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Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

118 points by justinucd 9y ago

nxsynonym 9y ago
I'm not all that surprised. The biggest advantage to a Coding Boot Camp is the intense, focused study for the duration of the program - and possibly any industry experience any of the teachers bring (although I'm sure the quality of that experience varies greatly from camp to camp). The biggest downfall I see in the idea behind the Boot Camps is that they are great at pumping out entry level coders, but don't seem to offer much in terms of career growth or learn trajectory outside of the basics. I'd be much more inclined to pay for one of these programs (which is another issue when you add the cost of tuition on top of regular living expenses + time away from work) if they offered some sort of career mentor-ship for a designated time period after landing that first role. They could offer counseling for career growth, additional classes, etc. I think that would create more return on invested from a student prospective. Overall I think the boot camp space got way too crowed too quickly, which is understandable considering the amount of people trying to land that entry level paycheck.
- skybrian 9y ago
  That sounds like a good way for a boot camp program to differentiate itself. On the other hand, I don't know that they necessarily have to be more than what they are? Getting people enough coding knowledge to get an entry-level job can be life-changing, so specializing in that seems like a good thing. You can always take more courses and learn more.
- andrewjl 9y ago
  Check out https://outco.io https://outco.io which sounds like to covers the parts you find lacking.
  - jefflombardjr 9y ago
    This looks like every other boot camp out there. Uses buzzwords like 'pair programming' and stereotypical whiteboard background video. How do you think this differentiates itself from other boot camps? Online/Onsite is not unique.
    - andrewjl 9y ago
      My understanding is their curriculum covers soft skills in addition to algorithms and data structures. For example students are trained on how to communicate well, verbally and non-verbally, while white boarding, as well as how to present their experiences in best possible light in relation to the job description and what the interviewer is looking for. I'd say that overall they focus more on the interview phase, though I see a potential to extend the curriculum to get engineers ready for promotion or a management role.
mtmail 9y ago
I noticed a couple (4) "No agencies, recent bootcamp grads, or visa candidates." on this month's "who is hiring?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885
- busterarm 9y ago
  I count 5, and at least two of those are quite clear about looking to fill a senior position. The other 3 are companies that have a bit of a reputation and I wouldn't even consider working at anyway.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    > The other 3 are companies that have a bit of a reputation and I wouldn't even consider working at anyway. How is that relevant in this context? Regardless of company it's obviously a trend to refuse bootcamp graduates.
    - busterarm 9y ago
      3 out of 923 comments is a trend now? I think you need to reevaluate what you consider obvious/significant.
      - mythrwy 9y ago
        4 explicitly say it which is in a way kind of them. Many others probably just drop the resume right in the trash.
        busterarm 9y ago
        You're just assuming that though. You don't have producible evidence of this. It's the conclusion that you want to draw, so anything that might provide your conclusion evidence, you take as evidence. What I can tell you is that I know many, many bootcamp grads and virtually all of them got good jobs, at good companies and not always junior. I still don't take that as proof of anything and am willing to take evidence to the contrary where it exists though.
fortythirteen 9y ago
Most coding bootcamps I interacted with were usually thinly veiled sources of cheap labor for the build-a-site dev shops that either started them or "partnered" with a nationally recognized bootcamp org. All you had to do was look at the stack they were teaching and see that the entity running the camp was just getting suckers to pay for their own on the job training.
thegayngler 9y ago
These bootcamps are too basic for starters. They never take you beyond the basics. Secondly, the industry has changed. You need to know more things than you did previously. Even computer science grads aren't necessarily "ready" for the workforce. Education is behind in general instead of ingrained into the community with which it wishes to operate. They are always lagging behind or even way behind. On some level I feel as though businesses need to get real and just pick someone for the job even entry level. There is nothing wrong with a business investing in its talent rather than expecting everyone to come in with prepackaged with everything you want them to know. Most of the people hiring these days didn't know how to do any of the stuff people are doing when they come out of bootcamp when they started their careers.
- Techonomicon 9y ago
  We are way past a time of loyalty amongst employees. Not worth a company's time and money to do this for someone that may / may not be around after. And locking someone in because of it just leaves a bad taste in the employees mouth.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    I'm curious about this idea. I'm wondering why companies can't invest in employees and why the burden of everything is on the employee to come through the door fully prepared and exactly what a company needs right out of the tin. Often, a previous novice had the role and gradually developed the role and themselves. Then, the company wants to hire some new person at the same salary as the person who left the role with all the developed skill of the previous person. I'm wondering why companies don't do a deal with employees : "we will help you develop skill for free at this job while you get paid, and in return you will work here in some capacity at x salary for x number of years to pay that off. if you leave early, you owe us money" Now, certainly, the employee could really stink and the company could want to fire them, but I think that would be an exception since the employee would have all the positive AND negative motivation to successfully fulfill their contract. This might help solve this pesky student debt problem we have as well.
  - donovanm 9y ago
randomdrake 9y ago
I'm glad they're going away. > While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies. In other words, they don’t teach students the other important entrepreneurial tech skills. This makes sense seeing how their focus is coding. But as I stated in my last article, many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers – those who have strong leadership, communication, and team-building skills. Being a coding god is one skill set, but knowing how to work collaboratively on a technical team and manage a product is another skill set in itself. This type of belief in what "coding" is, is hugely responsible for both the rise and fall of these horribly designed, while possibly well-intended, "bootcamps." Being a good software developer has absolutely nothing to do with "important entrepreneurial tech skills." Knowing how to tackle problems, envision loops and algorithms, write pseudocode, understand the basics of how requests on the Internet work, or how your computer accesses databases or files; these are skills of a good software developer. The end goal of being a software developer is not CEO. "many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers" No, recruiters all over the world are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because they can't find any competent programmers anymore. There are hundreds of people who were taught how to write a conditional in Ruby on Rails available, but ask them to tackle a problem like: "how would you store 1 million strings, search through them while caching results, and make sure only certain individuals can access certain strings," and you get a deer in the headlights look. So recruiters don't ask questions like that anymore. They ask questions that can be simply memorized and regurgitated. When there's no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we're not in a good spot. The sooner we can dispel the myth that programming and software is just "coding," "hustling," and "entrepreneurial skills" the sooner companies won't have to pony up over $150k/yr to find a competent software developer.
- stale2002 9y ago
  LOL! So your argument that what makes a person a good software engineer is the whiteboard coding algorithms? That stuff is EASIER to learn than actual software engineering skills. All you got to do is spend a couple months cramming from the book cracking the code interview. You learn that stuff in a singular CS class, that's called data structures and algorithms. You are right about one thing though, if we are in a state where you can cram for your interview, that is a bad spot. And that is precisely the problem with the CS algorithms type questions! The "hard" stuff in software engineering is about how you design maintainable code, how you design high level architecture, and generally all the skills that go into coding in a TEAM as opposed to be a programming superstar individual.
