At Dev Bootcamp, we talk a lot about first jobs because most of our students are changing industries to land their first job in web development. They are leaving careers in education, advertising, law, hospitality, customer service, art, or any number of things to launch into something new. First jobs after Dev Bootcamp are typically junior, entry-level web development positions, but software development is about lifelong learning and growth. So what about the second jobs?
We’ve been up and running for over three years now. We’ve seen over 1,500 hundred students graduate our program. We’ve reached the point where we can start to see step two, alumni leaving first jobs and embarking on second jobs.
Take Celeen, for example. Celeen’s first job after Dev Bootcamp was working as a test engineer for social media startup Sprout Social. She learned a ton: “Java, for one, along with a lot of environment configuration and maintenance. I learned a lot about operations: I now know how to set up a jenkins server, beginning/intermediate level bash scripting, how to package and distribute a python project, and the ins and outs of selenium. I learned a lot about managing and organizing a large codebase.” But, after a year, Celeen realized that test engineering wasn’t where her passion was, so she took a new opportunity at GiveForward, an online fundraising company. Now she’s an engineer on a small team working on a Rails backend, an Angular frontend, and dabbling in some CSS. “I love getting to represent abstract ideas with code, and wrap my head around complex associations. I’m excited to keep learning, building cool things, and leveling up my Web Development skills.”
Ed, a graduate of our New York campus, has taken a different path to his second job post-Dev Bootcamp. After graduation, he and some fellow cohort-mates decided to work on a startup that helped people find and order science and tech kits. “While we were building our startup, we also worked a part-time gig at another startup called Adjacent Apps, where we did full-stack web dev.” When the startup got some traction, they decided to devote full-time resources to it. Although they built a paying customer base, they were still operating at a loss. They decided to part ways and pursue their own jobs. Ed took a job at JPMorgan Chase as an application developer, where he’s still working now.
Another graduate from NYC, Keaty, got her first gig at Case Commons, a non profit shop that develops software for child protective services. “I was a full stack developer there for a little under a year, working predominantly in Ruby and Javascript.” On Monday, she started her new job at Pivotal Software, working as a platform engineer on their Cloud Foundry team, where she’ll be learning C# and Go on the job. “It was a difficult decision to leave the team at my first job after Dev Bootcamp, but I feel that contributing to Cloud Foundry is more aligned with my long term goals.”
For Katy, “Fooda was a great opportunity when I came out of Dev Bootcamp because the company was in the perfect stage of its startup lifecycle for me. It was small enough that I quickly had to take responsibility for important features in our product, but big enough that I always had support when I needed guidance.” After a year and a half at Fooda, Katy accepted a position as a Support Developer at Braintree, a fast-growing Chicago payments technology company. “Their application(s) and codebase are what I was looking for and I am impressed by their passion for education and work-life balance.”
One more example, just for kicks. Jonathan got a job working at Groupon after he finished Dev Bootcamp. “Working there was probably the best decision I could have made for my career. I learned how to write code in a massive production environment and had the support of many senior developers.” Although it was a great place to start, he felt that things moved slowly because of the huge team and huge codebase. “After nearly a year of working at Groupon, I decided to move to a faster-paced company, Springleaf Financial. I have more impact on the code bases and am developing new tools and features every day!”
Your first job after Dev Bootcamp is very important, but it’s only your first job. It’s the first step in what we hope will be a long, creative, satisfying career in software.
If you’re ready to start your career in web development, apply today.
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