Rather Burn Your Money Than Paying for a Bootcamp

Welcome back to the Product Bakery. I'm Christian and as always here with my dear co-host Alex. Hi Alex. Hi Christian and hi everyone. Well the very classic introduction into an episode. I miss that so much. Whenever I sit in front of a microphone I automatically want to say welcome. In every meeting. I had this last week we've been on a production and there was like this sound audio guy and I constantly had like this microphone over our heads and I really wanted to say it but I was like okay nobody would understand. You're traveling a lot recently right? For branding stuff, projects. Yeah I mean it was a mix of work and pleasure. I mean I have been also off the grid for two weeks in Peru. Hashtag self-care. Hashtag self-care. Yeah. No internet. Oh. That was fun. I haven't had that in a while. But yeah that's. So have you done like a kind of survival boot camp in Peru? Almost. I mean we've been in the jungle. We had to like walk in there far from civilization, far from anyone but yeah. We had a machete. Yeah Alex talking about boot camps. I know you have a very special opinion on that. And I know also I mean we talked about last episode that you are hiring a lot of people and yet you have hired a lot of people. So your team has grown from one to 15 people. And I was just wondering I can imagine that there are quite some designers, researchers, product people who are applying who are maybe coming directly from school or coming from a different industry and maybe have done a boot camp. And I just wanted to know how do you feel about seeing the word boot camp on a CV or application letter? It's not only you who knows that I have an opinion about that. I'm pretty sure we maybe even talked about this as well at one point in this podcast. But yeah just ask my recruiters what I think about them. They have a very clear answer. But okay so disclaimer it's definitely a topic that kind of gets me kind of up to gets my gears. I don't even know the right word. Makes you emotional I would say. Yeah yeah definitely. Therefore like just a disclaimer if you've done a boot camp, if you know someone who did a boot camp or if you recently hired someone out of a boot camp, I am 100% sure that there is good boot camps. And I'm 100% sure that even the ones that I would kind of call bad boot camps can bring out good people. At the end it's always down to the people. But I think in general, and this is where I like to also simplify things for myself, in general I do feel like a lot of the boot camps are simply overselling an idea of becoming a designer, a product manager, an engineer. Oh believe me there is a ton of boot camps for front-end developers and so on. And it's like overselling this idea with a lot of promises. With promises that are connected to a very high salary, to a certain position and whatsoever. And I think you have a lot of these people out there. And I think this is actually something that I sometimes find kind of really frustrating. Like there is people who hear these things, they are willing to kind of take this extra step, they're willing to even invest a lot of their money to participate in these boot camps. Because it's like, oh the next role is guaranteed and blah blah blah. But at the end they're not becoming or they're not developing into this great designer or PM or developer that they've been promised. I also feel like the structure of the boot camps itself often is like really tailored towards exactly this, oh yeah you need to land that job. So instead of like teaching the craft, they teach how do you fake a portfolio, how do you make sure that the portfolio has at least three shitty persona cards that are completely useless because they're not based off actual data and use it to then show that you have this amazing design process. I'm just trying to identify for myself right now if we have a chicken and egg problem here. So my question for you is, is the problem the people who are overselling these boot camps? Or is the problem the people who are attending and believing they will get xyz out of it which they don't? It's probably a mix of both or none of them right. I think, I mean first of all it starts with, there's a reason why traditional education takes a lot of time. Why you learn principles, why you learn a lot of different things. And on a lot of, like especially in design, this isn't entirely true. No, I would almost say it's the same, it's true for all three things, right, for devs, designers and product managers. You need to have a certain level of creativity, you need to have a certain level of problem-solving skills. You can train a lot of it, but if you remove this, if you remove the traditional education, and not even everyone coming out of traditional education automatically becomes a great professional, right? And now, remove the traditional education, break it down to some weeks or months, because of course boot camps also come at different lengths. And I mean, what do you expect to get out of it, right? So I think it is obviously the person overselling, it is at the same time the person that obviously believes it, they want to know more, they want to do more. I do think that a lot of people coming out of these boot camps actually have a great mindset, but sometimes, because they're coming from these boot camps, they're also biased and have completely unrealistic expectations. Because if you do a couple of weeks with the right mindset, you approach a company, you're open enough for an entry-level role, okay, then we can probably talk, because then the mindset is enough, I'm happy that you have basics on the processes and that you have a basic understanding of how to work, and that's a very good starting point. But if you then come out of the boot camp and you believe that you can land a mid-level to senior role, because that's what you've been promised, and because your portfolio shows five imaginary apps that are amazing with this amazing process, you will at least have a very hard time to land a job in my team, because what I can see and what I can tell is that you've never worked with people. And I think if there's one thread in this podcast, it's that working in product, working in a company in general, it's always down to the people. It's about the interactions, it's about working with the stakeholders, understanding