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Boot Camps Introducing More Women To Tech (dice.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the welcome-to-the-club dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: A new study from Course Report suggests that boot camps are introducing more women to the tech-employment pipeline. Data for the study came from 769 graduates from 43 qualifying coding schools (a.k.a. boot camps). Some 66 percent of those graduates reported landing a full-time job that hinged on skills learned at the boot camp. Although the typical "bootcamper" is 31 years old, with 7.6 years of work experience, relatively few had a job as a programmer before participating in a boot camp. Perhaps the most interesting data-point from Course Report, though, is that 36 percent of "bootcampers" are women, compared to 14.1 percent coming into the tech industry via undergraduate programs. Bringing more women and underrepresented groups into the tech industry is a stated goal of many companies. Over the past few years, these companies' diversity reports have bemoaned how engineering and leadership teams skew overwhelmingly white and male. Proposed strategies for the issue include adjusting how companies recruit new workers; boot camps could also quickly deepen the pool of potential employees with the right skills.

1 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Yawn. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Normally as an employee in the field it would be logical for me to be against these things as they increase the supply of labor which drives down my salary theoretically.

    But being a long time employee in the field, I know it doesn't work the way these people think it works. You can't just pop in to your local coding boot camp after working for 10 years as an apartment manager or secretary and start crapping out code.

    Somebody who grew up spending countless hours nerding out and went from hobby->job will almost always be leaps and bounds better than someone who went into software/IT as a career as if it's just like going to a heating and air conditioning school. "I'll spend 6 months learning how to do Javascript and Ruby and then I'll go get a $100K job!" Right.

    I for one welcome our new narrowly educated, technically sparse "programming" overlords.