Iron Yard code school to close all campuses

I know some of the guys at DM pretty well and I don't think they've "Checked Out". Which DM reviews are you talking about? These seem to tell a different story.

https://www.coursereport.com/schools/devmountain

I agree with you. I think everyone would be better off if we admitted that all of of were beginners and learned things gradually at some point. No one got born knowing javascript syntax. No senior knows everything now.

Simultaneously, plenty of positions are ok for beginners and it is good idea to hire people who are still learning basics for them.

Ex TIY employee here. I only left the place because I wanted to go back to developing fulltime.

As someone who worked with the instructors and campuses, the global team, and taught for years at The Iron Yard, I can tell you the team -- especially the campus teams -- were largely the right mix of talent - great engineers that cared about communicating well and respecting folks from all walks of life.

With that said, after the investment rounds some things definitely began to take shape:

1. The global staff slowly became more and more steps removed from the daily convo's of the instructors and campus directors

2. There were regional managers and others who were brand new to the business; the company hired mostly from outside to bring in management team and half of them never ran a local campus first (to me their credentials from prior positions didn't always matter). They should have hired all mgmt from within, as they sadly did not mirror the culture of the campus teams.

3. There's such a plethora of schools out there now competing for the same customer-base. The Iron Yard spent a LOT of time, effort, and money making some of the best curriculum I've ever seen - including its own platform for distributing content, videos, running live-editable code blocks of any language on Docker instances on the fly, and homework and review features for staff. But a lot of places competed on price and still operated without approval from state education boards or meeting any national standards.

4. Instructors needed a change of pace, as they are constant learners too. Any churn and change of staff usually meant that "If it wasn't documented, then the lessons were not learned in-full for the next employee". So, I definitely saw some campuses run into trouble because when a veteran employee left (no upward movement for them, etc because there was already too much mgmt in-place) the impact was quite hard.

I loved the team, but ultimately a few miscalculated moves and operational/strategic retries burned the candle at both ends faster than the mgmt expected.

Is the issue the applicants? With all due respect, in terms of effective practice, the sheer number of hours put in has nothing, well not "nothing", but a lot less to do with it than the quality and type of hours spent. One needs a lot of the effective type of hour. It is about what one practices, the repetition, the evaluation of one's mistakes, and the fixing of these mistakes. And then the doing it correctly at least 22 more times. In a row. But mainly, it is the doing, with very short bursts of targeted critique at regular and frequent intervals delivered by a master who can help you learn to spot these pitfalls sooner than you would yourself. Respectfully, a lot of time can be wasted in a shortened educational model like a bootcamp for code with extraneous stuff as a part of the "firehose" method of teaching, which has become a beloved buzzword in the industry. The science on effective practice for efficient skill acquisition is not new. http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... That isn't to say that students should not prepare to put in hours. But schools should prepare to make the very most of a few hours. I don't know about TIY or Dev Mountain, but I do know that several of the schools in NYC have not yet revised their curricula to optimize the hours spent. Getting better students doesn't help ineffective curricula. The school's job is to teach those who are willing to set aside time and money. When one wrangles ineffective curricula or online teaching materials that behave wonkily and waste one's time because they malfunction constantly, those are precious minutes one could have spent in effective practice. The students also need teachers and advocates who blame themselves first if effective learning isn't occurring. They need schools who blame themselves first if they aren't getting work. As a student, I'd be reluctant to spend money at a school that didn't blame itself for its own outcomes failures.

The thing is, students can't hear about the outcomes failures as much as they should because no one on the student side (the non-moneymaking side of it) can afford to be honest; they are the victims of this, especially once they have spent money. This is why I'm trying to help with that here. "Review sites" (not to name any names) are often just glorified advertising services. (literally handled by the marketing departments of these coding schools) I know this because I have been on both sides of this- inside the school and out. But since we are talking about failures that cause closings of schools here, and since so many will be seeing this page, I think it is time we talk about these issues honestly. The victors will be the schools who take responsibility for their own failures. They will be those who are brave enough to invite anonymous critique they can't control. (not "independently verified" claims of their success metrics they can control by virtue of what they measure and who is doing the verifying, and how much detail they go into in these metrics, and how much they get to leave out of that whole story- which is a lot, by the way.)

I was one of the original advisory board members of DevMountain (and father of one of the three founders). I also run an entrepreneur bootcamp in Utah, where DevMountain is located. This assertion about the founders of DevMountain "checking out" is unfounded. Sure, they are now wealthier than they were and have security and may seem more at ease (a natural occurrence after an exit), but they take their continuing roles seriously. Only one of the three to date has "retired" (about 8 months after the acquisition) and the other two (including my son) are still there working every day. Capella has been pleased with them. Also, just 10 minutes ago I heard about some exciting things being worked on and arranged by the founders -- innovative approaches to the industry. These two founders are still the top two leaders in the DevMountain subsidiary of Capella. They continue to innovate in the areas of coding bootcamp curriculum development, student success, marketing, and much more. As a side note, Capella has been a great acquirer, basically leaving DevMountain as it was, only adding some financial clout and general oversight, leaving the original DevMountain CEO in that position with nearly full discretion over the enterprise.