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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.
It's not like the boot camp instructors are CompSci masters who went to MIT or Stanford. It's the same content.
Even if Boot Camps are a little better, they aren't $2900 better
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.
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Don't link to the NYT fucker. Aside from being a leftist piece of trash,
I've heard a lot of right-leaning people complain about the New York Times. I haven't, however, seen any evidence that they aren't a good source of information.
they limit the number of articles they allow you to see each month.
It's bad enough that millennial assholes think that it's a crime if everything on the internet is not free, free, free. Reporters shouldn't be paid, they should work for the love of it. (and for the "exposure").
But now, when the New York Times actually is giving away their content for free, the millennial assholes are complaining that they are not getting enough content for free.
"Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months..."
Did anyone else get a good chuckle out of that sly dig? I can imagine a funny commercial: "Are you a high school dropout? Recently paroled? Functionally illiterate? Severe mental deficiency and/or brain damage? Or even a humanities graduate? You too can learn to code in a few months!"
Intensive courses sound good, but once the "graduates" get out, they discover that they will be competing with people who have been obsessed with computers since the age of ten; people who would rather code than eat.
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.