jorblumesea 9y ago
Learning to code in 3 months != properly trained engineers
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sotojuan 9y ago
Bootcamps are just too short. I think the sweet spot for a coursework in programming is a year to two years. That's essentially how long my university degree was if you remove the non-CS required classes.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  More like 5 if people want to use the term "engineer" on their CV.
  - bigspider421 9y ago
    Disagree. Engineer here - I did a 6 week bootcamp and immediately got hired at Amazon. $150k+, the most I've ever been paid. Still learning tons but my experience was quite positive.
    - ex_amazon_sde 9y ago
      I've been interviewing a lot of people when I was in Amazon and the company had a much, much higher bar.
      - jefflombardjr 9y ago
        It was also likely a much, much smaller company.
    - josefresco 9y ago
      PhD prob helped.
      - bigspider421 9y ago
        My degree is completely unrelated to CS. Although I do have a strong math background which possibly helped...
    - xenihn 9y ago
      What'd you learn in the bootcamp that (you believe) helped you get the role? And what was the application/interview process like?
Sivart13 9y ago
I think it's a big leap from "two large bootcamps have closed" to "the bootcamp industry is shutting down". Like anything else, there was a big race to capture the market once Dev Bootcamp proved it could work, and now the market is correcting itself. No reason to think bootcamps are going to stop existing altogether.
- CloudYeller 9y ago
  Yeah, in 2013, the top bootcamps were raking in like $15k per student, and they were churning out hundreds of students per year. Earning millions from teaching people JavaScript was an incredible proposition.
- Jemmeh 9y ago
  Exactly. There's good bootcamps and bad bootcamps, of course some will shut down. What other industry would cause this headline? A grocery store down the street from me closed, I guess supermarkets are all dying!
  - stanleydrew 9y ago
    If there were zero supermarkets ten years ago then this analogy might make sense.
- nowarninglabel 9y ago
  I think there is more information that is let on here. I've talked with some folks at prominent bootcamps who are likely to be shutting their doors or hard pivoting soon if their revenue situation doesn't drastically improve.
  - skewart 9y ago
    Any idea what's causing the revenue problem? I assume it's getting harder to attract students willing to pay for a bootcamp? Is that because fewer people are looking to learn to code than a few years ago? Or because they're learning in different ways other than bootcamps? Or is everyone only wanting to go to the most prestigious bootcamps? Or something else?
YCode 9y ago
It's funny, until recently I thought boot camps were for people who already were working in a field who wanted to sharpen a particular skill in that field. At least, the few my work paid for some years back were essentially that. From the sounds of it though a lot of places are abusing these to create micro IIT Techs that hand out near worthless certificates.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  > I thought boot camps were for people who already were working in a field who wanted to sharpen a particular skill in that field The name 'boot camp' doesn't really imply that they would be.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- gaius 9y ago
  It's funny, until recently I thought boot camps were for people who already were working in a field who wanted to sharpen a particular skill in that field. Right, same with MOOCs. I am a pretty experienced engineer already, I recently took a course on EdX[1]. I wanted to round out my R (mainly a Python guy but there is some cool stuff in the R ecosystem), revise some of the maths from undergrad 20+ years ago, try out a MOOC, and take a peek into an area of computing I'd had no exposure to. I enjoyed it and I got a lot out of it and would recommend it to others. But could I have been a non-programmer, completed that course, and been adequately prepared to begin a career in industry? Absolutely not. And to be fair that is not how that course is pitched, but there are some that are, that have even less content in them. $200 is a bargain for a working engineer who wants a new skill, or is even just curious. $20000 is a massive scam for a beginner who thinks they can kickstart a career that way. [1] https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-analysis-life-sciences https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-analysis-life-sciences
solidsnack9000 9y ago
"Shutting down" or "consolidating"?
sdenton4 9y ago
So I think this is completely wrong. Bootcamps are providing a route to jobs that doesn't involve taking another for years it for a university degree; it's a massive gain in efficiency. By being smaller, bootcamps should have more ability to pivot content to match market demands, and give students advice on directions to persue. Front end development needs for entry level people are getting satisfied, so it's time to how some new teachers and refocus curriculum. Camps need to market as great learning spaces, rather than throwing their whole rep behind a single specially. The notion that the space is overcrowded is bullshit; it just depends where you set your sights. I don't think we would call university education an overcrowded space, in spite of serving many orders of magnitude more students than the bootcamps currently are... One can argue that there are too many law schools, charging to much to create too many entry level lawyers. Hand wringing about these two camps closing is like worrying that there are too many law schools specializing in bankruptcy law. Ultimately I think the closures are more about these two companies failing to adapt than any kind of general lesson about bootcamp education.
- jgmmo 9y ago
  University education is absolutely an overcrowded space. Most colleges do not live up to their cost. Students are starting to notice and choose other options. It's also well known theres too many law schools and too many lawyers. It's a bad market to enter into now.
  - aaronchall 9y ago
    I want to upvote you for your practical values and downvote you because of your lack of cites. Can we get some sources here?
  - gaius 9y ago
    How many STEM PhDs/year vs tenure track positions? As as a civilisation we massively over-educate, but under-train...
- bdcravens 9y ago
  > Bootcamps are providing a route to jobs that doesn't involve taking another for years it for a university degree; it's a massive gain in efficiency. Problem is they aren't teaching enough in bootcamps. You're not going to learn enough in 3-6 months to be hirable. There's too much else to the job, unless you can go to work for those magical companies that use a STACK that is a 1:1 match for what you learned in bootcamp. Most companies aren't interested in hand-holding. If bootcamps would partner with companies to bring in bootcampers at $30k/year and let the real learning begin, it would be a successful model. Unfortunately, the bootcamp marketing is selling something far more grandiose.
stuartaxelowen 9y ago
Map draws `closing` on top of `still open`, hiding reality.
- joeylemberg 9y ago
  You are totally correct. The default view makes it looks like Chicago had 1 closing and no openings. Zooming in reveals multiple openings in Chicago.
pascalxus 9y ago
I'm not surprised that Google would turn down applicants from boot-camps with less than 3 years of experience. they turn down qualified engineers with over 15+ years of relevant experience.
- outside1234 9y ago
  I suspect turning down engineers with 15+ years of experience is explainable via Google's age-ism, not the actual underlying experience.
aecorredor 9y ago
"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" I have a 4 year computer science degree and I didn't learn any of the listed topics either, so I'm not sure if the article is implying that other institutions do prepare new grads for these topics. The main advantage I see from bootcamps is that you basically code intensely for 4 months, learn the most important stuff to be productive (at least in small scale) right away, and then you're able to tackle more in depth topics by yourself.
- jonny_eh 9y ago
  Exactly. They're failing not due to curriculum, but the business model and cash flow.
- nonconvergent 9y ago
  Ditto on the CS Degree. Closest thing I learned to the above skills that was part of the curriculum was Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs. Had to teach myself git.
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    I taught every single person I was on a group project with git, all the way up through senior year. My familiarity with it came from a damn hackathon of all places. It's actually gross how source control was just not a concept taught at all in the program.
  - leo79 9y ago
    You joking right? I got my cs degree 15 years ago and back then i learned Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs...
    - ericmcer 9y ago
      It is still the same people teaching the courses probably.
    - deleted 9y ago
geebee 9y ago
