I've been on the fence on going to a bootcamp for years, since the dev bootcamp days because I don't feel I could complete a CS degree given all that math. I've also been in various FAANG companies the past 5 years and while not in a dev/swe role I have picked up some things as I go. The front end and user interfaces is something I've been interested for a while so I think I may pivot to front end dev or some kind of automation engineer for UI testing. Are there any release engineers here?
If you are motivated you can learn everything that’s in a boot camp on your own. However, going through a boot camp successfully is a good signal during hiring that you have some experience in programming in relavent technology. It’s much harder to signal your experience when it’s all self taught. Whether it’s good value for the money depends on your own circumstances.
That's a fair point. From what I've seen it really comes down to the hours you put in outside of class and your own side projects. Being able to speak the language, walk through the stack you used and why, issues you ran into and how you overcame them.
If I may ask... what specialization are you in? and is it the same thing you started off in? I've been thinking of pivoting and have narrowed it down to 1-3 niches, but also don't have a degree but currently working in a FAANG company.
My first paid programming gigs were on video games as a freelance Unity developer, but my "real career" was founded on embedded Android
Embedded systems were a good match for my background tinkering with assembly for calculators and messing with MCUs, but it's a very "traditional" part of tech.
Android in embedded is much closer to mobile in terms of culture, so my lack of a degree wasn't a problem getting started, and demand has only grown over the years. I currently work in HMI for self-driving vehicles these days but I've worked on everything from in-store interactive displays to prototype fitness equipment
Bonus: You can also pivot to traditional mobile dev, which I've done for some stints over the course of my career
As someone that used to work on the Play Store team many many moons ago... a lot of that was outsourced to overseas which resulted in much slower response time. Here stateside we had a lot of metrics in place to fast response. Typically your app would get reviewed the same day. Not sure what it's like now but the managers were incompetent back then even so.
> the managers were incompetent back then even so.
This. So. Much. This.
We go round and round about specific policies at corporate or civic levels. We hash it all out and pat ourselves on the back that we’ve at least proposed how whatever the issue of the moment might be improved.
But we never come to the basic generic issue. That large swaths of decision makers should not make the decisions they do.
My experience has been that the Play Store does have relatively quick review times (usually under a day). But the feedback given upon rejections is often so poor that it doesn't help much. As it can often take several trial and error submissions to resolve the issue.
Only for app updates in my experience. Publishing new apps takes ~7 days for years now. If I remember right, it started with Covid but it never improved.
