8 ms·

Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

133 points by imartin2k 9y ago

wolco 9y ago
Because those who can learn under those conditions can easily learn the material for free and many have before attending. What they use a bootcamp for is a bridge into a career. People are finding other less costly ways into the job market. The bootcamps of the future will focus on either the experienced developers wanting to learn a new language/skill quickly. The structure will be like an extended conference where everyone attends presentations and gets excited for a few days and then everyone goes home. This will be followed up with an online course teaching the basics that will allow everyone to work at there own pace. A few tests and assignments will assign grades. A hackton will be planned where everyone will build a product using there new skills. Teams will be assigned based on grades to make things fair.
- austenallred 9y ago
  I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, especially when there are so many different ways to learn and a million different paths to take. One of the most important parts of bootcamps, in my mind, is that all of the curriculum is there, in the right order, and on a set schedule. When I taught myself to program I probably spent 80% of my time finding the right resources and understanding what I should be learning and 20% of my time learning. I think it takes a pretty special person to self-teach when you don't know what you don't know.
  - throwaway91111 9y ago
    It's difficult to make an argument for bootcamps, though, when they won't teach you most of what you'd need to know either. The curriculum is typically focused around a single tech stack (many teach Mongo for unfathomable reasons), leaving students ill prepared for the workforce. Debugging? How to sort a lidt efficiently? What is a hash? All of these are arguably critical to understanding simple, common code; you'd be lucky to make it through a year as a junior dev without being fired if all the skills you have come from a bootcamp. Of course, Galvanize et all just hire their own grads to inflate the post-graduation job placement stat. So maybe it's not necessary to know anything outside the course to get a job!
    - adzz 9y ago
      Classic internet. The argument for bootcamps is easy! It costs a FRACTION of a college degree, takes a fraction of the time, and almost guarantees you a job. "you'd be lucky to make it through a year as a junior dev without being fired if all the skills you have come from a bootcamp" LOL. I know literally hundreds of people who have done just that, and it aint luck. There is tons in a comp sci degree that you don't need to know right away to be an effective working programmer. And lots of bootcamps do teach "How to sort a lidt(sic) efficiently". It's a little hard to generalise because bootcamps vary in quality - like anything - but they give you a good structured introduction to lots of relevant material and the tools to keep learning as you go.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      You have a point. Here's the problem the bootcamps will start to run into: They're teaching as much as they can in twelve weeks, but lengthening the program increases the cost dramatically. Why Mongo? Because they're already using JS so they don't have to teach two languages (no time), and mongo is super easy to pick up. They'll learn other stuff on the job. Why aren't they teaching how to debug and what a hash is? Well we have to choose between that and understanding what a database is, so you take your pick. They would love to have classes be six months or a year, but then they'd have to double their prices (eliminating a lot of the demand) and people would have to support themselves with no pay for twice as long (eliminating most of the rest of it). It's hard enough finding people to take 12 weeks off and pay $10k, and now we need to charge $20k for six months? No one can afford that, what we have now works well enough. In order to do something longer and more thorough/in-depth you'd probably have to start with a fundamentally different business model.
      - gkop 9y ago
        Longer programs would also compete with flexible programs from traditional institutions. For example, Mills College's MA in Interdisciplinary Computer Science [0]. The traditional institutions arguably have large advantages in accreditation, financial aid, quality control, social status, signaling, and branding. [0] https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/computer-science/ma-interdisciplinary-computer-science.php https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/computer-s...
  - jasode 9y ago
    >I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, I wanted to give some counterpoint to that. The point is not to argue with you because you clearly felt that it was "difficult" so by extension, it makes sense to project the learning obstacles out the world so we know they are there. You felt there were hurdles and that's all in the past so we can't argue with what you felt. (Hopefully, the above was said with enough empathy to not sound critical because one has to be open-minded about the following observation...) There are others[1] who think that the discipline for self-teaching is the baseline skill for average computer programmers and that attending "coding bootcamps" is a negative signal. I believe the thinking is... if one requires coding bootcamps to learn Javascript/Ruby/Mongo, it doesn't instill confidence in the hiring manager that the person will be able to learn new topics on-the-job that will be more difficult, with an undefined curriculum, under tighter deadlines. If people still want to say "fuck off" to the types of people that look down on coding bootcamps, that's fine as long you're aware that the hiring prejudices are out there and you have consciously chosen to ignore those companies. [1] examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7600307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7600307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732885
    - austenallred 9y ago
      My point was not that the material itself was difficult to learn, but that knowing which direction to go in, or knowing what material to learn, was the more difficult part.
      - jasode 9y ago
        >, but that knowing which direction to go in But the coding bootcamp's curriculum and sequencing isn't necessarily superior. It could be as arbitrary or suboptimal as any low-rated 1-star book on Amazon. A curious programmer would actually be skeptical that the bootcamp has the proven syllabus for learning. Therefore, find a 5-star book on Javascript/Ruby on Amazon, and start with Ch 1. What evidence (not marketing materials) would the novice programmer see that makes the coding bootcamp's sequencing superior to that?
  - gkop 9y ago
    What era was it when you are learning? Now we have excellent community-developed free and open resources like https://www.theodinproject.com https://www.theodinproject.com .
    - austenallred 9y ago
      Years ago. It probably has changed to some degree. But for example, what you just linked - that's a great resource, but it still doesn't get you very far; you'd have to jump from there to somewhere else to learn what a bootcamp would teach.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    There will always be some types that are naturally inclined towards development. I learned on my own, no college degree, in the late 90's, when there was no Stack Overflow or Github. I lived in a tiny town, so there wasn't a local Barnes and Noble or the like. I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a developer. They may remain hired, an eternal junior programmer, and as long as they're surrounded by seniors they'll make commits on a daily basis. They'll become the "one year of experience ten times" as they get on in their career. Succeeding as a developer really requires a knack of learning to learn and independent problem solving. It's okay to not be at the upper level; we always need assembly line programmers. However, all of the marketing on bootcamps lumps everyone together, and doesn't tell the true story: there may not be enough assembly line programming jobs to go around.
    - pm24601 9y ago