I think that bootcamps actually can work well for people who already have highly honed analytical and logical reasoning skills, but for whatever reason haven't gotten involved in programming. For instance, a linguistics or philosophy major, or maybe a pure math major, who hasn't done any programming. For example, in a math class on graph theory, we essentially did DFS and BFS, but through proof, not through code. I think one of the reasons bootcamps may be closing is there just aren't enough people like this to train. 6 weeks can do amazing things for people who come in with years of intense analytical training, but it's not a curriculum that can create that core skill in 6 weeks - that takes years - actually, decades.
- AquinasCoder 9y ago
  I completely agree. I did my undergrad and grad studies in philosophy, specifically focusing on contemporary and symbolic logic, before joining a six month bootcamp. Before the bootcamp, I had at least six months of development experience. Would I do it again? Absolutely, the bootcamp gave me discipline, a network, and a schedule to fill the gaps in my development experience. Did it teach me computer science? No way. We spent a week on it and hardly covered bubble sort, quick sort, and binary search. Although I have only touched the surface of computer science, I view it as an extension of my training in logic, and philosophy as an abstraction of pure mathematics. I know that if I want better jobs I will have to continue to learn algorithms, data structures, architecture, etc. Bootcamps can direct an analytical inclination, but rarely, if ever, create it. I am not at all sure that the conclusion is that bootcamps are ineffective. The issue is not with bootcamps as such, but with those who believe that the hard work is done by just showing up for lecture or doing the minimum in homework. I like to think that bootcamps are just an extension or tool to employ as an autodidact. There has always been a divide between those jobs which require a more rigorous foundation and jobs which need someone to bang out some semi-workable code for a website. Bootcamp grads are often under the wrong impression that they are qualified for the first type without some experience doing menial tasks.
  - scriptkiddy 9y ago
    Just like most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. > I like to think that bootcamps are just an extension or tool to employ as an autodidact. If you are an autodidact, a bootcamp isn't even required. The Internet is chock full of resources for learning programming that makes it extremely simple to learn on your own. I look at a bootcamp as paying for connections. A Bootcamp should help get you in touch with prospective employers or connect you with other developers with similar goals. Learning how to program is the easy part when compared to learning the soft skills required to be part of or build a successful company.
ravenstine 9y ago
> Bloomberg ran an article stating many students were still not prepared for the tech industry even after their extensive training. If you look at bootcamps as an education/career on a platter, sure. But they're no different than how a typical school should work; you get as much out of the experience as you put in. My experience at Dev Bootcamp was that those who put in the effort and had the right perspective were the ones who made it into the field after their graduation. Some people, actually many, simply don't have what it takes to be a programmer, and that shouldn't be seen as a failure on the part of bootcamps. It'd be one thing if few to none of the graduates from bootcamps succeeded in their profession, but that's simply not the case. I and many people I know wouldn't be where we are now if we didn't have the kind of bootcamp style education where we could dedicate our time to educating ourselves and hacking on shit. Yes, yes... we might have been able to do that without paying a bootcamp, for "free", yet we'd be paying the overhead of organizing people, consistently getting people together to spend time hacking on projects, etc. I was lucky enough to get one other person to hack on a project with me after bootcamp – everyone else was either too busy or out to make money from the free work of others. I'd much rather spend $20k to go to Dev Bootcamp and be able to hack with people on Node.js & Ruby projects, be in the bay area, and go to hack-a-thons every other night than spend far more than that sitting through a bunch of non-tech classes I hate to come out with some abysmally outdated skills in PHP & Java. Just because some bootcamps have shut down doesn't mean that the model itself is a failure. Though I had some minimal experience coding on my own prior to bootcamp(let's just say I could make Hangman in Python but had no idea what object-orientation was), I was able to become proficient enough to build a live YouTube chat(before YouTube had that) with shared video controls... as a result of the experiences I had through Dev Bootcamp. You CAN learn to code in a few months, but you have to want it enough. Strange as it may seem, not everyone wants to succeed as much as others. Even if 80% of bootcamp graduates didn't become programmers after the course, that's no reason to see the bootcamp model as a failure. Not everyone is cut out for it, and yet it has changed the lives of numerous people. Though I'm sad that Dev Bootcamp is no more(which I'd still argue is a result of terrible management both prior to and after the Kaplan acquisition), I hope the idea of coding bootcamps can evolve to be more successful.
jefflombardjr 9y ago
As someone who went to a boot camp, this doesn't surprise me at all. I don't think it's worth it for most people. BUT, I don't see them going away entirely. I'm thrilled with the boot camp I went to, and would do it all over again. Hear me out... > Are Coding Boot Camps Worth It? - If the first time you're touching code is at a boot camp, it's not worth it. By the time I had started a boot camp, I had been reading books and doing tutorials on and off for 2 years. Thinking in terms of product life cycle, and your programming skills are the product, you want to go to a boot camp at the beginning of the growth phase. - If your instructor or TA is a graduate of the program, it's not worth it. We had instructors who had worked at F500 tech firms and a small class size. To me the real value was having 3 months worth of access to someone who in many cases made hiring decisions at those companies. - If the boot camp focuses more on their curriculum more than their people, it's not worth it. Curriculums are garbage, it doesn't matter what language you learn, you should be learning how to think like a developer. It's not all about focusing on the instructors too, if you've been self-studying for 2 years, and your peer doesn't know how to open a text editor, they're going to hold you back. You want a boot camp that is selective with their applicants. - If you're doing it for money, it's not worth it. You're not going to make an average salary right out of the school. In fact, you probably won't even be a full-time employee, plan on being a contractor for the first year. If you don't know how to find work on your own or research how to, knowing how to program isn't going to change anything. - You're starting at the bottom, every opportunity good or bad is an opportunity to learn. Paid or unpaid take it, eventually, you will have enough opportunities to start saying no to less valuable opportunities, but until you're 100% booked, you're a yes man or yes woman. In fact don't wait until graduation. - If you can't afford to take 6 months off and devote them entirely to programming, it's not worth it. I had saved for 2 years, paid off my debt, and instead of using the remaining money for a down payment on a house, I paid for tuition/living expenses to dedicate 3 months of uninterrupted time. I know I was fortunate enough to have this opportunity, but if you're going to do it, you need the resources to do it right. Otherwise, continue with self-study and find a mentor at a meetup. - If you're not in a tech hub, it's not worth it. San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Portland, Chicago, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Denver, or Montreal are good. Maybe Boston or Atlanta, don't know enough about the tech scenes there. - If you have medical/family issues, it's not worth it. It is stressful if you have any other things going on in your life sort them out first. I've seen a lot of people fail, but it is still very much worth it for some people. I went to a boot camp to accelerate something I was already doing. What is said about boot camps applies to education in the broader sense as well. In many cases college isn't worth it, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't go.
zebraflask 9y ago
I think this is for the best. These have typically struck me as analogous to people taking an overpriced amateur cooking class and then hoping that qualifies them for work in a gourmet restaurant. And it's hardly a new idea, but why pay when a quick Google search provides a mountain of free training material? Self-taught coders are a bit more impressive.
dmitri1981 9y ago
The article fails to mention that both dev boot camp and iron yard were acquired by some large for profit cos. The discussion on HN regarding their closure seemed to highlight that both companies had their quality of teaching severely cut post acquisition which no doubt aided their demise. Also, many of their boot camps were in secondary locations that could not support on-going employment for all their grads
brookside 9y ago
