The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder
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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.
Code schools too often make it look like you attend and then succeed, there's a lot more than goes on in between.
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.
"I did learn some stuff," Johnson says. "I can write some code, and I didn't know anything before I started."
Oh jeez. I feel really bad for his students.
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?
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The bootcamp was called General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly/).
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.
Also remember AOL server with Philip Greenspun?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PS: I'm glad it worked for you.
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.
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.
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?
We call it "college", and it can also be risky (especially some of the shadier ones).
(we have a junior dev using it)
Either way, a massive bargain, compared to what's out there