10 ms·

Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

127 points by huntermeyer 9y ago

Flammy 9y ago
The comments are pretty heart warming and show they definitely got something right.
- oddevan 9y ago
  I didn't have the chance to take their classes (timing for Cohort Zero in 2013 was just a LITTLE bit off), but all the people I knew involved were passionate about giving a quality education and moving the industry forward. I had no hesitations recommending them over other for-profit schools. And that's not even getting into how well they sponsored the local tech scene. Cheers to everyone involved with this, and I hope you all land on your feet.
- christophilus 9y ago
  I was an instructor there for 2 cohorts. It was probably the hardest I ever worked. The same was true for my fellow instructors. We were/are senior engineers who took the job for reasons other than money (it was a pay cut for me). We wanted to contribute back. A few students had pretty bad experiences, I think. It was a very demanding program. Several times, I had full-grown adults break down and cry during our 1:1s. But over all, the majority of students thrived. It was life-changing-- in a good way-- for most of them, and that's why I and my fellow instructors were there. It was one of the most meaningful periods of my career. I wouldn't go back and undo any of it, but I also won't be teaching at a code-bootcamp again. I'd consider a slower-paced program such as a university, tech school or high-school, though.
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    Question: if the pay was such that you weren't taking a pay cut, would that have made you stay longer? What would the conditions have to be like for someone who's a senior engineer to even consider making "a career change" into teaching swe for the next 10 years of their career, rather than a 2 year moonlighting stint? (Wondering what the setup had to be too make this sustainable)
    - bphogan 9y ago
      I don't know about the original poster, but I'd have stayed teaching full time if I could have afforded it. But I was literally making half of what my students were making after a couple of years in industry. Another thing to think about is this: Just cos you know SWE really well doesn't mean you have the ability to teach it to others. Not everyone "gets" things quickly, or will understand your explanations on the first attempt, so you must be patient. Not everyone learns the same way, nor do they have the same educational experiences, so you must be kind. And not everyone has a great home life, and has a ton of distractions that prevent them from learning, so you must be empathetic. Finally, not everyone loves to code - they just want the dollars that come from a job and will do whatever it takes to get there, including lie, cheat, and do the bare minimum, so you must be firm and strong to avoid burning out and thinking they're all terrible lazy students. There are people who can do this. But they're rare. And even rarer when they see the low paychecks offered.
      - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
        It is too bad that these bootcamps can't find a way to invest real money in excellent teachers. A few of these teachers are great. The teachers are the core of the business, just like they are in a university. We all know what has happened to salaries there. I think if bootcamps and colleges keep paying teachers like they are worth less than one of the jillion dollar Vitra sofas these schools are furnished with, they deserve to fail hard. (nice sofas though) Perhaps this is one of the key areas of failure in the model? Just a suggestion. Most of these teachers really stink. These bootcamps value youth or a let's call it a"certain look" over teaching experience and teaching innovation and creative teaching techniques. They also hire a lot of sadly unqualified grads of their programs who are confused when current students submit apps that are slightly more complicated than what they are used to seeing. They have no idea how to reach out to a diverse array (no pun intended) of students, because they are usually the "tell me what to do - I just follow orders" type of student/employee themselves who are all too keen to buy into the positivity consensus so enthusiastically promoted by these bootcamps. I hope you can teach where you are appreciated one day.
    - christophilus 9y ago
  - bphogan 9y ago
    I taught at a traditional institution and had the same experiences you did. Although I had to leave because I lost confidence in the institution. I think you'd find the same challenges in a slower-paced program, to be honest - there's plenty to do. While I only spent 4 hours a day in the classroom, I spent the rest of it either grading, revising lessons to keep things fresh, or grading assessments. The most time consuming part was providing meaningful feedback. Sure I could've phoned it in, but nobody likes getting a grade without feedback. And nobody learns from it either. Despite the hours, it was worth it tho. I love hearing from my former students. There are times when I wish I was still doing it. When you care like you and I do, you put your whole self into helping people make a better life for themselves learning to do what you already love to do, you'll take the low pay and the stress because it outweighs the negative. The sad thing is that people who run a lot of these places know that, so they can get away with paying you a lot less than you'd make if you stayed in dev.
    - christophilus 9y ago
      Thanks for that perspective. I wonder if there's a better way to go about teaching? It sounds like the current model for both code-schools and universities is pretty crappy for the teachers. What can be done to improve this, do you think?
      - bphogan 9y ago
        I have many many thoughts on what model would work. Sorry if this gets ranty... I believe that the models that will be successful are models where there is curriculum designed to be done asynchronously, with ample time for practice and repetition to build skills, followed by assessment and feedback. You do not need a classroom for this. A wise man once told me that a good teacher is not the sage on the stage, they are the guide on the side. And that's what adults need. They don't need to all sit in a room together being held back cos one person doesn't understand it. Lecture and talking and demos can all be done online on Youtube. Or you make a web site, write some content and make some videos, give some practice problems with unit tests that tell the student if they got them right. Easy peasy. Nobody's time is wasted. The third part is the part that doesn't scale - you need people to provide coaching and feedback. And you need one on one time to discuss feedback, options, choices, etc.\ Think about this: If I tell you to make me a five page web site with a contact form, appropriate color scheme, valid semantic markup, clean CSS, appropriate color scheme, and content, then I have to do the following: 1. Develop lessons to give you the information on how to do these things 2. Give you ample opportunities and time to practice and excel at these things individually 3. Give you detailed feedback on your practice so you can practice more 4. Give you the time to do the assessment well 5. Review your work and give you detailed feedback on it so you learn. Notice that I start with an end in mind, then work it out to get you to be successful - I don't just start teaching you a bunch of stuff and then make up some test... it's all planned out. So the curriculum design takes time and planning. It's an art and science of its own and we learn new things about how people learn all the time. But a small group of folks can take the time to put curriculum together. There are people who study this for a living. They're not subject matter experts though, so you kinda do need both. But notice all the places where there's review and feedback. That's the part that doesn't scale. That takes time. It takes a LONG time to give good, detailed feedback to a learner so they can improve. Your job isn't to fail them - it's to make sure they're successful - if they do their part