Are Coding Bootcamps Worth It? (One Year After Bootcamp)

you might have heard stories of people going from completely unemployed to landing six figure tech jobs in a matter of months all because of attending coding boot camps but are these stories even true is there actually a way to learn to code and to land a high-paying job in a quarter of the time it takes to do a traditional computer science degree well just over one year ago i graduated from a coding boot camp and it was one of the best decisions that i have ever made i'm gonna walk you through my experience show you what life looks like a year after coding bootcamp and tell you whether or not i think it was worth it so what is a coding bootcamp coding bootcamps provide short-term intensive training to build job-ready skills three-month 12-week very intensive coding bootcamp and after the 12 weeks they gain the skills to be able to get jobs as software engineers people who enroll explore coding fundamentals learn industry standards and best practices and complete multi-faceted coding projects to show that you have the actual skills to do the job and coding bootcamps attract anyone from beginners learning how to code for the first time to establish professionals looking to make a career change and these boot camps are designed to teach you the tech skills that you'll actually need to do the job rather than in college where you learn a lot of theory that doesn't have much practical use outside of academia the goal of a coding bootcamp is to give you the skills to work in tech quickly without all the fluff of a traditional computer science degree learn to code graduate get a job or pay nothing after reading that quote featured on the home page of bloom tech my curiosity peaked after a bit of research i learned that bloom tech doesn't charge a single penny until you land a job in tech paying more than 50k a year seriously bloom tech we're doing something revolutionary ready for it we teach you the skills that employers really want so you can get the job that you really want that means live instruction that fits your schedule one-on-one career support and building real products for real clients backed by our 110 tuition refund guarantee take that college a damn near immediately i dropped out of college and enrolled in the data science program at bloomtech in january of 2020. if nothing else i knew enrolling would financially commit me to landing a job in tech no matter what bloom tech wasn't cheap i enrolled in the nine month full-time data science program and true to their promise i was not charged a single penny until after i had landed a high paying tech job but this was still a 30 commitment at the time but it came with the guarantee that my education would be completely free if i couldn't land a job and this may seem super pricey but before bloom tech i was about to spend 215 000 on a computer science degree at a university and not only am i saving cash but i'm saving three years of my life because i'm learning the same things and i'm getting the same outcome a great thing about bloom tech and other coding bootcamps is that they teach for mastery not teaching you to get a passing grade on a test this means that if you don't complete the weekly project which is required to move to the next unit you can retake that one week long unit as opposed to a college class where if you missed a week you'd have to take the entire class again this way you can graduate from the program and honestly feel like you mastered all of the information that they covered here's what we learned week number one through four was for learning statistic fundamentals which is essential in any data science job we started by learning data wrangling and storytelling and learning how to create compelling data analysis we learned statistical analysis statistical tests and we even spent some time focusing on linear algebra as it would help us with machine learning down the road and you may be thinking how can you learn all of that stuff in four weeks well the program is full time and that means eight hours a day five days a week this is like a full-time job it is a real commitment if you want to spend one year and get out of it what most people get from their university degrees in four weeks five through eight were about predictive modeling we learned about regression and made lots of linear models made random forest classifiers and even learned how to compare two machine learning models against each other we were doing applied modeling and creating data visualizations to be able to show people what insights we were able to deliver from the data weeks nine through twelve were pretty much entirely focused on data engineering and in this four weeks we learned pretty much the entire data engineering process we learned software engineering best practices we learned how to manipulate data with sql create our own databases and once we had the whole pipeline we learned how to host what we built on the cloud weeks 13 through 16 were the core machine learning curriculum we learned natural language processing and did some sentiment analysis on social media data we made our own neural networks from the ground up we created image classifiers and we even experimented with some cutting edge machine learning models week 17 through 20 were about computer science i know that sounds a little odd considering this is a data science program but in tech when you interview you really have to know software engineering best practices if you want to make it through we worked on python object oriented program and data structures and algorithms basically everything you're going to need for acing coding interviews now weeks 21 through 24 are arguably the best weeks of the entire program and this is what bloom tech calls labs you participate in an in-house apprenticeship and you get to build real products for real people on a team i was in the data science program but i worked with software engineers data engineers web designers and other people who basically helped us make a full machine learning product that we could host on the internet and show people and this was one of the things that actually helped me land my job was the fact that i had this real world experience working on a team i graduated from bloom tech in october of 2020 and i started applying to jobs immediately and like most people on the market i got rejected over and over and over and over and i even started to worry that tech companies just wouldn't want to hire me because i didn't have a traditional university degree and honestly i was terrified and this is when i discovered one of the most valuable things that my coding boot camp offered career services most coding boot camps and especially bloom tech hire career counselors whose job it is is to help you find a job not not learn to code but to find a job these people know the ins and outs of tech hiring like the back of their hand they're the ones who help you write a resume that stands out helps you fix and iterate on resumes that aren't yielding any interviews scouts the job market for you and finds roles that would be a good fit for you shows you the best way to apply to tech jobs because there are secrets like the applicant tracking service which will completely reject your resume before a person's even seen it unless you match the job post they'll help you prepare for interviews and nail your elevator pitch and one of the most important things they'll teach you how to negotiate once you finally get an offer this is something that particularly saved my ass there is so much that goes into landing a tech job that has nothing to do with tech these career counselors know that and they're there to help you through every step of the process i literally would not be where i am today without the amazing career service people at bloom tech i had a number of interviews during my job search process and in the beginning it was painful i had a horribly hard time explaining myself who i was and why i was the right person for the role i was nervous i stumbled over my words and i literally called an interviewer by the wrong name twice but i kept interviewing and i kept reviewing those interviews with career coaches and over time i got better by the end of the job search process i had no anxiety about interviewing which was insane because i started this process barely being able to get on a zoom call with someone without shaking career counselors help you learn about the interview process making it less intimidating and then the more you're exposed to it the more comfortable you naturally feel i actually wrote an article about every single job interview that i went on so you can check out the link in the description if you want to learn from some of my wins and very big losses for eight months of applying to jobs and being in a four month long interview process i was finally hired as a data analyst 2 at vmware in june of 2021 and another question that everyone's waiting for is how much do i get paid so my total compensation is hundred and one thousand six hundred and fifty dollars it's a ninety five thousand dollar base salary with a seven percent cash bonus as of filming this video i have paid off fifteen thousand dollars or half of my income share agreement with bloom tech so my student loans are going away slowly i've gone to college instead of a coding boot camp i would still be 200 000 in debt and three years behind where i am right now that is the reason why dropping out of college and going to a coding bootcamp was the best decision that i have ever made for my career

Channel: Jack Ross

Views: 11,734

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Id: bw7J2BPETak

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022