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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

HOLY. SHIT.

I am sorry. :( 90% of these coding schools need to go. I thought my private school was bad.

Also, there are plenty of free sources for education. Definitely enough to get you started building your own applications. Hell, ever pluralsight is a better bargain.

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Agreed. I am incredibly dubious that "bootcamps" have any value whatsoever in any case, except maybe for introducing practicing developers to new technologies. I know tech is the hot place to be any more, but man it's amazing the number of charlatans that have started to show up surrounding "hot technology."

Different people have different learning styles. And many people do not have an effective or appropriate learning environment where they can learn new tech through free resources. So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people; even it can help wade through what's out there to understand what's important to learn, how long you should spend learning x, etc.

But until this article, I had never thought much about bootcamps requiring accreditation, or the dangers of this type of training. Yikes!!

Thanks very much to the author for sharing this experience.

I get that not everyone can sit down and start grepping how a kernel works, how to architect database solutions, or get what it means to be reentrant in the context of parallel programming. Not everyone can be efficient successful autodidacts; however we have places to learn, like colleges. I would rather see community colleges or university start offering more individual courses to help you get up to speed. There is probably some room for just emerging people in technology completely for a period of time, like some bootcamps seem to do, but these sort of operations reek the same way for-profit universities do, feeling very strongly like whoever is teaching is in it for the money and that the whole operation is a fly-by-night. Beyond that, I wouldn't hire someone out of a bootcamp to do much more than maintain my generic off the shelf CMS, as I'm not sure 6-12 weeks is enough to truly gain the experience and knowledge to avoid anything but the most superficial problems when attempting to build and maintain effective codebases.

One of the big "problems" with learning at college is the sequential nature of Computer Science.

You have to take CS1 your first semester, then CS2 your second semester, and then you finally have the prerequisites to take multiple classes at once.

Coding bootcamps have a semester's worth of material, so it would be cool if colleges had a one-semester full-time class that covers Intro CS, Data Structures, Web Development, and Intro to Software Engineering.

Because that basically is a coding bootcamp (except coding bootcamps have class all day in lieu of giving out homework).

This was a big reason for me to do a coding bootcamp. I was switching majors out of engineering and into CS. I didn't want to spend 2 years slowly learning CS to find out if I liked it. It was faster and cheaper for me to do one of these schools to see if I really did want to do this for a living. Now I'm employed and do do it for a living and love it. I still push myself everyday to learn and do more learning outside of work. Unfortunately this style of teaching just doesn't fit the mould of traditional universities, but I think it's a great way to find out if you really want to pursue a career in this field.

"So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people"

Something to think about is when my father was still alive and retired/contracting he charged about $200/hr for very specialized database work in a very specific financial field. I've heard thats not totally out of line today. Anyway my point is some of these bootcamps cost $16K and for $16K you could hire "most specialized programming consultants" for 1:1 time for a rather amazing 80 hours. Obviously you'd be better off with a modest amount of hours across many consultants unless you've already found a specialty or someone you work very well with.

Now most tutors aren't going to charge $200/hr for some easy noob questions, then again the middleman (and they'll be middlemen) are going to want an unacceptably large cut.

Its just something to think about, throwing out the advice, that if you've got questions and $16K burning a hole in your pocket there's already a strong and established ecosystem of consultants willing to take your dough in exchange for some answers.

As a point of comparison, music teachers and flight instructors don't really make that much per hour, although much like programming the pros at the top of those fields do clear $100K/yr.

It seems like a rational alternative.

The value is pretty easy to understand. If one sees more value in participating in a structured and relatively grueling X week course, networking with a lot of apparently well-connected people in the industry, potential employment opportunities upon completion vs. spending however long doing free-learning, figuring out something to build, continue to build a portfolio, having to market yourself/prove your worth for employment, etc. This is all not even getting into the quality of the programs. For those who want everything laid out for them, there's definite more value vs. doing it the old-fashioned way.

With all that said, I have my own also not positive opinions about the proliferation of these schools and how they affect the industry as a whole. I just think that there is a fair-ish tradeoff (granted one picks the right "school").

I think caveat emptor absolutely applies with bootcamps, but there are also ones that are certainly worth the money. I'm a recent App Academy grad (full disclosure) and almost all of my cohort are now at high-paying jobs at companies they love, including Google, Groupon and Tumblr. (I'm still looking for work right now, but only because of extenuating personal circumstances.)

Having talked with my friends who are working now, there are definitely things a/A doesn't teach you much about (e.g. deployment/devops, advanced Git) but on the whole we all feel like we learned more than enough to prepare ourselves for working in software development. I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well, though they expect you to come in with some coding experience already.

So yes, there are good/great ones out there, but I'd agree that your bullshit detector should be set very high if you're looking into bootcamps.

  I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well

My first impression of them is dishonesty.

They claim to be "The CS degree for the 21st century" which is simply not true for an intensive web development course.

I went through Hack Reactor. It's not a CS degree, but I work next to people having one. I don't think they're necessarily better at their job. "The CS degree for the 21st century" can mean anything. It's just marketing bullshit. That being said, judging startups (and IMO Hack Reactor is essentially a startup) based on their marketing would mean that 90% of startups are - what you call - "dishonest".

I enjoyed HR, I'm valuable for the company I'm working for, I maintain a couple of successful Open Source projects (~ 500 stars each) in Go, JavaScript and Haskell.

