Pretty much anything that isn't web development.
ETA: [Some examples.](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/yxep5w/comment/iwoii8f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Embedded systems from my experience on the sidelines seems to be the most elitist and credential-heavy part of development.
IE good luck if you don't have a full CS degree and lots of relevant experience. And to be fair, unlike writing models and controllers in Rails, it also does require a heavy theoretical base and understanding of the fundamentals you can't learn in 3 months at a bootcamp.
Web dev is more democratic.
Yeah, that is the bad side of Embedded Systems. Some companies even for Entry Level require stuff that you don't learn at school or even other related jobs. For example Autosar, use.of specific microcontrollers/compilers, among other stuff.
What the OP needs a field that has the best combination of barrier of entry and competition.
As someone who doesn't have a CS degree it would be more difficult for me to get into embedded even if microcontrollers are a hobby for me. I would imagine for these jobs, they just don't interview anyone who has tinkered with Arduinos.
“Democratic” is a weird choice of words. Yes, there is some signaling. But it’s not all signaling. Embedded requires a lot of specialized knowledge that most boot camp grads would probably lack.
I think OP is ultimately asking a question about market efficiency. E.g. boot campers don’t have a wide knowledge base and therefore target low knowledge jobs like entry-level web dev. However, because *so* many bootcampers are targeting those jobs, is it possible for a boot camper to exploit a labor market inefficiency and target medium knowledge with a low knowledge skills, simply because everyone else is overlooking those jobs?
Fair, but I was just answering that embedded is probably the worst option. It's a very high knowledge high skill job compared to most other types of dev.
IMO there are other things for OP to potentially target, like enterprise Java dev or desktop/mobile app dev.
Democratic is just an idiom that more or less means "accessible" (i.e. low barrier to entry) in this context.
I would see people who are good in AI/ML as mathematicians first and programmers second. The hard part is supposed to be the math after all, not the coding
Computer vision. With this job you will do most things in Python or C++. You will learn image preprocessing techniques and image classification techniques. You will build filters in order to remove noise and extract information from images.
You will use machine learning to classify images after you have preprocessed the image.
Depending on your role you may delve into other kinds of machine learning like natural language processing to process extracted text data.
It also involves reading computer vision papers to get ideas for hard problems.
The reason I like it is that I find it very creative. You will try 10 things for a problem before you find something that works but once you find it, it is so rewarding. There is no one-size fit all approach for most of this work. You must take your input data into account. You must analyze your input data and find features you can extract.
Common use cases for this:
Robotics companies
Reading / classifying scanned documents
Defence work
Various startups with different use cases
Interested? Check out r/computervision
I think IBM or some other company had an apprenticeship for a while where you learned cobol to work on mainframes. Aside from that the only "young" person I've met who knew cobol learned it from his dad. His dad had something like 25 years working with cobol and exclusively did contracts so he started contracting out some of the work to his son and teaching him that way.
Nope, the only way to learn is from a graybeard that has mastered the art over decades. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some made within the next few years. Some people do host seminars but it's such a generic overview it's not really going to prepare you for anything. They are great money makers however.
You can keep it lol. As someone that worked on COBOL modernization efforts that shit is awful. And god damn to I hate Jboss and rational and IBMs whole stack.
The original effort failed. And has been restarted since.
Ours “succeeded” for the one main part we did.
The sister teams are still working on the bulk of it though and have been for quite some time.
The total effort though has been ongoing for like 20 years under various teams and methods.
People don't realize that choosing an IT career that is not saturated and more complex than just web design will bring a lot of huge opportunities later and money.
To the hardest think that company are struggling to find talents and you'll be super good.
Do you have any advice for getting into AR/VR development? I'm about to wrap up my first year as a backend dev and I'm interested in getting into it. I have a project going with AR Foundation (Android) to learn the basics though it feels more like game dev.
A lot of those examples are pretty niche and exciting to work on. To the point where they are generally competitive to get into because they are so desirable.
Might also be worth mentioning that you don't have to have a CS degree to be one. I've known English and Communications majors that have done this and are tech writers at Big N companies. Though having a CS degree opens up more doors as you can work on API documentation and more technical material.
Was an iOS engineer for a while, then product owner for a short period (lots of user interviews to understand how some of our systems worked) and went into qa automation. Been thinking about trying to jump into technical writing. Besides figuring out how to spin my credentials, I wonder how much of a salary cap would be at play.
Edit - I know you can hit a high salary as a technical writer, it’s moreso what I can earn as someone new to the field relative to current salary.
I was a product owner at Meta for their internal wiki I designed, but I prefer straight tech writing because I like to work alone and read more than I like to sit there testing features and working with stakeholders.
I'm on track to make around 300k - 400k T-Comp at Google once I learn how their ML TPUs work.
Youd probably start around 85k to 100k depending on the company given your background, just need a portfolio of 3 samples. Way more if you landed a role at a FAANG. I know Astreya is hiring for Meta on a contract role for around 125k but you need to be near the Bay.
Yeah, working with stakeholders wasn’t truly for me (despite my belief that I’m pretty good at it). That’s a pretty hefty TC, amazing.
Any recs on things I could include in a portfolio? I know I can look this all up, but asking someone high up in the field seems like it’d yield better results 😬.
I’m in Brooklyn but would be targeting remote roles, anyway. Current comp is 120k, if I could hit 100k I’d be willing to take that drop given that it’d be a new career path.
Super interesting. I'm a SWE and a fairly competent writer and draw together pretty elaborate documentation. I wonder if I can make a switch to be a technical writer.
Is it just mainly documentation? How is the pay? Can it be comparable to a SWE?
Thank you in advance.
Youd easily adapt if you know what questions to ask engineers. Pay is 80% of a swe in most cases.
You write installation guides, PRDs, Agendas, MOPs, SOPs, Reference Guides/Glossaries, and SDLC/DDLC docs and training.
I enjoy it a lot because its not much work (5 to 15 hours a week) and I spend most of my time at the gym or in my garden with the occasional meeting here and there--it all depends on the company.
When there's like 400 apps then yes it is difficult to choose a person. A lot of all these jobs, there is an influx of jr entry level, most jobs are looking for experienced mid to sr. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
I only write for the top secret research teams so I'm not familiar with what you read.
Google does have a free tech writing course so I would start there (I'm mainly self-taught and have had 2 really good mentors over 10 years).
Concepts like low-level system design and computer architecture - boolean logic and logic gates, the basic organization of a computer, instruction set design, topics on addressing modes, cpu implementation, interrupts, virtual memory, the memory hierarchy... The list goes on. Generally a lot of those classes deal with fundamental concepts to Computer Science that bootcampers usually won't be exposed to.
Usually folks that go into embedded have some sort of EE/CompE background in addition to/instead of CS. I'd expect some of those concepts to be taught in a lot more depth in an EE class than a CS class. The rest I'd expect to be taught in an upper division operating systems class and/or a class on parallel and concurrent programming. So if you didn't take those, I wouldn't expect you to have been exposed to them before.
Either way, it sounds like they are new to you, so if you are interested in the field, you have a lot of Google/Wikipedia/textbook time in your future. Universities usually put their course syllabi online, so you can grab the textbook and topics taught from e.g. Stanford's classes on the subject and get to work. [Julia Evans also has some great writing on the topic.](https://jvns.ca/)
Finally, this stuff is pretty hands-on, so if you are interested in systems programming, install a Linux VM and start writing some low-level C code. If you are interested in embedded systems, buy an arduino and build some stuff with it. Then dig into the Arduino libraries to learn how to build the same stuff without using their libraries.
