Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?
Disclaimer: My post-bootcamp experience (Chicago 2014) was probably very different from what I&#x27;m seeing today (New York 2017). Every meetup I go to seems flooded with bootcamp grads, and it appears the market is oversaturated with bootcamp grads. Overall, it seems like it&#x27;s much harder to get that first engineering job<p>I graduated from Dev Bootcamp Chicago in 2014. Before starting, I was a financial analyst for three years, and had been teaching myself some rudimentary python for about a year.<p>It took me about two months to get my first job at a start up, where I stayed for a year and pretty much made what I was making as an analyst. After that I moved to New York, where it took me a month to find a (better) job at another start up. Now I&#x27;m at a third start up as a senior engineer, which also took me about a month to find.<p>The program was fun, I met some great people (some of whom I&#x27;m still good friends with), I think it helped me get a foot in the door in the industry, and I picked up a lot of good conceptual knowledge and soft skills related to building software.<p>However, the the technical skills I learned from the curriculum ended up being almost completely irrelevant the second I graduated. They focused primarily on back-end development, with a Ruby&#x2F;Rails&#x2F;SQL&#x2F;jQuery stack. Since then, I&#x27;ve focused mainly on front-end, and worked almost entirely with Angular&#x2F;React&#x2F;Node&#x2F;Mongo. Now I&#x27;m am starting to dip my toes into Scala and PureScript and have no intention of ever using Ruby again.<p>My cohort mates saw mixed (but mostly positive results). All the people who were clearly talented got jobs immediately after graduating. It was more difficult for those who had no prior coding experience, or had trouble picking up the material.