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Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

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206 pointsyaks_hairbrush289 comments

I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry.

The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies.

Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have stepped in to bridge that gap - they essentially screen for people who learn quickly, teach them the bare essentials, and send them on their way.

This means bootcamps have a symbiotic relationship with the quality of students they're able to attract. The best bootcamps turn out the highest quality students, who then get the best jobs, which makes the bootcamp look better.

Dev Bootcamp was always in that awkward position where it was trying to be one of the "premiere" bootcamps, but never actually made it to tier 1 status. It's always lived in the shadow of Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, and to a lesser extent, App Academy. Having personally worked with Dev Bootcamp graduates, I've felt that on average, they were much weaker than the graduates from the other bootcamps I mentioned.

Since Hack Reactor in particular has been expanding its reach to additional locations, Dev Bootcamp was probably getting boxed out of the premium bootcamp space. The founders were unwilling to be relegated to tier 2 (or the demand was dropping too fast) so they had to pull out.

It's a shame, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised.

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times.

Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months.

So you can make it a year long, but then do you charge $40-80k up-front? No one has that kind of money.

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country.

The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and themselves a great American tall tale. Becase if it isn't earned, if it isn't "merit" in any real sense, then what? Then does everyone have a right to opportunity? Yeikes. We don't have enough opportunity for that. Instead, we avoid facing these issues by focusing on "diversity" now... but only a certain very narrow definition of diversity, and only when we want to raise ourselves above others of merit for being so meritorious as to think of diversity. Then, we wonder if "diversity" has made us less competitive. The only answer here is money. Money. That's it.

I absolutely agree with what you are saying, but I also believe most hugely successful people who work, work (or worked early in their careers) just as hard as anyone else, they just happen to be working at the right thing with the right people. Of course once you are successful, you can hire people to do most of the work for you while you just monitor.

Finding the right thing with the right people is where the socioeconomic status comes in, particularly having a well connected family.

On my graduation year, my university created a slogan, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Having just spend 5 years getting a degree from said university, I thought that wasn't a very good slogan for such an institution. It was absolutely correct though.

Bill Fernandez (Apple Employee #4) did a nice interview last year where he talked about (among other things) the origins of Apple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca-LXxMpveE

In it he talks about how Steve Jobs and company were just immersed in a technological community from a young age. They had after-school tech clubs (that the kids actually wanted to go to) as early as elementary school, virtually every Dad on the street was an engineer... yeah, no shit they created Apple. Not discounting the skills of Jobs and Woz, but they had about the most fertile soil possible in which to grow a tech company and a network of contacts from childhood. Listening to that piece made me insanely jealous. Would have killed for that kind of community as a kid.

You are wrong, at least in some sense.

I was teaching English in China making about $800 per month. I wanted to build an application and had no experience and certainly no money. I went to school for Journalism and have zero family money or connections.

I bought Agile Web Development with Rails. I spent the next year or so trying to learn while working an ultra low pay job with almost a dial up connection.

I applied for an accelerator with my terrible app, got accepted, ultimately didn’t raise any money but I did end up with a junior engineer job. Which led to another, then another until finally here I am, I still work contract jobs but finally that terrible app is actually good and generating real money.

I own a house now. I get paid more in a month than I would make in 18 months teaching in China.

I didn’t go to a bootcamp, I didn’t go to Stanford and I have never raised investment money.

How I really got it? I worked very hard. Studied cheap books, reached out to experienced developers I tracked town through sheer force of will.

By most definitions, I am successful however that success might not have yet resulted in a million dollar pay day but life is pretty food.

Another story, the founder of the Gringos restaurant chain in Houston, literally started as a dishwasher and now he flies in a private jet and gives millions to charity. And before someone declares “white privilege” or some other nonsense – he’s brown.

Another kid I knew was a minimum wage bar-back at a nice Houston bar. 5 years later, he owned the place.

Look at Asian immigrants to the US, plenty of stories of first generation immigrants that speak not a word of English and arrived in the US with $500 and now they’re sending their kids to Harvard.

How many Algerian immigrant kids are in France’s elite schools? Probably close to zero.

There are tens of thousands of stories like that.

You rarely hear about rags to riches in Europe.

While the US doesn’t have a monopoly on success stories, the American dream os far from a myth. It is literally there for the taking. Look at the Apple story, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet. How many self-made billionaires are there in Europe? How many self-made millionaires even?

Nothing is stopping a poor guy with a squeegee and a bottle of Windex from creating a window washing empire – if he’s willing to dream that big. Good luck doing that in most other countries – they’d crush him with taxes and regulations before he could even afford to buy his first truck or hire his first employee.

In Europe, starting or growing a business is only for the rich or privileged generally. In America, anyone can do it; but not everyone wants to put in the sweat and hours to actually execute.

Born Stanford and Harvard provide very generous financial aid packages to those that "get in" but aren't rich. The problem is getting in requires a lot of prep and achievement long before the college application is submitted, and that's where the rich get their leg up. And at the end of the day, that is still worth something to employers.

The claim is not that colleges provide no value, but that going to college is not a reliable indicator of anything but privilege. Using it as an indicator of intelligence or work ethic, especially as being more intelligent and hard working than someone who got their degree from University of Phoenix, doesn't work. It's just buying into the narrative that rich people must be rich because they're smart.

I think the parent comment was referring to Harvard/Stanford's need-blind admissions & full financial aid packages.

Not really. Money helps to get in, but elite universities provide the most generous financial aid of any schools in the country. If you come from a anything below the middle class and get in, you likely won't pay a cent.

yes, money helps in so many ways. it sure does help you get in. It starts helping you when you are an infant. It helps the whole way. I know this because I worked in the tutoring idustry that helps people get in in exchange for money.

It helps, but it's certainly not the dominant effect. I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence. I've seen so many students who still didn't do that well even after extensive, expensive tutoring.

For example, SAT coaching only increases scores by around 50 points. [0]

[0] https://www.jefftk.com/p/sat-coaching-what-effect-size

>" I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence"

Oh, I sure do. The strongest positive correlations I've noticed with elite schooling are conscientiousness, acquiescence to authority and then wealth, in that order. Intelligence is a relatively distant 4th place, thought it still correlates positively, IMO.

PG actually wrote a whole essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

"...what we've found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it's negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school."

For what it's worth, I agree with pg and don't think your college is the best predictor of anything (after all, I actually decided not to go to an Ivy myself). That being said, I reject the notion that it's trivial to buy your way into an elite university. There's a whole class of second-tier private colleges that exist primarily because it's not that easy for rich kids to buy their way into the truly top schools.

I really hope that you see this, because this seems like a teachable moment.

We aren't talking about making a million dollar donation to get your son into school. That happens, sure, but it's an extreme example.

Here are things that richer people can do easily & poorer people struggle with.

* Not working or working part time for four or more years

* Moving across the country

* Living in places with high cost of living (think Stanford, Berkely, NYU)

* Getting tutoring for the SAT, taking the SAT multiple times

* Going to a high school where the teachers give a shit

* Having people in your life who went to college & can help you apply

* Having extracurricular activities that show you'd contribute to campus life

* Already being comfortable with being interviewed at age 18

These are just what I could think of in a few minutes. Scholarships _do not_ level the playing field (though they certainly help).

That's an extremely patronizing way of approaching this debate.

I'm well aware of the different kinds of privilege which money affords students. I grew up lower middle class but went to boarding school and university with some incredibly privileged people.

Money helps, but it's still not the dominant factor. If it were, I never would have gotten the education I received. Insinuating that those who went to elite universities just had enough money to get in and go is insulting to those of us who worked very hard to get there.

I'm not going to engage further with you, since you seem more interested in "teaching" me than engaging in a discussion of equals.

You're free to ignore me, but I'll engage just once more.

I read your comments and perceived that you were misunderstanding, and that I could present it in a way that would clarify things. I'm sorry that you felt patronized, but there is no shame in ignorance. I think you should be more open to people telling you that they have something to teach you; maybe I was wrong, and maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but when I try to teach someone something it's because I respect them enough to think it's worth the effort.

You see all of our points, but you keep coming back to this idea of buying your way into school, which is not a point anyone is arguing. Why is that?

Happy trails.

Edit: And yes, I do believe that, regardless of how difficult it was to get into school, people work very hard in school. I never said they didn't, though I can see how it would be easy to come away with that impression. What I am saying is that it doesn't show them to be harder working than someone who did not attend school.

I don't think they're saying that money buys your way in a Ivy school, but in that it gives you a legs up with stuff like better and earlier education for example

I haven't taken the SAT in a long time, but I can speak on the GRE

For the GRE Verbal, you just have to memorize about a thousand words to basically get everything right except for the reading comprehension. that puts someone's score somewhere around ~158/170. I dont think memorizing 1k words is a very hard thing to do, though i am baffled that people dont do it.

For math, a person should memorize special right triangle ratios, prime numbers under 100, and some geometry rules. the rest is just practicing a finite set of question types.

Its all very coach-able

For what it's worth, I boosted my SAT score by 400 points (2100 out of 2400) just by being more aware of the tricks used on those tests. My weakest subject was writing, but not because I am a bad writer, my handwriting is garbage.

It's just like taking IQ tests over again, once you know what to expect, you can game the system a bit by memorizing patterns. Scores on any standardized testing should be taken with a grain of salt.

I would disagree. Having money helps in a lot of things. For one, if you've got money, your family probably isn't struggling to eat. If you've got money, you're likely living in a better area of town.

It is the dominant factor if it is enough money. I'm not talking about a meeting 1 million dollar 'donation'

Works well for most companies that hire exclusively from top tier universities. They definitely miss out on some talent but unless they need thousands of engineers, they can find all talent they need from just a few top universities. Probably overpay 10k-40k/year for that privilege compared to equally skilled/smart people from other unis but it's chump change in overall employee cost. Also makes interviewing easier - rejecting 90-95% of applicants from lower tier state schools who could not fizzbuzz is not fun.

Another part of the value of a university is that they factor in SAT scores heavily into admissions. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ.

Hiring based on IQ tests is illegal, but hiring mostly from certain universities is not.

For those (like me) who immediately wondered if SATs correlate with socio economic status rather than IQ, this Slate article covers some of the debate about standardized tests and points to meta studies. SATs do track IQ and predict college success, but social emotional skills, grit, and other factors also count. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

That's a very interesting article. One of the points that really stood out to me, despite the present but weak correlation with socioeconomic status, is that it still serves as a very strong springboard for gifted children out of poverty. The article mentions that the SATs can be the bane of upper middle class parents trying to get their children into good schools (test prep works, but only goes so far), while even kids with a lower SES get perfect scores on the SAT.

I can easily imagine that abject poverty would mess with SAT scores (or probably even prevent someone from taking the SAT), but for the majority of the country I would expect the SAT levels the playing field rather than hurting it. For example, I live in a rural town in Missouri. No one here is rich, but the majority of the town is not in poverty. I can't think of a better way than the SAT for a precocious child here to get into a top-tier school.

Exactly. There are many schools (in the east in particular) where privileged children end up who didn't get into the Ivy League, Stanford, U of Chicago or U of Michigan.

The value of the alumni and professional network of these lesser schools, as well as the brand name, is lower than the top tier schools, but the parents often did attend a more elite school, and their network offers inter-generational benefits.

It's interesting that state schools like Michigan accept a large number of less competitive in-state students, thereby providing the sort of springboard you mention, while also attracting a top tier of students that is on par with those attending Ivy League schools.

