8 Companies Who Actually Love Hiring Coding Bootcampers

Table of Contents

• What companies hire coding bootcamp graduates?
• Why do companies hire coding bootcamp graduates?
• Eventbrite
• Razorfish
• Access Development
• Progressive Insurance
• Cisco
• Mobify
• Granicus
• Capital One Labs

In our recent Student Outcomes survey, alumni reported that they were working in over 650 different companies! Of course, you may have read recent press citing companies like Google who apparently aren’t willing to invest in junior technical talent from coding bootcamps (we happen to know that coding bootcamp grads have been hired at Google and Salesforce, but that’s not the point)... Here we’re highlighting 8 forward-thinking companies who are psyched about the bootcamp alumni on their engineering teams. Each of these employers have hired multiple developers, and are seeing their investment pay off.

What companies hire coding bootcamp graduates?

• Eventbrite
• Razorfish
• Access Development
• Progressive Insurance
• Cisco
• Mobify
• Granicus
• Capital One Labs

Why do companies hire coding bootcamp graduates?

• These companies see coding bootcamps as an effective channel to recruit talented, diverse junior developers who may not have a traditional computer science degree.
• The average bootcamper has ~7 years of work experience, which means they already know how to navigate the workplace and may even have an interesting career background that can contribute to a company’s bottom line.
• Hiring partners get to interview a pre-vetted group of students who had the self-motivation to get through a coding bootcamp, the grit to work 60 hours a week to change their careers, and the proven ability to learn new technologies quickly.
• As Pat Poels, Director of Engineering at Eventbrite, puts it:
  “If you make the investment, you choose the right people, and invest in them in the right way, it's going to pay off. Those bootcamp grads will be worth so much more to you down the road. Think beyond the next six months; what can these new hires mean for the next six years?”

This list is as varied as the jobs bootcampers take after graduation; companies run the gamut from startups, to mid-sized engineering teams, to enterprise companies with thousands of developers. Bonus: start at the bottom for advice from employers to employers about hiring from bootcamps.

Eventbrite

Eventbrite is an online ticketing platform with a 145-person engineering team, and has hired 8 coding bootcamp graduates!

Coding bootcamps they hire from: Hackbright Academy

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: Software Engineer Level One

What they love about coding bootcamp grads: “There's an element of fearlessness that exists for people who have self-selected into a bootcamp like Hackbright Academy. Hackbright grads haven't all necessarily had traditional schooling or backgrounds, and I think that developers who have shown fearlessness tend to be really strong. They tend to be really great at learning and working through whatever problems they may have.” –Pat Poels, Director of Engineering at Eventbrite

Razorfish

Razorfish is a digital marketing agency with a 120-person technical team, and they’ve hired 7 coding bootcamp graduates (so far)!

Coding bootcamps they hire from: General Assembly

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: UX Design and Web Development roles

What they love about coding bootcamp grads: “Bootcamp students have just invested the last 12+ weeks of their lives (financially and time-wise) fully diving into a new skill that they love, and they’re pumped to graduate and start their first jobs. Their mentality is so much different coming out of a bootcamp like that than it is coming out of a four-year university, in my humble opinion. Coding bootcamp grads have so much more skin in the game than those who are coming out of a four-year CS degree.

A coding bootcamp is able to turn over their curriculum quickly as the tech landscape changes. I hate to be crushing four-year universities because they definitely have their place in the tech space, of course, but it's hard for a four-year university with a very solid locked-in curriculum to change at that same pace. Bootcamps are teaching things that are more applicable, more emerging, more innovative than someone out of a four-year university.” –Talent Acquisitions Manager Nick Easlick

Access Development

Access Development is a B2B rewards and loyalty company in Utah with a team of developers working in Java and Ruby, and they’ve hired 6 coding bootcampers!

Coding bootcamps they hire from: DevPoint Labs

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: Ruby developer team manager, Full stack Ruby developers.

What they love about coding bootcamp grads: “I think there are advantages [to coding bootcampers], and one of those is the coding bootcamp grad’s perspective. Coding bootcamps are not as rigid, or as focused on some of the historical structure that CS grads think about when they are developing software. Bootcamp grads bring an interesting perspective that has really helped our development team move into a new realm, such as extending into continuous delivery, test automation and some of the other modern development technologies and capabilities.” –CTO Clint Peterson

Progressive Insurance

Progressive Insurance is a tech company that sells insurance with an IT organization of 3,500+ people, and they’ve hired 8 coding bootcamp graduates in one year alone.