      Hmmm..... > I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a developer. I disagree. Lets try this shall we: "I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a " ... doctor ... pilot ... nurse ... electrician ... architect I am not willing to accept a self-taught brain surgeon.
      - bdcravens 9y ago
        Nor would I. There's a reason why we're talking about this on HACKER News. Every field you mentioned is a licensed profession, in an industry surrounded by regulations and inspections. Every one of those fields involves the health or safety of other people. Programming is a pretty wide open field, without regulation and highly prescribed ways of performing the work. It feels extremely disingenuous to compare a brain surgeon to someone building Uber for Skateboards and deciding whether to use Redux or observables.
        throwawayxyz709 9y ago
        Maybe that's why brain surgery is a successful, reputable field and we're stuck with shit like Uber for Skateboards and Redux..
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    I learned by picking up a book on development. Its curriculum was right there, laid out in the correct order and I could work on it at my own pace. These books still exist. But today there are also guided sites like code academy that do a great job at providing elementary resources for learning to program (though, I generally find the pace to be a bit glacial).
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
I think the biggest factor causing these bootcamps to go out of business was stated in the article: there is no IT worker shortage. The fact that most of the people attending those bootcamps already held Bachelors degrees strongly implies that. If there was a real worker shortage, employers would be hiring people without degrees and have them do the best they can. I think bootcamps arose as a result of an industry-wide PR move to give the illusion of a worker shortage, done in an effort to push more people into the tech industry and increase the labor pool significantly, thus pushing wage growth below inflation. With the labor market finally actually tightening, and with the PR move not working as well as was hoped, people are starting to see that the virtue signalling offered by bootcamps aren't as necessary as they thought.
- troupe 9y ago
  > If there was a real worker shortage, employers would be hiring people without degrees and have them do the best they can. Doesn't this kind of assume that even someone with very little skill can add value to a company as a software developer? It might be possible that below a certain skill level, they would make things worse instead of better.
- barrkel 9y ago
  There's lots of work for people with skills. Worker shortage under one perspective is a logical impossibility - it just means salaries are too low - but from the other side, there's plenty of things that could be automated that aren't because salaries are too high, hence a shortage. This is all aside from the difficulty of grading devs to establish different salary levels, of course. I personally don't think my salary is too high ;-)
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    > but from the other side, there's plenty of things that could be automated that aren't because salaries are too high, hence a shortage. That just means there's a market opportunity out there to build a tool that helps accomplish this. The majority of companies in the world could not afford to write and in-house version of Quicken, but they have no problem paying a few grand a year in licensing fees for it.
deleted 9y ago
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tptacek 9y ago
A 250k Haskell programming job in SFBA is prima facie evidence of a "skills gap". The law of supply and demand says that's how you evaluate an inadequate number of available programmers. It's facile to suggest there's an adequate labor supply because employers can acquire developers simply by paying 5x the national median income. I would suggest instead that we focus on two other problems with bootcamps, one mentioned in the article and one not: * As the article suggests, bootcamps are probably not as effective at placing graduates as they'd like us to believe. There is a stigma to bootcamps, which is telling, because there's no such stigma for self-taught programmers. That may be because bootcamps aren't effective, or it may be because of correctable market inefficiencies that someone will make money arbitraging out. I'd guess it's a little of both. * It's probably not easy to staff a bootcamp. They don't pay instructors particularly well. If you can effectively train 70% of a cohort of students well enough to secure professional employment, there's a lot of other stuff you can do in this field. To make the business work, bootcamps have to balance the willingness of students to pay with the salary demands of instructors, while retaining enough to grow. Maybe that's just hard to do.
- kevingadd 9y ago
  If I were thinking about working as an instructor at a bootcamp, low placement rates would probably discourage me from doing it - the last thing I want is to participate in a training program that cons jobseekers out of money, even if the salary is good.
  - HillaryBriss 9y ago
    amen to that. i took a look at one of those teacher gigs and couldn't believe how much they were charging the students. it seemed like i would be participating in a scam.
  - icantdrive55 9y ago
    I have found when it comes to money, and career; 95% just go along with the flow. "Hay--its legal?" (I got my first dose of reality in Chiropractic School. It was obviously placebo, but placebo was just not talked about. Selling out is so common. I'm not talking the cute TV version on of selling out, but the real people who con the uninformed, and vulnerable out of their money daily. There's a lot of denial in so many professions.)
barns-n-moguls 9y ago
If the skills gap/demand for 'coders' is correlated with the closing of two 'coding bootcamps' closing; does the author of this post also assume that some spontaneous, profound event will reverse our current trajectory? That h1b and other visa abuse by primarily tech companies will be permitted to continue, perhaps even expand? Will the direction of 'america first' soon make a 180 as well, perhaps the cost of outsourcing IT/programming will be reduced by imminent unprecedented legislation? While I understand that the majority of our greatest thinkers can attribute the University of Phoenix to their sudden rise from obscurity, is their any sort of data available displaying how well they educate their students? I have seen far too many students graduate from university with computer science degree, with little to no understanding of the real world, or anything other than the concepts required to learn to program with java(exaggeration), but I can only imagine what sort of education another 'for-profit university' provides all the kids who want to become cool, hip, programmers and make 250k for browsing reddit remotely. My guess is they spend most of their time/money figuring out how to locate and market to unemployed/underemployed Americans with access to student loans, and little certainty or direction in their lives; while spending zero time coming up with a metric via quiz/survey to determine good candidates for programming jobs, as that would likely reduce profits for said for-profit university. I don't know much about these bootcamps, but I'm sure some of them do great things, however, I don't think the author of this post considered any of the likely relevant factors to the conclusion they are drawing about a possible trend here. Quality front page nothingburger rambling.
austenallred 9y ago
