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Let me give you a list of the top scams coding bootcamps use to steal your money

331 points by ZeljkoS 7y ago

Dirlewanger 7y ago
Zed certainly knows how to ruffle feathers. He's a rare voice in the tech world that will cut through the bullshit.
- carapace 7y ago
  Ha! I met him once IRL. It took him two sentences to insinuate that I might be an asshole. Me: Something about FOO. Jed: "Most people I've met who are into FOO are assholes." Me: ... Nevertheless, I find him entertaining, and he definitely will cut through the bullshit.
- mcguire 7y ago
  "cut through" I think you misspelled "generate a metric ton of".
kresten 7y ago
Good to see Zed Shaw back. Wonder what’s he’s doing these days....
- sky_rw 7y ago
  follow link, reads twitter bio He's teaching people how to code, the hard way.
sky_rw 7y ago
In my previous roles as lead developer at startups in NYC and SF I interviewed roughly 30-40 bootcamp graduates looking for RoR jobs. The bar for a jr. position was extremely low and still none of them were able to pass. Many knew they course material very well, but as soon as you threw any real world problem that required any deviation from their established lane they completely floundered. Eventually we just started filtering out anybody with that background. Saddest thing is I keep hearing stories of people saving up huge amounts of money to go to these bootcamps with this dream that they can jump from a 30k/year retail job to a $120k/year SWE job with a 4 month bootcamp. I just do not believe it ever happens.
- alexbanks 7y ago
  I encountered _so many_ "I was a teacher and I wanted a new career" types that quit their jobs and moved in with parents/family/friends to attend bootcamps, only to find that they actually hated programming, and afterwards couldn't find a job and had to return to their original industry. Of course, the schools don't care, they make their money either way.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    “only to find that they actually hated programming” That’s an important point. A lot of people will find programming very boring and tedious. I wouldn’t recommend this career to most people.
    - redis_mlc 7y ago
      What I ask people is, "Do you like solving puzzles?" Because as a programmer you get paid to solve new problems, not old ones.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        ”Because as a programmer you get paid to solve new problems, not old ones.” In a lot of programming jobs you will repeatedly solve the same problem or a variation of it.
        alanh 7y ago
        Yep, there’s always the job available of "customer wants a new form" and "make this wordpress site match some designer's PSD" out there
        blaser-waffle 7y ago
        "it's like facebook, but for [X]"
      - 7y ago
alexbanks 7y ago
My personal experience around bootcamps echoes all of these points. I've interacted with several codeschool grads and several of them took those exact TA positions to boost employment %s. Of all the bootcamps I've ever seen, HackReactor is probably the only one I'd ever hire from again. Their grads (without asserting anything about the ethics of the school) seem to be more employable than the rest post-schooling.
- redthrow 7y ago
  Someone who went to HackReactor & got a job at Airbnb making 6 figures was telling people not to go to a Bootcamp because the job situation is getting worse and all the best parts of the course are available either for free online or $10 on Udemy (vs $20k for the bootcamp). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSgsX80ymF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSgsX80ymF8
  - gowld 7y ago
    Maybe people who go to bootcamps know that watching videos from home doesn't work for them?
    - redthrow 7y ago
      That exact point is addressed at the 3:00 mark.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        Then either transcribe it or tell us what they said. Life is to short to watch YouTube videos when text exists.
      - peripitea 7y ago
        Edit: For context, his argument is basically: "If independent learning is not your forte then that's a much larger problem, because you will need to do significant independent study regardless of the bootcamp." It's not a great argument. Yes, being able to learn/research independently is an important skill that everyone should have, but it's a spectrum. Teaching yourself programming in six months through self-study alone is VERY FAR along on that spectrum. I would bet there are far more people who can get a job with the structure/forced deadlines/etc. of a bootcamp + a heavy amount of self-study to improve their skills, than there are who can do the entire thing themselves. Also, self study is far from the most efficient way to learn most things. Having someone to help unblock you when you have a bug you can't figure out, or when there's a concept you're not quite grasping can make a huge difference in your overall rate of learning.
troughway 7y ago
@zedshaw - any idea of if/when you'll write that rant on why pickaxe book ruined ruby?
ngngngng 7y ago
Austen seems to be working exceptionally hard to get around the fact that they're operating illegally in CA. California laws are often garbage (overbearing, ill conceived, whatever) but damn is it frustrating to see so many vulnerable students saddle themselves with so much debt in pursuit of making a stable living. https://insights.dice.com/2019/10/02/lambda-school-violation-law/ https://insights.dice.com/2019/10/02/lambda-school-violation...
- gowld 7y ago
  > Austen seems to be working exceptionally hard to get around the fact that they're operating illegally You mean trying to fix the fact? As far as I've seen (Allred comments on HN), Allred/Lambda certainy test the boundaries of law and enforcement, but Allred is consistently respectful with CA's rulings, does what CA agencies demand, and keeps the school/"school" open. Yes, Lambda moves fast and breaks rules and pays penalty costs, but they don't deny the legitimacy of the laws and try to weasel out.
- peripitea 7y ago
  >but damn is it frustrating to see so many vulnerable students saddle themselves with so much debt in pursuit of making a stable living. It sounds like you're talking about traditional American colleges with this criticism, not Lambda school. I'm confused.
motohagiography 7y ago
Why do we have bootcamps for coding when we could apply the same methodology to law, minor surgery, accounting, policing, and jobs we actually need more people in because the prices are so high? We could teach elementary school kids to set bones, do stitches, manage projects, and treat flu. If people have a problem with this, they should have a problem with subsidies for teaching people to code as well.
- saddestcatever 7y ago
  Because "Software Engineering" isn't (currently) held to the same standards of certification, ethics, and peer review that other Engineering and Medical fields are. Maybe some day.
  - kuschku 7y ago
    And that's exactly the issuem Software Engineering is just as much engineering as anything else, requires the same quality and lessons in ethics, and nowadays costs more people their lives than many other forms of engineering. The MCAS of the 737-MAX wasn't designed by mechanical or civil engineers ;)
  - carapace 7y ago
    Yeah, this. ...maybe? On the one hand the idea that you can become a well-paid programmer starting from one of these bootcamps is almost insulting to me as someone who dedicated much of his life to the field. On the other hand, a lot of people do it. I've worked with them. They don't all suck. Have I wasted my life on trivialities? What does my knowledge and, yes, mastery count for if Joe Bootcamp can solve Jane Businessman's problems with a few months of training and a bolus of javascript?
    - mcguire 7y ago
      In my experience, you will be the one called in to fix it when Joe's solution goes pear shaped.
    - mrguyorama 7y ago
master_yoda_1 7y ago
I agree with the points but I can't bias my opinion just because someone went to bootcamp. You can find good or bad candidate everywhere. Once I interviewed a candidate form one of the well known state funded school and the person can't even write a for loop. Also IMO coursera/udacity/community colleges are more reliable than bootcamp.
iongoatb 7y ago
Zed is an idiot. I've read his book when I started programming (eh, decent, not that great) but his opinion on bootcamps is uninformed and flat out ignorant. I attended Hack Reactor in SF and all the smart, motivated people ended up getting really good jobs in big tech and startups. Most people were in this category. The not-so-smart and not-so-motivated people didn't do that well. Go figure. Bootcamps aren't a scam, and they aren't a magic pill. I was making 6 figures within a few months of graduating from Hack Reactor. Let's do the ROI on that - $20k for a $120k salary within 1 year - 6X my original investment. The majority of graduates were in a similar boat. Zed's claim about survivorship bias couldn't be further from the truth.
- uwuhn 7y ago
  I feel like most bootcamps are bad, and the metric I measure it by is how many people actually end up with careers. Sample size of friends, coworkers, and coming across random profiles on Linkedin or Twitter or whatever. Hackbright is the best one from what I've seen when it comes to placement and career retainment, and it's free too, but it's only available to women. Hack Reactor seems ok. App Academy seems ok too. DevBootcamp seems like it used to be ok, but is now bad after it was sold. Which other bootcamps have you hired people from?
- scarmig 7y ago
  The question isn't whether there are smart, motivated people who graduate from a boot camp and succeed. Of course there are. But what's much less clear is the value add of a boot camp. Yes, smart, highly motivated people will succeed after a boot camp, but there's plenty of reason to think they'd succeed regardless. What is worse is the not-so-smart people who spend five figures in a boot camp, and get nothing out of it. The fact that so many boot camps feel the need to goose their numbers by hiring the failgrads is a pretty clear sign that this happens a lot.
vo2maxer 7y ago
Zed’s follow up to initial thread on bootcamps: https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212808427468185600?s=21 https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212808427468185600?s=21
Jaygles 7y ago
