I Got The Job, But Did Bootcamp Help Me?

So we agreed that I would be able to continue with my apprenticeship with the new company. I then got another interview. This time it was an opportunity to meet and chat with the tech lead (who would be my manager if I was successful), along with a senior developer.

Unlike the first round, there wasn’t as much structure. It was far more like a back and forth kind of chit chat. When I first realised it would be that format I panicked. What would we discuss for an hour? There wasn’t even a tech test to take up the time.

But it ended out fine and, as I said before, I did get the job, so I guess I didn’t do too badly!

So, here it is—the big question.

How much did Bootcamp help me?

For the first job, I would say Bootcamp helped me a lot. As in it helped me get the job itself. The Bootcamp essentially doubled up as a recruitment centre which put its students forward for jobs with companies that partnered with it.

However, while Bootcamp taught me necessary coding skills – overall, I did walk into my first job a complete amateur at coding. There was several examples of this:

• I was not taught the tech stack which I would need for the job role
• While we were given an introduction to group working, and GitHub, it was not enough to be a functioning developer in the workplace
• I struggled to absorb what I was learning, and 12 weeks is a short time to cover a whole curriculum

When I was moving to my second job, I did wonder if the Bootcamp helped me.

For example, if I had interviewed for that role immediately after graduating, would I have been able to answer the more technical questions? And, if I had been, would I have struggled to answer the questions regarding work processes and product lifecycle?

Overall I think my post-graduation process so far has taught me some important lessons:

• A job in software development is a constant learning experience.
• Just because someone has a junior, mid or senior title, it does not mean that they know everything (or nothing).
• Please don’t take it for granted that any advice is absolute, even mine.
• In development, there are 100s of solving the same problem.

So if you’ve made it to the end of this series of blog posts, and I had to give you one piece of advice about going forward after coding Bootcamp is that:

Take the lessons about how to learn and carry that on. Just keep going. Keep learning. I promise it’ll start making sense eventually!