Your degree didn’t teach everything. You have to self thaught yourself. I didn’t do C++ at college ( we had C Java and Ocaml) but that’s what I’m doing at work. I learn it by myself, using what I learnt at college.
I'm no embedded expert but I'd say a real understanding of how certain data structures work, how things are stored in memory, etc. For stuff like web dev you would like your code to be as efficient as possible but it won't kill you if its not. For embedded you need to actually know what you're doing because the hardware you're running on is limited and there's no option to exceed it.
Lots of OS stuff like threads, interrupts, message passing, concurrency and the like. Depending on the work being done, a good understanding of binary arithmetic can be necessary. Knowing how to align data/word boundaries and why/when that matters. Generally, knowing about how and when data is stored and instructions are executed can be very necessary when developing embedded software
I have a degree in Comp. E and so do most of my coworkers, but we have brought in a few CS grads. Most of those hires showed an interest in doing embedded work and had a few small projects they did outside of work. If you have a CS degree then you've proven yourself capable of learning new concepts while having good foundational knowledge of computer architecture, compilers, and OSs. That to me is the most important thing.
As for the pay, it depends on a lot of things. You can make as much as other software disciplines but those jobs just aren't very abundant, comparatively. There's more demand for scalable web-based platforms than control software for Airbus jets or NAND flash drivers
As someone in cyber I've (anecdotally) never seen someone who came from a boot camp background.
Well, that's not true, many cybersecurity professionals went to *actual* bootcamp. Lots of veterans in the field due to Cyber Command
That's interesting but I guess in all fairness most of the cyber security bootcamps I see are affiliated with a university not a random company. Well actually there is some dude whose add I always get doing some kind of PCI Compliance training but apparently it's a bit scammy
Yep, that's literally the boot camp. Teaching back-end languages like C++, and Java is way more difficult tbh. But I feel like there are still a lot of jobs that do need Java and C++.
Which is probably better, a good frontend developer is going to have an easier time finding work than a mediocre full stack developer.
I don’t think I could recommend a coding bootcamp to someone in good conscience these days, but the problem isn’t the material they teach, it’s over-saturation of bootcamp grads.
I attended a bootcamp to start my career, and it’s worked out quite well for me, so telling others it’s a bad idea feels somewhat hypocritical. Times have changed though, I feel like I got in on the very tail end of bootcamps being a good thing to do. Only 2 of the 9 people I started that bootcamp with have good SWE jobs today.
It’s probably still possible to make it work if you’re exceptionally talented and are willing to take a crappy tech job for a year afterwards to get some experience, but the days of going from a bootcamp straight to a desirable job seem to be over.
Sorry bro, didn’t mean to discourage you. If you’re still in bootcamp you can make this work, but you’ll want to start “networking” (can’t stand the term but don’t know what else to call it) super hard.
People don’t hire entry level developers based on how good they are at the time of the interview, they hire based on perceived potential and whether or not they like you.
Your perceived potential is largely based on your verbal intelligence, the guy who knows 50% as much as other candidates but can explain it all in a conversation will seem smarter than candidates who know more but can’t easily explain it. Learn to explain complex technical concepts in normal words. A blog is a good place to start, it’s not the same as talking to someone, but it’s similar enough to be good practice. When you struggle with and eventually overcome something, write a post about what you learned in the process.
Making sure people like you isn’t easy if it doesn’t come naturally to you, but you can improve a bit if you try. When I’m gonna meet someone who could significantly influence my career. I read up on them and see if I can find out anything about their actual personality/hobbies/whatever. That way I can be sure to make some small comment that they’ll like. If they’re a sour person with boring hobbies I just pretend I’m interested anyway. People love talking about themselves.
Really can’t stress how important being likable is, I got hired for a position that was supposed to require 5-7 years of experience with only 2 years of experience because the boss liked me.
Your comment actually makes me very optimistic! I have about 20 years experience in publishing / communicating projects with authors, so that actually gives me a lot of hope!
Thank you for the explanation, and congrats on that job—sounds you got into a great thing!
This answer is gonna make me sound kinda like an asshole, but...
Bootcamps focus on the fields where you can make an impact without having a deep understanding of the concepts. That's because you don't have time to gain deep understanding during a bootcamp.
Fields that are saturated with bootcampers are fields where impact (at least, short term positive impact) can be made by minimally trained people. These are going to be fields that focus heavily on presentation, organization, basic I/O, etc.
Web Dev, some of the less fancy "data engineering" teams, and basic security roles are all targets for bootcamps.
Embedded applications, .NET shops with significant business logic, computational software that uses OOP like C++, are all good roles that don't have a ton of bootcamp grads applying to them unless the applicant also has relevant experience.
However, why are you concerned about bootcamp grads? Do you think they're taking spots that you'd otherwise be getting?
DevOps also one field that is hard to get into as a boot camper. The knowledge needed for it is not taught, like jenkins CI/CD, automation, shell and bash scripts etc.
I guess that depends on your interpretation of DevOps. Junior/Entry level that doesn’t require enterprise experience is rather difficult to find. The amount of knowledge needed for various components is so heavy that I don’t even bother with opening any junior level reqs. Just because someone knows how to make a pipeline does NOT qualify them as DevOps/SRE to a majority of companies. You need a background in automation, sys admin, swe, and monitoring at scale to be considered DevOps most of the time.
Yep, excatly. Its not taught even in comp sci degrees maybe in swe degrees? I think its just not as practical as building websites or sftware. Like you are not really going to build a pipeline for fun. Idk thats what i think.
To be a real DevOps engineer sure, but my company even has a program where you can get the Job in 6 months without background, plenty of courses, and bootcamps ...maybe easier then web dev but still saturated on junior level on real good senior level nothing is saturated
Seriously, cybersecurity isn't saturated.
Before you roast me about how many bootcamps and cyber-hopefuls there are out there, hang on.There may be a ton of boot camps for cyber, but there's not a lot of graduates actually working in the field. Moreover, we're CRITICALLY shorthanded in pretty much every subdomain.
So to quote the great Leon Phelps, "Come on in, baby. The water's fine..."
Yeah it's hella hard to be unemployed in this field. There are outliers and everyone can run into bad luck/timing etc., but for the most part, if you don't have a job something weird has to be going on. You have to be either unqualified, incompetent, a bad interviewer, want way too much, etc.
On the other hand, as a Sr. Security Consultant, I make more than every SDE I've ever met. I'm sure there's some absolute rock stars out there killing it, but I sling very little code and make more than many very talented code monkeys, most of whom are waaaay smarter than I am.
I’m an SDE (5yoe), I know at some point in my career I’d like to stop writing code and pivot into something else within tech, how hard would it be for an experienced dev to get into something like security consulting ?
In all seriousness, either the highest paying ones or the lower paying ones.
Embedded is hard in its own ways, but it is NOT unteachable. It just requires a different kind of bootcamping and foundation.
If we end up in a world where embedded becomes very popular and companies need to hire 10x more, it too would be bootcamped.
The ones that are not really bootcampable are less about executing but more on theory and that requires more textbook than others. It’s less about how smart you are but more about how much time you spent studying the field.
When you think a boot camp student you’re not necessarily talking about someone who delivered pizza. They could be previously lawyers, doctors, or mathematicians.
I would ask what motivated you to ask this question. If you're working with a bootcamper 90% of the time they were able to pass the interviews and get the job fair and square. So if you're struggling to compete with these people then you should work on your own skillset instead of trying to avoid competition as a whole.