Without being too arrogant, most CS graduates can barely code. And realistically that's what most of us either do or should do all day long.

While it's maybe a bit of an exaggeration, good bootcamps have an emphasis on (ahem) marketable skills that a lot of CS programs don't. You'd be right that you don't learn a ton of theory like you would in CS, but App Academy at least (and I'd assume Hack Reactor as well) makes sure you have enough grounding in programming fundamentals that learning new languages/frameworks/stacks isn't hard.

That said, one weird thing I've heard about Hack Reactor is that they purposely will hold back students they feel aren't 100% where they want them to be and keep them from graduating. Whether that's out of genuine concern for students or it's just to inflate their job placement numbers (or both), I couldn't tell you.

> That said, one weird thing I've heard about Hack Reactor is that they purposely will hold back students they feel aren't 100% where they want them to be and keep them from graduating.

2013 Hack Reactor grad here. I had actually heard this about Dev Bootcamp before applying to HR, so I asked the HR founders during my interviews if they did this and they emphatically said no. Their genuine emphasis on supporting students -- including intensive interventions when they detect students might be falling behind -- was the main reason I decided to fork over $17k to a couple of strangers and move across the country to San Francisco.

And they didn't disappoint me. Our cohort of 26 had two drop-outs: one guy on the second day (he was from Atlanta, felt a little out of place and wanted to go home, so he became the first person to take HR up on their "full refund if for any reason you want to quit during the first week" offer) and a girl almost midway through the course (she got intensive support, we were all really rallying for her, but she didn't want to keep going). Everyone else pulled together, worked long hours, built some incredible projects, and landed jobs at lots of Companies You've Heard Of. But don't take my word for it... check out the [Hack Reactor alumni page](http://www.hackreactor.com/students/) and see for yourself.

I don't know a single student who has been held back, although I graduated nearly two years ago and my experience may be outdated.

> 2013 Hack Reactor grad here. I had actually heard this about Dev Bootcamp before applying to HR, so I asked the HR founders during my interviews if they did this and they emphatically said no.

Huh, interesting. I knew DBC does that too but they seemed much more upfront about it in their ad copy (and in fact it was touted as a selling point). FWIW, a/A sounds similar to HR by how you describe it; they want everyone to succeed and will give you plenty of support but if you still aren't pulling your weight you'll get booted. There was a guy in our cohort who dropped right before final projects and they let him come back at the same point in the next cycle but they made an exception for him because he had personal reasons for dropping.

But yeah, besides that, great learning environment, everyone wants everyone else to do well, build cool shit and get good jobs. I'd recommend a/A in a heartbeat to anyone, with the caveat that you've done enough programming to know it's something you enjoy doing. (But the amount of Ruby you have to learn to get through the admission process successfully is a pretty decent litmus test.)

Someone was just complaining to me that a/A requires a $14k deposit up front, even though the marketing says it's "no cost until you find a job". (In which case it's more like "full refund if you don't find a job" not "no cost until you find a job".) Is there any truth to that?

$14k? Not unless they changed it since I enrolled. I did have to pay a deposit but it was "only" $5k. I admit I was annoyed because they had just bumped that number from $3750 IIRC. So you do have to front some cash but nothing approaching the full eventual cost of the program. (Again, unless they changed it, which would make me a bit sad if they did. I like that lowered-risk, alignment-of-incentives model and it would be a shame if they had to abandon it.)

I'm a full stack Rails developer now, and attended an online bootcamp called Tealeaf Academy. I liked it a lot because the guys who run it understand development pretty well, and they were accessible to answer questions as I had them. They made no promises about my career prospects after attending the course, charged a fair price. In my mind, the 4 month program was closer to a supercharged college course, not an overhyped bootcamp.

Until recently I was teaching for another 'coding bootcamp' (or something that could be described as such) and when I was reading the linked article/pdf my jaw was on the floor. We surely weren't perfect, but this type of stuff makes everyone look bad.

I am a founder at Coding House.

Wrong.

- Maybe the bottom 20% should go and that is natural selection.

- The is a huge shortage of devs.

- Most colleges are not doing a good job creating dev's (their are about 100 who do).

- You can learn everything we teach on your own for free (near free).

- btw Plursight is great if you are a JR Dev not if you don't know shit.

- Boot camps expedite the process by 4x to 12x the amount of time it would take.

- You will not become an expert or an intermediate dev at any boot camp. You will still be green.

- In a boot camp you will learn between 2-4% of what you need to know about coding.

- You will earn the rest over 20-30 years.

- Thus we focus on teaching people how to be self relent. So the can pick up a new language, framework, how to FIX bugs, TDD, merging, working in groups. The process that one can apply to most anything they need to do down the road.

> The is a huge shortage of devs.

If the high salaries for developers were due to a training-insufficiency-based shortage of qualified devs, the natural market for training programs would be hiring firms, not would-be devs.

The reason the market is would-be devs is because, insofar as there is a shortage, its a talent-and-inclination-based shortage, but you can sell it to would-be devs as a training-based shortage that they are taking advantage of by buying into your program.

> You can learn everything we teach on your own for free (near free).

Then why does anyone need you?

> Boot camps expedite the process by 4x to 12x the amount of time it would take.

Where does this quantification come from?

A huge shortage of devs, and yet somehow their wages remain suspiciously flat:

http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...

You should really work on your language skills as a founder, it does not reflect so well on you (and Coding House) if you can't even spell properly when you're trying to defend your creation.

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