and you do yours, they will be. (Obviously if you only put an hour into this final project there won't be much for me to give feedback on, so the learner has to put in the effort too) But you are their guide on the side, not the keeper of all knowledge that they must appease. So to find people who are caring individuals who can be these instructors, who can help people understand the curriculum, who can coach them through the process, who can meet with them... that doesn't scale. People will need to be compensated for this. With benefits so they don't have to worry about their own well-being as well as their students'. But if you can figure out a way to scale this and finance it, it would work well. I interviewed for and was offered a position at a bootcamp that had a model very similar to this, but they were doing a commission-based salary based on number of students that chose you as their coach, so it was too risky for me. I hear they changed their model tho and are doing well. Hopefully more places will catch on. Bottom line - good curriculum designed with outcomes in mind from the start, with everything aligned, is a good start. But learning happens through practice and feedback - I don't care how many times you read the book or watch the Pluralsight videos - you won't learn it till you practice it, do challenges someone else offers you, and internalize the feedback they give you once you're done. Ah well... this got super ranty and I'm tired. I hope it makes sense. You can email me if you want to chat about this more. I'd be happy to do that.
  - trowawee 9y ago
    Thank you for teaching. I'm a Dev Bootcamp grad from 2014; people like you, who took on that challenge, completely changed my life for the better.
  - wyldfire 9y ago
    > A few students had pretty bad experiences, I think. It was a very demanding program. Several times, I had full-grown adults break down and cry during our 1:1s. I think we could all learn a lot from their failures. Is there anything about their experience that could help you predict who would make an ill-suited applicant? Or some helpful advice on how folks should be prepared to approach the program ("you should expect to put in X hrs per day over the next 180 days if you want to be successful")?
    - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
      Is the issue the applicants? With all due respect, in terms of effective practice, the sheer number of hours put in has nothing, well not "nothing", but a lot less to do with it than the quality and type of hours spent. One needs a lot of the effective type of hour. It is about what one practices, the repetition, the evaluation of one's mistakes, and the fixing of these mistakes. And then the doing it correctly at least 22 more times. In a row. But mainly, it is the doing, with very short bursts of targeted critique at regular and frequent intervals delivered by a master who can help you learn to spot these pitfalls sooner than you would yourself. Respectfully, a lot of time can be wasted in a shortened educational model like a bootcamp for code with extraneous stuff as a part of the "firehose" method of teaching, which has become a beloved buzzword in the industry. The science on effective practice for efficient skill acquisition is not new. http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... That isn't to say that students should not prepare to put in hours. But schools should prepare to make the very most of a few hours. I don't know about TIY or Dev Mountain, but I do know that several of the schools in NYC have not yet revised their curricula to optimize the hours spent. Getting better students doesn't help ineffective curricula. The school's job is to teach those who are willing to set aside time and money. When one wrangles ineffective curricula or online teaching materials that behave wonkily and waste one's time because they malfunction constantly, those are precious minutes one could have spent in effective practice. The students also need teachers and advocates who blame themselves first if effective learning isn't occurring. They need schools who blame themselves first if they aren't getting work. As a student, I'd be reluctant to spend money at a school that didn't blame itself for its own outcomes failures. The thing is, students can't hear about the outcomes failures as much as they should because no one on the student side (the non-moneymaking side of it) can afford to be honest; they are the victims of this, especially once they have spent money. This is why I'm trying to help with that here. "Review sites" (not to name any names) are often just glorified advertising services. (literally handled by the marketing departments of these coding schools) I know this because I have been on both sides of this- inside the school and out. But since we are talking about failures that cause closings of schools here, and since so many will be seeing this page, I think it is time we talk about these issues honestly. The victors will be the schools who take responsibility for their own failures. They will be those who are brave enough to invite anonymous critique they can't control. (not "independently verified" claims of their success metrics they can control by virtue of what they measure and who is doing the verifying, and how much detail they go into in these metrics, and how much they get to leave out of that whole story- which is a lot, by the way.)
  - Akkuma 9y ago
    Hey Chris, give me a call, this is your mother. Ok not really your mother, since I doubt your mother's beard is as luxurious as my own, but we need a call to catch up.
jaboutboul 9y ago
Anyone care to shed some light on what precipitated this?
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  I'd like to know this too. Their prices are very high, so maybe the demand subsided?
  - smt88 9y ago
    It seemed to be a gold rush. Too many schools opened, crowding the market and driving prices down. I've personally been swamped in bootcamp graduates' resumes, even though my listing specifically says "5+ years experience". That tells me that they're desperate and bulk-applying. I've also heard this anecdote from others -- totally swamped by bootcamp grads. It's a free market, and the demand for bootcamp grads is now lower than the supply. That's exactly what you'd expect, isn't it?
    - throwaway7645 9y ago
      Makes sense. Thank you.
- patio11 9y ago
  Can I make a comment which is not specific about this school, to which I have no connection, or to coding bootcamps? For-profit education is a regulated industry in the United States and is experiencing significant adversarial attention at the moment, as a result of widespread looting of federal tuition assistance programs, to the tune of billions of dollars. Can I name a Greek god who has non-zero relevance to this story? Apollo.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    Why Apollo? I got this from Wikipedia: "...Apollo was also seen as a god who could bring ill-health and deadly plague." In that case...I see your point.
keyle 9y ago