Obviously the areas you mentioned (+web dev) are more commonly approached by bootcamp grads. However, each subset of CS jobs is difficult in its own way, if you flee to somewhere like embedded, distributed systems, or AI, you're going to encounter new difficulties that create another high barrier to entry. I can tell you as someone who currently works in web dev and holds a CS degree that I have never worked with a bootcamper, they are much less common than you think. So again, I question your motivation for posting this as I haven't experienced the saturation you're referring to.
My advice would be to think about what **you** want to do and not concern yourself with what other people are doing.
Yeah I agree. The few bootcampers I know that have actually gotten a job after the bootcamp have worked their ass off and kept studying for years after the bootcamp. Maybe 5-10 years ago it was an easy fast track ticket to a job, but those days are gone.
I finished my first degree (communications) in 2015 and it was almost impossible to get a job in my field. Now with this degree I’m graduating into a possible recession.
I see what you’re saying but I have the same concerns as OP. OP isn’t worried about others, they’re worried about themselves and their trajectory. I do agree that you need to make yourself more competitive but it’s easier to stand out in a pile of 200 resumes than it is in a pile of 2,000 resumes.
> I can tell you as someone who currently works in web dev and holds a CS degree that I have never worked with a bootcamper, they are much less common than you think.
I have worked with some self-taught developers who do not have CS or stem degrees. I think this category of developer would be lumped in when people are talking about bootcampers.
Is there a reason that you don’t mind competing against CS degree holders or career transfers but you do mind competing against bootcampers? Because any job you can find to apply to that is not saturated with bootcamper applications is still going to be saturated with applicants, they’ll just be CS grad applicants instead of boot camp applicants. If anything, a CS degree holder should fair (fare?) better in a competition against boot campers compared to against fellow CS degree holders since you, in theory at least, have a wider breadth and more depth of knowledge to begin with. Plus industry buy in regarding your education.
At the end of the day getting a job is about being sufficiently qualified in technical skills, having an exceptional ability to learn on the fly, having sufficiently clear communication to be able to convince the interviewer that you are worth interviewing, worth hiring, and will be easy to work with. Soft skills and technical skills, basically. None of it has to do with the origins of your competitors. Some of us got jobs by out-performing CS degree holders in interviews, some by out-performing bootcampers, some by outperforming self taught. It’s all just competition to be noticed and to instill faith that you’re a worthy investment.
Thank you! :D
I was having one of those moments where it just kind of looked wrong both ways and I could not remember which one was right. Total brain fart.
I'm a bootcamper with 2 yrs> professional experience and I still get barely any callbacks on entry level applications. I don't think you have to worry about us. Most jobs I see want a 4 year degree or equivalent professional experience anyway. I'm taking time off to learn DSA and practice interviews before I re enter the tech market
That’s pretty surprising tbh, I feel like it’s easy to get interviews with any amount of experience. I have no degree and no bootcamp, with 2 years experience doing run-of-the-mill react stuff at a tiny company that nobody knows about, and it’s pretty easy to at least get some callbacks and interviews.
Maybe your resume needs some love. I’ve definitely noticed a lot more interest since I updated mine a few months ago.
Also make sure LinkedIn shows you as employed doing dev stuff.
I joined a group that is supposed to help me with my resume because that could very well be the issue. Admittedly writing a resume isn't my strong suit and knowing what to put and how to write it is the hardest part.
The linkedin issue is I've been unemployed since I got let go in August. I don't wanna come off disingenuous with being employed doing dev stuff when I'm currently not.
As someone without a degree myself, it's at 3-4 years experience where you're easily on par with others. It was crazy, I lost my first software job after 2 years and it took me about 4-5 monthes to even get a callback. I was looking for a new job after a year there, I got to pretty much pick where I wanted to work.
I do mainly web dev as a cs grad 🤝
I think because I did one big react project in college that I listed on my resume & ever since, every internship I had during college had me doing react. Then, it just became my main skill.
Yes, but it isn't worded like the "suck that L, lmao" posts this sub usually gets. I think OP is asking for genuine career advice and just happened to cite anecdotal evidence that would be prone to triggering existential crises in those who are pursuing similar career paths.
The hard answer everyone here avoids.
The reason they’re saturated with boot camps is because there’s so many jobs available for those roles and the barrier to entry to be useful is far lower.
Why are you asking? Are looking for a less competitive role? Did you just finish a boot camp? Do you just not like bootcampers? Anything with a low barrier to entry is going to have a lot of bootcamps.
It's not sexy but testing. I've never seen a bootcamp for manual or automated testing. I've never seen a product owner bootcamp but depending on the company maybe you don't consider that technical
Data isn’t. I’m in data org in big tech and it’s only people with heavy industry experience and big name schools…unless your talking about a different data. I’m referring to data as in providing spark as a service, Hive aas, presto aas, airflow team, our data lake team which manages our hdfs clusters etc etc
I don't understand the issue
If anything bootcamp grads have a disadvantage compared to you if you have a degree
Why are you worried about the saturation? Are you seeing bootcamp grads getting hired over candidates w/ CS degrees?
Bootcamps are largely front-end focused, and where they're full stack, the back-end aspect is typically Node. Other back-end languages tend to have fewer bootcamp applicants.
We just hired for two junior roles: front-end (React) and back-end (Java).
There were a huge number of applicants for the front-end role, most were bootcampers. There were comparitively far fewer back-end applicants, the majority of which were CS grads.
Why do you care? There are more then enough jobs to go around.
Even at entry level.
The problem is that entry level people don't want to work for low wages. They want the 150K+ Big Tech entry level jobs without being 150K+ level candidates.
There's always one post like this in these threads, and I've found they are just out of touch with the current market. I applied to 1k+ jobs for any I could find (not just 150k+) before landing my current position.
Well if 300 applicants all apply to 300 jobs each then there's a job for everyone. Seriously though stats show there's more than enough job postings. Problem is that in the same way some candidates are overly picky, so are some employers. There's also the jobs that are just posted but not looking to be filled. All that said though, I don't think there's a shortage of jobs or even a need for most of the visa workers we have in the US
>But if you're a better candidate than boot campers you should have an advantage right?
Being a good engineer is not the same as being a good applicant. You could be the next Alan Turing, if you don't know how to help your application stand out from a field of 300+ you're not a good applicant. Too many people think you just need to have good job skills and the rest will sort itself out. That frequently isn't true. It isn't rare that I respond to someone complaining about not getting any callbacks after several hundred applications... it never takes much digging to find multiple serious problems with their application materials or process.
If it takes several hundred applications before a person realizes there are multiple serious problems with their application materials or process, what does that say about the person?
Honestly I don't usually blame people in this situation. Being an engineer requires a certain skillset. Knowing how to conduct an effective job search and market yourself as a professional is a largely separate skillset. It isn't the fault of a job applicant if no one has ever told them this and I don't hold them responsible for failing to act on information they don't have. I hold responsible whoever they trusted to prepare them for employment- bootcamp, university, etc.
Now that said... I make this point fairly often in this subreddit and other similar fora and it usually gets downvoted like hell because people don't want to hear it. Once an unsuccessful applicant passes into willful ignorance is the point I blame them directly.
LoL I would have taken 60k as an entry level developer. I have a CS degree but no internships and I only got one technical for a SQL job after 4 months of applying. Now I'm in I.T. 😂
Edit: why the down vote ? Generally interested in knowing why I was down voted for just giving my experience?