For what it's worth, when I saw that you looped in U of Michigan with the ivy leagues I thought you must have attended U of M. I don't view U of M with anywhere near the same level of prestige.

FYI, some non-trivial bodies have ranked U of M as the top public university in America.

It's not illegal, it's just considered defacto discrimination and you have to prove it's actually beneficial.

There's no reason that you couldn't be sued the same way if you're only hiring from a certain university and that leads to excluding people from a protected class.

You can use "disparate impact" doctrine to argue that just about anything is illegal. It's pretty hard to full proof yourself against that.

But there's a big difference between something that existing legal precedent has ruled as strongly likely to be illegal for hiring (IQ testing), and a currently widespread hiring practice that may at some future date suffer the same fate (hiring from particular schools). The legal risk of the former is extremely high, while you would have to be extraordinarily unlucky to suffer damages from the latter. Even if the courts do so rule in the future, you'd have to win (lose?) the lottery and be the one or two companies that get taken to court in that test case.

Interestingly the NFL uses the Wonderlic test.

From what I understand SAT grades what you've learned and ACT grades what you are capable of learning. At least that's what I understood years ago.

Edit: Oh yea, don't believe me? Here's a link. Apparently I got it backwards though. :)

http://www.educationplanner.org/parents/act-sat-scores.shtml

>Hiring based on IQ tests is illegal

Citation pls?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

It would be legal if you can prove in court that IQ is reasonably related to the job.

I don't know if this is accurate, but reading between the tea leaves it seems the commitment to diversity compromised their ability to signal their student quality. Their values are certainly laudable, but perhaps unprofitable. Maybe they would have been better off as a non-profit? It seems like rich and famous people would love to throw money to this initiative as a non-profit.

How diverse was charging $10k/head in New York City in the first place? Are we just talking about racial diversity? Seems like an awfully strange hill to die on.

Diversity usually means diversity of race, sometimes gender and sexual orientation, hardly ever age or wealth, and never diversity of opinion.

I'm guessing not very diverse at all since most people had to float 6 months+ without income.

Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income?

I smell a business opportunity.

Haha. Yeah I'm the founder of https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science - a computer science academy that's free up-front and takes a percentage of salary for two years after you get a job.

The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything. It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be.

Also we're online, so you don't need to move anywhere (but still live instruction and world-class instructors).

but then one has to be affluent enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to do a mountain of pre-work and then get educated or re-educated, or for many in the USA, re-re-educated, and then one has to then afford to remain unemployed (bootcamps tend to go light on this part when recruiting) while looking for a place that wants to hire a bootcamp graduate.(hint: tough for diversity candidates here) These places are hard to find for many, even many who previously attended and paid for! an ivy school in a dying field. If this were such a wonderful model, and if we actually had a skills gap that needed filling, why aren't these hundreds of desperate and honorable tech employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? If there were such a clamour for those with basic tech skills, why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months and months? Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?

We're not a bootcamp, but your points are well-founded.

> But then one has to be $$ enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to get educated or re-educated

You're right: Not everyone can afford to not work for six+ months. We don't have a perfect solution for everyone yet. But it's much easier for most Americans to find a way to stay alive for 6 months than it is for them to find $10,000 lying around. Basic subsistence, especially with a tiny bit of help from a safety net of some sort is generally close to within reach, and if it's not we don't have a way to help yet.

For example, we had a student last week that has been living with a friend, and we learned she was so poor she couldn't afford a computer to code with, and had been using an old Android tablet and a cloud editor. We shipped her one, but for many "enough to stay alive" is much, much easier to find than some amount of cash.

> If we actually had a skills gap that needed filling why aren't these employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves?

Well, some do. Others have ridiculous recruiters' fees that are enough to pay for student tuitions. This is true not just of alternatives to higher ed, but of colleges. Why doesn't Google also become Stanford? Probably because that's a lot of work and what we have is close enough.

To be clear, with regard to SWE, I don't think there's that big of a skills gap. It's not like there's a desperate shortage for junior rails semi-devs out there. But employers definitely hire folks and they definitely pay big recruiting fees and there's definitely demand.

> Why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months?

Other than the requisite time to get your first job (which is generally 3-6 months regardless), I haven't seen that any from tier one bootcamps struggling to find work for months. Probably three months on average, but that's pretty normal. Maybe we have a different understanding of "tier 1."

> Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?

Because crappy bootcamps want to lie and make money.

I mean look, there's ITT Tech, which is a complete rip-off for the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean college in general is a bad thing for everyone. Somehow, though, that's how non-university programming academies get lumped together - one bad bootcamp? This entire idea must be horrible! As with everything, there are shades of grey.

I appreciate your taking the time to speak to these issues honestly. This fact alone sets you very much apart. While I do think your model is better, even lots better, the tuition deferment model can be very misleading to those who don't get the tax/rent burden in SF or NYC (not saying you or your school is misleading students as I don't know it or you... I'll read up). As far as tier 1 bootcamps, I'm pretty sure you and I know who we are speaking of. I do think students should question these schools and their supposed outcomes with a critical mind. The facts aren't reaching these recruits because their desperation for employment is clouding their view, and because many who stand to profit from this desperation are actually in a state of desperation themselves. I'm not saying you are in particular. I am saying that we need to be more responsible and act like a supportive community.

I dropped out of top tier university(online continue education) but yours looks great. I will check it out may be I will get enrolled.

Hmm, I was under the impression that these kind of salary percentage schemes weren't legal? (Mostly just because I've never seen one before.)

Nope, just new. Purdue University uses one as well.

>It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be.

I love this idea, thank you for starting this! I think this something there should be more of. I just looked at your site, and noticed the 3% acceptance rate for the $0 upfront cost tier. Just curious how that's changed over time as your exposure has increased. I assume you are trying to maintain some instructor/student ratio, etc? Are you willing to share what limits you from accepting more students at the $0 upfront tier? If so I'd love hear more, lmk.

We've grown almost in line with the increase in applications in number of instructors. We haven't raised real money or anything, so we're limited by the number of instructors and cash we can pay them, but we're growing as quickly as we can without sacrificing quality.

We see hundreds of new applications per day and can only service a small fraction of them. Hopefully we can change that to some degree soon.

Is your program appropriate for students who are high school seniors/graduates as a alternative, or lead-in to college? What level of programming experience is required?

Yes.

You'll want to know intermediate JavaScript coming in. We have courses that prepare you for that free, so apply and we'll figure it out.

That's how undergraduate University education works in Australia (at least it did when I attended. Perhaps someone younger than me can comment if things have changed in the last 20 years).

Effectively the government pays your undergraduate university fees. There is then an additional tax applied against your salary, after it reaches a certain threshold. This of course results in jokes that Arts graduates may as well be enjoying free tertiary education.

I think this is a much fairer system than being asked to pay upfront and perhaps taking out a student loan in order to pay fees. The Australian system allows any student with the ability and desire to attend University (it's not completely perfect, but it is much better).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aus...

That's effectively how it works in the US as well for most people.

Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off.

I don't believe they are cancelled ever. There is a special condition that if you work for the federal government for 20 years, they can be cancelled after 20 years if they aren't paid off, but AFAIK, that's it, and you have to attempt to pay them off during those 20 years.

If there is a new exception, please let me know. My wife has some.

If you opt into the income based repayment plan they are cancelled after 20 years of payments. I'm not sure how they retroactively count payments made under old repayment plans if you switch now.

I can't believe we're acting like taking 10% of disposable income for 20 years is a good deal

It's not 10% of your disposable income for 20 years. It's capped at 10% of your disposable income for 20 years.

It's designed as a safety net for people who can't find a decent job after taking out student loans.

If you get a high paying job you're not going to qualify for the income based repayment plan because you only qualify for the newer income based repayment plans if it will lower your monthly payments below the standard repayment plan.

>It's not 10% of your disposable income for 20 years. It's capped at 10% of your disposable income for 20 years.

Yes, and also there's lots of non-typical deductions that can furthur reduce your effective income for these plans, and ways to reduce the forgiveness period to 10 years. Lots of lawmakers say that program is not sustainable, and Congress may try to change it soon... If your not utilizing it and have student loan debt, I'd recommend looking into it sooner than later, as you may be grandfathered in if/when it's restructured. Most people who are elegible don't take advantage of it yet, and loan servicers do their best to steer students away from signing up for IDR.

I did not know that. So why all the noise about how expensive tertiary education is in the US?

As you can see from my sibling comments, people who make too much money to qualify for income based repayment (because they'd be paying more than the standard plan), people who went to college years ago, and the generally uninformed just don't know about income based repayment plans.

Not every loan is a federal loan. Additionally, federal loans almost NEVER cover the full amount of university, unless you're at a state school or community college.

My federal loans covered about 1/8 of my tuition.

Federal loans make up 90% of all loan disbursements.

The vast majority of college students only have Federal student loans.

>unless you're at a state school or community college

Private colleges enroll about 15-20% of students. If you don't want $100k in debt, go to a public school, or go to a top tier school like Harvard that has very generous financial aid.

If you can't get into a top tier school with excellent financial aid (or your parents make too much money to qualify), you have to decide whether $100k in debt is worth it.

It's not society's job to pay for private college.

I'm from CA. Even with the resident discount, UCs are just as pricy as private colleges.

UC Berkeley tuition and fees comes to about $13k per year for California residents. The average private school tuition is over $30k per year.

Not sure why you think that it's so expensive. I went to school in Georgia (much lower cost of living area) and UCs are only about 15% more expensive than our flagship schools (Georgia Tech and UGA, and GSU).

Cost of university education has risen much faster than inflation for decades primarily due to easily obtained loans and increasing bureaucratic overhead. At the same time, the job prospects for many degree-holders have decreased. Additionally, student loans are for life and can not be cancelled by filing bankruptcy now. The 20 year thing mentioned by the above comment only applies to very specific government jobs.

So education is more expensive, student loans are more expensive, student loans can't be cancelled, and job prospects and real income are worse.

>The 20 year thing mentioned by the above comment only applies to very specific government jobs.

No you are completely incorrect. For public sector jobs the loan forgiveness happens after 10 years. Under the income based repayment plan anyone who makes payments for 20 years will have the remainder cancelled.

https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans/in...

Large student loans affect your credit and there is no threshold for your salary for when you have to start paying back.

>there is no threshold for your salary for when you have to start paying back.

There is. You pay back 10% of your disposable income. Disposable income is income above 1.5x the Federal poverty level.

If you make less than that, you pay $0.

The federal poverty level for a single individual is a bit less than $14,000.

Because a. not everyone qualifies for that, and b. 10% of disposable income for 20 years for something that didn't work out is still a pretty awful deal

>Because a. not everyone qualifies for that

Everyone who has federal student loans (90% of all loan disbursements) qualifies for income based repayment plans if the plan will lower your payment.

*PLUS loans your parents took out don't qualify, but you won't need those if you're going to a 4 year state school.

>20 years for something that didn't work out is still a pretty awful deal

Didn't work out meaning can't make much money. For a family of 4 making $50k (about the median household income), you'd pay back around $100 a month.

Not everyone qualifies for government loans.

Government loans are credit independent. Subsidized loans are need based (the interest that accrues while in school is subsidized by the government), but unsubsidized loans are not. The vast majority of students qualify.

If you are a felon, once you are released from jail, you can still qualify.

The only people who really can't qualify that I'm aware of are non residents, people who have been convicted of drug offenses that occurred while accepting federal financial aid, and people who already have degrees.

