I graduated from General Assembly in NY 2 years ago. I worked as a junior dev on Long Island for 6 months. Then I hopped across the pond to Berlin, Germany to teach at a Bootcamp whilst I travel Europe. It's been a dream so far :)
I had 1 full year of dev experience and I had direct bootcamp experience. Also, I'm technically a TA, not the lead teacher. Bootcamps, such as GA, hire teachers and TAs who are fresh out out of their own bootcamps, with a lot less professional experience than I had.
Also, like a lot of bootcamp grads in this thread, I did a lot of programming on my own, getting better and more confident. So I personally believe I was/am a stronger programmer than my years of experience would imply.
There is a stigma with the hiring of developers solely based on the number of years of experience they have. If you are qualified to do something, and the employer has determined that you are qualified for that position, then number of years of experience you have should be irrelevant.
Gotchya. I guess I'm in better shape than I thought. I'd like to teach at a bootcamp in some foreign country and travel in my spare time too.
How did you apply? How hard was the interview process?
It's just demoralizing sometimes when every job listing around where I live says 3-5 years of experience required for something that isn't beyond what I can do right now.
FWIW, when I was in GIS school, they talked about the fact that many GIS jobs would say crap like "requires 5 years experience in X software" when the software in question was not even 5 years old.
So, you might want to take that requirement with a grain of salt.
I just moved back home to my parent's house. I'm going to use this time to get a basic job to save money and use my free time to learn as much as possible by designing, developing, and promoting an app/platform I thought of. There is a market for it, I lose sleep over it, and worst case: it'll help me land a job like yours.
I read enough negative comments that I feel the need to weigh in here...
I went to General Assembly in NY in 2015. I had a great experience with them - learned A TON and was successfully able to change careers. I am now teaching at a bootcamp in Berlin, Germany. Attending General Assembly changed my life for the better, I can say the whole-heartedly.
The cons are the cost and the time commitment. It will take you many months to become a proficient programmer, this is only the first (several) steps.
You obviously need to be wary of bootcamps that don't live up to their promises. I would say stick to the bigger names in general, but do your research and make sure that the school has alumni who were went on to have successful careers.
A lot of comments on here are saying things like "Bootcamps are a scam" and "Bootcamps are just not worth it". This could not be further from the truth. These bootcamps have changed a lot of people's lives for the better. There are some bad ones out there (as with any institution), and it is ultimately on you to do your due diligence to make sure that school is right for you. But as for me, attending a bootcamp was one of the best decisions I ever made.
To be fair, there's nothing wrong with exctinction, just as there is nothing wrong with "invasive species". These things are as old as the hills. A certain amount of genetic turnover is, as you point out, just the fitness function making its judgements.
The trouble we have is the rate of extinction and invasion. A typical ecology can support a certain rate of species loss... A single species will be replaced by other organisms that can occupy the same niche. They will fill in the gaps and the same level of biodiversity can be maintained.
However these things take time. And if, while the replacement species is adapting to fit the old niche, another several extinctions happens, we start to have problems. Organisms that could've adapted to fill out the niche are themselves under stress. Once you have several key species under stress simultaneously, you run the risk that an entire segment of the food chain... possibly double digit percentages of the metabolic chain, will collapse simultaneously.
With a slow enough rate of extinction, you can just keep filling in the holes, but once you cross a certain threshold, you can trigger a regression to a more primordial state. Like desert. You end up with orders of magnitude less complex of an ecology.
If think we can get by on a planet with an ecology that is an order of magnitude less complex, with an order of magnitude (or two) fewer species, then none of what I'm saying is a problem for you.
I am scared of dramatically decreasing the number of species just because it seems really hard to predict the effects of that. So I'd like to delete the species as slowly as possible to mitigate our risk.