I'm a bootcamp graduate who successfully inserted myself into the market and within three years (2016 - 2019) gained a senior title at a large company (~2000 employees) as a software engineer. I attribute my success to having a computer science background from being a gigantic nerd my entire life (first code written was QBasic in 3rd grade and you KNOW I was at every lan party in high school) and luck (Had someone willing to hire me to maintain small fry websites for a year which helped my resume quite a bit although at a poopy salary). Both my brother and I went this route after getting unrelated bachelors degrees from a large university. I think a lot of people don't become competent after these bootcamps because they just aren't technical enough to grasp the concepts at the pace they're introduced in class. The people in my cohort have been fairly successful. Without checking I think about 50% of them have jobs as web developers now.
- cjaro 7y ago
  I graduated from my bootcamp in early 2017 and am angling for a promotion from Jr. Developer to Associate by the end of this year. I think most everyone from my cohort is still at their dev jobs. This part of your reply stood out to me: "I think a lot of people don't become competent after these bootcamps because they just aren't technical enough to grasp the concepts at the pace they're introduced in class." because I think it's 100% accurate. I had a lot of education to carry out alongside my job, where I was learning a ton of programming concepts in the real world and let me tell you, it's not easy stuff. But, luckily for me, with the right supervisor or mentor or peers, you can climb the mountain a little easier.
  - geogra4 7y ago
    I think bootcamps work best for people who are already technical but aren't specifically trained as programmers. I have a friend from college that was a biochemist for a while, took a bootcamp course, and is now a dev at Microsoft.
- munchbunny 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I agree with this. All of the successful dev bootcamp alumni that I know had been writing code for one reason another for at least a year before they joined one of the bootcamps. They probably didn't need a dev bootcamp to get them off the ground, but it probably helped with giving them structure and routine to fully follow through with retraining and transitioning careers. Generally there seem to be three schools of hiring: (1) people who have been classically trained, (2) people who seem generally smart and willing to grind, (3) people who have done the work before. #1 you mostly only get from a 4-year degree program, and colleges generally filter for #2. The other way I see people in category #2 hired is when they transition into a dev job through ad hoc circumstances (e.g. data analyst who needed to do more and more coding on the job). #3 is just having been a programmer before. If you go to a dev bootcamp, you won't have #1 or #3. You're depending purely on #2, and that's the one category where it's mostly about you, not the dev bootcamp. The dev bootcamp is just there to give you structure and to signal something to employers.
southphillyman 7y ago
Made the mistake of suggesting a bootcamp to an unemployed relative. She passed the initial screening/interview stage but really seemed to be struggling with the prerequisite material. The bootcamp didn't seem to care and kept trying to pressure her into signing the ISA. She probably wouldn't have been able to complete a basic beginner MOOC much less an intensive 8+ hour a day bootcamp. I eventually talked her out of moving forward but it was not encouraging to see how aggressive the bootcamp wanted to admit a clearly under qualified student.
- gowld 7y ago
  What's was in that particular ISA? What would it cost if she got a non-bootcamp-boosted job?
  - southphillyman 7y ago
    It was Lambda School, so whatever their terms are.
- austenallred 7y ago
  That’s exactly why Lambda School starts with the precourse work. It’s not a fit for everyone, and the 40+ hours of precourse work helps us discover who that’s true for.
everdev 7y ago
I'm glad to see Income Share Agreements (ISAs) as #1. They're a tax on the poor and just as bad if not worse than predatory student loans. This "don't pay unless you get a job education model" costs you far more than those who have the means to pay for a bootcamp outright. BTW, as someone who hires developers at all talent levels I'd never put any value in a diploma, from an Ivy League or a boot camp. The only thing I want to see is the most interesting thing you've built recently. From there we can talk technical details and cultural fit.
- peripitea 7y ago
  I know multiple people who could not have attended a bootcamp if not for ISAs. I also know one who could afford to pay but still chose to go the ISA route. They are all happy-to-thrilled with the model. I would love to know your reasoning for describing them as "just as bad if not worse than predatory student loans". I can't conceive of a worldview where that would be true, so I think I'm missing something in your perspective.
  - everdev 7y ago
    Thanks for being inquisitive. It's easy to look at this as giving education to those who wouldn't get it otherwise. But there is a dark side: https://medium.com/@kevgardner83/the-true-cost-of-income-sharing-agreements-f43418265d35 https://medium.com/@kevgardner83/the-true-cost-of-income-sha... > The average up-front tuition amount for coding bootcamps is $10,000 to $15,000, according to Course Report, which collects data and reviews on coding bootcamps. The idea to not pay thousands of dollars at the start of the program may be attractive. But, let’s say you agree to an ISA. And after completing the a coding bootcamp, you’re hired with a salary of $60,000 a year. If you pay 20 percent of your salary for four years, you’ll end up paying $48,000. That’s more than four times the average cost for an up-front payment to a coding bootcamp. It's basically charging those with the least money more tuition. It would be fine if they capped it at the tuition price or even a nominal interest rate, but some programs make 400% more from students that can't afford upfront tuition. It's fine if you want to charge everyone in your bootcamp under the ISA model, but if you offer a $10k tuition and a $40k ISA you're basically offering the same product at vastly different prices to two different economic groups.
rchaud 7y ago
My recommendation for people interested in bootcamps is to focus on one that offers a skillset in a particular area like Wordpress, that doesn't require education on formal CS concepts. You can still get exposure to databases, security, UI/UX design etc doing Wordpress, without bankrupting yourself paying 5-figure bootcamp fees. Best of all, you can get a real job building marketing websites/some basic apps, as opposed to pie-in-the-sky dreams of working at Netflix's Data Science department. BTW, my bootcamp (I took a JS course), paid me $500 to post about my experience on Quora. I wrote a 1,000 word article about what I learned and how I applied in a project. To the bootcamp's credit, at no point was I asked to embellish my experience or attribute getting a job solely due to the bootcamp.
draw_down 7y ago
Typical replies... "this doesn't represent ALL bootcamps!" Oh, I didn't know that excuses it. Less than 100% of them operate immorally so let's just not talk about it.
_JC_Denton 7y ago
I know the author would chalk my experience up to 'survivorship bias', but my bootcamp experience was life-changing and 100% positive. I don't know if the quality of bootcamps have gone down, but I did one ~5 years ago, and was very impressed by the talent of my classmates and felt lucky to be with them. Backgrounds were extremely diverse, from Ivy-league graduate math majors to a former horse trainer. The graduation rate was around 85%, and among the graduates, the 'true' job placement rate was probably around 90%. I was able to hit the ground running in my first software engineering job at a well funded startup, and was on par with other fresh cs degree graduates. Over the next few years I was the first among that class to be given a team leadership role. Looking at LinkedIn, the other graduates from my bootcamp seem to be having their own successes at FAANG jobs and other strong positions. While I believe my experience was somewhat typical for my bootcamp cohort, (like college) I think quality can vary greatly based on the bootcamp, and I am sure some are bad deals in the ways Zed has outlined. edit: For those who are wondering if the successful bootcamp grads would have been successful anyways without the bootcamp - 100% no way for me. I had already been self-studying programming before the bootcamp and it was a night and day difference. It would have taken years of self study to learn what I did, and with a good chance that life would have derailed me along the way.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  The most obvious way to unify your experience with the details in the original thread is that they have gone down in quality over the past 5 years. Given the massive number of new bootcamps that have launched (and shut down) it seems natural that not all of them would be up to the quality standard you enjoyed at the time.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    That would suggest that choosing a bootcamp that was around 5 years ago would be a far better choice than one started more recently.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Alternatively you could look at quality directly instead of using a proxy. At least use a better proxy, like length of program.
beering 7y ago
Take anything Zed Shaw says with a grain of salt, given that he has his own very strong views on how to teach/learn coding (as shown by his books). For example, "FBTA"s are real and I have encountered them in real life. There are definitely bootcamps that game the system by hiring their own grads. On the flip side, I think ISAs are a really promising way to align incentives between the school and students. Compare that to people going into massive debt by going to uni and then failing to find a good job - only the gov't cares if you're able to repay your debt or not.
- chanchar 7y ago
  On this note, I'm surprised ISAs are not more common for higher education (ie. college, university). I know a couple of smaller liberal art schools (ie. Purdue) have been testing this.
  - _--___-___ 7y ago
    Are you referring to the only Purdue I know of, which is a flagship state university known for its engineering programs? I guess it's small compared to Ohio State and liberal arts-focused compared to Georgia Tech.
    - rubidium 7y ago
      They seem to not know Purdue is a near-top or top tier stem school. Mitch’s annual open letter just came out today: https://www.purdue.edu/president/messages/annual-open-letters/2001-med-openletter-full.php https://www.purdue.edu/president/messages/annual-open-letter...
- miohtama 7y ago
  Zed is definitely a very opinionated author and you need to factor in bias in his messaging. However based on the discussion threads here it seems to be no smoke without a fire.
dannykwells 7y ago
The author appears to run this website: https://learncodethehardway.org/ https://learncodethehardway.org/ which directly profits from people not doing bootcamps but rather, teaching themself to code (using his books). So maybe not the most unbiased source (even if some of the content rings true). Everyone - everyone - always has an angle.