Shouldn't place like these be growing instead of closing down? What did they get wrong? The demand for qualified developers isn't slowing afaik.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  There is no demand for qualified developers, only a demand for cheap, skilled labor. If there were a demand, these coding schools would not have such a devil of a time getting decent jobs for their grads.(and they do- just talk to some honest, recent grads-- it will be tough to find honest ones who are unemployed/underemployed on a public forum, if you know what I mean.) Why, if there is such a great demand, isn't the burden to educate on the employer who needs the labor? It used to be, back before we made students pay for several degrees with no employment in sight. Now, it is all the fault of the individual. The corporations are just looking for honest work here, right? ;) We all just got used to being blamed if we could not fully fund faux-careers for our LinkedIn profiles a decade before any real employment emerged for us. If these bootcamps are actually filling such a great need in the industry, why should the students pay? I get why people pay for Harvard: the connections!! (but...is even Harvard free now if you can't pay?- so there's even that too, for Harvard!) Those law students get wined and dined for free and multiple offers from great jobs without even asking, much less "applying". This is NOT the case with these bootcamps, no matter what they claim. They are all struggling to get these junior devs decent work. Their meager "connections" got used up with their first crop of students, and now the ladders have been pulled up after them. Sure, there are a very very few exceptions, as always. If a school aims to teach, they should be able to keep enrollment low, and they should be able to teach anyone from zero with an interest serious enough that they drop out of society to do it for several months of their life. Because employers would pay big money for that service, just like they do for Harvard grads. BUT THEY DON'T. Instead, they seek those who could already do it without their help, and they seek payment from them too, thereby getting the benefit of looking like they "helped" an actual ivy league grad get a job, when it was more that that grad helped them look good. I wrote a more detailed response to A CIRR.org representative on the shorter of the threads about Dev Bootcamp's recent closing, if you are interested in a deeper analysis on what these bootcamps "did wrong", or are doing wrong. Here is the link to my response to "ewisesg" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14773016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14773016
rmason 9y ago
Knew two people who worked at their Detroit campus. If I'm remembering correctly they had more jobs lined up than students. Now Detroit isn't even listed on their website, yet it only opened in 2015. This filled a real need in Detroit and it saddens me.
- chao- 9y ago
  >This filled a real need in Detroit and it saddens me. The same is true for Houston. I'm about to hire an Iron Yard graduate for a junior dev position, and if I had the budget to more people, one of the other top candidates was also an Iron Yard grad.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    If you'd like you could send me that dev's info (also in Houston)
omarjmh 9y ago
Another one bites the dust
microcolonel 9y ago
There are a great number of excellent reasons not to be in Detroit, as a business or an individual. The taxes are outrageous, the government is corrupt, the people who could afford to leave have all but left, the infrastructure is even worse than you'd expect given the ratio of revenue to services. 90% of murders go completely unresolved. That is, out of every ten people killed, and there are a lot, the perpetrators in nine of those murders will likely walk completely free. I don't know how anyone gets by, except perhaps in the gated communities, and in the communities which have organized more closely despite the odds. Even there, the shallow/immediate opportunities are effectively gone. You truly can not expect many with another option to choose Detroit as it stands. My family on my mother's side grew up there, and it seems it's really breaking their heart to see it today. My mother holds on to hope that the artists will somehow "save" Detroit, which could be somewhat true. I'm of the opinion that nothing will save Detroit until it is so bad that the politicians no longer get anything for their corruption and excess.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  The burbs seem "fine", and crimes get solved. I could see living in the burbs and not minding it too much. I wouldn't live in the city limits, but I wouldn't live in NYC either..
  - detroit1234 9y ago
    You've never tried to take I-75 into the city or back to the suburbs during rush hour, have you? The burbs are fine if you like that and paying way too much money for a tiny apartment or house, sure.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      No idea, I just went to visit. I would way rather live in Chicago if I wanted a midwest city with bad weather. I am just saying that it isn't ALL a barren wasteland. You can live in the Detroit metro area and have an OKish life.
- detroit1234 9y ago
brightball 9y ago
They were a staple of the community in Greenville, SC. This news was a shock all around.
- bschwindHN 9y ago
  I was surprised by this as well, when I think of Greenville and tech startup-ish companies, I think of the The Iron Yard. Are there any other companies around with that sort of strong presence? I haven't lived in Greenville for two years now but I've had thoughts of moving back there.
  - Valien 9y ago
    ChartSpan and eRad are 2 'startups' in the area growing relatively fast and blend tech and healthcare. Other than that it's a lot of smaller groups. Lot of automotive and Windstream, GE, Fluor, INFOR have strong dev presence here as well.
    - brightball 9y ago
      Don't forget Benefit Focus. They have office in Greenville and Charleston (HQ), have been growing like crazy and went public a couple years back. That company is doing really well and can't seem to hire people fast enough.
      - Akkuma 9y ago
        Benefit Focus from everyone I've known who has worked there pre-public said the company is absolutely terrible to work for from the engineering department perspective.
        bschwindHN 9y ago
        I worked there for two years. Loved the people there, but the engineering definitely wasn't great. Imagine a Java application that started in 2000 and hasn't really had any significant rewrites and is now too big to change. They run a good business and offer a lot of value to companies who use their product, but the engineering was definitely tough in the not-so-fun way due to the sheer amount of legacy code.
adamzerner 9y ago
Dev Bootcamp just shut down also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364.
amcooper 9y ago
Maybe the truly surprising thing about The Iron Yard is that they were able to run so many campuses in third tier markets for as long as they did.
aryehof 9y ago
What is the root cause for the decision to end this business? Insufficient income? Costs too high? Cash flow issues - unsustainable inflows vs outflows? Mismanagement or something else?
- swyx 9y ago
  bizarre that this basic question was left unanswered. Any one of the above would have given some satisfaction to the many people who have a vested interest in Iron Yard/the success of coding bootcamps in general
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    The successful model would have to be one that turned out grads who beat out Stanford grads for jobs. That means it would have to be constantly improving and changing at a blistering speed. In the end, this means that the successful model has to be run by true visionaries who see a solution they can sustain over time. It won't look like a huge scale money-making venture that anyone can hop in on with VC money.
    - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
      more of a luxury model, and less of an every-person solution to the college debt and job crisis
- nashashmi 9y ago
  So according to the numerous comments below asking the relatively similar question, it was difficult to run the business, partially because good teachers are hard to find and partly because the program is intense on the student and lastly because the money to run such operations is unsustainable in the long run. There is a business model that works but the industry is still in an exploratory phase in trying to discover it.
  - aryehof 9y ago
    > There is a business model that works but the industry is still in an exploratory phase in trying to discover it. Industry business model? The cynic in me says that there is still interest in how to best extract money from the growing flood of people interested in programming as a job.
Unbeliever69 9y ago