There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to start. First, to say there's no skills gap is insanity. I refuse to believe anyone in the industry actually believes that - even the worst bootcamps are placing folks, they just place folks that are not well prepared and shift the burden of training to the company. I'm constantly blown away that some of those people get jobs, and they somehow keep them, as the companies just start training from almost scratch. That really sucks, and a lot of companies are (rightly) wary of that, and a lot of companies throw bootcamp resumes straight in the trash can, but there are enough that won't that it doesn't matter. Don't get me wrong, most of the skills gap is for capable engineers, and if you understand data structures, algorithms, architecture, memory management, etc. you'll get a job very quickly. We're talking within a week. But most bootcamp grads don't know any of that stuff, so the market is flooded with junior rails devs. (And even those folks still slowly get OK jobs). There are audited, standardized reports from an organization called CIRR. Look at them - you'll see 90%+ placement rates, audited and from third parties. Granted there are a lot of lies on the home pages of bootcamp grad websites, but the perception HN has is much worse than reality at the good bootcamps. I know the internal financials of quite a few bootcamps, and most are making a killing. It's really not hard to make money by charging $10,000/head so long as you keep demand. Iron Yard got out ahead of its skis and tried to open 16 locations at once. I have no idea what happened to Dev Bootcamp but the only way they could be losing money is if their expenses were absurd. They were bought for $80 million. I think the most likely scenario is the acquirer tried to change things up and killed everything.
- ellius 9y ago
  Is there a good way to learn those skills at a professional level outside of a university setting? I feel like I've taught myself a sufficient amount of front end, back end, ops (Docker, IaC etc), but I'm at a loss for how to test my ability with algorithms and data structures, memory management, etc. I've picked up some books, but I don't have a good way to measure my ability or demonstrate it to employers.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    The free way is of course with books (http://teachyourselfcs.com http://teachyourselfcs.com is a good guide), but if you're looking for a school you could do something like bradfield or something like https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science (disclosure - I'm a cofounder of Lambda School). As far as demonstrating it to employers, that comes down to the interviewing process, which is in and of itself pretty broken, but they'll probably just ask you a lot of contrived questions about that stuff.
brightball 9y ago
I got the impression that The Iron Yard shut down because the company who acquired them made them. Everything else seemed to indicate that they were doing great.
pjdemers 9y ago
People are realizing that even though coding pays well, it's not a job for everyone. We hired 4 people out of boot camps. All had a decent level of skill (of course they did, we choose the 4 we liked out of dozens available). However after a few weeks, two of them left, saying: "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades". And they went back to their old jobs and old pay.
- trentmb 9y ago
  > "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades" Not a bootcamp grad, but I just hit my two year mark a couple weeks ago and want to blow my brains out. Writing internal web applications is the most mind numbing thing ever. It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work. The real issue is that I have no idea what field I'd pivot into.
  - david-gpu 9y ago
    If it's mind-numbing, can it be automated? Can you use higher-level tools to build them and reduce the repetitive parts?
    - everybodyknows 9y ago
      If only there were the right high-level tool -- an android with an engineers face! It could attend the pointless meetings, and answer QA's trivial questions, the same over and over. Then I could have stayed on at FANGcorp.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - SeeDave 9y ago
    You may enjoy a product manager, technical program manager, or business analyst role more. Not sure what city you're in, but there are plenty of courses at Galvanize! Good luck and please do not blow your brains out!
  - 9y ago
ryanmarsh 9y ago
"than there are people looking to pay, on average, $11,000 for 12 weeks of intensive training" ...able to pay $11,000 and not work full time for 12 weeks FTFY There isn’t really much evidence of a “skills gap” Except that hiring is nearly everyone's biggest problem in tech and, you know, that whole crazy H1B thing. Companies and Gov't job programs should be paying for dev schools not poor people. If they did it would all work out fine. As a matter of fact Iron Yard's corporate dev boot camp has been the profitable part of the business for some time. I'm flabbergasted by this article. I'm not going to waste the time to reply to every one of the ridiculous assertions. America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market. Dev boot camps can and do get people to work. Many people in the position of needing a dev boot camp can't afford to go without work and pay for it at the same time (or at all).
- acdha 9y ago
  > America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market. Outside of a few hotspots like SF, do offered wages really back that up? It's good being a developer but it certainly doesn't look like a desperate shortage.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    In metro Boston area, we're paying new college grads $100K to start and sometimes losing on comp. We're not "desperate", but for the overall market wage for new college grads to be 1.5x the state median household income, that smells like shortage to me.
    - nilkn 9y ago
      The state median household income includes high school dropouts working at McDonald's, and it includes folks living in very affordable rural areas with low wages. It's not a meaningful point of comparison when you're looking at a subset of workers who are highly educated and seeking jobs in a technically demanding field at companies located in almost exclusively expensive metro areas. To add to that, the Massachusetts median household income is nearly $70k. And in Boston? It's almost $80k. Moreover, the median family income in Boston is $100k. http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/massachusetts/boston/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/massachusetts/boston/
lisa_henderson 9y ago
Great teachers are expensive. This needs to be emphasized more. Even if there is strong demand for the dev bootcamps, the bootcamps still have to hire great teachers. The teachers are highly experienced developers, the kind of people who could be making something between $120,000 to $160,000. So the schools face some very high expenses. A comparison might be made to retail. Sometimes you'll see a store that is very busy, full of customers, and then it goes out of business. Why did it fail when it was so busy? Often the reason is that the landlord raised the rent. High costs can kill an otherwise good business idea.
- arcanus 9y ago
  What is the average boot camp instructor salary?
brudgers 9y ago
The two examples in the article were owned by large educational conglomerates: Apollo and Kaplan. They are clearer examples of big companies end of lifeing a product than examples of the Bootcamp market. Since the salary a skilled and experienced developer can make in the current job market does not really align with University of Phoenix's adjunct pay scale and tuition rates, it is hard to see how a Bootcamp could generate similar rates of return to UoP's accredited college degree programs. UoP has a widget making process via the sharing economy similar to Uber's. The analogy might be if Uber recruited professional race car drivers for a service claiming to get riders to the airport faster. Both Kaplan and Apollo have a different economic model than many bootcamps. Many bootcamps generate significant revenue from job placement in addition to or in lieu of tuition. Currently, the sweet spot of bootcamps looks like it might be outsourcing on the job training more than as traditional private business schools. Over the long run, programming will be better suited to the private business school model as programmers become common in small businesses in the way bookkeepers are.
telecuda 9y ago
As a neighbor and local supporter of Iron Yard Tampa Bay (St. Petersburg FL), losing our growing economy's only code school was a big letdown this week. In my experience, admittedly Iron Yard graduates were often too green to join our small engineering team (and we don't utilize .NET or Ruby). I'd like to say we have better training and mentorship for junior devs, but we don't yet. However, when we listed an iOS position, it was The Iron Yard's campus director who spread our ad through their national network. She found an Atlanta Iron Yard graduate who spent two years at a large company, receiving on the job training that now qualified her for our role. The Iron Yard St. Pete was meaningful in that it provided a starting point for people in our area to make a career change and offered a meeting place for tech (located in the same building as our co-working space). The closure for us here locally is less about losing a code school and more about losing an anchor in our developing startup ecosystem.
