I've been wanting to write a blog post about DevMountain and my experience there for a while. I learned a lot of things there. I also was exposed to a lot of things and don't remember how to do them. I'm continually working on what I know and do and so hopefully I'll be able to take full advantage of my experience there further on down the line.
I finished my MBA in the fall of 2014 and immediately started applying to jobs. Between my wife and I we applied to over 100 jobs without much luck by way of interviews. I think I got one or two calls just confirming that I had indeed applied and to see if I was interested if they wanted to bring me in to which of course I said, but never heard anything more from any of those applications. In response to that frustration I began looking at my options.
In the spring of 2013 I began doing exercises on free sites like codeacademy.com and others to get experience with coding. At that time I remember coming across coding boot camps, but due to cost, timing with a kid on the way and what not, I opted for a part time delivery job and continuing working till the baby came.
One big push for doing the coding boot camp at DevMountain came after talking to a friend, David Dame, in which conversation he told me that getting into tech is a great idea and that DevMountain or something similar would be really useful. Between him and my wife's encouragement I decided to apply and was accepted to start their January 2015 track in the part time program.
I was encouraged by the placement stats of their graduates, which stats came from their part time students, since their full time program had just started. I also went and met both the founder of DevMountain and another coding boot camp, DevPoint Labs, and got a much better feel for DevMountain despite it being more expensive.
So night one of actually coding was a disaster for me. We were setting up things to work with Github and I was struuuuugling and needed a lot of help. I left that night totally wrecked. I cried in my car outside of my house cause I was so worried and felt so dumb. I wanted to cry several times in class, but that's just too embarrassing so I didn't do that.
It slowly got better and I was able to actually comprehend some things and do some things on my own. My brother and his wife were indispensable to my ability to getting things done and explaining some things. They're really good at coding and are making and will make tons of money in the future.
What I really liked about DevMountain versus learning on my own is they know the material/concepts needed to break into the tech world as well as how long to spend trying to learn those as an entry level developer. For example codeacademy has a lot of material on html, css, but in DevMountain you spend at most one week on that stuff, i.e. three days in class and then the classwork outside of it, so maybe six nights of coding. I could be wrong, but time wise I feel like I spent more time on it when I was teaching myself than when I tasked with assignments by DevMountain. In that sense I loved the direction DevMountain gave.
Another thing I absolutely love about DevMountain is that it is a very real alternative to going to a traditional school for 4 years to get a degree in computer science. I can attest that the education gained in a traditional college environment is 100% legitimate as I have family that are some of the best coders I've met to date who are CS graduates. I do think that both routes are perfectly fine. There are the merits of having a certification/degree from a traditional school that a coding boot camp won't ever be able to provide. As a means to breaking into the industry in a shorter, cheaper time frame with what I believe is also a lower salary point than a traditional degree is ok since the cost of going and time of course is cheaper and shorter. In the time it'd take to get experience at a cheaper entry point is more than made up for by the time the traditional four year graduate has finished school and is just barely getting real world experience.
One thing that DevMountain didn't do so well I feel was job prep. Not in the sense of technical training, but just how to network and find a job when you have no experience. As is the case in most job fillings it typically happens due to someone knowing someone. That is how it was for me and I know that's how it is for a lot of coders. In my estimation the best way to "cold apply" to jobs is to put your resume out there for positions and titles you'd be interested in doing and then once you get an alert for it don't apply, but instead see who on LinkedIn that you know that could introduce you to the company or put in a good word for you. That results in a much better chance of actually getting an interview and a job offer.
That is mainly everything about DevMountain that I can think of. I hope you enjoyed it and if you have any questions for me leave a comment down below.
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