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Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

blog.theironyard.com

101–110 of 139 posts

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#101
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. People who can effectively teach others to program well enough to secure professional employment may have better options than teaching open-enrollment entry-level programming classes. 2. Because of that, and for any of a number of other reasons, we may generally be overestimating how effectively these kinds of schools are educating people. 3. It's an open secret that hiring in the technology industry isn't based o…

Training junior developers is something I enjoy & think I'm good at. I actually looked at working for a boot camp once. To do so would have required more than a half pay cut. If I'm going to do that it will be as an underserved public sector educator, not a for profit company.

Out of curiosity, how much were they paying?

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#102
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know this too. Their prices are very high, so maybe the demand subsided?

It seemed to be a gold rush. Too many schools opened, crowding the market and driving prices down. I've personally been swamped in bootcamp graduates' resumes, even though my listing specifically says "5+ years experience". That tells me that they're desperate and bulk-applying. I've also heard this anecdote from others -- totally swamped by bootcamp grads. It's a free market, and the demand for bootcamp grads is now…

Makes sense. Thank you.

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#103
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding #1, an Iron Yard competitor offered a six-month contract for $45,000, 1099, here in Boston (with "an option" to re-up, at the same rate). It would not exactly be difficult to beat that number by doing almost anything else. Another was talking about $80K/year...in freaking Ohio. I would love to teach more than I do, and I'm starting to work on some web courses because I've learned from corporate training tha…

> $80K/year...in freaking Ohio I don't get this sentence, is this good or bad? I grew up in Ohio and for the majority of people I know there, they would be absolutely thrilled at that salary. The cost of living is nowhere near SF levels. The "freaking Ohio" part, yeah I can understand that for a lot of parts of Ohio, but it's highly dependent on where in the state you're talking about.

80k is great in Ohio - I think that's the implication. 80k goes a long way when rent is 800/month.

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: if the pay was such that you weren't taking a pay cut, would that have made you stay longer? What would the conditions have to be like for someone who's a senior engineer to even consider making "a career change" into teaching swe for the next 10 years of their career, rather than a 2 year moonlighting stint? (Wondering what the setup had to be too make this sustainable)

Well, market-rate pay would be a good starter. TIY was really close. It was almost a horizontal move for me. But there are a few other things that these kinds of institutions need to solve: - How to keep your staff from burning out - How to keep your staff up to speed Both are hard problems. TIY (at the time that I taught there, anyway) was staffed by people who had 10-15 years (and more in some cases) of industry ex…

That is a good idea. Even though the code that students get into in these bootcamps is the industry equivalent of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", and people keep saying that in various ways here to speak on why these junior devs can't get work, that doesn't mean that it will always be that way, nor does it mean that having industry experience would not be really helpful. More than that though, is that good teaching is lacking in most of these bootcamp teachers and in most bootcamp curricula. The writing of many of these lessons in general reflects our nation's years-long trend away from cultural literacy and the value of style and communication. These teachers at bootcamps need to be so stellar at their teaching jobs that they become famous for it. And then, they need to be paid well for bringing that level of expertise. The coding bootcamp industry seems to forget that there have been many very early predecessors in this space. Take classical music, for example. A college level classical musician at a conservatory is already a professional level musician. The teachers at conservatories must be true masters in their areas of expertise. Sure, it would be great if they had up-to-date industry experience, but it is generally understood that it is so difficult to be technically great as a teacher that no one really gives a hoot about "industry experience" per se. That is considered the student's job to keep up with. It isn't a perfect model, but somehow these conservatories get people to pay mountains of money to study with these incredible teachers. And you know what? They have stopped paying these incredible teachers what they used to as well, because there is an abundance of great music talent and a dearth of music work at this point. This was not always the case, but after many years of great teaching and lower and lower pay to musicians, this is now the case. Software engineering could learn from studying the failures of this very old model, because at least its teachers had these coding schools beat from the beginning.

How to keep our staff from burning out is an easy one. Give them real breaks and often, and pay them enough to have time to do their own projects on a sabbatical year every two years. At great pay with these things in place, you can ask them to get and keep themselves up to speed. Basically, treat the teachers like they have real value and you will get real value and real competition for those positions. Or, just make the corporations pay for the labor training they say there is such a huge need for?

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#105
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"qualified developers" is probably the key word there. These bootcamps are all trying to train out a pretty specific set of basic proficiencies. That's not to say the training can't be useful, it's just to say that they all seem to be going for the same basic web development skills, and probably the majority of companies looking to employ developers and looking for more than that, or something entirely different. Cou…

I think this comment nails it to be honest, I am a bootcamp grad and a lot of the time I do feel that most junior web devs are pushed into the cult of Javascript very early, React is pushed as if gospel and whilst much "emphasis" (IMO only in spoken ways) is placed on being a full-stack, I feel that there is next to no real education provided on basic back end/operations skills. So most of the grads come out as front…

Is there any emphasis on teaching data structures or algorithms, or is it really just front end web?

