I’m concerned, however, that the camp can’t produce evidence of the kind, “Before the minicamp, Mary Sue was in rehab for crack. A year later, she’s clean and has a successful web consultancy.” (Exaggerating the expected magnitude of change, of course.) Religious retreats don’t produce this, and tend to produce results more like, “Immediately after the retreat I felt really good, and a year later I do awesome on unobservable metrics!”
Before the bootcamp, I’d just barely managed to graduate college and didn’t have the greatest prospects for finding a job. (Though to be fair, I was moving to SF and it was a CS degree.)
At the bootcamp, I founded (and then folded) a startup with other bootcampers, which was profoundly educational and cost a couple months of time and <$100.
Now, <1 year after the bootcamp, I’m doing programming and design work on the new SimCity, which is as close to a dream job for me as could reasonably be expected to exist.
I can’t attribute all my recent success to the bootcamp, because I was pretty awesome beforehand, but it really did dramatically improve my effectiveness in a number of domains (my girlfriend is grateful for the fashion tips I picked up, for example). Other specific things I’ve found useful include meditation, value of information calculations, and rejection therapy.
I’m concerned, however, that the camp can’t produce evidence of the kind, “Before the minicamp, Mary Sue was in rehab for crack. A year later, she’s clean and has a successful web consultancy.” (Exaggerating the expected magnitude of change, of course.) Religious retreats don’t produce this, and tend to produce results more like, “Immediately after the retreat I felt really good, and a year later I do awesome on unobservable metrics!”
Before the bootcamp, I’d just barely managed to graduate college and didn’t have the greatest prospects for finding a job. (Though to be fair, I was moving to SF and it was a CS degree.)
At the bootcamp, I founded (and then folded) a startup with other bootcampers, which was profoundly educational and cost a couple months of time and <$100.
Now, <1 year after the bootcamp, I’m doing programming and design work on the new SimCity, which is as close to a dream job for me as could reasonably be expected to exist.
I can’t attribute all my recent success to the bootcamp, because I was pretty awesome beforehand, but it really did dramatically improve my effectiveness in a number of domains (my girlfriend is grateful for the fashion tips I picked up, for example). Other specific things I’ve found useful include meditation, value of information calculations, and rejection therapy.