My son is looking at a bit of a career change. He’s investigating coding boot camps. Are there any basic guidelines to evaluate the quality of these camps?
[Moderating]
Since this is seeking recommendations, let’s move it to IMHO.
I know you’re probably talking about recommendations for actual in-person coding boot camp classes, but several years ago I really leveled up my knowledge of Javascript and JS-related architectures using freecodecamp.org.
Pros:
- It’s free!
- It’s online, so you learn from the comfort of home
- Finishing a course in a particular discipline will get you as up to speed as any ‘for pay’ code camp class - I think they even offer certifications when you finish a course (how ‘official’ they are, I don’t know. I just took enough lessons for my own personal learning)
- The lessons are set up in such a way as to be little puzzle-style games, so they’re kind of fun to completel
Cons:
- It’s free. So there’s possibly less incentive or ‘skin in the game’ to push through the tough parts and keep going
- Self-directed, so takes discipline and motivation
- No human instructors to ask when you get stuck, but there’s a good support community
If nothing else, it may be a good starting point for your son to see if it’s really for him. Good luck to him!
(Disclaimer: this is from my memory of when I did the lessons maybe 5 or more years ago)
If it’s free then wasted time should be the only down side. If your son has to pay then look carefully at the suggested prerequisite skills for the course. Anyone with no coding experience enrolling in one of these programs is taking the chance that their time is wasted. Some people will never make a career from their coding skills. If your son has no experience in this he should definitely start with a free program.
Someone will eventually mention the predictions AI will eliminate the need for coders in the next 5 years. I don’t think it will happen that fast, or eliminate the need for people with coding skills, but probably will reduce the demand for coders, and there are an awful lot of experienced coders already. However, if it does take longer that gives time for your son to gain some experience, and find a specialty where coding is a secondary requirement.
There likely will be a whole new niche that forms of specialists telling the AI the exact parameters of what to code. In order to do that, the humans telling the AI what to code will need to understand the code well enough to know what to tell the AIs. Also, at least for a while, I imagine the code will need to be tweaked or personalized to fit the exact requirements of the project, which will also take coding know-how.
Building and coding custom websites is such a specialized job that I can’t imagine AIs will be good at doing all the custom work for a long time to come. Maybe the AI can get the project 70 or 80% of the way there, but taking it to the finish line will still take a fair amount of human interaction.
My personal niche in the web dev industry is, I’ve been a designer, first print graphics, then web design, and I’ve done enough coding to be able to understand how the ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ of a web site need to be integrated. So I’m not the world’s best web designer (but I’m good) and I don’t consider myself a full-fledged coder, but I’m a very good ‘bridge’ between the Design and the Dev sides. The ‘full-stack’ web developer I believe is a magical unicorn that doesn’t really exist, because design and development are such different disciplines that you’re going to be good at one and mediocre at the other. I can’t imagine AIs will be good at ‘full picture’ development for a long time either, so there will be plenty of opportunity for certain niches that someone like the OP’s son can inhabit.
Is this the same son from two years ago?
Yes, the boot camp he paid good money for turned out to be pretty much useless. It did not provide anywhere near necessary to get hired in that space. So, now after using his degree to sell software he wants to give coding another try. Hopefully he can locate a legitimate boot camp.
One of the complicating factors was the aforementioned camp terminated in person learning due to COVID. Online only. The transition to online was not good.
He should try the free one shown above. For an experienced programmer a boot camp could give them the skills to get a job with a new specialty software product. It will only be a first step for someone starting out. Your son went through one boot camp and must have some knowledge of the software thar he sells. So he might me one step up now. Another boot camp might get him all the way up, I think more likely it will take a little more than that.
If he’s completed a bootcamp already, he had enough of a formal qualification to apply for jobs.
IME formal qualifications are not what employers look for as much as passion and practical skills. In his shoes, I would focus on actual coding projects. Build a portfolio, be prepared to talk about his projects, do something collaborative to show he has teamworking skills, contribute to open source projects, look up example coding interview tasks for his strongest programming language.
Is he getting interviews? Perhaps his cv and covering letter are not presenting him in the right way.
I agree with the recommendation for a free on-line boot camp, not that I’ve ever taken one.
As for this, in the 55 years that I’ve been programming massive amounts of the code that I would have written a long time ago are now available as packages, often for free. I started generating raw html, hardly anyone does that anymore. I needed to generate a word file for a conference program, nice Python package for that. I’m sure we all have similar examples. Yet there is still plenty of need for programmers.