Job Hunting 101 for Coding Bootcamp Graduates

Our goal with this article is to help all coding bootcamp graduates understand the reality of the job market and tackle it head on. At Boost we’ve helped hundreds of software engineers, fresh and experienced, move up to land new roles. Even though coding bootcamp graduates are rarely accepted into our program, many apply and we’ve discovered common pitfalls among the populace.

Bootcamps — almost all of them — either directly lie to you when they tout 98% graduation rates or artificially inflate their numbers by hiring their own grads for a couple months or finding them low-paying/unpaid contract work. There is a flooding of bootcamp talent on the market right now and most do not get called back when they send out applications.

As a bootcamp graduate, you have to play a very different job hunt “game” than experienced software engineers and formal CS graduates to get even close to the same results. You need to be more refined, more ambitious, and more directly appropriate for the role. Recruiters and engineers are always looking for reasons to say “no” and for bootcamp graduates, even the smallest things will trigger them. Thus, you need to mitigate as much risk — both perceived and actualized — as possible.

Although it’s not entirely fair to you, you need to make up for the mistakes of your past peer group.

This is the guide to help you do just that, and to beat the game you first must understand the game.

First off, here are some of the most common mistakes we see:

• Applying to hundreds of companies when your response rate is < 5%.
• Spamming applications without meaningful personalization.
• Believing you’re prepared for interviews when you’re not. Aim for a 30% pass rate on phone screens minimum.
• Having an unpolished personal website and ghost-town Github profile.
• Having projects with demos that are broken.

We’ll dive more into these later.

Preface: The Job Market for Bootcampers

Since 2011 bootcamps have taken the technology industry by storm. Hack Reactor, App Academy, Udacity, Bloc.io, App Academy, MakerSquare, General Assembly — the list goes on and on.

When each bootcamp started out, their respective curriculums were of mediocre quality. The candidates that graduated from “Batch x,” where x < 10, were often people who could barely code after graduating. Unfortunately, for the many lesser-known bootcamps, this is even true as x approaches infinity.

The technology industry was starving for talent, so when recruiters and hiring managers saw this abundant source of new talent they clawed tooth and nail to hire. When people passed interviews it was a miracle, and even when many failed they’d still be given a chance.

Fast forward a couple years and many of those first hires didn’t work out. Often they wasted company time/resources and experienced engineers became angry. Guess who got blamed? The recruiters. “Why did we hire these people again?” was a question heard around hundreds of offices all around San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

And recruiters don’t like making the same mistake twice, so they logged into their ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and made a filter. It read “No boot campers.” They over-reacted (or appropriately reacted depending on who you talk to) and now the freshest bootcamp graduates — even the top performers who have talent and ambition — are getting shafted.

Here are the rules that will help you either avoid obstacles entirely or crush them with brute force.

Rule #1: Don’t look like a bootcamp graduate.

Boot campers who remove their bootcamp from their resume look more like self-taught programmers. And guess what? They also get more interviews.

Simply removing the bootcamp off your resume and LinkedIn is step #1. Here are more “warning flags” that can make you look like a boot camper:

• Putting “Full-stack Engineer”, “Scrum Master”, or another role on a project. It’s a project, not a job.
• Putting projects under experience. You’re not fooling anyone and only make yourself look desperate; keep projects in their own section.
• Having projects that are named similarly to other people’s projects. If a bootcamp tells you to create “The To-do List,” and you want to list it as a project, rename it to something unique and even think about modifying it to be unique.
• Having a few select skills that were all clearly learned at a Bootcamp. Oh, you’re passionate about Rails and Javascript? Go take a day and learn something — anything — that is a little unique. Show you’re more of an explorer than a follower; when you only use Rails/Javascript and basic libraries, you look about as unique as a marketing candidate who says “my great communication skills make me stand out.”

Rule #2: Have what it takes.

Unfortunately most bootcamps still fail to properly teach coding and modern web development. But I don’t blame them — it’s hard and best practices are constantly evolving. It takes a certain amount of time to get the skill-set working for you.

The boon for most boot campers is that they were put in a structured program and told to run, but right when the gates closed and the structure ended, they ended up not sure what to do next. What technologies should they play with? Should they build more projects?

The answer is almost always yes.

Keep building. Keep playing. As a fresh graduate it’s likely your skill-set is too narrow and your projects are too group-oriented for you to prove yourself as an independent engineer.

We’ve helped a couple people who have done the 100 projects in 100 days challenge, and all of them ended up rocking their interviews. I don’t think all boot campers need to be that intense, but if you take an extra 3 weeks to build 7 small projects (3 days each) and put them on your personal site, you will be an objectively better coder by the end of it. It’s also a great way to develop your own self-direction and confidence — often people hit a level of stasis when they’re trying to determine what to build. When you limit yourself to 3 days per project, you can just build something — anything, and it will help.

