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As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In the last five years, dozens of schools have popped up offering an unusual promise: Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy. Students and their hopeful parents shelled out as much as $26,000 seeking to jump-start a career. But the coding boot-camp field now faces a sobering moment, as two large schools have announced plans to shut down this year -- despite backing by major for-profit education companies, Kaplan and the Apollo Education Group, the parent of the University of Phoenix. The closings are a sign that years of heady growth led to a boot-camp glut, and that the field could be in the early stages of a shakeout. [...] One of the casualties, Dev Bootcamp, was a pioneer. It started in San Francisco in 2012 and grew to six schools with more than 3,000 graduates. Only three years ago, Kaplan, the biggest supplier of test-preparation courses, bought Dev Bootcamp and pledged bold expansion. It is now closing at the end of the year. Also closing is The Iron Yard, a boot camp that was founded in Greenville, S.C., in 2013 and swiftly spread to 15 campuses, from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C. Its main financial backer is the Apollo Education Group. Since 2013, the number of boot camp schools in the United States has tripled to more than 90, and the number of graduates will reach nearly 23,000 in 2017, a tenfold jump from 2013, according to Course Report, which tracks the industry.
I'm old enough to remember the MCSE and Java/back end web development bootcamps from the late 90s. I even went to an MCSE bootcamp to renew my certification when a consultancy I was working for paid for it. Any time a field gets hot, and there's money to be made, people who don't have a whole lot of aptitude for it are going to look for a quick way in. In the case of my bootcamp, there was a clear division between those of us who needed to stuff our brains with facts to pass a certification test quickly, and those who were driving a truck last week and got tricked by the school's recruiter to giving them their student loan money, GI Bill benefits, etc.
But just like 1999, 2018 and beyond isn't going to need 20 million JavaScript developers who know a couple of web framework tricks. Right now, anyone who can fog a mirror and write in Node.js or Rust is in hipster startup heaven, making lots of money. When the downturn comes, and activity goes back down to a reasonable level, all the people who are suffering through this for the money aren't going to stick around. We're already seeing the coder schools folding up the tents because they can't get enough marks through the door anymore.
There's nothing wrong with educating yourself and changing gears. I've been on a journey to learn more about modern IT stuff like DevOps, cloud, etc. and filling the gaps in my knowledge has been a long, slow process. I've been doing end user computing and systems integration stuff for a while, so web programming is something I haven't done a lot of. Would it be great to just sit down and "learn DevOps in 14 days?" Sure, but I know that's not realistic. When you're working with people who've done nothing but code and manage web apps for a decade, you have a lot of catching up to do and it's not something you can rush if you want any deep knowledge. It's the difference between, say, putting an SSL certificate on a website that a CA gave you, vs. knowing how that process actually works, what can go wrong, etc.
I have had the misfortune of working with such people. Let me be frank about them: they were total disasters.
I don't have high expectations for people with a Comp Sci or similar degree. But even the worst of these people could easily run circles around the self-taught or those with limited education like boot camps or just a continuing education course or two.
The limited education folks are often extraordinarily ignorant. Many of them only know JavaScript. That's it. That's all they know. They don't even know that C, C++, Perl, Java or C# exist.
These people who only know that JavaScript exists end up using JavaScript for absolutely everything. Just like the people, their projects end up being disasters, too. Something is seriously wrong when somebody writes a large, convoluted JavaScript script to do something that could be done with a four or five line shell script.
It really doesn't help that JavaScript is a shitty, inefficient language. At least the college-trained Java code monkeys have a decent language and a large standard library to work with. But the JavaScript fools? By the time they've finished searching for npm packages to use, the Java code monkey has already finished, tested and deployed a working solution.
They are totally clueless about data structures other than arrays and maps. They don't know what a tree is. They don't know what a list is. They don't know what a queue is.
They are totally clueless about algorithms, too. Unless it's one of the few algorithms in JavaScript's extraordinarily shitty standard library, they have no idea it exists.
Since they don't know about algorithms and data structures, they don't know about complexity theory. If their code doesn't run fast enough, it's because "the hardware is too slow"!
Hiring such a low-skill individual (I don't want to refer to them as "programmers", because often they just aren't in any meaningful way) will often only result in distraction and time-wasting for any programmers who have even the slightest ability to program, as these other programmers spend their days fixing up the mistakes and disasters of the self-trained or minimally-trained hacks.
My instructor at the software guild in Louisville had a masters from MIT and previously worked for Microsoft. She was worth every penny.
Community Colleges are the niche solution.
Anyone can learn to code on their own, if they have the desire and purpose.
Nobody does - well, very few people do.
The problem is that few, very few, people have that level of commitment on their own. So we need a cheat. Community college for $200 is that cheat. I know it works, because I've done it. I learned C, then C++, then statistics - all at a community college. Best of all, my day-job paid for the classes. Then they sent me to Intermediate and Advanced Cross-Platform C++ classes - followed by X/Motif training.
There's something about "GOING" to class that matters, at least for the first language. Picking up other languages isn't too hard after that. I've learned over 20 - perhaps over 30 other languages - since then.
I've known a few people who did well in these "boot camps" - they usually had deep programming skills in other languages and 10+ yrs of experience already.
I've also known people who attended boot camps with inappropriate backgrounds. They returned very excited, but still nearly clueless. Intensive study over 3 hrs a day is more than our brains can usually handle in completely new subjects. I've attended 4 hr daily training for 2 weeks and my brain physically hurt after. Then I had 2 hrs of homework every evening and 2 hours of practical use outside.
Our brains need time to get, ponder, understand what we're learning.
There is also something about PAYING $$$ for the learning. There are lots and lots of free courses online to learn all the beginning level stuff, yet people seldom sign up, much less finish those courses. In theory, everyone here could learn from beginning through masters-level computer stuff. I bet less than 2% have.