
The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder - drewsing
http://www.inc.com/salvador-rodriguez/devschool-coding-bootcamps.html
======
Ayraa
A lot of the students enrolled hoping to get a job later.

The scam aside, this goes to show that too many people still believe in the
old system: learn skill in school -> get job. Especially that one student who
lamented now he can't prove he completed the lessons from this bootcamp. Would
a no name bootcamp impress any employer?

Learning in a classroom (or via Slack chats!) is not enough. It's just the
first step. The key is applying it as soon as possible by doing projects, for
yourself or for someone else. For free in the beginning if need be. Employers
now want to see proof you can do something, not a piece of paper showing you
can. Plus publishing these projects online can help employers / recruiters
discover you.

Too many parents are still teaching their kids a paint by the numbers formula
they knew for life: go to school -> land job. Work there -> rise through the
ranks. The good news is, there's a hundred different ways to land a job now.
The bad news is, trying, failing at, trying again at those different ways can
be hard.

~~~
49531
As a former instructor at a code school I always told students that learning
to code would put them on a successful trajectory more than make them
instantly valuable. It's not an on/off situation. A good engineer is always
learning and improving.

Code schools too often make it look like you attend and then succeed, there's
a lot more than goes on in between.

------
davidhariri
"He had a penchant for oversharing personal information and sometimes ripped
hits from a colorful glass bong during video lectures with the students."

"I did learn some stuff," Johnson says. "I can write some code, and I didn't
know anything before I started."

Oh jeez. I feel really bad for his students.

~~~
kafkaesq
I wouldn't look down on that remark. People are different, and everyone needs
to start somewhere.

------
jdhawk
Has anyone done a coding bootcamp? With the plethora of relatively cheap/free
resources out there from Universities, to professional institutions, all the
way to YouTube, what is the appeal?

Do the certifications count for anything to hiring managers? Do you need
someone to kick you in the ass on a daily basis to keep moving? Do you need
the higher touch Q&A thats not available in Forums/StackOverflow type places?

~~~
rajangdavis
I went through General Assembly's Web Development Immersive 2 years ago.

I have made good use of what I have learned in that program; however, I would
be reluctant to recommend that everyone should take it.

It really depends on how much of your own time you are willing to invest in
learning the material. I had 1 year of some web development experience at that
point, so I was familiar with some of the material and didn't mind putting in
work to get better. It was great for me in that it rounded out some of my
skills and got me interested in bash which was something I never expected.

They worked really hard to get feedback from students to ensure that our
experience was what we wanted and that they were also challenging us without
being overwhelming. They also had a very passionate and personable staff that
would answer any questions assuming that you had tried to solve your problem
before asking.

They encouraged students to fail first so that they would eventually not fear
failure; this was one of the most important lessons that I have taken with me.
I don't think you can really learn this from an online course or tutorial.

I saw people go into the program without any developer experience come out of
it building complex web apps that were using newer technologies (at that time)
like Web Sockets and NodeJS. I also saw people go into the program and not
really get much from it, but I don't know how much work they really put in.

A couple of the students from my cohort are working at big name companies like
Uber and Starbucks, so my takeaway is that there isn't a guaranteed route to
success with these types of programs. They give you enough tools to start a
fire but they leave the rest up to you.

~~~
kafkaesq
Most of that sounds positive, actually. So I'd be curious as to what the basis
for your net negative take was.

~~~
rajangdavis
I'll bite. The negative aspects, to me, were ultimately minor in my experience
but consequential for a lot of the students.

This might have changed, but if you had the money, they will take you in.
There is an interview process that they use to screen applicants, but my
impression is that if you can pay, you get in.

This creates issues where there are students that are heavily invested in a
successful outcome but might not have the ability to grasp the material. I
tried helping some of my colleagues but some of them just could not grasp the
material and it was hard for me understand what obstructed their ability to do
so.

It might have been a confidence thing ("I don't get this and I never will"),
but again, failure was encouraged in the program.

Additionally, there were issues that occurred due to a lack of diversity in
race and gender. I do not want to get into it because it's really complicated
and I lack the ability and the time to give this a fair evaluation. The gist
of it is: General Assembly facilitated open dialogue but not all of the
participants wanted to participate. I will leave it at that.

Halfway through the program, we had a teacher give pretty uninspiring lessons.
The subject matter wasn't super dry or uninteresting (it was on SQL and
relational databases); my feeling was that the teacher had some personal
issues that were affecting his work.

This sucked more for the people that had zero background in development
because he was poorly teaching crucial material and none of the students were
feeling it. A lot of the students complained about this and he started turning
around after that.

I also get the feeling that there was some "drama" in the inner workings of
General Assembly. The director of our cohort quit towards the end of our
immersive (week 10 out of a 12 week program); she was basically the one that
ran the show and made sure that our needs for learning were met.

From my understanding, she was fired because of student complaints. She was
very personable and very protective of the students so I feel like there must
have been some pressure from above.

