Joining a Bootcamp — is it worth it?

Nadavschwartz
2 min readFeb 8, 2021

We have all received an email, saw an ad, heard from someone, or just saw somewhere some Bootcamp that promises to get you from anything to a “job-ready” software engineer that makes 100k+ in 12 weeks.

And, I’m pretty sure we have all thought about it. Many of us have tried it. Many failed as well, many succeeded as well, but I would like to say something about it, a glimpse of my experience and what I think of it.

When I started the Bootcamp, I had no experience. The closest I got to programming was the shutdown command on my windows when it froze at times. Or run CMD commands with the internet support like ipconfig /flushdns.

The first language we learned was ruby, which, even though it is quite far from being famous, is incredibly English-like and very easily understandable.

From there, we learned Sinatra, which I am not sure why, but it did help with transitioning to rails, which was the first significant bulk of info and crisis I had to deal with to deeply understand.

After that, we learned Javascript, one of my favorite all-time languages.

And from there — we learned react and redux.

If you told me that it took me to understand rails in the same time frame, it took me to understand react-redux, I would have laughed so hard my face would hurt.

By no means am I saying that one Bootcamp is better than the other. I am not saying that flatiron’s approach is better than any other Bootcamp. I genuinely believe that every Bootcamp’s style fits different people.

but I will say that, from the bottom of my heart -

if you will put in the time and do the work, it doesn’t matter which Bootcamp you go to. If you have a passion for learning and enjoying spending hours tackling puzzles in bugs and errors most of the time, you have no idea why — you will succeed.

I will say that, though — flatiron helped me learn how to learn, which by itself is quite a fantastic life skill and essential skill to have as a software engineer.

--

--