tldr; It’s complicated, but I would pick bootcamp for myself and my friends.
How long have you been intending to self study coding?
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.
Do you have an air-tight course of study which has your full confidence?
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.
Do you have a community of colleagues and mentors in the software industry who will have your back and introduce you to employers, co-founders and investors?
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!
How much do you enjoy self-studying?
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.
Will self-study actually save you money?
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.
Will there actually be any jobs for me? Aren’t software jobs drying up?
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.
Enumerated Benefits of Fractal Bootcamp:
Benefits of Fractal Bootcamp | |
Time | 3 months |
Hours of Experience | 600+ hours coding |
Job Placement | We help you apply + interview |
Negotiation | We help negotiate a good salary |
Salary | We have a track record of getting students 6-figure jobs within one year |
Community | 5-10 ambitious colleagues, 3 ambitious mentors |
Headshots | Professional headshots 📸 |
Professional Projects | 5 portfolio projects & a site |
Experience coding on a team | Daily pair programming & multiple team projects |