I am going to go out on a limb here and say it has nothing to do with the code school business model but instead by the for-profit colleges that bought both the Iron Yard and Dev School (which shut down recently). It is my belief that for-profit schools (in these cases Apollo Group and Kaplan Test Prep) have looked at code schools as potential cash cows devoid of the complications of both federal financial aid and the gainful employment entanglements associated with the "type" of students that typical for-profits schools attract. While for-profits seemed like a perfect fit for acquiring code schools (and I'm sure led to handsome paydays for the founders), these businesses brought bloat, inefficiencies, and baggage that could not operate in the fast-paced and nimble environments they bought into. I can't speak for these two code schools but I heard from a reliable first-hand source that when Dev Mountain was bought out by Capella Education, the founders "checked out." What checked in was a bureaucracy that was more concerned about asses-in-seats than providing a bleeding-edge, entrepreneurial-driven education. If you look at the reviews of Dev Mountain by recent students there is no doubt whatsoever that this is what happened. Is this possibly what befell Iron Yard and Dev School? I can't say. What I can say from decades is that when you sell out to a for-profit school, you are very well dancing with the devil.
- vyrotek 9y ago
  I know some of the guys at DM pretty well and I don't think they've "Checked Out". Which DM reviews are you talking about? These seem to tell a different story. https://www.coursereport.com/schools/devmountain https://www.coursereport.com/schools/devmountain
- jrichards 9y ago
  I was one of the original advisory board members of DevMountain (and father of one of the three founders). I also run an entrepreneur bootcamp in Utah, where DevMountain is located. This assertion about the founders of DevMountain "checking out" is unfounded. Sure, they are now wealthier than they were and have security and may seem more at ease (a natural occurrence after an exit), but they take their continuing roles seriously. Only one of the three to date has "retired" (about 8 months after the acquisition) and the other two (including my son) are still there working every day. Capella has been pleased with them. Also, just 10 minutes ago I heard about some exciting things being worked on and arranged by the founders -- innovative approaches to the industry. These two founders are still the top two leaders in the DevMountain subsidiary of Capella. They continue to innovate in the areas of coding bootcamp curriculum development, student success, marketing, and much more. As a side note, Capella has been a great acquirer, basically leaving DevMountain as it was, only adding some financial clout and general oversight, leaving the original DevMountain CEO in that position with nearly full discretion over the enterprise.
kennydude 9y ago
This is the first I've heard of them, and having colleges/universities dedicated to teaching coding is impressive, and hearing positive things out of it.
CivilianZero 9y ago
I can tell you all without a doubt, The Iron Yard closing has nothing to do with its performance. Someone bought somebody else and the new people in charge just don't want to spend the money. That's all. Unfortunately there's nothing to be learned about code-bootcamps from this. I can tell you, however, as someone who recently completed TIY and now has a better job than any of my college-completing friends have, going through TIY was the best decision I ever made. And you can safely ignore anyone who dismisses the level or quality of what you learn at TIY. I learned how to code and I learned how to continue to learn how to code. That's more than I can say for any of my other learning experiences which were almost completely focused on "passing".
- brightball 9y ago
  I went to one of their showcase events where the students show projects and bring resumes to meet potential employers. The amount of progress the students made from "never done this before" to show day was really impressive.
  - CivilianZero 9y ago
    Yeah, only one person in my 8 person class had ever done any coding before. It would've taken me significantly longer than 3 months to get to that point and I don't know if I ever would've understood as much as I do now.
- bradwestfall 9y ago
  I'll have to respectfully disagree. I'll tell you apart of the story you haven't heard about. I was a founding person in a bootcamp that Apollo actually started (not bought) in Phoenix. Apollo started us two years before buying Iron yard. We were successful and well respected in Arizona and Apollo was very hands off with us letting us run as if we were a startup. Apollo decided to buy a bootcamp (Iron Yard) because Apollo has such crappy relationships with "department of education's" in every state that they could never grow us into other states like California which is where we were looking to go. So buying one that was already in other states was a good idea (they thought.) So even though our parent company bought another camp, it didn't feel to us that we were acquiring them, we were basically told that TIY was going to absorb us as they saw fit. In that process we were treated pretty poorly by TIY -- basically like we didn't matter. The Iron Yard was going to open up a camp in Phoenix (and planning to piggyback on our success), but they treated us so poorly that nobody wanted to help them anymore and they had basically zero support from our Alumni who didn't appreciate their lack of respect for our camp staff. Soon they canceled their expansion to Phoenix. One of our camp's managers went to go work directly for them though much earlier in the acquisition process and when I asked him why TIY doesn't care about our camp, his response was basically that TIY was ran so poorly internally that it wasn't personal, that it was a disaster over there in TIY. Soon he quit and went back to Apollo management. So, I would have to disagree, while Apollo does destroy many things, I'm fairly certain that the unwinding of TIY is their own doing (from a managerial standpoint). I have no doubt that they had good teachers thought who poured their hearts into the curriculum and students. So don't confuse my words for accusing TIY of having poor curriculum or teaching.
b34r 9y ago
Never heard of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
matthiasak 9y ago
Ex TIY employee here. I only left the place because I wanted to go back to developing fulltime. As someone who worked with the instructors and campuses, the global team, and taught for years at The Iron Yard, I can tell you the team -- especially the campus teams -- were largely the right mix of talent - great engineers that cared about communicating well and respecting folks from all walks of life. With that said, after the investment rounds some things definitely began to take shape: 1. The global staff slowly became more and more steps removed from the daily convo's of the instructors and campus directors 2. There were regional managers and others who were brand new to the business; the company hired mostly from outside to bring in management team and half of them never ran a local campus first (to me their credentials from prior positions didn't always matter). They should have hired all mgmt from within, as they sadly did not mirror the culture of the campus teams. 3. There's such a plethora of schools out there now competing for the same customer-base. The Iron Yard spent a LOT of time, effort, and money making some of the best curriculum I've ever seen - including its own platform for distributing content, videos, running live-editable code blocks of any language on Docker instances on the fly, and homework and review features for staff. But a lot of places competed on price and still operated without approval from state education boards or meeting any national standards. 4. Instructors needed a change of pace, as they are constant learners too. Any churn and change of staff usually meant that "If it wasn't documented, then the lessons were not learned in-full for the next employee". So, I definitely saw some campuses run into trouble because when a veteran employee left (no upward movement for them, etc because there was already too much mgmt in-place) the impact was quite hard. I loved the team, but ultimately a few miscalculated moves and operational/strategic retries burned the candle at both ends faster than the mgmt expected.