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UO -> In-state: $26,000, out of state: $49,000 OSU -> In-state: $26,000, out of state: $45,000 PSU -> In-state: $30,000+, out of state: $43,000 MSU -> In-state: $27,000, out of state: $51,000 UM (Michigan) -> In-state: $29,000, out of state: $60,000 UM (Miami) -> $64,306

These prices look like they include room and board and such after spot checking a couple, e.g. http://undergrad.osu.edu/cost-and-aid/basic-costs gives in-state tuition for an incoming freshman of 11K per year. You can argue that talking about tuition alone is misleading, but it wasn't included 15 years ago either, and yet 10K/year for in-state is around where things were back then too, IIRC.

11K is still a lot of money. I paid for all of my school on my own as I went through it, but if it was 11K I would have had to get loans!

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#107

They were a staple of the community in Greenville, SC. This news was a shock all around.

I was surprised by this as well, when I think of Greenville and tech startup-ish companies, I think of the The Iron Yard. Are there any other companies around with that sort of strong presence? I haven't lived in Greenville for two years now but I've had thoughts of moving back there.

ChartSpan and eRad are 2 'startups' in the area growing relatively fast and blend tech and healthcare. Other than that it's a lot of smaller groups. Lot of automotive and Windstream, GE, Fluor, INFOR have strong dev presence here as well.

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a genuine question: What's different about doing consultancy that allows one to keep up to date? (As opposed to teaching) My confusion comes from thinking of them both as full time jobs (so therefore where would you get the time to do extra study on the side). Would the consultancy allow you to 'learn by doing' (i.e., you pick a new technology to use and figure it out as you build and deploy it)?

Consulting exposes you to problems in the field; teaching is where you tell others about problems you're familiar with. If you don't have an input of new problems, you're eventually just recycling the same material...

But then the great teaching would have to be informed by coding's great problems. Your average consultant doesn't encounter "the great coding problems" on a daily or even yearly basis. This is why it might be better for teachers to devote themselves to seeking and researching these challenges and problems as a part of their teaching like all great teachers of any lifelong pursuit have done. If these bootcamp teachers did that, the level of teaching would rise very high. It might finally be worth its price tag, even if students didn't get jobs. I guess that is why the pro-level musicians pay so much for a summer spent with master teachers with no promise of work at the end-- it is because those teachers actually teach them something of great value at the craft that pays for itself and helps the student become an artist at what they do. And for the most part, unfortunately, software engineers are not treated by their companies as artists of value either, like these classical musicians were, at least for many years before that began to decline sharply. There is so much precedent about where this bootcamp model and this "dearth of technical talent" will lead- and these places are not good. They lead to the worker getting paid very little and there being very few low-paying jobs in the end. But this is tech, so it will happen at speed and scale like never before. I've already watched tech do everything in classical music from 1950-1990 in about five years (including the sexism and its accompanying legal battles and outcries). Well, everything except great teaching at the "camp" level.

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comment nails it to be honest, I am a bootcamp grad and a lot of the time I do feel that most junior web devs are pushed into the cult of Javascript very early, React is pushed as if gospel and whilst much "emphasis" (IMO only in spoken ways) is placed on being a full-stack, I feel that there is next to no real education provided on basic back end/operations skills. So most of the grads come out as front…

Is there any emphasis on teaching data structures or algorithms, or is it really just front end web?

I don't know where the parent graduated from, but as mentioned above, I'm a DBC grad from 2014 and we were mostly taught Rails, which is entirely a backend framework. There was a decent amount of data structure work, a little bit of algorithm work, and very little ops. Students quickly and shallowly learned JS frameworks for their final projects. After 2.5 years employed, I've found that the relative lack of algo work didn't matter in the least - I'm a web dev, at least right now, and I'm not implementing algorithms. Ops/infrastructure/deployment is the area where I was most lacking, and where I've grown the most, but I don't really know where you would fit it into the curriculum, or even if it would be valuable, given how many different permutations of infrastructure you can encounter, even working in the exact same coding stack.

Re: Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

#110
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised by this as well, when I think of Greenville and tech startup-ish companies, I think of the The Iron Yard. Are there any other companies around with that sort of strong presence? I haven't lived in Greenville for two years now but I've had thoughts of moving back there.

ChartSpan and eRad are 2 'startups' in the area growing relatively fast and blend tech and healthcare. Other than that it's a lot of smaller groups. Lot of automotive and Windstream, GE, Fluor, INFOR have strong dev presence here as well.

Don't forget Benefit Focus. They have office in Greenville and Charleston (HQ), have been growing like crazy and went public a couple years back. That company is doing really well and can't seem to hire people fast enough.
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