Are Dev Bootcamps a scam? A Hacker's perspective | Hacker News Reader

Are Dev Bootcamps a scam? A Hacker's perspective

techendo.co

41 pointslouhong30 comments

Another hacker's perspective: no, they are not a scam.

Right now, demand is high enough in the bay area, that I believe these schools are a great value for someone who wants to start a career in iOS or web development. The tuition for Hacker Bootcamp is ~$12k, and they claim that 88% get job offers after graduating, with an average salary of $79k.

I recently met 2 people who graduated from hacker bootcamp. The first guy had a great attitude, seemed very curious, motivated, and interested in learning. He had multiple offers in the $80-90k range. He kept talking about what a great time he had interviewing with one company, which I'm pretty sure is the company he would eventually pick.

The other guy had a worse attitude, no offers yet and seemed like he almost felt entitled to a senior level job because he finished hacker bootcamp. Considering that I've been doing this stuff for 10 years now, it was hard to see someone with such high expectations for 6 months of effort not being met.

They won't guarantee you a job, but they are not a scam. This may be a little extreme, but I was reminded of this Vonnegut quote: “Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”

I was accepted into Fullstack Academy, a NYC bootcamp that is one of the schools this article is about. I'm currently a programming intern at Thinkful, an ed-tech startup in NY.

> The bootcamp model gives you an "intensive" course good enough so that you're able to build a shitty web app, and then they hopefully place you in a job needing a code monkey.

Everyone writes shitty code when they first start. Building shitty web apps is better than building no web apps, which is what most beginners do. Bootcamps force you to build stuff early, and building is the best way to learn. Your 5th web app won't be so shitty.

> Personally I'm against charging to teach others how to code. If people come to the profession with drive and passion, I believe it should be free. I wasn't charged when I first asked how to code.

This is an idealistic fantasy. Sure, learning to code for free is better than learning to code for $12k. But human labor is scarce and people don't work for free.

> I also think good programming is a journey, not something that can be consumed and digested in a compacted 12-week course.

Agree. I see bootcamps as the third step on a journey to becoming an entry-level developer. The 1st phase is with online resources like CodeAcademy and CodeSchool, the 2nd with mentor-led part-time courses like Thinkful, and the 3rd with bootcamps or apprenticeships. The 4th phase is all the learning you should be doing on the job ;-)

I think if a dev bootcamp is confident, they won't charge their students unless they land a job. (Added: a few people have noted that App Academy is a bootcamp that uses this model.)

I personally prefer the https://www.hackerschool.com/ model. It is not a "bootcamp". There is no structure, aside from what the students come up with themselves. It's a good place for both newbies and seasoned vets alike. It is free. They make their money by helping students get jobs at partner companies. If a student gets a job at a partner company, the company pays the fee, not the student.

Disclaimer: I attended Hacker School and got a job through them. It was a worthwhile sabbatical and "reboot" for my career (after being burnt out by my previous software job of six years).

"I think if a dev bootcamp is confident, they won't charge their students unless they land a job."

That sounds seriously un-optimal. Like it or not, some people will sign up and for whatever reason not get a job. They decide they hate programming. They have a mental health issue. They are not very smart. Parents get ill and they have to move across the country. And so on. So, to make the same money, the company will have to charge the successful students more money. Why should I, a smart student, pay more money and subsidize the untalented, unmotivated, or just unlucky student. It makes no sense why I would want that.

That's not how it works at any bootcamps. Reasons #1,2,3 you mentioned can be somewhat filtered in the application process.

I think if a dev bootcamp is confident, they won't charge their students unless they land a job.

You mean like App Academy? http://www.appacademy.io/#p-home

Edit: I attended App Academy as well

"I think if a dev bootcamp is confident, they won't charge their students unless they land a job."

App Academy in SF/NYC does this.

Note: I attended App Academy.

I wouldn't draw to many conclusions from what is happening now with 'dev bootcamps'.

They are a new segment of the education industry and many players are fighting for their share of a market that is under-exploited.

