The Coming Code Bootcamp Destruction
zedshaw.com
zedshaw.com
I'm torn on this issue though, because even though I feel that Hack Reactor was worth every penny, I can acknowledge that the "coding bootcamp" space could potentially be littered with shysters and people trying to make a quick buck, taking advantage of students by promoting false hiring stats. I'd welcome for a light to be shined on those programs, but would lament if Hack Reactor specifically gets thrown under the bus or that the tech industry sours on grads of good schools like Hack Reactor because they are labeled as simply "bootcamp grads".
That said, either way the real tests come later. Things like adapting to new technologies and new ideas, or self-teaching all the theory that bootcamps inevitably skip over.
Is your average bootcamp grad who had no real experience going in able to have a normal software engineering career trajectory? There's no good data, and there won't be for a while, but I have my doubts.
Your question about the potential to have a normal software engineering career trajectory is a good one (one that I am particularly interested to hear the answer to) and that's why I wish that more employers would speak to this issue. I would venture to guess that my employer would speak highly of Hack Reactor and how prepared HR grads are because they have continued to hire from there, but it would be nice to see how employers actually review these schools and not just the students.
When you start by learning a language, that becomes the basis for your understanding of computing. This isn't always a strength. Imagine someone who learned programming via C but now has to learn Lisp - they're going to have a hard time.
I've heard very mixed reviews of hiring from bootcamps. For people who needed the exact skillset the bootcamp taught, it was perfect. For those without that exact alignment, ran into the limits of the person's knowledge pretty fast.
That seems natural. They only have 3 months of experience. The company is simply going to have to help with that, along with ample googling and reading.
I think the expectations of those doing the hiring may have been out of line, possibly due to bootcamps selling them something they simply can't deliver reliably, possibly due to hiring managers not knowing the field.
The training industry has been around for a long time. I would suspect there is years, perhaps decades, worth of data, just not under the name "bootcamp".
Back in the early 80's, my mom taught the intro programming course at the local community college, after learning it herself a year prior. Her students came from all walks of life, and many of them got good jobs after a couple of semesters. Her observation was that someone with a science or math background could learn programming in a jiffy.
not that I think a pile of lies were sent to him, but more along the lines of, what happened isn't always what was perceived to happen, or what was perceived from hearing about something happening.
I would definitely say that my experience of grinding out 60 hour weeks of programming was very much aligned with learning something the hard way, so I really hope that Zed at least manages to acknowledge the successful programs in the space.
While I share the concern that many of these programs may not live up to their claims, it should not be overlooked that there are a few quality ones that really change people's lives.
Isn't that what traditional education/university courses do?... but over a much longer period of time and more money?
Light is the best disinfectant, I hope your post spark some strong discussion because that rarely happens with universities and the stakeholders.
I wonder very strongly what happened to the students of Livingsocial's Hungry Academy experiment led by Jeff Casimer and JumpStartLabs in 2012. It was a initial class of 8-15 or something with promised contracts at the end. LivingSocial chose not to continue the program and I believe gschool(galvanize) spawned off of that model.
Jeff talking about his vision for teaching people to code on ruby rogues in 2012 http://rubyrogues.com/050-rr-hungry-academy-with-jeff-casimi...
I started Dev Bootcamp in early spring 2013, signing up after lamenting that http://pragmaticstudio.com/ in Reston, VA was 2-3,000 for a 3 day course. It just made sense in comparison.
I've found Dev Bootcamp to change and evolve as time moved due to student feedback(I parttime coached students there to stay in touch). The curiosity to learn everything and knowing how to find the answers was my favorite takeaway from the bootcamp.
Most of what I heard about it was second-hand, so my information may not be entirely accurate. That said, I believe the outcome was pretty mixed. Some of the students did very well and ended up becoming respected members of the engineering org. Others were just OK. A few left for other companies shortly after completing the program -- pretty tacky stuff, since LivingSocial PAID them the entire time they were students. I also heard one or two of them didn't pan out at all and were eventually let go.
I think the primary reason LivingSocial chose not to continue the program was because they started running out of money. The first class finished around the time it became clear that daily deals were not going to be the cash cow that everyone expected. LivingSocial saw their valuation drop dramatically, and started being much more careful about how they were spending money.
I left the company about a year after Hungry Academy ended, so I have no idea where these folks are now.
That being said, I still think there is a valid business in training developers who want to change "stacks" (i.e. Embedded dev jumping into web dev, C# dev jumping into Erlang). The stacks, and ecosystems, are just complex enough to require allocating a lot of free time to becoming proficient and employable. Not everyone is an autodidact. (Perhaps, this is also the solution to the old "developers burn out at 35" axiom.)