mcguire 9y ago
Parts of this sound like exactly what I was worried about when I first heard of the boot camps. An expensive training program producing a very limited skill set isn't really a sustainable model. Coupling that with the for-profit schools and an investment environment looking for a big payout, this just sounds like a train wreck.
baron816 9y ago
The article makes good points, but the author, nor anyone here really knows why they're going out of business, or even if it's a systemic thing. The industry is becoming more mature and competitive. It's inevitable that at this stage, some firms will fail and there will be consolidation. I know plenty of people who were able to get great jobs right after graduating from a bootcamp and quickly become valuable members of their teams. Do bootcamps adequately prepare people to work as software engineers? No, but neither do most CS programs. I think the more pernicious problem they pose to their graduates is that they flood the hiring market will low quality talent. They don't do a good job of screening who will be any good, and just push them through their programs without ensuring that they know the material. At the same time, employers aren't focusing on the things that really matter to them in the interview process. Making someone write a contrived algorithm on a whiteboard in under 30 minutes doesn't tell anyone anything. I get that companies need to search for a signal in all of the noise bootcamps are putting out, but they need a better way of doing that.
blfr 9y ago
Teaching people in general isn't a very good business. Even the lauded head start programs that last much longer than boot camps and target kids (so they have both much more potential influence and more time to recoup the costs) achieve meagre results if any. In fact, there are reasons to believe that human capital is mostly what you're born with plus (or maybe it's more of a multiplier) the accumulated achievements of your predecessors with very little input from organized education. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.... http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...
eliben 9y ago
Economics 101 - because there are too many of them? There was demand; with demand, supply found its way into the market. As often happens, supply then overshot demand which led to lowered prices which led to shrinkage of supply. ... none of this will prevent a "Why are new coding bootcamps springing up like mushrooms after rain" piece of journalism appearing in a few weeks...
cribbles 9y ago
They aren't. Two specific coding bootcamps that 1) had been acquired by for-profit education conglomerates and 2) underwent relatively rapid expansion into second and third tier tech markets went out of business. As evidence of a larger trend, this article cites a single quote from the CEO of "a private lender and an alternative accreditor for the fast-growing boot camp sector." This is unpersuasive.
JoshMnem 9y ago
Many bootcamps are terrible and promise things that aren't possible. (People generally can't learn how to code professionally in 12 weeks.) The bootcamps that tend to deliver do so because they only accept people who already have put significant work into programming before they start the bootcamp. I organize a programming club in Berkeley that meets twice per week (over 4,000 members on meetup.com), so I meet a lot of people who go through various bootcamps. I think that I could help demonstrate how to fix many of the problems with the entire bootcamp model, if we could obtain funding for opening a physical space in Berkeley. I've been doing it for over three years and have a pretty good idea about how to find people who will succeed, without limiting opportunities or even charging a lot of money.
timwaagh 9y ago
Those prices are too high. I dont think anyone has these amounts lying around unless they already have good jobs (and hence do not need this). These programs should compromise on immersion and cost about $2000 for three months.
- wishinghand 9y ago
  I don't think someone able to teach the basics of programming would want to settle for $6,666.67 a month(assuming a class size of ten). That's also assuming they had no gaps or dropouts between classes. Sure, in your example it's no longer immersive but: 1. Immersion is what gets even the weaker programmers through. Non-immersion will drop the placement rate greatly. 2. There's still a lot of prep work so the teacher will still basically be a full time teacher. And that's assuming a one person operation. They'll need someone for advertising, outreach to local companies, and their own technical needs.
bsg75 9y ago
Because becoming a developer, like any other discipline, is much more than than just learning to use tools (as quickly as possible). Its probably that employers and students alike are starting to realize that expensive crash courses are often not the best investment.
Animats 9y ago
The demographics indicate that coding bootcamps are mostly retraining people who already educated and giving them a new set of specific skills. That's a good thing. Jobs change, and people have to learn new skills from time to time.
learc83 9y ago
The best bootcamps (in terms of placement rates with SV companies) are equivalent to 12 week long interviews that the interviewee pays for. They screen for people who already know a good bit, and are really good at interviewing in general. Then they put those people through an intensive 3 month long coding interview and place the people who make it through. The problem with this business model is that there is a small supply of people that are capable of making it through, are willing/able to pay $10k+ to do it, and are willing/able to go 3 months without pay. It's a joke to think that Joe JobChanger is really going to pick up all the skills and knowledge he needs to get a job at Google in 3 months. Professional programmers with years of experience regularly spend that long just practicing white board problems to get try to get a job at Google. The amount of students who can do that is just too small to build an industry around.
CM30 9y ago
Maybe because too many people got into the business and completely saturated the market with coding bootcamps. I mean, maybe I'm wrong here, but I get the impression most people running these things didn't really do it because they were passionate about the field or knew how to run a teaching business, but because it was seen as a quick way to make extra cash. There are just too many of the bloody things, and it's a pain to compete in the field as a result. Just look at how many this site seems to list for example: https://www.coursereport.com https://www.coursereport.com 426 schools listed there alone. And that's likely just the more promoted/credible ones. It's like any type of business really. The more popularity a trend gets, the more competition there is, the more people who don't know what they're doing get involved and the more businesses/sites go out of business. It's happened to web hosts, to mobile app developers, to people trying to run social networking sites and marketing blogs alike. The fact they're offering a service facing competition from both real world schools/colleges and online help sites probably isn't helping their chances either.
wishinghand 9y ago
> Google’s director of education echoed this sentiment: “Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry.” No shit? Of course 12 week programs won't help anyone get into Google. None of them advertise that. They're all web development or app development curriculums. Google is an aspirational position that requires a brilliant graduate with some great internship experience.
- learc83 9y ago
  >None of them advertise that. App Academy does. They list Google on their home page. They do seem to place some people with Google, but from what I've learned looking into them though, I think it has more to do with selection than training. To me, it seems like top bootcamps are 3 month long interviews that the interviewee pays for.