Bootcamps rode a wave of phenomenal publicity at their inception. Articles in the NYTimes and the like made me aware of Flatiron / General Assembly as alternatives to grad school, which I had just enrolled in at the time. These "Bootcamps Are Dead" stories will to some degree be self-fulfilling. Regardless of any realities in the junior dev job market, exposure to this wave of (sinking?) submarining would give me great pause were I making the same school decision today.
eric_b 9y ago
Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? Most developers I know have years of deep experience with computers before becoming professional programmers. (Things like fixing driver issues, installing linux, patching games etc). I have several friends who went to bootcamps had no deep technical interest beforehand. They just heard that computer programming was good money, and they enrolled. To me, the ideal bootcamp student would be the person who dabbles with programming or programming-tangential technologies on the side, but just needs that little extra boost. That is a very small number of people if experience is any guide. I just don't think it's reasonable to go from 0 to junior developer in 12 weeks if you don't have that technical history. It's why you can't become a doctor in 12 weeks, generally. The four year degree programs force exposure to programming and programming-thinking for 4 dedicated years. This is enough to close the gap for non-technical people, but 12 weeks is surely not.
- stanleydrew 9y ago
  > Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? I'm not sure many people do think that. But it was an experiment. If you assume that the tooling around "programming" or "product building" or whatever you want to call it will eventually be good enough that you can slot a generic human into a well-defined role then these bootcamps might make sense. We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed.
  - scriptkiddy 9y ago
    > We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed. I've seen this sentiment being thrown around a lot lately. I don't think it will ever be the case. There will always need to be someone who can build the tools or the tools that build the tools or the tools that build the tools that build the tools. Let's use your auto assembly line idea to illustrate this. A good portion of auto manufacturing these days is completely automated, the body is assembled by robots for instance. Well, a factory had to build those robots, right? That factory probably bought some robot control software from another company who specializes in that. The company that built the robot probably didn't manufacture all of the components for the robot. For instance, their welding robot may have a wire feed spool that was manufactured by a company that builds welders. However, the company that manufactured the spool probably didn't forge the metal themselves, they bought it from a forging company. That company in turn bought ore from a mining company. The mining company mined that ore using an automated tunnel boring machine. The automated tunnel boring machine was built by another company that manufactures automated mining machinery, and the trail starts anew. Somewhere down the line in every industry is an engineer who designs and possibly even builds components that are necessary for that industry to operate. Now, applied to software engineering: Even if we did have software that could automatically build a web application tailored specifically and exactly to what any given company wanted down to website design and SEO, that software would have still need to have been built in the first place. If that software was built by another piece of software and so on up the line, at some point there is a person who built the progenitor. Regardless of who built the original, wouldn't these pieces of software still have bugs? What if these pieces of software involved more software that could fix their own bugs? Well , who fixes the bugs in the bug fixing software? Beyond this, what if there is a new feature that needs to be built out? Will the software be able to build out that new feature and integrate it with the existing application? If so, how will it handle conflicts? As it currently stands, it takes a team of multiple professionals to simply maintain any non-trivial codebase. I don't personally believe that it is possible to design an AI that is powerful enough to do this kind of work without this AI having human levels of intelligence and creativity. In order for this AI to be able to reach this kind of proficiency it would have to be self aware. And then we are forced to ask the question: is self aware AI still AI, or is it alive? We are not ready to answer these questions. Until we are, there will always be a need for flesh and bone engineers of all sorts. That ended up way longer than I intended.
nhorob67 9y ago
Anyone have any boot camps they think are "best-in-class"?
- aaronchall 9y ago
  Recurse Center, née Hacker School, emphasizes that they are not a "boot camp", but they at least started with the best reputation. I'm not sure where they are now in terms of reputation, though. I think it may be that there was an unserved pool of natural talent that the first boot camps quickly served to train, and now we're down to the trickle of trainable talent that thinks boot camps are the way to go. And as schools like NYU (where I'm currently teaching a fairly new Python certificate program) begin to grab market share as substitutes to boot camps, with their stellar reputations, the bootcamp niche will become even more difficult to compete in.
gumby 9y ago
Wow, they cost $26K!!?? For what they offer that seems like an outrageous amount -- and largely unaffordable for most of the target customer base. Since the for-profit education industry had rushed in, I assume they just went for their typical milk-the-student-loan-system scam
- jefflombardjr 9y ago
  I paid less than a third of that. The good ones are either affordable or they make you pay % of salary once you are employed.
postit 9y ago
I believe boot camps got a bit of traction because of the price point compared to a college degree. Once people realized they didn't learn enough and didn't get that sweet three figure silicon valley job, the hype started to fade. We don't see the same trends in Europe, where university degrees are mostly cheap or free.
- rufford 9y ago
  There isn't the same demand for European software engineers though. Obviously part of it is the value proposition, but I think a lot of said proposition is about the time just as much as the cost I didn't want to waste 2-3 years getting an additional degree, and a bootcamp filled in nicely (simply a personal anecdote but it worked fine for me)
autokad 9y ago
how do people feel about specialized bootcamps like data science? has anyone done them?
eighthnate 9y ago
The reason why boot camps are shutting down is because money is drying up. They are either predicting we are about to head into recession and/or that the hiring of entry level developers is going to dry up in the coming months/years. Go back to 2004-2007. There were tons of "training schools" for developers. They all cashed out right around the time of the financial crisis. Then around 2012, they all resurfaced as "boot camps". Rising interest rates, saturated employment environment and 10 years of insane growth probably means that they don't see much room for growth in the near term so they are closing shop. They'll be back in a few years under different branding once the environment changes.
seangrogg 9y ago
"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" As a bootcamp grad (Hack Reactor) this is only partially true; while you can easily skate by without needing to learn any of these things there are many who elect into them. Anecdotally, from my cohort: * Testing and version control were a part of the entire curriculum from the first sprint to our capstone code freeze. Basic git was drilled into us, as well as exploration of more involved git workflows when we began our project phase. We learned about TDD and BDD and had a sprint dedicated to setting up our own tests (with tests against our tests). * People could elect to take product management/scrum master roles in their project teams (of which there were 3); some people elected to take these positions every project, some avoided them, but most served in a managerial capacity at least once. * Deployment (admittedly most to Heroku, only one to AWS) was a soft requirement of every project and it was part of one of our sprints. Outside of my cohort, many people spent extensive time working with things that weren't a core part of what we did. During my database sprint my partner and I decided against the offered MySQL sprint and wrote our own Postgres branch. Many people took deep dives into algorithms and data structures - bloom filters, red-black/b-trees, various sort implementations, etc. Some project teams built CI pipelines and deployed on AWS/GCS/Azure. Overall, while these things aren't a part of the core curriculum you'll find many people electively choose to take on far more than what's mentioned. And I learned _none_ of that in my _full year_ of CS.
corbett3000 9y ago
We've found that coding boot camps do not produce highly skilled devs. They output over priced junior talent who believe they're all of a suddenly highly sought after "full stack engineers" worthy of $70k+ salaries because the boot camps tell them that's what their worth - and then they take a 20% recuiting fee. If we see a candidate apply that has a coding camp on their resume it's almost always a pass.

