Coding Bootcamps - Can Anyone be a Six-Figure Coder?

[kyphysics]

My cousin, who graduated with a degree in economics and minored in psychology, quit his overseas English teaching job, went to a coding bootcamp (I believe it was just a few months long), and became a computer programmer/coder with a $160,000 salary (NYC).

He's encouraged me to do it (I work for a local college in admin.) and change careers, due to the high demand and high salary potential. I brushed it off last year, but have been more open to it recently.

One of the things I was skeptical of was the ability to rapidly change careers and be competent in an entirely new field in such a short period of time + get a high salary with career stability and upward mobility potential. It seemed like a "too good to be true" story. However, having looked into this more and also seeing my cousin's own trajectory as a horrible college student-turned-six-figure-programmer, I am intrigued.

His background is that he was a frat president, who majored in economics with the idea of going into business/finance of some sort and ended up not landing any good jobs. He got hired by the U.S. Census Bureau to do some low level data entry type of work and hated his job and decided to teach English overseas (on very low salary). During his time away and trying to find a new life path/focus, he came across a coding boot camp article about people working fast food and going to a short boot camp to making $100,000/year+. He looked into, came back to the U.S., and did the same. . .

I'm actually shocked he made it through and is working at a Wall Street firm doing coding for their client registration page (he helps manage it). He had ZERO programming classes in college and after a $10,000 boot camp, is now able to make $160K. He mentioned people as old as 30, 40 and even one 54-year old in his class, who all made the career switch.

It's not at all jealousy that I have, but more like wonderment. This is someone who drank his way through college and talked about girls. It's just weird to see him making lots more than me after a simple boot camp.

Some questions I have are:

a.) Is coding something you have to have a natural talent for to learn and be successful at? I honestly wonder if my cousin was just naturally gifted in this area and didn't know, b/c he never took classes in undergrad. It's hard to ask him straight up without offending him and implying his intelligence wasn't so great, etc.

b.) This may seem cynical, but if this is such a great gig, I wonder why everyone doesn't just do it too?

c.) Can a person who isn't naturally talented in coding, but has a college degree and average intelligence get through one of these camps and pick up the skills for a career change? Note that I'm not asking whether a person SHOULD do such a thing, but simply whether it's possible in most cases.

d.) I did not want to offend my cousin and had no reason to disbelieve him, but also looked up salaries too and did actually find that many starting/entry level coding positions in a big city do pay $150,000. This is for people with JUST coding boot camp backgrounds.

That made me wonder if computer science/computer engineering (what's the diff?) majors are getting paid like $200,000 for their starting job salaries? If a person is making $150,000 with just a few months training, how much more should/would a degree advantage a person?

Thanks in advance for answers from people in these fields.

 

[jedishrfu]

For starters, NYC salaries can be 3x greater than other areas of the country. So jumping from NYC to some other area will result in a drop in salary. The other thing about NYC is the high cost of living. Apartments are very expensive and even the cheapest may run about $3000 a month and upwards to $8000 or more.

https://www.zillow.com/new-york-ny/apartments/

It may well be that your cousin was hired as an economist who can program vs being hired as a generic programmer/software developer.

 

[kyphysics]

For starters, NYC salaries can be 3x greater than other areas of the country. So jumping from NYC to some other area will result in a drop in salary. The other thing about NYC is the high cost of living. Apartments are very expensive and even the cheapest may run about $3000 a month and upwards to $8000 or more.

https://www.zillow.com/new-york-ny/apartments/

It may well be that your cousin was hired as an economist who can program vs being hired as a generic programmer/software developer.

Yeah, $160K in the Bay Area or Manhattan is not that much relative to a middle-of-America suburban town.

re: hired as an economist - 100% no! He practically flunked out of undergrad in econ. and never once worked a job in business/finance. This is not to dunk on him. He's a very gregarious and likeable guy. But he was not at all intellectual-minded (literally the opposite). He tried two small business ventures with friends and they failed. He worked teaching English in Asia, which was not related to econ. at all. And in talking with him last month, he said he just does simple coding on their registration page. He's not some econ. analyst or anything like that - although, maybe it helps a tiny bit that he's got a related degree.

My point is, he seems like the last person to be able to do this, given his horrendous academic track record. He was literally a frat king party guy, who thought about getting drunk and having lots of sex in college. Got bad grades (I think he even cheated in some classes from the way he described things) and couldn't land a good job out of college. He was a low level data entry type of guy for the government before teaching English. His two biz ventures failed.

 

[harborsparrow]

He might get lucky but in this field there is often lack of job security and the technology constantly changes, requiring constant retraining. Also sometimes very long hours required with high stress.
And from time to time, outsourcing and layoffs. Eventually he may be at a disadvantage because lacking a broader understanding of pitfalls. In most corporate jobs programmers work under high pressure and intense scrutiny.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Boy, this thread really makes the rounds! How many sections has it been in?

The core of this thread seems to be envy. "My cousin got a well-paying job and I didn't! It's not fair! It's not fair!" Nobody here can objectively look at the situation - we don't have the job posting or your cousin's resume, much less any internal perspective on what the hiring company was thinking.

All we can do is go around in circles with "maybe it's this" and you saying "no it's not". Past experience shows people get bored with this game quickly.

 

[Choppy]

I think you're right to by cynical.

That's not to say your cousin's experience didn't happen. Certainly there are highly paid programmers out there. And an intensive bootcamp can certainly allow a person to gain practical, marketable programming skills.