- grimjack00 7y ago
  On the other hand, I know of a couple bootcamps that recommend his website and books as prep and supplementary material.
_bxg1 7y ago
Setting aside all of the anecdotes for and against bootcamps in this thread and the one on Twitter, consider this: compared to the rest of the job market, software engineering in 2020 is a ridiculous gold rush, no matter which way you slice it. And bootcamps are a vague-but-lucrative new business sector that capitalizes on this reality with hardly any regulation or accreditation system. Historically, whenever there's been a lucrative new business opportunity with little oversight it's almost guaranteed to be rife with corruption and scams. That's not to say that legit bootcamps don't exist - my own partner had a successful experience with one - but the marketplace is a minefield of potentially life-ruining opportunities, and the only way to tell good from bad is through anecdotes and he-said-she-said. That's a big problem.
- carapace 7y ago
  Yeah, a gold rush, and old SF hands know the way to cash in: stay in town, sell shovels and Levi's.
  - vsareto 7y ago
    Old SF hands might be cashing in, but many people are getting >$150k-$250k jobs out of it. The shovel analogy is stretched thin. It's more like selling gold shovels at this point: both sides get rich, but one a little more than the other.
    - carapace 7y ago
      Look at the risks.
- tempsy 7y ago
  I mean the ISA-style bootcamps don't make any money unless you get a real SWE job (being a TA doesn't trigger the ISA) and there are good ones out there.
  - sandofsky 7y ago
    They also make money by reselling ISAs to hedge funds. This could stop happening in a few years if the ISAs don’t pan out, and the hedge funds stop buying them. But right now the school is protected regardless of outcome. The other issue is that bootcamps can collect that money even if they provide no value. Say a student gets nothing out of the bootcamp, and spends the next three years on rigorous self-study. The only upside for students is if the bootcamp fails, and they totally give up on a career in programming. If you have an ISA hanging over your head that might cost you upwards of $30k, I’d say it’s more likely you’ll give up than if you blew $7k up-front.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hashkb 7y ago
Former instructor here: don't spend your money on this. My bootcamp, as far as I know, didn't abuse anyone; just innocently failed to provide the students with the value. Three months isn't enough time. One year isn't enough time. If you had a good experience at a bootcamp, then you probably would have been fine on your own. Most students at bootcamps are like most students at any school (lazy/cheating) except in the case of the bootcamp, the school has less to offer in the first place and essentially no incentive to grade you rigorously. So even more than usual, you get out what you put in. Bootcamp grads flooding the industry have put such a burden on hiring, performance reviews, and firing, that we now live in a world where "senior" means "second year" and asking someone to perform a tree search on a white board is literally torturing them. Making good software, dealing with other humans, providing value and earning money -- it's not easy; and it's ridiculous to assume that these bootcamps can come anywhere near the (lack of) preparation you get from real schools.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > If you had a good experience at a bootcamp, then you probably would have been fine on your own. The rest of your post may have substantial merit but this is just horseshit. Most people are v incapable of sitting down to learn something for forty hours a week without some outside motivation for one week, never mind three months.
alanh 7y ago
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1212284566431576069.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1212284566431576069.html
- alisey 7y ago
  How do people even read on Twitter? All I can see on their desktop website is a single tweet with a "Show this thread" link that doesn't do anything.
alanh 7y ago
I just want to say that, as is usually the case for any label or collection of people, you have to end up judging bootcamp grads on an individual basis. At my company, we have interviewed and hired quite a few bootcamp grads, most of whom were previously bootcamp TAs. And yeah — a lot of them are very mediocre, you know, the kind of engineer you would never select to be on your dream team, but at least one is a really amazing hire, a great co-worker, extremely conscientious and forever learning on and off the job, pushing the rest of us forward, etc.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  "Many bootcamp grads are unqualified" is sort of a weird complaint in a field where it's common (and I think accurate) to complain that many degree-holders with a decade of experience are unqualified. It's not obvious to me that this is any special weakness of bootcamps, rather than just another consequence of the fact that programming doesn't have much standardized education or trustworthy credentialing.
axbytg 7y ago
When it works, it works. Myself and a friend started learning programming at the same time, both with the goal of switching careers. I worked in tech in sales, he had a job translating subtitles. He did a bootcamp, I taught myself. I'm finally on my first job as a SWE at a tiny startup with no funding, making a little less than I was in sales. He has been promoted 3 times to engineering manager at a well established international company with $xx,xxx,xxx in funding, and just bought a house. Maybe don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
sincerely 7y ago
I guess I'm confused why he calls ISAs a scam. They're remarkably straightforward and making 100k - 25% or whatever seems a hell of a lot better than making 30k
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  His phrasing is pretty strong, but I guess there's a difference between "ISAs are scams" and "shady bootcamps can use ISAs as scams". In particular, harsh ISAs are almost completely dominated by student loans, charging like a loan if you have a bad job and much worse if you have a good one. Say a bootcamp with $15k tuition offers an ISA at 20% of income above $10k for 4 years, capped at $85k income. That's unusually bad, but not a blatant scam. If the bootcamp gets you a good job at or above cap, you pay $60k over 4 years. Much higher than tuition, but on some level who cares - you're still way ahead overall. If the bootcamp doesn't help you at all, and you keep a prior $35k wage job, you'll wind up paying $20k total at $415/month. A 7%, four year student loan for the full tuition would only have cost ~$350/month. So you only really "win" if you're unemployed or down near minimum wage. (Or drop out, perhaps? I don't know what happens to ISAs in that case.) I think most ISAs are better than that, especially wrt salary floor. But paying a double-digits percentage of income even if the program hasn't helped you get a better job isn't necessarily much 'safer' than taking a loan directly. It could still be better with poor credit or high prior debt, but ISAs aren't generally promoted on that basis.
duxup 7y ago
Anecdote time: I did a camp tied to Trilogy, that ran through a local University (but really was only administered it, no 'educational' ties). It was a good camp IMO, it had plenty of flaws, but overall I think it was a good camp. The real issue ... they don't filter who gets in enough. Admittedly that is a HARD job as you don't know who will do well. In my crowd of folks who did well there was "accountant tired of accounting", "VP or something or other who just wanted to do a coding camp", "director of something or other who just didn't want to manage people", "bank teller who wanted a real job", "musician who wanted to try something more profitable", and a collection of other not great job / folks who didn't do much in college. These were a mix of young and old, age didn't matter, and they all did great. But on the down side I'd say that at least 50% of the class "graduated" and were IMO, unemployable. I'm not talking about passing an interview, I just don't think they were ever going to learn. I often think of them and what happened to them. I expect some amount of that but the costs involved were high, I hope they didn't take a serious financal hit. Personally I'm doing fine, as are the other folks who did well in class, web dev now and happy to be coding away.
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
Does anyone here have experience with Codefellows? Considering taking one of their courses.
mcguire 7y ago
"#6: Gotta keep that 95%-100% job placement rate up, but did you know that it's 95% of "graduates" get placed in jobs? Well, if you can't increase placement, then decrease the number of "graduates". Best one is the school that calls you a graduate once you get a job. 100% baby!" I've seen that one with a for-profit college. It requires a paid "internship" thingy to graduate. Then gives out really uninspired internship openings. Sure, you've got a job, though.
ravenstine 7y ago
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I attended a bootcamp(Dev Bootcamp) and it was a life-changing time for me. However, I will say this: - When there's a gold rush, there are going to be people trying to make money selling shovels. Some of those shovels are going to be crap. Perhaps most. That doesn't mean that some people aren't running an honest business(or in this case, a bootcamp). - Bootcamps are what you make of them. If you expect them to be like a school where knowledge is just dumped on your lap by a professor, you're going to be in for a world of disappointment. If you're willing to take charge of your learning and are willing to spend the time sharing knowledge with others, and dedicate yourself to maximizing your time(studying, projects, failing in a good way), then a bootcamp will be for you. I spent as much time as I could learning, and was often the last person to exit the building in the early AM. - In relation to the previous point, you may not necessarily need a bootcamp. If you have the passion and the will, you can acquire the knowledge and skills on your own. You could take the tens of thousands of dollars you'd spend on a bootcamp and quit work for a while to study and do projects at home, go to hacker spaces, and attend developer meetups, and you'd get something pretty close to what a bootcamp will give you. However, a bootcamp will bring you together with a bunch of other people in the same position as you in somewhere like San Francisco where there's nonstop action going on. By going to Dev Bootcamp, I was immersed in a world I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to and had experiences with people I might not have had otherwise. All in all, most of the value of a bootcamp is being around people you can learn from and with. If you find that on your own, then you might be able to save by not having to pay that bootcamp tuition. All that said, I don't completely disagree with Shaw's tweets. A lot of bootcamps are clearly(IMO) predatory. Ultimately, a bootcamp can't make any guarantees as to whether or not you get a job. That task is ultimately up to you and, as much as it's not fair, your success will mostly stem from your ability to sell yourself. You can be a completely shit programmer but charm your way into a career. Income share deals, I think, are a bad idea, even if they work out for a few. At that point, you might as well save money by skipping bootcamp and do the learn-on-your-own approach I described earlier. There are many bootcamps that act like they have standards but will actually take just about anyone, even if they aren't really the type that can handle the self-responsibility of going to a bootcamp. Shaw might be painting with a broad brush, he's not totally wrong.