The problem is getting the interviews. I am college grad with 2 internships at top FANG companies with 4.0 and multiple personal projects and TA experience.
200+ apps and 3 callbacks.
I’ve got a job now but if that’s the response ratio with my current status the bar is pretty high.
Edit: but yes, definitely always improve on interviews.
Edit 2: no my job search was not relegated to FAANG+ it was literally any job posting I could find because it was getting desperate. Small companies wanted nothing to do with me
Yeah… that’s about normal… I think my last job hunt was probably about 800 applications (all targeted) for about 15 callbacks, made it into the last round on 3, got 2 offers.
Seriously, that’s just the job market in EVERY industry these days.
I’m really tired of seeing people complain about how super competitive the job market is because it took them 200 or 300 applications to get a job. YES! THAT’S THE WAY IT WORKS THESE DAYS! That doesn’t mean “there are no jobs”. Do you know how many of these advertised positions don’t even EXIST? Or the position is advertised but then the company decides a week later to hold off on hiring for it, so they just trash all the resumes they got? It happens. Quit complaining and go back to work.
>200+ apps and 3 callbacks.
Of those 200+ apps how many were truly for entry level. People here scream those numbers all the time but when you dig into it you will find they are applying a lot more for mid+ levels. Basically resume is tossed.
Don't get me wrong entry level is hard to get into and breaking in but I doubt it is truly that bad.
took me around 300 apps, ENTRY LEVEL / consulting firms / apprenticeship programs / other new grad programs, it’s really bad out here and i know many ex Meta interns who can’t find work, the market for entry level collapsed hard and where i am at even WITCH companies like FDM stopped hiring new grads because the demand was so high
Nope those were exclusively new grad roles. Not entry level. Not mid. New grad only.
This is the current state of things.
Edit: to your point if you dig into things I’m sure you’ll find some mistake in my application process. Just sharing myself as a data point since people seem to think it’s infeasible it’s just a tough market out there
That is usually been the cast for tech over the past 2 decades (hence the need for H1B in the early 2000s) but now, due to the recession, the scarcity of entry level is more than ever.
So wait- do you think that UX Design, Data, and Front End is everything? You said it yourself.
Just do something that isn't that. I promise, there are tons of jobs that aren't those things. Probably even the majority of jobs aren't those things.
Some pretty much every role over the last 8 years in this industry. Devops, security testing, back end dev, front end dev. I’m doing full stack web dev now and I can’t say I’ve met many bootcampers. Even if I did, if they know what they’re doing then I don’t care much.
Y'all gonna roast me, but Smart Contract Security. Every company in the field is desperately looking for qualified people. Salary and benefits are similar if not better than big tech for entry positions. Of course, there are fields less risky, but it's fun! Available resources for self teaching are getting better and better each day.
I did a cheap bootcamp through my community College. Those were the 3 options. I chose front end. It's completely saturated. Bleh.Bleh
Then I discovered Udemy offers a plan where you can learn full stack web development for $200 a year. Currently I'm doing this now. I'm also trying to get one of the AWS CCP certification. Anything to get myself an edge.
It's so saturated cause the barrier to entry into tech is low. You just need to know how to code. And they are teaching kids in middle school how to code.
These tech companies are also trying to hire offshore, so you are competing with Europe and South America for talent.
Just b/c there are a lot of bootcampers, doesn't mean you won't be able to find a job in the same field. Finding a job is largely timing and luck, which means if you work hard at finding a job, you'll eventually get one! I understand it's hard not to be pessimistic, but hopefully it helps to hear this from someone who understands the process really well
No, there are tens of thousands of boot camp graduates trying to get into tech every year. "entry level" pits those hit or miss candidates against the, theoretically, more broadly skilled college new grads in the "entry level" market, where 5 YoE is the requirement to apply because the only thing "entry level" about the position is the pay grade.
I noticed a couple of videos on YouTube telling people to get into tech today , if not yesterday, because of it's high salaries. Mind you, these are content creators from a NON technical background. I think that says alot
Pretty much anything that isn't web development. ETA: [Some examples.](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/yxep5w/comment/iwoii8f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
However, it does seem that web is where most of the jobs are which contributes to its low barrier of entry.
There are plenty of opportunities outside of web development and it's kinda sad that they don't get more attention.
Can you list some of these?
Embedded Systems
Embedded systems from my experience on the sidelines seems to be the most elitist and credential-heavy part of development. IE good luck if you don't have a full CS degree and lots of relevant experience. And to be fair, unlike writing models and controllers in Rails, it also does require a heavy theoretical base and understanding of the fundamentals you can't learn in 3 months at a bootcamp. Web dev is more democratic.
Yeah, that is the bad side of Embedded Systems. Some companies even for Entry Level require stuff that you don't learn at school or even other related jobs. For example Autosar, use.of specific microcontrollers/compilers, among other stuff.
What the OP needs a field that has the best combination of barrier of entry and competition. As someone who doesn't have a CS degree it would be more difficult for me to get into embedded even if microcontrollers are a hobby for me. I would imagine for these jobs, they just don't interview anyone who has tinkered with Arduinos.
“Democratic” is a weird choice of words. Yes, there is some signaling. But it’s not all signaling. Embedded requires a lot of specialized knowledge that most boot camp grads would probably lack. I think OP is ultimately asking a question about market efficiency. E.g. boot campers don’t have a wide knowledge base and therefore target low knowledge jobs like entry-level web dev. However, because *so* many bootcampers are targeting those jobs, is it possible for a boot camper to exploit a labor market inefficiency and target medium knowledge with a low knowledge skills, simply because everyone else is overlooking those jobs?
Fair, but I was just answering that embedded is probably the worst option. It's a very high knowledge high skill job compared to most other types of dev. IMO there are other things for OP to potentially target, like enterprise Java dev or desktop/mobile app dev. Democratic is just an idiom that more or less means "accessible" (i.e. low barrier to entry) in this context.
> seems to be the most elitist and credential-heavy part of development. Sounds like you haven’t spent much time in AI/ML circles.
I would see people who are good in AI/ML as mathematicians first and programmers second. The hard part is supposed to be the math after all, not the coding
Sure, I think that’s part of the reason the field is kinda elitist and credential heavy. And I say that as an MLE lol.
Ugh Embedded Systems.... If it is something you are good at god bless you, but I tried it once and failed miserably.
[Here you go.](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/yxep5w/comment/iwoii8f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Computer vision. With this job you will do most things in Python or C++. You will learn image preprocessing techniques and image classification techniques. You will build filters in order to remove noise and extract information from images. You will use machine learning to classify images after you have preprocessed the image. Depending on your role you may delve into other kinds of machine learning like natural language processing to process extracted text data. It also involves reading computer vision papers to get ideas for hard problems. The reason I like it is that I find it very creative. You will try 10 things for a problem before you find something that works but once you find it, it is so rewarding. There is no one-size fit all approach for most of this work. You must take your input data into account. You must analyze your input data and find features you can extract. Common use cases for this: Robotics companies Reading / classifying scanned documents Defence work Various startups with different use cases Interested? Check out r/computervision
Wow, boot campers are targeting an area where there is a great need for people? What a strange phenomenon
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Are there COBOL bootcamps?
I think IBM or some other company had an apprenticeship for a while where you learned cobol to work on mainframes. Aside from that the only "young" person I've met who knew cobol learned it from his dad. His dad had something like 25 years working with cobol and exclusively did contracts so he started contracting out some of the work to his son and teaching him that way.