Strategies such as charging students only when they get a job should be regarded as short-term moves to establish the reputation of the provider.

What will probably happen as the 'dev bootcamp' sector matures is that it will become more like that of other education providers.

Providers will inevitably have a trade-off between maintaining the quality of developers that they produce and the amount of profit that they earn.

I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor, one of the schools that this article is about.

> I also think good programming is a journey, not something that can be consumed and digested in a compacted 12-week course.

I am in emphatic agreement -- we tell our students that the point of our school is to get to a spot where you can get paid to learn the rest, and we hold classes for alums to encourage ongoing education.

> Personally I'm against charging to teach others how to code.

Sounds like a fine personal philosophy. Our students faced a decision of self-instruction vs Hack Reactor, and they choose to pay the instructors at my school (who took pay cuts when we hired them away from Twitter, Adobe, Google, etc but are nonetheless pretty pricey). I summarized my perception of why in this quora post: http://www.quora.com/Programming-Bootcamps/Self-study-vs-Boo...

> I'd like to hear back from bootcamp graduates on their experiences both in the program and in the real world.

http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Hack-Reactor http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco

> ...good enough so that you're able to build a shitty web app, and then they hopefully place you in a job needing a code monkey...

I'm not a fan of the tone of this article, but it's also aggravating that the content is incorrect. Student projects include 3d space shooters (http://satellite-game.com/), bittorrent clients (https://github.com/rtjoseph11/nTorrent), music visualizers (http://arcanegl.jit.su/), a reddit-focused machine learning / dataviz mashup (http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/17/reddit-insight-interview-ha...), distributed computing platforms (http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/43651/), etc.

These Yelp reviews mean very little to be honest. What kind of an idiot would write a bad review when

1. Writing bad review of the code training you got basically admits to others that your skills as a programmer is poor.

2. You risk souring interpersonal relationship you might have built going to the program. When you say the code training you got at X is bad, you are actually telling potential employers that people who got training from X are also bad. Who writes in their grad school application that they got trained in Kaplan?

--- edited point 2

http://www.yelp.com/biz/kaplan-test-prep-and-admissions-san-...

Edit: As pointed out below, this isn't a comparable institution. However, I think we can empirically test the question "Will students offer bad yelp reviews to schools that are their primary credential?" The answer seems to be yes:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/bay-area-medical-academy-san-francis... http://www.yelp.com/biz/los-angeles-film-school-los-angeles http://www.yelp.com/biz/southern-california-health-institute...

That's a bad example.

When trying to get a job an interviewer could possibly see a bad review that a student left of your school and assume that means the student may not have the skills necessary for the job. Also, presumably at your school as students and instructors are interacting personal relationships are being developed (ie. networking) which could be beneficial in finding a job. If the student then gives a bad review of the school it could burn the bridges that they built while in the class.

On the other hand, when someone is grading a standardized test, they grade based on how you answered the test questions. They don't do an internet search to see what kind of preparation you had for the test. It's different than a job interview because a test is judging what skills and knowledge you are demonstrating at that point in time, whereas a job interview is judging both where you are at now and what you will be able to do in the future. Also, hopefully in a test prep class there is no direct advantage to be gained by networking as that would defeat the purpose of the test.

Yeah, good point -- my response was pretty vapid. trololo

I don't think Kaplan is relevant from a credentials or networking standpoint. (My understanding is that it should help you get into a school based on how your score improves on a test rather than offering direct social signaling.)

Is this pithy URL meant as a rebuttal to your parent's point? I assure you, it isn't.

Kaplan and devbootcamps might share some similarities, but they are qualitatively different when it comes to their value propositions for students and how that value is derived.

Kaplan is meant to boost scores on an objective test and that is where the value is. They either succeed or they fail for each student. There is no consideration of Kaplan by the institutions proctoring these tests or the institutions accepting these scores as a metric. The boost to test scores is not tied to the social reputation of Kaplan and so they are free to speak out against Kaplan if they are dissatisfied and that dissatisfaction, rather than some sort of conception of social good-doing in warning others, may even be the incentive that spurs them to do so.