118 points by justinucd 9y ago

I'm not all that surprised. The biggest advantage to a Coding Boot Camp is the intense, focused study for the duration of the program - and possibly any industry experience any of the teachers bring (although I'm sure the quality of that experience varies greatly from camp to camp). The biggest downfall I see in the idea behind the Boot Camps is that they are great at pumping out entry level coders, but don't seem to offer much in terms of career growth or learn trajectory outside of the basics. I'd be much more inclined to pay for one of these programs (which is another issue when you add the cost of tuition on top of regular living expenses + time away from work) if they offered some sort of career mentor-ship for a designated time period after landing that first role. They could offer counseling for career growth, additional classes, etc. I think that would create more return on invested from a student prospective. Overall I think the boot camp space got way too crowed too quickly, which is understandable considering the amount of people trying to land that entry level paycheck.

skybrian 9y ago
That sounds like a good way for a boot camp program to differentiate itself. On the other hand, I don't know that they necessarily have to be more than what they are? Getting people enough coding knowledge to get an entry-level job can be life-changing, so specializing in that seems like a good thing. You can always take more courses and learn more.
andrewjl 9y ago
Check out https://outco.io https://outco.io which sounds like to covers the parts you find lacking.
- jefflombardjr 9y ago
  This looks like every other boot camp out there. Uses buzzwords like 'pair programming' and stereotypical whiteboard background video. How do you think this differentiates itself from other boot camps? Online/Onsite is not unique.
  - andrewjl 9y ago
    My understanding is their curriculum covers soft skills in addition to algorithms and data structures. For example students are trained on how to communicate well, verbally and non-verbally, while white boarding, as well as how to present their experiences in best possible light in relation to the job description and what the interviewer is looking for. I'd say that overall they focus more on the interview phase, though I see a potential to extend the curriculum to get engineers ready for promotion or a management role.

mtmail 9y ago

I noticed a couple (4) "No agencies, recent bootcamp grads, or visa candidates." on this month's "who is hiring?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148885

busterarm 9y ago
I count 5, and at least two of those are quite clear about looking to fill a senior position. The other 3 are companies that have a bit of a reputation and I wouldn't even consider working at anyway.
- Kiro 9y ago
  > The other 3 are companies that have a bit of a reputation and I wouldn't even consider working at anyway. How is that relevant in this context? Regardless of company it's obviously a trend to refuse bootcamp graduates.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    3 out of 923 comments is a trend now? I think you need to reevaluate what you consider obvious/significant.
    - mythrwy 9y ago
      4 explicitly say it which is in a way kind of them. Many others probably just drop the resume right in the trash.
      - busterarm 9y ago
        You're just assuming that though. You don't have producible evidence of this. It's the conclusion that you want to draw, so anything that might provide your conclusion evidence, you take as evidence. What I can tell you is that I know many, many bootcamp grads and virtually all of them got good jobs, at good companies and not always junior. I still don't take that as proof of anything and am willing to take evidence to the contrary where it exists though.

fortythirteen 9y ago

Most coding bootcamps I interacted with were usually thinly veiled sources of cheap labor for the build-a-site dev shops that either started them or "partnered" with a nationally recognized bootcamp org. All you had to do was look at the stack they were teaching and see that the entity running the camp was just getting suckers to pay for their own on the job training.

thegayngler 9y ago

These bootcamps are too basic for starters. They never take you beyond the basics. Secondly, the industry has changed. You need to know more things than you did previously. Even computer science grads aren't necessarily "ready" for the workforce. Education is behind in general instead of ingrained into the community with which it wishes to operate. They are always lagging behind or even way behind. On some level I feel as though businesses need to get real and just pick someone for the job even entry level. There is nothing wrong with a business investing in its talent rather than expecting everyone to come in with prepackaged with everything you want them to know. Most of the people hiring these days didn't know how to do any of the stuff people are doing when they come out of bootcamp when they started their careers.

Techonomicon 9y ago
We are way past a time of loyalty amongst employees. Not worth a company's time and money to do this for someone that may / may not be around after. And locking someone in because of it just leaves a bad taste in the employees mouth.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  I'm curious about this idea. I'm wondering why companies can't invest in employees and why the burden of everything is on the employee to come through the door fully prepared and exactly what a company needs right out of the tin. Often, a previous novice had the role and gradually developed the role and themselves. Then, the company wants to hire some new person at the same salary as the person who left the role with all the developed skill of the previous person. I'm wondering why companies don't do a deal with employees : "we will help you develop skill for free at this job while you get paid, and in return you will work here in some capacity at x salary for x number of years to pay that off. if you leave early, you owe us money" Now, certainly, the employee could really stink and the company could want to fire them, but I think that would be an exception since the employee would have all the positive AND negative motivation to successfully fulfill their contract. This might help solve this pesky student debt problem we have as well.
- donovanm 9y ago

randomdrake 9y ago

I'm glad they're going away. > While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies. In other words, they don’t teach students the other important entrepreneurial tech skills. This makes sense seeing how their focus is coding. But as I stated in my last article, many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers – those who have strong leadership, communication, and team-building skills. Being a coding god is one skill set, but knowing how to work collaboratively on a technical team and manage a product is another skill set in itself. This type of belief in what "coding" is, is hugely responsible for both the rise and fall of these horribly designed, while possibly well-intended, "bootcamps." Being a good software developer has absolutely nothing to do with "important entrepreneurial tech skills." Knowing how to tackle problems, envision loops and algorithms, write pseudocode, understand the basics of how requests on the Internet work, or how your computer accesses databases or files; these are skills of a good software developer. The end goal of being a software developer is not CEO. "many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers" No, recruiters all over the world are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because they can't find any competent programmers anymore. There are hundreds of people who were taught how to write a conditional in Ruby on Rails available, but ask them to tackle a problem like: "how would you store 1 million strings, search through them while caching results, and make sure only certain individuals can access certain strings," and you get a deer in the headlights look. So recruiters don't ask questions like that anymore. They ask questions that can be simply memorized and regurgitated. When there's no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we're not in a good spot. The sooner we can dispel the myth that programming and software is just "coding," "hustling," and "entrepreneurial skills" the sooner companies won't have to pony up over $150k/yr to find a competent software developer.

stale2002 9y ago
LOL! So your argument that what makes a person a good software engineer is the whiteboard coding algorithms? That stuff is EASIER to learn than actual software engineering skills. All you got to do is spend a couple months cramming from the book cracking the code interview. You learn that stuff in a singular CS class, that's called data structures and algorithms. You are right about one thing though, if we are in a state where you can cram for your interview, that is a bad spot. And that is precisely the problem with the CS algorithms type questions! The "hard" stuff in software engineering is about how you design maintainable code, how you design high level architecture, and generally all the skills that go into coding in a TEAM as opposed to be a programming superstar individual.

jorblumesea 9y ago

Learning to code in 3 months != properly trained engineers

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

sotojuan 9y ago

Bootcamps are just too short. I think the sweet spot for a coursework in programming is a year to two years. That's essentially how long my university degree was if you remove the non-CS required classes.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago
More like 5 if people want to use the term "engineer" on their CV.
- bigspider421 9y ago
  Disagree. Engineer here - I did a 6 week bootcamp and immediately got hired at Amazon. $150k+, the most I've ever been paid. Still learning tons but my experience was quite positive.
  - ex_amazon_sde 9y ago
    I've been interviewing a lot of people when I was in Amazon and the company had a much, much higher bar.
    - jefflombardjr 9y ago
      It was also likely a much, much smaller company.
  - josefresco 9y ago
    PhD prob helped.
    - bigspider421 9y ago
      My degree is completely unrelated to CS. Although I do have a strong math background which possibly helped...
  - xenihn 9y ago
    What'd you learn in the bootcamp that (you believe) helped you get the role? And what was the application/interview process like?

