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Ask HN: Are we close to a saturation point for coding bootcamps?
I see daily ads/emails for programs now guaranteeing to make you a software engineer (as opposed to just a Rails web developer) - programs with names I no longer recognize. What is the future of this industry, and will there be consolidation?
- nostrademons 11y agoCoding bootcamps are not a scalable market the way software products themselves are - the number of customers you can serve is limited by the number of trained instructors you have, along with strong geographic barriers. There's no reason to believe it'll be a winner-take-all market. Perhaps a strong brand could emerge that starts to dominate, but even then there's likely room for differentiation in individual learning styles. I suspect the eventual structure of the coding bootcamp industry will be similar to therapists, tutoring centers, preschools, martial arts studios, or maybe small colleges. A number of local businesses, each of which serves a geographic region, with wide variety in quality and teacher/student fit. The whole industry might collapse if all the software that needs to get written is already written, but that probably has at least a generation or two to run.
- kls 11y agoPersonally I see them as a signal of the end of the bubble cycle. At the end of each bubble there have been these type of 2 weeks and you can make a killing courses. At the end of the .com crash we had 2 week Macromedia Flash courses where graduates where expected to make 90-100k walking out the door. In my experience these courses are a market signal and are temporal.