jbtule 7y ago
Boot camp combined with apprenticeship model is way better. LaunchCode https://www.launchcode.org/ https://www.launchcode.org/ is non-profit, no ISA, no fee to applicant. Offers a free slower paced bootcamp (after work hours) that teach you the basics (two programming languages, git, mvc style web programming), but then you interview and place into a paid apprenticeship, about $15/hour, at an employer who trains you for the Job they want you to do (3-6 months), after which if the apprenticeship works out they hire you on with full entry level tech salary for that area. The catch is it's only in Saint Louis, South Florida, Kansas City, and Tampa Bay. Not to say any bootcamp wouldn't work, it's just the key to bootcamps working, is getting hired by a company that invests in training their Junior Devs, which is MUCH more important than the bootcamp itself.
- tomlagier 7y ago
  Strong agree on the key to success being a company that will invest in training juniors. I think a lot of the noise around bootcamps misses this key fact - it's not really the education which makes people employable, it's the real-world work experience. I think that just having a directory of companies that are willing to hire people with minimal experience at slightly-better-than minimum wage is a much better approach to the problem then trying to delude people that anyone can make six figures after a two month boot camp. Some can, sure, but it's a much less reliable method than working in the industry for a few years.
cweagans 7y ago
Zed Shaw writes books targeted at new programmers. From my standpoint, he has a financial incentive to not appreciate bootcamps, especially those with ISAs and similar that don't require up front investment from students because they are cutting into his book sales. Some of his points are definitely true at some schools, but it's worth taking most of them with a grain of salt.
- glangdale 7y ago
  Do you think that it's very likely that someone would forgo buying a relatively cheap book in favor of going to a bootcamp? This seems like two very different markets, and I would suspect that many people in the space where they overlap would do both (i.e. buy the book and go to a bootcamp).
  - cweagans 7y ago
    Potentially. They're both marketed to the same audience and they're often sold as no upfront cost, which can be really appealing. It's completely anecdotal, but I know several people that have chosen bootcamps over books and they're much happier for it.
    - glangdale 7y ago
      "Learn Python 3 the Hard Way" on Amazon: "68 used and new from $11.95". New it's essentially $18. I have trouble imagining that anyone who might have wanted to learn from a book would have baulked at a <$US20 purchase. There are plenty of people who don't like learning from books, which is fine, and I'm certainly not denying their existence, but those people wouldn't be in Zed's market anyhow.
bitwize 7y ago
Ooh! Ooh! Here's one! Offering you "free" training and job placement, then making you sign yourself into two years of indentured servitude, falsifying your CV and phone screen to get you work, and because of that contract you signed if you back out you're on the hook for the cost of your "free" training, which they assess at $20,000.
dvtrn 7y ago
I accidentally posted in another thread* earlier today about my curiosity over point 7 which included reports of bullying and "FBTA's" forcing people to do pushups. Tried Googling and couldn't come up with any results, but have any of these reports been published or written about? That sort of behavior should absolutely be put in the spotlight and strongly rebuked. *https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972278
- mtnGoat 7y ago
  i was curious where this came from too. is he latching onto one single hearsay experience or is this widespread. nobody i know that went to a bootcamp was hazed.
gdix 7y ago
No way, the bootcamps hire some of their students as teaching assistants which the students put on their resume?! What a scam! What kind of organization would ever do this. Oh wait, every college. Not a scam, duh. Want to hear the biggest scam? There are organizations that charge $200K up front to teach you things regardless of whether you get a job. Most of what they teach you can be acquired FOR FREE on the internet. Many many people never get a job in their field and spend decades paying these organizations back. Many of these organizations have tens of billions of dollars in endowments. You may have heard of some of them: Harvard, Yale, MIT. Something seriously must be done about these scam artists.
chimpful 7y ago
I went to Makersquare(now hack reactor) and I can tell you #10 is definitely true. There is no network of job openings and most people found jobs outside the school. Half found jobs half didn't. The ones that found jobs out of the bootcamp were extremely smart. The TA point is also true. The letting go of lower quality applicants was also true. I think the Camp was more fulfilling for me because I had previous programming experience so I could dive deeper into the material since I had some fundamentals already in place. If you have no previous experience, you are f'ed because the material goes by to quickly to deeply learn anything.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I attended a Big Nerd Ranch Advanced iOS bootcamp, in 2012 (It was still ObjC, back then). It was an excellent (and expensive) experience. One of my fondest memories of the last decade. I feel it was worth every penny of it. My company did not pay for it. I took a week's vacation, and paid for it out of pocket. I don't pretend that it was anything more than a fairly basic "primer," to get me "back on the bicycle again," but it did a great job with that. That said, it was a different animal from the types of bootcamps that the author is talking about. It was a "prototypical" bootcamp; a week-long, immersion course, with a fairly narrow agenda.
0kl 7y ago
I will try to refrain from being anecdotal here, but some of it will leak in, I’m sure. Boot camps usually strap in their students for about 3-6 months and make them learn extremely basic coding in some modern stack with html/css. Depending on the company, this may be a better/cheaper alternative to starting talent that was in the grinder for 4 years but may not have any other business knowledge - or sometimes lack knowledge aside from c++/java. (Not arguing the merits here, personally I prefer depth of understanding to a mechanical and superficial understanding, but business needs do differ) So is it fair to say boot camps are stealing your money? The same way that any for-profit educational institute might. At the same time, they have a similar function to other educational institutions in that they are largely a culling mechanism and not an educational one - but that is a problem across the board. It’s unfortunate that they market and promise what they do, as it’s just unrealistic - but that doesn’t mean that they don’t do anything. I don’t have the data anymore, but from multiple cohorts what I saw was a slightly skewed bell curve, where the top of the class (~1 out of every 10 or so) tends to do well and find a decent entry level job in 3-8 months, the bottom of the class just flatlines and really don’t learn a thing (1-4 of 10), and the remaining hustle hard to break into the industry for ~2 years or decide it’s not for them. I haven’t run the numbers, but I know a lot of my college educated friends are not working in what they studied, so for those that ended up not in a code related role, but did not bottom out (I.e. they did learn some basics of how code works), were they scammed by the universities? (Okay, actually, as a victim of this myself, I’d say yes here, but again, I’m just pointing out this may not be isolated to boot camps) Summary: only go to a boot camp if you have your eyes wide open and know it is a culling mechanism and that if you’re not in the top of the class or exceptionally lucky, you will not have an easy time finding employment. Even the top of the class won’t have an easy time, but it’ll be easier than you. You will probably leave knowing more about code than before regardless, but also be aware of how shallow your knowledge will be, regardless of how long or intense your boot camp is.
blaser-waffle 7y ago
> #4: These Fake Bootcamp TAs (FBTA) will claim any previous job that is within 20 miles of "tech" is a qualification to teach computer science. FBTAs have used: > Geology > System Administration > Accounting > Law > Civil Engineering I'm gonna have to disagree with System Administration as not being "tech" or not qualified. Skillsets of Syadmins and Netadmins may vary greatly, but someone with a background in bash and some knowledge of the Windows Registryis going to be light years ahead of someone coming in with a background in geology or law.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  That stood out to me also. There are sysadmins, even very experienced ones, who have never written code or code-equivalent scripts. But there are lots who have, and "tell me more" seems like the obvious reaction. For that matter, anyone with a recent Civil Engineering degree has probably done a fair bit of Matlab programming, and even some geologists do heavyweight climate modelling. If we agree that a background in physics is potentially a good qualification, it's worth asking most of these people what specific work qualifies them. Maybe the complaint was specifically about those people teaching programming, though? "Sysadmin + bootcamp" could definitely prepare someone for an entry-level programming job, but it does sound worrying if a bootcamp loads up on TAs who don't have education or experience in software beyond the bootcamp itself.