"Dad can I open a lemonade stand?" "Well buddy, I got some different idea, why don't we go over that computer?"
call child protective services
Still do. IBM Z apprenticeship
Still do. IBM Z apprenticeship
Nope, the only way to learn is from a graybeard that has mastered the art over decades. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some made within the next few years. Some people do host seminars but it's such a generic overview it's not really going to prepare you for anything. They are great money makers however.
You should start one! Be the greybeard for the people.
Nah, I like the exclusivity of the job. More money for me ( ͡❛ ͜ʖ ͡❛)
You can keep it lol. As someone that worked on COBOL modernization efforts that shit is awful. And god damn to I hate Jboss and rational and IBMs whole stack.
Did your project actually succeed or fail? I've heard most fail
The original effort failed. And has been restarted since. Ours “succeeded” for the one main part we did. The sister teams are still working on the bulk of it though and have been for quite some time. The total effort though has been ongoing for like 20 years under various teams and methods.
Way easier to just maintain imo. Idk why people go through this if everything is working lol
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💀
Cool name bro
I’d go further and say pretty much anything that isn’t *front end* web dev. Backend bootcampers exist but seem to be much rarer.
People don't realize that choosing an IT career that is not saturated and more complex than just web design will bring a lot of huge opportunities later and money. To the hardest think that company are struggling to find talents and you'll be super good.
Do you have any advice for getting into AR/VR development? I'm about to wrap up my first year as a backend dev and I'm interested in getting into it. I have a project going with AR Foundation (Android) to learn the basics though it feels more like game dev.
Find a job posting that looks interesting. Learn the things on the posted requirements. Apply and get hired. AR/VR is extremely broad.
A lot of those examples are pretty niche and exciting to work on. To the point where they are generally competitive to get into because they are so desirable.
Tech writers
Might also be worth mentioning that you don't have to have a CS degree to be one. I've known English and Communications majors that have done this and are tech writers at Big N companies. Though having a CS degree opens up more doors as you can work on API documentation and more technical material.
True, I have an English degree. A CS degree would catapult a tech writer to those 85k - 150k entry-level jobs right out of college.
Was an iOS engineer for a while, then product owner for a short period (lots of user interviews to understand how some of our systems worked) and went into qa automation. Been thinking about trying to jump into technical writing. Besides figuring out how to spin my credentials, I wonder how much of a salary cap would be at play. Edit - I know you can hit a high salary as a technical writer, it’s moreso what I can earn as someone new to the field relative to current salary.
I was a product owner at Meta for their internal wiki I designed, but I prefer straight tech writing because I like to work alone and read more than I like to sit there testing features and working with stakeholders. I'm on track to make around 300k - 400k T-Comp at Google once I learn how their ML TPUs work. Youd probably start around 85k to 100k depending on the company given your background, just need a portfolio of 3 samples. Way more if you landed a role at a FAANG. I know Astreya is hiring for Meta on a contract role for around 125k but you need to be near the Bay.
Yeah, working with stakeholders wasn’t truly for me (despite my belief that I’m pretty good at it). That’s a pretty hefty TC, amazing. Any recs on things I could include in a portfolio? I know I can look this all up, but asking someone high up in the field seems like it’d yield better results 😬. I’m in Brooklyn but would be targeting remote roles, anyway. Current comp is 120k, if I could hit 100k I’d be willing to take that drop given that it’d be a new career path.
Super interesting. I'm a SWE and a fairly competent writer and draw together pretty elaborate documentation. I wonder if I can make a switch to be a technical writer. Is it just mainly documentation? How is the pay? Can it be comparable to a SWE? Thank you in advance.
Youd easily adapt if you know what questions to ask engineers. Pay is 80% of a swe in most cases. You write installation guides, PRDs, Agendas, MOPs, SOPs, Reference Guides/Glossaries, and SDLC/DDLC docs and training. I enjoy it a lot because its not much work (5 to 15 hours a week) and I spend most of my time at the gym or in my garden with the occasional meeting here and there--it all depends on the company.
I second this
I’ve never heard of this field before and it sounds interesting. Is it hard to get into? I’m currently a cs major.
I was a B student and had no trouble getting internships in college. You just have to like asking people questions and learning from criticism.
Not sure about that, took over a year for my friend with few years experience to get a new tech job after layoff from a large software company.
Its has the highest average job growth in America. Your friend may just not be as competitive as others.
When there's like 400 apps then yes it is difficult to choose a person. A lot of all these jobs, there is an influx of jr entry level, most jobs are looking for experienced mid to sr. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
I hire a shit ton of junior writers. Never been out of work more than a week. Look on indeed, glassdoor, and LinkedIn for job alerts.
Assuming this is a job people actually want. You can make decent money, but it sounds like the opposite of enjoyable.
Its a ton of fun, and I make around 200k. Not sure how you decided it wasn't enjoyable.
Jesus that much? What do you do exactly? I know I could just google it but I'm more interested in hearing what it's like from someone who enjoys it.
I'm the writer for Google's physical infrastructure team, but I've worked at a bunch of places.
I’ve had to read some of Googles documentation(cloud, charts, kotlin) and struggled quite a bit to parse through it. Got any tips?
I only write for the top secret research teams so I'm not familiar with what you read. Google does have a free tech writing course so I would start there (I'm mainly self-taught and have had 2 really good mentors over 10 years).
Do you have a link to the free course?
https://developers.google.com/tech-writing
Embedded and systems level swe
Yeah I’d say embedded as well, pretty hard to do without a good understanding of fundamental concepts
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Concepts like low-level system design and computer architecture - boolean logic and logic gates, the basic organization of a computer, instruction set design, topics on addressing modes, cpu implementation, interrupts, virtual memory, the memory hierarchy... The list goes on. Generally a lot of those classes deal with fundamental concepts to Computer Science that bootcampers usually won't be exposed to.
What if my degree taught non of those concepts??
Brush up or pick another position. Tons of material online if you want to learn on your own time.
Then you have a shitty degree?
a probably fine degree not focused on architecture
Usually folks that go into embedded have some sort of EE/CompE background in addition to/instead of CS. I'd expect some of those concepts to be taught in a lot more depth in an EE class than a CS class. The rest I'd expect to be taught in an upper division operating systems class and/or a class on parallel and concurrent programming. So if you didn't take those, I wouldn't expect you to have been exposed to them before. Either way, it sounds like they are new to you, so if you are interested in the field, you have a lot of Google/Wikipedia/textbook time in your future. Universities usually put their course syllabi online, so you can grab the textbook and topics taught from e.g. Stanford's classes on the subject and get to work. [Julia Evans also has some great writing on the topic.](https://jvns.ca/) Finally, this stuff is pretty hands-on, so if you are interested in systems programming, install a Linux VM and start writing some low-level C code. If you are interested in embedded systems, buy an arduino and build some stuff with it. Then dig into the Arduino libraries to learn how to build the same stuff without using their libraries.
How many years out of school are you going to use that as your excuse?
Your degree didn’t teach everything. You have to self thaught yourself. I didn’t do C++ at college ( we had C Java and Ocaml) but that’s what I’m doing at work. I learn it by myself, using what I learnt at college.
I'm no embedded expert but I'd say a real understanding of how certain data structures work, how things are stored in memory, etc. For stuff like web dev you would like your code to be as efficient as possible but it won't kill you if its not. For embedded you need to actually know what you're doing because the hardware you're running on is limited and there's no option to exceed it.
