52 ms·

Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

206 points by yaks_hairbrush 9y ago

arikr 9y ago
"Hi Andrew, we had actually been working too find a sustainable business model since the very beginning. Ultimately we couldn't find one that didn't sacrifice on our commitment to provide the highest quality program possible while keeping our program open to the most diverse students possible." What does that mean? It seems like this should've been a profitable business - 3000 graduates @ $10k/piece = $30mm revenue.
- obilgic 9y ago
  revenue != profitable business
  - arikr 9y ago
    Of course. Though the existence of what seems to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps working fine confuses me. Also, pretty sure dev bootcamp was bootstrapped - if they didn't put in outside capital, then either they were profitable from day one or they were running break even. I'd guess they were profitable.
    - arikr 9y ago
      Hm, wikipedia lists 40 staff, and 450 students per year. Say 40 * $200,000 = $8mm/yr, plus rent. 450 students/yr ~= $6mm. This back of the envelope would point to them being unprofitable.
      - blackoil 9y ago
        Avg. salary of 200K seems to be very high?
        arikr 9y ago
        Fully loaded cost. See: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Vicarious-raise-so-much-money-40MM-in-March-2014/answer/Michael-Wolfe?srid=p42X https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Vicarious-raise-so-much-money-..., https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mean-cost-per-year-for-a-software-engineer-in-Silicon-Valley/answer/Michael-Malone?srid=p42X https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mean-cost-per-year-for-a-s...
        cjbprime 9y ago
        It was a ballpark of the cost per employee, not the salary per employee.
        jnmandal 9y ago
        You normally do math like this with assumption an employee costs 2x salary.
- arikr 9y ago
  e.g. Financial aid sponsored by dev bootcamp for some students, or even corporate sponsors for financial aid didn't work? There also seem to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps running that are doing fine, so this is confusing.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    It would be helpful to know if they were "doing fine" and what that actually means in numbers, student outcomes, and values of the school.
  - bluesnow10 9y ago
    This explains it: https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-are-terrible-businesses-d4c9f122814 https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-ar...
- pryelluw 9y ago
  Over 5 years thats about 6 million per year. Which sounds like a lot but their business model seems to not be cheap to operate. Question is: Why not sell it?
- foota 9y ago
  I believe that three thousand was over the last five years. So 6mm. I don't know much about it, but you could eat that up pretty easily it seems. Figure 300 students at a time, ten students an instructor, 100k per instructor, gives 3 million. Then there's rent and support staff.
  - goobynight 9y ago
    Rent is certainly huge. These guys are renting prime time space in city centers.
    - nether 9y ago
      I wonder if these posh locations are worth it. I'm sure it attracts some students, and there's some advantage in the proximity to hip startups also in city centers. But students are low income during the program and hardly have a chance to do anything outside the office, given the workload of these bootcamps.
      - bluesnow10 9y ago
        Ding.
  - jnmandal 9y ago
    The support/general overhead wasn't cheap either. When I was there we had a free therapist, mandatory morning yoga, teambuiliding exercises, and stuff like weekly free food, etc.
    - seaknoll 9y ago
      > mandatory morning yoga This would enrage me.
      - JMCQ87 9y ago
        Bootcamps are not for everyone.
- taneq 9y ago
  Translation: To balance the books we would have had to either raise prices or reduce quality, and we didn't want to do either. Kudos to them for making that kind of hard call rather than compromising on their values.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    From my perspective, their values were the only thing that made the company insolvent.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    It's bonkers that they couldn't make those numbers work. I can't wrap my head around it or make it not work no matter what I do to the numbers.
booleandilemma 9y ago
Does this mean coding is starting to lose its sexiness? Is the fad over?
- arikr 9y ago
  No.^1 [1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
- smt88 9y ago
  Possibly, but there certainly is an over-abundance of bootcamp grads, and it's hard to choose among them.
  - panorama 9y ago
    I'm not a fan of this line of thinking. Not every bootcamp graduate is the same. There may be less variance between them from a purely technical standpoint but their backgrounds are far more diverse than what you'd get out college. In other words, I don't think it's fair to say "there's an over-abundance of graduates from XYZ university. It's hard to choose among them." Regardless, stereotyping job candidates based on where they learned to code is poor practice. A good hiring manager ought to take the time to treat a candidate respectfully, but I know this behavior is rare. If your organization simply doesn't want to take on junior/entry-level programmers, it should be clear in the job post _and_ IMO, you shouldn't be open to receiving college-grad applications, either.
    - bluesnow10 9y ago
      Totally agree. I'm the CEO at Bloc, the first and largest online coding and design bootcamp. There is a big wedge between quality and financial viability when the model is in-person/bricks-and-mortar. https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-are-terrible-businesses-d4c9f122814 https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-ar...
    - smt88 9y ago
arikr 9y ago
If Dev Bootcamp was unprofitable, are other bootcamps also unprofitable, or was Dev Bootcamp an exception?
- nathan-wailes 9y ago
  My guess is that the profitability of different bootcamps varies with the policies / niche that those bootcamps have adopted. It seems likely that all bootcamps have high operating expenses / lower margins than a pure software business may be capable of.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  Recently, I had the opportunity to do some number crunching on actual outcomes data for one of the tier 1 bootcamps. (all its years of operation to date) I discovered that some major changes needed to be made in their business model in order for them to be truly profitable. Their big innovative business idea seemed to be: we are gonna be the best at bootcamping. I don't get how that even passes as an innovative business idea at the first funding round. Their delivery on that awesomeness idea didn't show itself in their outcomes. They still love their model though. This may be because they don't have to be profitable. I was puzzled.
  - arikr 9y ago
    Oh dear.
    - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
      Yes. Well said. I truly wish there was a way for the minds who convene here to get at a disturbing issue with respect to bootcamps: No one with access to actual data can be honest about what is going on here. they can't really share this data in any detail that would be valuable to a potential student, and really to the industry as a whole. These "transparency" reports that have cropped up recently are not so transparent-- (although they are better than nothing) they too deceive (why not show an actual budget with actual living expenses after graduation- including debt to the coding school- a detailed personal budget, if you will?- and actually show what it costs to live and study for several months in addition to this- show them how much they will actually have to lay out for a NYC security deposit (three months' rent if local, 6 months often if foreign these days- sure, not everywhere, but anywhere they will feel is a decent, legal place to live) this is just one aspect of how they are not "full-disclosure" with newbies. Also- the pre-work thing: take responsibility for teaching these people, please! They are paying you! Stop acting like their paying you lots of money is a privilege of theirs. Stop acting like they just got into Yale Law School when they got into your bootcamp. Get real with them. That gives you credibility right there. The honesty problem: Students can't be honest about what happens to them, because if they are, they (in their own minds) will devalue the bootcamp pedigree they paid good money for. (I have been talking to bootcamp graduates since this whole thing started and doing research. No, for some of the reasons I state, I can't produce this evidence, at least not right now) Then there is the whole having to pretend to be a member of the upper classes in NYC in order to get a job. This is a real thing in NYC, so tell them about it, and teach them how to act like rich people when you send them out. Teach them to act entitled- even arrogant. People who found and work for these bootcamps can't be honest (even if they believe they want to be) for obvious reasons. I mean, this is why we value double-blind testing in medical research. I just don't see another way than the companies themselves taking the responsibility to educate employees. I don't think they have to become Stanford. I do think Google has already started with this effort in bringing Howard University onto their Mountain View campus... I'm paying attention. The burden on the employee just becomes greater and greater until people are funding whole mini-careers in order to clear the first barrier to entry. It is ridiculous. We should not stand for it. But labor is dead. The bootcamp thing was a fantastic model five years ago, and Dev Bootcamp was truly a pioneer. That should be recognized for sure, and applauded. But what is being ignored is that this barrier to entry is now the highest it has ever been as a direct result of these bootcamps. I can believe that and also think Dev Bootcamp and others have done wonderful work for people. It is just that the big heavy castle door is closing fast and a few are scrambling to run under before the spikes hit their backs. Most will be left drowning in the castle moat. The answer is clear here: the model needs to change dramatically and it needs to always be changing dramatically. Agile anyone? (sorry- had to, I really had to) So maybe take stock and make real change that responds to the market in a sustainable way. Sustainable would be wonderful.
