A lot of the students enrolled hoping to get a job later.
The scam aside, this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job. Especially that one student who lamented now he can't prove he completed the lessons from this bootcamp. Would a no name bootcamp impress any employer?
Learning in a classroom (or via Slack chats!) is not enough. It's just the first step. The key is applying it as soon as possible by doing projects, for yourself or for someone else. For free in the beginning if need be.
Employers now want to see proof you can do something, not a piece of paper showing you can. Plus publishing these projects online can help employers / recruiters discover you.
Too many parents are still teaching their kids a paint by the numbers formula they knew for life: go to school -> land job. Work there -> rise through the ranks. The good news is, there's a hundred different ways to land a job now. The bad news is, trying, failing at, trying again at those different ways can be hard.
As a former instructor at a code school I always told students that learning to code would put them on a successful trajectory more than make them instantly valuable. It's not an on/off situation. A good engineer is always learning and improving.
Code schools too often make it look like you attend and then succeed, there's a lot more than goes on in between.
> this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job
I would say it proves the opposite. Those people got scammed by a shitty little outfit, here today, gone tomorrow. That's much less likely to happen when you go to, you know, a real school.
Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal?
Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?
I did a bootcamp program. In-person, 13 weeks, 9-5, 5 days a week, plus HW/Weekly projects/Capstone project.
If I had locked myself in my apartment could I have learned the same things in the same amount of time? Maybe.
Going through an organization took the legwork out and let me focus on the learning. I didn't have to seek out my own materials (I did anyways, but that was for added depth into things that interested me along the way), I didn't have to trust my ability to be self critical in order to evaluate my progress, I didn't have to prepare exercises and projects, etc.
Plus, I was going through it with 20 other students who were learning the same things at the same time as me - people to learn with, bounce ideas off of, ask different questions in class, etc.
Plus I got a ton of career support. They brought in panels of industry leaders to talk to us, took us to different types of companies to meet their teams and get a good sense of the different types of organizations we could work for. They helped us with our resumes, online presence, interview technique - and hosted 'career day' events where they brought in a staggering number of companies who were looking to hire someone just like us, and helped us with applications, networking etc.
Again, could I have taught myself the same amount of material in 13 weeks solo? Maybe. Would I have walked away with a new job as quickly as I did (less than 10 days after finishing the course), and with a decently sized professional network? Probably not.
On top of that, the physical learning environment was great (coffee, food, etc), plus going to school every day meant it was easy to stay in learning/work mode, instead of getting distracted or procrastinating at home.
My SO went through a similar setup as the one described by the grandparent. Hers was ~15k, maybe up to ~17k by the end of the day, considering food and whatnot. I can't speak for her, but from my perception, the investment seems to have paid off: she's now working at a much lower stress level than before (her previous job was in high stress environment) and her salary and benefits (vacation time, perks like company-provided food and activities, etc.) have improved substantially. The job is also much more intellectually stimulating than her previous job. Given a couple years of experience, which anyone needs when changing a career, she could be making almost double than the cap at her previous job. All in all, she is way happier now than before.
A close friend of mine did https://devbootcamp.com/ --- and coupled with the instruction and a lot of hard work in the class, was able to switch careers successfully. This was a few years ago when there was less competition amongst boot camp graduates to find jobs, but I'm still seeing devbootcamp graduates successfully change careers.
I think the combination of the kick in the ass, working on projects as a team, and access to recruiters at the end of the program is what makes them successful.
I've had friends do Hack Reactor, App Academy, MakerSchool, Dev Bootcamp, and Galvanize. They've all been very positive about the quality of instruction, and all are now happily employed, but all have clarified that while the schools all try to help with job placement, it's not substantively different than getting a first job out of school.
I have a MA in Global Affairs and Management and getting a job in DC meant pulling all sorts of connections, being willing to do internships that paid close to nothing, and networking my rear off. I once sent out over a three month period over 20 applications for paid positions a week (so not internships) and got, I kid you not, zero responses. It was connections all the way. Even once I had made my way in the pay was pitiful and it remains a connections game.
After I did the bootcamp, easily 20% of resumes I sent out at least got a response. All in person interviews led to job offers. That's a pretty different experience than hunting for a first job out of school if you have a non-technical degree.