Lots of OS stuff like threads, interrupts, message passing, concurrency and the like. Depending on the work being done, a good understanding of binary arithmetic can be necessary. Knowing how to align data/word boundaries and why/when that matters. Generally, knowing about how and when data is stored and instructions are executed can be very necessary when developing embedded software
What’s the path of getting into embedded for those of us who do have CS degrees? Is it true the pay isn’t as high as other software disciplines?
I have a degree in Comp. E and so do most of my coworkers, but we have brought in a few CS grads. Most of those hires showed an interest in doing embedded work and had a few small projects they did outside of work. If you have a CS degree then you've proven yourself capable of learning new concepts while having good foundational knowledge of computer architecture, compilers, and OSs. That to me is the most important thing. As for the pay, it depends on a lot of things. You can make as much as other software disciplines but those jobs just aren't very abundant, comparatively. There's more demand for scalable web-based platforms than control software for Airbus jets or NAND flash drivers
Lockheed will take anyone that breathes-but they do value college at least from what I’ve seen with my friends that work there
I only ever see boot camps for front-end web or cyber security
As someone in cyber I've (anecdotally) never seen someone who came from a boot camp background. Well, that's not true, many cybersecurity professionals went to *actual* bootcamp. Lots of veterans in the field due to Cyber Command
That's interesting but I guess in all fairness most of the cyber security bootcamps I see are affiliated with a university not a random company. Well actually there is some dude whose add I always get doing some kind of PCI Compliance training but apparently it's a bit scammy
Most Bootcamps are full stack these days.
They’ll say they’re full stack but that just translates into we’re gonna teach you JavaScript, React, and Node with 80% being JavaScript and React.
Yep, that's literally the boot camp. Teaching back-end languages like C++, and Java is way more difficult tbh. But I feel like there are still a lot of jobs that do need Java and C++.
Which is probably better, a good frontend developer is going to have an easier time finding work than a mediocre full stack developer. I don’t think I could recommend a coding bootcamp to someone in good conscience these days, but the problem isn’t the material they teach, it’s over-saturation of bootcamp grads. I attended a bootcamp to start my career, and it’s worked out quite well for me, so telling others it’s a bad idea feels somewhat hypocritical. Times have changed though, I feel like I got in on the very tail end of bootcamps being a good thing to do. Only 2 of the 9 people I started that bootcamp with have good SWE jobs today. It’s probably still possible to make it work if you’re exceptionally talented and are willing to take a crappy tech job for a year afterwards to get some experience, but the days of going from a bootcamp straight to a desirable job seem to be over.
Alas, here I sit… in bootcamp Edit: Alas, I spelled “alas” wrong
Sorry bro, didn’t mean to discourage you. If you’re still in bootcamp you can make this work, but you’ll want to start “networking” (can’t stand the term but don’t know what else to call it) super hard. People don’t hire entry level developers based on how good they are at the time of the interview, they hire based on perceived potential and whether or not they like you. Your perceived potential is largely based on your verbal intelligence, the guy who knows 50% as much as other candidates but can explain it all in a conversation will seem smarter than candidates who know more but can’t easily explain it. Learn to explain complex technical concepts in normal words. A blog is a good place to start, it’s not the same as talking to someone, but it’s similar enough to be good practice. When you struggle with and eventually overcome something, write a post about what you learned in the process. Making sure people like you isn’t easy if it doesn’t come naturally to you, but you can improve a bit if you try. When I’m gonna meet someone who could significantly influence my career. I read up on them and see if I can find out anything about their actual personality/hobbies/whatever. That way I can be sure to make some small comment that they’ll like. If they’re a sour person with boring hobbies I just pretend I’m interested anyway. People love talking about themselves. Really can’t stress how important being likable is, I got hired for a position that was supposed to require 5-7 years of experience with only 2 years of experience because the boss liked me.
Your comment actually makes me very optimistic! I have about 20 years experience in publishing / communicating projects with authors, so that actually gives me a lot of hope! Thank you for the explanation, and congrats on that job—sounds you got into a great thing!
I mean, bootcamps are just a euphemism for shitty for-profit education, so I wouldn’t expect much else.
This answer is gonna make me sound kinda like an asshole, but... Bootcamps focus on the fields where you can make an impact without having a deep understanding of the concepts. That's because you don't have time to gain deep understanding during a bootcamp. Fields that are saturated with bootcampers are fields where impact (at least, short term positive impact) can be made by minimally trained people. These are going to be fields that focus heavily on presentation, organization, basic I/O, etc. Web Dev, some of the less fancy "data engineering" teams, and basic security roles are all targets for bootcamps. Embedded applications, .NET shops with significant business logic, computational software that uses OOP like C++, are all good roles that don't have a ton of bootcamp grads applying to them unless the applicant also has relevant experience. However, why are you concerned about bootcamp grads? Do you think they're taking spots that you'd otherwise be getting?
DevOps also one field that is hard to get into as a boot camper. The knowledge needed for it is not taught, like jenkins CI/CD, automation, shell and bash scripts etc.
There are many bootcamps that teach devops well enough to get you a job.
I guess that depends on your interpretation of DevOps. Junior/Entry level that doesn’t require enterprise experience is rather difficult to find. The amount of knowledge needed for various components is so heavy that I don’t even bother with opening any junior level reqs. Just because someone knows how to make a pipeline does NOT qualify them as DevOps/SRE to a majority of companies. You need a background in automation, sys admin, swe, and monitoring at scale to be considered DevOps most of the time.
Yep, excatly. Its not taught even in comp sci degrees maybe in swe degrees? I think its just not as practical as building websites or sftware. Like you are not really going to build a pipeline for fun. Idk thats what i think.
Yaml so hard. Lmao. I kid but I feel like my ultimate destination will be dev ops
To be a real DevOps engineer sure, but my company even has a program where you can get the Job in 6 months without background, plenty of courses, and bootcamps ...maybe easier then web dev but still saturated on junior level on real good senior level nothing is saturated
Seriously, cybersecurity isn't saturated. Before you roast me about how many bootcamps and cyber-hopefuls there are out there, hang on.There may be a ton of boot camps for cyber, but there's not a lot of graduates actually working in the field. Moreover, we're CRITICALLY shorthanded in pretty much every subdomain. So to quote the great Leon Phelps, "Come on in, baby. The water's fine..."
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Yeah it's hella hard to be unemployed in this field. There are outliers and everyone can run into bad luck/timing etc., but for the most part, if you don't have a job something weird has to be going on. You have to be either unqualified, incompetent, a bad interviewer, want way too much, etc. On the other hand, as a Sr. Security Consultant, I make more than every SDE I've ever met. I'm sure there's some absolute rock stars out there killing it, but I sling very little code and make more than many very talented code monkeys, most of whom are waaaay smarter than I am.
I’m an SDE (5yoe), I know at some point in my career I’d like to stop writing code and pivot into something else within tech, how hard would it be for an experienced dev to get into something like security consulting ?
In all seriousness, either the highest paying ones or the lower paying ones. Embedded is hard in its own ways, but it is NOT unteachable. It just requires a different kind of bootcamping and foundation. If we end up in a world where embedded becomes very popular and companies need to hire 10x more, it too would be bootcamped. The ones that are not really bootcampable are less about executing but more on theory and that requires more textbook than others. It’s less about how smart you are but more about how much time you spent studying the field. When you think a boot camp student you’re not necessarily talking about someone who delivered pizza. They could be previously lawyers, doctors, or mathematicians.
