I graduated from Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco about 3.5 years ago.
Admittedly, I didn't really need to "learn how to learn" as many claim they did. That's fine for them, but I was already going in with that mindset. What I got was mainly an environment where I could study and hack on things with other people wanting to do the same, without all the distractions of everyday life. I could have done similar things without dropping thousands for tuition and a living situation, but I still may not have been exposed to more current technologies. If I had tried to study programming on my own for the same amount of time, I might have still been writing Python 2.4 scripts in Notepad to do boring things with spreadsheets. I would have wasted so much time and avoided diving into Rails, Sublime Text, JavaScript, etc. I was pretty smart before going to bootcamp(I could at least do script kiddie crap) but very inept in many ways.
What mattered after DBC wasn't so much the technologies I learned but my willingness to come up with difficult ideas and say to myself "Sure, I'm gonna learn X (language|framework) to get this thing done". I had too much of an "I'm not that smart" mentality beforehand. I never would have dreamed that I would ever spend a month and a half sitting in Panera Bread with a friend hammering out a streaming video app to show to employers. And it worked! Poorly, mind you. It was pretty awful, but also glorious – it allowed you to build a shared playlist and watch YouTube videos with multiple people, all synchronized, with chat, a vote-skip button, and even a way to draw over videos. It did work, and we both got hired in another few months from writing it. Granted, my first employer was pretty crappy, but now I've ended up working 2 years somewhere that I've been very happy.
From what I can tell, those in my cohort who applied themselves actually made it after graduation. Those who couldn't shake the "knowledge on a silver platter" mentality didn't fare as well. Simple as that. There are so many opportunities in our field that it seems that even in 2017 someone with the drive and even average talent can make it.
EDIT: I forgot to mention where I work! I work at KPCC, a public radio station in Pasadena.
Admittedly, I didn't really need to "learn how to learn" as many claim they did. That's fine for them, but I was already going in with that mindset. What I got was mainly an environment where I could study and hack on things with other people wanting to do the same, without all the distractions of everyday life. I could have done similar things without dropping thousands for tuition and a living situation, but I still may not have been exposed to more current technologies. If I had tried to study programming on my own for the same amount of time, I might have still been writing Python 2.4 scripts in Notepad to do boring things with spreadsheets. I would have wasted so much time and avoided diving into Rails, Sublime Text, JavaScript, etc. I was pretty smart before going to bootcamp(I could at least do script kiddie crap) but very inept in many ways.
What mattered after DBC wasn't so much the technologies I learned but my willingness to come up with difficult ideas and say to myself "Sure, I'm gonna learn X (language|framework) to get this thing done". I had too much of an "I'm not that smart" mentality beforehand. I never would have dreamed that I would ever spend a month and a half sitting in Panera Bread with a friend hammering out a streaming video app to show to employers. And it worked! Poorly, mind you. It was pretty awful, but also glorious – it allowed you to build a shared playlist and watch YouTube videos with multiple people, all synchronized, with chat, a vote-skip button, and even a way to draw over videos. It did work, and we both got hired in another few months from writing it. Granted, my first employer was pretty crappy, but now I've ended up working 2 years somewhere that I've been very happy.
From what I can tell, those in my cohort who applied themselves actually made it after graduation. Those who couldn't shake the "knowledge on a silver platter" mentality didn't fare as well. Simple as that. There are so many opportunities in our field that it seems that even in 2017 someone with the drive and even average talent can make it.
EDIT: I forgot to mention where I work! I work at KPCC, a public radio station in Pasadena.