Should I go to bootcamp or self-study?

I’ve been having conversations with friends for years who never get around to it.

Very few people actually self-study. The odds here are really low. I know you think you are disciplined. But are you disciplined enough to put in 60 hours a week, rain or shine, even when it’s hard, for the next 3 months?

In a bootcamp community, you and everyone around you codes for 600+ hours in 3 months. You can relax and put your “self-discipline” away.

Some friends who opt to self-study second guess their approach every few weeks, starting over on a new course, a new language, a new web framework… Cut that shit out!

It’s literally our job to update curriculum with industry best practices, which we know are good enough to get you an entry-level job. When you constantly switch approaches, you continually learn basic coding skills, over and over again. To become a strong software engineer, you need to go deep into a course of study. Once you’ve gone deep, it’ll be much easier to learn lateral skills in other languages and frameworks.

Our friends who self-study often study alone; internet communities can be a cold comfort on the hard days, when you need care and community.

Bootcamp is an intense adventure with ambitious friends. It’s not just an economic tradeoff, it’s a whole era of your life!

Realistically, most people just don’t enjoy learning alone, and that’s okay!

We’ve designed this bootcamp to make us happy; we think it will make you happy too.

Let’s say that it takes you 6 months of self-study to do the 600+ hours of work that you would be able to do at bootcamp in 3 months. This is extremely optimistic.

You can easily land a $90k/yr job after bootcamp. 3 months of salary is $22.5k; our tuition is $5000. You come out ahead by $17,500.

Plus, you’ll have 3 more months of professional learning, and be 3 months closer to a promotion or an equity cliff. You’ll have 3 more months of relationships with co-workers and mentors in industry. You’ll have your bootcamp community and your bootcamp mentors. We consider this to be a no-brainer.

Yes, there will be jobs. No, jobs aren’t drying up. Jake explains this in depth here.

We are confident that the best time to be a software engineer is right now, and we wouldn’t be personally helping our friends and family break into this industry if we didn’t think so.