Software engineering is a high demand job nowadays.
That means by 2029, about 33 million jobs will be added.
you’re free to see why more and more people are pursuing a career in this space.
Recently, coding bootcamps have sprung up and have gained a huge attraction due to their affordability and flexibility.
More and more people are attending them to jumpstart their careers as software developers.
However, are these coding bootcamps more effective and more cost-efficient than academic institutions?
Can they truly getanyonea software engineering job?
I have seen both sides, so my opinion is not biased.
These skills will be helpful in career promotions.
I was able to get valuable experience that I could not get anywhere else.
Computer science is not learning the syntax of languages.
Thats the easy part.
The hard part is understanding the fundamental concepts and theories and learning how to apply them in various parameters.
There is no coding bootcamp out there that will do this!
They are not designed to teach you the theoretical and higher-level concepts.
The second advantage is that you get an accredited degree.
This plays a huge role in the resume screening of job interviews.
A good chunk of software engineering jobs requires you to have an undergraduate degree.
The third advantage is the career data pipe.
For instance, Workday, Google, and Facebook recruited heavily from my school.
In some cases, interviews are done the very next day.
Okay, that sounds awesome …. Whats the catch here?
What about graduate school?
This is still a lot of money!
Any other alternatives for me to get an accredited degree?
Yes, there is!
Recently,MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) have become extremely popularin sites such as Udacity or Coursera.
Some universities have started to partner up with these platforms.
A famous example is Georgia Techs online program forMaster of Science in Computer Science.
That program costs a total of $7,000 USD.
They tend to cost anywhere from $5000 to $20,000 USD.
The second advantage is that bootcamps are also shorter, as they can last from 8 to 12 weeks.
Instead of graduating in years from universities, you graduate in weeks.
The time investment is low compared to going through the traditional way.
But then whats the issue here?
Attaining a job right after bootcamp is not an easy task.
A Stack Overflow study revealed that around 9% of graduates never found a software engineering job.
Why is this happening?
The focus of bootcamps is teaching their students skills to land an entry-level software engineering job.
Their understanding of data structures and algorithms is super weak.
Bootcamp graduates struggle in evaluating time complexity of a coding problem.
They do not know how to perform recursion or graph traversals.
They are not comfortable tackling coding challenges.
So what ended up maybe being a $10,000 investment now becomes a $15,000 investment.
Not all software engineering interviews are as hard as Facebooks.
Startups and smaller companies tend to have a lower bar for hiring engineers.
It also depends on what kind of software engineer you want to come.
Your journey doesnt stop at coding bootcamp or university.
Thisarticlewas written byYen Huangand originally published onTowards Data Science.
Yen is a software engineer at Twitter.
He works on the Messaging team, maintaining and improving pubsub systems.
He has worked with numerous clients on ramping up their technical skills for jobs with over 400 client sessions.
If you need help with resume or interview prep, email him at his business email doseofcode1@gmail.com.
Also, follow Huang onInstagram.