That's how App Academy works already. Put a deposit down, go through the program, then pay them a percentage of your first years wages from your new job. I did it, and rich people at the golf club where I worked were telling me it was a bad idea, sounded illegal, etc. In my opinion I got an awesome job in an awesome career for super cheap. I had no money, someone was finally willing to give me a chance based on my ability to work through problems in the application. It was the hardest thing I ever did but well worth it.

Ya, we're kinda like App Academy except not a bootcamp (a longer, more exhaustive CS program), online (so you don't have to move to San Francisco), and with no down-payment (because most of our students just don't have $4k, even for a down-payment).

Please add a Java based web development option (ideally with JSF), I'd join in a heartbeat. The web dev is too javascript / front-end centric, and the CS (I'd assume) is too math-centric.

Java / JSF / MyFaces is the best of both worlds, imo. No need to write most front-end javascript, 80% of dev time can be spent on business logic.

The CS Academy does teach Java. It's our main tool for understanding a lot of the lower-level stuff such as architecture, scaling, etc.

We use JavaScript as the front-end web language, for reasons that are likely obvious (as well as React/Redux), and also use JS learn a lot of the data structures/algorithms portion, but Java is our main compiled language.

Does it cover JSF?

No. We use JavaScript for front-end stuff as that's the native language of the browser.

We'll also use a little bit of Spring, so JSF isn't far away, but I wouldn't go into looking for a school that teaches exactly one (relatively small) framework. Look for the fundamental principles and worry about frameworks later.

Fair enough, and I'm no expert, but isn't JSF 2 a formalized / built-in standard, rather than a relatively small framework?

I thought most of what made Spring useful and popular was blown away by JSF 2.

Yeah, it's formally a part of the Java platform, and it's widely used, but I'd recommend becoming adept at using several different kinds of frameworks before I single one out. JSF, like all frameworks, will have advantages and disadvantages, and I'm sure there are Spring vs JSF holy wars, but the best advice someone can give a budding programmer is do not get caught up in that until you actually understand the underlying principles.

Spring and JSF are to some extent mutually exclusive. I worked on a project that used JSF views with Spring EL that called Spring beans. However, the best practice, according to BalusC on StackOverflow, is to avoid mixing Spring components and JSF managed beans (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18387993/spring-jsf-inte...).

Exactly my point. Why are bootcamps teaching Spring, when JSF 2 is built-in and does it all better? Or at the very least should be assumed to be the future.

Aren't most bootcamp grads being hired for frontend roles?

And this is exactly the issue with most of them.

There are a million resources online to learn javascript, that isn't challenging. I want a solid DBA / backend developer bootcamp.

Depends. We're not really a bootcamp, most of our grads are hired for full-stack roles

We are doing this at Holberton since we announced in 2015. It's a 2-year program based in San Francisco, no upfront tuition but a percentage of students salary when they get a job.

The program is also quite different from regular education, we have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and by collaborating with their classmates. Check us out https://www.holbertonschool.com/

It's indeed a "business opportunity" but I also believe that this the tuition model that post-secondary education should adopt if we consider that its main role is to train students to get a job after graduation. The success of schools should be proportional to students success.

Who can afford to live in San Fran without working for 2 years (9 months)?

And who can afford to have $15,000 taken off the top of their salary between $51,000 and $100,000? I hope this graduate can find remote work and live in a tent in a national park campground nearby a major tech employment city with a killer public transportation system that reaches its public park campgrounds. There are actual bears on Bear Mountain by the way.

How many software engineering jobs in San Francisco pay 50,000?

The $50,000 lower limit is there for people looking for work in more rural communities. For example, yesterday we had a student that was formerly a forklift driver making $10/hr get a job offer in the middle of nowhere for $78k (and that was only two days after graduation). He lives in an area where he pays $500/month for rent.

If he only went from making $10/hr to making $50k, the lifetime economic value is still indisputable - easily over a million dollars during his lifetime. Him paying us back for a couple of years in exchange for making that possible at no money down and shouldering the risk if it didn't work out is a fairly reasonable ask IMO.

Well, I can't speak to SF. I can tell you that in NYC, these salaries are going down down down as the supply of "junior Rails semi-devs" (hilarious btw) climbs ever higher with the rise of the last viable profitable education gambit: the bootcamp. I've actually started to see full time SWE positions on AngelList for $40,000 per year. (I know!!!!!) I realize you guys aren't a bootcamp, and I'm not speaking to anyone in particular here. Although- how are you not a bootcamp? Because by bootcamp, I loosely mean: a non-degree granting thing that gives you some skills you can sell in the decaying labor marketplace, but quickly, before it totally decays and there is nothing left at all. Anyhow, labor is dead. We all know it. Here is a great little piece from The Baffler on this point. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/why-work-livingston

That said, it is tough to do the actual life of a 2017 Bourgeois Professional with the income of a manual laborer (debt slave), even for a few years, because the theater of this requires a lot of energy, perfect physical health, and a great wardrobe to start, not to mention the attitudes and social mores that take a lifetime to learn. No one speaks of this crushing emotional toll that adds up to very real financial expenditures that help one deal with these theatrical maneuvers over time. It comes at great financial and psychological cost. People wonder why there is so much burnout in this field... I'm not claiming you should take this on. Not at all. It's just that it is never talked about. Some of these these "bootcamps" are desperate... some of these are in the top tier in SF and NYC. It seems that these issues should be raised at some point and discussed in a place like this one is all I'm saying.

As someone who has spent most of their life in NYC, I can tell you that this is a load of crap. There have always been shitty developer jobs in this city, before and since bootcamps, with equally shit pay. There's a ton of companies here with a lot of needs and not a lot of budget.

1) New York laws have changed very recently to make it much, much harder to screw over freelancers and contractors -- the places where you'd otherwise see these companies sourcing labor.

2) Even competent developers take jobs for low pay. I see it happen all the time. I've even done it.

3) You could just be seeing signal that AngelList has a lot of mindshare now and poorly funded NY startups are listing there. I've seen people I know with vanity businesses hiring part time devs on that site for $29k.

4) Salary caps are still climbing here.

  And who can afford to have $15,000 taken off the top
  of their salary between $51,000 and $100,000?

Anyone who's BATNA is making $46,000 or less, i.e. the median working 25+ year old with an associate's degree or lower in the United States [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

I made it work... Also that's cheaper than what it costs to live in SF for 2 years, even assuming your rent in that situation is free.

The two business models seems interesting. How do you track students once program completes? how do you know where are they working. How does the legal binding works ?

https://www.holbertonschool.com/

https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

I can only speak for Lamdbda School, of course.

The original document is called an income share agreement (ISA). It's not a debt instrument or a loan, but is actually a legally binding "equity" stake in a student's future income under specific circumstances for a specific amount of time. Lambda, for example, takes a percentage of income for two years, only if they're working in a software-related field, and only if they're making above $50k/yr. We also cap the amount paid over the two years at $30k, regardless of how much a student is making. So, yes, if they don't get a good job, we never get paid. That only seems fair.

As for how it works practically:

In conjunction with the ISA, each student signs a 4506-T or 4506T-EZ (or any successor form) with the IRS, which effectively copies us on their taxes.

Students self-report their salary, and we adjust payments according to their reports, until year-end reconciliation, which happens around tax time. We get their taxes and double check that their self-reporting has been accurate, and adjust accordingly.

Should a student default, we have the same remedies that any other private lender would - we reserve the right to report to credit bureaus, we can sell the agreements to collections, etc.

Thank you for the detailed answer

On Holberton side:

-How do you track students once program completes?

We are working with http://vemo.com/, they are specialized in Income Share Agreements (ISA) and the goto in the industry if you want to do ISA. Purdue University is also using them. Vemo request access to students tax return so that we can see their income.

- How does the legal binding works?

Students are supposed to let us know about their employment situation so that we can adjust the payment. The deal is that they pay 17% of their income if they make $50k/year or more. At the end of the year tax time, we do a reconciliation where we compare the amount received against the student income, where the student or the school might owe money to the other part.

What is great about this model is that: -Student only contributes back to the school if they are employed. -Student contribution is proportional to their "financial success". -Holberton can only thrive if its graduates thrive, no bs.

If education loans and repayment plans were tied to future income, I feel like we would have a much healthier higher education system in the U.S. As it stands now, it seems to be one of the bleaker spots in our overall current situation (I know, I know there are a few bleak spots right now and no one is forcing people to take out these loans).

That's exactly it. Right now, barring government action, so long as I can keep students coming to my door there's no incentive to perform.

Schools like ITT Tech have shown, in my mind difinitively, that if you're willing to pay enough for student acquisition you can have absolutely terrible outcomes, still saddle up students with tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, fail to get them jobs, and for some inexplicable reason they'll still keep coming.

This is definitely the case. I got accepted to both HR and Dev Bootcamp. I chose HR because it had the better reputation and had released outcomes statistics. HR had tougher requirements to get in, you had to understand more programming than a freshman or sophomore college student. Dev Bootcamp accepted me with a logic puzzle and basic if statements and for loops. There was no competition.

HR's recent purchase of Makersquare has me a bit worried that they are outstripping the supply of smarter incoming students but I can't say for sure yet without interviewing a larger sample.

Fellow HR grad here.

There was a point in time where completely unqualified students memorized and gamed the admissions process. Someone who did the remote interview copy and pasted the answers around the internet.

This led to a very large amount of students that were just not prepared for the program in any way, and it also coincided with the window in time that HR decided that they weren't going to remove any students for performance issues.

It was a fucking mess. I know people who mock interviewed students from those cohorts and they decided to completely disassociate with the school because of the experience.

I know people who technically interviewed them at their companies and they blacklisted Hack Reactor after too many of those rotten apples couldn't write a simple for loop. Some of these interviewers were Hack Reactor grads themselves.

I know someone who hired one of the people from those cohorts and had to fire them for performance after trying to give them half a year and excessive mentorship to improve.

It's a shame that shit like this has happened, because in my eyes it's irreparably tarnished the Hack Reactor name. I've given away my hoodie/tshirt to Goodwill because it just doesn't mean anything special to me anymore.

They've started kicking those people out again (around 7%). They check performance on your daily problems, how much you contribute to the peer projects, and a hard cut at a midterm exam where they record your screen and make sure you're not just copying solutions. They also weed people out on behavioural teamwork issues.

Some of the people who got kicked out just dropped back to the next cohort though, which is severely disappointing, because on top of paying the full tuition they are likely to fail again. I checked and there's no way those people can catch up based on their code, they're the kind of people Jeff Atwood talks about. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

>recent

It was several years ago, and Makersquare was by a long shot at least on par with Hack Reactor with their entry requirement rigamarole. If you're referring to the "merge" that happened in last October, that was merely the final stage in the purchase. Their curriculums and staff had long before been merged, the only final step was the name itself, which was hung up on Texas law regarding some financial aid packages students were able to receive.

Early Dev Bootcamp grads I know are pretty talented, but over the last couple years they seem to be the bootcamp of choice for people with less prior experience (that's a good thing) and less commitment to their own personal development & the industry (that's a bad thing). Those two things combined are a disaster.

Interesting...thanks for sharing that information.

Just want to point out that the founders ~peaced~ left 3 years ago. Kaplan has been running the program over the past few years.

For-profit education companies, looking to get a piece of the action, have swept in and bought numerous bootcamps. This very thing happened to Dev Mountain a few years back. If you look at the reviews prior and after this acquisition, there is a very stark contrast to what happens when a reputable business is converted into a cash cow.

> the founders peaced 3 years ago

What does this mean?