127 points by huntermeyer 9y ago

Flammy 9y ago

The comments are pretty heart warming and show they definitely got something right.

oddevan 9y ago
I didn't have the chance to take their classes (timing for Cohort Zero in 2013 was just a LITTLE bit off), but all the people I knew involved were passionate about giving a quality education and moving the industry forward. I had no hesitations recommending them over other for-profit schools. And that's not even getting into how well they sponsored the local tech scene. Cheers to everyone involved with this, and I hope you all land on your feet.
christophilus 9y ago
I was an instructor there for 2 cohorts. It was probably the hardest I ever worked. The same was true for my fellow instructors. We were/are senior engineers who took the job for reasons other than money (it was a pay cut for me). We wanted to contribute back. A few students had pretty bad experiences, I think. It was a very demanding program. Several times, I had full-grown adults break down and cry during our 1:1s. But over all, the majority of students thrived. It was life-changing-- in a good way-- for most of them, and that's why I and my fellow instructors were there. It was one of the most meaningful periods of my career. I wouldn't go back and undo any of it, but I also won't be teaching at a code-bootcamp again. I'd consider a slower-paced program such as a university, tech school or high-school, though.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Question: if the pay was such that you weren't taking a pay cut, would that have made you stay longer? What would the conditions have to be like for someone who's a senior engineer to even consider making "a career change" into teaching swe for the next 10 years of their career, rather than a 2 year moonlighting stint? (Wondering what the setup had to be too make this sustainable)
  - bphogan 9y ago
    I don't know about the original poster, but I'd have stayed teaching full time if I could have afforded it. But I was literally making half of what my students were making after a couple of years in industry. Another thing to think about is this: Just cos you know SWE really well doesn't mean you have the ability to teach it to others. Not everyone "gets" things quickly, or will understand your explanations on the first attempt, so you must be patient. Not everyone learns the same way, nor do they have the same educational experiences, so you must be kind. And not everyone has a great home life, and has a ton of distractions that prevent them from learning, so you must be empathetic. Finally, not everyone loves to code - they just want the dollars that come from a job and will do whatever it takes to get there, including lie, cheat, and do the bare minimum, so you must be firm and strong to avoid burning out and thinking they're all terrible lazy students. There are people who can do this. But they're rare. And even rarer when they see the low paychecks offered.
    - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
      It is too bad that these bootcamps can't find a way to invest real money in excellent teachers. A few of these teachers are great. The teachers are the core of the business, just like they are in a university. We all know what has happened to salaries there. I think if bootcamps and colleges keep paying teachers like they are worth less than one of the jillion dollar Vitra sofas these schools are furnished with, they deserve to fail hard. (nice sofas though) Perhaps this is one of the key areas of failure in the model? Just a suggestion. Most of these teachers really stink. These bootcamps value youth or a let's call it a"certain look" over teaching experience and teaching innovation and creative teaching techniques. They also hire a lot of sadly unqualified grads of their programs who are confused when current students submit apps that are slightly more complicated than what they are used to seeing. They have no idea how to reach out to a diverse array (no pun intended) of students, because they are usually the "tell me what to do - I just follow orders" type of student/employee themselves who are all too keen to buy into the positivity consensus so enthusiastically promoted by these bootcamps. I hope you can teach where you are appreciated one day.
  - christophilus 9y ago
- bphogan 9y ago
  I taught at a traditional institution and had the same experiences you did. Although I had to leave because I lost confidence in the institution. I think you'd find the same challenges in a slower-paced program, to be honest - there's plenty to do. While I only spent 4 hours a day in the classroom, I spent the rest of it either grading, revising lessons to keep things fresh, or grading assessments. The most time consuming part was providing meaningful feedback. Sure I could've phoned it in, but nobody likes getting a grade without feedback. And nobody learns from it either. Despite the hours, it was worth it tho. I love hearing from my former students. There are times when I wish I was still doing it. When you care like you and I do, you put your whole self into helping people make a better life for themselves learning to do what you already love to do, you'll take the low pay and the stress because it outweighs the negative. The sad thing is that people who run a lot of these places know that, so they can get away with paying you a lot less than you'd make if you stayed in dev.
  - christophilus 9y ago
    Thanks for that perspective. I wonder if there's a better way to go about teaching? It sounds like the current model for both code-schools and universities is pretty crappy for the teachers. What can be done to improve this, do you think?
    - bphogan 9y ago
      I have many many thoughts on what model would work. Sorry if this gets ranty... I believe that the models that will be successful are models where there is curriculum designed to be done asynchronously, with ample time for practice and repetition to build skills, followed by assessment and feedback. You do not need a classroom for this. A wise man once told me that a good teacher is not the sage on the stage, they are the guide on the side. And that's what adults need. They don't need to all sit in a room together being held back cos one person doesn't understand it. Lecture and talking and demos can all be done online on Youtube. Or you make a web site, write some content and make some videos, give some practice problems with unit tests that tell the student if they got them right. Easy peasy. Nobody's time is wasted. The third part is the part that doesn't scale - you need people to provide coaching and feedback. And you need one on one time to discuss feedback, options, choices, etc.