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Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

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Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#41

Post by maxxxxx »

matwood wrote: post #15
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #3

I think the biggest factor causing these bootcamps to go out of business was stated in the article: there is no IT worker shortage. The fact that most of the people attending those bootcamps already held Bachelors degrees strongly implies that. If there was a real worker shortage, employers would be hiring people without degrees and have them do the best they can. I think bootcamps arose as a result of an industry-wi…

> there is no IT worker shortage. There is no junior worker shortage. A bootcamp grad is competing with other bootcamp (100+ boot camps) grads, and people who just self started and got to coding. Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging.

"Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging. "

Strangely finding a job is also quite challenging for senior people....

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#42

Post by octalmage »

trentmb wrote: post #16
pjdemers wrote: post #10

People are realizing that even though coding pays well, it's not a job for everyone. We hired 4 people out of boot camps. All had a decent level of skill (of course they did, we choose the 4 we liked out of dozens available). However after a few weeks, two of them left, saying: "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades". And they went back to their old jobs and old pay.

> "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades" Not a bootcamp grad, but I just hit my two year mark a couple weeks ago and want to blow my brains out. Writing internal web applications is the most mind numbing thing ever. It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work. The real issue is that I have no idea what field I'd pivot into.

Have you considered a different company? I worked at a large company for a few years building internal tools and I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't imagine working there for the rest of my life. But I enjoyed writing code in my free time and knew it was what I wanted to do. I've been at a smaller company for ~5 years and I couldn't be happier.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#43

Post by austenallred »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #39
austenallred wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, especially when there are so many different ways to learn and a million different paths to take. One of the most important parts of bootcamps, in my mind, is that all of the curriculum is there, in the right order, and on a set schedule. When I taught myself to program I probably spent 80% of my time finding the right resources and understanding what…

It's difficult to make an argument for bootcamps, though, when they won't teach you most of what you'd need to know either. The curriculum is typically focused around a single tech stack (many teach Mongo for unfathomable reasons), leaving students ill prepared for the workforce. Debugging? How to sort a lidt efficiently? What is a hash? All of these are arguably critical to understanding simple, common code; you'd b…

You have a point. Here's the problem the bootcamps will start to run into:

They're teaching as much as they can in twelve weeks, but lengthening the program increases the cost dramatically. Why Mongo? Because they're already using JS so they don't have to teach two languages (no time), and mongo is super easy to pick up. They'll learn other stuff on the job. Why aren't they teaching how to debug and what a hash is? Well we have to choose between that and understanding what a database is, so you take your pick.

They would love to have classes be six months or a year, but then they'd have to double their prices (eliminating a lot of the demand) and people would have to support themselves with no pay for twice as long (eliminating most of the rest of it). It's hard enough finding people to take 12 weeks off and pay $10k, and now we need to charge $20k for six months? No one can afford that, what we have now works well enough.

In order to do something longer and more thorough/in-depth you'd probably have to start with a fundamentally different business model.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#44

Post by sokoloff »

maxxxxx wrote: post #41
matwood wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no IT worker shortage. There is no junior worker shortage. A bootcamp grad is competing with other bootcamp (100+ boot camps) grads, and people who just self started and got to coding. Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging.

"Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging. " Strangely finding a job is also quite challenging for senior people....

I think there's a market for lemons problem at play. Mid and senior developers who are effective at what they do are incredibly valuable and valued and therefore don't generally have to look via the main queue of job applicants. They often get retained well at their current place and are poached/referred more often than the average or ineffective developer.

(This breaks down when a company suddenly closes or does a layoff so deep that it puts a lot of good people on the street.)

The flip side of the very effective using a different mechanism is that the people in the main pool have a harder go of it, as hiring managers are used to seeing a parade of people who interview poorly (and therefore interview A LOT) or who join and fizzle out (and therefore job hunt A LOT).

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#45

Post by blfr »

Teaching people in general isn't a very good business. Even the lauded head start programs that last much longer than boot camps and target kids (so they have both much more potential influence and more time to recoup the costs) achieve meagre results if any.

