Someone who's self taught doesn't need a bootcamp.

In reality all good coders are self taught - you can't really teach this stuff. You have to learn to play, to explore the solution space and figure out the different ways of composing your raw materials. And you need to do this over and over again throughout your career as new materials become available. Self-teaching never stops.

Coding is a skill, much like being a carpenter.

You can read about it all you want but unless you are doing it, you are not going to grow.

Hack Reactor is touted as really exclusive, but it's a 12 week boot camp. Does anyone seriously think that 3 months or even 6 months is enough to become any sort of passable? A well paced, self taught programmer can surely strive to a higher standard.

I've been working with computers all my life. I made static HTML/CSS/JS websites back in the 1990s before I'd hit puberty.

I never learnt how to code though, but I know a lot of technical stuff.

So I legitimately thought that "hey, I can learn to code in a few months"

Nope. 12 weeks is hilariously less to truly understand coding.

You can, at most, mimic the actions of the teacher.

It took me quitting, then months of idle rumination to understand what a recursive loop could be used for.

It makes me wonder if 12 weeks in a startup accelerator is also not enough time to truly understand how to run a business, either.

Also startup accelerators usually work with businesses that already exist. It's actually a good analogy. If you already know a little bit about coding and computer science a bootcamp can really help. If you don't have the drive to learn programming than a bootcamp can leave you with a huge skills gap.

My first business failed miserably. I had no business training and no one in my family who'd ever run a business. I was just overwhelmed all the time and never had advisors to reach out to (a problem YC students wouldn't have)

In hindsight, I know what I did wrong and what I should have done instead.

I'd say it took me at least a year of failing before I could gather my bearings and understand what was going on.

Well like coding, the only way to learn how to run a business is to do it and pour all your time and energy into it for years and years.

Passable for what?

For a junior web developer position? Yes, absolutely.

And it turns out that junior web developers make a shit ton of money in the bay area.

A whole lot of companies do not need serious CS algorithms experts. A whole lot of companies merely need blue collar, CRUD web devs to build their CRUD angular react node web app.

Being a crud web devoper is still a pretty good gig.

> And it turns out that junior web developers make a shit ton of money in the bay area.

Part of the problem is the high salary comes with the expectation of quick growth.

I think a lot of bootcamp graduates come up short.

That's my main gripe with these boot camps. If you're an experienced programmer with all the fundamentals in place, you could certainly learn a lot about a new language/framework in 12 weeks.

But, that's not who these things are aimed at. New programmers need time to absorb the fundamentals of programming. Getting pushed through some fast-paced program is the worst way to absorb anything.

I do like the idea of hopping right into writing applications vs the more traditional route, but it needs to be over years, not weeks.

> Hack Reactor is ~11 hours a day

11 hours a day for 12 weeks can't compare with two hours a day for a year.

More like Apples to sour grapes. 11 hours a day, of anything, is complete overkill. Especially something like learning how to program.

11 hours a day is a bit extreme. After a certain point I would be concerned about my retention. Personally, I've never had good results from studying more than a few hours a day, but I understand this may not be the case for others. I usually study a bit, take a break for a couple hours, and study some more.

You're kidding right?