331 points by ZeljkoS 7y ago

Dirlewanger 7y ago

Zed certainly knows how to ruffle feathers. He's a rare voice in the tech world that will cut through the bullshit.

carapace 7y ago
Ha! I met him once IRL. It took him two sentences to insinuate that I might be an asshole. Me: Something about FOO. Jed: "Most people I've met who are into FOO are assholes." Me: ... Nevertheless, I find him entertaining, and he definitely will cut through the bullshit.
mcguire 7y ago
"cut through" I think you misspelled "generate a metric ton of".

kresten 7y ago

Good to see Zed Shaw back. Wonder what’s he’s doing these days....

sky_rw 7y ago
follow link, reads twitter bio He's teaching people how to code, the hard way.

sky_rw 7y ago

In my previous roles as lead developer at startups in NYC and SF I interviewed roughly 30-40 bootcamp graduates looking for RoR jobs. The bar for a jr. position was extremely low and still none of them were able to pass. Many knew they course material very well, but as soon as you threw any real world problem that required any deviation from their established lane they completely floundered. Eventually we just started filtering out anybody with that background. Saddest thing is I keep hearing stories of people saving up huge amounts of money to go to these bootcamps with this dream that they can jump from a 30k/year retail job to a $120k/year SWE job with a 4 month bootcamp. I just do not believe it ever happens.

alexbanks 7y ago
I encountered _so many_ "I was a teacher and I wanted a new career" types that quit their jobs and moved in with parents/family/friends to attend bootcamps, only to find that they actually hated programming, and afterwards couldn't find a job and had to return to their original industry. Of course, the schools don't care, they make their money either way.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “only to find that they actually hated programming” That’s an important point. A lot of people will find programming very boring and tedious. I wouldn’t recommend this career to most people.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    What I ask people is, "Do you like solving puzzles?" Because as a programmer you get paid to solve new problems, not old ones.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      ”Because as a programmer you get paid to solve new problems, not old ones.” In a lot of programming jobs you will repeatedly solve the same problem or a variation of it.
      - alanh 7y ago
        Yep, there’s always the job available of "customer wants a new form" and "make this wordpress site match some designer's PSD" out there
        blaser-waffle 7y ago
        "it's like facebook, but for [X]"
    - 7y ago

alexbanks 7y ago

My personal experience around bootcamps echoes all of these points. I've interacted with several codeschool grads and several of them took those exact TA positions to boost employment %s. Of all the bootcamps I've ever seen, HackReactor is probably the only one I'd ever hire from again. Their grads (without asserting anything about the ethics of the school) seem to be more employable than the rest post-schooling.

redthrow 7y ago
Someone who went to HackReactor & got a job at Airbnb making 6 figures was telling people not to go to a Bootcamp because the job situation is getting worse and all the best parts of the course are available either for free online or $10 on Udemy (vs $20k for the bootcamp). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSgsX80ymF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSgsX80ymF8
- gowld 7y ago
  Maybe people who go to bootcamps know that watching videos from home doesn't work for them?
  - redthrow 7y ago
    That exact point is addressed at the 3:00 mark.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Then either transcribe it or tell us what they said. Life is to short to watch YouTube videos when text exists.
    - peripitea 7y ago
      Edit: For context, his argument is basically: "If independent learning is not your forte then that's a much larger problem, because you will need to do significant independent study regardless of the bootcamp." It's not a great argument. Yes, being able to learn/research independently is an important skill that everyone should have, but it's a spectrum. Teaching yourself programming in six months through self-study alone is VERY FAR along on that spectrum. I would bet there are far more people who can get a job with the structure/forced deadlines/etc. of a bootcamp + a heavy amount of self-study to improve their skills, than there are who can do the entire thing themselves. Also, self study is far from the most efficient way to learn most things. Having someone to help unblock you when you have a bug you can't figure out, or when there's a concept you're not quite grasping can make a huge difference in your overall rate of learning.

troughway 7y ago

@zedshaw - any idea of if/when you'll write that rant on why pickaxe book ruined ruby?

ngngngng 7y ago

Austen seems to be working exceptionally hard to get around the fact that they're operating illegally in CA. California laws are often garbage (overbearing, ill conceived, whatever) but damn is it frustrating to see so many vulnerable students saddle themselves with so much debt in pursuit of making a stable living. https://insights.dice.com/2019/10/02/lambda-school-violation-law/ https://insights.dice.com/2019/10/02/lambda-school-violation...

gowld 7y ago
> Austen seems to be working exceptionally hard to get around the fact that they're operating illegally You mean trying to fix the fact? As far as I've seen (Allred comments on HN), Allred/Lambda certainy test the boundaries of law and enforcement, but Allred is consistently respectful with CA's rulings, does what CA agencies demand, and keeps the school/"school" open. Yes, Lambda moves fast and breaks rules and pays penalty costs, but they don't deny the legitimacy of the laws and try to weasel out.
peripitea 7y ago
>but damn is it frustrating to see so many vulnerable students saddle themselves with so much debt in pursuit of making a stable living. It sounds like you're talking about traditional American colleges with this criticism, not Lambda school. I'm confused.

motohagiography 7y ago

Why do we have bootcamps for coding when we could apply the same methodology to law, minor surgery, accounting, policing, and jobs we actually need more people in because the prices are so high? We could teach elementary school kids to set bones, do stitches, manage projects, and treat flu. If people have a problem with this, they should have a problem with subsidies for teaching people to code as well.

saddestcatever 7y ago
Because "Software Engineering" isn't (currently) held to the same standards of certification, ethics, and peer review that other Engineering and Medical fields are. Maybe some day.
- kuschku 7y ago
  And that's exactly the issuem Software Engineering is just as much engineering as anything else, requires the same quality and lessons in ethics, and nowadays costs more people their lives than many other forms of engineering. The MCAS of the 737-MAX wasn't designed by mechanical or civil engineers ;)
- carapace 7y ago
  Yeah, this. ...maybe? On the one hand the idea that you can become a well-paid programmer starting from one of these bootcamps is almost insulting to me as someone who dedicated much of his life to the field. On the other hand, a lot of people do it. I've worked with them. They don't all suck. Have I wasted my life on trivialities? What does my knowledge and, yes, mastery count for if Joe Bootcamp can solve Jane Businessman's problems with a few months of training and a bolus of javascript?
  - mcguire 7y ago
    In my experience, you will be the one called in to fix it when Joe's solution goes pear shaped.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago

master_yoda_1 7y ago

I agree with the points but I can't bias my opinion just because someone went to bootcamp. You can find good or bad candidate everywhere. Once I interviewed a candidate form one of the well known state funded school and the person can't even write a for loop. Also IMO coursera/udacity/community colleges are more reliable than bootcamp.

iongoatb 7y ago

Zed is an idiot. I've read his book when I started programming (eh, decent, not that great) but his opinion on bootcamps is uninformed and flat out ignorant. I attended Hack Reactor in SF and all the smart, motivated people ended up getting really good jobs in big tech and startups. Most people were in this category. The not-so-smart and not-so-motivated people didn't do that well. Go figure. Bootcamps aren't a scam, and they aren't a magic pill. I was making 6 figures within a few months of graduating from Hack Reactor. Let's do the ROI on that - $20k for a $120k salary within 1 year - 6X my original investment. The majority of graduates were in a similar boat. Zed's claim about survivorship bias couldn't be further from the truth.

uwuhn 7y ago
I feel like most bootcamps are bad, and the metric I measure it by is how many people actually end up with careers. Sample size of friends, coworkers, and coming across random profiles on Linkedin or Twitter or whatever. Hackbright is the best one from what I've seen when it comes to placement and career retainment, and it's free too, but it's only available to women. Hack Reactor seems ok. App Academy seems ok too. DevBootcamp seems like it used to be ok, but is now bad after it was sold. Which other bootcamps have you hired people from?
scarmig 7y ago
The question isn't whether there are smart, motivated people who graduate from a boot camp and succeed. Of course there are. But what's much less clear is the value add of a boot camp. Yes, smart, highly motivated people will succeed after a boot camp, but there's plenty of reason to think they'd succeed regardless. What is worse is the not-so-smart people who spend five figures in a boot camp, and get nothing out of it. The fact that so many boot camps feel the need to goose their numbers by hiring the failgrads is a pretty clear sign that this happens a lot.

vo2maxer 7y ago

Zed’s follow up to initial thread on bootcamps: https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212808427468185600?s=21 https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212808427468185600?s=21