133 points by imartin2k 9y ago

Because those who can learn under those conditions can easily learn the material for free and many have before attending. What they use a bootcamp for is a bridge into a career. People are finding other less costly ways into the job market. The bootcamps of the future will focus on either the experienced developers wanting to learn a new language/skill quickly. The structure will be like an extended conference where everyone attends presentations and gets excited for a few days and then everyone goes home. This will be followed up with an online course teaching the basics that will allow everyone to work at there own pace. A few tests and assignments will assign grades. A hackton will be planned where everyone will build a product using there new skills. Teams will be assigned based on grades to make things fair.

austenallred 9y ago
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, especially when there are so many different ways to learn and a million different paths to take. One of the most important parts of bootcamps, in my mind, is that all of the curriculum is there, in the right order, and on a set schedule. When I taught myself to program I probably spent 80% of my time finding the right resources and understanding what I should be learning and 20% of my time learning. I think it takes a pretty special person to self-teach when you don't know what you don't know.
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  It's difficult to make an argument for bootcamps, though, when they won't teach you most of what you'd need to know either. The curriculum is typically focused around a single tech stack (many teach Mongo for unfathomable reasons), leaving students ill prepared for the workforce. Debugging? How to sort a lidt efficiently? What is a hash? All of these are arguably critical to understanding simple, common code; you'd be lucky to make it through a year as a junior dev without being fired if all the skills you have come from a bootcamp. Of course, Galvanize et all just hire their own grads to inflate the post-graduation job placement stat. So maybe it's not necessary to know anything outside the course to get a job!
  - adzz 9y ago
    Classic internet. The argument for bootcamps is easy! It costs a FRACTION of a college degree, takes a fraction of the time, and almost guarantees you a job. "you'd be lucky to make it through a year as a junior dev without being fired if all the skills you have come from a bootcamp" LOL. I know literally hundreds of people who have done just that, and it aint luck. There is tons in a comp sci degree that you don't need to know right away to be an effective working programmer. And lots of bootcamps do teach "How to sort a lidt(sic) efficiently". It's a little hard to generalise because bootcamps vary in quality - like anything - but they give you a good structured introduction to lots of relevant material and the tools to keep learning as you go.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    You have a point. Here's the problem the bootcamps will start to run into: They're teaching as much as they can in twelve weeks, but lengthening the program increases the cost dramatically. Why Mongo? Because they're already using JS so they don't have to teach two languages (no time), and mongo is super easy to pick up. They'll learn other stuff on the job. Why aren't they teaching how to debug and what a hash is? Well we have to choose between that and understanding what a database is, so you take your pick. They would love to have classes be six months or a year, but then they'd have to double their prices (eliminating a lot of the demand) and people would have to support themselves with no pay for twice as long (eliminating most of the rest of it). It's hard enough finding people to take 12 weeks off and pay $10k, and now we need to charge $20k for six months? No one can afford that, what we have now works well enough. In order to do something longer and more thorough/in-depth you'd probably have to start with a fundamentally different business model.
    - gkop 9y ago
      Longer programs would also compete with flexible programs from traditional institutions. For example, Mills College's MA in Interdisciplinary Computer Science [0]. The traditional institutions arguably have large advantages in accreditation, financial aid, quality control, social status, signaling, and branding. [0] https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/computer-science/ma-interdisciplinary-computer-science.php https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/computer-s...
- jasode 9y ago
  >I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, I wanted to give some counterpoint to that. The point is not to argue with you because you clearly felt that it was "difficult" so by extension, it makes sense to project the learning obstacles out the world so we know they are there. You felt there were hurdles and that's all in the past so we can't argue with what you felt. (Hopefully, the above was said with enough empathy to not sound critical because one has to be open-minded about the following observation...) There are others[1] who think that the discipline for self-teaching is the baseline skill for average computer programmers and that attending "coding bootcamps" is a negative signal. I believe the thinking is... if one requires coding bootcamps to learn Javascript/Ruby/Mongo, it doesn't instill confidence in the hiring manager that the person will be able to learn new topics on-the-job that will be more difficult, with an undefined curriculum, under tighter deadlines. If people still want to say "fuck off" to the types of people that look down on coding bootcamps, that's fine as long you're aware that the hiring prejudices are out there and you have consciously chosen to ignore those companies. [1] examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7600307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7600307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732885
  - austenallred 9y ago
    My point was not that the material itself was difficult to learn, but that knowing which direction to go in, or knowing what material to learn, was the more difficult part.
    - jasode 9y ago
      >, but that knowing which direction to go in But the coding bootcamp's curriculum and sequencing isn't necessarily superior. It could be as arbitrary or suboptimal as any low-rated 1-star book on Amazon. A curious programmer would actually be skeptical that the bootcamp has the proven syllabus for learning. Therefore, find a 5-star book on Javascript/Ruby on Amazon, and start with Ch 1. What evidence (not marketing materials) would the novice programmer see that makes the coding bootcamp's sequencing superior to that?
- gkop 9y ago
  What era was it when you are learning? Now we have excellent community-developed free and open resources like https://www.theodinproject.com https://www.theodinproject.com .
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Years ago. It probably has changed to some degree. But for example, what you just linked - that's a great resource, but it still doesn't get you very far; you'd have to jump from there to somewhere else to learn what a bootcamp would teach.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  There will always be some types that are naturally inclined towards development. I learned on my own, no college degree, in the late 90's, when there was no Stack Overflow or Github. I lived in a tiny town, so there wasn't a local Barnes and Noble or the like. I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a developer. They may remain hired, an eternal junior programmer, and as long as they're surrounded by seniors they'll make commits on a daily basis. They'll become the "one year of experience ten times" as they get on in their career. Succeeding as a developer really requires a knack of learning to learn and independent problem solving. It's okay to not be at the upper level; we always need assembly line programmers. However, all of the marketing on bootcamps lumps everyone together, and doesn't tell the true story: there may not be enough assembly line programming jobs to go around.
  - pm24601 9y ago
    Hmmm..... > I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a developer. I disagree. Lets try this shall we: "I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a " ... doctor ... pilot ... nurse ... electrician ... architect I am not willing to accept a self-taught brain surgeon.
    - bdcravens 9y ago
      Nor would I. There's a reason why we're talking about this on HACKER News. Every field you mentioned is a licensed profession, in an industry surrounded by regulations and inspections. Every one of those fields involves the health or safety of other people. Programming is a pretty wide open field, without regulation and highly prescribed ways of performing the work. It feels extremely disingenuous to compare a brain surgeon to someone building Uber for Skateboards and deciding whether to use Redux or observables.
      - throwawayxyz709 9y ago
        Maybe that's why brain surgery is a successful, reputable field and we're stuck with shit like Uber for Skateboards and Redux..
- mywittyname 9y ago
  I learned by picking up a book on development. Its curriculum was right there, laid out in the correct order and I could work on it at my own pace. These books still exist. But today there are also guided sites like code academy that do a great job at providing elementary resources for learning to program (though, I generally find the pace to be a bit glacial).

