Coding Camps: A Smart Bet For MBAs Or A Waste Of Time?

A NEW PATH TOWARDS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

One of opportunities made possible by the coding camp experience is in product management, the most commonly desired position for those attending coding camps as an MBA. Product management itself exists at the intersection of business, engineering, and design, as it requires skills from all three. According to Sentance, understanding how the product itself actually functions is imperative for successful product managers within the tech industry.

William Sentance, graduate of Oxford University and co-founder of CodeSmith

“The dream people for Harvard Business School right now are software engineers who are turning towards business because they know that those people all get hired as senior product managers at Google, whereas their more standard McKinsey grads can’t get product management roles because they don’t have the technical credentials,” Sentance says. “A lot of MBAs come in understanding that they will be a more effective as a product manager if they can code – if they can talk the language.”

While product managers aren’t usually required to write lines of code themselves, having coding knowledge greatly helps to understand the technical limitations in producing a software product and the application of said product.

But how does attending a coding camp fit into the timeline of earning an MBA? Does it make more sense to attend a coding camp before, during, or after earning an MBA? Sentance is unsure which route is best.

“I personally think you should do it upon graduation (from B-school) because all of your knowledge is fresh and you can immediately pursue that senior position,” says Sentance. “But, then again, maybe not. Maybe it actually gives you time to lock in your coding knowledge over the next couple of years, get that internship at DropBox over the summer.”

UVA-Darden MBA and CodeSmith graduate, Travis Sorenson

That’s pretty much what Sorenson thought after graduating from Darden with his MBA.

After leaving his first-post MBA job, Sorenson spent time taking individual classes from various online coding schools, such as Code Academy and Code School. “I worked my way through some individual classes, but I never really got anywhere,” Sorenson says. “Soon after I quit my job, I spent most of my time for about three months attempting to learn to code on my own. Still, I didn’t really get anywhere.”

Sorenson then began exploring the world of coding camps, visiting various coding schools in order to get an impression on each one. Looking at the resumes of the students at the camps he visited, Sorenson says he was “blown away” by the diversity of backgrounds in most of the students he met.

“Nobody that I met was a software engineer, and there were only a few computer science majors,” Sorenson says. “Other than that, most of the people I met had diverse backgrounds. That’s when I really got interested in attending a camp.”