Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?

Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?
hackeducation.com

I think bootcamps arose as a result of an industry-wide PR move to give the illusion of a worker shortage, done in an effort to push more people into the tech industry and increase the labor pool significantly, thus pushing wage growth below inflation. With the labor market finally actually tightening, and with the PR move not working as well as was hoped, people are starting to see that the virtue signalling offered by bootcamps aren't as necessary as they thought.

I would suggest instead that we focus on two other problems with bootcamps, one mentioned in the article and one not:

* As the article suggests, bootcamps are probably not as effective at placing graduates as they'd like us to believe. There is a stigma to bootcamps, which is telling, because there's no such stigma for self-taught programmers. That may be because bootcamps aren't effective, or it may be because of correctable market inefficiencies that someone will make money arbitraging out. I'd guess it's a little of both.

* It's probably not easy to staff a bootcamp. They don't pay instructors particularly well. If you can effectively train 70% of a cohort of students well enough to secure professional employment, there's a lot of other stuff you can do in this field. To make the business work, bootcamps have to balance the willingness of students to pay with the salary demands of instructors, while retaining enough to grow. Maybe that's just hard to do.

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 them, as the companies just start training from almost scratch. That really sucks, and a lot of companies are (rightly) wary of that, and a lot of companies throw bootcamp resumes straight in the trash can, but there are enough that won't that it doesn't matter.

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. But most bootcamp grads don't know any of that stuff, so the market is flooded with junior rails devs. (And even those folks still slowly get OK jobs).

There are audited, standardized reports from an organization called CIRR. Look at them - you'll see 90%+ placement rates, audited and from third parties. Granted there are a lot of lies on the home pages of bootcamp grad websites, but the perception HN has is much worse than reality at the good bootcamps.

I know the internal financials of quite a few bootcamps, and most are making a killing. It's really not hard to make money by charging $10,000/head so long as you keep demand. Iron Yard got out ahead of its skis and tried to open 16 locations at once. I have no idea what happened to Dev Bootcamp but the only way they could be losing money is if their expenses were absurd. They were bought for $80 million. I think the most likely scenario is the acquirer tried to change things up and killed everything.