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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 hope I am not in the minority with this, but I honestly enjoyed the concept of Dev/Code Bootcamps. I've had an internal philosophy that no matter what 'career' you do (to some extent, so let's not anon-troll that, please) or hobbies/interests, development skills in some programming language would help you. And if you want to make a career out of it, even better!
However, that being said, I'm also a firm believer in experience over quick buzzy skills any day of the week, 100% of the time. All I viewed this as was a way to 1) make a non-profit for gains in big dollars on the business side (WTF WOULDNT want a successful non-profit) and 2) water-down a field that, in my opinion, should NOT be watered down.
Software engineering/development, bridging advanced mathematics (e.g. linear algebra, calculus, etc.) takes an EXTREME amount of well-rounded background in all things computing, skills and investing into yourself, your study, your craft. It's the field I work in, respect and make a living in. I feel like a chimp in shadows of some truly gifted software developers I've met and worked with in my past and I've been doing this for almost 15 years professionally now. Those people didn't get there by taking a quick 4 week crasher on the shiny-new-topic, whizbang a resume with a thesaurus and try to land a $100K gig for 6 months to build a 'previous employment' line-item they could wow the next place into hiring them on.
It's sad from the ideology of it, but if this is the direction it's going, I'm not totally heartbroken either from the glass-half-empty perspective.
The second group are above average, but will never be elite. They lack passion, open mind and desire to continually learn stuff.
The third group are coder that are collecting pay checks and don't have a passion for technology or learning. The would rather be doing something else. I would guess 60% fall into this category from my own experience. Depending on the project, that number can be as high as 75%.
Anyone that has 10+ years of experience with software development would know this. Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying attention.
Has anyone worked with boot camp graduates?
I'm sincerely curious about the caliber of people they turn out. I'm perhaps a bit curmudgeonly on this; I think that to be a competent software developer you need to have a pretty thorough grounding in math and science, as well as some native talent... which seems to be far more common in people drawn to math and science. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.
What I'd really like to see is a proper study of boot camp graduates that uses good sampling methods and some decent objective measurement of skill/ability, at a few points in time (fresh grads, grads after two years in industry, grads after five years in industry, for example) and compares them to graduates from the "traditional" sources, controlling for extraneous variables. In the absence of that, I'd like to hear anecdotes, especially from people who worked with boot camp grads they thought were pretty good.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You cannot for 60 years insist upon blind consumerism and automation without question, upon walled gardens and closed source, and expect people to take an interest in programming in less than a generation.
you cannot hijack the word 'hacker' and expect to be taken seriously when you've spent 35 years incarcerating and denigrating the very people you'd hope to attract to the science of programming and computer systems.
albeit unrelated, this is Much the same with gender and STEM. you cannot usurp 150 years of wife-as-homemaker and husband-as-breadwinner in a week of code camps and diversity seminars. You created these problems, and you'll need to work as hard as you did when you created them in order to fix them.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There are a ton of jobs out there and huge shortages in a lot of fields.
Any time I push into someone not being able to find a job it boils down to their wants coming before their needs. Grandpa didn't get much choice in the CCC where he worked. But it was a paycheck and the money helped back home.
If you show willingness to pickup a trade there are multiple companies in this area that are hiring. I know people with a GED that showed up a plumber's ad in the paper saying "I don't know anything about plumbing, I'll work hard, show up on time and pass a drug test" and they are now well on their way to a Union journeyman.
But jobs like that mean you have to leave Seattle and SanFrancisco for the 'uncultured' flyover states.
Our local VocTech highschool can't crank out CNC operators fast enough. The principal told me that most HS seniors not on the college track are getting hired at $20/hr before they graduate. We have a 8 week GED/CNC operator course where you can earn your GED, get a CNC cert AND a job in 3 nights a week. You just have to show that you have your life on track with no recent arrests and a character witness.
Hell truck drivers are in massive demand right now. I wouldn't bank on it for a long term career but if you need money can pass a CDL it'll get you to the next phase of your life. With enough money to do everything 'millenials' are complaining they can't get like a house and steady income.
I know multiple people that have taken this and similar paths to their career. The loudest millenials that seem to be pushing the 'there are no jobs' out there have lead a relatively easy life. They had few to no hardships growing up and now expect everything to be handed to them.
My wife and I are both old millenials. Both have advanced degrees, good jobs and have half jokingly talked about what would happen if we had to emigrate. Neither of us are above swinging a hammer or shoveling shit if it means food and a roof and have done both at some point in our lives.