"Peaced" (to peace) is a colloquialism which means "to leave" or "to abandon". In this case, it indicates the founders left the company.

I mean they sold the company

> Dev Bootcamp was always in that awkward position where it was trying to be one of the "premiere" bootcamps, but never actually made it to tier 1 status. It's always lived in the shadow of Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, and to a lesser extent, App Academy. Having personally worked with Dev Bootcamp graduates, I've felt that on average, they were much weaker than the graduates from the other bootcamps I mentioned.

They definitely were not "always" in that awkward position since DBC was the first of these bootcamps, and is where the entire term 'coding bootcamp' originated. Early DBC grads went on to start several of the other "top tier" bootcamps, including Hack Reactor.

I think the students build confidence at least as much as they learn practical skills. Having an experienced technologist watch you work and say "that part is good, this part needs this change" is enormously valuable for any sort of advanced amateur. The kind of person who maybe builds sites and apps, but doesn't know what they don't know and have never received validation.

You've also just described MBA programs.

They're not free upfront though...?

So, three years ago, I was attending DBC and getting my first exposure to web app development. Today, I write code for a living and am enjoying the work I do much more than what I had been doing before.

Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No.

Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No.

Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really.

But I did learn an enormous amount of practical knowledge in a very short time (basically: "How to build and deploy a database-backed CRUD app with a reasonable UI while working as part of a small fast paced team" and "How to research stuff you don't know the answer to and figure out how to do it on your own").

They taught me what I needed to know to teach myself the rest of what I needed to know to get where I wanted to be. And for that, it was worth it for me.

But I do have mixed feelings about the bootcamps in general.

They can be really helpful for people in certain circumstances (in my case: career changer who needed to jumpstart the learning process and get some practical guidance), but they sell themselves as something else ("Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!").

Sorry to hear they are shutting down. I suppose it was Kaplan's decision and the space has become so crowded that there must be pricing pressure on the programs and a limit to how many graduates the job market can absorb. Will have to go look into this some more and see what I can find out.

>Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No.

>Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No.

>Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really.

This perfectly describes my experience with LaunchCode in the midwest.

Yeah, main difference though is that LaunchCode provides it education for free rather than charging $15k

Same experience here (first DBC cohort). I ended up not being able to make end to end Rails apps, which fortunately didn't matter since it gave enough of a springboard to get into the industry. But I also didn't feel it delivered on what I really needed it to, which was to provide help I can't find on my own and a steady stream of good job leads.

Never underestimate the benefit of being around motivated people.

I think most people hear "Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!" and think "get a job coding" which was pretty accurate in my experience (and those of my friends who attended a bootcamp).

Now, of course, being a "computer programmer" is way more complicated than that.

But I don't know a single person IRL who regretted doing a bootcamp (only know people who went to App Academy and DBC); they all still consider it a) a good investment and b) the reason they have their current jobs.

I don't really think DBC promised more than that. In fact, in my cohort they were all about "will code for food"; the idea being this was the first step and the next one was to find a place to continue learning.

I've had one friend who swore by Dev Boot Camp in Chicago and told me I should be a teacher. He got me in touch with a director in my city, but before I could come in for an in-personal interview, they wanted me to do this really basic web app (CD database with artists, albums, etc.)

If I hadn't been employed I probably would have done it. I was working full-time and then came home to do some more open source work. There was no money on the table for the problem ($200 ~ $400 would seem reasonable for a pre-interview project like this). I sent them an e-mail with 5 major tasks I was working on, all for open source projects or things I would open source. They could pick one, I'd finish it and I'd do a full presentation on it.

They said they had tried to do reviews based off Github pull requests in the past and that, no, I had to do the original problem they gave me. I didn't contact them back.

I really want to teach, but I was weary of these for-profit boot camp programs. They also talked about how they wanted teachers to push/promote the programs at events and such. I have another friend who went through a different boot-camp like program and told me she felt really rushed through it, but she didn't want to swear them off either.

It's cheaper to go to a state community college and get a 2-year programming degree in many places in the US. It will take longer, yes.

I know CS majors with masters degrees who've only written in C/Java and don't keep up with tech. I've know people without degrees at all who have learned BigO notation and learning algorithm development all on their own. You get out of any program what you put into it.

Wait, they didn't teach you data structures and algorithms?

They seriously stop at "hey deploy a CRUD app?"

That's rough. There's no way students are getting jobs with that in this environment. Maybe when they first started that was enough, but now the market is flooded with not-quite-competent junior devs.

They can and they do. Which is somewhat problematics. A lot of companies are trying to scale, and with the demand for software developers being so high (plus the push for diversity), bootcamp "grads" are a pretty popular target.

But companies rarely make the difference between a CS major (especially those with multiple internships or coops often spawning longer than the bootcamp on their own) and bootcamp graduates.

So they both start as SWE or Junior/Associate SWE. Often there's a drastic difference in ramp up and output, and people around them won't always know why (unless people stalk them on linkedin or ask).

That puts a ton of burden on teammates that may not be properly prepared to coach these people (they go through the same hiring process, same onboarding process, etc). Don't get me wrong, its a failing on the companies who hire people they are not prepared to handle, but they're often pressured to.

It's a really awkward situation.

> So they both start as SWE or Junior/Associate SWE

> That puts a ton of burden on teammates that may not be properly prepared to coach these people

You hit the nail on the head. Bootcamp grads will typically require more coaching than 4-year CS grads. Companies that don't realize this are setting themselves and their new hire(s) up for a painful experience.

In my opinion, fresh bootcamp grads are ready to be apprentice developers. Unfortunately, that's not really a role / distinction that any 21st century companies even recognize, probably because that also means recognizing the additional costs involved : apprentices require mentoring, and mentoring costs money. It's simply greedy thinking on the part of a hiring company to believe they can get a 4-year CS grad on the cheap & easy by going the bootcamp route. It's bad management not to account for the latter's steeper learning curve & onboarding requirements.

Ultimately there's no such thing as a free lunch. Even talented people can't magically leapfrog the learning curve by cramming out webapps for 3 months. There will be gaps in their skillset - gaps that are best bridged with hands-on guidance from a senior developer. This applies to all junior devs, obviously, but doubly so for bootcamp grads.

> gaps that are best bridged with hands-on guidance from a senior developer

Yup. Also, there are situations where that gap becomes problematic to fill. As a lot of bootcamp people get hired, you start getting in situations where everyone in the team is a bootcamp grad. Then they don't have someone with an actual CS background to compensate.

I only have an IT degree myself (which, while longer to get, for all practical purpose is just a longer bootcamp). That was fine: I learnt a lot on my own, and 15-20 years ago, everyone else on my team had a CS background. I got coached, i learnt, I went from there.

Fastforward today and people without CS backgrounds might not have someone who does anywhere near. You don't know what you don't know, and have no way to be guided in the right direction. That's bad news.

Huh. I went through devbootcamp 3 years ago and stay in touch with a fair amount of people who did bootcamps. Haven't really heard this one before. The anecdotes I've heard are actually the opposite direction; that the bootcamp grads hit the ground running because they know the framework and general toolset for web dev (plus are usually spending a huge amount of time outside of work leveling up) and the CS majors take longer to be productive.

Of course, as their careers go beyond "junior", the bootcamps grads need to do major lifting to catch up in other areas beyond basic web dev. But early on, I've only really heard good things.

Curious.

People from good universities do co-ops, internships, and side work. They know the frameworks already too. And then you have some who don't, but come from MIT or CMU and pick that stuff up faster than I can link to the tutorial (well, once they're done complaining its not Haskell anyway, lol)

Though it does remind me of a company I worked for that hired a lot of bootcamp peeps, and it was hailed as a giant success by management. Meanwhile the rest of the team was grumbling about having to do 2x the work as they had to pick up the slack.

(Now, obviously, I do know some people who went through bootcamps that do amazing. I also know some 100% self taught engineers who are now Principal engineers or similar at Google or Microsoft. The above is just what I've seen to be the common case). Teaching React or how to build an API controller to someone we just hired is never the bottleneck. Interns pick that up just fine, no matter where they come from.

I think the majority of it is sheer time. A bootcamp grad has generally been coding for three months. A CS grad has (ideally) been programming for four years.

Take a bootcamp grad after 3.5 years of work vs a fresh CS grad and it's (often) a no-brainer, up until you start running into the need for theoretical knowledge a CS grad has. I've never once heard a bootcamp talk about scaling or architecture in any real way.

To be fair, they introduced us to data structures and algorithms, but there was no time to get a strong understanding of them.

Most of the first 3 weeks of the class was focused on writing Ruby programs to do different sorts and searches, and to model and manipulate different objects (suduko boards, battleship boards, etc.).

I left with a good practical knowledge of working with arrays and hashes in Ruby and when I would prefer one structure over the other, but what I mostly learned was how to model data objects for a SQL database and set up a web app to manipulate those objects (and how to integrate w 3rd party APIs).

But if you asked me anything about a Linked List or a Trie or when it was better to use which one, I would not have given you a very satisfactory answer (still might not, about Tries at least...).

And, yeah, getting a job was tricky. Partly because I still had a lot to learn (still do), but also partly because there is a lot of knowledge that every computer science grad has learned backwards and forwards and then forgot about that most bootcamp grads have only barely been exposed to.

I attended a (London-based) bootcamp and all we really covered was developing CRUD apps with a decent-ish UI and API integration. On the one hand it did feel very superficial but then a lot of web development jobs don't require much more in terms of skill.

Everyone on the bootcamp had a list of things they'd have liked to cover as well but there simply isn't time for everything. When planning the bootcamp's curriculum you have a difficult balancing act between giving people a firm grounding and teaching them things that are going to be directly helpful for getting jobs (which is most people's priority, given that they're not earning).

Students on my bootcamp who had been able to put together a portfolio of decent (albeit simple) websites that met users' needs didn't have trouble getting jobs. No, they weren't engineering roles at large tech companies but they're the first step in a new career.

It always frustrates me when commenters are overwhelmingly undereducated about a topic but continue to make broad, sweeping generalizations. There's a ton of negativity, outright assuming, and misinformation being thrown around here. It happens in every bootcamp-related thread (and topics in other subjects of course).

No, not every bootcamp was legit. No, making assumptions about all bootcamps based on a handful of bad apples is not an honest critique. No, your anecdote about a bad bootcamp grad does not hold more weight than someone else's anecdote about a bootcamp completely changing their life.

The fact is DBC, which spawned an entirely new industry, was an overwhelmingly positive force. DBC has always made inclusivity and community a priority. For the vast majority of students, DBC has been a much higher ROI investment than a 4 year college degree and changes the way people think about modern education systems. There are thousands of capable engineers (including myself) out there today thanks to DBC, which often operated with high stress and, apparently, minimal funds.

It's a shame each bootcamp topic has its share of otherwise reasonable people making unfounded claims. In a community that values programming, startups, inclusivity, and helping others, you'd think the negativity and baseless accusations would be a lot more infrequent. It's been 5 years since DBC began and yet commenter ignorance still requires graduates to come in and defend their bootcamps.

If you have no idea what you're talking about, it's fine, ask and I'd be happy to answer. But this community really ought to be celebrating what DBC has accomplished.

Source: I'm an early 2013 DBC grad who has worked in SF tech since graduating. I've also helped hundreds of bootcamp grads with their job search post-graduation (meaning I have my fair share of honest criticisms for DBC). The vast majority of people I've talked with are now employed at companies most people on HN would love to work for.

