I finished programming bootcamp almost six months ago…

Software Engineering in San Francisco, California

There’s a lot to tell since I last blogged, which was shamefully, all the way back in October, 2013.

But I’ll stick to the parts that I would want to hear about if I was considering a career change or looking for info on coding bootcamps…

Did I get hired?

Yep.

I was hired as a software engineer in San Francisco two months after finishing MakerSquare’s computer science program. I finished right as the holidays kicked off, and I also moved away from the city my program was in, so if two months seems like awhile, trust me, it was still very quick.

What’s the job like?

Exciting. Challenging. Exactly what I wanted.

I work for a company called CrowdFlower, which I’ll gab about more in my next post. The engineering department is between 20-30 people and growing. My actual team is 4 engineers plus our product manager. Our team is unique (and a great fit for me) in that we work on a little bit of everything, from ruby on rails, to pure ruby scripts, some r, some d3, lots of javascript, and many tools and frameworks I had never heard of before starting the job.

It’s nothing like bootcamp but I can’t really imagine walking into this world without having gone to an immersive coding school (or doing the more obvious, getting a computer science degree).

Did bootcamp make it all happen?

Yes, and no.

The spectrum of experience and developer skills that a coding cohort has is so broad that it’s not necessarily a fair learning experience or an impressive accomplishment to employers. Looking back, I sort of wish I had gone in more prepared, more skilled and more expectant that not everyone was as new to the field as I was. But I know consciously deciding to make a career change and sticking with it and working hard has changed my life, and I’m so excited to be where I’m at now.

I’ll write about my company, how I found my job, the interview process, and more fun things soon. Glad to be back blogging!

– becca