Things I wish I had known before attending a programming bootcamp

Programming boot-camps and coding schools are doing difficult and important work. It is not easy to take hundreds of people from ‘how do I turn this on’ to hirable in a short amount of time, but these schools consistently deliver on that promise.

This story isn’t meant to disparage those schools. Anything that sounds like bitterness is really just personal frustration that I didn’t start learning sooner.

1. Be aware that when you condense anything, some quality is lost. Have you ever played an audio file after it has been condensed? It sounds like you are underwater. When you condense what it takes to make someone ‘hirable’ as a developer in 3–7 months, you lose some depth and context around subjects.

You learn the how and skim past the why. Even if it is in the curriculum, you will not pay it the attention it deserves. You spend your time getting things to work, and never understanding the inner mechanisms of what you are implementing.

2. Embrace the struggle. As a programmer, each time you solve a problem you should theoretically not have to solve that same problem again. Reading errors and struggling to understand what exactly happened doesn’t just help you solve the problem you are experiencing today, but any problem like it you experience moving forward. It seems like there are infinite things that can go wrong, but there aren’t. So… take the time to understand why things go wrong, and next time that thing goes wrong fixing it will take half the time.

Connect with several current students independently (either on Twitter or LinkedIn) to get a better sense of the experience. These schools are changing incredibly fast. What you are sold online and in interviews might no longer be representative of the actual experience of students in the school.

4. Schools differentiate themselves by their hiring statistics. These statistics are poorly regulated and unreliable, so look for transparency from the school to sense how confident you can be in the numbers. Some schools require assessments and completed projects beforehand. It is safe to assume that these schools would have better hiring rates since they have more information about how successful you will be as a programmer when they admit you. Other schools round up as far as what they consider a relevant job to include in their stats. Hiring statistics are important but not something to base a decision on entirely.

5. Get comfortable with GitHub. Being confident on GitHub helps you program with confidence. The ability to quickly recover from mistakes makes you more comfortable making mistakes. Making and learning from mistakes is how we learn.

6. Get comfortable with your file directory. It sounds basic, but being comfortable navigating your file system from the terminal is crucial to becoming a respectable developer. Strong system skills is a differentiator, particularly for students coming from programming bootcamps.

Going to a programming bootcamp is a no brainer if you are discontented, looking for a second career, looking for a first career, or just scared of robots replacing you in your job. Inevitably, automation will creep into every industry until it replaces most jobs. Either be the person programming those computers, or be fight to be the 1/10 people who gets to keep their job to check the robots work. The decision is an easy one, but choose carefully because there are as many bad schools as their are good.

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