I do believe the bootcamp certificate crowd will have a harder time than this though. I'm seeing way more "degree required" postings than I did 5 years ago.
This is standard in the tech industry. The bulk of college hiring happens August-October for start dates in May-August or even later. And the local market is always going to be difficult in non tech hubs. Relocation is almost always a requirement for the better jobs.
The basic setup over 3 months:
1. Crash course in basic dev tooling setup (git etc.)
2. Crash course in data structures and algorithms (e.g. leetcode)
3. Crash course in setting up a production environment
4. Group interview prep sessions post-graduation
According to him this worked because:
1. There was very little talent on the market at all
2. Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads
3. There was a backlog of otherwise highly competent people trying to break into tech that just needed guidance on how to get in
None of these things are true anymore and he has sinced closed his bootcamp since it began to felt exploitative.
This sounds like self-serving BS to me, or if it’s at all real, it’s indicative of employers not understanding what’s important in hiring for software development.
Even if someone takes longer to ramp up, the depth of knowledge is much more important in the medium to long term. Perhaps if the work being done is just churning out boilerplate, the boot camp grad might have a brief edge, but that’s exactly the kind of thing CS grads can automate out of existence.
But anyway, the key phrase in your comment is “according to him”. It sounds like he came up with a maximally rosy-eyed rationale for his failure, but the reality was probably a lot simpler: he just wasn’t creating any value.
Sounds like you’ve bought into your friend’s BS. Perhaps he believed it too. But I’m pointing out that it’s much more likely that the bootcamp wasn’t producing quality developers, and became unsustainable once the market became a bit more discriminating.
Having met many of these grads, and lived through that phase of hiring, I think it's a lot less ridiculous if you imagine the early bootcamp grads from my friends program as someone who's e.g. a senior mechanical engineer with a degree from good university.
These people have strong technical and soft skills and were unusual at the time in that they were already productive in stacks that companies were using.
By 2015, you couldn't fill a bootcamp with these kinds of people, so graduate quality is dropping at the same time that universities up their game and start including classes that teach some basic SWE skills.
I don't think we actually disagree that the value-add was never that great as the program mostly only helpful to people who already had most of the skills necessary to be a good engineer.
I do agree about the under-qualified part though. We do some basic technical pre-screening that has candidates spend maybe 15 minutes answering 2 fizzbuzz-style questions just to save everyone time and there's a solid minority of candidates that can't do a question they didn't rehearse in leetcode training.
It’s going to make them look rosy for the next few Qs while everyone else haemorrhages cash. Long term, not so much, but the long term isn’t important to the market.