
U.S. coding school Galvanize to lay off 11 percent of workforce - artsandsci
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-galvanize-layoffs-idUSKCN1B92AD
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ProAm
I'm wonder what effect the unemployment levels have on bootcamp attendance?

I would guess low unemployment would cause attendance to go down for people
grasping at a chance for a tech job?

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busterarm
I also wonder if the market for low-skill juniors is really bad right now
(note: I'm not saying that bootcamp grads are bad). I started to see this a
couple of years ago and I had the sense that most of the hirable people past
their college years who would attend a bootcamp probably did already.

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bobbywilson0
disclosure: I used to work at Galvanize as an instructor, a couple years ago.

I don't have any connection to Galvanize now so I don't feel the need to
defend or promote bootcamps, but I do feel like I have some knowledge on the
situation. When I was instructing I was constantly worried about there being
enough jobs for my students. This was also when the startup market was
"hotter" than it is now. The thing that I came to realize looking back is that
there is actually still a huge amount of steady demand for software engineers.

It isn't necessarily startups though. I have definitely heard from startups
that they feel like they are inundated with bootcamp grads. I think part of
the reason is because working at a cool startup is part of the picture that is
painted to perspective students.

The less exciting (to the graduates) opportunity is working with big companies
that are replacing their previous outsourced staff with internal junior
engineers. They also didn't want to hire one or two grads, they were
interested in hiring five to ten.

To me at least it seems like larger companies are trying to adjust their
staffing to accommodate a more fluid staff that comes and goes rather than the
longer term employees of previous generations. Which includes always having a
broad opportunity for new employees, which dovetails into the bootcamps
constantly producing graduates.

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tdeck
I always got the impression that most of the truly entry-level software jobs
(the kind where they routinely hire people with associates degrees or no
degree) are in unglamorous companies, in cities all throughout the country,
writing code in unsexy languages like SQL, C#, and J2EE. These companies don't
typically try to pretend they only hire the top 10% of the entire industry,
and they're willing to train people on the job. They don't pay the big bucks,
but it's better than working at Kroger.

Unfortunately the narrative of "you too could be writing ugly line-of-business
applications for $40k/year" is not an exciting sell, as you've said, to people
who have watched a few episodes of Silicon Valley. So there's an expectation
mismatch. We want to point at the Bureau of Labor Statistics about openings in
the software industry and think that they're about changing the world with
node.js and AWS lambda, because that's a more promising vision of tomorrow
that doesn't involve encountering Windows Server 2005 in the course of your
daily work.

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whipoodle
Sure, doing your time in those sorts of places and then moving on is a good
approach. That's more or less what I did. (I went to college for CS, but I'm
oldish.) But those jobs can suck for reasons that don't really have anything
to do with technology.

While you're unlikely to catch me extolling the virtues of cool-guy startups,
they do tend to have the benefit that they "get" developers and bias towards
facilitating the work rather than the endless bullshit you tend to get sucked
into in the bigger places.

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blackguardx
I always thought it was weird that they had their own venture fund. Shouldn't
a growing business invest in itself?

~~~
kenthorvath
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can both invest in yourself, while
investing in other opportunities. The problem is how to allocate your
resources optimally.

Having early access to motivated and talented programmers that may have a good
idea for a disruptive product or technology seems like a potential advantage
for a venture fund.

Particularly if those seeking funding are also seeking training and career
advice.

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good_vibes
Does anyone have experience as a student there? How did you fare in the job
market afterwards?

I almost went there but chose not to.

~~~
t0mbstone
Bit of context: I used to live in Denver, and I would hang out at Galvanize a
lot. I was friends with a number of the instructors and students.

I worked at a company in Denver that hired at least 5 people straight out of
gSchool, and I was one of the employees on the team who was given the task of
onboarding and mentoring the gSchool graduates and helping them when they got
stuck (which was pretty much constantly).

Each one of the graduates had at least a basic, fundamental understanding of
programming with Ruby on Rails and Javascript, but they were all very much
junior-level. They were all deeply brainwashed in TDD and Agile dogma, but
would often become paralyzed when encountering real world problems.

Most of them had sub-par developer instincts (as was expected), and all of
them required about a year-long ramp-up and a lot of on-the-job mentoring and
training before they were really pulling their weight.

When you look at the quality of the code that was being created and the sheer
amount of manpower and money being thrown at mentoring all of the junior level
code school graduates, I would rather have had a single senior level developer
than 4 juniors combined.

But that's not how the pay worked out. A senior dev doing the same amount of
work as 4 juniors was only making like $120K, and I happen to know that every
one of the code school students was hired on for at least $65K a year (if not
more).

The worst part? After about a year, half of them had leveraged their new
year's worth of real, on-the-job experience into job offers from other
companies, where they were presumably hired for even more.

My personal opinion is that the company I worked for kind of got shafted a
little bit by their enthusiasm and optimism with the idea of bringing on so
many junior level developers straight out of code camp. Especially after we
spent so much time and money mentoring them, only to have them leave for
better jobs elsewhere.

I have a strong suspicion that many other companies have suffered from similar
experiences with code school graduates and were left with bitter taste in
their mouths.

If so, that would certainly explain why so many code schools are starting to
encounter difficulties and are having to downsize or close. Companies are
starting to catch on to the fact that they are still going to have to dump a
good year of mentoring and training into each one of these "graduates" before
they are earning their keep.

TL;DR: The gSchool graduates that I had personal experience with seemed to
make out like bandits. That was before the market cooled down, though.

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santaclaus
Is this the same company in SOMA by the Bay Bridge?

~~~
omot
yeah

