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Early 'Coding School' Dev Bootcamp Is Shutting Down (axios.com)
Dev Bootcamp, the original "coding bootcamp," is shutting down, the company announced on Wednesday. The company's last cohort of students, who begin the program next week, will graduate in December and receive job search help before the school permanently shuts down. From a report: Why it matters: Early coding bootcamps like Dev Bootcamp launched a boom in alternative education for programing skills, with some of the school's own alumni going on to found their own successful programs, like App Academy. Ultimately, the coding bootcamp craze highlighted not only the need to rethink computer science and programming education in traditional colleges, but also the increasing demand for workers with these technical skills.
Follow the multitude of other voc tech training paradigms and industry solutions and apply them to coding.
Yes, this does mean coders should unionize if they want to stop getting walked on.
I think I see the problem...
"with some of the school's own alumni going on to found their own successful programs, like App Academy"
Dev Bootcamp failed primarily because its own students graduated and then decided to cannibalize its business.
Society is about to collapse!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Going out of business implies your business model doesn't work. Why didn't their business model work?
Probably unrealistic expectations. My 50-year-old apartment complex got sold to corporations several times in as many years. Each time the new corporation would slap on exterior paint, redo the landscaping and charge "luxury" rental rates. When the numbers don't add up, they sell the apartment complex. The current corporation is actually renovating the apartments as exterior paint, landscaping and higher rental rates by themselves don't make for a viable business model.
Remember MCSE bootcamps? If you're in IT and of a certain age, you probably do. These schools sprang up to soak up the demand for system administrators at the peak of the First Dotcom Bubble. I got my MCSE on NT 4.0 (wow, I'm old) through self-study at the time, and these schools were what helped coin the term "paper MCSE." Basically, they'd force-feed total newbies the exam details in a cram session, and teach them a little bit about network and system administration. Microsoft's exams were notoriously easy to game back then, so tons of people who didn't really know anything got certified and were hired in admin positions they weren't qualified for. It took _years_ to clean out some of the paper MCSEs, and some would argue we're not done yet.
I wasn't shocked when I read that web coder bootcamps were starting to pop up as the Second Dotcom Bubble was inflating. I'm not a web developer by any means, but I can't imagine these schools teach anything beyond the absolute basics. Already, if you're starting with one of the JavaScript frameworks, a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight. You have to learn the basics if you want to do anything the framework can't do for you, and I bet these coder schools don't teach much beyond how to do front-end coding in one or two frameworks.
It's similar to how the MCSE bootcamps were -- my company paid for me to go to one for a certification upgrade because I was a consultant at the time and they wanted to bill me out at a higher rate. If you were there for a refresher, the model made sense. If you were a former plumber, truck driver, or similar as many of my classmates were, you were in for a world of trouble if you passed and hit the real world. Maybe these coder bootcamps will produce people who can work at some startup banging on front-end code for 16 hours a day, but nothing beats first principles when it comes to really learning.
In the IT world, things move too fast these days to capture everything in a single certification, and I'd argue that it's difficult to learn everything the way you could when products, systems and networks were simpler. I don't know much about web coding though -- is it possible to boil things down enough to make a bootcamp graduate semi-useful?
Should have included the other half of TFA that explains why the coding camp went out of business.
The article doesn't state why it went out of business, but rather merely states that it couldn't find a sustainable business model.
The real reason is such:
1) Tell everyone that anyone can be a developer.
2) Everyone and anyone signs up for the classes, creating an unsustainable bubble.
3) The vast majority of them find out that developing software requires a particular mindset that they don't, and can't, have.
4) Disappointment sets in, and the word spreads that not anyone and everyone can be a software developer.
5) The bubble bursts.
6) Revenues plummet.
We'll see this cycle repeat again in about 10-15 years.
Do you really need to be told why?
The education offered was superficial.
The students going in were the sort who couldn't make it in a real program.
The students coming out were well versed in buzzwords and trendy shit, but not much else.
Employers would rather pay less to get the same level of skill from a bunch of H1-Bs.