I went through Fullstack's Flex program last year and it's definitely paid for itself. I tried to teach myself for several years and bounced around from language to language without getting too far. The entire time I never knew even how to really structure an application even though I could write a recursive function and understand it. For example, no online tutorial really goes through the rationale behind your folder structure or how to organize your code when you're a beginner. I kinda got fed up with my progress and decided to make the jump. Also, I saw that Javascript was starting to entangle itself in everything so I figured that if I were to go anywhere, it would be a bootcamp that only taught Javascript. The best thing about it was the incremental progression with explanations behind why certain things worked a certain way (historical and pragmatic). For some reason, I absolutely NEEDED that. I needed to understand why things worked they way they do, and most books and other tutorials just never really bothered explaining things that in depth. Having to create your own jQuery, your own ORM, etc makes you appreciate what those tools really do. The second best thing was the feedback loop. Things that used to take me a week to research then understand now only took 30 minutes. It also helped me narrow my focus and ignore those 'hey you should totally use this framework/language instead' posts that would throw me off track for about a month and make me question whether I was learning the 'right' stuff.
I think it basically comes down to the type of person. Some require essentially supervision to learn. They need someone to tell them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. These are the people who take advantage of traditional schooling, and sitting in classes.
I think I fall in the other end of the spectrum, where I'm bored in a classroom sitting, and I'd rather people be at home hacking away learning myself. Trial and error experience works far better than someone telling me to do something. My progression basically comes from projects. I work on a side project that develops a few certain skills, then I choose another project I've been interested in, that builds on the previous project, but introduces new topics to learn. So on and so forth.
In my opinion a lot of these bootcamps are just filled with people who thought programming would be a good career change to make more money. I saw this years ago in my freshmen CS classes. Bunch of people who thought they'd just take the classes because that was what making money, or OOOO computers! Inevitably failed out. While those who learn on their own are the ones who are actually interested in programming, and have been doing so way before bootcamps existed.
I did a coding bootcamp. It helped in a combination of all the ways you mentioned. Most importantly, I think I needed a way to commit myself to spending 8+ hours every day on learning coding for awhile. I don't have the personality/willpower to do that on my own, although once I made the commitment I never felt like skipping a day of class. It was one of the best decisions of my life.
It was App Academy by the way, a bootcamp that was appealing to me because of its tuition-conditional-on-employment payment scheme. Which meant that I was only risking my own time and effort in learning, not an additional 10k like the poor students of the guy in the article.
I know companies and hiring managers who have hired from certain boot camps they consider to be good. They consider the certifications from those particular boot camps to be an indicator that the person they are interviewing can join a fast-paced team and start producing Rails or Node.js web apps with minimal extra training.
The boot camp grads often don't understand a lot of fundamental computer science, but the kind of programming work they are hired to do does not require an understanding of fundamental computer science, so lack of understanding is not a drawback. If you just need someone to churn out web apps, a boot camp grad can do that.
It's also often the case that self-taught programmers tend to write hacky, tightly coupled, non-modular code, don't like writing tests, don't know about CI or version control, don't work well on teams, etc. At good boot camps, the students learn to do those things, and work on projects that are similar to the ones they will work on if they find jobs in industry. So, some people consider boot camp grads superior to self-taught candidates.
However, all of the people I know who hire boot camp grads have a short list of boot camps they consider to be of good quality.
I went through General Assembly's Web Development Immersive 2 years ago.
I have made good use of what I have learned in that program; however, I would be reluctant to recommend that everyone should take it.
It really depends on how much of your own time you are willing to invest in learning the material. I had 1 year of some web development experience at that point, so I was familiar with some of the material and didn't mind putting in work to get better. It was great for me in that it rounded out some of my skills and got me interested in bash which was something I never expected.
They worked really hard to get feedback from students to ensure that our experience was what we wanted and that they were also challenging us without being overwhelming. They also had a very passionate and personable staff that would answer any questions assuming that you had tried to solve your problem before asking.
They encouraged students to fail first so that they would eventually not fear failure; this was one of the most important lessons that I have taken with me. I don't think you can really learn this from an online course or tutorial.
I saw people go into the program without any developer experience come out of it building complex web apps that were using newer technologies (at that time) like Web Sockets and NodeJS. I also saw people go into the program and not really get much from it, but I don't know how much work they really put in.
A couple of the students from my cohort are working at big name companies like Uber and Starbucks, so my takeaway is that there isn't a guaranteed route to success with these types of programs. They give you enough tools to start a fire but they leave the rest up to you.
