Overpriced Bootcamps

I’ve recently learned that people pay more than 12000€ for a 2-3 months onsite bootcamp to be hired as a junior developer… just don’t do it.

Overpriced

That’s too overpriced, it won’t pay off quickly. Investing in your education is a good idea, but not in such way.

Just as an example, an intensive language course from A1 to C2 costs about 4000€: 3 hours per day, 5 days per week, about an year, including home excises, tests and exams. Worth to mention that tution fees for a couple of semesters in CS topics on the bachelor level would be less than 12000€ for sure.

It’s possible to have a solid self-learning program for 100€ a month easily: egghead, udemy, leetcode, edX, buying books, watching online courses, etc. Just do it daily for 1-2 hours. And one year of such self-education would cost you about 1000€, but it would be much more better than a paid bootcamp.

Scam schemes

All those “you pay only 1000€ and your future employer will pay the rest”, “you do not pay if no job offer in N months”, “contracts with included N months of employment” are scam for sure. Read carefully what you sign in. Or better just stay off.

They do not care that you will be hired. They are good already after you have paid the first bill. If one of students will be hired, then this is a huge win.

Not enough

After such courses you won’t have enough knowledge to pass a tech interview nor be actually hired. So it doesn’t gurantee that you will find a job. Not excluding completely, but passing an interview after such course would be more luck and most likely not result of the course itself.

They help you to create a starter of your portfolio, which contain some toy projects, todo applications and etc. Nothing exciting for an interviewer. It’s super easy to notice template projects of bootcampers.

They don’t teach many aspects of development: security, testing, debugging etc. Neither they show you real world development processes nor projects. Of course this is not required on the junior level, but that is always counted as extra scores and may make the difference.

Also it doesn’t provide you with practical knowledge. If you would run you own weekend-project for a year (like a blog), then you will have much more practical knowledge to be a junior than after such course. Or taking an internship program - there you can see something in practice.

Open source

All what you get in such courses is Open source, it’s free by its nature. You don’t need to buy licenses nor complete paid certifications. This is not a rocket science nor sacred elder knowledge. Read tutorials, documentation, articles, blogs, communities (like Rolling Scopes), discussions, comments, lots of everything, Google is your best friend

Maybe 20 years ago it was hard to find out information, but nowadays it’s almost impossible to find a programming stack/library/framework/etc without publically available information.

Also it’s a very good idea to gain some practical knowledge is to contribute to some open source project. Just find some project you like or use on Github and try to fix some bug there.