I was researching and planning on jumping into a dev bootcamp in the coming months. Actually its a back to back bootcamp, one for rails and one that teaches Node and mobile.<p>I am wondering if it's worth it to invest the time and money to become a good developer at this stage in the game?<p>My main concerns are A) if there really is a shortage that could use filling and B) when I have honed my skills a solid base (around 1 year in), would there really be a job for me?<p>I would love to hear your opinion!<p>For reference I am 25, my background is in IT and I am currently at a senior management level in a marketing function.
Yes, it is. The market is going to continue to grow (although it is possible that the field will continue to split into more specialized subfields than 'front-end' and 'back-end'), some of which may eventually have little connection to the 'web' as we still know it (possible example: 'devops').
Why wouldn't there be a place for you? Web technologies are only going to increase in importance. If you're worried about competition, you'll need to get over that. Fear of competition comes from a scarcity mindset. Instead of focusing on what other people are doing (the competition), choose to focus on increasing your own skills and value. If you do that, you'll naturally surpass those people who choose to become complacent and put in the bare minimum. You have a marketing background, so that helps a great deal. There's no shortage of talented developers, but there are a shortage of talented developers who know how to market themselves and present their ideas and value to clients. If you're skilled at what you do AND you know how to market and sell that value to clients, the sky's the limit for you.
Programming is becoming a key skill almost like writing and math for any interesting job. First, there is the web platform (see why JavaScript is important there here: <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/next-generation-web-apps-with-full-stack-javascript.html" rel="nofollow">http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/next-generation-web-apps-wi...</a> ), then there is the maker movement, according to Neil Gershenfield, the 3rd digital revolution <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0RDrSKenGo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0RDrSKenGo</a>
there might be an abundance of CS majors these days, but its been argued that there still is a lack of <i>quality</i> CS majors (<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/01/08/are-there-too-many-students-going-into-computer-science/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/01/08/are-there-too-m...</a>). so if you can do the dev bootcamp and become a super hacker, then its worth it.<p>on another note, McKinsey predicts there will be a shortage of data scientists in the upcoming years, of 140-190K. (<a href="http://www.mckinsey.com/features/big_data" rel="nofollow">http://www.mckinsey.com/features/big_data</a>). If you are good at math/statistics and are willing to learn how to code, data science boot camps may be something to consider (see below). Right now a lot of data scientists are people with PhD's but this likely won't be the case in a few years. My guess is data science bootcamps will start sprouting all over the place very soon (perhaps its lagging the dev bootcamp wave by 2-3 years..)<p><a href="http://www.thisismetis.com/data-science" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisismetis.com/data-science</a>
<a href="http://www.thedataincubator.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.thedataincubator.com</a>
I think it can always be useful to make a basic website. You can use it to prototype any idea you have, at work or during your free time, and see if you like doing that and want to keep improving your web dev skills.