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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't place like these be growing instead of closing down? What did they get wrong? The demand for qualified developers isn't slowing afaik.

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1. People who can effectively teach others to program well enough to secure professional employment may have better options than teaching open-enrollment entry-level programming classes.

2. Because of that, and for any of a number of other reasons, we may generally be overestimating how effectively these kinds of schools are educating people.

3. It's an open secret that hiring in the technology industry isn't based on aptitude, but rather on credentials and hazing rituals. Something like 3 decades of cultural development have trained developers that the most important risk they face in hiring is accepting someone underqualified, rather than passing on someone who is in fact qualified.

Given all these problems, it's not surprising that a school with a model of charging a 4-5 figure tuition in exchange for attempting to increase the likelihood of graduates employment would fail.

Training junior developers is something I enjoy & think I'm good at.

I actually looked at working for a boot camp once. To do so would have required more than a half pay cut. If I'm going to do that it will be as an underserved public sector educator, not a for profit company.

Out of curiosity, how much were they paying?

The pitch was "up to 80k" which I assumed was a ridiculous attempt to start a negotiation, but they really didn't move off of that number.

This was in Chicago.

If they paid 160k, they might get the type of teacher who could deliver the goods, and who would love their job. There would be competition for these jobs because people could afford to take them.

Regarding #1, an Iron Yard competitor offered a six-month contract for $45,000, 1099, here in Boston (with "an option" to re-up, at the same rate). It would not exactly be difficult to beat that number by doing almost anything else.

Another was talking about $80K/year...in freaking Ohio.

I would love to teach more than I do, and I'm starting to work on some web courses because I've learned from corporate training that I'm good at it, but the money doesn't make sense at all.

> $80K/year...in freaking Ohio

I don't get this sentence, is this good or bad? I grew up in Ohio and for the majority of people I know there, they would be absolutely thrilled at that salary. The cost of living is nowhere near SF levels.

The "freaking Ohio" part, yeah I can understand that for a lot of parts of Ohio, but it's highly dependent on where in the state you're talking about.

80k is great in Ohio - I think that's the implication. 80k goes a long way when rent is 800/month.

Agree that it's great, but the feeling I got from the OP was along the lines of "They only offered 80k, and on top of that it was in Ohio"

I don't live in SF, I live in Boston. But I don't know what could make me move to Cleveland, that's all.

would it be more interesting if phrased as a form of sabbatical rather than a full teaching career?

I can make more contracting though, while working about half the hours.

Maybe I'd consider it if I owned the company. Other than that...eh.

> Something like 3 decades of cultural development have trained developers that the most important risk they face in hiring is accepting someone underqualified, rather than passing on someone who is in fact qualified.

I blame the easy investment cash that is often given based on the surface impression your company can make than on its efficiency and GAAP numbers. This promotes overhiring and reduces the role of a single developer to a point where the professional duties take a vanishingly small amount of time, so the efficiency (and hence aptitude or experience) is no longer an asset, while the ability to entertain the earlier hires becomes one of the most important requirements.

Point 3 is overly pessimistic, but firing is a lot more difficult than not-hiring, so there's good reason to be careful.

I know the US is not the world but since we are discussing Iron Yard, it's worth pointing out that the private sector in the US is almost exclusively at-will employment.

Wrongful termination suits are something that all large companies have lots of scar tissue around though

Companies that size should have well-documented processes to follow to minimize liability around that. The much larger problem I've seen is that managers - since ground-level engineering managers tend to overwhelmingly be young and first-time-managers since the industry is dominated by youth overall - are green, don't know what they don't know about firing, and wait to bring in HR until they've already made up their mind, at which point they find out about the six month official process they should've started following six months ago. Or are just afraid of having the conversation, period.

New manager training is an even bigger hole in most orgs than on-the-job entry-level engineer training.

Small companies usually have a lot more leeway here, I've been the replacement employee for a guy who only lasted a month and a half at a startup before.

After getting past my initial uneasiness around dealing with poor performers (defining poor performer as "someone the rest of the team feels is a net negative and can't trust with important features"), I'm less afraid of a not-good-enough hire (effort and conscientiousness in looking for the right solution is the most important thing I look for there), and withhold my "definitely not" calls for people I think would be truly toxic to the team's rhythm.

Well that's because they have poor hr its not hard to fire a genuine NCI (non culpable incompetence) employee.

This is probably true. It's just been my experience that it is extremely hard to get managers to evaluate performance and reliably go through the long drawn out process of letting people know they are under performing, and then removing them.

That's not the whole explanation, IMO. If you had the same distribution of accepted candidates with both the loose and strict policies, I'd still expect interviewers to use the strict one.

Why? If their hire doesn't work out, they've got a much better story - "Our hiring processes are really strict and everyone got on board with it, it must've been something else that went wrong". And when the hire does work, people at the company get to self-congratulate about how "elite" they are.

The costs of extraneous interviewing and leaving positions unfilled is borne more by the company, while the costs of making a bad hire is borne more by the hiring manager, so the hiring manager makes choices that offload costs more onto the company. Principle-Agent problem.

"qualified developers" is probably the key word there. These bootcamps are all trying to train out a pretty specific set of basic proficiencies. That's not to say the training can't be useful, it's just to say that they all seem to be going for the same basic web development skills, and probably the majority of companies looking to employ developers and looking for more than that, or something entirely different.

Could also just be saturation in general. This is not the first closing announcement in recent weeks.

