> I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1%

> I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please. I think the question is even broader than that: how many people who buy into these programs will be working as developers in five or ten years? I'm a self-taught programmer, so I know first-hand that you don't need a computer science degree to learn how to build web applications that provide value to real people. But I think some of the programs out there aren't realistic about what it takes to become a decent developer over the long haul. In my opinion the viability of the 0-to-$120,000 in x months pitch is primarily a function of the current market and little else. The bad news: the market is not static, and when the next downturn arrives, a lot of jobs that exist today will likely go away, even if the tech industry doesn't see a precipitous drop in jobs overall. A couple of points on this: 1. A lot of people in tech today didn't live through the first .com boom, or if they did, have chosen to forget it. There was a very similar dynamic: tons of people rushed to learn HTML, web design, etc. If you lived in the Bay Area and knew how to, say, code an HTML table, chances were you could land a high-paying job at a startup. Post-crash, a good number of these .com refugees left technology, moved into non-technical roles or went back to school. 2. If you're serious about a career as a developer, it's wise to consider what you choose to learn. From what I see personally, a lot of the demand for Ruby on Rails developers comes from "startups." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but somebody just starting out who hopes to be employed as a well-paid developer five years from now shouldn't assume that knowing how to develop a Rails CRUD app with a Bootstrap front-end is a perpetual guarantee of a six-figure salary. As you note, there's more to development than a framework, but frameworks do so much these days that new developers often see little incentive to go beyond the framework.