The fact that TapJoy is hiring people straight out of DevBootCamp makes me seriously question the quality of their engineering organization, rather than causing me to think highly of DevBootCamp (which may be an excellent program).
If you do have prior experience, can you tell me why you want a $12K bootcamp instead of just learning Rails yourself?
I actually built two Rails apps on my own before attending Dev Bootcamp, but the quality of my code was horrible. I was able to fill in my gaps at knowledge about Rails and Object Oriented design and testing, and can now write nice clean code, versus guessing and putting bandaids on bad code.
Dev Bootcamp is 100% accessible to individuals with no prior experience whatsoever. We think anyone can learn to code, although we don't think anyone can learn what we cover in 9-10 weeks. We select for people with motivation, passion, drive, etc. first and foremost above prior programming experience.
We've found some students with prior experience actually have trouble because it's difficult for them to maintain a beginner's mindset.
I wouldn't have expected there to be so much money in a field that is so approachable. Is there a dearth of quality rails engineers, or is it related to web engineers in general?
To tell you the truth, this makes me wonder whether there's significant opportunity in the web space for senior engineers with traditional software engineering backgrounds. If people are so desperate that they're willing to hire brand-new engineers at an $84k average and spend months/years training them, how much will they pay for people that require no training at all?
How many C++ programmers grok CSS? How many Java programmers understand prototypes? How many enterprise developers are used to shipping code at least weekly? No CS degree I've seen has covered analytics, or even effective logging at scale. As much as CS-oriented coders look down their nose at web devs there are skills involved. If engineers can adapt there are huge payoffs sitting on the table, but they have to actually do so. There aren't very many who have, not nearly enough to meet demand, and so prices rise and companies swap from teaching web development on the job to teaching CS on the job.
Being an intern implies a temporary/part-time position or a student position, however the dictionary term is: "A student or a recent graduate undergoing supervised practical training."
I think that's absolutely what our new engineers from dev bootcamp consider themselves. I've heard that the teachers tell the students that when they graduate from DBC they are "World-class beginners". So in a way, I actually agree with what you just wrote. Not only that, but the attitude of treating yourself like a beginner is so healthy in bay area tech companies.
Another thing to keep in mind is the education is very competitive, more competitive than Harvard. These aren't just anyone, they're the top few percentage of people ready to drop 10 weeks, most move into a new city, and totally change their life in order to devote it to technology.
Luckily we have many projects with work to be done all over the stack. Obviously we're not sticking them into the hairiest of problems right off the bat. We'll start them off easy and let them progress. With their drive and their attitude, I'm confident it'll be impossible to tell who came from dbc and who came from a college in just a few months, if not weeks.