I think this comment nails it to be honest, I am a bootcamp grad and a lot of the time I do feel that most junior web devs are pushed into the cult of Javascript very early, React is pushed as if gospel and whilst much "emphasis" (IMO only in spoken ways) is placed on being a full-stack, I feel that there is next to no real education provided on basic back end/operations skills. So most of the grads come out as front-enders with front end skills and very little understanding of how front end decisions impact (and help in many cases) the back end and as a result, the entire stack. It makes me kinda sad tbh, because I find the back end tasks super engaging and they really fill out the gaps in your knowledge, especially as a Junior.

Is there any emphasis on teaching data structures or algorithms, or is it really just front end web?

I don't know where the parent graduated from, but as mentioned above, I'm a DBC grad from 2014 and we were mostly taught Rails, which is entirely a backend framework. There was a decent amount of data structure work, a little bit of algorithm work, and very little ops. Students quickly and shallowly learned JS frameworks for their final projects. After 2.5 years employed, I've found that the relative lack of algo work didn't matter in the least - I'm a web dev, at least right now, and I'm not implementing algorithms. Ops/infrastructure/deployment is the area where I was most lacking, and where I've grown the most, but I don't really know where you would fit it into the curriculum, or even if it would be valuable, given how many different permutations of infrastructure you can encounter, even working in the exact same coding stack.

My hunch is location, iron yard had a bunch of locations in 3rd and 4th tier markets where there just aren't that many programming jobs. Even in Austin which is probably one of the better markets they had, entry level coding jobs are somewhat scarce compared to demand for them

This is definitely part of it. They had a location in Orlando. The only companies here large enough to be able to train entry level coders are the exact same companies who wouldn't hire a junior without an accredited degree in a relevant field - basically large military contractors.

The consultancy I used to work for passed on quite a few Iron Yard candidates because we were too small to have a place for them.

I think they were even based out of a 4th tier market in Greenville, SC.

They were. They've done a lot for and been very active in the tech scene around town, so I have no idea how successful/unsuccessful their other campuses have been.

Houston: Lot of .NET here (oil and healthcare), but I believe IY here was teaching Ruby and React.

There is no demand for qualified developers, only a demand for cheap, skilled labor. If there were a demand, these coding schools would not have such a devil of a time getting decent jobs for their grads.(and they do- just talk to some honest, recent grads-- it will be tough to find honest ones who are unemployed/underemployed on a public forum, if you know what I mean.) Why, if there is such a great demand, isn't the burden to educate on the employer who needs the labor? It used to be, back before we made students pay for several degrees with no employment in sight. Now, it is all the fault of the individual. The corporations are just looking for honest work here, right? ;) We all just got used to being blamed if we could not fully fund faux-careers for our LinkedIn profiles a decade before any real employment emerged for us. If these bootcamps are actually filling such a great need in the industry, why should the students pay? I get why people pay for Harvard: the connections!! (but...is even Harvard free now if you can't pay?- so there's even that too, for Harvard!) Those law students get wined and dined for free and multiple offers from great jobs without even asking, much less "applying". This is NOT the case with these bootcamps, no matter what they claim. They are all struggling to get these junior devs decent work. Their meager "connections" got used up with their first crop of students, and now the ladders have been pulled up after them. Sure, there are a very very few exceptions, as always. If a school aims to teach, they should be able to keep enrollment low, and they should be able to teach anyone from zero with an interest serious enough that they drop out of society to do it for several months of their life. Because employers would pay big money for that service, just like they do for Harvard grads. BUT THEY DON'T. Instead, they seek those who could already do it without their help, and they seek payment from them too, thereby getting the benefit of looking like they "helped" an actual ivy league grad get a job, when it was more that that grad helped them look good. I wrote a more detailed response to A CIRR.org representative on the shorter of the threads about Dev Bootcamp's recent closing, if you are interested in a deeper analysis on what these bootcamps "did wrong", or are doing wrong. Here is the link to my response to "ewisesg" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14773016

I imagine that the simplest explanation is that costs end up killing these programs.

Good educators cost a decent amount of money, so if you have a high quality bar you're looking at a lot of (mostly fixed) costs. Add building rent + admin costs.

Public schooling costs $10k/pupil on average, and I imagine most of these code schools have a slightly higher bar.

That sums it up pretty well. I took a pay-cut to work at TIY. I did it for reasons other than money, obviously. But it's hard to find senior engineers who:

1. Are willing to put their career on hold to teach

2. Are capable of communicating in that capacity

3. Can deal with the intensity of a code-bootcamp for very long

> The demand for qualified developers isn't slowing afaik.

Does anyone in industry really count a 6-month course, no matter how intensive, as 'qualified'? It's hard enough breaking into your first job after a 3-4 year degree, most places still want more experience for their 'graduate' positions. I can't imagine it'd be easier for someone changing tracks mid-career with only a few months' coding experience.

There are plenty of easy position throug. The other industry problem is that we like to pretend that every position is super difficult and requires genius. And once we attract someone on that proposition, genius developer finds himself doing repetitive work and moving buttons there and back - all the while less experienced junior with three months js learning would be happy, challenged and perfectly suitable.

I've certainly seen this in past jobs. They advertise for smart, creative people and that's what they get. The job is to maintain some awful 5-year-old web app, changing fonts and twiddling fields around to please an internal customer.

I read a great quote once to the effect that a scalpel isn't better than a bread knife, it's just a different knife, for a different job. Don't hire a scalpel to cut bread.

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