Is a Coding Bootcamp the Right Path to Becoming a Top Notch Software Engineer?

The core concept the coding bootcamps are selling is that Software Engineering is like riding a bicycle: once you get up to speed you stay at that speed forever. Additionally, you’re moving fast enough to learn and perform at a job.

However, the industry is not happening on a bike path in the woods. It's happening on a 12-lane freeway with no speed limits, no lines between the lanes, and no auto insurance. Everyone's cruising along on tricked-out Ninjas or extreme comfort Goldwings at 95 mph. The 'campers never mention this, obscure it, ridicule the idea, and lie to you in other ways to keep you from noticing.

Education and Continued Learning

It really doesn’t matter how you get started; what’s far less important is how you continue. The extra years of education that come with a Software Engineering (SWE) or Computer Science (CS) degree will certainly help, assuming you pay attention and really learn as you go, of course. However, if someone starts with a bootcamp and spends 3–4 years reading books and working on personal projects and open-source projects, they will still learn a lot. And all of that self-directed practice will likely teach them things that are more valuable to an employer than college classes in esoteric theories or advanced math.

College exposed me to a wider range of ideas than I probably would have discovered and studied on my own, and there's certainly value in that additional breadth. Most of it has come in very handy at one time or another. But it’s not as if bootcamp graduates lose the opportunity to ever take classes again. And even degreed people need to keep learning—I spent four days in machine-learning classes last month and half of yesterday in a people-skills class.

Industry Perspective

Mozilla has recently begun recruiting people from coding bootcamps. A while back, I spent an evening pair-programming a solution to an urgent problem with someone who recently came in through that path, and I think she’ll do great.

Hiring Manager's Perspective

Having been someone who has managed all the hiring for multiple development teams, let me assure you that this question as worded is hostile and biased. Code monkey is derogatory, and frankly, we need a lot of developers who can wire things up for businesses. The question gives me a vision of an electrical engineer looking down their nose at an electrician, calling them a code monkey.

I don't care if you have a CS degree or not when you first enter the field, you write code that higher-level, more capable developers tell you to write. That's called being a junior developer, and we all start there.

Interestingly, I actually believe that colleges do it wrong for the most part. They tend to start students on things like algorithms before the student has experienced writing software that would benefit from said algorithm. What's the point of learning about tree or hash structures until you have worked with a database and considered storage and retrieval performance?

The Path to Becoming a Top Notch Software Engineer

The best, most talented developers I know of started out writing code to solve problems—they didn't jump right into a book of theory. Then, as they encountered problems in their code and got comfortable with the syntax of programming languages, they started to think about elegance and started bolting on the theory.

So, to answer the question, yes, a coding bootcamp puts you on the right track to be a top-notch software engineer because it introduces you to languages and solving common problems within the provided frameworks. To become a top-notch engineer, you will need over time to learn more theory, but you certainly don't need that theory to get in the door.

TLDR

Bootcamp or CS degree, you will start out doing grunt work.

Note: For a detailed comparison of coding bootcamps and traditional degree programs, you may want to visit websites like Career Karma or Forbes.