As a hiring manager who reviewed many bootcamps and interviewed bootcamp grads, DBC was top tier. I hired a few DBC graduates. The people who went through their program tended to be extremely smart and motivated. The program itself was very thorough and demanding.

Out of all the bootcamps I expected to fold DBC was at the bottom of the list.

i think this is a bit of a legacy reputation issue. as some commenters explained above the nature of DBC has changed a lot since Kaplan took over.

> It always frustrates me when commenters are overwhelmingly undereducated about a topic but continue to make broad, sweeping generalizations.

This sentences describes about 80% of the comments in HN. We computer nerds like to think we know about everything.

Bootcamps are threats to ego. If it turns out that random person can do the same with three months of study, then one is not such a huge exceptional genius as one would like to believe.

A lot of the negativity is insecurity.

What a lot of people fail to understand is working in React and Angular is no easier to get into with a CS degree than without one. Both technologies among the thousands of others change weekly and for that reason Bootcamps are damn near as effective training tool than anything else. Ego's do get hurt though.

I have nothing against bootcamps, but I don't think it is difficult for someone with CS degree to learn react. There is a lot of practical in CS too and that experience makes learning react much easier - especially compared to people with little experience and not much programming background.

Likewise, second bootcamp would be easier and learning new technology for someone from bootcamp is easier then for someone with neither bootcamp nor CS.

what do you mean "change weekly"? if you mean minor semver nudges thats not material enough to be pertinent to the conversation

> If it turns out that random person can do the same with three months of study

The best bootcamps invariably have a selective recruitment pipeline ensuring that they train students who have both natural aptitude as well as a baseline technical skillset. These aren't really "random" people at all : programming isn't particle physics, but it's not as easy as the sales pitch makes it sound.

I have worked with several in the IT industry who have graduated from Bootcamps and they are fine developers. Sweeping generalizations is just what the internet does and we're all dumber for it.

For anyone seeking alternatives, $0 up-front cost software engineering bootcamps that I'm aware of:

Learner’s Guild https://www.fastcoexist.com/3068200/when-this-entrepreneurs-...

42 (completely free) https://www.42.us.org/

Holberton School https://www.holbertonschool.com/

Lambda Academy https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

Hey, I'm the co-founder of Lambda Academy of Computer Science (https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science. Also happy to answer any questions.

We're not a bootcamp, but we are 100% free until you get a job, and have live instructors from UC Berkeley, NASA, etc. We have a very rigorous curriculum that is closest to an uber-practical CS degree, but there's not really a close proxy to it anywhere.

We cover all the CS & programming fundamentals employers want you to understand, and get much closer to the metal, covering things like architecture/scaling, functional programming (hence the name), use compiled languages, etc.

We're also online, so you don't have to move anywhere, but we're live and on a strict schedule, so it's not something you can do asynchronously.

> We're also online, so you don't have to move anywhere, but we're live and on a strict schedule, so it's not something you can do asynchronously.

Has that been a benefit in terms of graduates getting easier access to remote positions? (The fact that they've demonstrated the ability to work remotely through your course)?

Do you work directly with potential employers, helping students get a foot in the door, or is that up to students themselves? If you do help out, do you "sell" the remote idea?

Finally, are you open to non-US students?

> Has that been a benefit in terms of graduates getting easier access to remote positions?

I don't know that it's really come up much; generally we don't recommend a remote position for your first job, as you'll need a lot of hands-on training. It makes more sense as you become more senior.

> Do you work directly with potential employers, helping students get a foot in the door, or is that up to students themselves? If you do help out, do you "sell" the remote idea?

Yes, we work directly with potential employers, but again "remote" isn't the emphasis.

> Finally, are you open to non-US students?

We are, but unfortunately the "free-up-front" option is only available based on our income share agreement, which is only available to those authorized to work in the US.

I am the co-founder of Holberton, happy to answer any question here.

In a nutshell: we are training SWE using a project-based and peer-learning approach. No formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by practicing and collaborating with peers - pretty much like in the workplace.

We haven't graduated any cohort yet (our program is 2 years long, but students can start working after 9 months) but have already students who intern/work at NASA, LinkedIn, Tesla, Apple, Dropbox, Nvidia, Docker, CreditKarma...

Big difference between us and bootcamps: we are covering the fundamentals of CS + we are not focusing on teaching students specific tools but rather developing their critical thinking, problem-solving skills and guiding them on becoming self-learners. All good Software Engineers know that you must constantly learn to stay on top of your game, being about to retrain yourself is the most valuable skill that a professional should have to continue to grow career wise.

42 student here.

The school is 100% free as in no upfront cost and no later charge. The difficulty is to get in, one has to make it through a 26 day C heavy selection process and pass logic tests beforehand.

The school is really meritocratic in the sense that formal background is irrelevant and financial assistance makes it accessible for almost everybody.

Provided you happen to be between the ages of 18 and 30.

I have not found official info on this but there are programs for people above 30, I see them on campus every day.

From their FAQ:

I am not between the ages of 18 and 30. Can I come to 42?

No. While we do not have anything against those who are over 30 years old, when opening a new location, we have decided to concentrate our where they can be the most efficient and where we have a great deal of experience.

Would Viking Code School also make this list?

Founder of Viking here: Yes, we're the original online school to offer deferred tuition (have for almost 3 years). Basically, we are 100% online and offer an Immersive 12-week bootcamp that's very challenging to get into but comes with a deferred tuition option where you don't pay until you get a job (you even get your deposit back if you don't).

Recurse Center

Attending Dev Bootcamp in March 2013 is the best decision I've ever made, it totally altered the trajectory of my career and I'm happier and more fulfilled as a result. I'm not sure I would have been able to make the switch from consulting to software engineering without DBC.

That being said, I'm extremely lucky to have enrolled during the narrow window I did. The entire bootcamp industry is suffering, not just DBC. They've now totally saturated the market with juniors and refused to adapt to that reality by extending and improving their product: they should be offering longer courses, covering more material, interspersing their offerings with internships, and providing intermediate-level bootcamps for engineers looking to graduate to the next level. Today's bootcamp graduates have to compensate for this themselves by continuing to teach themselves new content as they fight for jobs after graduation. This is difficult - don't get me wrong, it's still doable and still very much worth the effort - but it's hard, and this explains the current embarrassingly low rate of bootcamp graduates winning jobs as developers. If this describes you: keep your chin up, find a friend to practice interviewing with, and know that you're going to need to work through this material eventually: https://teachyourselfcs.com. And feel free to reach out to me.

I don't think anyone close to the bootcamp industry would see this as a surprise, and I think we'll see many more bootcamp closures/M&As in the near future. Hopefully the industry will evolve and adapt, not die - everyone deserves the opportunity, not just the lucky few who had it easy before the market got saturated.

I'm already web developer, but I want to move into Software Engineering. I wish there was a bootcamp out there that would train people who already work with JS and coding, but are not as strong in CS. Bootcamp L2, for example.

Check out the guys at outco!

https://outco.io/

A few definitely are trying to adapt with the jr dev saturation problem. I went to one in San Diego called Origin Code Academy and they're trying out extension courses and have already succeeded with final project internships rather than letting students come up with their own app. I don't know yet if that'll help them survive but the latter gives their graduates a leg up in the job search.

I worked at Dev Bootcamp for four years. A big part of why the company is going out of business is that it put students ahead of profits.

I wrote a post about this here: https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didn...

Thanks for writing this Abi

DBC 2013 alumnus here.

I'm super disappointed to hear this news. Although I could see it coming, because how often does this kind of thing NOT happen when a small company gets purchased by a larger corporation?

DBC was quite an institution. As I've stated before, it's not about what they can teach you – it was simply an invaluable resource to allow those with ambition to figure out aspects of app development on their own and with other people. If you're expecting a series of lectures, exams, and knowledge to be bestowed upon you at DBC, you're looking at it wrong and you will fail. To have a place to go where you can spend months hacking on things with other people while going through a learning process, right in the center of the action in technology, was so unique and valuable. I met so many cool people and had far greater experiences than my time in college. It changed my life tremendously. I have Shereef and everyone whom I shared my experience with to thank! I really could be living in a van down by the river right now if I didn't discover DBC.

The greatest thing I got out of DBC was not coding ability, which I mostly picked up on my own, but a mindset/philosophy about learning and problem-solving. I know that many of these things come naturally to people software engineering, especially those far more brilliant than I, but not everyone figures these things out. They summed it up as the "growth" mindset vs. the "fixed mindset", which seems fairly accurate to me.

I really hope someone can continue(or at least hold a candle to) DBC's legacy. A lot of bootcamps seem like junk, but I'm sure that's not all of them.

which aren't junk in your opinion?

Kudos to the school who started it all, and the vision behind it. Thinking about the future, and the million of people who could benefit from learning coding, is DBC going to open source their curriculum?

I think they should consider it, and I think that they could reach out to Free Code Camp to see if they can do something together. Hope to see this happening! What do you think?

From the European side - https://codeworks.me/

Burst of bootcamp bubble? Dev Bootcamp seems to have been the first ever coding bootcamp. Think Hack Reactor (another popular bootcamp) was founded by Dev Bootcamp grads. Or maybe the herd would just distribute to other bootcamps? Even if the failure of Dev Bootcamp doesn't directly hurt the business of other bootcamps, it has a psychological effect on the bootcamp industry: suddenly the bootcamp experience doesn't seem so attractive anymore. If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?

The bubble is credentialed post-secondary schools and the 1.3 trillion dollar student debt crisis.

Just like the credentialed schools, there's a wide variety in quality and outcomes, but I think it's pretty clear they're doing better on ROI (and at least people aren't going into decades of debt for them en masse).

> "If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?"

If someone learns nothing after finishing their courses and has nothing positive on their resume for several years, they'd probably be in a tough spot. That's not really very different from the case for other types of schooling, though. If someone is learning and growing though, why would it? Only an extremely strange employer would ignore a candidate's performance in their last job and reject them based on schooling they did before it.

Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off.

The income based repayment plans are also retroactively available to all Federal borrowers.

It's not actually as big of a problem as it sounds.

This intensifies the problem.

Just imagine the US real estate bubble a decade ago if housing loans worked in such a fashion! The perverse incentives alone are enough to cause severe harm.

The loan forgiveness entices people who wouldn't otherwise buy the education product and further inflates the sticker price of education.

Sure, but it essentially shifts the debt burden from the individual to the government.

$1.3 trillion in extra government debt isn't a large enough to really cause problems.

I highly doubt that. Almost no one looks 20 years into the future like that.

10% of your income for 20 YEARS.

Man, it is funny that people get mad at Bootcamps like app academy for charging 20% of your income for a single year....

App Academy nearly tripled my salary in all of 6 months! The motivated people I met and what I learned about the industry, not including the technical skills I obtained, have easily been worth double what they ask for.

It ended up costing 1/4 of my 4 yr degree. I admit, that it's not a magic pill like their marketing will have you believe. That's my one gripe, with how they portray themselves. You have to be motivated and driven to succeed and realistically, not everyone can handle the complexity and speed at which they teach.

They really give you the bare minimum but it's an amazing little boost. It's up to you build yourself up from there.

It's 10% of your disposable income. You're only going to be paying for 20 years if you make next to no money.

If you don't get a decent job, you'll basically be paying almost nothing for 20 years. If you get a great job, you'll pay it off way before then.

I would say it's a general education bubble in the US that is still build on the claim that the system can work for everyone - as long as you just try hard enough.