dkarapetyan 9y ago
Good. The idea and intention behind bootcamps is a good one but the current implementation is suspiciously like university of phoenix.
- vosper 9y ago
  I don't know much about University of Phoenix, but I've hired a couple of bootcamp graduates, found through the bootcamp recruiting events. They were both pretty inexperienced, but motivated and smart people. As good as any junior programmers I've hired. In the right circumstances I'd hire them again. It's diamonds-in-the-rough from a recruiting standpoint, but you get to vet a lot of people very quickly (it was exhausting) and if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that their motivated (good bootcamps are not cheap, and they're hard work). How things worked out for the rest of the graduates I don't know... Both people I hired had some experience before bootcamp
  - nobleach 9y ago
    Diamonds in the rough is exactly how I'd describe it. I've sifted through many resumes from DevMountain graduates (and not surprisingly their instructors). What it looked like was one big homogeny of "here's how you create a github account, here's how you commit and push the Angular exercises we've been working on". Almost all were identical resumes. Regardless, the ones that we've hired seemed to do fine.
- justin 9y ago
  My youngest brother went through Dev Bootcamp in 2012. He had graduated from a top 30 university but wasn't able to find a great job and had been doing some part time, low skill work. DBC literally changed his life. Post graduation he immediately got a job at a dev shop as a programmer, and now 5 years later is a great developer gainfully employed in Silicon Valley. Not sure why you would shit on the grave of a program that has done a lot of good for its graduates.
  - arikr 9y ago
    I'm sure DBC has many good outcomes, but it's a fair comment.
micahlucretius 9y ago
Burst of bootcamp bubble? Dev Bootcamp seems to have been the first ever coding bootcamp. Think Hack Reactor (another popular bootcamp) was founded by Dev Bootcamp grads. Or maybe the herd would just distribute to other bootcamps? Even if the failure of Dev Bootcamp doesn't directly hurt the business of other bootcamps, it has a psychological effect on the bootcamp industry: suddenly the bootcamp experience doesn't seem so attractive anymore. If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?
- xiaoma 9y ago
  The bubble is credentialed post-secondary schools and the 1.3 trillion dollar student debt crisis. Just like the credentialed schools, there's a wide variety in quality and outcomes, but I think it's pretty clear they're doing better on ROI (and at least people aren't going into decades of debt for them en masse). > "If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?" If someone learns nothing after finishing their courses and has nothing positive on their resume for several years, they'd probably be in a tough spot. That's not really very different from the case for other types of schooling, though. If someone is learning and growing though, why would it? Only an extremely strange employer would ignore a candidate's performance in their last job and reject them based on schooling they did before it.
  - learc83 9y ago
    Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off. The income based repayment plans are also retroactively available to all Federal borrowers. It's not actually as big of a problem as it sounds.
    - hkmurakami 9y ago
      The loan forgiveness entices people who wouldn't otherwise buy the education product and further inflates the sticker price of education.
bcherny 9y ago
DBC was acquired by Kaplan back in 2014 [1]. Was this Kaplan's decision or DBC's? [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-development-school-dev-bootcamp-1403660869 https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-developm...
- micahlucretius 9y ago
  I would guess it was Kaplan's decision. If the cause is unprofitability, then there are no moves left for DBC. DBC sold to Kaplan for the money, and Kaplan sees no money to be made in DBC, thus shuts it down.
- phrowaway21231 9y ago
  sold for 80M to kaplan.
skylark 9y ago
I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry. The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies. Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have stepped in to bridge that gap - they essentially screen for people who learn quickly, teach them the bare essentials, and send them on their way. This means bootcamps have a symbiotic relationship with the quality of students they're able to attract. The best bootcamps turn out the highest quality students, who then get the best jobs, which makes the bootcamp look better. Dev Bootcamp was always in that awkward position where it was trying to be one of the "premiere" bootcamps, but never actually made it to tier 1 status. It's always lived in the shadow of Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, and to a lesser extent, App Academy. Having personally worked with Dev Bootcamp graduates, I've felt that on average, they were much weaker than the graduates from the other bootcamps I mentioned. Since Hack Reactor in particular has been expanding its reach to additional locations, Dev Bootcamp was probably getting boxed out of the premium bootcamp space. The founders were unwilling to be relegated to tier 2 (or the demand was dropping too fast) so they had to pull out. It's a shame, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised.
- busterarm 9y ago
  Early Dev Bootcamp grads I know are pretty talented, but over the last couple years they seem to be the bootcamp of choice for people with less prior experience (that's a good thing) and less commitment to their own personal development & the industry (that's a bad thing). Those two things combined are a disaster.
  - nathan-wailes 9y ago
    Interesting...thanks for sharing that information.
- austenallred 9y ago
  That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can make it a year long, but then do you charge $40-80k up-front? No one has that kind of money.
trevmckendrick 9y ago
Hard to compete against things like Lambda Academy where there's no up front cost and you only pay if you get a job: https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chrshawkes 9y ago
  Lambda does not look like a legit company, there is no terms of service, privacy policy or even a legit contact which is typically required for most reputable businesses. I don't trust them without basic legal information available on their website. For all we know, they are run by the Russian mob.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    There's not really a need for a terms of service on a static page. We should probably get a privacy policy up. And there is a contact... both email addresses and forms. Do you need a physical address? We don't have someone sitting around waiting to answer the phone all day. We're Lambda Inc. Incorporated in Delaware. Haven't announced our fundraising yet but that will be public soon. Clearly need to work on making the site look more legit.
    - chrshawkes 9y ago
      Sorry, maybe legit is too harsh a word, but in many cases I've seen privacy policies and terms of service to be a requirement to do business with the likes of Amazon and Google etc...
      - austenallred 9y ago
        terms of service is something you have if you're an app. Our students sign legal contracts. Our site is just a landing page. But ya we'll work on it. Thanks for the feedback. Something something cobblers kids worst shoes.
phrowaway21231 9y ago
Shereef Bishay sold out his staff and sold out his mission and he's going to the do the same to his staff at Learner's Guild in Oakland! He sold it off to Kaplan for 80M and his staff (with equity) got nothing!!! I interviewed for a role at Dev bootcamp in 2016 and got an odd feeling from the place and the woman who interviewed me. She took several months to get back to me after I followed up multiple times and wow am I soooo glad I didn't get that.
- busterarm 9y ago
  What do you expect from a bootcamp that's notorious for their "touchy feely wednesdays". They cared more about the mission than the curriculum. You interviewed with a cult.
- kabuks 9y ago
  Hey, what you're saying about me is not true. Please don't do that. Seriously, it hurts.
  - jnmandal 9y ago
    Hey Shereef, alumnus here. Don't listen to this; I attended right after the Kaplan acquisition, and everyone was very transparently working to keep the mission and values you started with alive. I'm sure you made out with money but that doesn't mean you sold out the mission. This person is just upset they didn't get a job at what was an awesome institution.
  - JustAnotherPat 9y ago
    You abandoned DBC and set up a competitor. A lot of people got screwed over while you raked in a ton of cash. You may not be responsible for the decline of DBC, but part of the reason it is crap now is because they expanded to like 30 locations. I'm almost certain that's the model you pitched to Kaplan because you sold right after the New York Campus opened.
  - stowaway90210 9y ago
    I was at DBC around the time of the sale and you're full of shit. You checked out, drove tons of taleneted people away (Michael, Lachy, Tony, Jesse, Keith, Zee, Myles, to name a few), and then decided you were bored with bootcamps. You were in it for yourself and it would have been better for everyone if you could have admitted it. Sounds like you're still believing your own stories. Kudos to you for hiring and inspiring an amazing team. Too bad you didn't know what to do with it.
paloaltokid 9y ago
That's too bad. I've worked with many DBC grads and some nice people came through there. I interviewed many DBC grads and they were definitely all over the place in terms of ability and understanding, but some had everything it took to grow into solid software engineers. I've worked with some of the instructors as well and they're great folks.
