I went to Dev Bootcamp in 2012. I was self taught beforehand, and had done a little bit of contracting work.
They focused pretty heavily on soft skills, like communication and pairing, and also somewhat on generic software construction ideas, on thinking through a problem and breaking it down into its component pieces. The curriculum used JS and Rails, although I didn’t feel that I had much more than a surface familiarity of either by the end of the cohort.
I think that, in general, if a bootcamp has a decent focus on software construction and doesn't totally fall down on teaching you the technical stuff, you’ll probably be prepared to work, at least, as a junior dev. But, you can't just rely on a bootcamp. You really have to spend a lot of time (like, a ton of time) learning on your own, writing code and reading code others have written.
Since then, I’ve been working steadily as a mostly front-end and sometimes full-stack developer.
My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps. But, I believe most of the people who wanted to be devs are still doing just that!
> My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps
I think that's really funny about the first ~3 DBC cohorts. A few grads of those first cohorts went on to start App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright Academy (I think) and others like it.
well back in 2012 was literally the first time a code bootcamp had been done. I think because of that, a lot of smart people saw you could take this business model and get started really cheaply and it could be huge, which is was/is.
If you look at the early cohorts of DBC, anyone of those people could have learned to program on their own or already was. I think a lot of smart risk takers saw a huge opportunity that was wide open and ran with it.
They focused pretty heavily on soft skills, like communication and pairing, and also somewhat on generic software construction ideas, on thinking through a problem and breaking it down into its component pieces. The curriculum used JS and Rails, although I didn’t feel that I had much more than a surface familiarity of either by the end of the cohort.
I think that, in general, if a bootcamp has a decent focus on software construction and doesn't totally fall down on teaching you the technical stuff, you’ll probably be prepared to work, at least, as a junior dev. But, you can't just rely on a bootcamp. You really have to spend a lot of time (like, a ton of time) learning on your own, writing code and reading code others have written.
Since then, I’ve been working steadily as a mostly front-end and sometimes full-stack developer.
My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps. But, I believe most of the people who wanted to be devs are still doing just that!