Here's the thread that started it all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133

Thank you for this. I remember reading this 5+ years ago. It was the catalyst for me dropping out of college, and eventually made my way up to SF to go to DBC. A hell of a journey, and it all started with a post on some forum.

Edit: I also didn't realize you're the DBC founder? I owe you so much and i owe my entire career (thus far) to DBC and the entire industry you started with some crazy idea of teaching people to code in a couple months. Thank you for everything you have done.

You are very welcome. Thank you for the kind words.

Shereef, as a DBC grad (Otters, Chicago, 2013), I thank you for posting this. It changed my life, and the lives of many other students.

To think, this is the post that launched an industry!

I don't know if I should feel sad about this, but I do feel sad about this. As others have mentioned, DBC was the first company in this industry, and their excellent execution seems to have been what led to so many other entrepreneurs becoming convinced that this concept could work; they really did a great service for people in this country who didn't graduate college with a hard-science / engineering degree. I considered going to a bootcamp back in February of 2013 (one year after DBC launched), met Shereef and his cofounder Jesse Farmer at their SF location, and left very impressed with what they had created and with them personally.

Hi! Thanks for the nice words. :)

Thanks for the kind words.

Some more kind words:

I'm currently working through week six of Phase 0, and I'm so, so sad that DBC isn't going to last. I did tons of research about different bootcamps, but ultimately I chose DBC because I wanted to be a part of a program that has such a commitment to being a corrective force in the embarrassingly un-diverse tech world.

It really is incredible that the thing you created has empowered so many students to both maximize their ability to learn and gain more agency in such an inequitable society.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. I'm glad I decided to dive into this while DBC was still around. (And now I should probably get back to work with attributes and modules...)

So I graduated from DBC 3 years ago and I agree with most of the sentiments already stated in this thread. However, I think the red flag for me was seeing some of my cohort graduate and then immediately after become instructors at DBC. I don't care what you say, you cannot teach programming after being exposed to programming for 12 weeks. For one thing, a "good" teacher isn't just someone who has been coding for a while (which obviously you lack if you have just graduated from the program); you actually have to understand pedagogy and take an actual interest in being a mentor or guide. If DBC had hired instructors with industry experience, I often found that they lacked the proper skills to make them effective educators.

I hear that, I remember being asked if I was planning on sticking around to teach at DBC and feeling inadequate at the thought of it. Mentoring perhaps made sense...

BTW I finished in 2013 as well (Pocket Gophers SF!).

Nice! I was in the Red Admirals.

DBC was acquired by Kaplan back in 2014 [1]. Was this Kaplan's decision or DBC's?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-developm...

I would guess it was Kaplan's decision. If the cause is unprofitability, then there are no moves left for DBC. DBC sold to Kaplan for the money, and Kaplan sees no money to be made in DBC, thus shuts it down.

sold for 80M to kaplan.

Top tier boot camps are essentially 12 week long interviews that the interviewee pays for.

It's a great business model for those top tier boot camps, but there's a limited number of students who can make it through, pay for it, and take time off to do it. It's just not that scaleable.

True. Schedule for most bootcamps are too rigid, especially for a married person. And living costs during and after bootcamp (until that perfect job magically appears) can far outway the actual tuition costs.

"Hi Andrew, we had actually been working too find a sustainable business model since the very beginning. Ultimately we couldn't find one that didn't sacrifice on our commitment to provide the highest quality program possible while keeping our program open to the most diverse students possible."

What does that mean? It seems like this should've been a profitable business - 3000 graduates @ $10k/piece = $30mm revenue.

I believe that three thousand was over the last five years. So 6mm. I don't know much about it, but you could eat that up pretty easily it seems. Figure 300 students at a time, ten students an instructor, 100k per instructor, gives 3 million. Then there's rent and support staff.

Rent is certainly huge. These guys are renting prime time space in city centers.

I wonder if these posh locations are worth it. I'm sure it attracts some students, and there's some advantage in the proximity to hip startups also in city centers. But students are low income during the program and hardly have a chance to do anything outside the office, given the workload of these bootcamps.

The support/general overhead wasn't cheap either. When I was there we had a free therapist, mandatory morning yoga, teambuiliding exercises, and stuff like weekly free food, etc.

This might have something to do with their financial issues. You obviously don't need these kinds of amenities to learn how to code a SPA. I'd be put off by them and wonder where my money was going and why.

Answering as a current employee. When these were being phased out to start to lower costs students and graduates reacted strongly that they felt they were a large part of our value. Part of what makes us "us". As another commenter in here pointed out: bootcamps aren't for everyone.

We were up front about these things being part of our program because we want to focus on the human aspects of people as much as technical skills. That meant some people were better suited to join other places, but some people came specifically because of this part of it.

That makes more sense, but didn't people ever raise an eyebrow about a therapist on staff, or requiring yoga? From the outside, the optics of that could be interpreted quite a few ways.

> mandatory morning yoga

This would enrage me.

Bootcamps are not for everyone.

> Bootcamps aren't for everyone.

DBC grad here (Chicago 2013). Mandatory morning yoga is not an inherent part of a generic coding bootcamp experience. DBC chose to make yoga classes part of its unique culture, but I doubt all other bootcamps follow suit.

Personally, I wasn't "enraged" by the yoga and I even appreciated the emphasis on mental health, but I don't think yoga was the only way to achieve this and I would have appreciated the chance to opt out.

Why do other Bootcamps, that don't require morning yoga, do just fine then?

EDIT: Or I can be more mean: why is it the only bootcamp that required morning yoga, the one that is closing?

they don't call it a bootcamp for nothin'. ;)

Translation: To balance the books we would have had to either raise prices or reduce quality, and we didn't want to do either.

Kudos to them for making that kind of hard call rather than compromising on their values.

It's bonkers that they couldn't make those numbers work. I can't wrap my head around it or make it not work no matter what I do to the numbers.

From my perspective, their values were the only thing that made the company insolvent.

Over 5 years thats about 6 million per year. Which sounds like a lot but their business model seems to not be cheap to operate. Question is: Why not sell it?

e.g. Financial aid sponsored by dev bootcamp for some students, or even corporate sponsors for financial aid didn't work?

There also seem to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps running that are doing fine, so this is confusing.

It would be helpful to know if they were "doing fine" and what that actually means in numbers, student outcomes, and values of the school.

revenue != profitable business

Of course.

Though the existence of what seems to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps working fine confuses me. Also, pretty sure dev bootcamp was bootstrapped - if they didn't put in outside capital, then either they were profitable from day one or they were running break even. I'd guess they were profitable.

Hm, wikipedia lists 40 staff, and 450 students per year.

Say 40 * $200,000 = $8mm/yr, plus rent. 450 students/yr ~= $6mm.

This back of the envelope would point to them being unprofitable.

Avg. salary of 200K seems to be very high?

It was a ballpark of the cost per employee, not the salary per employee.

Fully loaded cost.

See: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Vicarious-raise-so-much-money-..., https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mean-cost-per-year-for-a-s...

You normally do math like this with assumption an employee costs 2x salary.

That's too bad.

I've worked with many DBC grads and some nice people came through there. I interviewed many DBC grads and they were definitely all over the place in terms of ability and understanding, but some had everything it took to grow into solid software engineers.

I've worked with some of the instructors as well and they're great folks.

DevBootcamps work over the last 5 years have been super impactful and paved the way for many bootcamps. Like many in the industry, and as a founder of DevMountain bootcamps, we all knew DBC as the golden standard. DBC changed tech education and positively affected many! Much respect and best wishes to everyone involved.

Is this announcement official? I don't see anything on their website https://devbootcamp.com/. Also, the timing is off -- it seems announcing this at this time is going to put a damper on the entire next semester.

I was a graduate of one of the 2015 cohorts. It was a good school that really prepared me for a solid career. However, I remember running the numbers on the camp when I was there and was having trouble coming up with how they could still be profitable given their location, staff, and cohort sizes.

Good. The idea and intention behind bootcamps is a good one but the current implementation is suspiciously like university of phoenix.

My youngest brother went through Dev Bootcamp in 2012. He had graduated from a top 30 university but wasn't able to find a great job and had been doing some part time, low skill work.

DBC literally changed his life. Post graduation he immediately got a job at a dev shop as a programmer, and now 5 years later is a great developer gainfully employed in Silicon Valley.

Not sure why you would shit on the grave of a program that has done a lot of good for its graduates.

Trouble with anecdotes is that it is not data. I'm happy for your brother but that still doesn't change the fact that most bootcamps are overpromising and underdelivering on their promises of gainful employment. It's simply not possible to learn to program in bootcamp time frames.

I'm certain if we saw actual numbers it would not be a pretty picture.

For the truly motivated it is much better to go to recurse.com or join a learning Meetup. Get a day job to pay the bills and learn at your own pace. Programming is not going anywhere even with all the fancy AI startups. In fact if I was just starting out I'd just learn Python and R.

I fully support this comment, and have been doubling-down for a while on the notion that people who come out of hacker schools and "do well" just had a knack for it in the first place.

We have been looking for a very entry-level dev to be in a pretty entry level role that would be perfect for someone to get their feet wet in the industry.

Every single person we've interviewed from a "hacker school" has been from Hack Reactor. I'd say something like 40% of them would actually be able to be some sort of "developer" given that they keep up the practice. About 20% (at best) are what I would consider an actual "entry level dev intern"

Entry level in this context is basically just the ability to code some basic html, css, javascript, with a computer given to you, and a task to work on over the course of a day. Many of the previous Hack Reactor students we had interview (at least 60%) (some even being "assistants"), in my opinion, have no business in software development. They were technical enough to understand "web dev" in conversation, but just couldn't manifest that into anything useful without huge amounts of guidance for menial tasks.

Are you paying below market? The good ones probably are shooting for better paying companies. I know some Hack Reactor alumni have made their way to Google.

Love your use of speculation to counter my anecdotal data. Incredibly intellectually dishonest.

It is possible to learn enough programming to within 10 weeks to get a job programming. Of course they won't be the best programmers at that point. But I've hired bootcamp grads and have had other friends go through, and they have been positive outcomes. Yes, that is anecdotal data, but it categorically proves false that "it's simply not possible to learn to program in bootcamp time frames."

+1 to justin's comments. It's true that an anecdote isn't a complete data set, but it is one data point. Further, it's one more data point than the pure speculation that dkarapetyan's comment provides.

Let me add a 2nd data point- as a 2013 DBC grad, I would still be in my previous career (completely unrelated to engineering) if I hadn't attended DBC. My instructors and classmates were instrumental in helping me get out of a job I hated and into one I love. It wasn't a perfect experience, but it was a life-changing one, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

> For the truly motivated it is much better to go to recurse.com or join a learning Meetup.

Speaking of data, care to provide any which supports this opinion?

> most bootcamps are overpromising and underdelivering on their promises of gainful employment.

You generalize about an entire industry without providing evidence, and then you use that generalization to denigrate a specific company within that industry which may or may not buck a trend. A trend which you haven't even proven exists, btw. Nice.

Here's some actual numbers that HR released: http://hrhqdir.s3.amazonaws.com/outcomes/2017/April/CIRRRepo...

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

>for the truly motivated

No matter how motivated you are, you'll be casting around and learning aimlessly a bunch of random material about "programming" because you don't really know the nuances of the market as well.

Me: Turbo nerd, generally well-informed in the ways of technology, but outside the industry. Was working as a teacher and then a recruiter. I even took Harvard's CS50x class, so I knew the very basics of programming (some languages are compiled, others... aren't?), but I didn't really know that web development was the hot hiring field, I didn't know Javascript was the language of the web, that you could even use it for backend if you wanted. In fact, I didn't even really consider that there was a difference between front and back end.

