As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check
Attention code boot campers: if you literally have any other relevant experience for a software engineering job, my advice is to just leave the code camp off your resume and focus on that. And then, your experience from the code camp will come through positively in the actual technical interview process.<p>Hiring managers are under a deluge of underqualified code boot camp candidates, who are trying to effectively get past resume screens using all sorts of tricks. The blow back from that (I&#x27;m speculating here) is that code boot camp folks are probably often being screened out early at a lot of places since its just too difficult to assess them on paper based on the extensive grooming their resumes and github profiles get by their mentors at these bootcamps.<p>Instead, my advice would be to clearly label the work you&#x27;ve done at a code camp in your README files and include a link to your github. Explicitly call out on your resume projects you have done <i>on your own</i>, and talk about those in your cover letter. If you have literally any other projects or experience related to software engineering include those on your resume and emphasize them!<p>But highlighting your code camp and trying to tout it as &quot;highly selective&quot; and &quot;accepts only top 1% of applicants&quot; and all that stuff may be doing more harm than good at this point. The well has been poisoned by enough under-qualified people applying that ultimately need to be screened out via an on-site interview, which is time consuming and considered a failure of the hiring process, since they have been set up to pass the resume screen and the initial phone screens. So my advice is to just leave it off, consider the knowledge a secret asset, and don&#x27;t risk inadvertently damaging your own application!<p>All it takes is for a company to be burned once or twice by misleading applications from a coding boot camp candidate to just auto-screen out all resumes from them in general. It sucks, but I found myself looking at resumes that seemed genuinely good, but as soon as the boot camp was listed there, I no longer had trust in what I was looking at. So be mindful, there may be folks out there who would have normally had you interview but didn&#x27;t just because of past negative experiences with others from your code camp, or other boot camps altogether!