Jaygles 7y ago

I'm a bootcamp graduate who successfully inserted myself into the market and within three years (2016 - 2019) gained a senior title at a large company (~2000 employees) as a software engineer. I attribute my success to having a computer science background from being a gigantic nerd my entire life (first code written was QBasic in 3rd grade and you KNOW I was at every lan party in high school) and luck (Had someone willing to hire me to maintain small fry websites for a year which helped my resume quite a bit although at a poopy salary). Both my brother and I went this route after getting unrelated bachelors degrees from a large university. I think a lot of people don't become competent after these bootcamps because they just aren't technical enough to grasp the concepts at the pace they're introduced in class. The people in my cohort have been fairly successful. Without checking I think about 50% of them have jobs as web developers now.

cjaro 7y ago
I graduated from my bootcamp in early 2017 and am angling for a promotion from Jr. Developer to Associate by the end of this year. I think most everyone from my cohort is still at their dev jobs. This part of your reply stood out to me: "I think a lot of people don't become competent after these bootcamps because they just aren't technical enough to grasp the concepts at the pace they're introduced in class." because I think it's 100% accurate. I had a lot of education to carry out alongside my job, where I was learning a ton of programming concepts in the real world and let me tell you, it's not easy stuff. But, luckily for me, with the right supervisor or mentor or peers, you can climb the mountain a little easier.
- geogra4 7y ago
  I think bootcamps work best for people who are already technical but aren't specifically trained as programmers. I have a friend from college that was a biochemist for a while, took a bootcamp course, and is now a dev at Microsoft.
munchbunny 7y ago
Anecdotally, I agree with this. All of the successful dev bootcamp alumni that I know had been writing code for one reason another for at least a year before they joined one of the bootcamps. They probably didn't need a dev bootcamp to get them off the ground, but it probably helped with giving them structure and routine to fully follow through with retraining and transitioning careers. Generally there seem to be three schools of hiring: (1) people who have been classically trained, (2) people who seem generally smart and willing to grind, (3) people who have done the work before. #1 you mostly only get from a 4-year degree program, and colleges generally filter for #2. The other way I see people in category #2 hired is when they transition into a dev job through ad hoc circumstances (e.g. data analyst who needed to do more and more coding on the job). #3 is just having been a programmer before. If you go to a dev bootcamp, you won't have #1 or #3. You're depending purely on #2, and that's the one category where it's mostly about you, not the dev bootcamp. The dev bootcamp is just there to give you structure and to signal something to employers.

southphillyman 7y ago

Made the mistake of suggesting a bootcamp to an unemployed relative. She passed the initial screening/interview stage but really seemed to be struggling with the prerequisite material. The bootcamp didn't seem to care and kept trying to pressure her into signing the ISA. She probably wouldn't have been able to complete a basic beginner MOOC much less an intensive 8+ hour a day bootcamp. I eventually talked her out of moving forward but it was not encouraging to see how aggressive the bootcamp wanted to admit a clearly under qualified student.

gowld 7y ago
What's was in that particular ISA? What would it cost if she got a non-bootcamp-boosted job?
- southphillyman 7y ago
  It was Lambda School, so whatever their terms are.
austenallred 7y ago
That’s exactly why Lambda School starts with the precourse work. It’s not a fit for everyone, and the 40+ hours of precourse work helps us discover who that’s true for.

everdev 7y ago

I'm glad to see Income Share Agreements (ISAs) as #1. They're a tax on the poor and just as bad if not worse than predatory student loans. This "don't pay unless you get a job education model" costs you far more than those who have the means to pay for a bootcamp outright. BTW, as someone who hires developers at all talent levels I'd never put any value in a diploma, from an Ivy League or a boot camp. The only thing I want to see is the most interesting thing you've built recently. From there we can talk technical details and cultural fit.

peripitea 7y ago
I know multiple people who could not have attended a bootcamp if not for ISAs. I also know one who could afford to pay but still chose to go the ISA route. They are all happy-to-thrilled with the model. I would love to know your reasoning for describing them as "just as bad if not worse than predatory student loans". I can't conceive of a worldview where that would be true, so I think I'm missing something in your perspective.
- everdev 7y ago
  Thanks for being inquisitive. It's easy to look at this as giving education to those who wouldn't get it otherwise. But there is a dark side: https://medium.com/@kevgardner83/the-true-cost-of-income-sharing-agreements-f43418265d35 https://medium.com/@kevgardner83/the-true-cost-of-income-sha... > The average up-front tuition amount for coding bootcamps is $10,000 to $15,000, according to Course Report, which collects data and reviews on coding bootcamps. The idea to not pay thousands of dollars at the start of the program may be attractive. But, let’s say you agree to an ISA. And after completing the a coding bootcamp, you’re hired with a salary of $60,000 a year. If you pay 20 percent of your salary for four years, you’ll end up paying $48,000. That’s more than four times the average cost for an up-front payment to a coding bootcamp. It's basically charging those with the least money more tuition. It would be fine if they capped it at the tuition price or even a nominal interest rate, but some programs make 400% more from students that can't afford upfront tuition. It's fine if you want to charge everyone in your bootcamp under the ISA model, but if you offer a $10k tuition and a $40k ISA you're basically offering the same product at vastly different prices to two different economic groups.

rchaud 7y ago

My recommendation for people interested in bootcamps is to focus on one that offers a skillset in a particular area like Wordpress, that doesn't require education on formal CS concepts. You can still get exposure to databases, security, UI/UX design etc doing Wordpress, without bankrupting yourself paying 5-figure bootcamp fees. Best of all, you can get a real job building marketing websites/some basic apps, as opposed to pie-in-the-sky dreams of working at Netflix's Data Science department. BTW, my bootcamp (I took a JS course), paid me $500 to post about my experience on Quora. I wrote a 1,000 word article about what I learned and how I applied in a project. To the bootcamp's credit, at no point was I asked to embellish my experience or attribute getting a job solely due to the bootcamp.

draw_down 7y ago

Typical replies... "this doesn't represent ALL bootcamps!" Oh, I didn't know that excuses it. Less than 100% of them operate immorally so let's just not talk about it.

_JC_Denton 7y ago

I know the author would chalk my experience up to 'survivorship bias', but my bootcamp experience was life-changing and 100% positive. I don't know if the quality of bootcamps have gone down, but I did one ~5 years ago, and was very impressed by the talent of my classmates and felt lucky to be with them. Backgrounds were extremely diverse, from Ivy-league graduate math majors to a former horse trainer. The graduation rate was around 85%, and among the graduates, the 'true' job placement rate was probably around 90%. I was able to hit the ground running in my first software engineering job at a well funded startup, and was on par with other fresh cs degree graduates. Over the next few years I was the first among that class to be given a team leadership role. Looking at LinkedIn, the other graduates from my bootcamp seem to be having their own successes at FAANG jobs and other strong positions. While I believe my experience was somewhat typical for my bootcamp cohort, (like college) I think quality can vary greatly based on the bootcamp, and I am sure some are bad deals in the ways Zed has outlined. edit: For those who are wondering if the successful bootcamp grads would have been successful anyways without the bootcamp - 100% no way for me. I had already been self-studying programming before the bootcamp and it was a night and day difference. It would have taken years of self study to learn what I did, and with a good chance that life would have derailed me along the way.

kevingadd 7y ago
The most obvious way to unify your experience with the details in the original thread is that they have gone down in quality over the past 5 years. Given the massive number of new bootcamps that have launched (and shut down) it seems natural that not all of them would be up to the quality standard you enjoyed at the time.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  That would suggest that choosing a bootcamp that was around 5 years ago would be a far better choice than one started more recently.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Alternatively you could look at quality directly instead of using a proxy. At least use a better proxy, like length of program.

beering 7y ago

Take anything Zed Shaw says with a grain of salt, given that he has his own very strong views on how to teach/learn coding (as shown by his books). For example, "FBTA"s are real and I have encountered them in real life. There are definitely bootcamps that game the system by hiring their own grads. On the flip side, I think ISAs are a really promising way to align incentives between the school and students. Compare that to people going into massive debt by going to uni and then failing to find a good job - only the gov't cares if you're able to repay your debt or not.

chanchar 7y ago
On this note, I'm surprised ISAs are not more common for higher education (ie. college, university). I know a couple of smaller liberal art schools (ie. Purdue) have been testing this.
- _--___-___ 7y ago
  Are you referring to the only Purdue I know of, which is a flagship state university known for its engineering programs? I guess it's small compared to Ohio State and liberal arts-focused compared to Georgia Tech.
  - rubidium 7y ago
    They seem to not know Purdue is a near-top or top tier stem school. Mitch’s annual open letter just came out today: https://www.purdue.edu/president/messages/annual-open-letters/2001-med-openletter-full.php https://www.purdue.edu/president/messages/annual-open-letter...
miohtama 7y ago
Zed is definitely a very opinionated author and you need to factor in bias in his messaging. However based on the discussion threads here it seems to be no smoke without a fire.

dannykwells 7y ago

The author appears to run this website: https://learncodethehardway.org/ https://learncodethehardway.org/ which directly profits from people not doing bootcamps but rather, teaching themself to code (using his books). So maybe not the most unbiased source (even if some of the content rings true). Everyone - everyone - always has an angle.

grimjack00 7y ago
On the other hand, I know of a couple bootcamps that recommend his website and books as prep and supplementary material.