~~~
kafkaesq
Yup - education is hard; sounds like GA is still figuring this out. Thanks for
the data points.

------
s0uthPaw88
I attended a coding bootcamp 3 years ago, and this was a major concern of mine
going into it. The instructor had only taught one small class previously, so
there was not much of a track record to trust. I spent quite a bit of time
researching the instructor's background and speaking with his former students.
Even with all that, there really was no way of knowing going into it whether
it would deliver what I was hoping for. Ultimately I decided the risk of
losing my $3k was worth the potential upside of a career as a software
developer. Luckily, it worked out.

~~~
gaius
$3k is a bargain, some charge $20k!

------
keithpeter
_" Every year, dozens of new schools open, promising to teach anyone who can
type the skills necessary to make a career in software development."_

OK, so people want an accessible route into the very basics. Where are the
Community Colleges? In the UK, your local Further Education college will do
you the very basics for not much money as an evening class.

~~~
reustle
They are there, but their curriculums are extremely outdated most of the time.

~~~
walshemj
The cisco academy approved evening class ones are good we had 20 switches and
20 routers to play with at Mender College in the UK but it was about £500/£600
per quarter (free if you are unemployed)

~~~
keithpeter
CISCO was very much the gold standard, I'm thinking more like html -> client
side -> server side (simple) -> server side (more complex).

PS: I'm glad it worked for you.

------
robertjm
I know this guy, he worked for me on a project for a bit. At the time, he was
in Mexico on a sail boat just going from port to port working on projects
remotely. He would exchange tid-bits about his life, he was definitely
unhinged. At the time, I think he was avoiding prosecution in the US by being
in Mexico. This is super crazy but I'll be honest, not out of character for
the guy.

~~~
passivepinetree
That's super interesting. Can you offer any more details about him/his
skills/his life?

~~~
robertjm
Not too much. I was referred to him through a friend of mine who is a
recruiter who knew I was looking for rails dev's, we still talk about him
every once in awhile as possibly the oddest dev that's ever worked for me. He
was a pretty good Rails developer (and passionate) and very active on the Ruby
Forums, I think he was banned at some point though for some of his behavior. I
remember he went on a Facebook rant regarding his ex-wife on Facebook, about
how she was keeping his kid(s?) away from him and (at the time) she was the
reason he couldn't return to the United States. After he got hired, he
basically went to the other dev's on the github and emailed all of them
telling them "he was the new lead dev" on the project. I had to take an entire
day calming down the rest of the team haha.

------
emeraldd
This would be a perfect opportunity for someone who runs a bootcamp to contact
these students and give them a chance enroll for free. It would be great PR
...

------
kafkaesq
_His uneasy students began to formulate theories. "We really didn't want to
believe that we had been deserted," says Lundgren, who had paid $5,988 in
tuition._

My heart goes out to these bootcamp students -- scammed and otherwise. That's
a heck of a lot money for someone not earning a tech salary to pony up. For a
set of skills which (at that level) just aren't going to be enough to get them
into the kinds of jobs the envision being in reach, at the end of the tunnel.

------
mpron
I saw this a few days ago. Creepy stuff. Please do your research when choosing
a bootcamp. Or learn on your own.

------
jamisteven
Ide be moving to Mexico to track this scumbag down, cant be that hard, dude
has a profile on every social media platform is existence.

------
throwsincenotpc
I don't get it, people paid $100k to this guy to get courses through slack and
online videos ? The article says 19 students, who paid $5k each for that ? are
you kidding me ?

~~~
danso
Yeah, this was a crazy story, but the fact that people were paying what
amounts to college tuition for _learning-via-Slack-from-a-guy_ was the biggest
shock to me. And I am a fan of bootcamps and think that there are bootcamps
where you will get far more out of your $10,000 than you would for a year in
college.

But those bootcamps are _physical_ places, with hands on instruction from a
variety of instructors. I don't keep track of the bootcamp scene but I
imagined it to be saturated by now with a bit of the race to the bottom, in
terms of quality and pricing. A teacher-via-Slack isn't shocking, the prices
he commanded _are_. But maybe such an arrangement is the only resort for folks
who don't live in big cities like New York, or growing hubs like Omaha?

~~~
xiaoma
It's clear evidence of market demand. Even in 2016, it's likely a good bet to
start a bootcamp, especially outside of the US.

