5 ms·

U.S. coding school Galvanize to lay off 11 percent of workforce

36 points by artsandsci 9y ago

ProAm 9y ago
I'm wonder what effect the unemployment levels have on bootcamp attendance? I would guess low unemployment would cause attendance to go down for people grasping at a chance for a tech job?
- busterarm 9y ago
  I also wonder if the market for low-skill juniors is really bad right now (note: I'm not saying that bootcamp grads are bad). I started to see this a couple of years ago and I had the sense that most of the hirable people past their college years who would attend a bootcamp probably did already.
  - bobbywilson0 9y ago
    disclosure: I used to work at Galvanize as an instructor, a couple years ago. I don't have any connection to Galvanize now so I don't feel the need to defend or promote bootcamps, but I do feel like I have some knowledge on the situation. When I was instructing I was constantly worried about there being enough jobs for my students. This was also when the startup market was "hotter" than it is now. The thing that I came to realize looking back is that there is actually still a huge amount of steady demand for software engineers. It isn't necessarily startups though. I have definitely heard from startups that they feel like they are inundated with bootcamp grads. I think part of the reason is because working at a cool startup is part of the picture that is painted to perspective students. The less exciting (to the graduates) opportunity is working with big companies that are replacing their previous outsourced staff with internal junior engineers. They also didn't want to hire one or two grads, they were interested in hiring five to ten. To me at least it seems like larger companies are trying to adjust their staffing to accommodate a more fluid staff that comes and goes rather than the longer term employees of previous generations. Which includes always having a broad opportunity for new employees, which dovetails into the bootcamps constantly producing graduates.
    - tdeck 9y ago
      I always got the impression that most of the truly entry-level software jobs (the kind where they routinely hire people with associates degrees or no degree) are in unglamorous companies, in cities all throughout the country, writing code in unsexy languages like SQL, C#, and J2EE. These companies don't typically try to pretend they only hire the top 10% of the entire industry, and they're willing to train people on the job. They don't pay the big bucks, but it's better than working at Kroger. Unfortunately the narrative of "you too could be writing ugly line-of-business applications for $40k/year" is not an exciting sell, as you've said, to people who have watched a few episodes of Silicon Valley. So there's an expectation mismatch. We want to point at the Bureau of Labor Statistics about openings in the software industry and think that they're about changing the world with node.js and AWS lambda, because that's a more promising vision of tomorrow that doesn't involve encountering Windows Server 2005 in the course of your daily work.
      - whipoodle 9y ago
        Sure, doing your time in those sorts of places and then moving on is a good approach. That's more or less what I did. (I went to college for CS, but I'm oldish.) But those jobs can suck for reasons that don't really have anything to do with technology. While you're unlikely to catch me extolling the virtues of cool-guy startups, they do tend to have the benefit that they "get" developers and bias towards facilitating the work rather than the endless bullshit you tend to get sucked into in the bigger places.
blackguardx 9y ago
I always thought it was weird that they had their own venture fund. Shouldn't a growing business invest in itself?
- kenthorvath 9y ago
  The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can both invest in yourself, while investing in other opportunities. The problem is how to allocate your resources optimally. Having early access to motivated and talented programmers that may have a good idea for a disruptive product or technology seems like a potential advantage for a venture fund. Particularly if those seeking funding are also seeking training and career advice.
santaclaus 9y ago
Is this the same company in SOMA by the Bay Bridge?
- omot 9y ago
  yeah
good_vibes 9y ago
Does anyone have experience as a student there? How did you fare in the job market afterwards? I almost went there but chose not to.
- komali2 9y ago
  Curious as well. I went to Makersquare / Hack Reactor and it seems the experience depends hugely on which bootcamp you actually went to, based on my conversations at meetups.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- t0mbstone 9y ago
  Bit of context: I used to live in Denver, and I would hang out at Galvanize a lot. I was friends with a number of the instructors and students. I worked at a company in Denver that hired at least 5 people straight out of gSchool, and I was one of the employees on the team who was given the task of onboarding and mentoring the gSchool graduates and helping them when they got stuck (which was pretty much constantly). Each one of the graduates had at least a basic, fundamental understanding of programming with Ruby on Rails and Javascript, but they were all very much junior-level. They were all deeply brainwashed in TDD and Agile dogma, but would often become paralyzed when encountering real world problems. Most of them had sub-par developer instincts (as was expected), and all of them required about a year-long ramp-up and a lot of on-the-job mentoring and training before they were really pulling their weight. When you look at the quality of the code that was being created and the sheer amount of manpower and money being thrown at mentoring all of the junior level code school graduates, I would rather have had a single senior level developer than 4 juniors combined. But that's not how the pay worked out. A senior dev doing the same amount of work as 4 juniors was only making like $120K, and I happen to know that every one of the code school students was hired on for at least $65K a year (if not more). The worst part? After about a year, half of them had leveraged their new year's worth of real, on-the-job experience into job offers from other companies, where they were presumably hired for even more. My personal opinion is that the company I worked for kind of got shafted a little bit by their enthusiasm and optimism with the idea of bringing on so many junior level developers straight out of code camp. Especially after we spent so much time and money mentoring them, only to have them leave for better jobs elsewhere. I have a strong suspicion that many other companies have suffered from similar experiences with code school graduates and were left with bitter taste in their mouths. If so, that would certainly explain why so many code schools are starting to encounter difficulties and are having to downsize or close. Companies are starting to catch on to the fact that they are still going to have to dump a good year of mentoring and training into each one of these "graduates" before they are earning their keep. TL;DR: The gSchool graduates that I had personal experience with seemed to make out like bandits. That was before the market cooled down, though.

