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Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

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Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#71

Post by Techonomicon »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #30
justin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My youngest brother went through Dev Bootcamp in 2012. He had graduated from a top 30 university but wasn't able to find a great job and had been doing some part time, low skill work. DBC literally changed his life. Post graduation he immediately got a job at a dev shop as a programmer, and now 5 years later is a great developer gainfully employed in Silicon Valley. Not sure why you would shit on the grave of a progr…

Trouble with anecdotes is that it is not data. I'm happy for your brother but that still doesn't change the fact that most bootcamps are overpromising and underdelivering on their promises of gainful employment. It's simply not possible to learn to program in bootcamp time frames. I'm certain if we saw actual numbers it would not be a pretty picture. For the truly motivated it is much better to go to recurse.com or j…

I fully support this comment, and have been doubling-down for a while on the notion that people who come out of hacker schools and "do well" just had a knack for it in the first place.

We have been looking for a very entry-level dev to be in a pretty entry level role that would be perfect for someone to get their feet wet in the industry.

Every single person we've interviewed from a "hacker school" has been from Hack Reactor. I'd say something like 40% of them would actually be able to be some sort of "developer" given that they keep up the practice. About 20% (at best) are what I would consider an actual "entry level dev intern"

Entry level in this context is basically just the ability to code some basic html, css, javascript, with a computer given to you, and a task to work on over the course of a day. Many of the previous Hack Reactor students we had interview (at least 60%) (some even being "assistants"), in my opinion, have no business in software development. They were technical enough to understand "web dev" in conversation, but just couldn't manifest that into anything useful without huge amounts of guidance for menial tasks.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#72

Post by smm2000 »

bovitclan wrote: post #43
austenallred wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can m…

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

Works well for most companies that hire exclusively from top tier universities. They definitely miss out on some talent but unless they need thousands of engineers, they can find all talent they need from just a few top universities. Probably overpay 10k-40k/year for that privilege compared to equally skilled/smart people from other unis but it's chump change in overall employee cost. Also makes interviewing easier - rejecting 90-95% of applicants from lower tier state schools who could not fizzbuzz is not fun.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#73

Post by austenallred »

brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #69
austenallred wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. Yeah I'm the founder of https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science - a computer science academy that's free up-front and takes a percentage of salary for two years after you get a job. The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything . It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. Also…

but then one has to be affluent enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to do a mountain of pre-work and then get educated or re-educated, or for many in the USA, re-re-educated, and then one has to then afford to remain unemployed (bootcamps tend to go light on this part when recruiting) while looking for a place that wants to hire a bootcamp graduate.(hint: tough for diversity candidates here) These plac…

We're not a bootcamp, but your points are well-founded.

> But then one has to be $$ enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to get educated or re-educated

You're right: Not everyone can afford to not work for six+ months. We don't have a perfect solution for everyone yet. But it's much easier for most Americans to find a way to stay alive for 6 months than it is for them to find $10,000 lying around. Basic subsistence, especially with a tiny bit of help from a safety net of some sort is generally close to within reach, and if it's not we don't have a way to help yet.

For example, we had a student last week that has been living with a friend, and we learned she was so poor she couldn't afford a computer to code with, and had been using an old Android tablet and a cloud editor. We shipped her one, but for many "enough to stay alive" is much, much easier to find than some amount of cash.

> If we actually had a skills gap that needed filling why aren't these employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves?

Well, some do. Others have ridiculous recruiters' fees that are enough to pay for student tuitions. This is true not just of alternatives to higher ed, but of colleges. Why doesn't Google also become Stanford? Probably because that's a lot of work and what we have is close enough.

To be clear, with regard to SWE, I don't think there's that big of a skills gap. It's not like there's a desperate shortage for junior rails semi-devs out there. But employers definitely hire folks and they definitely pay big recruiting fees and there's definitely demand.

> Why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months?

Other than the requisite time to get your first job (which is generally 3-6 months regardless), I haven't seen that any from tier one bootcamps struggling to find work for months. Probably three months on average, but that's pretty normal. Maybe we have a different understanding of "tier 1."

> Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?

Because crappy bootcamps want to lie and make money.