BreakoutList 9y ago
For anyone seeking alternatives, $0 up-front cost software engineering bootcamps that I'm aware of: Learner’s Guild https://www.fastcoexist.com/3068200/when-this-entrepreneurs-thriving-business-lost-its-purpose-he-walked-away https://www.fastcoexist.com/3068200/when-this-entrepreneurs-... 42 (completely free) https://www.42.us.org/ https://www.42.us.org/ Holberton School https://www.holbertonschool.com/ https://www.holbertonschool.com/ Lambda Academy https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science
- sylvainkalache 9y ago
  I am the co-founder of Holberton, happy to answer any question here. In a nutshell: we are training SWE using a project-based and peer-learning approach. No formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by practicing and collaborating with peers - pretty much like in the workplace. We haven't graduated any cohort yet (our program is 2 years long, but students can start working after 9 months) but have already students who intern/work at NASA, LinkedIn, Tesla, Apple, Dropbox, Nvidia, Docker, CreditKarma... Big difference between us and bootcamps: we are covering the fundamentals of CS + we are not focusing on teaching students specific tools but rather developing their critical thinking, problem-solving skills and guiding them on becoming self-learners. All good Software Engineers know that you must constantly learn to stay on top of your game, being about to retrain yourself is the most valuable skill that a professional should have to continue to grow career wise.
- austenallred 9y ago
  Hey, I'm the co-founder of Lambda Academy of Computer Science (https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science. Also happy to answer any questions. We're not a bootcamp, but we are 100% free until you get a job, and have live instructors from UC Berkeley, NASA, etc. We have a very rigorous curriculum that is closest to an uber-practical CS degree, but there's not really a close proxy to it anywhere. We cover all the CS & programming fundamentals employers want you to understand, and get much closer to the metal, covering things like architecture/scaling, functional programming (hence the name), use compiled languages, etc. We're also online, so you don't have to move anywhere, but we're live and on a strict schedule, so it's not something you can do asynchronously.
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nether 9y ago
Can't bode well for Kaplan's other bootcamp, Metis for data science.
- JMCQ87 9y ago
  That space might still have less competition and therefore lower marketing costs.
geekjock 9y ago
I worked at Dev Bootcamp for four years. A big part of why the company is going out of business is that it put students ahead of profits. I wrote a post about this here: https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didnt-fail-3a4e456899be https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didn...
- jnmandal 9y ago
  Thanks for writing this Abi
nathan-wailes 9y ago
I don't know if I should feel sad about this, but I do feel sad about this. As others have mentioned, DBC was the first company in this industry, and their excellent execution seems to have been what led to so many other entrepreneurs becoming convinced that this concept could work; they really did a great service for people in this country who didn't graduate college with a hard-science / engineering degree. I considered going to a bootcamp back in February of 2013 (one year after DBC launched), met Shereef and his cofounder Jesse Farmer at their SF location, and left very impressed with what they had created and with them personally.
- jfarmer 9y ago
  Hi! Thanks for the nice words. :)
- kabuks 9y ago
  Thanks for the kind words.
  - midairmatthew 9y ago
    Some more kind words: I'm currently working through week six of Phase 0, and I'm so, so sad that DBC isn't going to last. I did tons of research about different bootcamps, but ultimately I chose DBC because I wanted to be a part of a program that has such a commitment to being a corrective force in the embarrassingly un-diverse tech world. It really is incredible that the thing you created has empowered so many students to both maximize their ability to learn and gain more agency in such an inequitable society. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. I'm glad I decided to dive into this while DBC was still around. (And now I should probably get back to work with attributes and modules...)
panorama 9y ago
It always frustrates me when commenters are overwhelmingly undereducated about a topic but continue to make broad, sweeping generalizations. There's a ton of negativity, outright assuming, and misinformation being thrown around here. It happens in every bootcamp-related thread (and topics in other subjects of course). No, not every bootcamp was legit. No, making assumptions about all bootcamps based on a handful of bad apples is not an honest critique. No, your anecdote about a bad bootcamp grad does not hold more weight than someone else's anecdote about a bootcamp completely changing their life. The fact is DBC, which spawned an entirely new industry, was an overwhelmingly positive force. DBC has always made inclusivity and community a priority. For the vast majority of students, DBC has been a much higher ROI investment than a 4 year college degree and changes the way people think about modern education systems. There are thousands of capable engineers (including myself) out there today thanks to DBC, which often operated with high stress and, apparently, minimal funds. It's a shame each bootcamp topic has its share of otherwise reasonable people making unfounded claims. In a community that values programming, startups, inclusivity, and helping others, you'd think the negativity and baseless accusations would be a lot more infrequent. It's been 5 years since DBC began and yet commenter ignorance still requires graduates to come in and defend their bootcamps. If you have no idea what you're talking about, it's fine, ask and I'd be happy to answer. But this community really ought to be celebrating what DBC has accomplished. Source: I'm an early 2013 DBC grad who has worked in SF tech since graduating. I've also helped hundreds of bootcamp grads with their job search post-graduation (meaning I have my fair share of honest criticisms for DBC). The vast majority of people I've talked with are now employed at companies most people on HN would love to work for.
- watwut 9y ago
  Bootcamps are threats to ego. If it turns out that random person can do the same with three months of study, then one is not such a huge exceptional genius as one would like to believe. A lot of the negativity is insecurity.
  - chrshawkes 9y ago
    What a lot of people fail to understand is working in React and Angular is no easier to get into with a CS degree than without one. Both technologies among the thousands of others change weekly and for that reason Bootcamps are damn near as effective training tool than anything else. Ego's do get hurt though.
learc83 9y ago
Top tier boot camps are essentially 12 week long interviews that the interviewee pays for. It's a great business model for those top tier boot camps, but there's a limited number of students who can make it through, pay for it, and take time off to do it. It's just not that scaleable.
- avremel 9y ago
  True. Schedule for most bootcamps are too rigid, especially for a married person. And living costs during and after bootcamp (until that perfect job magically appears) can far outway the actual tuition costs.
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pensierinmusica 9y ago
Kudos to the school who started it all, and the vision behind it. Thinking about the future, and the million of people who could benefit from learning coding, is DBC going to open source their curriculum? I think they should consider it, and I think that they could reach out to Free Code Camp to see if they can do something together. Hope to see this happening! What do you think? From the European side - https://codeworks.me/ https://codeworks.me/
kabuks 9y ago
Here's the thread that started it all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133
- hello_newman 9y ago
  Thank you for this. I remember reading this 5+ years ago. It was the catalyst for me dropping out of college, and eventually made my way up to SF to go to DBC. A hell of a journey, and it all started with a post on some forum. Edit: I also didn't realize you're the DBC founder? I owe you so much and i owe my entire career (thus far) to DBC and the entire industry you started with some crazy idea of teaching people to code in a couple months. Thank you for everything you have done.
  - kabuks 9y ago
    You are very welcome. Thank you for the kind words.
- toomanyrichies 9y ago
  Shereef, as a DBC grad (Otters, Chicago, 2013), I thank you for posting this. It changed my life, and the lives of many other students. To think, this is the post that launched an industry!
factorialboy 9y ago
Who needs bootcamps? All you need is a decent machine and an internet connection to learn. That's how we learnt "web" back in the day. Cynical me hopes all commercial (and often spammy) bootcamps and conferences and meetups die a quick death. Also death to the hipster culture in tech. /rant over
- PagingCraig 9y ago
  With that logic you might as well do away with University as well, right?
- wolco 9y ago
  In my day we didn't have the internet and we learned by writing code and looking up function calls in books and bugging the guy at the computer store. With all of the free learning materials online you can literally get a university education from top schools for free. If I was starting out now I would considered it because it's a fast track to employment. When I started out I knew how to program but no one would consider you without an education. That forced me to go to college and learn fun things like COBOL and jcl and many other languages in a short period of time. In the end I rarely use most of those language but if a mainframe opportunity comes up I'm ready. Being forced to learn so many things at once was the real education because it helps in the real world where you are expected to pickup new languages. For some reason my mainframe dev resume bullet points have never been mentioned during an interview. If you can develop for a s/390 that should somehow give you a slight boost for your next javascript role in my opinion.