So for 17,000 I was able to have all that sorted for me in 3 months flat, then kicked out into the industry a viable app developer. I went from a shit set of jobs straight into a bonafide, legitimate, and stable career trajectory. ~5 months total time investment. It simply would not have been possible to be so efficient by self-teaching, I wouldn't have known where to begin, what to study, that web dev had the lowest barrier to entry, etc. Literally the job placement stuff was completely useless and unused to me, I was a recruiter and so didn't use any of that stuff from my bootcamp, the thing that made it valuable to me was the curriculum.

I worked on my own for about 6 months time with a job, but in the 8 weeks that I have been at a well known bootcamp, there is no way I could have developed 1/10th of the knowledge that I have now during the same time period working a shitty job.

How do you know that? From anecdotes? :)

Most top bootcamps are very transparent with their numbers.

I think the comment is really about bootcamps in general.

Some people will succeed in development. Many won't. I received very little formal education, mostly self-taught, and I've been very successful. Put me in a bootcamp, I'd likely thrive there as well. I suspect your brother had a knack, and just needed a little direction.

Most criticism is focused at the false promise bootcamps provide. Many grads are barely qualified to be an intern, yet they were sold on promises of employability if they graduated. Even worse are the bootcamps that pad their employment numbers by hiring grads as teaching assistants.

This sounds very much on target. I've noticed quite a few bootcamps grads being hired as assistants, and waiting around for a regular job. Some sit around up to a year. This, and the fact that the industry is flush with bootcamp grads (I live in NY), are giving me second thought about the benefits of a bootcamp.

Instead of hiring bootcamp grads - which push grads to aim for salaries north of 70k - it would make sense for companies to recruit self tought programmers with an aptitude towards tech. By self tought I am not referring to child prodigies, but anyone who can complete the equivalent of freeCodeCamp.org's front end certificate. Such programmers would be happy to get a starting salary of 30k, and have the opportunity to get their feet wet.

It all boils down to networking. Universities are a form of networking by signalling to society who are the best and the brightest. IMHO, bootcamps can be viewed in the same light. If companies and potential hires weren't lazy and instead got involved in plain old networking, there would be less of a need for Bootcamps/Universities. Maybe due to the lack of community, companies must resort to other means in order to filter applicants.

I'm sure DBC has many good outcomes, but it's a fair comment.

I downvoted you because you're generalizing and have clearly not researched the topic.

As a hiring manager I reviewed many bootcamp programs and interviewed grads. DBC was one of the best and produced consistently good junior candidates.

There are a lot of crappy ones but DBC wasn't one of them.

Not sure why you were downvoted, it's a good point.

Many current bootcamps were duping students into promises of jobs, and making them pay large tuition fees up front. Very similar to what the scam universities are known to do - promise how the degree will help someone get a job, and then charge them large fees.

A friend of mine did DBC, and my sense was that many of their friends in the program struggled for a long time to get jobs.

Also, the founders I know stopped looking at some bootcamp grads, as they found them to be very low quality (this was noted to me back in 2014, may have changed).

21 of the 23 people in my App Academy cohort got jobs. 18 of them within like 3 months. The two that struggled had severe social issues holding them back. We had 5 dropouts who got full refunds.

2+ years on and all of us are still working in the industry.

It really does depend on the bootcamp. How valuable a bootcamp is depends on its style and the individual. Even though I had a positive (but probably unnecessary) experience, I'm not exempt from feeling like they're a bit scammy sometimes.

In my case, they give you a curriculum of the minimum that you need to get a job (really) and some serious pressure to get it done and get that job. Almost anyone who actually gets through it is going to be an asset to most companies that don't need an extremely diverse or exceptional skill set.

For roles I'm looking to hire, would I hire a fresh bootcamp grad? No. Would I hire one with two years experience? You bet your ass.

I don't know much about University of Phoenix, but I've hired a couple of bootcamp graduates, found through the bootcamp recruiting events. They were both pretty inexperienced, but motivated and smart people. As good as any junior programmers I've hired. In the right circumstances I'd hire them again.

It's diamonds-in-the-rough from a recruiting standpoint, but you get to vet a lot of people very quickly (it was exhausting) and if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that their motivated (good bootcamps are not cheap, and they're hard work).

How things worked out for the rest of the graduates I don't know... Both people I hired had some experience before bootcamp

Diamonds in the rough is exactly how I'd describe it. I've sifted through many resumes from DevMountain graduates (and not surprisingly their instructors). What it looked like was one big homogeny of "here's how you create a github account, here's how you commit and push the Angular exercises we've been working on". Almost all were identical resumes. Regardless, the ones that we've hired seemed to do fine.

I disagree. I'm a graduate of App Academy and I can't recommend their program highly enough. Ironically, my impression of it has grown since finishing. They asked us to review them right before graduation and I gave them a pretty mediocre review. It wasn't until I entered the job search and realized how well they actually prepared us, and set us on track to succeed and learn that I gained full appreciation for it. You can complain about any number of things, from the teachers all being previous students, to a weird paper thin attempt at an inclusive environment, but I wouldn't call it scammy like University of Phoenix. I don't regret going there for a second. I would say that from a personal level I was challenged more at App Academy than I was in college when I got my degree in Engineering. That could be because I actually enjoyed web dev, but either way, I disagree with that comparison.

I'm not sure I agree. The "system" right now leaves a lot of room for both good and bad camps. It's unregulated, but isn't in and of itself like University of Phoenix.

This is probably one of the few that wasn't doing sketchy stuff like that so I'm not sure I would say it's "good". If anything this shows the "university of Phoenix" model is the only viable one.

Who needs bootcamps? All you need is a decent machine and an internet connection to learn. That's how we learnt "web" back in the day. Cynical me hopes all commercial (and often spammy) bootcamps and conferences and meetups die a quick death. Also death to the hipster culture in tech. /rant over

Why stop at bootcamps? There are so many resources on the internet, most of which are free, that can replace all of the knowledge universities have to offer and then some. Someone could learn astrophysics through Google searches.

But that's not a reasonable position across the board. Of course universities offer more than mere information, and I would say that bootcamps(at least DBC) focus mostly on those other things and far less on the information. By that I mean learning to code at home online isn't going to give you the same experience as spending days or weeks hacking on your first mobile app with a bunch of other people, non stop, while chowing on beer and pizza. Yes, there's tremendous value in that, especially if you need to learn to work on a team and self-organize. In theory, you can emulate that environment on your own, but there's a reason people pay for that kind of experience. A person of novice experience can't or won't come up with a substitute for that. It's an introduction to a world, of sorts. At least it was for me.

In my day we didn't have the internet and we learned by writing code and looking up function calls in books and bugging the guy at the computer store.

With all of the free learning materials online you can literally get a university education from top schools for free.

If I was starting out now I would considered it because it's a fast track to employment. When I started out I knew how to program but no one would consider you without an education. That forced me to go to college and learn fun things like COBOL and jcl and many other languages in a short period of time. In the end I rarely use most of those language but if a mainframe opportunity comes up I'm ready. Being forced to learn so many things at once was the real education because it helps in the real world where you are expected to pickup new languages. For some reason my mainframe dev resume bullet points have never been mentioned during an interview. If you can develop for a s/390 that should somehow give you a slight boost for your next javascript role in my opinion.

It would be nice if that were true I agree, but in fact for many people a major part of the journey is getting to the point where you can teach yourself effectively. Some of those people benefit from these sorts of horrific social environments.

With that logic you might as well do away with University as well, right?

The personal computer revolution was started by hipsters.

If Dev Bootcamp was unprofitable, are other bootcamps also unprofitable, or was Dev Bootcamp an exception?

Recently, I had the opportunity to do some number crunching on actual outcomes data for one of the tier 1 bootcamps. (all its years of operation to date) I discovered that some major changes needed to be made in their business model in order for them to be truly profitable. Their big innovative business idea seemed to be: we are gonna be the best at bootcamping. I don't get how that even passes as an innovative business idea at the first funding round. Their delivery on that awesomeness idea didn't show itself in their outcomes. They still love their model though. This may be because they don't have to be profitable. I was puzzled.

Oh dear.

Yes. Well said. I truly wish there was a way for the minds who convene here to get at a disturbing issue with respect to bootcamps: No one with access to actual data can be honest about what is going on here. they can't really share this data in any detail that would be valuable to a potential student, and really to the industry as a whole. These "transparency" reports that have cropped up recently are not so transparent-- (although they are better than nothing) they too deceive (why not show an actual budget with actual living expenses after graduation- including debt to the coding school- a detailed personal budget, if you will?- and actually show what it costs to live and study for several months in addition to this- show them how much they will actually have to lay out for a NYC security deposit (three months' rent if local, 6 months often if foreign these days- sure, not everywhere, but anywhere they will feel is a decent, legal place to live) this is just one aspect of how they are not "full-disclosure" with newbies. Also- the pre-work thing: take responsibility for teaching these people, please! They are paying you! Stop acting like their paying you lots of money is a privilege of theirs. Stop acting like they just got into Yale Law School when they got into your bootcamp. Get real with them. That gives you credibility right there. The honesty problem: Students can't be honest about what happens to them, because if they are, they (in their own minds) will devalue the bootcamp pedigree they paid good money for. (I have been talking to bootcamp graduates since this whole thing started and doing research. No, for some of the reasons I state, I can't produce this evidence, at least not right now) Then there is the whole having to pretend to be a member of the upper classes in NYC in order to get a job. This is a real thing in NYC, so tell them about it, and teach them how to act like rich people when you send them out. Teach them to act entitled- even arrogant. People who found and work for these bootcamps can't be honest (even if they believe they want to be) for obvious reasons. I mean, this is why we value double-blind testing in medical research. I just don't see another way than the companies themselves taking the responsibility to educate employees. I don't think they have to become Stanford. I do think Google has already started with this effort in bringing Howard University onto their Mountain View campus... I'm paying attention. The burden on the employee just becomes greater and greater until people are funding whole mini-careers in order to clear the first barrier to entry. It is ridiculous. We should not stand for it. But labor is dead. The bootcamp thing was a fantastic model five years ago, and Dev Bootcamp was truly a pioneer. That should be recognized for sure, and applauded. But what is being ignored is that this barrier to entry is now the highest it has ever been as a direct result of these bootcamps. I can believe that and also think Dev Bootcamp and others have done wonderful work for people. It is just that the big heavy castle door is closing fast and a few are scrambling to run under before the spikes hit their backs. Most will be left drowning in the castle moat. The answer is clear here: the model needs to change dramatically and it needs to always be changing dramatically. Agile anyone? (sorry- had to, I really had to) So maybe take stock and make real change that responds to the market in a sustainable way. Sustainable would be wonderful.

My guess is that the profitability of different bootcamps varies with the policies / niche that those bootcamps have adopted. It seems likely that all bootcamps have high operating expenses / lower margins than a pure software business may be capable of.

Hard to compete against things like Lambda Academy where there's no up front cost and you only pay if you get a job: https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

Lambda does not look like a legit company, there is no terms of service, privacy policy or even a legit contact which is typically required for most reputable businesses. I don't trust them without basic legal information available on their website. For all we know, they are run by the Russian mob.

There's not really a need for a terms of service on a static page. We should probably get a privacy policy up. And there is a contact... both email addresses and forms. Do you need a physical address? We don't have someone sitting around waiting to answer the phone all day.