Many bootcamp graduates are in tough financial positions and can’t take a whole month to just build their own projects without income; we’ve seen some move the outskirts of Oakland to escape the SF rent craze or move away entirely. If you’re in a precarious position, find any sort of contract work you can (even if it’s building a small Dentist’s website in Mississippi for $150). Experienced developers will rarely charge less than $80-$100 an hour, so you can undercut them pretty heavily and still come out on top. A “self-taught” programmer with even minor contracting experience looks 2x better than one with only personal projects.

Rule #3: Create a focused identity and polish it.

If you’re applying for python backend jobs, front-end jobs, data jobs, and iOS jobs, you’re spreading yourself way too thin. Applying to every job only makes you look like you lack passion, and your resume and online persona will reflect this.

Not only should you pick just one role and hyper-focus on it; you should go even further: extend your focus to a technology stack, programming philosophy, or specific market.

Let’s say you’re really interested in education technology (edtech). If you have a small project that is focused on the space, like a visualization of classroom demographics or college application dashboard, then those types of companies are way more likely to call back.

Go even further and polish your identity on your personal site — a headline like “Ambitious full-stack engineer with an interest in data” is so boring; I’ve read that 100 times in the last month alone. “Full-stack engineer focused on solving the world’s problems in K-12 education” will jump out way more to those companies. Of course, you don’t have to focus that much; you just have to back up what you say. If you want to say “Drones and self-driving cars,” start building a project that hooks into a DJI Drone or rudimentary LIDAR+Arduino hardware.

It’s painfully obvious, but I also want to mention that demos must function properly: the design/CSS should be clean and no bugs should be easily found. If you need a status page or PagerDuty to tell you your demos are down, set them up. If you need feedback on the design, ping around design communities like Hackathon Hackers. Battle-test your demos before you present them as a reflection of your abilities; a single obvious bug will result in a “no.”

Rule #4: Applications aren’t a game of spam (for you).

99% of personal messages that go out on AngelList and through emails appear like this:

“Hey recruiter/founder/engineer! I really love what your company is doing. The industry is moving really fast and I’d love to chat with you. I’ve focused on developing x, y, and z skills by working on a, b, and c projects. Would appreciate if you can take the time to review my application. Thanks!"

Those get thrown out right away unless you’re a Senior Software Engineer or went to Stanford. You, as a bootcamp graduate, must do better. Here’s how to apply:

• You think you love what the company is doing? Take 3-5 minutes to research the company and then mention exactly what you think is interesting! What product moves did they make? Why are they better than their competitors? Why is this the team you want to join, specifically? What blog posts of theirs did you read?
• Speak their mission and tie it into your narrative. Example: “My cousin had trouble learning in middle school and I would tutor them frequently (Math, Physics, etc), so it’s from my own experience that I realize personalized education is going to be a MASSIVE wave. Not only do I want to be involved in this space, I want to be at the company that defines it.”
• Don’t tell me all of your projects and skills in a personal message — I can look at your resume for that. Maybe mention 1 or 2 skills if they’re unique/interesting, like WebRTC or Elm.
• Use email instead of AngelList or other sites if you can and combine it with something like Mixmax so you can follow up easily. Online applications, on average, have a 6% response rate. Cold emails with two follow-ups have a 60% response rate.

We see so many bootcamp grads who just try and play the numbers game. Only play the numbers game when you’re achieving 15%+ response rate, else you’re scaling up a failing strategy.

Rule #5: If you ever blank on an interview question, you weren’t prepared.

Since the limiting factor for most bootcamp graduates is the application process, many drown in applications and forget about balancing interview preparation.

• You need to know data structures. All of them — Graphs, Trees, Strings, etc. If a specific type of problem makes you especially nervous, you haven’t practiced it enough.
• You should be able to write a simple web application without much need for Google or basic documentation. If a candidate asks to use Google or documentation to look up a native function in their preferred coding language, they are very likely to fail the interview.
• You need to do extensive research on the company before going in for on-site interviews. Have good questions — show them you’re entrepreneurial and really care about their company.

Interview preparation takes weeks, not days. Get on Leetcode, HackerRank, etc. Don’t apply to companies or take interviews until you’re relatively confident and have done live, mock interviews with other candidates or mentors.

Conclusion

At Boost, we want to see you succeed. As a boot camper who took the plunge to learn something new and fight for a new career, you’re already light-years ahead of most people. It takes courage to enter something that new, and it takes courage to continue on and blaze your own trail once the structure is gone.

The nice thing about Silicon Valley and SF is that people are helpful. Attend meet-ups, make friends, and mentor others. By using the network that exists in the technology industry and following the above rules, you will be able to land a position. The talent shortage exists and companies want you to be their next hire, so stop giving them easy reasons to say no. :)