I mean look, there's ITT Tech, which is a complete rip-off for the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean college in general is a bad thing for everyone. Somehow, though, that's how non-university programming academies get lumped together - one bad bootcamp? This entire idea must be horrible! As with everything, there are shades of grey.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#74

Post by nathan-wailes »

I don't know if I should feel sad about this, but I do feel sad about this. As others have mentioned, DBC was the first company in this industry, and their excellent execution seems to have been what led to so many other entrepreneurs becoming convinced that this concept could work; they really did a great service for people in this country who didn't graduate college with a hard-science / engineering degree. I considered going to a bootcamp back in February of 2013 (one year after DBC launched), met Shereef and his cofounder Jesse Farmer at their SF location, and left very impressed with what they had created and with them personally.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#75

Post by brooklyn_ashey »

busterarm wrote: post #58
sylvainkalache wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are doing this at Holberton since we announced in 2015. It's a 2-year program based in San Francisco, no upfront tuition but a percentage of students salary when they get a job. The program is also quite different from regular education, we have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and by collaborating with their classmates. Check us out https://www.holbertonschool.com/ It's indee…

Who can afford to live in San Fran without working for 2 years (9 months)?

And who can afford to have $15,000 taken off the top of their salary between $51,000 and $100,000? I hope this graduate can find remote work and live in a tent in a national park campground nearby a major tech employment city with a killer public transportation system that reaches its public park campgrounds. There are actual bears on Bear Mountain by the way.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#76

Post by morgante »

bovitclan wrote: post #43
austenallred wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can m…

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

Not really. Money helps to get in, but elite universities provide the most generous financial aid of any schools in the country. If you come from a anything below the middle class and get in, you likely won't pay a cent.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#77

Post by brooklyn_ashey »

arikr wrote: post #4
arikr wrote: post #2

"Hi Andrew, we had actually been working too find a sustainable business model since the very beginning. Ultimately we couldn't find one that didn't sacrifice on our commitment to provide the highest quality program possible while keeping our program open to the most diverse students possible." What does that mean? It seems like this should've been a profitable business - 3000 graduates @ $10k/piece = $30mm revenue.

e.g. Financial aid sponsored by dev bootcamp for some students, or even corporate sponsors for financial aid didn't work? There also seem to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps running that are doing fine, so this is confusing.

It would be helpful to know if they were "doing fine" and what that actually means in numbers, student outcomes, and values of the school.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#78

Post by chronic6a5 »

brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #67
bovitclan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and the…

> The only answer here is money. Money. That's it.

Exactly. I'm rich. I didn't even work that hard; it was mostly inherited. I "bought" my way through Stanford/Harvard and learned far more than my peers, solely because I had money to pursue side projects and could hire experienced PhD tutors.

I feel bad for those without enough money. With that said, I will do everything in my power to keep this status quo, whether that means donating to lobbyists or tricking others into suboptimal life decisions. Any poor person would do the same (in fact they already do with their other non-monetary resources such as time).

This is absolutely not fair but that is the reality. I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot by making the playing field more fair.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#79

Post by jfarmer »

nathan-wailes wrote: post #74

I don't know if I should feel sad about this, but I do feel sad about this. As others have mentioned, DBC was the first company in this industry, and their excellent execution seems to have been what led to so many other entrepreneurs becoming convinced that this concept could work; they really did a great service for people in this country who didn't graduate college with a hard-science / engineering degree. I consi…

Hi! Thanks for the nice words. :)

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#80

Post by panorama »

It always frustrates me when commenters are overwhelmingly undereducated about a topic but continue to make broad, sweeping generalizations. There's a ton of negativity, outright assuming, and misinformation being thrown around here. It happens in every bootcamp-related thread (and topics in other subjects of course).

No, not every bootcamp was legit. No, making assumptions about all bootcamps based on a handful of bad apples is not an honest critique. No, your anecdote about a bad bootcamp grad does not hold more weight than someone else's anecdote about a bootcamp completely changing their life.

The fact is DBC, which spawned an entirely new industry, was an overwhelmingly positive force. DBC has always made inclusivity and community a priority. For the vast majority of students, DBC has been a much higher ROI investment than a 4 year college degree and changes the way people think about modern education systems. There are thousands of capable engineers (including myself) out there today thanks to DBC, which often operated with high stress and, apparently, minimal funds.

It's a shame each bootcamp topic has its share of otherwise reasonable people making unfounded claims. In a community that values programming, startups, inclusivity, and helping others, you'd think the negativity and baseless accusations would be a lot more infrequent. It's been 5 years since DBC began and yet commenter ignorance still requires graduates to come in and defend their bootcamps.

If you have no idea what you're talking about, it's fine, ask and I'd be happy to answer. But this community really ought to be celebrating what DBC has accomplished.

Source: I'm an early 2013 DBC grad who has worked in SF tech since graduating. I've also helped hundreds of bootcamp grads with their job search post-graduation (meaning I have my fair share of honest criticisms for DBC). The vast majority of people I've talked with are now employed at companies most people on HN would love to work for.

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