Sivart13 9y ago

I think it's a big leap from "two large bootcamps have closed" to "the bootcamp industry is shutting down". Like anything else, there was a big race to capture the market once Dev Bootcamp proved it could work, and now the market is correcting itself. No reason to think bootcamps are going to stop existing altogether.

CloudYeller 9y ago
Yeah, in 2013, the top bootcamps were raking in like $15k per student, and they were churning out hundreds of students per year. Earning millions from teaching people JavaScript was an incredible proposition.
Jemmeh 9y ago
Exactly. There's good bootcamps and bad bootcamps, of course some will shut down. What other industry would cause this headline? A grocery store down the street from me closed, I guess supermarkets are all dying!
- stanleydrew 9y ago
  If there were zero supermarkets ten years ago then this analogy might make sense.
nowarninglabel 9y ago
I think there is more information that is let on here. I've talked with some folks at prominent bootcamps who are likely to be shutting their doors or hard pivoting soon if their revenue situation doesn't drastically improve.
- skewart 9y ago
  Any idea what's causing the revenue problem? I assume it's getting harder to attract students willing to pay for a bootcamp? Is that because fewer people are looking to learn to code than a few years ago? Or because they're learning in different ways other than bootcamps? Or is everyone only wanting to go to the most prestigious bootcamps? Or something else?

YCode 9y ago

It's funny, until recently I thought boot camps were for people who already were working in a field who wanted to sharpen a particular skill in that field. At least, the few my work paid for some years back were essentially that. From the sounds of it though a lot of places are abusing these to create micro IIT Techs that hand out near worthless certificates.

chrisseaton 9y ago
> I thought boot camps were for people who already were working in a field who wanted to sharpen a particular skill in that field The name 'boot camp' doesn't really imply that they would be.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
gaius 9y ago
It's funny, until recently I thought boot camps were for people who already were working in a field who wanted to sharpen a particular skill in that field. Right, same with MOOCs. I am a pretty experienced engineer already, I recently took a course on EdX[1]. I wanted to round out my R (mainly a Python guy but there is some cool stuff in the R ecosystem), revise some of the maths from undergrad 20+ years ago, try out a MOOC, and take a peek into an area of computing I'd had no exposure to. I enjoyed it and I got a lot out of it and would recommend it to others. But could I have been a non-programmer, completed that course, and been adequately prepared to begin a career in industry? Absolutely not. And to be fair that is not how that course is pitched, but there are some that are, that have even less content in them. $200 is a bargain for a working engineer who wants a new skill, or is even just curious. $20000 is a massive scam for a beginner who thinks they can kickstart a career that way. [1] https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-analysis-life-sciences https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-analysis-life-sciences

solidsnack9000 9y ago

"Shutting down" or "consolidating"?

sdenton4 9y ago

So I think this is completely wrong. Bootcamps are providing a route to jobs that doesn't involve taking another for years it for a university degree; it's a massive gain in efficiency. By being smaller, bootcamps should have more ability to pivot content to match market demands, and give students advice on directions to persue. Front end development needs for entry level people are getting satisfied, so it's time to how some new teachers and refocus curriculum. Camps need to market as great learning spaces, rather than throwing their whole rep behind a single specially. The notion that the space is overcrowded is bullshit; it just depends where you set your sights. I don't think we would call university education an overcrowded space, in spite of serving many orders of magnitude more students than the bootcamps currently are... One can argue that there are too many law schools, charging to much to create too many entry level lawyers. Hand wringing about these two camps closing is like worrying that there are too many law schools specializing in bankruptcy law. Ultimately I think the closures are more about these two companies failing to adapt than any kind of general lesson about bootcamp education.

jgmmo 9y ago
University education is absolutely an overcrowded space. Most colleges do not live up to their cost. Students are starting to notice and choose other options. It's also well known theres too many law schools and too many lawyers. It's a bad market to enter into now.
- aaronchall 9y ago
  I want to upvote you for your practical values and downvote you because of your lack of cites. Can we get some sources here?
- gaius 9y ago
  How many STEM PhDs/year vs tenure track positions? As as a civilisation we massively over-educate, but under-train...
bdcravens 9y ago
> Bootcamps are providing a route to jobs that doesn't involve taking another for years it for a university degree; it's a massive gain in efficiency. Problem is they aren't teaching enough in bootcamps. You're not going to learn enough in 3-6 months to be hirable. There's too much else to the job, unless you can go to work for those magical companies that use a STACK that is a 1:1 match for what you learned in bootcamp. Most companies aren't interested in hand-holding. If bootcamps would partner with companies to bring in bootcampers at $30k/year and let the real learning begin, it would be a successful model. Unfortunately, the bootcamp marketing is selling something far more grandiose.

stuartaxelowen 9y ago

Map draws `closing` on top of `still open`, hiding reality.

joeylemberg 9y ago
You are totally correct. The default view makes it looks like Chicago had 1 closing and no openings. Zooming in reveals multiple openings in Chicago.

pascalxus 9y ago

I'm not surprised that Google would turn down applicants from boot-camps with less than 3 years of experience. they turn down qualified engineers with over 15+ years of relevant experience.

outside1234 9y ago
I suspect turning down engineers with 15+ years of experience is explainable via Google's age-ism, not the actual underlying experience.

aecorredor 9y ago

"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" I have a 4 year computer science degree and I didn't learn any of the listed topics either, so I'm not sure if the article is implying that other institutions do prepare new grads for these topics. The main advantage I see from bootcamps is that you basically code intensely for 4 months, learn the most important stuff to be productive (at least in small scale) right away, and then you're able to tackle more in depth topics by yourself.

jonny_eh 9y ago
Exactly. They're failing not due to curriculum, but the business model and cash flow.
nonconvergent 9y ago
Ditto on the CS Degree. Closest thing I learned to the above skills that was part of the curriculum was Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs. Had to teach myself git.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  I taught every single person I was on a group project with git, all the way up through senior year. My familiarity with it came from a damn hackathon of all places. It's actually gross how source control was just not a concept taught at all in the program.
- leo79 9y ago
  You joking right? I got my cs degree 15 years ago and back then i learned Waterfall, UML, and making ERDs...
  - ericmcer 9y ago
    It is still the same people teaching the courses probably.
  - deleted 9y ago

geebee 9y ago

I think that bootcamps actually can work well for people who already have highly honed analytical and logical reasoning skills, but for whatever reason haven't gotten involved in programming. For instance, a linguistics or philosophy major, or maybe a pure math major, who hasn't done any programming. For example, in a math class on graph theory, we essentially did DFS and BFS, but through proof, not through code. I think one of the reasons bootcamps may be closing is there just aren't enough people like this to train. 6 weeks can do amazing things for people who come in with years of intense analytical training, but it's not a curriculum that can create that core skill in 6 weeks - that takes years - actually, decades.

