Currently working full-time. No college, no experience, just bootcamp. I can talk about the bootcamp experience - mainly web dev stuff, including some pretty involved projects - with a fair amount of competence. I have sent out >100 resumes in the past year and have gotten ~3 interviews and 0 job offers. I don't remember how many of the jobs I applied for required a bachelor's - maybe around 50%? [I will be explicitly tracking new applications that this market cares about, including Bachelor's Yes/No? .] I do not live in or near any major metro areas, and there really aren't that many full-remote positions, so 90% of the jobs I'm applying for are in cities >100 miles away that would require relocation [assisted or self-].
This market resolves N/A if, by January 1st, 2024, I have not applied to at least 300 new jobs in the period starting now [September 1st, 2023], or if, in the period starting now [September 1st, 2023], I have not applied to at least 100 jobs that do not list a bachelor's degree as a requirement. This market also resolves N/A if, at any point between now and the end of 2023, I decide to stop job searching - whether or not I have already met the application quotas by that point.
Otherwise, if I am not hired as a dev by January 1st, 2023, this market resolves No. [If I receive a job offer and don't accept it, it will probably be because of something I see as sus or invalid about the job offer, so I'm not counting job offers I don't accept.]
If and when I am hired as a dev in the intervening period, this market resolves Yes.
Related questions
@Lorec And have you done any private projects or open source in the year since finishing the bootcamp? Our field is one of the few, where you can get good experience without employment or formal education. If you don’t practice the craft, you will forget what you’ve learned
I think it's harder [although by no means impossible!] to learn anything useful OR impressive-to-employers from independent projects than most aspiring devs realize.
I think it's important to keep learning, but I disagree about the matter of fact that I'll forget the relatively little I've already learned if I don't practice. This has not been my experience with ~any skill in life, and software has not been an exception.
I don't see how your question is relevant to the market, which is about what will happen assuming I just have the bootcamp experience - unless you're asking if I plan to list any independent projects from the last year on my resumé, which I don't.
@Lorec it's quite relevant to the market: I wouldn't hire someone who has finished his bootcamp a year ago and has not done anything to practive and/or improve his skills since
@BeatRohrer Genuine question, if you're willing to answer: what kind of interim socially atomized practice/experience [or open source contribution] would make you likely to hire a year-ago bootcamp grad who hadn't obtained any gainful work in the meantime? If projects start seeming actually likely to improve my employment prospects instead of just looking amateurish and silly, I'll start listing them.
@Lorec If you don‘t have a formal education in CS and don‘t have any practical experience, you start with a disadvantage, because hiring you is a risk: we have to pay you, while we invest the time of our other employees to bring you up to speed. If we know that you have a genuine interest in the field and are ready and eager to learn, we will be more optimistic, that our investment will be worth it. If you’re building stuff on your own and learning new languages by yourself, we see interest in the field and know that you can teach yourself, which is quite an important skill.
And if we see, that you have been contributing to the open source community we can assume, that your code has been read and critiqued by other people and you know some things about cooperating in a team with other developers.
So for us it wouldn’t be about a specific project, but about the attitude and the practical experience.
But take my words with a grain of salt: I‘m from central europe and don‘t know the job market in the US, where you’re probably from.
@BeatRohrer Yes, I am from the US and it's quite plausible the culture is different.
To be clear, I can imagine taking on what amounts to a second, unpaid job/internship in open-source or independent development improving my prospects. I may do that if it becomes obvious that it's necessary. But it still seems possibly avoidable [To be recursively clear, I have not been fully "on" with job searching for the last year for health reasons.].
And anything short of that, I can't see being taken seriously.