Coding bootcamps they hire from: Tech Elevator

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: Application Developers, System Testers, and Business Systems Analysts

What they love about coding bootcamp grads: “When I look at our coding bootcamp hires, I find individuals who have some life lessons under their belt. They're still junior developers, but they come with a higher level of maturity than I get from a student right out of college. Plus, they have some life lessons and business acumen. Progressive is a pretty casual company – we're certainly not a suit and tie company – but you still have to know how to navigate a corporate environment. Coding bootcamp graduates tend to have that.” –Jane Gundlach, IT Manager

Cisco

The Chief Technology and Architecture Office (CTAO) at Cisco is a small innovation team that has hired 4 coding bootcamp grads.

Coding bootcamps they hire from: Hack Reactor

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: Software engineer, primarily front-end and web-centric.

What they love about coding bootcamp grads: “These days, most front-end and full-stack engineer resumes look the same, everyone lists the same set of frameworks and tools and whatnot. We’ve found the only way to really gauge a candidate is by the quality of the code they write. Since the Hack Reactor folks have their final projects and other work available on GitHub, it’s easy to get a sense for what type of developer they’re going to be. On top of that, the Hack Reactor program seems to prepare students exceptionally well, they have a good sense of what it’s like to work on a modern web development project.” –Director of Experience Design, Dustin Beltramo and Technical Leader, Joe Sutton

Mobify

Mobify is a mobile eCommerce platform based in Vancouver, Canada that optimizes the shopping experience, and over the past two years, they’ve hired 4 coding bootcamp graduates.

Coding bootcamps they hire from: Lighthouse Labs

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: Back End Data Engineer, Front End Engineer for Customer Success Team, UI Developer, Web Developer, Support Engineer.

What they love about coding bootcamp grads: “Because the Lighthouse Labs grads have such varied backgrounds, Mobify has been able to find Lighthouse Labs talent that are a good fit for different areas of the business. Some got an undergraduate degree in math or science and then decided to go into software engineering after graduation, so they can hit the ground running in a more complex technical role. Others are coming from a design background and might need a bit more training to ramp up. Students who are making a career transition and decide they want to be involved in design and development are typically better suited for some of Mobify’s more junior positions.”–Laura Crawford, Talent Acquisition Manager

Granicus

Granicus is a software development firm for government agencies, and they’ve hired 3 coding bootcamp grads.

Coding bootcamps they hire from: Turing School

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: Junior engineering roles (although Granicus doesn’t like to use Junior/Senior labels)

What they love about coding bootcamp grads: “The strength of the community at Turing is obvious- grads are going back to events at Turing as alumni and supporting each other, mentoring, and showing current students what they’re experiencing in the workplace and what they can expect to run into. I like that about them.” –Chris, Engineering Manager

Capital One Labs

Capital One Labs is an experimental product and technology team within the larger Capital One organization, and have hired data science bootcamp grads.

Coding bootcamps they hire from: Metis

Roles they hire bootcamp grads for: Junior Data Scientist

Their advice to other employers hiring bootcampers: “The hardest part for us [about hiring from a coding bootcamp] is having an interview process that selects the top talent and making sure that applicants are the right fit for our role. At the same time, we have to be fast enough and agile to work with Metis grads as well because there's so much competition for this talent. My advice is to start early and build a strong relationship with the bootcamp and then build out a process that can effectively and quickly hire the right people.”–Brennan Biddle of Capital One Labs

Are you an employer considering hiring from a coding bootcamp? Here are the top tips we heard from hiring partners as you navigate the world of coding bootcamp grads:

• "Technology really is immaterial to success. Just because they're graduating as Rails developers, doesn't mean these applicants are not interested in your technology stack. A competent developer can prove themselves quickly." –Granicus
• "First, not all coding boot camps are created equal. We would recommend talking to colleagues in the industry who have experience with the various programs." –Cisco
• "My advice is to start early and build a strong relationship with the bootcamp and then build out a process that can effectively and quickly hire the right people.”–Capital One Labs
• "See if you have relationships with anyone who has been involved with the bootcamp before. Leverage those relationships to validate the capability of the bootcamp, and then give them a try." –Access Development
• "I think being open-minded is important. A lot of coding bootcampers come to your company with rich backgrounds and a lot of knowledge that they can leverage into being successful engineers. Just because their background may not look like the traditional software developer, doesn't mean that they can’t grow into some of your strongest engineers." –Mobify
• "Look at your team's needs and what resources you can offer bootcamp grads. I was listening in on a conversation between some of our senior developers at lunch, and they were saying that if you’ve been accepted into Turing, you've actually passed a level of filtering that makes you acceptable for our organization. We can’t say that about other sources of talent, which is interesting." –Granicus

FURTHER READING:

• How to Pass a Technical Job Interview After Bootcamp
• How Successful are Coding Bootcamp Grads?
• 4 Ways Coding Bootcamp Alumni Got Hired

​​Do you work for a company that hires bootcampers? Have advice for bootcamp grads or other employers? Let us know in the comments!