\ Think about this: If I tell you to make me a five page web site with a contact form, appropriate color scheme, valid semantic markup, clean CSS, appropriate color scheme, and content, then I have to do the following: 1. Develop lessons to give you the information on how to do these things 2. Give you ample opportunities and time to practice and excel at these things individually 3. Give you detailed feedback on your practice so you can practice more 4. Give you the time to do the assessment well 5. Review your work and give you detailed feedback on it so you learn. Notice that I start with an end in mind, then work it out to get you to be successful - I don't just start teaching you a bunch of stuff and then make up some test... it's all planned out. So the curriculum design takes time and planning. It's an art and science of its own and we learn new things about how people learn all the time. But a small group of folks can take the time to put curriculum together. There are people who study this for a living. They're not subject matter experts though, so you kinda do need both. But notice all the places where there's review and feedback. That's the part that doesn't scale. That takes time. It takes a LONG time to give good, detailed feedback to a learner so they can improve. Your job isn't to fail them - it's to make sure they're successful - if they do their part and you do yours, they will be. (Obviously if you only put an hour into this final project there won't be much for me to give feedback on, so the learner has to put in the effort too) But you are their guide on the side, not the keeper of all knowledge that they must appease. So to find people who are caring individuals who can be these instructors, who can help people understand the curriculum, who can coach them through the process, who can meet with them... that doesn't scale. People will need to be compensated for this. With benefits so they don't have to worry about their own well-being as well as their students'. But if you can figure out a way to scale this and finance it, it would work well. I interviewed for and was offered a position at a bootcamp that had a model very similar to this, but they were doing a commission-based salary based on number of students that chose you as their coach, so it was too risky for me. I hear they changed their model tho and are doing well. Hopefully more places will catch on. Bottom line - good curriculum designed with outcomes in mind from the start, with everything aligned, is a good start. But learning happens through practice and feedback - I don't care how many times you read the book or watch the Pluralsight videos - you won't learn it till you practice it, do challenges someone else offers you, and internalize the feedback they give you once you're done. Ah well... this got super ranty and I'm tired. I hope it makes sense. You can email me if you want to chat about this more. I'd be happy to do that.
- trowawee 9y ago
  Thank you for teaching. I'm a Dev Bootcamp grad from 2014; people like you, who took on that challenge, completely changed my life for the better.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  > A few students had pretty bad experiences, I think. It was a very demanding program. Several times, I had full-grown adults break down and cry during our 1:1s. I think we could all learn a lot from their failures. Is there anything about their experience that could help you predict who would make an ill-suited applicant? Or some helpful advice on how folks should be prepared to approach the program ("you should expect to put in X hrs per day over the next 180 days if you want to be successful")?
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    Is the issue the applicants? With all due respect, in terms of effective practice, the sheer number of hours put in has nothing, well not "nothing", but a lot less to do with it than the quality and type of hours spent. One needs a lot of the effective type of hour. It is about what one practices, the repetition, the evaluation of one's mistakes, and the fixing of these mistakes. And then the doing it correctly at least 22 more times. In a row. But mainly, it is the doing, with very short bursts of targeted critique at regular and frequent intervals delivered by a master who can help you learn to spot these pitfalls sooner than you would yourself. Respectfully, a lot of time can be wasted in a shortened educational model like a bootcamp for code with extraneous stuff as a part of the "firehose" method of teaching, which has become a beloved buzzword in the industry. The science on effective practice for efficient skill acquisition is not new. http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... That isn't to say that students should not prepare to put in hours. But schools should prepare to make the very most of a few hours. I don't know about TIY or Dev Mountain, but I do know that several of the schools in NYC have not yet revised their curricula to optimize the hours spent. Getting better students doesn't help ineffective curricula. The school's job is to teach those who are willing to set aside time and money. When one wrangles ineffective curricula or online teaching materials that behave wonkily and waste one's time because they malfunction constantly, those are precious minutes one could have spent in effective practice. The students also need teachers and advocates who blame themselves first if effective learning isn't occurring. They need schools who blame themselves first if they aren't getting work. As a student, I'd be reluctant to spend money at a school that didn't blame itself for its own outcomes failures. The thing is, students can't hear about the outcomes failures as much as they should because no one on the student side (the non-moneymaking side of it) can afford to be honest; they are the victims of this, especially once they have spent money. This is why I'm trying to help with that here. "Review sites" (not to name any names) are often just glorified advertising services. (literally handled by the marketing departments of these coding schools) I know this because I have been on both sides of this- inside the school and out. But since we are talking about failures that cause closings of schools here, and since so many will be seeing this page, I think it is time we talk about these issues honestly. The victors will be the schools who take responsibility for their own failures. They will be those who are brave enough to invite anonymous critique they can't control. (not "independently verified" claims of their success metrics they can control by virtue of what they measure and who is doing the verifying, and how much detail they go into in these metrics, and how much they get to leave out of that whole story- which is a lot, by the way.)
- Akkuma 9y ago
  Hey Chris, give me a call, this is your mother. Ok not really your mother, since I doubt your mother's beard is as luxurious as my own, but we need a call to catch up.

