Guest post from Substack user Iz, on software boot camps and my Case Against Education.

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I figured there’s a phenomenon that you might find interesting if you haven’t already heard of it. That phenomenon is software engineering boot camps. They typically consist of 4-6 months of a relatively intense crash course on software engineering after which students typically get pretty well paying software engineering jobs.

I recently just finished the journey of completing one such program, job searching for three months, and finally landing a job at Bloomberg, which I start in a couple weeks. The program was 4 months and I spent a substantial amount of time practicing algorithms during the months I was searching for a job. As far as I know most other people who completed the program with me and landed jobs so far have starting salaries over 100k.

Almost everyone in my graduating cohort, myself included, has a degree unrelated to Computer Science. I may be a little off on the numbers, but I think that out of the 35 graduates in my cohort, only one completed a CS related degree, one completed some CS coursework, and one had a degree in statistics (not really related but might help a bit). Having no degree or work history at all might make getting a job a little harder because people might be more reluctant to interview you. The technical portion of the interview process mostly consists of having applicants write algorithms and demonstrate an understanding of data structures. I think that even someone with no degree or work history at all would still end up with a great job so long as they put in the work learning data structures and algorithms.

Boot camp grads do have a harder time getting interviews than CS grads, but once we get them I think they basically treat us like anyone else. It does take a little longer to get a job than it would for someone with a CS degree. The coaches in the program claim grads take 2-4 months to find a job. It took me 3 months which seems fairly normal.

It’s also interesting that many companies mostly care about the ability to write algorithms as I'm told it rarely comes up on the job. It might be that to some extent many in the industry replace the signal from degrees with the signal from ability to code algorithms.

P.S. A couple caveats for the sake of accuracy:

Not everyone on my program actually has a job yet but it's still inside the 4 month window they say it takes for people to find jobs. I think everyone will end up finding something.
About 20% of the people who started the program didn't make it through. Not sure how this compares to other educational options but something to think about.

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From the Boot Camp Trenches