Bootcamps: Should you?
Published: 2020-07-27 06:51:30

    Like many others with a desire to change their career, I spent a long time weighing the pros and cons of spending the money to attend a coding bootcamp. While I realize that people from many different backgrounds approach this from a variety of social and economic backgrounds, my own decision was spurred by the financial flexibility and inability to break through learning plateaus plaguing my attempts at self-teaching. Even fresh out now, chasing my first developer job, I feel that my experience attending a bootcamp granted me a solid technical foundation, introduced me to essential concepts in this field, and set me up to learn independently moving forward. 

   The program I chose was based on Software Engineering with a focus on Web Development. It was advertised as a full-stack program, so it began with the basics of programming concepts using Ruby. Starting from ground zero was nice, because it gave base to what little knowledge I retained from taking Udemy courses*. This base expanded into Ruby on Rails, detailing how calls from browsers to servers work, and an overview of how backends and APIs work. This expanded into Javascript and HTML/CSS to begin the journey into true front-end concepts, which ultimately amounted into learning Reactjs. This slow process acted as building blocks, forcing us to use only what we had to wrestle the problems of what individual projects we chose for ourselves. As we progressed, we knew why the technologies we learned were developed, what problems they solved, and how just how much easier they made our lives. 

   As our frameworks expanded and became more complex, our teaching staff became less and less involved in our learning process. We would of course have lectures outlining introductions to concepts, but were usually sent off to work through labs individually or in pair programming sessions (ONE OF THE BEST THINGS EVER). Spending money to work alone, you ask? Well, that is not quite the case. Given a structured curriculum with clear goals identified, working alone (or with my peers, which was 75% of the time) allowed me to ask the questions I needed to succeed. It made my learning cohort band together to support eachother through failures and successes, making the intimidating task of asking "What the hell is going on?" so much easier. I have been to many talks from hiring managers, and one of the most common things I hear is "If you're not asking questions as a junior developer, that's a very big concern to your employer."

   As lectures became less frequent, our individual autonomy became more and more necessary. Outside of asking questions, we learned to consult the internet for all of our problems. A very common quip of development humor is the consultation of Google for everything. This is VERY TRUE, but how is it really to find the answer to your highly specific questions? If you make a website in React that makes sequential user-generated forms for recipe information that gets posted to your Rails backend that should accept nested form information, but the data is not being reflected in your front-end when the information should be displaying now that the user as submitted it all, do you think that is #1 in your search results? Probably not... But you will find that many have posted their development woes to Stack Overflow, which you can slowly begin to piece together a solution that works for you. In exploring this, you also get insight into the fantastic world that is software development: a shared struggle in wielding computers to perform tasks.

   So I've shared a very shallow overview of my bootcamp experience, but I cannot stress how much I learned from it. Do I think I am immediately employable? No. Do I think I have imposter syndrome? Yes. Do I think you should do one? Maybe- It all depends on you. I have some very close friends that read books on Javascript with no foundation and turned it into a job. I wish I could do that. If I could, I probably wouldn't be changing my career at this point. In reality, I need structure and guidance if I am to learn something and have it stick, so a bootcamp was a great fit for me. If you are looking for something that will immediately get you a great job, please know that, like anything in life, it depends on what you put into it. If you're serious and determined, a bootcamp will put you in a great position to start a new career in a surprising amount of time. What are you waiting for??? ** 

*Note: I am not throwing shade at Udemy courses or self learning for that matter. I am simply stating that while I learned things from Udemy, I ultimately learned how to make one specific thing instead of how to use knowledge to create whatever I wanted. I attribute this to a narrow field of view that is inevitable when exploring an unknown field.

**Maybe wait for COVID-19 vaccines ;P