Devbootcamps are meant for students to be a quick way to gain entry into a field suffering for want of code monkeys. The value here is in the job placement, not in the education or boosting of knowledge. The ability for students to be placed in jobs is actually largely a function of the social standing and reputation of the devbootcamp and not in the merits of the individual's education attained there. So all parties involved: founders, instructors, and students as well as the "in" at the companies that hire these newly-minted code monkeys have the same incentive at keeping up the reputation of the school.

The "in" at the hiring companies may quietly pivot away from using devbootcamps as a source for employment if dissatisfied with the code monkeys attained, but will never speak publicly about their missteps in sourcing code monkeys from them. They have no incentive to and every incentive (personal reputation in career, nothing to gain by burning bridges with the school and students, etc.)

Students, even if they feel they didn't learn much or were not truly prepared for employment, won't voice this because the ongoing value of the sunk cost of their time and money relies upon a favorable impression of the devbootcamp and its students.

The founders and the instructors reasons for not speaking out against what they are doing is clear and I won't elaborate on it.

Your argument on Quora seems to be "if I make up largely-irrelevant categories, and then make up numbers, our program looks good". I'm not sure how that's supposed to be convincing.

"self-instruction period" - this seems significantly less important than total time-sink, which I'd guess doesn't run in your favor at all.

"the percentage that end up writing code for a living" - I honestly don't think I've ever seen a selection bias this big. You mean people who shell out 5 figures for education are more interested than people who dabble for a couple of hours at no cost?

"average starting salary" - These are much more strongly tied to negotiating ability, etc. than programming ability, although I suppose it could be considered relevant (assuming that there's still a disparity after accounting for things like other experience, other skills, etc.).

I'd honestly be interested in some actual measure of programming ability. These are very hard to come by, but it seems to me that you're in a pretty good position to find a reasonable method.

I'd like to see Bootcamps with transparency over graduates and contrasted against college or tradeskill schools:

1. How many students land jobs in the tech industry or go onto other things (personal projects, adding skillsets to their employ, etc). What's the breakdown of success?

2. How much they were offered? How much in a year?

3. Follows up to the length and stability of their employment. Did you keep working for longer then 3 months, 6 months?

4. Did you have pre-experience in tech?

---

I'd like to see these things, because while the programs generally provide some eye opening experience. They miss the mark at getting people a job. Business are reluctant to hire these unexperienced students (not to confuse experience with training here, I mean work experience).

They fail in providing a big picture to potential students, it all feels partly snake oil without some necessary objectivity.

In short, probably not.

The students learns valuable lessons in exchange for money. Probably quicker than they would on their own.

It's just speculation on my part, but I'll imagine having someone point you in the right direction on almost every turn will speed the learning up a lot, and provide good value for the student.

Personally I'm against charging to teach others how to code.

You want someone to teach you to code, with which you could earn $100k/yr for 30+ more years, and you want them to volunteer their time to do that for you? I bet you do.

How many hours per week and for how long will it take someone to teach you "how to code"? Let's call it 100 hours just b/c we need to have some sort of cap. We'll use me as the example - I have a full time gig already (where I work 50-60 hour weeks), two young kids, and a wife - so my time is limited. But hey - 100 hours... Okay - let's do it.

The key question is, "Do I have time to 'train' two people at the same time, or can I only train one?" Probably one person - I don't have a training room set up FFS. So now we have a bottleneck.

"But, Scott, I'm talking about learning on the job - having one of your co-workers train you." Perfect - so you're working in such a great environment that your co-worker is (a) an expert coder, (b) an expert trainer, and (c) your company lets you spend 100+ hours together (200 man hours) of paid time for him to train you? Lucky you - that puts you in the 0.001%.

However, if the tables were turned (you were the expert employee who is teaching the youngster), wouldn't you be getting paid to train? Maybe you would donate your next 2 1/2 weeks just so you could train this young person?

