#281 - Coding Bootcamp, College, Or Self-Taught? Which is Right For You and How to Decide

Let's weigh college, bootcamps, and the self-taught route with blunt pros and cons, then map each path to market realities, hiring filters, and long-term growth. 

The goal is to help you choose a route that gets you hired faster without stalling your career later.

• how degrees are used as filters and where they matter
• why top-tier schools win on internships and networks
• the gap between CS theory and practical stacks
• when bootcamps accelerate outcomes and where they fall short
• self-taught pitfalls and how to add structure and accountability
• coastal vs mid-market hiring differences and pay signals
• skills startups test versus what larger firms test
• the minimum effective dose for a hireable portfolio
• why fundamentals compound value in years three to five
• how AI raises the premium on first principles

Shameless Plugs

Free 5 day email course to go from HTML to AI

Got a question you want answered on the pod? Drop it here

Apply for 1 of 12 spots at Parsity - Learn to build complex software, work with LLMs and launch your career.

AI Bootcamp (NEW) - for software developers who want to be the expert on their team when it comes to integrating AI into web applications.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The Big Question
• 0:36 How Degrees Matter By Location
• 2:08 What College Teaches Versus The Job
• 4:16 When A Top School Is Worth It
• 5:35 Bootcamps As A Fast Track
• 7:03 Theory Gaps And AI’s Impact
• 8:16 Self-Taught Reality And Accountability
• 11:05 Choosing Based On Time And Money
• 12:22 Final Advice And Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network, and more. I'm Brian, your host. Should you go to a boot camp, get a college degree, or just go the self-taught route? And you're gonna hate this answer, but it depends. I'm gonna break down my very opinionated opinion and what I've told my son and what I've told other adults that have come to me asking this very same advice. Now, let me be very transparent here. I self-taught and I went to a coding boot camp to land my first job as a software developer in around nine months. Now, this was 11 years ago when the landscape was very, very different. But I'll tell you this if you're thinking about going to a college, here's something you really need to take into consideration. First of all, where do you live? Now, I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it's been years since somebody's asked to see my college degree. And my college degree has nothing to do with computer science. And at the biggest and best tech companies in the United States, which are mostly located in the Bay Area, they don't even ask to see a college degree at all. And even if they do, you're going to get the exact same examslash technical interview that literally every other software engineer gets. Nobody cares what your last company was, nobody cares what college you went to, nobody cares what your degree was for the most part. Now, this is also true. These things are used as a filter. So for some companies, if you didn't go to college, you won't even get to the first round of interviews. For some companies, if you went to a no-name tech company, you're probably not going to get to the first round of interviews in the first place. So if you think that getting the college degree is somehow a ticket into a job, you're not totally wrong, but it will only clear you past that first hurdle. And as you move along in your career, it's increasingly less important. Now, if you're on the coasts of the United States or you're going for top-tier tech companies, this is even less important than it ever was. Oddly enough, counterintuitively, the companies that care the most about your degree are usually the ones that pay the least. They're the ones in middle America that often require going into an office. The higher the likelihood that you need to wear slacks, the higher the likelihood that they're going to want to see your college degree. Now, that being said, if you are 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, if you really don't have a family or you haven't really started life yet and you're considering going back to school, to college, to an affordable program, I think maybe it's worth it. You're going to learn some computer science fundamentals, which are often lacking at most coding boot camps. But let me be honest, coding fundamentals come up later in your career. They are very helpful as you're building software and they're really, really helpful for interviews. But your day-to-day is going to look wildly different than the stuff you learned in a college. I actually hired a young woman who went to UCLA about five years ago when I was working at a big company. And she not only went to UCLA and got a computer science degree, she also went to a coding bootcamp. I found this really interesting. And I asked her, said, Whoa, what was the story behind that? Why'd you go to this top-notch program here? And then you also went to a coding bootcamp. And she said the thing that most people say my college program didn't prepare me for the actual practical way of writing code that most companies expect. They didn't do things like React, Node, Express, TypeScript, testing, building front-end web applications, building back end web applications, deploying AWS, Azure, GCP, SQL, all the things that they kind of expect you and want you to know on the job. Now, the larger the company, the more likely it is that they're not going to care about whether you know React or JavaScript or TypeScript. For startups and any smaller companies, they're definitely going to test that you have those kinds of skills. They can't just test for your general computer science knowledge. This isn't Google. If you're going to a 50-person startup, they're going to want you to hit the ground kind of running. So is a college degree a good idea? I