An Honest Rundown of a Government-Funded Bootcamp from Someone Who's Been Through It (Pros and Cons)
Last year I completed a 6-month government-funded course, and now I work at a small-to-medium SI company. Since it's a topic that comes up all the time in the community, I'm sharing my experience.
Pros
- It costs almost nothing. You even get a training allowance.
- An environment where you end up coding every day, even if by force.
- You get peers who endure it with you.
Cons
- Instructor quality varies way too much. It's a gamble.
- The curriculum is often only surface-level.
- Six months is absolutely not enough.
So what should you do?
1. Accept that the academy is just a 'starting point.'
2. Always complete at least one personal project after class.
3. Study CS knowledge not covered in the curriculum on your own.
I started #2 late, so my job search took an extra six months. What you do after the bootcamp matters much more than the bootcamp itself.
10 answers
For real, the instructor luck-of-the-draw really hits home. Same academy, but every class had a totally different vibe.
I also started my personal project late ㅠㅠ After finishing the course, I took three months off and then started, so I basically wasted half a year. Reading this post makes me reflect a bit.
So what did you use to study CS? I also feel like the curriculum alone isn’t enough, but I can’t figure out what direction to take.
Well, that's a bit... It's true that 'the academy is just a springboard,' but in a six-month course, telling people to do personal projects after class isn't realistically easy. If you're grinding away at the academy for 10–15 hours a day, your body just can't keep up. You can say that because it worked for you—for most people, just making it through is already overwhelming.
The stipend is a surprisingly big perk. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't have been able to go.
Congrats on joining a small/mid-sized SI company... but once you're there, it's a whole new beginning, so you'll end up preparing to switch jobs again later lol
Do you have a source? I get that instructor variance is large, but how large is it?
From a non-CS major’s perspective, I used to wonder whether 'studying CS on the side while attending an academy' was even realistic, but when I actually did it, it did work. I think consistency is the answer, even if it’s just an hour a day. That said, I should have looked up instructor reviews before academy reviews. That one thing alone can make six months vanish.
Isn't it only natural that 6 months isn't enough? lol That's not the academy's fault—it's just the nature of the job.
I'm upvoting this. I should send it to a friend who's agonizing over an academy.