We're Lambda Inc. Incorporated in Delaware. Haven't announced our fundraising yet but that will be public soon. Clearly need to work on making the site look more legit.

Sorry, maybe legit is too harsh a word, but in many cases I've seen privacy policies and terms of service to be a requirement to do business with the likes of Amazon and Google etc...

terms of service is something you have if you're an app. Our students sign legal contracts. Our site is just a landing page.

But ya we'll work on it. Thanks for the feedback. Something something cobblers kids worst shoes.

Love the quote from "ANONYMOUS LAMBDA SCHOOL STUDENT" on their landing page.

They really couldn't find anyone, even someone that you could lookup on LinkedIn to give a reasonable quote?

Co-founder here. I just liked the quote, and I don't know who left it. Can easily replace it with many others. Maybe that is more legitimate.

Relevant thread with comments from competitors and people who were there at the beginning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364

Can't bode well for Kaplan's other bootcamp, Metis for data science.

That space might still have less competition and therefore lower marketing costs.

I think Dev Bootcamps are awesome but would probably be better served as an online service without the live classroom setting. I would rather do acloud.guru and udemy.

I think a scathing review like this deserves a bit of explanation, regardless of topic. It's so easy to say "this thing BAD!" Why should we believe you?

What happened with your experience there?

Does this mean coding is starting to lose its sexiness?

Is the fad over?

No.^1

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Possibly, but there certainly is an over-abundance of bootcamp grads, and it's hard to choose among them.

I'm not a fan of this line of thinking. Not every bootcamp graduate is the same. There may be less variance between them from a purely technical standpoint but their backgrounds are far more diverse than what you'd get out college.

In other words, I don't think it's fair to say "there's an over-abundance of graduates from XYZ university. It's hard to choose among them." Regardless, stereotyping job candidates based on where they learned to code is poor practice. A good hiring manager ought to take the time to treat a candidate respectfully, but I know this behavior is rare. If your organization simply doesn't want to take on junior/entry-level programmers, it should be clear in the job post _and_ IMO, you shouldn't be open to receiving college-grad applications, either.

I actually don't hire junior/entry-level devs, but I do get flooded with their resumes even though I'm very explicit that I'm looking for experienced devs.

If I were considering entry-level hires, I wouldn't hire bootcamp grads if their only experience were at the bootcamp. If someone has been coding for less than 4 months, I'm going to spend most of my time teaching them how to code. That kind of employment provides more value to the employee than the employer. That might work for some big companies, but I can't do it in a small company.

> There may be less variance between them from a purely technical standpoint but their backgrounds are far more diverse than what you'd get out college.

I agree with you, but it doesn't make it any easier to hire them. I have no idea if I'd rather have an ex-ballerina or an ex-salesman as my employee. Neither of those careers give you training as a developer.

So if I'm just trying to decide if someone can do the job, seeing 20 people with 12-16 weeks of experience isn't helpful. And, as someone who has been writing code for 20 years and still has a lot to learn, it's insulting to suggest someone can become competent in that short a time. I know for a fact that they can't. It sometimes takes that long for an experienced dev to learn a new stack, and bootcamps are claiming to teach people a huge array of technologies.

> A good hiring manager ought to take the time to treat a candidate respectfully, but I know this behavior is rare.

I treat candidates with respect. I think (most) bootcamps should treat their customers with more respect and stop promising to teach them to code. Bootcamps are mostly "teaching to the test" in my experience -- they teach you how to get hired. That's valuable, but it's a totally different thing.

How about a math major from a top ivy? Physics grad student? Consultant? Chem-E engineer? Founder of a successful startup? Product managers? We had all those and more at my bootcamp cohort.

Look, you do what you want with your hiring. But don't just make the blanket claim that bootcamp grads aren't competent. People in my cohort were contributing right away. Looking at people few years above me, they're launching successful open source projects, becoming team leaders, giving talks at conferences, etc. If you're insulted by their success, maybe that's on you.

> Physics grad student? Consultant? Chem-E engineer? Founder of a successful startup? Product managers?

Those would be the same in that they don't have coding experience. Those people might be great hires, but they're not going to be great coders after a few short months trying to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and possibly a backend language.

I didn't say that they're stupid or anything. I mentioned that even a highly experienced coder wouldn't be competent with a new stack in that amount of time.

> People in my cohort were contributing right away.

Contributions aren't the same as good contributions. Bad contributions are much worse and more expensive than no contribution at all.

> launching successful open source projects, becoming team leaders, giving talks at conferences, etc.

Again, none of these things indicate competence necessarily, and they certainly don't indicate that someone is a great hire. Coding is not just knowing facts and writing code. It's having the experience to know how to structure things, what tradeoffs to make, etc.

> If you're insulted by their success, maybe that's on you.

I'm not insulted by their success, but I am concerned that bootcamps are taking lots of money from people and not delivering what they say they're delivering.

Edit: If you look at other comments in this thread, I think many bootcamp grads agree.

There's also going to be some survivorship bias here: you succeeded due to your bootcamp, but does that mean it works for everyone? Would you have been able to do it on your own? Are you smarter than the average person who would be interested in a bootcamp?

What basis do you have for asserting that their contributions are bad? That their open source projects and promotions to team leadership aren't signs of competence? Look, you can go on believing whatever you want to believe about bootcamp grads - no one's forcing you to hire them. But it is interesting to me that my cohort mates keep getting hired by everyone from small startups to Google, and they keep progressing in their careers. That tells me the bootcamps have done a good job of prepping them to begin their coding careers.

And wait, who said bootcamps is for everyone? My bootcamp never made that claim - they specifically said that it's hard, they're selective about who they let in, and that they kick out people who aren't cutting it. And who cares whether I (or anyone else) could have done it on my own? Could you have learned to code without taking comp sci classes? Probably, right? Does that mean your college was pointless/useless/fraudulent? Of course not.

Bootcamps showed that entry level developer jobs at most web startups don't require four years of studying computer science. It's a craft that many people can pick up without formal education in the subject matter. And if you ever want or need to learn about 'deeper' subjects? We can just pick up a book and learn it. This isn't rocket science.

> What basis do you have for asserting that their contributions are bad? That their open source projects and promotions to team leadership aren't signs of competence?

I didn't assert that. I asserted only that "contributions" are not evidence of competence. Competence isn't even always sufficient to make someone a good hire.

> That tells me the bootcamps have done a good job of prepping them to begin their coding careers.

I agree and said this in my original comment. I said that bootcamps are "teaching to the test" and prepping people to get past the hiring process.

> And who cares whether I (or anyone else) could have done it on my own?

The people who pay for a bootcamp and don't get their money's worth. It's not easy to part with $10k+ for most people. The top comment on this post is someone who felt that way.

> Could you have learned to code without taking comp sci classes? Probably, right?

Yes, and I did. I'm self-taught. But it didn't take me 16 weeks. I still look back on my skills a year ago and think, "Wow, I sucked a year ago." And I've been programming for 20 years.

> Bootcamps showed that entry level developer jobs at most web startups don't require four years of studying computer science.

They certainly don't necessarily show that. If you hire someone who needs months of training to be a productive, independent employee, that's not a success. That's evidence of a shortage of entry-level coders. I think that shortage is starting to wane.

> This isn't rocket science.

It's not rocket science, but besides being something that requires understanding the way computers work, it also requires learning and understand a staggering number of technologies. I regularly use CSS, and I can't even keep up with just CSS. There's too much to know.

There are also many layers to being a great programmer that people rarely get early on. Many people don't realize that readability/maintainability are the most important qualities of (most) code. Even if they do, they don't necessarily know how to achieve those things.

You seem to be suggesting that web programming is unique among professions in that experience is mostly unimportant and someone can figure it all out in a few months. Would you argue the same about plumbing, repairing air conditioners, accounting, or sales?

None of these things are rocket science, but they are things you can't just think your way through and understand how to be good at. It takes time and practice, like everything.

It's interesting that people who come on these threads to argue that bootcamps aren't effective, scams, etc. say, 16 weeks aren't enough to teach you everything about programming and that programming correctly requires constant practice and learn new things. Well, duh. That's true even if you spend four years majoring in CS, self-studied for a year, or got an associate degree in programming.

And yeah, that's because there's too much to know, especially in web dev where the frameworks and standards are changing all the time. And yeah, I think that a 12-16 intensive program backed by 3-6 months of pre-study (which was what my bootcamp was) is definitely sufficient to produce competent junior web devs. How do I know that? Because, again, I see people from my cohort and prior cohorts succeeding at their jobs.

You can keep saying, but! but! they need tons of support and hand-holding! They can't possibly know how to write clean code! (Because of course, new college grads are writing Code Clean-approved code from day one) They need months of training before they can fix a CSS issue!

C'mon. Yeah, if you hire a recent bootcamp grad and tell him to rewrite the whole backend, you're setting him up to fail. But if you hire him as a junior software engineer and give him tasks that are appropriate for that role? And what new hire doesn't require training? You think brand-new plumbers, air conditioning repairmen, accountants, salesmen etc. don't require training and mentorship?

Yeah, bootcamp isn't a magical potion that turns everyday joes into Linus Torvalds. But so what? It's an innovative program that's produced thousands of successful engineers in the Bay Area and beyond. The sauce isn't for everyone, but it's been a great way for many people to prep for a new career.

Edit: And what's even more amazing to me about the anti-bootcamp screeds is that this is an industry that celebrates self-learned programmers! Very often I see posts that say, bootcamps are scams, don't do it, you can't be competent coming out of it, just go study on your own for a while. Okay. So studying and making stuff on your own can make you a competent programmer, but intensively programming for 12-16 weeks with other people who share your passion while under expert guidance, is somehow not good enough? Never understood that one.

Shereef Bishay sold out his staff and sold out his mission and he's going to the do the same to his staff at Learner's Guild in Oakland! He sold it off to Kaplan for 80M and his staff (with equity) got nothing!!!

I interviewed for a role at Dev bootcamp in 2016 and got an odd feeling from the place and the woman who interviewed me. She took several months to get back to me after I followed up multiple times and wow am I soooo glad I didn't get that.

Hey, what you're saying about me is not true. Please don't do that. Seriously, it hurts.

I was at DBC around the time of the sale and you're full of shit. You checked out, drove tons of taleneted people away (Michael, Lachy, Tony, Jesse, Keith, Zee, Myles, to name a few), and then decided you were bored with bootcamps.

You were in it for yourself and it would have been better for everyone if you could have admitted it. Sounds like you're still believing your own stories.

Kudos to you for hiring and inspiring an amazing team. Too bad you didn't know what to do with it.

It's true. Those instructors were all amazing, but Kaplan started asking them for their college transcripts to determine their pay scale (lol), and they realized the fight has already been lost.

You abandoned DBC and set up a competitor. A lot of people got screwed over while you raked in a ton of cash.

You may not be responsible for the decline of DBC, but part of the reason it is crap now is because they expanded to like 30 locations. I'm almost certain that's the model you pitched to Kaplan because you sold right after the New York Campus opened.

Hey Shereef, alumnus here. Don't listen to this; I attended right after the Kaplan acquisition, and everyone was very transparently working to keep the mission and values you started with alive.

I'm sure you made out with money but that doesn't mean you sold out the mission. This person is just upset they didn't get a job at what was an awesome institution.

> He sold it off to Kaplan for 80M and his staff (with equity) got nothing!!!

Source?

Oh behave! Not getting a job at DBC does not mean you can now start spreading bad rumours about Shereef Bishay. The fact that you're using a throwaway account speaks volumes.

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