Are coding bootcamps worth it? Are they right for you? This is how I answered those questions.

So you’ve heard about coding bootcamps, and you’re debating if they’re right for you. How do you decide? 

For me, I wasn’t confident at first whether it was the right career choice. Were they just scams? If they weren’t, would I be able to keep up? How would I even know which bootcamp to take—there were so many choices! While wrestling with these questions, life marched on and found me catching up with a friend I hadn’t spoken with in over a year. As it happens, that same friend had just begun a coding bootcamp herself, and that opened the floodgates. I asked her all the questions I had been pondering, and I quickly found myself seriously considering taking that career step. 

But one does not make a dramatic career change without preparation. The question of which bootcamp would be right for me still lingered, and so I reached out to another friend, this one a senior developer, to ask what he thought of bootcamps and what recommendations he had. He first asked me whether I had any experience, no matter how small, with development and whether I had enjoyed it. I did, and I had—that very experience was what had first set me upon considering this path. He agreed a bootcamp might be right for me then, and his next question was so obvious that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t considered it yet: What did I want to do as a developer? 

My friend wasn’t asking if I wanted to do front-end, back-end, or even full-stack development. He was reminding me that different industries tended to use certain programming languages, and if I wanted to come out of a bootcamp and successfully make the leap to being a developer, I needed to have my eyes on a final goal more specific than “being a developer.” I have a history in the legal field, and I was already aware that legal software was a growing industry, so that was an obvious choice. Beyond that, I have a great deal of exposure to the medical industry due to my partner’s health issues and some friends employed in it. I did the legwork, and I found the language that would best match me with these industries was C# .NET. With a better metric for sifting through the myriad of bootcamps out there, I took a deeper dive and finally found my match: Coder Foundry.

Around the two-week mark of Coder Foundry’s bootcamp, I was able to finally (and with tremendous relief!) say I was on the right track. I was already developing websites that were astounding my friends and family (including my developer friend!). I owed that to my instructors’ phenomenal instruction, to learning from others in my cohort, and to my friends and family helping me not just get through the course but also find it to begin with. More than ever, my goal felt not only achievable but inevitable.

Good luck to all of you hopefuls out there. I hope hearing about my start has been some measure of help.