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

I think the biggest factor causing these bootcamps to go out of business was stated in the article: there is no IT worker shortage. The fact that most of the people attending those bootcamps already held Bachelors degrees strongly implies that. If there was a real worker shortage, employers would be hiring people without degrees and have them do the best they can. I think bootcamps arose as a result of an industry-wide PR move to give the illusion of a worker shortage, done in an effort to push more people into the tech industry and increase the labor pool significantly, thus pushing wage growth below inflation. With the labor market finally actually tightening, and with the PR move not working as well as was hoped, people are starting to see that the virtue signalling offered by bootcamps aren't as necessary as they thought.

troupe 9y ago
> If there was a real worker shortage, employers would be hiring people without degrees and have them do the best they can. Doesn't this kind of assume that even someone with very little skill can add value to a company as a software developer? It might be possible that below a certain skill level, they would make things worse instead of better.
barrkel 9y ago
There's lots of work for people with skills. Worker shortage under one perspective is a logical impossibility - it just means salaries are too low - but from the other side, there's plenty of things that could be automated that aren't because salaries are too high, hence a shortage. This is all aside from the difficulty of grading devs to establish different salary levels, of course. I personally don't think my salary is too high ;-)
- mywittyname 9y ago
  > but from the other side, there's plenty of things that could be automated that aren't because salaries are too high, hence a shortage. That just means there's a market opportunity out there to build a tool that helps accomplish this. The majority of companies in the world could not afford to write and in-house version of Quicken, but they have no problem paying a few grand a year in licensing fees for it.

deleted 9y ago

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tptacek 9y ago

A 250k Haskell programming job in SFBA is prima facie evidence of a "skills gap". The law of supply and demand says that's how you evaluate an inadequate number of available programmers. It's facile to suggest there's an adequate labor supply because employers can acquire developers simply by paying 5x the national median income. I would suggest instead that we focus on two other problems with bootcamps, one mentioned in the article and one not: * As the article suggests, bootcamps are probably not as effective at placing graduates as they'd like us to believe. There is a stigma to bootcamps, which is telling, because there's no such stigma for self-taught programmers. That may be because bootcamps aren't effective, or it may be because of correctable market inefficiencies that someone will make money arbitraging out. I'd guess it's a little of both. * It's probably not easy to staff a bootcamp. They don't pay instructors particularly well. If you can effectively train 70% of a cohort of students well enough to secure professional employment, there's a lot of other stuff you can do in this field. To make the business work, bootcamps have to balance the willingness of students to pay with the salary demands of instructors, while retaining enough to grow. Maybe that's just hard to do.

kevingadd 9y ago
If I were thinking about working as an instructor at a bootcamp, low placement rates would probably discourage me from doing it - the last thing I want is to participate in a training program that cons jobseekers out of money, even if the salary is good.
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  amen to that. i took a look at one of those teacher gigs and couldn't believe how much they were charging the students. it seemed like i would be participating in a scam.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  I have found when it comes to money, and career; 95% just go along with the flow. "Hay--its legal?" (I got my first dose of reality in Chiropractic School. It was obviously placebo, but placebo was just not talked about. Selling out is so common. I'm not talking the cute TV version on of selling out, but the real people who con the uninformed, and vulnerable out of their money daily. There's a lot of denial in so many professions.)

barns-n-moguls 9y ago

If the skills gap/demand for 'coders' is correlated with the closing of two 'coding bootcamps' closing; does the author of this post also assume that some spontaneous, profound event will reverse our current trajectory? That h1b and other visa abuse by primarily tech companies will be permitted to continue, perhaps even expand? Will the direction of 'america first' soon make a 180 as well, perhaps the cost of outsourcing IT/programming will be reduced by imminent unprecedented legislation? While I understand that the majority of our greatest thinkers can attribute the University of Phoenix to their sudden rise from obscurity, is their any sort of data available displaying how well they educate their students? I have seen far too many students graduate from university with computer science degree, with little to no understanding of the real world, or anything other than the concepts required to learn to program with java(exaggeration), but I can only imagine what sort of education another 'for-profit university' provides all the kids who want to become cool, hip, programmers and make 250k for browsing reddit remotely. My guess is they spend most of their time/money figuring out how to locate and market to unemployed/underemployed Americans with access to student loans, and little certainty or direction in their lives; while spending zero time coming up with a metric via quiz/survey to determine good candidates for programming jobs, as that would likely reduce profits for said for-profit university. I don't know much about these bootcamps, but I'm sure some of them do great things, however, I don't think the author of this post considered any of the likely relevant factors to the conclusion they are drawing about a possible trend here. Quality front page nothingburger rambling.

austenallred 9y ago

There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to start. First, to say there's no skills gap is insanity. I refuse to believe anyone in the industry actually believes that - even the worst bootcamps are placing folks, they just place folks that are not well prepared and shift the burden of training to the company. I'm constantly blown away that some of those people get jobs, and they somehow keep them, as the companies just start training from almost scratch. That really sucks, and a lot of companies are (rightly) wary of that, and a lot of companies throw bootcamp resumes straight in the trash can, but there are enough that won't that it doesn't matter. Don't get me wrong, most of the skills gap is for capable engineers, and if you understand data structures, algorithms, architecture, memory management, etc. you'll get a job very quickly. We're talking within a week. But most bootcamp grads don't know any of that stuff, so the market is flooded with junior rails devs. (And even those folks still slowly get OK jobs). There are audited, standardized reports from an organization called CIRR. Look at them - you'll see 90%+ placement rates, audited and from third parties. Granted there are a lot of lies on the home pages of bootcamp grad websites, but the perception HN has is much worse than reality at the good bootcamps. I know the internal financials of quite a few bootcamps, and most are making a killing. It's really not hard to make money by charging $10,000/head so long as you keep demand. Iron Yard got out ahead of its skis and tried to open 16 locations at once. I have no idea what happened to Dev Bootcamp but the only way they could be losing money is if their expenses were absurd. They were bought for $80 million. I think the most likely scenario is the acquirer tried to change things up and killed everything.