- chrshawkes 9y ago
  The personal computer revolution was started by hipsters.
- ravenstine 9y ago
  Why stop at bootcamps? There are so many resources on the internet, most of which are free, that can replace all of the knowledge universities have to offer and then some. Someone could learn astrophysics through Google searches. But that's not a reasonable position across the board. Of course universities offer more than mere information, and I would say that bootcamps(at least DBC) focus mostly on those other things and far less on the information. By that I mean learning to code at home online isn't going to give you the same experience as spending days or weeks hacking on your first mobile app with a bunch of other people, non stop, while chowing on beer and pizza. Yes, there's tremendous value in that, especially if you need to learn to work on a team and self-organize. In theory, you can emulate that environment on your own, but there's a reason people pay for that kind of experience. A person of novice experience can't or won't come up with a substitute for that. It's an introduction to a world, of sorts. At least it was for me.
xiaoma 9y ago
Relevant thread with comments from competitors and people who were there at the beginning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364
jbenn 9y ago
Attending Dev Bootcamp in March 2013 is the best decision I've ever made, it totally altered the trajectory of my career and I'm happier and more fulfilled as a result. I'm not sure I would have been able to make the switch from consulting to software engineering without DBC. That being said, I'm extremely lucky to have enrolled during the narrow window I did. The entire bootcamp industry is suffering, not just DBC. They've now totally saturated the market with juniors and refused to adapt to that reality by extending and improving their product: they should be offering longer courses, covering more material, interspersing their offerings with internships, and providing intermediate-level bootcamps for engineers looking to graduate to the next level. Today's bootcamp graduates have to compensate for this themselves by continuing to teach themselves new content as they fight for jobs after graduation. This is difficult - don't get me wrong, it's still doable and still very much worth the effort - but it's hard, and this explains the current embarrassingly low rate of bootcamp graduates winning jobs as developers. If this describes you: keep your chin up, find a friend to practice interviewing with, and know that you're going to need to work through this material eventually: https://teachyourselfcs.com https://teachyourselfcs.com. And feel free to reach out to me. I don't think anyone close to the bootcamp industry would see this as a surprise, and I think we'll see many more bootcamp closures/M&As in the near future. Hopefully the industry will evolve and adapt, not die - everyone deserves the opportunity, not just the lucky few who had it easy before the market got saturated.
- magic_beans 9y ago
  I'm already web developer, but I want to move into Software Engineering. I wish there was a bootcamp out there that would train people who already work with JS and coding, but are not as strong in CS. Bootcamp L2, for example.
  - Taylor_OD 9y ago
    Check out the guys at outco! https://outco.io/ https://outco.io/
- wishinghand 9y ago
  A few definitely are trying to adapt with the jr dev saturation problem. I went to one in San Diego called Origin Code Academy and they're trying out extension courses and have already succeeded with final project internships rather than letting students come up with their own app. I don't know yet if that'll help them survive but the latter gives their graduates a leg up in the job search.
josephorjoe 9y ago
So, three years ago, I was attending DBC and getting my first exposure to web app development. Today, I write code for a living and am enjoying the work I do much more than what I had been doing before. Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No. Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No. Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really. But I did learn an enormous amount of practical knowledge in a very short time (basically: "How to build and deploy a database-backed CRUD app with a reasonable UI while working as part of a small fast paced team" and "How to research stuff you don't know the answer to and figure out how to do it on your own"). They taught me what I needed to know to teach myself the rest of what I needed to know to get where I wanted to be. And for that, it was worth it for me. But I do have mixed feelings about the bootcamps in general. They can be really helpful for people in certain circumstances (in my case: career changer who needed to jumpstart the learning process and get some practical guidance), but they sell themselves as something else ("Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!"). Sorry to hear they are shutting down. I suppose it was Kaplan's decision and the space has become so crowded that there must be pricing pressure on the programs and a limit to how many graduates the job market can absorb. Will have to go look into this some more and see what I can find out.
- DerfNet 9y ago
  >Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No. >Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No. >Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really. This perfectly describes my experience with LaunchCode in the midwest.
  - blehhh 9y ago
    Yeah, main difference though is that LaunchCode provides it education for free rather than charging $15k
- SilasX 9y ago
  Same experience here (first DBC cohort). I ended up not being able to make end to end Rails apps, which fortunately didn't matter since it gave enough of a springboard to get into the industry. But I also didn't feel it delivered on what I really needed it to, which was to provide help I can't find on my own and a steady stream of good job leads. Never underestimate the benefit of being around motivated people.
zbarnes 9y ago
I was a graduate of one of the 2015 cohorts. It was a good school that really prepared me for a solid career. However, I remember running the numbers on the camp when I was there and was having trouble coming up with how they could still be profitable given their location, staff, and cohort sizes.
Tommyixi 9y ago
So I graduated from DBC 3 years ago and I agree with most of the sentiments already stated in this thread. However, I think the red flag for me was seeing some of my cohort graduate and then immediately after become instructors at DBC. I don't care what you say, you cannot teach programming after being exposed to programming for 12 weeks. For one thing, a "good" teacher isn't just someone who has been coding for a while (which obviously you lack if you have just graduated from the program); you actually have to understand pedagogy and take an actual interest in being a mentor or guide. If DBC had hired instructors with industry experience, I often found that they lacked the proper skills to make them effective educators.
- travisl12 9y ago
  I hear that, I remember being asked if I was planning on sticking around to teach at DBC and feeling inadequate at the thought of it. Mentoring perhaps made sense... BTW I finished in 2013 as well (Pocket Gophers SF!).
  - Tommyixi 9y ago
    Nice! I was in the Red Admirals.
ravenstine 9y ago
DBC 2013 alumnus here. I'm super disappointed to hear this news. Although I could see it coming, because how often does this kind of thing NOT happen when a small company gets purchased by a larger corporation? DBC was quite an institution. As I've stated before, it's not about what they can teach you – it was simply an invaluable resource to allow those with ambition to figure out aspects of app development on their own and with other people. If you're expecting a series of lectures, exams, and knowledge to be bestowed upon you at DBC, you're looking at it wrong and you will fail. To have a place to go where you can spend months hacking on things with other people while going through a learning process, right in the center of the action in technology, was so unique and valuable. I met so many cool people and had far greater experiences than my time in college. It changed my life tremendously. I have Shereef and everyone whom I shared my experience with to thank! I really could be living in a van down by the river right now if I didn't discover DBC. The greatest thing I got out of DBC was not coding ability, which I mostly picked up on my own, but a mindset/philosophy about learning and problem-solving. I know that many of these things come naturally to people software engineering, especially those far more brilliant than I, but not everyone figures these things out. They summed it up as the "growth" mindset vs. the "fixed mindset", which seems fairly accurate to me. I really hope someone can continue(or at least hold a candle to) DBC's legacy. A lot of bootcamps seem like junk, but I'm sure that's not all of them.
- swyx 9y ago
  which aren't junk in your opinion?
scott_booth 9y ago
.
- wishinghand 9y ago
  What happened with your experience there?
- komali2 9y ago
  I think a scathing review like this deserves a bit of explanation, regardless of topic. It's so easy to say "this thing BAD!" Why should we believe you?
buildmystartup 9y ago
I think Dev Bootcamps are awesome but would probably be better served as an online service without the live classroom setting. I would rather do acloud.guru and udemy.
johnhenry 9y ago
Is this announcement official? I don't see anything on their website https://devbootcamp.com/ https://devbootcamp.com/. Also, the timing is off -- it seems announcing this at this time is going to put a damper on the entire next semester.
trich7 9y ago
DevBootcamps work over the last 5 years have been super impactful and paved the way for many bootcamps. Like many in the industry, and as a founder of DevMountain bootcamps, we all knew DBC as the golden standard. DBC changed tech education and positively affected many! Much respect and best wishes to everyone involved.