But it's easy to get bamboozled by a dollar figure, and there's no reason to think that your cousin's experience is typical. There are a few things to keep in mind.

Private bootcamps can vary considerably in content, quality of instruction, intensity, professional reputation, etc. If you're thinking about this, do your research thoroughly. Don't base a $10k investment on a single data point if you can help it.

Sure $160k sounds impressive. Others have brought up cost of living. But is that an annual, stable salary with benefits on top? Or is that based on contract work that's going to dry up in a few years when this person's skill set is no longer in vogue? How long will it last? And/or is it stable work? Is that based on an eight hour, five day work week, or is that a salary that comes from huge amounts of overtime where you work through weekends to meet deadlines and can't ever take a vacation?

And as you've eluded to already, there may be personal factors at play too. Just because someone partied through one stage of their life, doesn't mean they can't buckle down later in life. And don't underestimate the power of soft skills. Some people are natural networkers.

 

[kyphysics]

Sure $160k sounds impressive. Others have brought up cost of living. But is that an annual, stable salary with benefits on top? Or is that based on contract work that's going to dry up in a few years when this person's skill set is no longer in vogue? How long will it last? And/or is it stable work? Is that based on an eight hour, five day work week, or is that a salary that comes from huge amounts of overtime where you work through weekends to meet deadlines and can't ever take a vacation?

And as you've eluded to already, there may be personal factors at play too. Just because someone partied through one stage of their life, doesn't mean they can't buckle down later in life. And don't underestimate the power of soft skills. Some people are natural networkers.

I can't speak for the stability of his position (he's moved from Bank of America to a smaller firm in the past year), but I know he makes a regular monthly salary of $16K (making his full year salary a little bit above $160K). My parents literally threw that in my face and said look at __________ and how successful he is.

Yes, it's a regular work week - albeit, hybrid (2-3 days in office and 2-3 days at home). He said he actually likes it a lot.

You are actually correct in that he is a very good networker. One of the things about his frat is that they promise to help each other later in life and in the work force. I don't know if he got hooked up for his current job, but he's said he knows frat brothers working on Wall Street (also with finance degrees) in various roles. W/o going into details, he's said some things that's made me believe he cheated in college and I actually wonder if he gets "help" with his coding from others he knows in the field. It's possible he was naturally smart and just hadn't applied himself until finding coding.

That being said, he said his boot camp had tons of people mid-career. I graduated one year behind a dormmate who went to law school and couldn't find a good legal gig. He was last working as some document review lawyer, which is like a contractor type of job with no benefits and low wages. He also did a boot camp and now works as a programmer in Atlanta for some non-profit firm. So, even lawyers have done this (he knows of others too).

 

[harborsparrow]

That really is NOT a typical salary. Especially for a non-degreed person, lacking experience, even a graduate of a coding bootcamp. In my opinion, you should not even consider doing such a thing yourself unless you really love computers and coding. Otherwise, you'll likely be miserable and no amount of money would make it worthwhile.

 

[kyphysics]

That really is NOT a typical salary. Especially for a non-degreed person, lacking experience, even a graduate of a coding bootcamp. In my opinion, you should not even consider doing such a thing yourself unless you really love computers and coding. Otherwise, you'll likely be miserable and no amount of money would make it worthwhile.

From what I've researched and anecdotally from friends/acquaintances in the field, it ACTUALLY IS the norm for NYC. Starting coder salaries (yes, from non-degreed boot camp grads) are $150,000.

As one person put it, if you have any kind of coding skills whatsoever, you'll get hired.

 

[Choppy]

For what it's worth, some quick Googling suggests typical programmer salaries in New York, NY:
https://www.indeed.com/career/programmer/salaries/New-York--NY
$102,607.00 - salary.com (entry level, median, Q1: $90k - Q3:$116k)
$82,270.00 - glassdoor.com (median, Q1: $63k - Q3:$107k)

There does seem to be some variation in the numbers, but I suspect "programmer" is a relatively generic term, and a lot can depend on the details. I wonder if that $150k is perhaps more along the lines of a back-end developer, which typically requires a more sophisticated skill set.

 

[harborsparrow]

Well, I'm a programmer living in the NYC metro area and have many friends working around the area. Wall St. might be the ONLY place salaries like that are common, and that place is a pressure cooker, so be advised. Outside Wall St. those numbers are high, IMHO, even for NYC. Also, most of those high salaries go for high performance/speed type software which is a specialty that, to my knowledge, is not typically taught in coding schools but requires close-to-the-metal expertise.

And in my experience also, those higher numbers are not for "mere programmers" but for people capable of being design analysts as well. Which means prolly more background than any coding school is likely to give.

Finally, I'm not sure job sites such as indeed.com are entirely trustworthy in a matter like this. They have an incentive to get people to sign up for their site, and they are not obligated to be truthful.

If this friend is really receiving the salary claimed, then I would say he has gotten a plum job through connections. These do exist, but the average person going to coding school is not going to get them.

 

[jedishrfu]

So this seems like a good time to end this thread. All of our guessing and searching have yielded a lot of anecdotal info on salaries, cost of living and other factors.

@kphysics has the dilemma of answering his parents pressure to get a higher paying job like his cousin not realizing all the factors that led to the higher salary.

K, you should look for jobs that you enjoy doing, save and invest your money for the future while building a solid set of programming skills. In programming, the best way forward is to become good, get promoted to team leader and perhaps a project manager and eventually a software architect while retaining your skills as a backup should the job go south.

Closing this thread with a thank you to all who have contributed.

Good night Mrs Calabash where ever you are.