jaboutboul 9y ago

Anyone care to shed some light on what precipitated this?

throwaway7645 9y ago
I'd like to know this too. Their prices are very high, so maybe the demand subsided?
- smt88 9y ago
  It seemed to be a gold rush. Too many schools opened, crowding the market and driving prices down. I've personally been swamped in bootcamp graduates' resumes, even though my listing specifically says "5+ years experience". That tells me that they're desperate and bulk-applying. I've also heard this anecdote from others -- totally swamped by bootcamp grads. It's a free market, and the demand for bootcamp grads is now lower than the supply. That's exactly what you'd expect, isn't it?
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    Makes sense. Thank you.
patio11 9y ago
Can I make a comment which is not specific about this school, to which I have no connection, or to coding bootcamps? For-profit education is a regulated industry in the United States and is experiencing significant adversarial attention at the moment, as a result of widespread looting of federal tuition assistance programs, to the tune of billions of dollars. Can I name a Greek god who has non-zero relevance to this story? Apollo.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  Why Apollo? I got this from Wikipedia: "...Apollo was also seen as a god who could bring ill-health and deadly plague." In that case...I see your point.

keyle 9y ago

Shouldn't place like these be growing instead of closing down? What did they get wrong? The demand for qualified developers isn't slowing afaik.

brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
There is no demand for qualified developers, only a demand for cheap, skilled labor. If there were a demand, these coding schools would not have such a devil of a time getting decent jobs for their grads.(and they do- just talk to some honest, recent grads-- it will be tough to find honest ones who are unemployed/underemployed on a public forum, if you know what I mean.) Why, if there is such a great demand, isn't the burden to educate on the employer who needs the labor? It used to be, back before we made students pay for several degrees with no employment in sight. Now, it is all the fault of the individual. The corporations are just looking for honest work here, right? ;) We all just got used to being blamed if we could not fully fund faux-careers for our LinkedIn profiles a decade before any real employment emerged for us. If these bootcamps are actually filling such a great need in the industry, why should the students pay? I get why people pay for Harvard: the connections!! (but...is even Harvard free now if you can't pay?- so there's even that too, for Harvard!) Those law students get wined and dined for free and multiple offers from great jobs without even asking, much less "applying". This is NOT the case with these bootcamps, no matter what they claim. They are all struggling to get these junior devs decent work. Their meager "connections" got used up with their first crop of students, and now the ladders have been pulled up after them. Sure, there are a very very few exceptions, as always. If a school aims to teach, they should be able to keep enrollment low, and they should be able to teach anyone from zero with an interest serious enough that they drop out of society to do it for several months of their life. Because employers would pay big money for that service, just like they do for Harvard grads. BUT THEY DON'T. Instead, they seek those who could already do it without their help, and they seek payment from them too, thereby getting the benefit of looking like they "helped" an actual ivy league grad get a job, when it was more that that grad helped them look good. I wrote a more detailed response to A CIRR.org representative on the shorter of the threads about Dev Bootcamp's recent closing, if you are interested in a deeper analysis on what these bootcamps "did wrong", or are doing wrong. Here is the link to my response to "ewisesg" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14773016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14773016

rmason 9y ago

Knew two people who worked at their Detroit campus. If I'm remembering correctly they had more jobs lined up than students. Now Detroit isn't even listed on their website, yet it only opened in 2015. This filled a real need in Detroit and it saddens me.

chao- 9y ago
>This filled a real need in Detroit and it saddens me. The same is true for Houston. I'm about to hire an Iron Yard graduate for a junior dev position, and if I had the budget to more people, one of the other top candidates was also an Iron Yard grad.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  If you'd like you could send me that dev's info (also in Houston)

omarjmh 9y ago

Another one bites the dust

microcolonel 9y ago

There are a great number of excellent reasons not to be in Detroit, as a business or an individual. The taxes are outrageous, the government is corrupt, the people who could afford to leave have all but left, the infrastructure is even worse than you'd expect given the ratio of revenue to services. 90% of murders go completely unresolved. That is, out of every ten people killed, and there are a lot, the perpetrators in nine of those murders will likely walk completely free. I don't know how anyone gets by, except perhaps in the gated communities, and in the communities which have organized more closely despite the odds. Even there, the shallow/immediate opportunities are effectively gone. You truly can not expect many with another option to choose Detroit as it stands. My family on my mother's side grew up there, and it seems it's really breaking their heart to see it today. My mother holds on to hope that the artists will somehow "save" Detroit, which could be somewhat true. I'm of the opinion that nothing will save Detroit until it is so bad that the politicians no longer get anything for their corruption and excess.

brianwawok 9y ago
The burbs seem "fine", and crimes get solved. I could see living in the burbs and not minding it too much. I wouldn't live in the city limits, but I wouldn't live in NYC either..
- detroit1234 9y ago
  You've never tried to take I-75 into the city or back to the suburbs during rush hour, have you? The burbs are fine if you like that and paying way too much money for a tiny apartment or house, sure.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    No idea, I just went to visit. I would way rather live in Chicago if I wanted a midwest city with bad weather. I am just saying that it isn't ALL a barren wasteland. You can live in the Detroit metro area and have an OKish life.
detroit1234 9y ago

brightball 9y ago

They were a staple of the community in Greenville, SC. This news was a shock all around.

bschwindHN 9y ago
I was surprised by this as well, when I think of Greenville and tech startup-ish companies, I think of the The Iron Yard. Are there any other companies around with that sort of strong presence? I haven't lived in Greenville for two years now but I've had thoughts of moving back there.
- Valien 9y ago
  ChartSpan and eRad are 2 'startups' in the area growing relatively fast and blend tech and healthcare. Other than that it's a lot of smaller groups. Lot of automotive and Windstream, GE, Fluor, INFOR have strong dev presence here as well.
  - brightball 9y ago
    Don't forget Benefit Focus. They have office in Greenville and Charleston (HQ), have been growing like crazy and went public a couple years back. That company is doing really well and can't seem to hire people fast enough.
    - Akkuma 9y ago
      Benefit Focus from everyone I've known who has worked there pre-public said the company is absolutely terrible to work for from the engineering department perspective.
      - bschwindHN 9y ago
        I worked there for two years. Loved the people there, but the engineering definitely wasn't great. Imagine a Java application that started in 2000 and hasn't really had any significant rewrites and is now too big to change. They run a good business and offer a lot of value to companies who use their product, but the engineering was definitely tough in the not-so-fun way due to the sheer amount of legacy code.

adamzerner 9y ago

Dev Bootcamp just shut down also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364.

amcooper 9y ago

Maybe the truly surprising thing about The Iron Yard is that they were able to run so many campuses in third tier markets for as long as they did.

aryehof 9y ago

What is the root cause for the decision to end this business? Insufficient income? Costs too high? Cash flow issues - unsustainable inflows vs outflows? Mismanagement or something else?

swyx 9y ago
bizarre that this basic question was left unanswered. Any one of the above would have given some satisfaction to the many people who have a vested interest in Iron Yard/the success of coding bootcamps in general
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  The successful model would have to be one that turned out grads who beat out Stanford grads for jobs. That means it would have to be constantly improving and changing at a blistering speed. In the end, this means that the successful model has to be run by true visionaries who see a solution they can sustain over time. It won't look like a huge scale money-making venture that anyone can hop in on with VC money.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    more of a luxury model, and less of an every-person solution to the college debt and job crisis
nashashmi 9y ago
So according to the numerous comments below asking the relatively similar question, it was difficult to run the business, partially because good teachers are hard to find and partly because the program is intense on the student and lastly because the money to run such operations is unsustainable in the long run. There is a business model that works but the industry is still in an exploratory phase in trying to discover it.
- aryehof 9y ago
  > There is a business model that works but the industry is still in an exploratory phase in trying to discover it. Industry business model? The cynic in me says that there is still interest in how to best extract money from the growing flood of people interested in programming as a job.