"Hi Andrew, we had actually been working too find a sustainable business model since the very beginning. Ultimately we couldn't find one that didn't sacrifice on our commitment to provide the highest quality program possible while keeping our program open to the most diverse students possible." What does that mean? It seems like this should've been a profitable business - 3000 graduates @ $10k/piece = $30mm revenue.

obilgic 9y ago
revenue != profitable business
- arikr 9y ago
  Of course. Though the existence of what seems to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps working fine confuses me. Also, pretty sure dev bootcamp was bootstrapped - if they didn't put in outside capital, then either they were profitable from day one or they were running break even. I'd guess they were profitable.
  - arikr 9y ago
    Hm, wikipedia lists 40 staff, and 450 students per year. Say 40 * $200,000 = $8mm/yr, plus rent. 450 students/yr ~= $6mm. This back of the envelope would point to them being unprofitable.
    - blackoil 9y ago
      Avg. salary of 200K seems to be very high?
      - arikr 9y ago
        Fully loaded cost. See: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Vicarious-raise-so-much-money-40MM-in-March-2014/answer/Michael-Wolfe?srid=p42X https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Vicarious-raise-so-much-money-..., https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mean-cost-per-year-for-a-software-engineer-in-Silicon-Valley/answer/Michael-Malone?srid=p42X https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mean-cost-per-year-for-a-s...
      - cjbprime 9y ago
        It was a ballpark of the cost per employee, not the salary per employee.
      - jnmandal 9y ago
        You normally do math like this with assumption an employee costs 2x salary.
arikr 9y ago
e.g. Financial aid sponsored by dev bootcamp for some students, or even corporate sponsors for financial aid didn't work? There also seem to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps running that are doing fine, so this is confusing.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  It would be helpful to know if they were "doing fine" and what that actually means in numbers, student outcomes, and values of the school.
- bluesnow10 9y ago
  This explains it: https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-are-terrible-businesses-d4c9f122814 https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-ar...
pryelluw 9y ago
Over 5 years thats about 6 million per year. Which sounds like a lot but their business model seems to not be cheap to operate. Question is: Why not sell it?
foota 9y ago
I believe that three thousand was over the last five years. So 6mm. I don't know much about it, but you could eat that up pretty easily it seems. Figure 300 students at a time, ten students an instructor, 100k per instructor, gives 3 million. Then there's rent and support staff.
- goobynight 9y ago
  Rent is certainly huge. These guys are renting prime time space in city centers.
  - nether 9y ago
    I wonder if these posh locations are worth it. I'm sure it attracts some students, and there's some advantage in the proximity to hip startups also in city centers. But students are low income during the program and hardly have a chance to do anything outside the office, given the workload of these bootcamps.
    - bluesnow10 9y ago
      Ding.
- jnmandal 9y ago
  The support/general overhead wasn't cheap either. When I was there we had a free therapist, mandatory morning yoga, teambuiliding exercises, and stuff like weekly free food, etc.
  - seaknoll 9y ago
    > mandatory morning yoga This would enrage me.
    - JMCQ87 9y ago
      Bootcamps are not for everyone.
taneq 9y ago
Translation: To balance the books we would have had to either raise prices or reduce quality, and we didn't want to do either. Kudos to them for making that kind of hard call rather than compromising on their values.
- busterarm 9y ago
  From my perspective, their values were the only thing that made the company insolvent.
- austenallred 9y ago
  It's bonkers that they couldn't make those numbers work. I can't wrap my head around it or make it not work no matter what I do to the numbers.

booleandilemma 9y ago

Does this mean coding is starting to lose its sexiness? Is the fad over?

arikr 9y ago
No.^1 [1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
smt88 9y ago
Possibly, but there certainly is an over-abundance of bootcamp grads, and it's hard to choose among them.
- panorama 9y ago
  I'm not a fan of this line of thinking. Not every bootcamp graduate is the same. There may be less variance between them from a purely technical standpoint but their backgrounds are far more diverse than what you'd get out college. In other words, I don't think it's fair to say "there's an over-abundance of graduates from XYZ university. It's hard to choose among them." Regardless, stereotyping job candidates based on where they learned to code is poor practice. A good hiring manager ought to take the time to treat a candidate respectfully, but I know this behavior is rare. If your organization simply doesn't want to take on junior/entry-level programmers, it should be clear in the job post _and_ IMO, you shouldn't be open to receiving college-grad applications, either.
  - bluesnow10 9y ago
    Totally agree. I'm the CEO at Bloc, the first and largest online coding and design bootcamp. There is a big wedge between quality and financial viability when the model is in-person/bricks-and-mortar. https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-are-terrible-businesses-d4c9f122814 https://medium.com/@clintmania/in-person-coding-bootcamps-ar...
  - smt88 9y ago

arikr 9y ago

If Dev Bootcamp was unprofitable, are other bootcamps also unprofitable, or was Dev Bootcamp an exception?

nathan-wailes 9y ago
My guess is that the profitability of different bootcamps varies with the policies / niche that those bootcamps have adopted. It seems likely that all bootcamps have high operating expenses / lower margins than a pure software business may be capable of.
brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
Recently, I had the opportunity to do some number crunching on actual outcomes data for one of the tier 1 bootcamps. (all its years of operation to date) I discovered that some major changes needed to be made in their business model in order for them to be truly profitable. Their big innovative business idea seemed to be: we are gonna be the best at bootcamping. I don't get how that even passes as an innovative business idea at the first funding round. Their delivery on that awesomeness idea didn't show itself in their outcomes. They still love their model though. This may be because they don't have to be profitable. I was puzzled.
- arikr 9y ago
  Oh dear.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    Yes. Well said. I truly wish there was a way for the minds who convene here to get at a disturbing issue with respect to bootcamps: No one with access to actual data can be honest about what is going on here. they can't really share this data in any detail that would be valuable to a potential student, and really to the industry as a whole. These "transparency" reports that have cropped up recently are not so transparent-- (although they are better than nothing) they too deceive (why not show an actual budget with actual living expenses after graduation- including debt to the coding school- a detailed personal budget, if you will?- and actually show what it costs to live and study for several months in addition to this- show them how much they will actually have to lay out for a NYC security deposit (three months' rent if local, 6 months often if foreign these days- sure, not everywhere, but anywhere they will feel is a decent, legal place to live) this is just one aspect of how they are not "full-disclosure" with newbies. Also- the pre-work thing: take responsibility for teaching these people, please! They are paying you! Stop acting like their paying you lots of money is a privilege of theirs. Stop acting like they just got into Yale Law School when they got into your bootcamp. Get real with them. That gives you credibility right there. The honesty problem: Students can't be honest about what happens to them, because if they are, they (in their own minds) will devalue the bootcamp pedigree they paid good money for. (I have been talking to bootcamp graduates since this whole thing started and doing research. No, for some of the reasons I state, I can't produce this evidence, at least not right now) Then there is the whole having to pretend to be a member of the upper classes in NYC in order to get a job. This is a real thing in NYC, so tell them about it, and teach them how to act like rich people when you send them out. Teach them to act entitled- even arrogant. People who found and work for these bootcamps can't be honest (even if they believe they want to be) for obvious reasons. I mean, this is why we value double-blind testing in medical research. I just don't see another way than the companies themselves taking the responsibility to educate employees. I don't think they have to become Stanford. I do think Google has already started with this effort in bringing Howard University onto their Mountain View campus... I'm paying attention. The burden on the employee just becomes greater and greater until people are funding whole mini-careers in order to clear the first barrier to entry. It is ridiculous. We should not stand for it. But labor is dead. The bootcamp thing was a fantastic model five years ago, and Dev Bootcamp was truly a pioneer. That should be recognized for sure, and applauded. But what is being ignored is that this barrier to entry is now the highest it has ever been as a direct result of these bootcamps. I can believe that and also think Dev Bootcamp and others have done wonderful work for people. It is just that the big heavy castle door is closing fast and a few are scrambling to run under before the spikes hit their backs. Most will be left drowning in the castle moat. The answer is clear here: the model needs to change dramatically and it needs to always be changing dramatically. Agile anyone? (sorry- had to, I really had to) So maybe take stock and make real change that responds to the market in a sustainable way. Sustainable would be wonderful.