Absurd statement.

Hi, author here. Sure. I think learning for free and helping others is really popular among the hacking community. That's how I and a lot of other people learned to program.

I certainly don't believe that bootcamps are a scam, I think that the _right_ bootcamp can provide a beginner with the foundation needed to succeed as an engineer-in-training. The way I see it, "being an engineer" is a life-long journey.

When you're starting to code the first few 100 hours tend to be the most difficult ones (since so much is new). This is where the support you get from a bootcamp is really helpful.

Also, "becoming an engineer" aside, I think that learning to code has many side benefits. One of them being that it helps clarify the way you think. In a recent blog post, Hilary Mason (from Bit.ly) articulated this very well:

"That you can apparently complete a three month Ruby bootcamp and get a job today is an artifact of a bizarre employment market, and likely unsustainable. But by dedicating three months to learning to think in a logical framework, you’ll also gain an ability that will open opportunities for you for the rest of your life." http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/learn-to-code-learn-to-think...

Full disclaiment: I'm the Marketing Engineer at http://www.thinkful.com (an online school that teaches beginners to code through mentorship and projects) and I was a Thinkful student before joining the team fulltime. Also, I was part of the last batch at https://www.hackerschool.com/ - an excelent program that could be compared to a bootcamp given it's duration and how intensive it is.

> In the end, while some graduates may have potential, I'd be willing to bet the majority are unemployable if it weren't for such a talent drought.

A couple of honest questions about this statement:

1. Is there really a talent drought, or is there an overabundance of companies looking for employees they don't need? I see a lot of companies seeking "rockstar" engineers with CS degrees and an insane level of expertise across the entire stack, but many of them are operating relatively straightforward CRUD applications at limited to modest scale.

2. If companies are hiring less-than-capable developers because of this perceived "talent drought", which the OP seems to be suggesting, what exactly are these developers doing all day? "Fake it until you make it" has very real limits. I don't care how intense a bootcamp is. If a company truly needs developers with a certain level of expertise, a rookie developer's lack of real-world experience is quickly going to become apparent. So if bootcamp graduates are being tolerated, it would suggest that, at least in some cases, companies can live with less experience and competence than they say they need.

This Dev Bootcamp phenomenon negatively affects Ruby and Ruby on Rails community disproportionately more than any other. I think pretty much all these training courses sell Ruby on Rails as the goto platform to learn. If this trend continues, Rails will be where PHP is now (no offence to smart people doing PHP, but you know what I mean).

Ruby/Ruby on Rails community isn't new to dealing with other people bad mouthing them. Remember Zed Shaw declaring "Rails Is A Ghetto" (http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto) in 2007? Despite many haters, Rails penetrated through Java/.NET duopoly, and it has gained a lot of respect since then. All the bad mouthing didn't matter back then. Rails had so many talented people. Really smart people were coming from Java and .NET world into Rails and some of them were very passionate about making the technology better. This trends is on a notable decline now.

There is an interesting parallel to what is happening in the US today with these dev bootcamps, to the surge in IT workers in countries like India and Pakistan this last decade.

In these countries, an incredible demand for developers arose very fast because of the "new" possibility of offshore outsourcing.

You had radio mechanics, electricians, admin workers flocking to IT. It paid well and there was a huge shortage of talent.

Read an HTML book and take a course, and you're a junior developer. 12 months later, granted you hadn't messed up too much, presto! You are now a senior developer.

The party didn't last however, and now, Pakistan and India are high risk countries to outsource to, main reason being this dilution of the talent pool (while you of course can find incredibly talented developers in these countries, it is exceedingly hard).

That probably won't happen to the same degree in the US, but the jobs of hiring managers and young entrepreneurs (who are often inexperienced with qualifying candidates) are certainly not getting easier.

I'm a recent grad of General Assembly's program, had a good experience, and would definitely recommend a bootcamp for some other people looking to learn quickly.