_bxg1 7y ago

Setting aside all of the anecdotes for and against bootcamps in this thread and the one on Twitter, consider this: compared to the rest of the job market, software engineering in 2020 is a ridiculous gold rush, no matter which way you slice it. And bootcamps are a vague-but-lucrative new business sector that capitalizes on this reality with hardly any regulation or accreditation system. Historically, whenever there's been a lucrative new business opportunity with little oversight it's almost guaranteed to be rife with corruption and scams. That's not to say that legit bootcamps don't exist - my own partner had a successful experience with one - but the marketplace is a minefield of potentially life-ruining opportunities, and the only way to tell good from bad is through anecdotes and he-said-she-said. That's a big problem.

carapace 7y ago
Yeah, a gold rush, and old SF hands know the way to cash in: stay in town, sell shovels and Levi's.
- vsareto 7y ago
  Old SF hands might be cashing in, but many people are getting >$150k-$250k jobs out of it. The shovel analogy is stretched thin. It's more like selling gold shovels at this point: both sides get rich, but one a little more than the other.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Look at the risks.
tempsy 7y ago
I mean the ISA-style bootcamps don't make any money unless you get a real SWE job (being a TA doesn't trigger the ISA) and there are good ones out there.
- sandofsky 7y ago
  They also make money by reselling ISAs to hedge funds. This could stop happening in a few years if the ISAs don’t pan out, and the hedge funds stop buying them. But right now the school is protected regardless of outcome. The other issue is that bootcamps can collect that money even if they provide no value. Say a student gets nothing out of the bootcamp, and spends the next three years on rigorous self-study. The only upside for students is if the bootcamp fails, and they totally give up on a career in programming. If you have an ISA hanging over your head that might cost you upwards of $30k, I’d say it’s more likely you’ll give up than if you blew $7k up-front.

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hashkb 7y ago

Former instructor here: don't spend your money on this. My bootcamp, as far as I know, didn't abuse anyone; just innocently failed to provide the students with the value. Three months isn't enough time. One year isn't enough time. If you had a good experience at a bootcamp, then you probably would have been fine on your own. Most students at bootcamps are like most students at any school (lazy/cheating) except in the case of the bootcamp, the school has less to offer in the first place and essentially no incentive to grade you rigorously. So even more than usual, you get out what you put in. Bootcamp grads flooding the industry have put such a burden on hiring, performance reviews, and firing, that we now live in a world where "senior" means "second year" and asking someone to perform a tree search on a white board is literally torturing them. Making good software, dealing with other humans, providing value and earning money -- it's not easy; and it's ridiculous to assume that these bootcamps can come anywhere near the (lack of) preparation you get from real schools.

barry-cotter 7y ago
> If you had a good experience at a bootcamp, then you probably would have been fine on your own. The rest of your post may have substantial merit but this is just horseshit. Most people are v incapable of sitting down to learn something for forty hours a week without some outside motivation for one week, never mind three months.

alanh 7y ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1212284566431576069.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1212284566431576069.html

alisey 7y ago
How do people even read on Twitter? All I can see on their desktop website is a single tweet with a "Show this thread" link that doesn't do anything.

alanh 7y ago

I just want to say that, as is usually the case for any label or collection of people, you have to end up judging bootcamp grads on an individual basis. At my company, we have interviewed and hired quite a few bootcamp grads, most of whom were previously bootcamp TAs. And yeah — a lot of them are very mediocre, you know, the kind of engineer you would never select to be on your dream team, but at least one is a really amazing hire, a great co-worker, extremely conscientious and forever learning on and off the job, pushing the rest of us forward, etc.

Bartweiss 7y ago
"Many bootcamp grads are unqualified" is sort of a weird complaint in a field where it's common (and I think accurate) to complain that many degree-holders with a decade of experience are unqualified. It's not obvious to me that this is any special weakness of bootcamps, rather than just another consequence of the fact that programming doesn't have much standardized education or trustworthy credentialing.

axbytg 7y ago

When it works, it works. Myself and a friend started learning programming at the same time, both with the goal of switching careers. I worked in tech in sales, he had a job translating subtitles. He did a bootcamp, I taught myself. I'm finally on my first job as a SWE at a tiny startup with no funding, making a little less than I was in sales. He has been promoted 3 times to engineering manager at a well established international company with $xx,xxx,xxx in funding, and just bought a house. Maybe don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

sincerely 7y ago

I guess I'm confused why he calls ISAs a scam. They're remarkably straightforward and making 100k - 25% or whatever seems a hell of a lot better than making 30k

Bartweiss 7y ago
His phrasing is pretty strong, but I guess there's a difference between "ISAs are scams" and "shady bootcamps can use ISAs as scams". In particular, harsh ISAs are almost completely dominated by student loans, charging like a loan if you have a bad job and much worse if you have a good one. Say a bootcamp with $15k tuition offers an ISA at 20% of income above $10k for 4 years, capped at $85k income. That's unusually bad, but not a blatant scam. If the bootcamp gets you a good job at or above cap, you pay $60k over 4 years. Much higher than tuition, but on some level who cares - you're still way ahead overall. If the bootcamp doesn't help you at all, and you keep a prior $35k wage job, you'll wind up paying $20k total at $415/month. A 7%, four year student loan for the full tuition would only have cost ~$350/month. So you only really "win" if you're unemployed or down near minimum wage. (Or drop out, perhaps? I don't know what happens to ISAs in that case.) I think most ISAs are better than that, especially wrt salary floor. But paying a double-digits percentage of income even if the program hasn't helped you get a better job isn't necessarily much 'safer' than taking a loan directly. It could still be better with poor credit or high prior debt, but ISAs aren't generally promoted on that basis.

duxup 7y ago

Anecdote time: I did a camp tied to Trilogy, that ran through a local University (but really was only administered it, no 'educational' ties). It was a good camp IMO, it had plenty of flaws, but overall I think it was a good camp. The real issue ... they don't filter who gets in enough. Admittedly that is a HARD job as you don't know who will do well. In my crowd of folks who did well there was "accountant tired of accounting", "VP or something or other who just wanted to do a coding camp", "director of something or other who just didn't want to manage people", "bank teller who wanted a real job", "musician who wanted to try something more profitable", and a collection of other not great job / folks who didn't do much in college. These were a mix of young and old, age didn't matter, and they all did great. But on the down side I'd say that at least 50% of the class "graduated" and were IMO, unemployable. I'm not talking about passing an interview, I just don't think they were ever going to learn. I often think of them and what happened to them. I expect some amount of that but the costs involved were high, I hope they didn't take a serious financal hit. Personally I'm doing fine, as are the other folks who did well in class, web dev now and happy to be coding away.

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

Does anyone here have experience with Codefellows? Considering taking one of their courses.

mcguire 7y ago

"#6: Gotta keep that 95%-100% job placement rate up, but did you know that it's 95% of "graduates" get placed in jobs? Well, if you can't increase placement, then decrease the number of "graduates". Best one is the school that calls you a graduate once you get a job. 100% baby!" I've seen that one with a for-profit college. It requires a paid "internship" thingy to graduate. Then gives out really uninspired internship openings. Sure, you've got a job, though.

ravenstine 7y ago

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I attended a bootcamp(Dev Bootcamp) and it was a life-changing time for me. However, I will say this: - When there's a gold rush, there are going to be people trying to make money selling shovels. Some of those shovels are going to be crap. Perhaps most. That doesn't mean that some people aren't running an honest business(or in this case, a bootcamp). - Bootcamps are what you make of them. If you expect them to be like a school where knowledge is just dumped on your lap by a professor, you're going to be in for a world of disappointment. If you're willing to take charge of your learning and are willing to spend the time sharing knowledge with others, and dedicate yourself to maximizing your time(studying, projects, failing in a good way), then a bootcamp will be for you. I spent as much time as I could learning, and was often the last person to exit the building in the early AM. - In relation to the previous point, you may not necessarily need a bootcamp. If you have the passion and the will, you can acquire the knowledge and skills on your own. You could take the tens of thousands of dollars you'd spend on a bootcamp and quit work for a while to study and do projects at home, go to hacker spaces, and attend developer meetups, and you'd get something pretty close to what a bootcamp will give you. However, a bootcamp will bring you together with a bunch of other people in the same position as you in somewhere like San Francisco where there's nonstop action going on. By going to Dev Bootcamp, I was immersed in a world I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to and had experiences with people I might not have had otherwise. All in all, most of the value of a bootcamp is being around people you can learn from and with. If you find that on your own, then you might be able to save by not having to pay that bootcamp tuition. All that said, I don't completely disagree with Shaw's tweets. A lot of bootcamps are clearly(IMO) predatory. Ultimately, a bootcamp can't make any guarantees as to whether or not you get a job. That task is ultimately up to you and, as much as it's not fair, your success will mostly stem from your ability to sell yourself. You can be a completely shit programmer but charm your way into a career. Income share deals, I think, are a bad idea, even if they work out for a few. At that point, you might as well save money by skipping bootcamp and do the learn-on-your-own approach I described earlier. There are many bootcamps that act like they have standards but will actually take just about anyone, even if they aren't really the type that can handle the self-responsibility of going to a bootcamp. Shaw might be painting with a broad brush, he's not totally wrong.