dkarapetyan 9y ago

Good. The idea and intention behind bootcamps is a good one but the current implementation is suspiciously like university of phoenix.

vosper 9y ago
I don't know much about University of Phoenix, but I've hired a couple of bootcamp graduates, found through the bootcamp recruiting events. They were both pretty inexperienced, but motivated and smart people. As good as any junior programmers I've hired. In the right circumstances I'd hire them again. It's diamonds-in-the-rough from a recruiting standpoint, but you get to vet a lot of people very quickly (it was exhausting) and if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that their motivated (good bootcamps are not cheap, and they're hard work). How things worked out for the rest of the graduates I don't know... Both people I hired had some experience before bootcamp
- nobleach 9y ago
  Diamonds in the rough is exactly how I'd describe it. I've sifted through many resumes from DevMountain graduates (and not surprisingly their instructors). What it looked like was one big homogeny of "here's how you create a github account, here's how you commit and push the Angular exercises we've been working on". Almost all were identical resumes. Regardless, the ones that we've hired seemed to do fine.
justin 9y ago
My youngest brother went through Dev Bootcamp in 2012. He had graduated from a top 30 university but wasn't able to find a great job and had been doing some part time, low skill work. DBC literally changed his life. Post graduation he immediately got a job at a dev shop as a programmer, and now 5 years later is a great developer gainfully employed in Silicon Valley. Not sure why you would shit on the grave of a program that has done a lot of good for its graduates.
- arikr 9y ago
  I'm sure DBC has many good outcomes, but it's a fair comment.

micahlucretius 9y ago

Burst of bootcamp bubble? Dev Bootcamp seems to have been the first ever coding bootcamp. Think Hack Reactor (another popular bootcamp) was founded by Dev Bootcamp grads. Or maybe the herd would just distribute to other bootcamps? Even if the failure of Dev Bootcamp doesn't directly hurt the business of other bootcamps, it has a psychological effect on the bootcamp industry: suddenly the bootcamp experience doesn't seem so attractive anymore. If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?

xiaoma 9y ago
The bubble is credentialed post-secondary schools and the 1.3 trillion dollar student debt crisis. Just like the credentialed schools, there's a wide variety in quality and outcomes, but I think it's pretty clear they're doing better on ROI (and at least people aren't going into decades of debt for them en masse). > "If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?" If someone learns nothing after finishing their courses and has nothing positive on their resume for several years, they'd probably be in a tough spot. That's not really very different from the case for other types of schooling, though. If someone is learning and growing though, why would it? Only an extremely strange employer would ignore a candidate's performance in their last job and reject them based on schooling they did before it.
- learc83 9y ago
  Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off. The income based repayment plans are also retroactively available to all Federal borrowers. It's not actually as big of a problem as it sounds.
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    The loan forgiveness entices people who wouldn't otherwise buy the education product and further inflates the sticker price of education.

bcherny 9y ago

DBC was acquired by Kaplan back in 2014 [1]. Was this Kaplan's decision or DBC's? [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-development-school-dev-bootcamp-1403660869 https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-developm...

micahlucretius 9y ago
I would guess it was Kaplan's decision. If the cause is unprofitability, then there are no moves left for DBC. DBC sold to Kaplan for the money, and Kaplan sees no money to be made in DBC, thus shuts it down.
phrowaway21231 9y ago
sold for 80M to kaplan.

skylark 9y ago

I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry. The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies. Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have stepped in to bridge that gap - they essentially screen for people who learn quickly, teach them the bare essentials, and send them on their way. This means bootcamps have a symbiotic relationship with the quality of students they're able to attract. The best bootcamps turn out the highest quality students, who then get the best jobs, which makes the bootcamp look better. Dev Bootcamp was always in that awkward position where it was trying to be one of the "premiere" bootcamps, but never actually made it to tier 1 status. It's always lived in the shadow of Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, and to a lesser extent, App Academy. Having personally worked with Dev Bootcamp graduates, I've felt that on average, they were much weaker than the graduates from the other bootcamps I mentioned. Since Hack Reactor in particular has been expanding its reach to additional locations, Dev Bootcamp was probably getting boxed out of the premium bootcamp space. The founders were unwilling to be relegated to tier 2 (or the demand was dropping too fast) so they had to pull out. It's a shame, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised.

busterarm 9y ago
Early Dev Bootcamp grads I know are pretty talented, but over the last couple years they seem to be the bootcamp of choice for people with less prior experience (that's a good thing) and less commitment to their own personal development & the industry (that's a bad thing). Those two things combined are a disaster.
- nathan-wailes 9y ago
  Interesting...thanks for sharing that information.
austenallred 9y ago
That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can make it a year long, but then do you charge $40-80k up-front? No one has that kind of money.

trevmckendrick 9y ago

Hard to compete against things like Lambda Academy where there's no up front cost and you only pay if you get a job: https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chrshawkes 9y ago
Lambda does not look like a legit company, there is no terms of service, privacy policy or even a legit contact which is typically required for most reputable businesses. I don't trust them without basic legal information available on their website. For all we know, they are run by the Russian mob.
- austenallred 9y ago
  There's not really a need for a terms of service on a static page. We should probably get a privacy policy up. And there is a contact... both email addresses and forms. Do you need a physical address? We don't have someone sitting around waiting to answer the phone all day. We're Lambda Inc. Incorporated in Delaware. Haven't announced our fundraising yet but that will be public soon. Clearly need to work on making the site look more legit.
  - chrshawkes 9y ago
    Sorry, maybe legit is too harsh a word, but in many cases I've seen privacy policies and terms of service to be a requirement to do business with the likes of Amazon and Google etc...
    - austenallred 9y ago
      terms of service is something you have if you're an app. Our students sign legal contracts. Our site is just a landing page. But ya we'll work on it. Thanks for the feedback. Something something cobblers kids worst shoes.

phrowaway21231 9y ago

Shereef Bishay sold out his staff and sold out his mission and he's going to the do the same to his staff at Learner's Guild in Oakland! He sold it off to Kaplan for 80M and his staff (with equity) got nothing!!! I interviewed for a role at Dev bootcamp in 2016 and got an odd feeling from the place and the woman who interviewed me. She took several months to get back to me after I followed up multiple times and wow am I soooo glad I didn't get that.

busterarm 9y ago
What do you expect from a bootcamp that's notorious for their "touchy feely wednesdays". They cared more about the mission than the curriculum. You interviewed with a cult.
kabuks 9y ago
Hey, what you're saying about me is not true. Please don't do that. Seriously, it hurts.
- jnmandal 9y ago
  Hey Shereef, alumnus here. Don't listen to this; I attended right after the Kaplan acquisition, and everyone was very transparently working to keep the mission and values you started with alive. I'm sure you made out with money but that doesn't mean you sold out the mission. This person is just upset they didn't get a job at what was an awesome institution.
- JustAnotherPat 9y ago
  You abandoned DBC and set up a competitor. A lot of people got screwed over while you raked in a ton of cash. You may not be responsible for the decline of DBC, but part of the reason it is crap now is because they expanded to like 30 locations. I'm almost certain that's the model you pitched to Kaplan because you sold right after the New York Campus opened.
- stowaway90210 9y ago
  I was at DBC around the time of the sale and you're full of shit. You checked out, drove tons of taleneted people away (Michael, Lachy, Tony, Jesse, Keith, Zee, Myles, to name a few), and then decided you were bored with bootcamps. You were in it for yourself and it would have been better for everyone if you could have admitted it. Sounds like you're still believing your own stories. Kudos to you for hiring and inspiring an amazing team. Too bad you didn't know what to do with it.

paloaltokid 9y ago

That's too bad. I've worked with many DBC grads and some nice people came through there. I interviewed many DBC grads and they were definitely all over the place in terms of ability and understanding, but some had everything it took to grow into solid software engineers. I've worked with some of the instructors as well and they're great folks.

