U.S. coding school Galvanize to lay off 11 percent of workforce
reuters.com
reuters.com
I would guess low unemployment would cause attendance to go down for people grasping at a chance for a tech job?
I don't have any connection to Galvanize now so I don't feel the need to defend or promote bootcamps, but I do feel like I have some knowledge on the situation. When I was instructing I was constantly worried about there being enough jobs for my students. This was also when the startup market was "hotter" than it is now. The thing that I came to realize looking back is that there is actually still a huge amount of steady demand for software engineers.
It isn't necessarily startups though. I have definitely heard from startups that they feel like they are inundated with bootcamp grads. I think part of the reason is because working at a cool startup is part of the picture that is painted to perspective students.
The less exciting (to the graduates) opportunity is working with big companies that are replacing their previous outsourced staff with internal junior engineers. They also didn't want to hire one or two grads, they were interested in hiring five to ten.
To me at least it seems like larger companies are trying to adjust their staffing to accommodate a more fluid staff that comes and goes rather than the longer term employees of previous generations. Which includes always having a broad opportunity for new employees, which dovetails into the bootcamps constantly producing graduates.
Unfortunately the narrative of "you too could be writing ugly line-of-business applications for $40k/year" is not an exciting sell, as you've said, to people who have watched a few episodes of Silicon Valley. So there's an expectation mismatch. We want to point at the Bureau of Labor Statistics about openings in the software industry and think that they're about changing the world with node.js and AWS lambda, because that's a more promising vision of tomorrow that doesn't involve encountering Windows Server 2005 in the course of your daily work.
While you're unlikely to catch me extolling the virtues of cool-guy startups, they do tend to have the benefit that they "get" developers and bias towards facilitating the work rather than the endless bullshit you tend to get sucked into in the bigger places.
Having early access to motivated and talented programmers that may have a good idea for a disruptive product or technology seems like a potential advantage for a venture fund.
Particularly if those seeking funding are also seeking training and career advice.
I almost went there but chose not to.
I worked at a company in Denver that hired at least 5 people straight out of gSchool, and I was one of the employees on the team who was given the task of onboarding and mentoring the gSchool graduates and helping them when they got stuck (which was pretty much constantly).
Each one of the graduates had at least a basic, fundamental understanding of programming with Ruby on Rails and Javascript, but they were all very much junior-level. They were all deeply brainwashed in TDD and Agile dogma, but would often become paralyzed when encountering real world problems.
Most of them had sub-par developer instincts (as was expected), and all of them required about a year-long ramp-up and a lot of on-the-job mentoring and training before they were really pulling their weight.
When you look at the quality of the code that was being created and the sheer amount of manpower and money being thrown at mentoring all of the junior level code school graduates, I would rather have had a single senior level developer than 4 juniors combined.
But that's not how the pay worked out. A senior dev doing the same amount of work as 4 juniors was only making like $120K, and I happen to know that every one of the code school students was hired on for at least $65K a year (if not more).
The worst part? After about a year, half of them had leveraged their new year's worth of real, on-the-job experience into job offers from other companies, where they were presumably hired for even more.
My personal opinion is that the company I worked for kind of got shafted a little bit by their enthusiasm and optimism with the idea of bringing on so many junior level developers straight out of code camp. Especially after we spent so much time and money mentoring them, only to have them leave for better jobs elsewhere.
I have a strong suspicion that many other companies have suffered from similar experiences with code school graduates and were left with bitter taste in their mouths.
If so, that would certainly explain why so many code schools are starting to encounter difficulties and are having to downsize or close. Companies are starting to catch on to the fact that they are still going to have to dump a good year of mentoring and training into each one of these "graduates" before they are earning their keep.
TL;DR: The gSchool graduates that I had personal experience with seemed to make out like bandits. That was before the market cooled down, though.