ellius 9y ago
Is there a good way to learn those skills at a professional level outside of a university setting? I feel like I've taught myself a sufficient amount of front end, back end, ops (Docker, IaC etc), but I'm at a loss for how to test my ability with algorithms and data structures, memory management, etc. I've picked up some books, but I don't have a good way to measure my ability or demonstrate it to employers.
- austenallred 9y ago
  The free way is of course with books (http://teachyourselfcs.com http://teachyourselfcs.com is a good guide), but if you're looking for a school you could do something like bradfield or something like https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science (disclosure - I'm a cofounder of Lambda School). As far as demonstrating it to employers, that comes down to the interviewing process, which is in and of itself pretty broken, but they'll probably just ask you a lot of contrived questions about that stuff.

brightball 9y ago

I got the impression that The Iron Yard shut down because the company who acquired them made them. Everything else seemed to indicate that they were doing great.

pjdemers 9y ago

People are realizing that even though coding pays well, it's not a job for everyone. We hired 4 people out of boot camps. All had a decent level of skill (of course they did, we choose the 4 we liked out of dozens available). However after a few weeks, two of them left, saying: "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades". And they went back to their old jobs and old pay.

trentmb 9y ago
> "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades" Not a bootcamp grad, but I just hit my two year mark a couple weeks ago and want to blow my brains out. Writing internal web applications is the most mind numbing thing ever. It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work. The real issue is that I have no idea what field I'd pivot into.
- david-gpu 9y ago
  If it's mind-numbing, can it be automated? Can you use higher-level tools to build them and reduce the repetitive parts?
  - everybodyknows 9y ago
    If only there were the right high-level tool -- an android with an engineers face! It could attend the pointless meetings, and answer QA's trivial questions, the same over and over. Then I could have stayed on at FANGcorp.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- SeeDave 9y ago
  You may enjoy a product manager, technical program manager, or business analyst role more. Not sure what city you're in, but there are plenty of courses at Galvanize! Good luck and please do not blow your brains out!
- 9y ago

ryanmarsh 9y ago

"than there are people looking to pay, on average, $11,000 for 12 weeks of intensive training" ...able to pay $11,000 and not work full time for 12 weeks FTFY There isn’t really much evidence of a “skills gap” Except that hiring is nearly everyone's biggest problem in tech and, you know, that whole crazy H1B thing. Companies and Gov't job programs should be paying for dev schools not poor people. If they did it would all work out fine. As a matter of fact Iron Yard's corporate dev boot camp has been the profitable part of the business for some time. I'm flabbergasted by this article. I'm not going to waste the time to reply to every one of the ridiculous assertions. America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market. Dev boot camps can and do get people to work. Many people in the position of needing a dev boot camp can't afford to go without work and pay for it at the same time (or at all).

acdha 9y ago
> America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market. Outside of a few hotspots like SF, do offered wages really back that up? It's good being a developer but it certainly doesn't look like a desperate shortage.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  In metro Boston area, we're paying new college grads $100K to start and sometimes losing on comp. We're not "desperate", but for the overall market wage for new college grads to be 1.5x the state median household income, that smells like shortage to me.
  - nilkn 9y ago
    The state median household income includes high school dropouts working at McDonald's, and it includes folks living in very affordable rural areas with low wages. It's not a meaningful point of comparison when you're looking at a subset of workers who are highly educated and seeking jobs in a technically demanding field at companies located in almost exclusively expensive metro areas. To add to that, the Massachusetts median household income is nearly $70k. And in Boston? It's almost $80k. Moreover, the median family income in Boston is $100k. http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/massachusetts/boston/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/massachusetts/boston/

lisa_henderson 9y ago

Great teachers are expensive. This needs to be emphasized more. Even if there is strong demand for the dev bootcamps, the bootcamps still have to hire great teachers. The teachers are highly experienced developers, the kind of people who could be making something between $120,000 to $160,000. So the schools face some very high expenses. A comparison might be made to retail. Sometimes you'll see a store that is very busy, full of customers, and then it goes out of business. Why did it fail when it was so busy? Often the reason is that the landlord raised the rent. High costs can kill an otherwise good business idea.

arcanus 9y ago
What is the average boot camp instructor salary?

brudgers 9y ago

The two examples in the article were owned by large educational conglomerates: Apollo and Kaplan. They are clearer examples of big companies end of lifeing a product than examples of the Bootcamp market. Since the salary a skilled and experienced developer can make in the current job market does not really align with University of Phoenix's adjunct pay scale and tuition rates, it is hard to see how a Bootcamp could generate similar rates of return to UoP's accredited college degree programs. UoP has a widget making process via the sharing economy similar to Uber's. The analogy might be if Uber recruited professional race car drivers for a service claiming to get riders to the airport faster. Both Kaplan and Apollo have a different economic model than many bootcamps. Many bootcamps generate significant revenue from job placement in addition to or in lieu of tuition. Currently, the sweet spot of bootcamps looks like it might be outsourcing on the job training more than as traditional private business schools. Over the long run, programming will be better suited to the private business school model as programmers become common in small businesses in the way bookkeepers are.

telecuda 9y ago

As a neighbor and local supporter of Iron Yard Tampa Bay (St. Petersburg FL), losing our growing economy's only code school was a big letdown this week. In my experience, admittedly Iron Yard graduates were often too green to join our small engineering team (and we don't utilize .NET or Ruby). I'd like to say we have better training and mentorship for junior devs, but we don't yet. However, when we listed an iOS position, it was The Iron Yard's campus director who spread our ad through their national network. She found an Atlanta Iron Yard graduate who spent two years at a large company, receiving on the job training that now qualified her for our role. The Iron Yard St. Pete was meaningful in that it provided a starting point for people in our area to make a career change and offered a meeting place for tech (located in the same building as our co-working space). The closure for us here locally is less about losing a code school and more about losing an anchor in our developing startup ecosystem.