them, being able to work with them, understanding the business, being able to work with business stakeholders, and so on and so forth. So those are all things that you only learn if you get hands-on experience in a company, and that's not something that the traditional boot camp or a real project, and that's not something that the traditional boot camp gives you. And because I have a very strong opinion, I'm also being corrected sometimes, and I hear that there are good boot camps that actually factor that in. I would have to look up the name again, but I know there's a boot camp that is actually initiated by a company, and the company to some extent guarantees you that with the boot camp, you get an internship role in the company. And well, I guess that is really helpful, because it means like, if I would hire an intern, this is like the fast onboarding program that teaches them the basics for the role, and they still learn it while practicing it. And I think this is a little bit like where we need to find better ways to boot camp. I do agree with you to 100%. And there is one job where I see there's a lot happening, that the boot camps are fucked up. This is especially the Scrum Master and Save Workshops and shit that they are selling. I mean, I'm in a lot of groups, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, and literally, there's 99.9% shit that's getting sold to people. And the reason why I asked about this chicken and egg problem is, I do understand that people want to do their job. For example, I want to become a Scrum Master, right? I would like to have the ownership or support teams with processes and help them grow. But seriously, do you believe that a person who wants to become a Scrum Master, doing a workshop, can really do that in a big running company, establishing processes, managing or helping a team to work together with a lot of individuals on different levels with different personalities? I have never ever seen that working at all. I mean, I'm generally against the role of a Scrum Master, I have to say. I think that's something we talked about as well. I think that's one of the most useless roles ever. And this is not against anyone who's listening in, but it doesn't make sense in itself, this whole role definition. However, so the mindset of people who are trying to do a cheap boot camp and then expecting a big outcome out of it, in terms of a senior role or well-paid role with a lot of responsibility, usually won't pay out and doesn't work out. And I mean, first of all, Scrum Master is even more ridiculous, because it's not even a boot camp, but it's like a one day course in many cases. But I think there you can add a third problem or a third part to the chicken and egg equation, which is the companies that on the other end, require someone to have a certificate, right? And I've seen it when at Bain, it was almost like a requirement if you work like in the digital program, that if you want to go to a client, the client wants to see that you are Scrum certified. And I mean, there you see the I mean, there you have companies requesting something that is completely useless. People who are willing to pay for something that's completely useless. And the other is offering something that's completely useless. It's a problem we can solve right now. But I think it's worth to share also the other side, because you know, I mean, most people, they just see the marketing of a boot camp. They just see the shiny comments, the five star comments on Trustpilot or whatever is going on. And I just wanted to catch up with you today to also at least warn people and make them aware of what's going on and the real benefits of having a boot camp or not. And yeah, just just being aware of what's going on and not making the wrong choice and losing money in the worst case. And without extending this too much, right? I think you will always have people who land great jobs after boot camp. 100% First of all, there is people who are extremely smart and good at what they do. And they probably would have landed a great job independently of the boot camp. I think that's definitely something to keep in mind. Secondly, a lot of companies hiring are flashed by what they see from this boot camp, because there are good portfolios, and you need to be able to read between the lines. So you might also just then end up in a company that will even less bring you forward and teach you what you actually want to learn to become someone good because you end up in an environment that doesn't have the right process that don't doesn't have the right understanding and you're you don't have the right skills to to to change that. And I think the last thing, and that's probably the closing word as a takeaway. If you want to land a job and actually become good, I do think that the beautiful internships that we all did a couple of 10, 15, 20 years ago, especially when the product roles have been so defined, and you would like either try to do something in a more creative field and so on, like this entry level internships, you can learn a lot from them. And I do think that maybe see it as an investment to maybe earn less at the beginning. It's like the same investment that you maybe would pay for a bootcamp. But I think in the end, you would probably learn more. And now I'm waiting for the hate comments. So long story short, to everyone who's listening in, Alex and I are launching a new bootcamp to make it better. And we're gonna teach you everything 20 years of experience for 50% off in just 30 minutes. And if you invite a friend, you get another 20% off for just $1,999. So sign up today, and you're gonna make it. No, I'm kidding. I think to wrap it up, I think everything has been said and needs to be said. Watch out what you sign up for. And I think especially the last sentences from Alex, there's also another way to invest your money by spending time with an internship or something else to gain the experience or actually developing a real product and real project. And then convincing companies that they should hire you. So we are more than happy to get hate comments, love comments, a follow button for our podcast. So feel free to follow us on Apple Music, Apple Podcasts. I don't know where we are launched. We are everywhere almost. And we are looking forward to talking to you next week. Perfect. Have a great evening. Bye bye.