4 ms·

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 pe

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.
matwood 9y ago
> there is no IT worker shortage. There is no junior worker shortage. A bootcamp grad is competing with other bootcamp (100+ boot camps) grads, and people who just self started and got to coding. Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  "Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging. " Strangely finding a job is also quite challenging for senior people....
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    I think there's a market for lemons problem at play. Mid and senior developers who are effective at what they do are incredibly valuable and valued and therefore don't generally have to look via the main queue of job applicants. They often get retained well at their current place and are poached/referred more often than the average or ineffective developer. (This breaks down when a company suddenly closes or does a layoff so deep that it puts a lot of good people on the street.) The flip side of the very effective using a different mechanism is that the people in the main pool have a harder go of it, as hiring managers are used to seeing a parade of people who interview poorly (and therefore interview A LOT) or who join and fizzle out (and therefore job hunt A LOT).
  - matwood 9y ago
    > Strangely finding a job is also quite challenging for senior people.... Are we talking about senior experience or X years in profession? I often see seniors (and mid, but less pronounced) who learned a job and did basically the same job for many years. When it's time to find a new job, they are barely beyond junior skill wise. Senior people who kept learning through their career are incredibly valuable and rarely seem to ever hit the open market. They end up recruited/poached from existing jobs.
  - 9y ago
bogomipz 9y ago
>"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." The US economy may be moving towards full employment but that doesn't in any way mean that the tech sector is moving towards full employment. Tech is but one sector of the overall labor market. Tech along with health care are two segments of the economy that continue to add jobs faster than any other segment. See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/04/03/tech-jobs-thriving-nationwide----up-73m/99789502/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/04/03/t...
sokoloff 9y ago
Is there evidence that wage growth in the IT sector (or for programmers specifically) is below inflation? I don't see that at all personally (as an employee nor as a hiring manager).
- matwood 9y ago
  I agree with you, and keep trying to figure out where all the doom and gloom people are coming from working in IT. Maybe it's everyone in SF dealing with insane housing prices? Everywhere else, programmer salaries are some of the best in a given location and continuing to rise. Job openings are also on the rise.

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.

matwood 9y ago

> there is no IT worker shortage. There is no junior worker shortage. A bootcamp grad is competing with other bootcamp (100+ boot camps) grads, and people who just self started and got to coding. Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maxxxxx 9y ago
"Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging. " Strangely finding a job is also quite challenging for senior people....
- sokoloff 9y ago
  I think there's a market for lemons problem at play. Mid and senior developers who are effective at what they do are incredibly valuable and valued and therefore don't generally have to look via the main queue of job applicants. They often get retained well at their current place and are poached/referred more often than the average or ineffective developer. (This breaks down when a company suddenly closes or does a layoff so deep that it puts a lot of good people on the street.) The flip side of the very effective using a different mechanism is that the people in the main pool have a harder go of it, as hiring managers are used to seeing a parade of people who interview poorly (and therefore interview A LOT) or who join and fizzle out (and therefore job hunt A LOT).
- matwood 9y ago
  > Strangely finding a job is also quite challenging for senior people.... Are we talking about senior experience or X years in profession? I often see seniors (and mid, but less pronounced) who learned a job and did basically the same job for many years. When it's time to find a new job, they are barely beyond junior skill wise. Senior people who kept learning through their career are incredibly valuable and rarely seem to ever hit the open market. They end up recruited/poached from existing jobs.
- 9y ago

bogomipz 9y ago

>"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." The US economy may be moving towards full employment but that doesn't in any way mean that the tech sector is moving towards full employment. Tech is but one sector of the overall labor market. Tech along with health care are two segments of the economy that continue to add jobs faster than any other segment. See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/04/03/tech-jobs-thriving-nationwide----up-73m/99789502/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/04/03/t...

sokoloff 9y ago

Is there evidence that wage growth in the IT sector (or for programmers specifically) is below inflation? I don't see that at all personally (as an employee nor as a hiring manager).

matwood 9y ago
I agree with you, and keep trying to figure out where all the doom and gloom people are coming from working in IT. Maybe it's everyone in SF dealing with insane housing prices? Everywhere else, programmer salaries are some of the best in a given location and continuing to rise. Job openings are also on the rise.