BreakoutList 9y ago

For anyone seeking alternatives, $0 up-front cost software engineering bootcamps that I'm aware of: Learner’s Guild https://www.fastcoexist.com/3068200/when-this-entrepreneurs-thriving-business-lost-its-purpose-he-walked-away https://www.fastcoexist.com/3068200/when-this-entrepreneurs-... 42 (completely free) https://www.42.us.org/ https://www.42.us.org/ Holberton School https://www.holbertonschool.com/ https://www.holbertonschool.com/ Lambda Academy https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

sylvainkalache 9y ago
I am the co-founder of Holberton, happy to answer any question here. In a nutshell: we are training SWE using a project-based and peer-learning approach. No formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by practicing and collaborating with peers - pretty much like in the workplace. We haven't graduated any cohort yet (our program is 2 years long, but students can start working after 9 months) but have already students who intern/work at NASA, LinkedIn, Tesla, Apple, Dropbox, Nvidia, Docker, CreditKarma... Big difference between us and bootcamps: we are covering the fundamentals of CS + we are not focusing on teaching students specific tools but rather developing their critical thinking, problem-solving skills and guiding them on becoming self-learners. All good Software Engineers know that you must constantly learn to stay on top of your game, being about to retrain yourself is the most valuable skill that a professional should have to continue to grow career wise.
austenallred 9y ago
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Lambda Academy of Computer Science (https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science. Also happy to answer any questions. We're not a bootcamp, but we are 100% free until you get a job, and have live instructors from UC Berkeley, NASA, etc. We have a very rigorous curriculum that is closest to an uber-practical CS degree, but there's not really a close proxy to it anywhere. We cover all the CS & programming fundamentals employers want you to understand, and get much closer to the metal, covering things like architecture/scaling, functional programming (hence the name), use compiled languages, etc. We're also online, so you don't have to move anywhere, but we're live and on a strict schedule, so it's not something you can do asynchronously.

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nether 9y ago

Can't bode well for Kaplan's other bootcamp, Metis for data science.

JMCQ87 9y ago
That space might still have less competition and therefore lower marketing costs.

geekjock 9y ago

I worked at Dev Bootcamp for four years. A big part of why the company is going out of business is that it put students ahead of profits. I wrote a post about this here: https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didnt-fail-3a4e456899be https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didn...

jnmandal 9y ago
Thanks for writing this Abi

nathan-wailes 9y ago

I don't know if I should feel sad about this, but I do feel sad about this. As others have mentioned, DBC was the first company in this industry, and their excellent execution seems to have been what led to so many other entrepreneurs becoming convinced that this concept could work; they really did a great service for people in this country who didn't graduate college with a hard-science / engineering degree. I considered going to a bootcamp back in February of 2013 (one year after DBC launched), met Shereef and his cofounder Jesse Farmer at their SF location, and left very impressed with what they had created and with them personally.

jfarmer 9y ago
Hi! Thanks for the nice words. :)
kabuks 9y ago
Thanks for the kind words.
- midairmatthew 9y ago
  Some more kind words: I'm currently working through week six of Phase 0, and I'm so, so sad that DBC isn't going to last. I did tons of research about different bootcamps, but ultimately I chose DBC because I wanted to be a part of a program that has such a commitment to being a corrective force in the embarrassingly un-diverse tech world. It really is incredible that the thing you created has empowered so many students to both maximize their ability to learn and gain more agency in such an inequitable society. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. I'm glad I decided to dive into this while DBC was still around. (And now I should probably get back to work with attributes and modules...)

panorama 9y ago

It always frustrates me when commenters are overwhelmingly undereducated about a topic but continue to make broad, sweeping generalizations. There's a ton of negativity, outright assuming, and misinformation being thrown around here. It happens in every bootcamp-related thread (and topics in other subjects of course). No, not every bootcamp was legit. No, making assumptions about all bootcamps based on a handful of bad apples is not an honest critique. No, your anecdote about a bad bootcamp grad does not hold more weight than someone else's anecdote about a bootcamp completely changing their life. The fact is DBC, which spawned an entirely new industry, was an overwhelmingly positive force. DBC has always made inclusivity and community a priority. For the vast majority of students, DBC has been a much higher ROI investment than a 4 year college degree and changes the way people think about modern education systems. There are thousands of capable engineers (including myself) out there today thanks to DBC, which often operated with high stress and, apparently, minimal funds. It's a shame each bootcamp topic has its share of otherwise reasonable people making unfounded claims. In a community that values programming, startups, inclusivity, and helping others, you'd think the negativity and baseless accusations would be a lot more infrequent. It's been 5 years since DBC began and yet commenter ignorance still requires graduates to come in and defend their bootcamps. If you have no idea what you're talking about, it's fine, ask and I'd be happy to answer. But this community really ought to be celebrating what DBC has accomplished. Source: I'm an early 2013 DBC grad who has worked in SF tech since graduating. I've also helped hundreds of bootcamp grads with their job search post-graduation (meaning I have my fair share of honest criticisms for DBC). The vast majority of people I've talked with are now employed at companies most people on HN would love to work for.

watwut 9y ago
Bootcamps are threats to ego. If it turns out that random person can do the same with three months of study, then one is not such a huge exceptional genius as one would like to believe. A lot of the negativity is insecurity.
- chrshawkes 9y ago
  What a lot of people fail to understand is working in React and Angular is no easier to get into with a CS degree than without one. Both technologies among the thousands of others change weekly and for that reason Bootcamps are damn near as effective training tool than anything else. Ego's do get hurt though.

learc83 9y ago

Top tier boot camps are essentially 12 week long interviews that the interviewee pays for. It's a great business model for those top tier boot camps, but there's a limited number of students who can make it through, pay for it, and take time off to do it. It's just not that scaleable.

avremel 9y ago
True. Schedule for most bootcamps are too rigid, especially for a married person. And living costs during and after bootcamp (until that perfect job magically appears) can far outway the actual tuition costs.

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pensierinmusica 9y ago

Kudos to the school who started it all, and the vision behind it. Thinking about the future, and the million of people who could benefit from learning coding, is DBC going to open source their curriculum? I think they should consider it, and I think that they could reach out to Free Code Camp to see if they can do something together. Hope to see this happening! What do you think? From the European side - https://codeworks.me/ https://codeworks.me/

kabuks 9y ago

Here's the thread that started it all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133

hello_newman 9y ago
Thank you for this. I remember reading this 5+ years ago. It was the catalyst for me dropping out of college, and eventually made my way up to SF to go to DBC. A hell of a journey, and it all started with a post on some forum. Edit: I also didn't realize you're the DBC founder? I owe you so much and i owe my entire career (thus far) to DBC and the entire industry you started with some crazy idea of teaching people to code in a couple months. Thank you for everything you have done.
- kabuks 9y ago
  You are very welcome. Thank you for the kind words.
toomanyrichies 9y ago
Shereef, as a DBC grad (Otters, Chicago, 2013), I thank you for posting this. It changed my life, and the lives of many other students. To think, this is the post that launched an industry!

factorialboy 9y ago

Who needs bootcamps? All you need is a decent machine and an internet connection to learn. That's how we learnt "web" back in the day. Cynical me hopes all commercial (and often spammy) bootcamps and conferences and meetups die a quick death. Also death to the hipster culture in tech. /rant over

