Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down

The biggest downfall I see in the idea behind the Boot Camps is that they are great at pumping out entry level coders, but don't seem to offer much in terms of career growth or learn trajectory outside of the basics. I'd be much more inclined to pay for one of these programs (which is another issue when you add the cost of tuition on top of regular living expenses + time away from work) if they offered some sort of career mentor-ship for a designated time period after landing that first role. They could offer counseling for career growth, additional classes, etc. I think that would create more return on invested from a student prospective.

Overall I think the boot camp space got way too crowed too quickly, which is understandable considering the amount of people trying to land that entry level paycheck.

All you had to do was look at the stack they were teaching and see that the entity running the camp was just getting suckers to pay for their own on the job training.

> While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies. In other words, they don’t teach students the other important entrepreneurial tech skills. This makes sense seeing how their focus is coding. But as I stated in my last article, many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers – those who have strong leadership, communication, and team-building skills. Being a coding god is one skill set, but knowing how to work collaboratively on a technical team and manage a product is another skill set in itself.

This type of belief in what "coding" is, is hugely responsible for both the rise and fall of these horribly designed, while possibly well-intended, "bootcamps."

Being a good software developer has absolutely nothing to do with "important entrepreneurial tech skills." Knowing how to tackle problems, envision loops and algorithms, write pseudocode, understand the basics of how requests on the Internet work, or how your computer accesses databases or files; these are skills of a good software developer.

The end goal of being a software developer is not CEO.

"many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers"

No, recruiters all over the world are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because they can't find any competent programmers anymore. There are hundreds of people who were taught how to write a conditional in Ruby on Rails available, but ask them to tackle a problem like: "how would you store 1 million strings, search through them while caching results, and make sure only certain individuals can access certain strings," and you get a deer in the headlights look. So recruiters don't ask questions like that anymore. They ask questions that can be simply memorized and regurgitated.

When there's no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we're not in a good spot.

The sooner we can dispel the myth that programming and software is just "coding," "hustling," and "entrepreneurial skills" the sooner companies won't have to pony up over $150k/yr to find a competent software developer.

I think the sweet spot for a coursework in programming is a year to two years. That's essentially how long my university degree was if you remove the non-CS required classes.