else these schools are doing to help their students actually succeed.
I went to a bootcamp. I won't say which one. It was in a major city, and it was a residential program (anybody who was in the bootcamp but not local lived together in apartments included in the cost of the program). The program was structured beginning with a quick review of language basics (you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began) and layouts, then moved on to Angular (this was a few years ago during MEAN stack hyper) and its associated patterns and best practices, then Node.js APIs and Mongo (the program has since shifted to PostgreSQL instead). Along the way, students were given assignments to augment these areas, such as reimplementing popular javascript libraries (like Underscore) against a test suite. The mid-point of the course culminated with presenting a solo project to the class, which was a good indicator of who was and who wasn't excelling. By this point, several students had dropped out and returned home or just stopped attending. After this, students were funneled into groups, with the higher performing students clustering together. The groups were given suggestions for projects to work on, typical web applications built on a combination of your own backend and third-party APIs. My group's project, for example, was a hybrid mobile budgeting application using Plaid and APN/GCM for push notifications. We had an exploratory phase where we tested the limits of the Plaid API (response times, features, webhooks, etc.) and determined user stories and requirements, then had stand-up meetings every morning and worked off of wireframes and ERD diagrams that we had designed. We were required to use git versioning so that we would inevitably experience merge conflicts and integration issues. There was about a week towards the end of the program that was focused on practice interviews (though these were admittedly somewhat half-assed) and resumes, in addition to the daily toy problems. At the end of the program, recruiters and local businesses were invited to see group and individual projects at a showcase day and this led to interviews for most of the students.
A "Hi I'm Bob" page seems like it would not be the product of an actual full-time bootcamp, but maybe a short part-time bootcamp? Even the relatively lower achievers were capable of hooking up some sort of front end for a public API by the mid-point of the course, putting it on github and getting it up on Heroku.
That said, many of the people I attended with had higher education or experience. My group was a former QA engineer, a bioengineering bachelor, an MBA, another biologist, and myself (Masters in Information Systems). By the end, we were relying more on the members of our group for disbursing useful information than on the instructional infrastructure of the bootcamp. I think subsequent jobs came mostly through networking between the groups of whoever was left by the end rather than the bootcamp itself.
>you were expected to know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to a reasonable degree before the course began
As a clarification, it seems you did not go to a "Coding" bootcamp, but some sort of engineering one. They seem to be the exception, rather than the rule
At any point in these camps was there a section on interviewing and job seeking?
I'm asking as both a hiring manager who has seen a very fair share of...sorry, BAD resumes coming from people who finished a local code school, who struggled through the interview (only one made it to a technical assessment, he struggled on the syntax but seemed to grok the concepts. He ultimately did not get hired)and as a friend of someone who went through a code school and has absolutely zero interview skills,.
Their resume-upon reading-would have you wondering if they've applied for a "Junior React Developer" by mistake (restaurants, service industry jobs, stints at hotels, and at the very bottom: "React Bootcamp, Chicago - 2017-2018"). The generic cover letter this friend had me read jumped from topic to topic and was at least 5 paragraphs and two pages long, their only portfolio item was a single page "Hi I'm Bob" they made in the class.
It just makes me wonder what else these schools are doing to help their students actually succeed.