+1 for being mindful of cognitive biases. For that very reason, I'm almost hesitant to post my experience. The only reason I do so anyway is because HN's comment crowd is more mindful than average about their own biases and those of others.
I graduated from Dev Bootcamp's Chicago location in August 2013, and after almost 4 months of (quite stressful) job searching, I got 2 offers on the same day- a job offer at a technology consultancy and an apprenticeship offer from an ad-tech startup. Both companies were kind enough to let me pursue both offers (I did the apprenticeship first followed by the consulting role). And after consulting for almost 3 years in both San Francisco and New York, I recently accepted an engineering position at a unicorn in NYC. I'm glad I experience both consulting and startup life, because now I know the startup world is where I belong.
Starting my dev career as a consultant resulted in me becoming a "jack of all trades" to some extent, which has its pros and cons. DBC taught me Rails and Javascript, I spent my apprenticeship coding in Java and JS, and I spent my consulting career coding in Java, Objective-C and Rails again for a bit.
I'm glad I got such a broad exposure to different tech stacks, but I definitely missed out on "diving deep" into one specific tech stack. It's reasonable to believe I'd be much more qualified for a senior developer position at my current job if I had worked in a Rails-only environment for the last few years, although without a time machine it's impossible to be sure.
I enrolled at bootcamp at a time when DBC was by far the most well-known school of the bunch. The Dan Rather Reports clip had just come out, and it was a pretty glowing profile. If I were to do it all over again, I would consider Dev Bootcamp or Hack Reactor, as the latter focuses on JS frameworks, which seems applicable to a broader number of job opportunities than the Rails ecosystem (although Rails is certainly useful as well).
The diversity of experiences that you get from consulting has bigger longer-term value, IMO. You might be more likely to be a senior dev today if you had been working in one tech stack for those years, but I think you'll go farther in your career 5 years or 10 years from now due to the consulting experiences, than if you spent all those years focused on a single tech stack.
I graduated from Dev Bootcamp's Chicago location in August 2013, and after almost 4 months of (quite stressful) job searching, I got 2 offers on the same day- a job offer at a technology consultancy and an apprenticeship offer from an ad-tech startup. Both companies were kind enough to let me pursue both offers (I did the apprenticeship first followed by the consulting role). And after consulting for almost 3 years in both San Francisco and New York, I recently accepted an engineering position at a unicorn in NYC. I'm glad I experience both consulting and startup life, because now I know the startup world is where I belong.
Starting my dev career as a consultant resulted in me becoming a "jack of all trades" to some extent, which has its pros and cons. DBC taught me Rails and Javascript, I spent my apprenticeship coding in Java and JS, and I spent my consulting career coding in Java, Objective-C and Rails again for a bit.
I'm glad I got such a broad exposure to different tech stacks, but I definitely missed out on "diving deep" into one specific tech stack. It's reasonable to believe I'd be much more qualified for a senior developer position at my current job if I had worked in a Rails-only environment for the last few years, although without a time machine it's impossible to be sure.
I enrolled at bootcamp at a time when DBC was by far the most well-known school of the bunch. The Dan Rather Reports clip had just come out, and it was a pretty glowing profile. If I were to do it all over again, I would consider Dev Bootcamp or Hack Reactor, as the latter focuses on JS frameworks, which seems applicable to a broader number of job opportunities than the Rails ecosystem (although Rails is certainly useful as well).