PagingCraig 9y ago
With that logic you might as well do away with University as well, right?
wolco 9y ago
In my day we didn't have the internet and we learned by writing code and looking up function calls in books and bugging the guy at the computer store. With all of the free learning materials online you can literally get a university education from top schools for free. If I was starting out now I would considered it because it's a fast track to employment. When I started out I knew how to program but no one would consider you without an education. That forced me to go to college and learn fun things like COBOL and jcl and many other languages in a short period of time. In the end I rarely use most of those language but if a mainframe opportunity comes up I'm ready. Being forced to learn so many things at once was the real education because it helps in the real world where you are expected to pickup new languages. For some reason my mainframe dev resume bullet points have never been mentioned during an interview. If you can develop for a s/390 that should somehow give you a slight boost for your next javascript role in my opinion.
chrshawkes 9y ago
The personal computer revolution was started by hipsters.
ravenstine 9y ago
Why stop at bootcamps? There are so many resources on the internet, most of which are free, that can replace all of the knowledge universities have to offer and then some. Someone could learn astrophysics through Google searches. But that's not a reasonable position across the board. Of course universities offer more than mere information, and I would say that bootcamps(at least DBC) focus mostly on those other things and far less on the information. By that I mean learning to code at home online isn't going to give you the same experience as spending days or weeks hacking on your first mobile app with a bunch of other people, non stop, while chowing on beer and pizza. Yes, there's tremendous value in that, especially if you need to learn to work on a team and self-organize. In theory, you can emulate that environment on your own, but there's a reason people pay for that kind of experience. A person of novice experience can't or won't come up with a substitute for that. It's an introduction to a world, of sorts. At least it was for me.

xiaoma 9y ago

Relevant thread with comments from competitors and people who were there at the beginning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364

jbenn 9y ago

Attending Dev Bootcamp in March 2013 is the best decision I've ever made, it totally altered the trajectory of my career and I'm happier and more fulfilled as a result. I'm not sure I would have been able to make the switch from consulting to software engineering without DBC. That being said, I'm extremely lucky to have enrolled during the narrow window I did. The entire bootcamp industry is suffering, not just DBC. They've now totally saturated the market with juniors and refused to adapt to that reality by extending and improving their product: they should be offering longer courses, covering more material, interspersing their offerings with internships, and providing intermediate-level bootcamps for engineers looking to graduate to the next level. Today's bootcamp graduates have to compensate for this themselves by continuing to teach themselves new content as they fight for jobs after graduation. This is difficult - don't get me wrong, it's still doable and still very much worth the effort - but it's hard, and this explains the current embarrassingly low rate of bootcamp graduates winning jobs as developers. If this describes you: keep your chin up, find a friend to practice interviewing with, and know that you're going to need to work through this material eventually: https://teachyourselfcs.com https://teachyourselfcs.com. And feel free to reach out to me. I don't think anyone close to the bootcamp industry would see this as a surprise, and I think we'll see many more bootcamp closures/M&As in the near future. Hopefully the industry will evolve and adapt, not die - everyone deserves the opportunity, not just the lucky few who had it easy before the market got saturated.

magic_beans 9y ago
I'm already web developer, but I want to move into Software Engineering. I wish there was a bootcamp out there that would train people who already work with JS and coding, but are not as strong in CS. Bootcamp L2, for example.
- Taylor_OD 9y ago
  Check out the guys at outco! https://outco.io/ https://outco.io/
wishinghand 9y ago
A few definitely are trying to adapt with the jr dev saturation problem. I went to one in San Diego called Origin Code Academy and they're trying out extension courses and have already succeeded with final project internships rather than letting students come up with their own app. I don't know yet if that'll help them survive but the latter gives their graduates a leg up in the job search.

josephorjoe 9y ago

So, three years ago, I was attending DBC and getting my first exposure to web app development. Today, I write code for a living and am enjoying the work I do much more than what I had been doing before. Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No. Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No. Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really. But I did learn an enormous amount of practical knowledge in a very short time (basically: "How to build and deploy a database-backed CRUD app with a reasonable UI while working as part of a small fast paced team" and "How to research stuff you don't know the answer to and figure out how to do it on your own"). They taught me what I needed to know to teach myself the rest of what I needed to know to get where I wanted to be. And for that, it was worth it for me. But I do have mixed feelings about the bootcamps in general. They can be really helpful for people in certain circumstances (in my case: career changer who needed to jumpstart the learning process and get some practical guidance), but they sell themselves as something else ("Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!"). Sorry to hear they are shutting down. I suppose it was Kaplan's decision and the space has become so crowded that there must be pricing pressure on the programs and a limit to how many graduates the job market can absorb. Will have to go look into this some more and see what I can find out.

DerfNet 9y ago
>Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No. >Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No. >Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really. This perfectly describes my experience with LaunchCode in the midwest.
- blehhh 9y ago
  Yeah, main difference though is that LaunchCode provides it education for free rather than charging $15k
SilasX 9y ago
Same experience here (first DBC cohort). I ended up not being able to make end to end Rails apps, which fortunately didn't matter since it gave enough of a springboard to get into the industry. But I also didn't feel it delivered on what I really needed it to, which was to provide help I can't find on my own and a steady stream of good job leads. Never underestimate the benefit of being around motivated people.

zbarnes 9y ago

I was a graduate of one of the 2015 cohorts. It was a good school that really prepared me for a solid career. However, I remember running the numbers on the camp when I was there and was having trouble coming up with how they could still be profitable given their location, staff, and cohort sizes.

Tommyixi 9y ago

So I graduated from DBC 3 years ago and I agree with most of the sentiments already stated in this thread. However, I think the red flag for me was seeing some of my cohort graduate and then immediately after become instructors at DBC. I don't care what you say, you cannot teach programming after being exposed to programming for 12 weeks. For one thing, a "good" teacher isn't just someone who has been coding for a while (which obviously you lack if you have just graduated from the program); you actually have to understand pedagogy and take an actual interest in being a mentor or guide. If DBC had hired instructors with industry experience, I often found that they lacked the proper skills to make them effective educators.

travisl12 9y ago
I hear that, I remember being asked if I was planning on sticking around to teach at DBC and feeling inadequate at the thought of it. Mentoring perhaps made sense... BTW I finished in 2013 as well (Pocket Gophers SF!).
- Tommyixi 9y ago
  Nice! I was in the Red Admirals.

ravenstine 9y ago

DBC 2013 alumnus here. I'm super disappointed to hear this news. Although I could see it coming, because how often does this kind of thing NOT happen when a small company gets purchased by a larger corporation? DBC was quite an institution. As I've stated before, it's not about what they can teach you – it was simply an invaluable resource to allow those with ambition to figure out aspects of app development on their own and with other people. If you're expecting a series of lectures, exams, and knowledge to be bestowed upon you at DBC, you're looking at it wrong and you will fail. To have a place to go where you can spend months hacking on things with other people while going through a learning process, right in the center of the action in technology, was so unique and valuable. I met so many cool people and had far greater experiences than my time in college. It changed my life tremendously. I have Shereef and everyone whom I shared my experience with to thank! I really could be living in a van down by the river right now if I didn't discover DBC. The greatest thing I got out of DBC was not coding ability, which I mostly picked up on my own, but a mindset/philosophy about learning and problem-solving. I know that many of these things come naturally to people software engineering, especially those far more brilliant than I, but not everyone figures these things out. They summed it up as the "growth" mindset vs. the "fixed mindset", which seems fairly accurate to me. I really hope someone can continue(or at least hold a candle to) DBC's legacy. A lot of bootcamps seem like junk, but I'm sure that's not all of them.

swyx 9y ago
which aren't junk in your opinion?

scott_booth 9y ago

wishinghand 9y ago
What happened with your experience there?
komali2 9y ago
I think a scathing review like this deserves a bit of explanation, regardless of topic. It's so easy to say "this thing BAD!" Why should we believe you?

buildmystartup 9y ago

I think Dev Bootcamps are awesome but would probably be better served as an online service without the live classroom setting. I would rather do acloud.guru and udemy.

johnhenry 9y ago

Is this announcement official? I don't see anything on their website https://devbootcamp.com/ https://devbootcamp.com/. Also, the timing is off -- it seems announcing this at this time is going to put a damper on the entire next semester.

trich7 9y ago

DevBootcamps work over the last 5 years have been super impactful and paved the way for many bootcamps. Like many in the industry, and as a founder of DevMountain bootcamps, we all knew DBC as the golden standard. DBC changed tech education and positively affected many! Much respect and best wishes to everyone involved.