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The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

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Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#41

Post by Ayraa »

A lot of the students enrolled hoping to get a job later.

The scam aside, this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job. Especially that one student who lamented now he can't prove he completed the lessons from this bootcamp. Would a no name bootcamp impress any employer?

Learning in a classroom (or via Slack chats!) is not enough. It's just the first step. The key is applying it as soon as possible by doing projects, for yourself or for someone else. For free in the beginning if need be. Employers now want to see proof you can do something, not a piece of paper showing you can. Plus publishing these projects online can help employers / recruiters discover you.

Too many parents are still teaching their kids a paint by the numbers formula they knew for life: go to school -> land job. Work there -> rise through the ranks. The good news is, there's a hundred different ways to land a job now. The bad news is, trying, failing at, trying again at those different ways can be hard.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#42

Post by rajangdavis »

jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

I went through General Assembly's Web Development Immersive 2 years ago.

I have made good use of what I have learned in that program; however, I would be reluctant to recommend that everyone should take it.

It really depends on how much of your own time you are willing to invest in learning the material. I had 1 year of some web development experience at that point, so I was familiar with some of the material and didn't mind putting in work to get better. It was great for me in that it rounded out some of my skills and got me interested in bash which was something I never expected.

They worked really hard to get feedback from students to ensure that our experience was what we wanted and that they were also challenging us without being overwhelming. They also had a very passionate and personable staff that would answer any questions assuming that you had tried to solve your problem before asking.

They encouraged students to fail first so that they would eventually not fear failure; this was one of the most important lessons that I have taken with me. I don't think you can really learn this from an online course or tutorial.

I saw people go into the program without any developer experience come out of it building complex web apps that were using newer technologies (at that time) like Web Sockets and NodeJS. I also saw people go into the program and not really get much from it, but I don't know how much work they really put in.

A couple of the students from my cohort are working at big name companies like Uber and Starbucks, so my takeaway is that there isn't a guaranteed route to success with these types of programs. They give you enough tools to start a fire but they leave the rest up to you.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#43

Post by tells »

jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

I went through Fullstack's Flex program last year and it's definitely paid for itself. I tried to teach myself for several years and bounced around from language to language without getting too far. The entire time I never knew even how to really structure an application even though I could write a recursive function and understand it. For example, no online tutorial really goes through the rationale behind your folder structure or how to organize your code when you're a beginner. I kinda got fed up with my progress and decided to make the jump. Also, I saw that Javascript was starting to entangle itself in everything so I figured that if I were to go anywhere, it would be a bootcamp that only taught Javascript. The best thing about it was the incremental progression with explanations behind why certain things worked a certain way (historical and pragmatic). For some reason, I absolutely NEEDED that. I needed to understand why things worked they way they do, and most books and other tutorials just never really bothered explaining things that in depth. Having to create your own jQuery, your own ORM, etc makes you appreciate what those tools really do. The second best thing was the feedback loop. Things that used to take me a week to research then understand now only took 30 minutes. It also helped me narrow my focus and ignore those 'hey you should totally use this framework/language instead' posts that would throw me off track for about a month and make me question whether I was learning the 'right' stuff.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#44

Post by dogma1138 »

jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

Probably more than you think, for some reason people think it's a new thing, it isn't.

Go back to the mid to late 90's to early 2000's and there were tons of them usually branded under one of the large IT/Tech companies like Sun or MSFT.

Java programming schools were very popular same goes for .NET/ASP the only difference now is that bootcamps are slightly less vendor oriented but they are still usually not stack agnostic.

12 Years ago you would go and pay for a "bootcamp" to get a Microsoft certification for .NET or some Java developer cert, now you just call it a full stack bootcamp.

MSFT went also even beyond that, in the early to mid 2000's they run programs in many countries that would focus on high school students for free/huge discount you would get to do MCSE/MCPD as extra credit classes after school.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#45

Post by eonw »

davidhariri wrote: post #22

"He had a penchant for oversharing personal information and sometimes ripped hits from a colorful glass bong during video lectures with the students." "I did learn some stuff," Johnson says. "I can write some code, and I didn't know anything before I started." Oh jeez. I feel really bad for his students.

"ripped hits", i love the lingo.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#46

Post by q3r3qr3q »

cheriot wrote: post #39
madenine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a bootcamp program. In-person, 13 weeks, 9-5, 5 days a week, plus HW/Weekly projects/Capstone project. If I had locked myself in my apartment could I have learned the same things in the same amount of time? Maybe. Going through an organization took the legwork out and let me focus on the learning. I didn't have to seek out my own materials (I did anyways, but that was for added depth into things that interested…

It sounds like the investment paid off, but if you don't mind me asking, what did the bootcamp cost?

Out of curiosity, what would it be worth to you and how did you come to that figure?

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#47

Post by matt4077 »

jdhawk wrote: post #2

Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the way to YouTube, what is the appeal? Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

I can imagine that having someone direct your education may reduce the potential for blind spots or complacency. I've seen quite a few people who, after starting to be productive, avoided certain topics because they seemed hard or unnecessary, like the guy who did everything with flat files because he didn't know databases, or people not useing VCSs.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#49

Post by 49531 »

Ayraa wrote: post #41

A lot of the students enrolled hoping to get a job later. The scam aside, this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job. Especially that one student who lamented now he can't prove he completed the lessons from this bootcamp. Would a no name bootcamp impress any employer? Learning in a classroom (or via Slack chats!) is not enough. It's just the first step. T…

As a former instructor at a code school I always told students that learning to code would put them on a successful trajectory more than make them instantly valuable. It's not an on/off situation. A good engineer is always learning and improving.

Code schools too often make it look like you attend and then succeed, there's a lot more than goes on in between.

Re: The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder

#50

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Ayraa wrote: post #41

A lot of the students enrolled hoping to get a job later. The scam aside, this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job. Especially that one student who lamented now he can't prove he completed the lessons from this bootcamp. Would a no name bootcamp impress any employer? Learning in a classroom (or via Slack chats!) is not enough. It's just the first step. T…

> this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job

I would say it proves the opposite. Those people got scammed by a shitty little outfit, here today, gone tomorrow. That's much less likely to happen when you go to, you know, a real school.

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