We made a conscious decision to try and hire someone from these camps as an experiment. I went to their demo day and winnowed the graduating class of 40 down to 6. Of the 6 we interviewed we decided to give 6 month internships to 3 of them, 2 developer and 1 qa. Despite being hourly with minimal benefits, they were making the yearly equivalent of 50k a year which I found more than reasonable given the fact they had no coding experience other than 12 weeks of study.
On the first day, the woman who was QA quit because she wanted to do development, despite being explicitly hired as a QA.
2 months later I had to let one of the developers go because she produced very little and was surfing YouTube for much of the day.
The last developer I did not opt to hire at the end of his internship. He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary.
I used the 75k he wanted and hired a competent developer with a CS degree and a couple years experience. He is orders of magnitude better than the boot camp guy was.
It is possible that a boot camp graduate could be useful after several years' experience, but fresh out of school they are extremely raw and need years of training. Therefore I won't be hiring any fresh graduates again.
On the first day, the woman who was QA quit because she wanted to do development, despite being explicitly hired as a QA.
2 months later I had to let one of the developers go because she produced very little and was surfing YouTube for much of the day.
The last developer I did not opt to hire at the end of his internship. He was a smart guy, but he needed years more experience to operate at the level of our other engineers and he was demanding a 75k salary.
I used the 75k he wanted and hired a competent developer with a CS degree and a couple years experience. He is orders of magnitude better than the boot camp guy was.
It is possible that a boot camp graduate could be useful after several years' experience, but fresh out of school they are extremely raw and need years of training. Therefore I won't be hiring any fresh graduates again.