I'll bite. The negative aspects, to me, were ultimately minor in my experience but consequential for a lot of the students.
This might have changed, but if you had the money, they will take you in. There is an interview process that they use to screen applicants, but my impression is that if you can pay, you get in.
This creates issues where there are students that are heavily invested in a successful outcome but might not have the ability to grasp the material. I tried helping some of my colleagues but some of them just could not grasp the material and it was hard for me understand what obstructed their ability to do so.
It might have been a confidence thing ("I don't get this and I never will"), but again, failure was encouraged in the program.
Additionally, there were issues that occurred due to a lack of diversity in race and gender. I do not want to get into it because it's really complicated and I lack the ability and the time to give this a fair evaluation. The gist of it is: General Assembly facilitated open dialogue but not all of the participants wanted to participate. I will leave it at that.
Halfway through the program, we had a teacher give pretty uninspiring lessons. The subject matter wasn't super dry or uninteresting (it was on SQL and relational databases); my feeling was that the teacher had some personal issues that were affecting his work.
This sucked more for the people that had zero background in development because he was poorly teaching crucial material and none of the students were feeling it. A lot of the students complained about this and he started turning around after that.
I also get the feeling that there was some "drama" in the inner workings of General Assembly. The director of our cohort quit towards the end of our immersive (week 10 out of a 12 week program); she was basically the one that ran the show and made sure that our needs for learning were met.
From my understanding, she was fired because of student complaints. She was very personable and very protective of the students so I feel like there must have been some pressure from above.
Probably more than you think, for some reason people think it's a new thing, it isn't.
Go back to the mid to late 90's to early 2000's and there were tons of them usually branded under one of the large IT/Tech companies like Sun or MSFT.
Java programming schools were very popular same goes for .NET/ASP the only difference now is that bootcamps are slightly less vendor oriented but they are still usually not stack agnostic.
12 Years ago you would go and pay for a "bootcamp" to get a Microsoft certification for .NET or some Java developer cert, now you just call it a full stack bootcamp.
MSFT went also even beyond that, in the early to mid 2000's they run programs in many countries that would focus on high school students for free/huge discount you would get to do MCSE/MCPD as extra credit classes after school.
Never heard of the AOL one, but I always find it funny that some how people think that bootcamps are new.
I would wager that more people learned to code via a bootcampish route (especially between 1995 and 2005) than through CS/SE degrees.
The before the dotCom bubble burst there were advertisements for Java/C++/SAP/ASP/W/E++ programming certificate courses on every website/newspaper.
Then there was a consolidation period with CS degree again becoming some sort of a filter pre-requisite and now where the "demand" at least for cheap(er) labor (and labor with 50-100K+ in student debt can never be cheap) bootcamps are touted as the next best thing again.
The only difference really is back then those certifications could actually easily land you a job because companies would advertise specifically for "XYZ certified programmers".
Now it's LF Full-Stack Engineer 19 years of experience in some framework that is 2 years old and is going to be in perpetual beta until its decline.
Thats not saying that bootcamp graduates won't find a job, they'll just be thrown into the same recruitment hell pool.
I can speak from the employer's point of view. It offers me another channel for finding possible qualified talent. I don't treat it much differently from other channels, and interview these candidates just like any other candidate. But I've hired a few developers from bootcamps and they've worked out well.
I can't say that these hires are necessarily better than other hires from other channels (e.g. universities, self-taught, etc). From my standpoint, it's having the extra channel that I find useful.
And after that, it comes down to the individual and how much potential & ability to learn each has.
After a year trying to teach myself on the side, I enrolled in Fullstack Academy (coincidentally, a YC company) because it was quite difficult to figure how to progress on my own -- not because individual topics were difficult, but because I found it difficult to figure out where to proceed next.
The curriculum was well structured, flowed logically, and emphasized best practices that employers would look for during interviews. More importantly, you have access to the instructors, who do a great job helping you work through any questions you might have. Worth every penny.
I did three years ago. Basically spent three weeks reading books and doing exercises available online for about 3-5 hours a day and then nine weeks of M-F 9 AM - 11 pm and probably 4-9 hours each day of the weekend doing curated exercises intended to get you to the point at the end of the bootcamp where you could get a functional web app up and knew how to teach yourself anything you were missing. Which, obviously, was a lot.