AquinasCoder 9y ago
I completely agree. I did my undergrad and grad studies in philosophy, specifically focusing on contemporary and symbolic logic, before joining a six month bootcamp. Before the bootcamp, I had at least six months of development experience. Would I do it again? Absolutely, the bootcamp gave me discipline, a network, and a schedule to fill the gaps in my development experience. Did it teach me computer science? No way. We spent a week on it and hardly covered bubble sort, quick sort, and binary search. Although I have only touched the surface of computer science, I view it as an extension of my training in logic, and philosophy as an abstraction of pure mathematics. I know that if I want better jobs I will have to continue to learn algorithms, data structures, architecture, etc. Bootcamps can direct an analytical inclination, but rarely, if ever, create it. I am not at all sure that the conclusion is that bootcamps are ineffective. The issue is not with bootcamps as such, but with those who believe that the hard work is done by just showing up for lecture or doing the minimum in homework. I like to think that bootcamps are just an extension or tool to employ as an autodidact. There has always been a divide between those jobs which require a more rigorous foundation and jobs which need someone to bang out some semi-workable code for a website. Bootcamp grads are often under the wrong impression that they are qualified for the first type without some experience doing menial tasks.
- scriptkiddy 9y ago
  Just like most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. > I like to think that bootcamps are just an extension or tool to employ as an autodidact. If you are an autodidact, a bootcamp isn't even required. The Internet is chock full of resources for learning programming that makes it extremely simple to learn on your own. I look at a bootcamp as paying for connections. A Bootcamp should help get you in touch with prospective employers or connect you with other developers with similar goals. Learning how to program is the easy part when compared to learning the soft skills required to be part of or build a successful company.

ravenstine 9y ago

> Bloomberg ran an article stating many students were still not prepared for the tech industry even after their extensive training. If you look at bootcamps as an education/career on a platter, sure. But they're no different than how a typical school should work; you get as much out of the experience as you put in. My experience at Dev Bootcamp was that those who put in the effort and had the right perspective were the ones who made it into the field after their graduation. Some people, actually many, simply don't have what it takes to be a programmer, and that shouldn't be seen as a failure on the part of bootcamps. It'd be one thing if few to none of the graduates from bootcamps succeeded in their profession, but that's simply not the case. I and many people I know wouldn't be where we are now if we didn't have the kind of bootcamp style education where we could dedicate our time to educating ourselves and hacking on shit. Yes, yes... we might have been able to do that without paying a bootcamp, for "free", yet we'd be paying the overhead of organizing people, consistently getting people together to spend time hacking on projects, etc. I was lucky enough to get one other person to hack on a project with me after bootcamp – everyone else was either too busy or out to make money from the free work of others. I'd much rather spend $20k to go to Dev Bootcamp and be able to hack with people on Node.js & Ruby projects, be in the bay area, and go to hack-a-thons every other night than spend far more than that sitting through a bunch of non-tech classes I hate to come out with some abysmally outdated skills in PHP & Java. Just because some bootcamps have shut down doesn't mean that the model itself is a failure. Though I had some minimal experience coding on my own prior to bootcamp(let's just say I could make Hangman in Python but had no idea what object-orientation was), I was able to become proficient enough to build a live YouTube chat(before YouTube had that) with shared video controls... as a result of the experiences I had through Dev Bootcamp. You CAN learn to code in a few months, but you have to want it enough. Strange as it may seem, not everyone wants to succeed as much as others. Even if 80% of bootcamp graduates didn't become programmers after the course, that's no reason to see the bootcamp model as a failure. Not everyone is cut out for it, and yet it has changed the lives of numerous people. Though I'm sad that Dev Bootcamp is no more(which I'd still argue is a result of terrible management both prior to and after the Kaplan acquisition), I hope the idea of coding bootcamps can evolve to be more successful.

jefflombardjr 9y ago

As someone who went to a boot camp, this doesn't surprise me at all. I don't think it's worth it for most people. BUT, I don't see them going away entirely. I'm thrilled with the boot camp I went to, and would do it all over again. Hear me out... > Are Coding Boot Camps Worth It? - If the first time you're touching code is at a boot camp, it's not worth it. By the time I had started a boot camp, I had been reading books and doing tutorials on and off for 2 years. Thinking in terms of product life cycle, and your programming skills are the product, you want to go to a boot camp at the beginning of the growth phase. - If your instructor or TA is a graduate of the program, it's not worth it. We had instructors who had worked at F500 tech firms and a small class size. To me the real value was having 3 months worth of access to someone who in many cases made hiring decisions at those companies. - If the boot camp focuses more on their curriculum more than their people, it's not worth it. Curriculums are garbage, it doesn't matter what language you learn, you should be learning how to think like a developer. It's not all about focusing on the instructors too, if you've been self-studying for 2 years, and your peer doesn't know how to open a text editor, they're going to hold you back. You want a boot camp that is selective with their applicants. - If you're doing it for money, it's not worth it. You're not going to make an average salary right out of the school. In fact, you probably won't even be a full-time employee, plan on being a contractor for the first year. If you don't know how to find work on your own or research how to, knowing how to program isn't going to change anything. - You're starting at the bottom, every opportunity good or bad is an opportunity to learn. Paid or unpaid take it, eventually, you will have enough opportunities to start saying no to less valuable opportunities, but until you're 100% booked, you're a yes man or yes woman. In fact don't wait until graduation. - If you can't afford to take 6 months off and devote them entirely to programming, it's not worth it. I had saved for 2 years, paid off my debt, and instead of using the remaining money for a down payment on a house, I paid for tuition/living expenses to dedicate 3 months of uninterrupted time. I know I was fortunate enough to have this opportunity, but if you're going to do it, you need the resources to do it right. Otherwise, continue with self-study and find a mentor at a meetup. - If you're not in a tech hub, it's not worth it. San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Portland, Chicago, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Denver, or Montreal are good. Maybe Boston or Atlanta, don't know enough about the tech scenes there. - If you have medical/family issues, it's not worth it. It is stressful if you have any other things going on in your life sort them out first. I've seen a lot of people fail, but it is still very much worth it for some people. I went to a boot camp to accelerate something I was already doing. What is said about boot camps applies to education in the broader sense as well. In many cases college isn't worth it, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't go.

zebraflask 9y ago

I think this is for the best. These have typically struck me as analogous to people taking an overpriced amateur cooking class and then hoping that qualifies them for work in a gourmet restaurant. And it's hardly a new idea, but why pay when a quick Google search provides a mountain of free training material? Self-taught coders are a bit more impressive.

dmitri1981 9y ago

The article fails to mention that both dev boot camp and iron yard were acquired by some large for profit cos. The discussion on HN regarding their closure seemed to highlight that both companies had their quality of teaching severely cut post acquisition which no doubt aided their demise. Also, many of their boot camps were in secondary locations that could not support on-going employment for all their grads

brookside 9y ago

Bootcamps rode a wave of phenomenal publicity at their inception. Articles in the NYTimes and the like made me aware of Flatiron / General Assembly as alternatives to grad school, which I had just enrolled in at the time. These "Bootcamps Are Dead" stories will to some degree be self-fulfilling. Regardless of any realities in the junior dev job market, exposure to this wave of (sinking?) submarining would give me great pause were I making the same school decision today.