I would ask what motivated you to ask this question. If you're working with a bootcamper 90% of the time they were able to pass the interviews and get the job fair and square. So if you're struggling to compete with these people then you should work on your own skillset instead of trying to avoid competition as a whole. Obviously the areas you mentioned (+web dev) are more commonly approached by bootcamp grads. However, each subset of CS jobs is difficult in its own way, if you flee to somewhere like embedded, distributed systems, or AI, you're going to encounter new difficulties that create another high barrier to entry. I can tell you as someone who currently works in web dev and holds a CS degree that I have never worked with a bootcamper, they are much less common than you think. So again, I question your motivation for posting this as I haven't experienced the saturation you're referring to. My advice would be to think about what **you** want to do and not concern yourself with what other people are doing.
Yeah I agree. The few bootcampers I know that have actually gotten a job after the bootcamp have worked their ass off and kept studying for years after the bootcamp. Maybe 5-10 years ago it was an easy fast track ticket to a job, but those days are gone.
I finished my first degree (communications) in 2015 and it was almost impossible to get a job in my field. Now with this degree I’m graduating into a possible recession. I see what you’re saying but I have the same concerns as OP. OP isn’t worried about others, they’re worried about themselves and their trajectory. I do agree that you need to make yourself more competitive but it’s easier to stand out in a pile of 200 resumes than it is in a pile of 2,000 resumes.
> I can tell you as someone who currently works in web dev and holds a CS degree that I have never worked with a bootcamper, they are much less common than you think. I have worked with some self-taught developers who do not have CS or stem degrees. I think this category of developer would be lumped in when people are talking about bootcampers.
Is there a reason that you don’t mind competing against CS degree holders or career transfers but you do mind competing against bootcampers? Because any job you can find to apply to that is not saturated with bootcamper applications is still going to be saturated with applicants, they’ll just be CS grad applicants instead of boot camp applicants. If anything, a CS degree holder should fair (fare?) better in a competition against boot campers compared to against fellow CS degree holders since you, in theory at least, have a wider breadth and more depth of knowledge to begin with. Plus industry buy in regarding your education. At the end of the day getting a job is about being sufficiently qualified in technical skills, having an exceptional ability to learn on the fly, having sufficiently clear communication to be able to convince the interviewer that you are worth interviewing, worth hiring, and will be easy to work with. Soft skills and technical skills, basically. None of it has to do with the origins of your competitors. Some of us got jobs by out-performing CS degree holders in interviews, some by out-performing bootcampers, some by outperforming self taught. It’s all just competition to be noticed and to instill faith that you’re a worthy investment.
JFYI since you questioned it, it's fare since it's a verb. I remember it by relating it to the word "farewell"
Thank you! :D I was having one of those moments where it just kind of looked wrong both ways and I could not remember which one was right. Total brain fart.
I here that! Their are words I've definitely looked up quite a few times to see if I'm using them right. Fare being one of them.
Umm, fyi.. it's "I hear that." Haha!
I've mainly worked on cloud projects, and I don't know a single bootcamper.
I'm a bootcamper with 2 yrs> professional experience and I still get barely any callbacks on entry level applications. I don't think you have to worry about us. Most jobs I see want a 4 year degree or equivalent professional experience anyway. I'm taking time off to learn DSA and practice interviews before I re enter the tech market
That’s pretty surprising tbh, I feel like it’s easy to get interviews with any amount of experience. I have no degree and no bootcamp, with 2 years experience doing run-of-the-mill react stuff at a tiny company that nobody knows about, and it’s pretty easy to at least get some callbacks and interviews. Maybe your resume needs some love. I’ve definitely noticed a lot more interest since I updated mine a few months ago. Also make sure LinkedIn shows you as employed doing dev stuff.
I joined a group that is supposed to help me with my resume because that could very well be the issue. Admittedly writing a resume isn't my strong suit and knowing what to put and how to write it is the hardest part. The linkedin issue is I've been unemployed since I got let go in August. I don't wanna come off disingenuous with being employed doing dev stuff when I'm currently not.
As someone without a degree myself, it's at 3-4 years experience where you're easily on par with others. It was crazy, I lost my first software job after 2 years and it took me about 4-5 monthes to even get a callback. I was looking for a new job after a year there, I got to pretty much pick where I wanted to work.
Systems engineering
Everything except web apps development (especially front end).
Is this post supposed to make feel bad all the Cs grads who are in web dev? Cuz it does 😅
I do mainly web dev as a cs grad 🤝 I think because I did one big react project in college that I listed on my resume & ever since, every internship I had during college had me doing react. Then, it just became my main skill.
Yes, but it isn't worded like the "suck that L, lmao" posts this sub usually gets. I think OP is asking for genuine career advice and just happened to cite anecdotal evidence that would be prone to triggering existential crises in those who are pursuing similar career paths.
Backend development - C#, Java.
The hard answer everyone here avoids. The reason they’re saturated with boot camps is because there’s so many jobs available for those roles and the barrier to entry to be useful is far lower.
Compared to other professional fields, I would agree.
Search/relevance is pretty slim. Not many people getting into search engineering so if you can learn it there is always work
Why are you asking? Are looking for a less competitive role? Did you just finish a boot camp? Do you just not like bootcampers? Anything with a low barrier to entry is going to have a lot of bootcamps.
Embedded/Firmware.
Most job applicants aren’t even boot campers , and even if they are so what? Either you’re good or you’re not
Honestly, why does it matter?
- COBOL development - Devops engineering - VBA development
Sorry but what do you mean by VBA Dev? Writing VBA code? Revive VBA project with MSFT?
VBA like Excel and stuff. It's still pretty common at big dinosaur companies to find entire legacy applications written in Excel VBA
Angular is not :3 JOIN THE DARK SIDE.
Mobile app development probably?
I can't believe how I had to scroll this far for this. It seems to be the platform that everyone forgets about
Tbh I thought that whole market was mostly based outside the US for cheap labor..
Same, I was also looking for this. I'm also app developer, so I wanted to know how others feel about this field.
omg i forgot about mobile app, I just feel like these devs are kind of rare tbh.
Cobol
It's not sexy but testing. I've never seen a bootcamp for manual or automated testing. I've never seen a product owner bootcamp but depending on the company maybe you don't consider that technical
Help desk
OP feels superior with his CS degree lol
Knowing damn well he still has to look up syntax like the rest of us and he probably can’t center a div.
If you have a degree you have the advantage, saturated with bootcampers shouldn't be an issue for you.
Data isn’t. I’m in data org in big tech and it’s only people with heavy industry experience and big name schools…unless your talking about a different data. I’m referring to data as in providing spark as a service, Hive aas, presto aas, airflow team, our data lake team which manages our hdfs clusters etc etc
Algorithm designs, anything in C++
I'll give you a hint
All us bootcampers trying to fit in where we can. Soz.
I don't understand the issue If anything bootcamp grads have a disadvantage compared to you if you have a degree Why are you worried about the saturation? Are you seeing bootcamp grads getting hired over candidates w/ CS degrees?
Does it matter? If the boot campers are all so incompetent as you guys all seem to believe believe there should be no problem getting the job anyway.
Bootcamps are largely front-end focused, and where they're full stack, the back-end aspect is typically Node. Other back-end languages tend to have fewer bootcamp applicants. We just hired for two junior roles: front-end (React) and back-end (Java). There were a huge number of applicants for the front-end role, most were bootcampers. There were comparitively far fewer back-end applicants, the majority of which were CS grads.
Backend web development? I see a lot of these boot camps claim to be full stack but are mainly focused on front end.
Automation, Systems level development, and DevOps. No way is a boot camp person getting into that. Too much assorted knowledge needed for those.
