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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?

#121

Post by austenallred »

EpicEng wrote: post #116
austenallred wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing apples to oranges - of course 4 yrs is better than 3 months. Consider the same person at some point in the future, and it would be bootcamp grad + 3 years experience vs CS grad. You could make a case for both at that point, but I'd guess many would be inclined to opt for a bootcamp grad + experience, all things being equal.

But you're suggesting that the employer should be paying for the remaining 3.75 years of experience. I'm certainly not going to hire someone who's going to require that sort of investment in comparison to a fresh college grad. You may as well just grab seemingly clever people off of the street.

Yup, that's one of the flaws of bootcamps. But that said, there's lots a bootcamp grad can do with relatively little training, and some of that are things that CS grads may struggle to do day one. A college grad, of course, will require some training too. Just a different level of it.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#122

Post by austenallred »

JCzynski wrote: post #105
austenallred wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How deep doesn't App Academy go into stuff like data structures, algorithms, memory management, architecture, scaling, etc.? I see mention of algorithms on the site, but not much else that would lead me to believe developers understand more fundamental CS concepts.

Not very; about 10 hours is spent on that with instructors, plus more time practicing it in the form of whiteboard questions. Which means there was a wide variance from most knowledgable to least.

Ya that'll do it

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#123

Post by vinceguidry »

auston wrote: post #82
staticautomatic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered the Georgia Tech online masters in comp sci?

Do you need a degree to do that? Or can you test your way in?

Yes.

http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program-info/admission-criteria

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#124

Post by bcassedy »

JCzynski wrote: post #77
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…

>Don't get me wrong, most of the skills gap is for capable engineers, and if you understand data structures, algorithms, architecture, memory management, etc. you'll get a job very quickly. We're talking within a week. Empirically, that's totally false. The people I knew who went to the same bootcamp (App Academy) as me and had the strongest skills took longer, not shorter, to get jobs. The average was around 9 month…

The opposite was true for my cohort. There seems to always be at least one or two of the top students that are dead set on making as much money as possible so they take the extra time to brush up skills and projects to land interviews with and be successful at the absolute top tier companies (Google/Facebook + Unicorns).

a/A also really pushes the idea that students should leverage offers against each other. I suspect that combined with the success of Haseeb's article is that top students are now more likely to push very hard to get top dollar for their worth instead of taking ~10k less and getting to work sooner.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#125

Post by joshvm »

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.

Learning algorithms for the sake of it is incredibly dull, for me. I find reading about nice algorithms interesting, but I don't remember anything later unless I'm solving a problem.

You're better off working through a problem set like Project Euler, or trying some TopCoder Single Round Matches (SRMs, there's a huge archive). At least that way you'll see some interesting puzzles and you'll get exposed to the majority of the 'standard' algorithms.

By the time you get 'good' you should be able to read a problem statement and immediately think "Ok, this is some kind of graph problem" or "List of sorted stuff? Probably need to use binary search". There are some good books like Skienna's the Algorithm Design Manual which encourages this kind of intuition.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#126

Post by wishinghand »

> Google’s director of education echoed this sentiment: “Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry.”

No shit? Of course 12 week programs won't help anyone get into Google. None of them advertise that. They're all web development or app development curriculums. Google is an aspirational position that requires a brilliant graduate with some great internship experience.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#127

Post by wishinghand »

timwaagh wrote: post #66

Those prices are too high. I dont think anyone has these amounts lying around unless they already have good jobs (and hence do not need this). These programs should compromise on immersion and cost about $2000 for three months.

I don't think someone able to teach the basics of programming would want to settle for $6,666.67 a month(assuming a class size of ten). That's also assuming they had no gaps or dropouts between classes. Sure, in your example it's no longer immersive but:

1. Immersion is what gets even the weaker programmers through. Non-immersion will drop the placement rate greatly.

2. There's still a lot of prep work so the teacher will still basically be a full time teacher. And that's assuming a one person operation. They'll need someone for advertising, outreach to local companies, and their own technical needs.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#128

Post by throwawayxyz709 »

coldtea wrote: post #69
throwawayxyz709 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried seeing a doctor or therapist? I have the same feelings as you and I'm giving SSRIs another go. There's a difference between hating your job without being able to cope and hating your job while being able to cope. Have you considered that you're depressed? Are you able to enjoy things and be productive outside of work or do you feel the same way you do as when you're at work? It can be a hard road to tr…

> There's a difference between hating your job without being able to cope and hating your job while being able to cope. The difference being in the latter case you've given up all hope and just keep at it?

Sorry, I forgot that in Hacker News Land, everyone has an awesome rockstar ninja startup job where they work 60-hour weeks to write the next JavaScript AI piece of crap and god dammit, they like it! Yes, turns out not everyone is enamored with their jobs. This might come as a surprise to you.

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#129

Post by throwawayxyz709 »

bdcravens wrote: post #109
pm24601 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm..... > I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a developer. I disagree. Lets try this shall we: "I would say that someone who needs a curriculum won't succeed as a " ... doctor ... pilot ... nurse ... electrician ... architect I am not willing to accept a self-taught brain surgeon.

Nor would I. There's a reason why we're talking about this on HACKER News. Every field you mentioned is a licensed profession, in an industry surrounded by regulations and inspections. Every one of those fields involves the health or safety of other people. Programming is a pretty wide open field, without regulation and highly prescribed ways of performing the work. It feels extremely disingenuous to compare a brain…

Maybe that's why brain surgery is a successful, reputable field and we're stuck with shit like Uber for Skateboards and Redux..

Re: Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

#130

Post by learc83 »

wishinghand wrote: post #126

> Google’s director of education echoed this sentiment: “Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry.” No shit? Of course 12 week programs won't help anyone get into Google. None of them advertise that. They're all web development or app development curriculums…

>None of them advertise that.

App Academy does. They list Google on their home page.

They do seem to place some people with Google, but from what I've learned looking into them though, I think it has more to do with selection than training.

To me, it seems like top bootcamps are 3 month long interviews that the interviewee pays for.

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