mcguire 9y ago

Parts of this sound like exactly what I was worried about when I first heard of the boot camps. An expensive training program producing a very limited skill set isn't really a sustainable model. Coupling that with the for-profit schools and an investment environment looking for a big payout, this just sounds like a train wreck.

baron816 9y ago

The article makes good points, but the author, nor anyone here really knows why they're going out of business, or even if it's a systemic thing. The industry is becoming more mature and competitive. It's inevitable that at this stage, some firms will fail and there will be consolidation. I know plenty of people who were able to get great jobs right after graduating from a bootcamp and quickly become valuable members of their teams. Do bootcamps adequately prepare people to work as software engineers? No, but neither do most CS programs. I think the more pernicious problem they pose to their graduates is that they flood the hiring market will low quality talent. They don't do a good job of screening who will be any good, and just push them through their programs without ensuring that they know the material. At the same time, employers aren't focusing on the things that really matter to them in the interview process. Making someone write a contrived algorithm on a whiteboard in under 30 minutes doesn't tell anyone anything. I get that companies need to search for a signal in all of the noise bootcamps are putting out, but they need a better way of doing that.

blfr 9y ago

Teaching people in general isn't a very good business. Even the lauded head start programs that last much longer than boot camps and target kids (so they have both much more potential influence and more time to recoup the costs) achieve meagre results if any. In fact, there are reasons to believe that human capital is mostly what you're born with plus (or maybe it's more of a multiplier) the accumulated achievements of your predecessors with very little input from organized education. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.... http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...

eliben 9y ago

Economics 101 - because there are too many of them? There was demand; with demand, supply found its way into the market. As often happens, supply then overshot demand which led to lowered prices which led to shrinkage of supply. ... none of this will prevent a "Why are new coding bootcamps springing up like mushrooms after rain" piece of journalism appearing in a few weeks...

cribbles 9y ago

They aren't. Two specific coding bootcamps that 1) had been acquired by for-profit education conglomerates and 2) underwent relatively rapid expansion into second and third tier tech markets went out of business. As evidence of a larger trend, this article cites a single quote from the CEO of "a private lender and an alternative accreditor for the fast-growing boot camp sector." This is unpersuasive.

JoshMnem 9y ago

Many bootcamps are terrible and promise things that aren't possible. (People generally can't learn how to code professionally in 12 weeks.) The bootcamps that tend to deliver do so because they only accept people who already have put significant work into programming before they start the bootcamp. I organize a programming club in Berkeley that meets twice per week (over 4,000 members on meetup.com), so I meet a lot of people who go through various bootcamps. I think that I could help demonstrate how to fix many of the problems with the entire bootcamp model, if we could obtain funding for opening a physical space in Berkeley. I've been doing it for over three years and have a pretty good idea about how to find people who will succeed, without limiting opportunities or even charging a lot of money.

timwaagh 9y ago

Those prices are too high. I dont think anyone has these amounts lying around unless they already have good jobs (and hence do not need this). These programs should compromise on immersion and cost about $2000 for three months.

wishinghand 9y ago
I don't think someone able to teach the basics of programming would want to settle for $6,666.67 a month(assuming a class size of ten). That's also assuming they had no gaps or dropouts between classes. Sure, in your example it's no longer immersive but: 1. Immersion is what gets even the weaker programmers through. Non-immersion will drop the placement rate greatly. 2. There's still a lot of prep work so the teacher will still basically be a full time teacher. And that's assuming a one person operation. They'll need someone for advertising, outreach to local companies, and their own technical needs.

bsg75 9y ago

Because becoming a developer, like any other discipline, is much more than than just learning to use tools (as quickly as possible). Its probably that employers and students alike are starting to realize that expensive crash courses are often not the best investment.

Animats 9y ago

The demographics indicate that coding bootcamps are mostly retraining people who already educated and giving them a new set of specific skills. That's a good thing. Jobs change, and people have to learn new skills from time to time.

learc83 9y ago

The best bootcamps (in terms of placement rates with SV companies) are equivalent to 12 week long interviews that the interviewee pays for. They screen for people who already know a good bit, and are really good at interviewing in general. Then they put those people through an intensive 3 month long coding interview and place the people who make it through. The problem with this business model is that there is a small supply of people that are capable of making it through, are willing/able to pay $10k+ to do it, and are willing/able to go 3 months without pay. It's a joke to think that Joe JobChanger is really going to pick up all the skills and knowledge he needs to get a job at Google in 3 months. Professional programmers with years of experience regularly spend that long just practicing white board problems to get try to get a job at Google. The amount of students who can do that is just too small to build an industry around.

CM30 9y ago

Maybe because too many people got into the business and completely saturated the market with coding bootcamps. I mean, maybe I'm wrong here, but I get the impression most people running these things didn't really do it because they were passionate about the field or knew how to run a teaching business, but because it was seen as a quick way to make extra cash. There are just too many of the bloody things, and it's a pain to compete in the field as a result. Just look at how many this site seems to list for example: https://www.coursereport.com https://www.coursereport.com 426 schools listed there alone. And that's likely just the more promoted/credible ones. It's like any type of business really. The more popularity a trend gets, the more competition there is, the more people who don't know what they're doing get involved and the more businesses/sites go out of business. It's happened to web hosts, to mobile app developers, to people trying to run social networking sites and marketing blogs alike. The fact they're offering a service facing competition from both real world schools/colleges and online help sites probably isn't helping their chances either.

wishinghand 9y ago

> Google’s director of education echoed this sentiment: “Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry.” No shit? Of course 12 week programs won't help anyone get into Google. None of them advertise that. They're all web development or app development curriculums. Google is an aspirational position that requires a brilliant graduate with some great internship experience.

learc83 9y ago
>None of them advertise that. App Academy does. They list Google on their home page. They do seem to place some people with Google, but from what I've learned looking into them though, I think it has more to do with selection than training. To me, it seems like top bootcamps are 3 month long interviews that the interviewee pays for.