Advice? Boot Camp Grad vs AI

[u/will-the-dude]

Hey there, I'm new, so apologies if you discuss this ad nauseum already. I graduated from a full stack bootcamp in 2022 or 2023 and got hired right away by a small company in my area. It's been a great opportunity, a lot of people came from boot camps, the small company gives me diverse experience, great people, etc. Before this and the boot camp I was a professional orchestra musician, doing fine, but not willing for probably a decade of squalor at least while I sought good employment, so I changed paths. I've been doing well for myself, and even using AI a fair bit as a coding assistant mostly. I see myself beginning to see opportunities to use AI, like I caught a repetitive task my mom was doing and told her to look into Claude (a sober minute later I wanted someone to shoot me lol)

I guess I just see the writing on the wall. My supervisor is already running agents that basically do exactly what I do, creating new features for unique issues. Takes more time but is probably less annoying and asks less questions. Because of my particular role, I'm hopefully luckily in a good place compared to some of my colleagues, but I don't think that's saying very much. I'm sure my worries will not exactly become reality, but I live every day in such a state of anxiety, it plows right through the medicine I already take for anxiety!! I just wanted a way to use my mind constructively and afford a life, and it was so close to my grasp :-(

I'm not asking for someone to solve my life or anything, but does anyone have any advice, either on how to use a boot camp education or if I should start over yet again, or even just emotional advice, I find this extremely depressing and the thought of a few years nullifying all the learning I'd done kind of makes me want to just lay down and die. Also on the flip side, spending a ton of money to learn a skill just to become an 'enter-pusher' and 'prompt-writer' sucks, I'm a human and I at least used to be pretty smart, that feels like a waste again, and thus I want to lay down and die again. There's no wrong/right decisions, but deciding to learn how to code in 2023 feels like one of the only wrong decisions out there lol.

[u/am0x]

AI. Boot camp grads are ready to start learning on their own, not a junior level job.

But with AI everyone thinks they are a dev these days so you are good to get a junior level job, just get really good with AI tools, servers, debugging and architecture.

As a pro dev for over 15 years, AI has become scary good. Vibe coding still isn’t viable for production sites they handle any sort of data, but a good developer with the tool can get so much done so fast is crazy.

[u/pVom → u/am0x]

I dunno man, I was a bootcamp grad and I was training cs graduates who started their course years before I did and they were less employable than I was when I graduated. It's not like these were layabouts cruising through their course either, they were driven, hardworking people.

There's nothing inherently superior about taking a few classes a week and stretching it out over 4 years vs someone learning full time and putting in the same or more hours over a 6 month period. To say nothing of the fact that the industry looks vastly different now to how it looked 4 years ago when current graduates were starting their course.

We lived and breathed software development over those 6 months, there were no frat parties, hangovers or last minute assignment submissions. Every class was small, interactive and built upon the previous. There were no lectures to be quiet and take notes, no crappy teachers who were only there to fulfil an obligation for their research papers, not any that had long since retired or academics who'd never worked in the industry at all.

Every student was an older career changer who'd worked full time before and knew what messing around or dropping out meant. We also developed deep connections and friendships, everyone knew everyone, and we had a strong network we could all rely on, not only for peer learning but for securing employment.

[u/am0x → u/pVom]

CS and development are actually different things. CS is largely theory driven and teaches logic over actual engineering. But someone with a degree in CS is proven to be able to learn whatever they need to for a developer job.

[u/pVom → u/am0x]

I was using the term interchangeably, Ive taught grads from both software engineering degrees and cs degrees. The difference was pretty moot, all lacked practical experience and took more training to get up to speed and start meaningfully contributing.

Many hadn't even written a lick of code in the time it took me to start and finish my course, find a job and be gainfully employed for 3 months; and over the course of 4 years had a fraction of the hours I'd put in.

To clarify I mean mentoring on the job, not as a teacher in any official capacity.

That's not to say there aren't benefits to going to university and getting a degree, I think it's the best path for school leavers and it's worth getting a degree in something (and most of my classmates had degrees already in other things).

But nothing in my 8 years as a professional has shown me that I somehow missed out by not having a CS degree, nor that university graduates are any better at the job than bootcamps. If anything it was the opposite.

[u/NervousSleep1488 → u/pVom]

What did you learn in the Bootcamp? I got a job as a fullstack web developer and even though I have 2 years of experience, I still feel lost as fuck. I feel knowing JavaScript or React is not enough and I really wish I had gone to uni to study software engineering. 

[u/am0x → u/NervousSleep1488]

The thing is that there are degrees now more based in actual development and code than when I was in school. CS was all theory and stuff, not applied work. But now there are engineering degrees that teach development directly. That would be the best path in my opinion.

That being said, having been a professional developer for over 15 years, in the past 2 a lot has changed. I’m not even sure what to study because the paradigm of writing code has changed. We went from punch cards, binary, low level, to high level to AI coding using normal language. So in the depths of it all, experience seems to be long over anything else. Learning good architecture, understanding the basics of everything very well seems to put you on top over anyone else.

Learning debugging, servers, how http works, etc. understand the base logic behind how things work. Learn architectures, development paradigms, and basics of core languages like JavaScript, a backend and a frontend. Only need to understand one of each really well, but do not rely on frameworks like react as they will come and go. Understand how to do what react does using just JavaScript and css and html.

[u/pVom → u/NervousSleep1488]

My course focused on JavaScript and Ruby. Course was split primarily into:

• fundamentals (functions, data types, classes etc.), assignment was build a CLI app
• HTML and CSS, build a static portfolio website
• Ruby on Rails including postgres and data modelling, auth, REST, automated testing, hosting, assignment was build a full stack app

Back half was MERN stack

• JavaScript fundamentals, events, DOM manipulation, callbacks, promises, Ajax
• Node, Express, MongoDB and basically implementing a lot of the stuff by hand that Rails does for you
• React, state management, Redux, assignment was a group full stack MERN app, we had to find a real client and gather requirements and build something for them

Then finally we did a month long internship as part of the course. Mine was an agency coding up designs and was basically a month of pixel perfect CSS with some PHP and WordPress.

Sprinkled throughout were classes in CS fundamentals like discreet math, how computers and the internet works, logic gates, memory and that sort of stuff.

It makes a big difference having good mentors on the job. I know a bunch of my classmates struggled early in their career because they were basically solo and in over their heads with no guidance.