In fact, there are reasons to believe that human capital is mostly what you're born with plus (or maybe it's more of a multiplier) the accumulated achievements of your predecessors with very little input from organized education.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha....

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#46

Post by nilkn »

sokoloff wrote: post #35
acdha wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market. Outside of a few hotspots like SF, do offered wages really back that up? It's good being a developer but it certainly doesn't look like a desperate shortage.

In metro Boston area, we're paying new college grads $100K to start and sometimes losing on comp. We're not "desperate", but for the overall market wage for new college grads to be 1.5x the state median household income, that smells like shortage to me.

The state median household income includes high school dropouts working at McDonald's, and it includes folks living in very affordable rural areas with low wages. It's not a meaningful point of comparison when you're looking at a subset of workers who are highly educated and seeking jobs in a technically demanding field at companies located in almost exclusively expensive metro areas.

To add to that, the Massachusetts median household income is nearly $70k. And in Boston? It's almost $80k. Moreover, the median family income in Boston is $100k.

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/massachusetts/boston/

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#47

Post by yorwba »

icantdrive55 wrote: post #32
kevingadd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were thinking about working as an instructor at a bootcamp, low placement rates would probably discourage me from doing it - the last thing I want is to participate in a training program that cons jobseekers out of money, even if the salary is good.

I have found when it comes to money, and career; 95% just go along with the flow. "Hay--its legal?" (I got my first dose of reality in Chiropractic School. It was obviously placebo, but placebo was just not talked about. Selling out is so common. I'm not talking the cute TV version on of selling out, but the real people who con the uninformed, and vulnerable out of their money daily. There's a lot of denial in so man…

You seem to have been shadowbanned for a long time now, but I didn't see anything in your comment history to justify it. Quite persistent of you to just continue posting! Maybe you should try contacting the mods to get your ban lifted?

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#48

Post by SyneRyder »

trentmb wrote: post #16
pjdemers wrote: post #10

People are realizing that even though coding pays well, it's not a job for everyone. We hired 4 people out of boot camps. All had a decent level of skill (of course they did, we choose the 4 we liked out of dozens available). However after a few weeks, two of them left, saying: "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades". And they went back to their old jobs and old pay.

> "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades" Not a bootcamp grad, but I just hit my two year mark a couple weeks ago and want to blow my brains out. Writing internal web applications is the most mind numbing thing ever. It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work. The real issue is that I have no idea what field I'd pivot into.

It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work.

Are you sure you're not expecting too much of yourself? Keeping focused is pretty difficult for programmers in general, we often need breaks to recharge. Famous Joel Spolsky essay related to this called Fire & Motion:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

[But if you're not enjoying the work, that's different. Life's too short for that, find something that you enjoy.]

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#49

Post by octalmage »

ellius wrote: post #14
austenallred wrote: post #7

There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to start. First, to say there's no skills gap is insanity. I refuse to believe anyone in the industry actually believes that - even the worst bootcamps are placing folks, they just place folks that are not well prepared and shift the burden of training to the company. I'm constantly blown away that some of those people get jobs, and they somehow keep th…

Is there a good way to learn those skills at a professional level outside of a university setting? I feel like I've taught myself a sufficient amount of front end, back end, ops (Docker, IaC etc), but I'm at a loss for how to test my ability with algorithms and data structures, memory management, etc. I've picked up some books, but I don't have a good way to measure my ability or demonstrate it to employers.

Create some open source projects in the field you are interested in! This is a great way to demonstrate that you know what you're doing, especially if others are using your project and collaborating with you. When I interview people I always look at their GitHub and dig into their work. Just make sure that your code has tests and has ok documentation.

Bonus: if one of them gets popular you'll have companies coming to you.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#50

Post by eliben »

Economics 101 - because there are too many of them? There was demand; with demand, supply found its way into the market. As often happens, supply then overshot demand which led to lowered prices which led to shrinkage of supply.

... none of this will prevent a "Why are new coding bootcamps springing up like mushrooms after rain" piece of journalism appearing in a few weeks...

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