jbtule 7y ago

Boot camp combined with apprenticeship model is way better. LaunchCode https://www.launchcode.org/ https://www.launchcode.org/ is non-profit, no ISA, no fee to applicant. Offers a free slower paced bootcamp (after work hours) that teach you the basics (two programming languages, git, mvc style web programming), but then you interview and place into a paid apprenticeship, about $15/hour, at an employer who trains you for the Job they want you to do (3-6 months), after which if the apprenticeship works out they hire you on with full entry level tech salary for that area. The catch is it's only in Saint Louis, South Florida, Kansas City, and Tampa Bay. Not to say any bootcamp wouldn't work, it's just the key to bootcamps working, is getting hired by a company that invests in training their Junior Devs, which is MUCH more important than the bootcamp itself.

tomlagier 7y ago
Strong agree on the key to success being a company that will invest in training juniors. I think a lot of the noise around bootcamps misses this key fact - it's not really the education which makes people employable, it's the real-world work experience. I think that just having a directory of companies that are willing to hire people with minimal experience at slightly-better-than minimum wage is a much better approach to the problem then trying to delude people that anyone can make six figures after a two month boot camp. Some can, sure, but it's a much less reliable method than working in the industry for a few years.

cweagans 7y ago

Zed Shaw writes books targeted at new programmers. From my standpoint, he has a financial incentive to not appreciate bootcamps, especially those with ISAs and similar that don't require up front investment from students because they are cutting into his book sales. Some of his points are definitely true at some schools, but it's worth taking most of them with a grain of salt.

glangdale 7y ago
Do you think that it's very likely that someone would forgo buying a relatively cheap book in favor of going to a bootcamp? This seems like two very different markets, and I would suspect that many people in the space where they overlap would do both (i.e. buy the book and go to a bootcamp).
- cweagans 7y ago
  Potentially. They're both marketed to the same audience and they're often sold as no upfront cost, which can be really appealing. It's completely anecdotal, but I know several people that have chosen bootcamps over books and they're much happier for it.
  - glangdale 7y ago
    "Learn Python 3 the Hard Way" on Amazon: "68 used and new from $11.95". New it's essentially $18. I have trouble imagining that anyone who might have wanted to learn from a book would have baulked at a <$US20 purchase. There are plenty of people who don't like learning from books, which is fine, and I'm certainly not denying their existence, but those people wouldn't be in Zed's market anyhow.

bitwize 7y ago

Ooh! Ooh! Here's one! Offering you "free" training and job placement, then making you sign yourself into two years of indentured servitude, falsifying your CV and phone screen to get you work, and because of that contract you signed if you back out you're on the hook for the cost of your "free" training, which they assess at $20,000.

dvtrn 7y ago

I accidentally posted in another thread* earlier today about my curiosity over point 7 which included reports of bullying and "FBTA's" forcing people to do pushups. Tried Googling and couldn't come up with any results, but have any of these reports been published or written about? That sort of behavior should absolutely be put in the spotlight and strongly rebuked. *https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972278

mtnGoat 7y ago
i was curious where this came from too. is he latching onto one single hearsay experience or is this widespread. nobody i know that went to a bootcamp was hazed.

gdix 7y ago

No way, the bootcamps hire some of their students as teaching assistants which the students put on their resume?! What a scam! What kind of organization would ever do this. Oh wait, every college. Not a scam, duh. Want to hear the biggest scam? There are organizations that charge $200K up front to teach you things regardless of whether you get a job. Most of what they teach you can be acquired FOR FREE on the internet. Many many people never get a job in their field and spend decades paying these organizations back. Many of these organizations have tens of billions of dollars in endowments. You may have heard of some of them: Harvard, Yale, MIT. Something seriously must be done about these scam artists.

chimpful 7y ago

I went to Makersquare(now hack reactor) and I can tell you #10 is definitely true. There is no network of job openings and most people found jobs outside the school. Half found jobs half didn't. The ones that found jobs out of the bootcamp were extremely smart. The TA point is also true. The letting go of lower quality applicants was also true. I think the Camp was more fulfilling for me because I had previous programming experience so I could dive deeper into the material since I had some fundamentals already in place. If you have no previous experience, you are f'ed because the material goes by to quickly to deeply learn anything.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I attended a Big Nerd Ranch Advanced iOS bootcamp, in 2012 (It was still ObjC, back then). It was an excellent (and expensive) experience. One of my fondest memories of the last decade. I feel it was worth every penny of it. My company did not pay for it. I took a week's vacation, and paid for it out of pocket. I don't pretend that it was anything more than a fairly basic "primer," to get me "back on the bicycle again," but it did a great job with that. That said, it was a different animal from the types of bootcamps that the author is talking about. It was a "prototypical" bootcamp; a week-long, immersion course, with a fairly narrow agenda.

0kl 7y ago

I will try to refrain from being anecdotal here, but some of it will leak in, I’m sure. Boot camps usually strap in their students for about 3-6 months and make them learn extremely basic coding in some modern stack with html/css. Depending on the company, this may be a better/cheaper alternative to starting talent that was in the grinder for 4 years but may not have any other business knowledge - or sometimes lack knowledge aside from c++/java. (Not arguing the merits here, personally I prefer depth of understanding to a mechanical and superficial understanding, but business needs do differ) So is it fair to say boot camps are stealing your money? The same way that any for-profit educational institute might. At the same time, they have a similar function to other educational institutions in that they are largely a culling mechanism and not an educational one - but that is a problem across the board. It’s unfortunate that they market and promise what they do, as it’s just unrealistic - but that doesn’t mean that they don’t do anything. I don’t have the data anymore, but from multiple cohorts what I saw was a slightly skewed bell curve, where the top of the class (~1 out of every 10 or so) tends to do well and find a decent entry level job in 3-8 months, the bottom of the class just flatlines and really don’t learn a thing (1-4 of 10), and the remaining hustle hard to break into the industry for ~2 years or decide it’s not for them. I haven’t run the numbers, but I know a lot of my college educated friends are not working in what they studied, so for those that ended up not in a code related role, but did not bottom out (I.e. they did learn some basics of how code works), were they scammed by the universities? (Okay, actually, as a victim of this myself, I’d say yes here, but again, I’m just pointing out this may not be isolated to boot camps) Summary: only go to a boot camp if you have your eyes wide open and know it is a culling mechanism and that if you’re not in the top of the class or exceptionally lucky, you will not have an easy time finding employment. Even the top of the class won’t have an easy time, but it’ll be easier than you. You will probably leave knowing more about code than before regardless, but also be aware of how shallow your knowledge will be, regardless of how long or intense your boot camp is.

blaser-waffle 7y ago

> #4: These Fake Bootcamp TAs (FBTA) will claim any previous job that is within 20 miles of "tech" is a qualification to teach computer science. FBTAs have used: > Geology > System Administration > Accounting > Law > Civil Engineering I'm gonna have to disagree with System Administration as not being "tech" or not qualified. Skillsets of Syadmins and Netadmins may vary greatly, but someone with a background in bash and some knowledge of the Windows Registryis going to be light years ahead of someone coming in with a background in geology or law.

Bartweiss 7y ago
That stood out to me also. There are sysadmins, even very experienced ones, who have never written code or code-equivalent scripts. But there are lots who have, and "tell me more" seems like the obvious reaction. For that matter, anyone with a recent Civil Engineering degree has probably done a fair bit of Matlab programming, and even some geologists do heavyweight climate modelling. If we agree that a background in physics is potentially a good qualification, it's worth asking most of these people what specific work qualifies them. Maybe the complaint was specifically about those people teaching programming, though? "Sysadmin + bootcamp" could definitely prepare someone for an entry-level programming job, but it does sound worrying if a bootcamp loads up on TAs who don't have education or experience in software beyond the bootcamp itself.