36 points by artsandsci 9y ago

I'm wonder what effect the unemployment levels have on bootcamp attendance? I would guess low unemployment would cause attendance to go down for people grasping at a chance for a tech job?

busterarm 9y ago
I also wonder if the market for low-skill juniors is really bad right now (note: I'm not saying that bootcamp grads are bad). I started to see this a couple of years ago and I had the sense that most of the hirable people past their college years who would attend a bootcamp probably did already.
- bobbywilson0 9y ago
  disclosure: I used to work at Galvanize as an instructor, a couple years ago. I don't have any connection to Galvanize now so I don't feel the need to defend or promote bootcamps, but I do feel like I have some knowledge on the situation. When I was instructing I was constantly worried about there being enough jobs for my students. This was also when the startup market was "hotter" than it is now. The thing that I came to realize looking back is that there is actually still a huge amount of steady demand for software engineers. It isn't necessarily startups though. I have definitely heard from startups that they feel like they are inundated with bootcamp grads. I think part of the reason is because working at a cool startup is part of the picture that is painted to perspective students. The less exciting (to the graduates) opportunity is working with big companies that are replacing their previous outsourced staff with internal junior engineers. They also didn't want to hire one or two grads, they were interested in hiring five to ten. To me at least it seems like larger companies are trying to adjust their staffing to accommodate a more fluid staff that comes and goes rather than the longer term employees of previous generations. Which includes always having a broad opportunity for new employees, which dovetails into the bootcamps constantly producing graduates.
  - tdeck 9y ago
    I always got the impression that most of the truly entry-level software jobs (the kind where they routinely hire people with associates degrees or no degree) are in unglamorous companies, in cities all throughout the country, writing code in unsexy languages like SQL, C#, and J2EE. These companies don't typically try to pretend they only hire the top 10% of the entire industry, and they're willing to train people on the job. They don't pay the big bucks, but it's better than working at Kroger. Unfortunately the narrative of "you too could be writing ugly line-of-business applications for $40k/year" is not an exciting sell, as you've said, to people who have watched a few episodes of Silicon Valley. So there's an expectation mismatch. We want to point at the Bureau of Labor Statistics about openings in the software industry and think that they're about changing the world with node.js and AWS lambda, because that's a more promising vision of tomorrow that doesn't involve encountering Windows Server 2005 in the course of your daily work.
    - whipoodle 9y ago
      Sure, doing your time in those sorts of places and then moving on is a good approach. That's more or less what I did. (I went to college for CS, but I'm oldish.) But those jobs can suck for reasons that don't really have anything to do with technology. While you're unlikely to catch me extolling the virtues of cool-guy startups, they do tend to have the benefit that they "get" developers and bias towards facilitating the work rather than the endless bullshit you tend to get sucked into in the bigger places.

blackguardx 9y ago

I always thought it was weird that they had their own venture fund. Shouldn't a growing business invest in itself?

kenthorvath 9y ago
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can both invest in yourself, while investing in other opportunities. The problem is how to allocate your resources optimally. Having early access to motivated and talented programmers that may have a good idea for a disruptive product or technology seems like a potential advantage for a venture fund. Particularly if those seeking funding are also seeking training and career advice.

santaclaus 9y ago

Is this the same company in SOMA by the Bay Bridge?

omot 9y ago
yeah

good_vibes 9y ago

Does anyone have experience as a student there? How did you fare in the job market afterwards? I almost went there but chose not to.

komali2 9y ago
Curious as well. I went to Makersquare / Hack Reactor and it seems the experience depends hugely on which bootcamp you actually went to, based on my conversations at meetups.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
t0mbstone 9y ago
Bit of context: I used to live in Denver, and I would hang out at Galvanize a lot. I was friends with a number of the instructors and students. I worked at a company in Denver that hired at least 5 people straight out of gSchool, and I was one of the employees on the team who was given the task of onboarding and mentoring the gSchool graduates and helping them when they got stuck (which was pretty much constantly). Each one of the graduates had at least a basic, fundamental understanding of programming with Ruby on Rails and Javascript, but they were all very much junior-level. They were all deeply brainwashed in TDD and Agile dogma, but would often become paralyzed when encountering real world problems. Most of them had sub-par developer instincts (as was expected), and all of them required about a year-long ramp-up and a lot of on-the-job mentoring and training before they were really pulling their weight. When you look at the quality of the code that was being created and the sheer amount of manpower and money being thrown at mentoring all of the junior level code school graduates, I would rather have had a single senior level developer than 4 juniors combined. But that's not how the pay worked out. A senior dev doing the same amount of work as 4 juniors was only making like $120K, and I happen to know that every one of the code school students was hired on for at least $65K a year (if not more). The worst part? After about a year, half of them had leveraged their new year's worth of real, on-the-job experience into job offers from other companies, where they were presumably hired for even more. My personal opinion is that the company I worked for kind of got shafted a little bit by their enthusiasm and optimism with the idea of bringing on so many junior level developers straight out of code camp. Especially after we spent so much time and money mentoring them, only to have them leave for better jobs elsewhere. I have a strong suspicion that many other companies have suffered from similar experiences with code school graduates and were left with bitter taste in their mouths. If so, that would certainly explain why so many code schools are starting to encounter difficulties and are having to downsize or close. Companies are starting to catch on to the fact that they are still going to have to dump a good year of mentoring and training into each one of these "graduates" before they are earning their keep. TL;DR: The gSchool graduates that I had personal experience with seemed to make out like bandits. That was before the market cooled down, though.