The Complete Guide to Finding the Right Programming Bootcamp

Everything you need to make an educated decision

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

In a day and age where technology is becoming increasingly prevalent in our society, bootcamps have become the next hot trend.

Long gone are the days where growing adults feel the desire to go to medical school for a decade or more to become a doctor, all the while racking up tens or hundreds of thousands in debt. No, in this day and age we have trained ourselves to hone in on what takes the absolute least amount of time and brings the largest rewards.

Of course, the rewards are usually thought of as more money or more freedom. Thus the concept of programming boot camps was born, and in just 7 years it has become over a $300 million industry in North America alone.

Having gone through a bootcamp myself, I can assuredly say that it has been one of the best decisions of my life to date. But after coming out on the other end way ahead of where I thought I would be, I can’t help but notice some of my peers that attended along with me didn’t end up so well. Some of them were still looking for a job about 6 months later, some didn’t even finish the 3-month bootcamp in the first place.

I am not naïve enough to think that my class was the only bootcamp every where people gave up and dropped out. So I feel extremely confident making the following statement:

Bootcamps, and a career in the tech field, are not for everybody.

It is very important to realize that while there are many positives to investing in a bootcamp and risking failure, there are also some strong negatives. You need to sit down for a couple weeks or months and see if it is really a path you want to go down. Please take my advice and look into some free resources online (freecodecamp, udemy, Harvard CS50) and dive into programming to see if it is something that even remotely interests you.

If you don’t like it on day 1, that’s fine and even normal, but commit to just 30–60 minutes every day for 3–4 weeks of programming. Generally, that is a good amount of time to figure out if you like doing something, and if you are committed to making time to program every day then there is a much higher chance you will…