I totally understand where you are coming from. I really respect the open and helpful culture of the developer community and want to give back without expecting any money. I had tried to learn on my own for awhile but was never able to dedicate the time needed to get to the next level. The course gave me that opportunity and set me up to be able to continue to learn. That said I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, just like I wouldn't recommend college for everyone.

I recently met a graduate from dev bootcamp in Chicago. I had an opportunity to talk about various coding subjects. Was he a junior? Yes. However, he had a grasp of good design patterns, best practices and most importantly he had a desire to learn - I mean this guy was a sponge.

I realize that I have a sample set of one, but based upon my interactions with him, I would say that this isn't a scam. It appears to give aspiring developers a very solid foundation to base a career on and dismisses them with realistic expectations.

I also don't see the fault in someone offering a course and charging for it. If people have the money and are willing to spend it on this, then I think there is value in what they offer. I have someone that I mentor, but I feel like these programs would definitely speed up the learning process. I wish he could afford a program like these, he would surely benefit from the breadth of knowledge offered.

I've had an exact opposite experience. The couple of people I've interviewed who had graduated from a dev bootcamp of some sorts (I don't remember exactly which one any more) had really poor understanding of software engineering principles and only seemed to really know how to use Ruby on Rails for building relatively simple web applications under heavy supervision.

Maybe the program they went to was a poor one, or they didn't have programming talent, but there's no way we could've hired those folks to do any work for us.

Obviously my sample size is really small as well.

It's encouraging to read comments on this thread mentioning positive experiences though. I think when well run by competent mentors/teachers, these things are very useful for all concerned.

Your sample size of one is bigger than the guy who wrote this article, who admits to not talking to any schools or graduates. Poorly researched speculation.

Is your impression of the content included in these developer camps based on personal experience? interviewing graduates? Or does this article only represent what you think that these camps are all about?

I graduated from Dev Bootcamp in SF this summer. I think the author of this article shares the sentiment of a lot of working or university-educated programmers who see it from the outside. But, the article is quite misinformed and, to be clear, lacks any factual claims to how well or poorly bootcamp graduates are performing in the real world.

Yes, there are wide claims from these bootcamps about $80k+ jobs waiting for people _if only they take this course_! Naturally, that's great for business, and turns out to be quite true judging from talking to alumni and people graduating from my own cohort. The problem with that, which Shereef (the founder of Dev Bootcamp) tries to get across to the students, is that there is a risk for students to become spectators, to feel like they can just get through the 9 weeks and be entitled to a well-paying job.

A lot of the process is getting you to combat that attitude and turn you into a world-class learner. That's also helped by a selective interview process, and they seem to be doing a good job at getting the most enthusiastic students aboard. What the teachers strive for at DBC is to create an ideal learning environment. It's hands-on and project-based rather than lecture-based, and, to reiterate the point, what one learns there more than anything is how to learn. We also have a whole lot of fun.

It's not for everyone, of course, but for people in certain situations it can be great. My goal was not necessarily to become a web developer, but to break into the software engineering field without a relevant degree or portfolio is a tall order, and I was able to make several projects at DBC that filled up the latter. Not masterpieces by any means, but not "shitty websites" as the author of the article purports. My team's final project used a lot more technologies than just Rails and Javascript (we used Solr, Redis, and several APIs for various tasks).

Two months now after I've graduated, I'm not only working, but using Java, Python, AWS, Linux, and more technologies day-to-day. We didn't use any of those at DBC but I've been able to pick them up quite quickly in part because of learning strategies we developed there. I am probably an outlier in that regard though, as it seems most people getting hired out of DBC are getting jobs doing Rails or front-end work. But not everyone will land a programming job, and some don't wish to.

The best piece of advice I can give to someone looking in to a bootcamp is this: Don't do it if you just want a job and are excited by the salary prospects and opportunites. Do it because you can't help yourself from being a programmer, solving problems relentlessly is something you love, and you want a way to collaboratively kickstart your learning in a great environment.

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