Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sivart13 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a big leap from "two large bootcamps have closed" to "the bootcamp industry is shutting down".

Like anything else, there was a big race to capture the market once Dev Bootcamp proved it could work, and now the market is correcting itself. No reason to think bootcamps are going to stop existing altogether.

View on HN

Yeah, in 2013, the top bootcamps were raking in like $15k per student, and they were churning out hundreds of students per year. Earning millions from teaching people JavaScript was an incredible proposition.

Exactly. There's good bootcamps and bad bootcamps, of course some will shut down. What other industry would cause this headline?

A grocery store down the street from me closed, I guess supermarkets are all dying!

If there were zero supermarkets ten years ago then this analogy might make sense.

I think there is more information that is let on here. I've talked with some folks at prominent bootcamps who are likely to be shutting their doors or hard pivoting soon if their revenue situation doesn't drastically improve.

Any idea what's causing the revenue problem? I assume it's getting harder to attract students willing to pay for a bootcamp? Is that because fewer people are looking to learn to code than a few years ago? Or because they're learning in different ways other than bootcamps? Or is everyone only wanting to go to the most prestigious bootcamps? Or something else?

This is speculation, but I assume there are fewer employers willing to hire bootcamp grads.

There are employers willing to hire them, but not at the amounts bootcamps suggest in their marketing. A bootcamper is at the point they can just start to learn, so if the industry standard for a role is $100k, a bootcamper would do well to earn $40k.

Perhaps there was a backlog of people who'd wanted to go to a bootcamp? Once that backlog is exhausted, it would be natural for applications to drop.

Yeah, it's like any industry affected by a goldrush. Badly run companies spring up to capitalise on the popularity boom, and when the situation inevitably corrects itself, those companies shut down or fail.

No different to how Pets.com or Webvan bit the dust when the dotcom boom started winding down.

The author really took the phrase "it takes 2 data points to create a trend" to heart there.

I'm also not a fan of the map on that page. They visually overweigh the closing bootcamps against open ones, when really there were 2 companies that closed many locations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com