don't know. Probably not, to be completely honest with you. If you're a young kid, then I'd go to a top-notch university. I told my son this. Go to a top-notch university if you want to get a college degree, because now you're not just paying for the education, which you could get basically anywhere. You're paying for the connections and the internships. This is a big one. If you go to Stanford or MIT or even a really good state school or something like that, they're probably going to have some really good internship opportunities. And those will actually help you land a job much quicker. And you're going to get a nice network of people. If you're going to a mid-tier, lower tier college and thinking that's going to be your ticket to employment in tech, especially on the coast of the United States, that's just not the reality that I'm seeing. And that's not a reality that I'm aware exists. It's not the one I'm telling my kids to do. I have young sons and a young daughter. If they want to go to college, hey, go to college. If you're thinking that going there is going to be your ticket to a high-paying tech job, you're wrong. Which leads me to the same thing can be said for coding boot camps. Here's the reality of coding boot camps people don't trust them, people hate them, they work, right? Around 10% of employed developers went to coding boot camps. The other 90% did not. Now, most of your colleagues and coworkers will have four-year degrees, typically in computer science. Does that mean boot camps are a scam or you shouldn't go to them? I mean, don't trust me. I own a coding boot camp, right? But I went to one myself, I got hired. In fact, if you go around the internet, there's plenty of stories of people that got hired going to coding boot camps. There's plenty of stories of people that went to colleges and didn't get hired. There's plenty of stories that people went to both to get a more well-rounded set of skills that actually made them employable. So coding boot camps, in my opinion, are the best bet for people that need structure, accountability, and just a path. And they want to get there quicker because you could absolutely learn everything on your own. You could learn how to fix your car on your own. You could learn how to probably do dental work on your own if you're really so inclined to do so. But it's like, how many years do you want to spend doing that? Going to a boot camp where they promise you a job in three months, that's just shady marketing. And that's just not something that I would ever want to do or feel comfortable with. And it should tell you a lot about the kind of boot camp. But do some research on the coding boot camps out there. And then when you're ready to go to Parsity or go to Hack Reactor or App Academy. These are ones that I actually stand by. And even though this is probably not good business sense because I own Parsity and I totally and firmly stand behind what we do. If you're not going to go to Parsity, I'd probably only go to App Academy or Hack Reactor. I can't really think of any other school that I would like completely recommend that people go to because the only other one that I really like was one in Colorado that is now since closed down. So those are the two left that I actually feel comfortable recommending besides the one that I obviously recommend. We're really small. So if we don't have room, I would try to go to one of those two. Now, obviously, coding boot camps have a lot of things wrong with them. One of the main problems is that they are actually too heavy on the practical side and not heavy enough on the theory. Is this so bad going into 2026 where we have AI tools increasingly writing more code for us? I actually think so, to be completely honest. This is why at Parsity we do take some time to study data structures and fundamentals and first principles and solving hard problems because this is what's going to not just get you paid and get you into the industry. It's going to keep you employed. And once you're employed, the learning doesn't stop. So at some point in your career, you'll see the bootcamp grads often are better when they hit the ground at a company and they're a little bit more savvy than the person that went to a college. This is at least my experience, that they tend to know what React is, they tend to know the most up-to-date frameworks, and they can really get hands-on in the code a lot faster. Now, here's where the college grads tend to beat bootcamp grads going forward. Around the three, four, five year mark when people are getting to more senior positions and you just can't just code all the time. You have to really think through the trade-offs about speed, scale, complexity, the latency of the kinds of programs that you're writing, and the relationship between the time it takes to run a program and the input you receive. This is when college grads tend to have a lot better foundations. Now, this is all learnable, of course, but too many bootcamp graduates kind of figure like, I know how to code, and that's all I need to know. I don't need to know whiteboard or data structures and algorithms or just fundamental concepts about how speed and latency work or the operating systems and things I'm going to be running my code on. And this is where computer science grads will often eat their lunch. Now, finally, everybody's favorite one, the self-taught route. The self-taught route sounds so attractive, doesn't it? It's totally free. You can do it on your own, and it makes you sound kind of cool too, right? Like I just learned it all on my own. And I used to kind of fib and tell people that I was self-taught because I felt like I was. I'm like, well, I basically learned everything on my own. But I'll tell you this much I didn't get hired till I went to a boot camp. I was only in that boot camp for 12 weeks. I got hired well before it ended. And I can thank them specifically for helping me get over that hump