What Do Professionals think of Coding Bootcamp Grads?

The truth about hiring in the industry is that recruiters will often need to filter based on qualifications due to the sheer volume of applicants, not due to a pervasive bias in one way for bootcamp grads or CS grads.

So it ends up having a similar effect as systemic bias in that bootcamp grads have a harder time getting hired. I think it's more like CS programs have a positive bias, rather than that bootcamps have a negative bias.

I've personally never experienced any bias against bootcamps in all of the jobs that I've worked and also have never heard of it being an issue from any of my friends from bootcamp that now work in industry.

What I do know is this:

Most qualified professionals understand that people come into industry from a variety of backgrounds. What we care about is whether you'll be a good coworker, self-sufficient after some ramp-up, and meaningfully contribute.

That said, when it comes to actually performing your job, having a computer science degree helps because of a better theoretical foundation, but I would not attribute theoretical foundation as being the differentiator between the most effective programmers and the average programmers.

I used to be a musician and went to college to study music performance and the analogy I like to use is that of studying music theory. Majoring in music often involves studying music theory instead of just playing your instrument, just like a CS student needing to take classes on CS theory.

While knowing music theory itself won't make you a better musician, figuring out how to apply the theory to your playing will and it gives you a much more colored understanding of why music evokes emotions the way it does, which gives you the power to apply it to amplify these effects of your own music. But theoretical knowledge is not musicianship in and of itself. To develop great musicianship, I think one has to go through the process of playing a lot of music.

In software engineering, I find that the foundational knowledge offered in CS programs like data structures and algorithms do help you comprehend difficult problems in this space, although it's rare that you face novel, difficult problems like this on a day-to-day basis. Software engineering is more about being a good communicator in writing, applying your problem solving skills, and enjoying spending time in front of a computer.

So what does this mean? While some bias may or may not exist against people who don't have a computer science degree, some recruiters will give you a shot. There are plenty of bootcamp graduates who have gotten a job.

Getting through the recruiter is definitely influenced by professional work experience and other qualifications to some degree, but it's all for nothing if you can't actually perform the job well.

So if you've already graduated from a bootcamp, you should spend all of your energy on becoming a better programmer by way of projects, practice problems, and contributions to other people's code. Worrying about this systemic bias is a moot point.

I've gone through dozens of interviews at Google now and my decisions are entirely based on a rubric that focuses on the candidate's interview performance as well as the assessed character of the candidate based on how they went about solving technical and team-related challenges.

Obviously a large tech company like Google needs to standardize the way the candidates are assessed to ensure that hiring is as fair-as-can-be across the board, but I do believe the approach we take at Google is reasonable despite it being far from perfect.

Not everyone who will be a good software engineer will be able to quickly solve the types of coding problems that Google interviewers typically give out, but the fact that it's rubric based and the only assessment that the interviewers are trying to make is against the rubric makes it a relatively meritocratic process in my opinion.

In conclusion, myself and everyone I've talked to that work as professional software engineers don't really pay attention to someone's educational background when interviewing, because the interviews are mostly focused on giving you an opportunity to show your skills and general cognitive ability.