Everyone who did the program with me now makes six figures in the Bay Area or decent salaries if they left. All of us who stuck with it (rather than moving to project management, etc) are working alongside people who got 4 year CS degrees and getting paid in the same range.
If you like coding, it's a pretty sweet deal. My brother-in-law recently went through the program (six months ago) and landed a job that more than doubled his salary back in Arizona, so it's not like it's only useful if you want to do the start-up SF thing.
I've worked as a teacher/mentor for an online coding bootcamp, and from my experience, the advantage of these kind of programs is moving very, very fast. Self-teaching takes a lot of time because you often have to figure out what to learn about next, and university programs tend to take of lot of time because they expect you to take a broad range of classes (a little assembly, some webdev, a bit of high level math, etc). These bootcamps on the other hand, take you from your first HTML file to fully working Rails/Django/Node apps in about 6 months.
Relative of mine completed a coding boot camp. Even if there are free methods to learn, I'd imagine, even if you didn't see value in having personal tutelage that there's a benefit to putting your skin in the game to get the certification. It's easier to shirk off going through a course when there's no down side to ignoring it. If you've paid an amount of money substantial enough to sting if you don't go through with it, I imagine that's a strong motivator for some people
Doing hard things as a group helps you stick to it. It's why meditation retreats are a thing, even though you can sit and do nothing at home without any problem. I think paying the amount these places charge for it is ridiculous, but there's a valid reason for some people to want the group setting.
There's also lots of people that don't know how to problem solve with Google. The concept just doesn't exist for them.
> There's also lots of people that don't know how to problem solve with Google. The concept just doesn't exist for them.
I currently teach at a university, and to be fair, learning via Google and Stack Overflow is not such a straightforward proposition. This is directly related to the screeds that are occasionally written about how complex JavaScript, etc. has become.
Yesterday, I was Googling around for answers on Bash minutiae -- how to read arguments with flags, the difference between single- and double-bracketed conditional statements, how to assign a heredoc to a variable -- but finding those answers was easy because I knew exactly what to look for, and more importantly, how to filter out irrelevant answers, because even with good Google queries, I had to read more than a few erroneous StackOverflow pages to get what I wanted.
Beginners in programming do not have similar advantages. Assuming they even know what they should be searching for, which in my experience they don't, they lack the ability to formulate what they need as a Google-friendly query. And they're pretty much completely lost when it comes to judging the content of competing "solutions". The hardest part are the unknown unknowns, e.g. beginners don't know to be aware of software dependencies, platform-specific behavior, etc. etc.
Google is invaluable to folks who are reasonably competent in their fields. But I wouldn't say that it's obviously adept for problem solving, especially for beginners.
Former student here, left before the instructor disappeared. Prior to joining, I had been learning to code on my own for 2 years and was 4-5 months into my first development job.
The only reason why I signed up for this bootcamp is because it promised 50 private pair programming sessions with a mentor, one that I thought was a "seasoned programmer", which turned out to be fake. It was either that or Code Mentor's Long-Term membership option. With the private sessions and group sessions which didn't count towards the 50, I assumed I would be getting a better deal.
Other than one on one feedback and mentoring, maybe if you need a more structured curriculum and you are a complete beginner to the world and you would rather pay someone than stumble around for a bit until you learn the basics, a bootcamp would be a good option.
I went to App Academy, and it was definitely worthwhile. I could have gotten the same information elsewhere, but there's a lot of value in having a curated, focused curriculum and a large amount of time dedicated to learning.
I can imagine that having someone direct your education may reduce the potential for blind spots or complacency. I've seen quite a few people who, after starting to be productive, avoided certain topics because they seemed hard or unnecessary, like the guy who did everything with flat files because he didn't know databases, or people not useing VCSs.
I attended a coding bootcamp 3 years ago, and this was a major concern of mine going into it. The instructor had only taught one small class previously, so there was not much of a track record to trust. I spent quite a bit of time researching the instructor's background and speaking with his former students. Even with all that, there really was no way of knowing going into it whether it would deliver what I was hoping for. Ultimately I decided the risk of losing my $3k was worth the potential upside of a career as a software developer. Luckily, it worked out.
"Every year, dozens of new schools open, promising to teach anyone who can type the skills necessary to make a career in software development."
OK, so people want an accessible route into the very basics. Where are the Community Colleges? In the UK, your local Further Education college will do you the very basics for not much money as an evening class.
