a) This is based on vague priors rather than empiricism, but I currently draw a strongish distinction between coding bootcamps that you pay to join, vs bootcamps that take N% of your first year salary. The latter seem more incentivized to only take people who they are fairly confident they can help land a good job (and help land them that job)
b) I still would expect people who make it through a generic pay-to-play bootcamp would be better than people with no training, all things being equal. (like, seems like they’d need to at least sort-of-know-what-an-API-call was, vs a rando who might literally know nothing). Like, it makes sense if the signal isn’t that reliable, but statistically seems like a randomly selected bootcamp has a reasonably large chance of having some-kind-of-standards-of-who-gets-to-graduate.
I wouldn’t be impressed with someone just because they did some random bootcamp, but if I’m sorting through a list of resumes, and need to weed it down, and two people have similarly looking experience/side-projects-or-lack-thereof, but one’s been to a bootcamp and one hasn’t, that seems marginally better to elevate to “actually talk to them” status?
c) I also had been more comparing bootcamps to a 4-year degree (which maybe tests conscienciousness more, but from what I hear doesn’t do much to guarrantee that you have the sense of causality that you need to program.
Ah, gotcha.
Some confounding things in my worldview:
a) This is based on vague priors rather than empiricism, but I currently draw a strongish distinction between coding bootcamps that you pay to join, vs bootcamps that take N% of your first year salary. The latter seem more incentivized to only take people who they are fairly confident they can help land a good job (and help land them that job)
b) I still would expect people who make it through a generic pay-to-play bootcamp would be better than people with no training, all things being equal. (like, seems like they’d need to at least sort-of-know-what-an-API-call was, vs a rando who might literally know nothing). Like, it makes sense if the signal isn’t that reliable, but statistically seems like a randomly selected bootcamp has a reasonably large chance of having some-kind-of-standards-of-who-gets-to-graduate.
I wouldn’t be impressed with someone just because they did some random bootcamp, but if I’m sorting through a list of resumes, and need to weed it down, and two people have similarly looking experience/side-projects-or-lack-thereof, but one’s been to a bootcamp and one hasn’t, that seems marginally better to elevate to “actually talk to them” status?
c) I also had been more comparing bootcamps to a 4-year degree (which maybe tests conscienciousness more, but from what I hear doesn’t do much to guarrantee that you have the sense of causality that you need to program.