eric_b 9y ago

Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? Most developers I know have years of deep experience with computers before becoming professional programmers. (Things like fixing driver issues, installing linux, patching games etc). I have several friends who went to bootcamps had no deep technical interest beforehand. They just heard that computer programming was good money, and they enrolled. To me, the ideal bootcamp student would be the person who dabbles with programming or programming-tangential technologies on the side, but just needs that little extra boost. That is a very small number of people if experience is any guide. I just don't think it's reasonable to go from 0 to junior developer in 12 weeks if you don't have that technical history. It's why you can't become a doctor in 12 weeks, generally. The four year degree programs force exposure to programming and programming-thinking for 4 dedicated years. This is enough to close the gap for non-technical people, but 12 weeks is surely not.

stanleydrew 9y ago
> Why do people think a 12 week course will make a non-technical person ready for a junior developer role? I'm not sure many people do think that. But it was an experiment. If you assume that the tooling around "programming" or "product building" or whatever you want to call it will eventually be good enough that you can slot a generic human into a well-defined role then these bootcamps might make sense. We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed.
- scriptkiddy 9y ago
  > We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed. I've seen this sentiment being thrown around a lot lately. I don't think it will ever be the case. There will always need to be someone who can build the tools or the tools that build the tools or the tools that build the tools that build the tools. Let's use your auto assembly line idea to illustrate this. A good portion of auto manufacturing these days is completely automated, the body is assembled by robots for instance. Well, a factory had to build those robots, right? That factory probably bought some robot control software from another company who specializes in that. The company that built the robot probably didn't manufacture all of the components for the robot. For instance, their welding robot may have a wire feed spool that was manufactured by a company that builds welders. However, the company that manufactured the spool probably didn't forge the metal themselves, they bought it from a forging company. That company in turn bought ore from a mining company. The mining company mined that ore using an automated tunnel boring machine. The automated tunnel boring machine was built by another company that manufactures automated mining machinery, and the trail starts anew. Somewhere down the line in every industry is an engineer who designs and possibly even builds components that are necessary for that industry to operate. Now, applied to software engineering: Even if we did have software that could automatically build a web application tailored specifically and exactly to what any given company wanted down to website design and SEO, that software would have still need to have been built in the first place. If that software was built by another piece of software and so on up the line, at some point there is a person who built the progenitor. Regardless of who built the original, wouldn't these pieces of software still have bugs? What if these pieces of software involved more software that could fix their own bugs? Well , who fixes the bugs in the bug fixing software? Beyond this, what if there is a new feature that needs to be built out? Will the software be able to build out that new feature and integrate it with the existing application? If so, how will it handle conflicts? As it currently stands, it takes a team of multiple professionals to simply maintain any non-trivial codebase. I don't personally believe that it is possible to design an AI that is powerful enough to do this kind of work without this AI having human levels of intelligence and creativity. In order for this AI to be able to reach this kind of proficiency it would have to be self aware. And then we are forced to ask the question: is self aware AI still AI, or is it alive? We are not ready to answer these questions. Until we are, there will always be a need for flesh and bone engineers of all sorts. That ended up way longer than I intended.

nhorob67 9y ago

Anyone have any boot camps they think are "best-in-class"?

aaronchall 9y ago
Recurse Center, née Hacker School, emphasizes that they are not a "boot camp", but they at least started with the best reputation. I'm not sure where they are now in terms of reputation, though. I think it may be that there was an unserved pool of natural talent that the first boot camps quickly served to train, and now we're down to the trickle of trainable talent that thinks boot camps are the way to go. And as schools like NYU (where I'm currently teaching a fairly new Python certificate program) begin to grab market share as substitutes to boot camps, with their stellar reputations, the bootcamp niche will become even more difficult to compete in.

gumby 9y ago

Wow, they cost $26K!!?? For what they offer that seems like an outrageous amount -- and largely unaffordable for most of the target customer base. Since the for-profit education industry had rushed in, I assume they just went for their typical milk-the-student-loan-system scam

jefflombardjr 9y ago
I paid less than a third of that. The good ones are either affordable or they make you pay % of salary once you are employed.

postit 9y ago

I believe boot camps got a bit of traction because of the price point compared to a college degree. Once people realized they didn't learn enough and didn't get that sweet three figure silicon valley job, the hype started to fade. We don't see the same trends in Europe, where university degrees are mostly cheap or free.

rufford 9y ago
There isn't the same demand for European software engineers though. Obviously part of it is the value proposition, but I think a lot of said proposition is about the time just as much as the cost I didn't want to waste 2-3 years getting an additional degree, and a bootcamp filled in nicely (simply a personal anecdote but it worked fine for me)

autokad 9y ago

how do people feel about specialized bootcamps like data science? has anyone done them?

eighthnate 9y ago

The reason why boot camps are shutting down is because money is drying up. They are either predicting we are about to head into recession and/or that the hiring of entry level developers is going to dry up in the coming months/years. Go back to 2004-2007. There were tons of "training schools" for developers. They all cashed out right around the time of the financial crisis. Then around 2012, they all resurfaced as "boot camps". Rising interest rates, saturated employment environment and 10 years of insane growth probably means that they don't see much room for growth in the near term so they are closing shop. They'll be back in a few years under different branding once the environment changes.

seangrogg 9y ago

"While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies" As a bootcamp grad (Hack Reactor) this is only partially true; while you can easily skate by without needing to learn any of these things there are many who elect into them. Anecdotally, from my cohort: * Testing and version control were a part of the entire curriculum from the first sprint to our capstone code freeze. Basic git was drilled into us, as well as exploration of more involved git workflows when we began our project phase. We learned about TDD and BDD and had a sprint dedicated to setting up our own tests (with tests against our tests). * People could elect to take product management/scrum master roles in their project teams (of which there were 3); some people elected to take these positions every project, some avoided them, but most served in a managerial capacity at least once. * Deployment (admittedly most to Heroku, only one to AWS) was a soft requirement of every project and it was part of one of our sprints. Outside of my cohort, many people spent extensive time working with things that weren't a core part of what we did. During my database sprint my partner and I decided against the offered MySQL sprint and wrote our own Postgres branch. Many people took deep dives into algorithms and data structures - bloom filters, red-black/b-trees, various sort implementations, etc. Some project teams built CI pipelines and deployed on AWS/GCS/Azure. Overall, while these things aren't a part of the core curriculum you'll find many people electively choose to take on far more than what's mentioned. And I learned _none_ of that in my _full year_ of CS.

corbett3000 9y ago

We've found that coding boot camps do not produce highly skilled devs. They output over priced junior talent who believe they're all of a suddenly highly sought after "full stack engineers" worthy of $70k+ salaries because the boot camps tell them that's what their worth - and then they take a 20% recuiting fee. If we see a candidate apply that has a coding camp on their resume it's almost always a pass.