Hackbright Academy alum Ingrid Avendaño is profiled in the Fast Company Labs article as “an art major goes to Uber”.
She studied art then changed majors to electrical engineering. She ultimately dropped out due to less than positive experiences in college, But her interest in coding led her to Hackbright Academy last summer.
Ingrid’s final project at Hackbright was to create a compiler —
“That’s all I really heard from people: ‘Compilers are really hard. You probably can’t do one in five weeks. And if you do it, it’s probably not going to be that great,’” she says. It was all the more troubling that she didn’t completely understand what a compiler was at first. “I didn’t understand why I needed certain tools to write a compiler.”
After a week of poking around online at other people’s explanations and examples, she got a boost from her Hackbright mentor, who stayed up with her until one in the morning one night. “I remember the moment when [my mentor] finally explained it, and I freaked out. I was like, ‘Thank you so much!’ And I went right to coding,” says Avendaño.
These days, Ingrid Avendaño writes Python and JavaScript at Uber where she works as a software engineer.
SurveyMonkey Promotes An Accountant To Software Engineer
Dee Gill became interested in coding when she started noticing what her colleagues in the engineering department were doing —
When she expressed interest in attending a coding bootcamp, her manager specifically recommended Hackbright. SurveyMonkey put her through hacker school with the intention of hiring her back as an engineer. “They sponsored me through the whole process,” she says.
After the three-month program, Gill’s supervisors asked her to create an entire application to automate some of the finance team’s tasks. “I built it from scratch, and I had to build a new service within our architecture,” she says.
The Python she learned at Hackbright paid off. “Having it work so well, and being able to co-exist with all of the other code and services we have in production in our architecture at SurveyMonkey was probably the proudest moment I’ve had so far,” says Gill.
Dee is now a software engineer at SurveyMonkey, and her application she made for SurveyMonkey’s finance team saves her former finance colleagues “hours and hours of work!”
Lyfting Anxiety
Ashley Lorden, a software engineer at Lyft, says her experience at Hackbright lessened her anxiety —
The Fast Company article concludes that “there is nothing easy about mastering a technical subject that is constantly evolving within a few months. The caliber of the students who graduate from these coding bootcamps is evidence of how much hard work both the schools and the students put in to continue to shape the tech world.”
Read the full article: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3028635/do-coding-bootcamps-produce-inferior-engineers