Unbeliever69 9y ago

I am going to go out on a limb here and say it has nothing to do with the code school business model but instead by the for-profit colleges that bought both the Iron Yard and Dev School (which shut down recently). It is my belief that for-profit schools (in these cases Apollo Group and Kaplan Test Prep) have looked at code schools as potential cash cows devoid of the complications of both federal financial aid and the gainful employment entanglements associated with the "type" of students that typical for-profits schools attract. While for-profits seemed like a perfect fit for acquiring code schools (and I'm sure led to handsome paydays for the founders), these businesses brought bloat, inefficiencies, and baggage that could not operate in the fast-paced and nimble environments they bought into. I can't speak for these two code schools but I heard from a reliable first-hand source that when Dev Mountain was bought out by Capella Education, the founders "checked out." What checked in was a bureaucracy that was more concerned about asses-in-seats than providing a bleeding-edge, entrepreneurial-driven education. If you look at the reviews of Dev Mountain by recent students there is no doubt whatsoever that this is what happened. Is this possibly what befell Iron Yard and Dev School? I can't say. What I can say from decades is that when you sell out to a for-profit school, you are very well dancing with the devil.

vyrotek 9y ago
I know some of the guys at DM pretty well and I don't think they've "Checked Out". Which DM reviews are you talking about? These seem to tell a different story. https://www.coursereport.com/schools/devmountain https://www.coursereport.com/schools/devmountain
jrichards 9y ago
I was one of the original advisory board members of DevMountain (and father of one of the three founders). I also run an entrepreneur bootcamp in Utah, where DevMountain is located. This assertion about the founders of DevMountain "checking out" is unfounded. Sure, they are now wealthier than they were and have security and may seem more at ease (a natural occurrence after an exit), but they take their continuing roles seriously. Only one of the three to date has "retired" (about 8 months after the acquisition) and the other two (including my son) are still there working every day. Capella has been pleased with them. Also, just 10 minutes ago I heard about some exciting things being worked on and arranged by the founders -- innovative approaches to the industry. These two founders are still the top two leaders in the DevMountain subsidiary of Capella. They continue to innovate in the areas of coding bootcamp curriculum development, student success, marketing, and much more. As a side note, Capella has been a great acquirer, basically leaving DevMountain as it was, only adding some financial clout and general oversight, leaving the original DevMountain CEO in that position with nearly full discretion over the enterprise.

kennydude 9y ago

This is the first I've heard of them, and having colleges/universities dedicated to teaching coding is impressive, and hearing positive things out of it.

CivilianZero 9y ago

I can tell you all without a doubt, The Iron Yard closing has nothing to do with its performance. Someone bought somebody else and the new people in charge just don't want to spend the money. That's all. Unfortunately there's nothing to be learned about code-bootcamps from this. I can tell you, however, as someone who recently completed TIY and now has a better job than any of my college-completing friends have, going through TIY was the best decision I ever made. And you can safely ignore anyone who dismisses the level or quality of what you learn at TIY. I learned how to code and I learned how to continue to learn how to code. That's more than I can say for any of my other learning experiences which were almost completely focused on "passing".

brightball 9y ago
I went to one of their showcase events where the students show projects and bring resumes to meet potential employers. The amount of progress the students made from "never done this before" to show day was really impressive.
- CivilianZero 9y ago
  Yeah, only one person in my 8 person class had ever done any coding before. It would've taken me significantly longer than 3 months to get to that point and I don't know if I ever would've understood as much as I do now.
bradwestfall 9y ago
I'll have to respectfully disagree. I'll tell you apart of the story you haven't heard about. I was a founding person in a bootcamp that Apollo actually started (not bought) in Phoenix. Apollo started us two years before buying Iron yard. We were successful and well respected in Arizona and Apollo was very hands off with us letting us run as if we were a startup. Apollo decided to buy a bootcamp (Iron Yard) because Apollo has such crappy relationships with "department of education's" in every state that they could never grow us into other states like California which is where we were looking to go. So buying one that was already in other states was a good idea (they thought.) So even though our parent company bought another camp, it didn't feel to us that we were acquiring them, we were basically told that TIY was going to absorb us as they saw fit. In that process we were treated pretty poorly by TIY -- basically like we didn't matter. The Iron Yard was going to open up a camp in Phoenix (and planning to piggyback on our success), but they treated us so poorly that nobody wanted to help them anymore and they had basically zero support from our Alumni who didn't appreciate their lack of respect for our camp staff. Soon they canceled their expansion to Phoenix. One of our camp's managers went to go work directly for them though much earlier in the acquisition process and when I asked him why TIY doesn't care about our camp, his response was basically that TIY was ran so poorly internally that it wasn't personal, that it was a disaster over there in TIY. Soon he quit and went back to Apollo management. So, I would have to disagree, while Apollo does destroy many things, I'm fairly certain that the unwinding of TIY is their own doing (from a managerial standpoint). I have no doubt that they had good teachers thought who poured their hearts into the curriculum and students. So don't confuse my words for accusing TIY of having poor curriculum or teaching.

b34r 9y ago

Never heard of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

matthiasak 9y ago

Ex TIY employee here. I only left the place because I wanted to go back to developing fulltime. As someone who worked with the instructors and campuses, the global team, and taught for years at The Iron Yard, I can tell you the team -- especially the campus teams -- were largely the right mix of talent - great engineers that cared about communicating well and respecting folks from all walks of life. With that said, after the investment rounds some things definitely began to take shape: 1. The global staff slowly became more and more steps removed from the daily convo's of the instructors and campus directors 2. There were regional managers and others who were brand new to the business; the company hired mostly from outside to bring in management team and half of them never ran a local campus first (to me their credentials from prior positions didn't always matter). They should have hired all mgmt from within, as they sadly did not mirror the culture of the campus teams. 3. There's such a plethora of schools out there now competing for the same customer-base. The Iron Yard spent a LOT of time, effort, and money making some of the best curriculum I've ever seen - including its own platform for distributing content, videos, running live-editable code blocks of any language on Docker instances on the fly, and homework and review features for staff. But a lot of places competed on price and still operated without approval from state education boards or meeting any national standards. 4. Instructors needed a change of pace, as they are constant learners too. Any churn and change of staff usually meant that "If it wasn't documented, then the lessons were not learned in-full for the next employee". So, I definitely saw some campuses run into trouble because when a veteran employee left (no upward movement for them, etc because there was already too much mgmt in-place) the impact was quite hard. I loved the team, but ultimately a few miscalculated moves and operational/strategic retries burned the candle at both ends faster than the mgmt expected.