@AmirF27 I’m one of the people who got a job within a couple of months after I joined an intensive 9 week actual bootcamp in Ruby on Rails. It was not a cheap bootcamp though, but because I’ve invested my savings in it, I gave it all my energy and focus. I could have done it by myself online but I tend to procrastinate if I work on my own pace so it would have taken longer. I actually learned about freecodecamp from that bootcamp I paid money for (ironic). In fact, one of my bootcamp tutors was asking us to do the JS course in Freecodecamp, so don’t think a paid bootcamp will make a big difference (it just pressures you to do a lot more work each day).
This was all very recent. I actually come from a different background with a degree in chemical engineering, so I didn’t have any clue on programming or web development. Due to a lot of circumstances, I’ve been unemployed for a long while. And I wouldn’t have considered programming had I stayed in my previous career. I went to a startup weekend once (around this time last year) and I was inspired by the way the developers who had the technical abilities to create working prototypes of useful business ideas within just 48 hours. By Autumn I joined this bootcamp and we created stuff and a full app as well as a graduation project.
So how did I get a job you ask?
We can eliminate “personal” networking, I am living in a foreign country and I don’t know anyone here. However, the bootcamp institute does have networking and because they have graduated other successful students, employers tend to reach to them to ask for fresh developers (most of these employers are start-ups). Just for information, more than half of the people taking this bootcamp are from different backgrounds, not CS.
So hard work, ofcourse plus dedication. We focused mainly on our graduation project app (it was a team project), as the bootcamp institute invites employers to the presentation day. I later got a couple of interview-offers from startups. I know a person who was in my batch that got hired within a week. In the end I still applied for jobs, and I managed to join a small sized international company which programs in Java mainly (different from the RoR I had learnt in the bootcamp)… so I’m learning a lot everyday in this job. But its a really great company and team members that teach you different stuff.
But here is the situation: the bootcamp institute can help you get to the interviews stage or help you with contacts to use when applying for jobs. Or alternatives to the bootcamp is the people you meet in Meetups, hackathons and startup events (they are mostly good for networking). But beyond all of them, if you apply here and there, and someone invites you over, it really depends on you passing the interview. So this is the second part to how to get the job in the interview.
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unless you lied in your application and claimed to have created non-existent apps or worked in complex frameworks , the employer knows and expects to be interviewing someone in a junior level. If you made it to the interview stage it means you have passed the initial screening tests. So you are still good.
So, they might ask you tricky questions but they are gauging your way of thinking not experience, so definitely the complexity of technical questions will be less. If you have 2 years experience in something, then they will ask you more to feel the depth of that experience. If you have less, they will ask you less complex questions.
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Speaking of the way of thinking, its how you approach a problem, how you attempt to solve it, how to validate your own approach and also how to say that you don’t know about something but it does sound similar to something you might have known. These are all thinking skills but also the way you show them on your interview will depend on your self-marketing skills. Similar to what @Soupedenuit said.
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Companies would ask you on how do you develop your programming skills more. So, for example my company told me (after I already started my job) they also thought that people who dedicated time and money to bootcamps shows they are more committed to developing themselves more. However, it doesn’t matter if its for money or for free, what matters is progress!!! For example, showing them your progress in FreeCodeCamp is really a good thing. But saying that you love learning about front end, and then they ask you ’ tell us what did you learn’, and you reply back ‘I just joined this online course last week’ is not a good way to show you have been improving your skills. And ofcourse having a portofolio is very useful. Like a github account where all the small snippets you code could be uploaded there and saved for reference. Your prospective employers won’t read your code line by line, but if you compare two applicants, one has no activity on github and one has at least 10 to 20 repo on github (even if they are small code files), who would you choose. Remember a company would also hire a developer that would contribute to the growth of their knowledge base and teach other team members from their own background and experience.
So, bottom line, don’t wait till you reach that “prepared stage”, no one is ever prepared, and the more you learn about something, the more you will realise you still need to learn more about this thing and more about this other thing etc… So, give it a go now and apply (or attend some events and network to have more contacts), if you get it well, you save time and you learn more programming while being paid, if you don’t at least you get more experience with the interviews and types of companies in the market and how to better place your learning path and self-marketing to such companies. Good luck!
