Kaplan to Buy Software-Development School Dev Bootcamp
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
It’s great to see that the HN community is not surprised by this acquisition. As a witness of this space for the past 2-3 years, I am excited for the future of the education space. I can say with confidence that some of the top programs (like Dev Bootcamp - http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-five-best-coding-bootcamps) have been training and placing great talent (up to ~90-95% of graduates).
Also, we have also have had a number of meetings regarding acquisition, mergers, and investment; however, I never imagined an acquisition of this size would happen so quickly. Congrats to Dev Bootcamp and their team (especially one of the cofounders, Dave Hoover, who has been so helpful for so many people since the start).
That aside I like the idea here. I think 1-4 months is a greta period of time. You can maintain a great pace that way. Personally, I do better in sprints. My University years were really 5-6 2 week sprints a year spread out between long periods of procrastination (and fun). The useful work I did outside of sprints doesn't amount to much.
The idea of paying your tuition (ideally, lower than £12k), working hard for 9 weeks and expecting to meet some legitimately valuable goals at the end of it is appealing to me.
Obviously I'm getting speculative, but I can imagine something like this being a fixture of 'lifelong education. Something you can do dozens of times in a lifetime.
Zero-to-junior developer is obviously in the current market, can sustain that high tuition. But, I would like to see tuition go down to levels that can make it available for other markets.
I can imagine a lot of useful 9-week sprint courses that could be very effective, if the quality was high enough. Writing. Data mining. Accounting.
The real hard work and long hours do happen while on site though.
Where I work we get a lot of these applicants but their applications are so generic and skill sets so shallow that we've never seriously considered hiring one -- and about half our team is completely self taught, so I don't think we are bias against non-degree holders.
I'm a little worried that a crash course in particular development stacks are going to put people with some literacy in a language but no professional judgment (takes years to develop) in positions in which they can do damage. Software is socially pervasive now so mistakes from underdeveloped judgment can have great effect.
We've been working with companies to provide technical mentorship and we've found that generally those who went through some of the top bootcamps actually are more "successful" at being careful with what they are doing since many of them come from other positions in the industry (former PMs, QAs, etc) and are well aware of the impact that they are making.
I'd still feel better if we had formal mentors in the office place and projects suited to novices. Even with industry experience in some other occupation (former PM, QA, BA, etc.), it takes years to learn software development properly. Learning a language or stack just gives you an entry point.
Formal mentoring should be the norm again PERIOD. Even a new senior level developer coming to a new organization should be paired with a developer familiar with that organization. Although it seems like overhead organizations would only be helped by it.
My comment was not assigning fault to boot camp grads. People looking for a job can't be blamed for accepting a job offered. It's been 20+ years since I was broke and trying to break into the field. I haven't forgotten what it feels like.
Over the last 15 years, business cultural norms changed with regard to mentoring at the same time that the social importance of software has gone up. I think we need a little caution because safety nets aren't there anymore.
Also wondering if the bootcamps sorted out their government issues.
As an industry, we still have a long way to go but with news like this, we will become more and more trustable in the public's eyes.
Like the article says - it's one thing to educate a few hundred people - can we do it at scale? Can we educate hundreds of thousands of students and get all of them jobs?
We need to work together as an industry and really try to figure out what are the next best steps to move forwards.
We need to diversify the technologies that we teach, curriculum, class sizes... Above all, we need to establish an amazing brand in the public eyes. That's where transparent, third-party review sites like http://www.switchup.org can really help.
Started by students, Switch is focused on producing the most cutting edge content that will help transform public perception of this industry and give it credibility.
We need alumni to speak out about their experiences. Talk about the pros and cons. We need prospective students to voice their concerns. We need schools to be transparent. We need standardized definitions of hiring rates...
I could go on and on... If we all work together, this industry will grow and help boost our economy. Are you ready to make the Switch? :) Shoot me a message at jonathan@switchup.org, http://www.switchup.org
My feedback in every case is that only listing a program's price but not its hiring statistics makes it impossible for potential students to properly evaluate the programs. At a bare minimum, each profile should include both links to their yelp reviews and their self-reported hiring rates (and how they were calculated). Self-reported stats may not seem very useful, but lying about them can get a school into legal troubles very quickly.
Thanks for the feedback - would you be interested in doing a blog post or leaving a review on our site?
"We offer a $500 scholarship if you're female, a veteran of the U.S. Military, or from an ethnic minority group underrepresented in the software engineering field (African American, Chicano/Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander)."
Isn't charging someone more because of their race or sex is illegal? That's what a "scholarship" for only certain groups amounts to.
edit: Your victory will insure that underrepresented groups and veterans get the same treatment as everyone else, and depending on the jurisdiction, it could get you $2500 or more if you were discriminated against. Some people go from club to club trying to find 'ladies' nights' and suing. They always win.
Or you could not do that, and account for it by the fact that being an underrepresented group or a veteran isn't a net benefit in society.
I am the co-founder of a similar program, Launch Academy (http://www.launchacademy.com) in Boston. We're a more intimate program than Dev Bootcamp but share some of their early core principals towards educational diversification.
I first met Shereef Bishay in early 2012 after he wisely took an MVP approach to what is now known as Dev Bootcamp via his cousin and a small group of other aspiring developers based on a 'bet' that he couldn't teach them to code in 10-weeks. Not only did Shereef prove that small group wrong (winning the bet) but he's gone on to pioneer an industry that has benefited thousands of people to change their lives for the better through immersive education in software development.
These programs are not for everyone however. Are you ready for a bootcamp? I've written a bit about this here http://qr.ae/sVVQs
But how did the first mover in this space, Dev Bootcamp, lose out to App Academy in the prestige stakes? Was it expelling people without giving them a full refund? Counting people who were working for them and for themselves as working? Something else>
Dev Bootcamp initially was a 10 week program for 20 students, then that was upped to ~40 students, and finally to 54. So in the first year, ~110-120 students were educated. Then, in an effort to scale, they moved to a 9-week rolling cohort broken into 3-week phases where ~16 new students walk in the door every 3 weeks. This means they are now bringing in almost 3x as many students per year (only considering the main SF branch) as when they started, and doing so in a time where there are plenty of other coding schools around as alternatives for prospective students.
Where before they got basically the whole applicant pool and brought in a smaller percentage of them, they now get a fraction of the (admittedly larger) pool and accept more of them. Oh, and they charge $12,200 upfront whereas App Academy allows you to opt only to repay them out of your first year salary after the program. I just saw an article earlier this week about how a much too high percentage of the American populace has no emergency fund (a few month's expenses to float them in the case of job loss, etc.), so given that it's no surprise that people with a choice of those 2 payment options will opt to choose App Academy. Frankly a lot of people don't even have the ability to choose because they don't have the upfront $12k + living expenses to cover Dev Bootcamp -- not sure if it's still the case but App Academy's office at one point was also zoned as a live-work space and students were able to live there, reducing their expenses during the program to almost nothing.
There is some (mostly) back-channel chatter about the potential padding of hiring numbers, but I think the prestige difference is more so the result of App Academy's more measured approach to scaling and more student-friendly terms resulting in less brand dilution, though perhaps at the cost of missing out on the big payday here.
Nitpick: it was actually 8 weeks. I was in the first cohort.