The cisco academy approved evening class ones are good we had 20 switches and 20 routers to play with at Mender College in the UK but it was about £500/£600 per quarter (free if you are unemployed)
Well they need a flexible accreditation route then don't they?
UK: I could get short (18 hour) courses accredited by writing a submission including Bloom Cognitive Domain style outcomes and an assessment plan in a couple of months. We made liberal use of e.g. in the assessment criteria so that the criteria could remain valid for a year or five even though the platform, language and methods could change as needed.
I know this guy, he worked for me on a project for a bit. At the time, he was in Mexico on a sail boat just going from port to port working on projects remotely. He would exchange tid-bits about his life, he was definitely unhinged. At the time, I think he was avoiding prosecution in the US by being in Mexico. This is super crazy but I'll be honest, not out of character for the guy.
Not too much. I was referred to him through a friend of mine who is a recruiter who knew I was looking for rails dev's, we still talk about him every once in awhile as possibly the oddest dev that's ever worked for me. He was a pretty good Rails developer (and passionate) and very active on the Ruby Forums, I think he was banned at some point though for some of his behavior. I remember he went on a Facebook rant regarding his ex-wife on Facebook, about how she was keeping his kid(s?) away from him and (at the time) she was the reason he couldn't return to the United States. After he got hired, he basically went to the other dev's on the github and emailed all of them telling them "he was the new lead dev" on the project. I had to take an entire day calming down the rest of the team haha.
This would be a perfect opportunity for someone who runs a bootcamp to contact these students and give them a chance enroll for free. It would be great PR ...
His uneasy students began to formulate theories. "We really didn't want to believe that we had been deserted," says Lundgren, who had paid $5,988 in tuition.
My heart goes out to these bootcamp students -- scammed and otherwise. That's a heck of a lot money for someone not earning a tech salary to pony up. For a set of skills which (at that level) just aren't going to be enough to get them into the kinds of jobs the envision being in reach, at the end of the tunnel.
I don't get it, people paid $100k to this guy to get courses through slack and online videos ? The article says 19 students, who paid $5k each for that ? are you kidding me ?
Yeah, this was a crazy story, but the fact that people were paying what amounts to college tuition for learning-via-Slack-from-a-guy was the biggest shock to me. And I am a fan of bootcamps and think that there are bootcamps where you will get far more out of your $10,000 than you would for a year in college.
But those bootcamps are physical places, with hands on instruction from a variety of instructors. I don't keep track of the bootcamp scene but I imagined it to be saturated by now with a bit of the race to the bottom, in terms of quality and pricing. A teacher-via-Slack isn't shocking, the prices he commanded are. But maybe such an arrangement is the only resort for folks who don't live in big cities like New York, or growing hubs like Omaha?
I want to know how he marketed that. I got plenty of shit I still remember that I could teach them for $5k. I'll give them a whole, damned CompSci education for $100k per set of students never leaving my house.
Sure but this obviously was a scam as the guy lied on his credentials, pretending he worked for Microsoft, Apple and co . I wouldn't pay that much money unless the courses are issued by a well known institution or give me access to college credits anyway.
People pay as much, or more, to go to a room a few times a week and have someone lecture them, then assign work which will be evaluated and eventually produce a piece of paper. Some don't even have physical rooms much anymore, and just charge to watch videos!
We call it "college", and it can also be risky (especially some of the shadier ones).
Crazy considering that Launch School (formerly Tealeaf) has an online program for $199 a month (working at it full time you should complete in about 4 months)
I know this all-too-well. :-) We actually bought the first section ($499 if I recall) and then they made the pricing switch - while that content is still available, in terms of completing the program, we had to switch to the monthly billing.
The scam aside, this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job. Especially that one student who lamented now he can't prove he completed the lessons from this bootcamp. Would a no name bootcamp impress any employer?
Learning in a classroom (or via Slack chats!) is not enough. It's just the first step. The key is applying it as soon as possible by doing projects, for yourself or for someone else. For free in the beginning if need be. Employers now want to see proof you can do something, not a piece of paper showing you can. Plus publishing these projects online can help employers / recruiters discover you.
Too many parents are still teaching their kids a paint by the numbers formula they knew for life: go to school -> land job. Work there -> rise through the ranks. The good news is, there's a hundred different ways to land a job now. The bad news is, trying, failing at, trying again at those different ways can be hard.