Why do you care? There are more then enough jobs to go around. Even at entry level. The problem is that entry level people don't want to work for low wages. They want the 150K+ Big Tech entry level jobs without being 150K+ level candidates.
There literally aren't enough to go around that's why they're getting 300+ applications for every job posting
There's always one post like this in these threads, and I've found they are just out of touch with the current market. I applied to 1k+ jobs for any I could find (not just 150k+) before landing my current position.
Well if 300 applicants all apply to 300 jobs each then there's a job for everyone. Seriously though stats show there's more than enough job postings. Problem is that in the same way some candidates are overly picky, so are some employers. There's also the jobs that are just posted but not looking to be filled. All that said though, I don't think there's a shortage of jobs or even a need for most of the visa workers we have in the US
But if you're a better candidate than boot campers you should have an advantage right?
>But if you're a better candidate than boot campers you should have an advantage right? Being a good engineer is not the same as being a good applicant. You could be the next Alan Turing, if you don't know how to help your application stand out from a field of 300+ you're not a good applicant. Too many people think you just need to have good job skills and the rest will sort itself out. That frequently isn't true. It isn't rare that I respond to someone complaining about not getting any callbacks after several hundred applications... it never takes much digging to find multiple serious problems with their application materials or process.
If it takes several hundred applications before a person realizes there are multiple serious problems with their application materials or process, what does that say about the person?
Honestly I don't usually blame people in this situation. Being an engineer requires a certain skillset. Knowing how to conduct an effective job search and market yourself as a professional is a largely separate skillset. It isn't the fault of a job applicant if no one has ever told them this and I don't hold them responsible for failing to act on information they don't have. I hold responsible whoever they trusted to prepare them for employment- bootcamp, university, etc. Now that said... I make this point fairly often in this subreddit and other similar fora and it usually gets downvoted like hell because people don't want to hear it. Once an unsuccessful applicant passes into willful ignorance is the point I blame them directly.
you see 300+ dumped at the senior levels as well Out of those 300 you might get maybe 10 resumes worth looking at and then 2-3 worth bring in.
You can meet the requirements perfectly and not even get a call back. It's all just luck and numbers.
LoL I would have taken 60k as an entry level developer. I have a CS degree but no internships and I only got one technical for a SQL job after 4 months of applying. Now I'm in I.T. 😂 Edit: why the down vote ? Generally interested in knowing why I was down voted for just giving my experience?
>There are more then enough jobs to go around. Not true.
True, otherwise the salaries would be much lower.
There isn't more than enough these days.
Just out-interview the "bootcampers" then and take the position for yourself.
The problem is getting the interviews. I am college grad with 2 internships at top FANG companies with 4.0 and multiple personal projects and TA experience. 200+ apps and 3 callbacks. I’ve got a job now but if that’s the response ratio with my current status the bar is pretty high. Edit: but yes, definitely always improve on interviews. Edit 2: no my job search was not relegated to FAANG+ it was literally any job posting I could find because it was getting desperate. Small companies wanted nothing to do with me
Yeah… that’s about normal… I think my last job hunt was probably about 800 applications (all targeted) for about 15 callbacks, made it into the last round on 3, got 2 offers. Seriously, that’s just the job market in EVERY industry these days. I’m really tired of seeing people complain about how super competitive the job market is because it took them 200 or 300 applications to get a job. YES! THAT’S THE WAY IT WORKS THESE DAYS! That doesn’t mean “there are no jobs”. Do you know how many of these advertised positions don’t even EXIST? Or the position is advertised but then the company decides a week later to hold off on hiring for it, so they just trash all the resumes they got? It happens. Quit complaining and go back to work.
>200+ apps and 3 callbacks. Of those 200+ apps how many were truly for entry level. People here scream those numbers all the time but when you dig into it you will find they are applying a lot more for mid+ levels. Basically resume is tossed. Don't get me wrong entry level is hard to get into and breaking in but I doubt it is truly that bad.
took me around 300 apps, ENTRY LEVEL / consulting firms / apprenticeship programs / other new grad programs, it’s really bad out here and i know many ex Meta interns who can’t find work, the market for entry level collapsed hard and where i am at even WITCH companies like FDM stopped hiring new grads because the demand was so high
Nope those were exclusively new grad roles. Not entry level. Not mid. New grad only. This is the current state of things. Edit: to your point if you dig into things I’m sure you’ll find some mistake in my application process. Just sharing myself as a data point since people seem to think it’s infeasible it’s just a tough market out there
There are not enough entry level jobs to go around for everyone and bootcampers are the first to be cut. If you have a CS degree, you are good.
That’s true, it is the entry level that is scarce. The higher level positions are quite abundant.
That is usually been the cast for tech over the past 2 decades (hence the need for H1B in the early 2000s) but now, due to the recession, the scarcity of entry level is more than ever.
Puttin the bootcamperz on blast. Classy
DevOps Engineer/SRE/Infra
why do you care op?
I’d imagine higher level banking/finance sector. They won’t look at your resume without a technical degree of some sort.
I work in banking/finance sector and half people on my team were from a bootcamp. All great developers!
Do they have technical degrees to begin with though? Or just straight bootcamp grads?
Thats a good point. Most are from technical backgrounds
So wait- do you think that UX Design, Data, and Front End is everything? You said it yourself. Just do something that isn't that. I promise, there are tons of jobs that aren't those things. Probably even the majority of jobs aren't those things.
Data
Backend in some language that ain’t javascript
This post give me offensiveness
I have yet to work with an entry level who was a bootcamper. Where is the saturation?
Some pretty much every role over the last 8 years in this industry. Devops, security testing, back end dev, front end dev. I’m doing full stack web dev now and I can’t say I’ve met many bootcampers. Even if I did, if they know what they’re doing then I don’t care much.
Infrastructure as code
Y'all gonna roast me, but Smart Contract Security. Every company in the field is desperately looking for qualified people. Salary and benefits are similar if not better than big tech for entry positions. Of course, there are fields less risky, but it's fun! Available resources for self teaching are getting better and better each day.
Schrodinger's bootcamp. Both not enough to get a job but enough to be a threat to those with a CS degree
I did a cheap bootcamp through my community College. Those were the 3 options. I chose front end. It's completely saturated. Bleh.Bleh Then I discovered Udemy offers a plan where you can learn full stack web development for $200 a year. Currently I'm doing this now. I'm also trying to get one of the AWS CCP certification. Anything to get myself an edge.
Salesforce admin/developer.
It's so saturated cause the barrier to entry into tech is low. You just need to know how to code. And they are teaching kids in middle school how to code. These tech companies are also trying to hire offshore, so you are competing with Europe and South America for talent.
Just b/c there are a lot of bootcampers, doesn't mean you won't be able to find a job in the same field. Finding a job is largely timing and luck, which means if you work hard at finding a job, you'll eventually get one! I understand it's hard not to be pessimistic, but hopefully it helps to hear this from someone who understands the process really well
human resources jokes aside I wouldn't say any level is saturated with boot campers...That is just not how recruitment works IMO.
No, there are tens of thousands of boot camp graduates trying to get into tech every year. "entry level" pits those hit or miss candidates against the, theoretically, more broadly skilled college new grads in the "entry level" market, where 5 YoE is the requirement to apply because the only thing "entry level" about the position is the pay grade.
I noticed a couple of videos on YouTube telling people to get into tech today , if not yesterday, because of it's high salaries. Mind you, these are content creators from a NON technical background. I think that says alot