Good. The idea and intention behind bootcamps is a good one but the current implementation is suspiciously like university of phoenix.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I'd like to hear your thoughts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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