of being like, am I ready to apply? What else do I need to know? Do I know enough? They filled in a few very small gaps for me that I wouldn't have been able to fill in myself or would have taken me a long time to learn how to fill in myself. And then they encouraged me or rather forced me to begin applying for jobs, which is what ultimately got me my job. If I hadn't gone to that particular coding boot camp, which actually wasn't that intensive or even dealt with anything beyond basic front-end stuff, I would have been waiting at least six months to probably another year before I even thought of applying. And so I owe them a lot of credit that I didn't give them in the past that I really regret now, because in hindsight, they were the reason why I got hired so fast. But the self-taught route can work. I've seen people do this. These people that do this, though, let me be honest, they tend to be very, very dedicated. They tend to have a very specific mindset, and they tend to be very meticulous and process-oriented. This is not the majority of most people, myself included. Even recently, I paid to go to interview Kickstart about five, six years ago so I can learn data structures and algorithms. I paid$10,000 for this program. I don't regret it at all. And this is not a commercial for them, and I'm not sponsored by them at all. They don't even know I exist, probably, but I wanted somebody to teach me without me having to guess if I was learning the right stuff. Now, my buddy who made it to Google looked at me and said, Well, why didn't you just learn all this online? All the information is there. And he's right, all the information is there, just like learning to code. The problem was though, I was learning everything completely wrong. I was spinning my wheels, doing hundreds of lead code problems, trying to just solve as many problems as I could and hoping I'd see patterns at some sort of point, and then wondering what they would actually ask me if I did get to Google, which I did. And this program just was a peek behind the curtain. So I could finally see what it was I should be studying, the order. And then they had accountability, which was really important. So every week they'd be testing me on stuff. I needed this accountability. It's the same reason why I paid a personal trainer to get me in the best shape of my life at 37 years old. Now, did I know I should eat less and work out more? I mean, duh, right? Who doesn't know this stuff? The problem was that I wasn't, or at least I was doing what I thought should work, but it wasn't working. I looked in the mirror and thought, I'm doing all this stuff, but it's not coming together. After three months with a personal trainer, I had a six-pack and I was on the front page of his Instagram page showing off my results. And that's what personal training and accountability can get you. Now, could I have done this on my own, the self-taught route? Of course I could have. Or maybe I couldn't have. I don't know. How long would it have taken? So if you have money, but not a lot of time, consider a boot camp. Maybe consider college if you're really young or you got a really great opportunity to go to one. But if you don't mind spending lots more time, then going the self-taught route can be viable. And if you have a mentor or a friend that's already in software, then you could ask them exactly what you should be studying, but be cautious. Too often they are blinded by their own experiences. And if they haven't been on the market in the last three years, they probably know a lot less than even the worst boot camps about what is going to be able to get you hired. I see this all the time. Super senior software developers that have these really strong opinions on what you should learn, but they haven't been interviewing in years. And so when they're on the market again, they're gonna find themselves in a very different market and they're giving you advice that is likely old, outdated, or maybe worked for them, but they don't really know how it worked for other people. So they're just kind of going off their own experience. So this is a bit dangerous. So one way I've seen people do this actually is to get the curriculums from multiple boot camps and then basically make their own curriculum out of that. Now, how many people actually win the game doing this? Very few. The myth of the self-taught developer is very attractive, it's very impressive. The reality is most people that go the self-taught route, I talk to them three years later, four, five years later, and they're still learning. And at this point, they've learned everything under the sun and still don't know enough to get hired. This is why boot camps, especially, will teach you the minimum effective dose, basically the minimum amount of information needed to be hired. So I hope this is helpful for you. Maybe you disagree with me. Maybe you went to a college and you're thinking, oh, you're totally wrong, or maybe you went to a boot camp and you think it sucks, or maybe you went the self-taught route and you did the Odin project and now you're hired and making tons of money. I know that for every single option out there, there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers. I'm telling you what I've seen after working with hundreds of people and speaking with about a thousand people over the phone. So I've heard all the stories you can imagine. And this is my opinionated opinion. And as always, I hope it's helpful. And if you do have a way that you suggest people learn how to code nowadays, then let me know. Am I totally off base here? But if you're one of those people that just says don't go to boot camps or pay anybody for anything, then that kind of tells me all I really need to know about you in the first place. But good luck in whatever path you choose to take. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself Podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.