
Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business? - imartin2k
http://hackeducation.com/2017/07/22/bootcamp-bust
======
wolco
Because those who can learn under those conditions can easily learn the
material for free and many have before attending. What they use a bootcamp for
is a bridge into a career. People are finding other less costly ways into the
job market.

The bootcamps of the future will focus on either the experienced developers
wanting to learn a new language/skill quickly. The structure will be like an
extended conference where everyone attends presentations and gets excited for
a few days and then everyone goes home. This will be followed up with an
online course teaching the basics that will allow everyone to work at there
own pace. A few tests and assignments will assign grades. A hackton will be
planned where everyone will build a product using there new skills. Teams will
be assigned based on grades to make things fair.

~~~
austenallred
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, especially
when there are so many different ways to learn and a million different paths
to take. One of the most important parts of bootcamps, in my mind, is that all
of the curriculum is there, in the right order, and on a set schedule. When I
taught myself to program I probably spent 80% of my time finding the right
resources and understanding what I _should_ be learning and 20% of my time
learning. I think it takes a pretty special person to self-teach when you
don't know what you don't know.

~~~
throwaway91111
It's difficult to make an argument for bootcamps, though, when they won't
teach you most of what you'd need to know either. The curriculum is typically
focused around a single tech stack (many teach Mongo for unfathomable
reasons), leaving students ill prepared for the workforce. Debugging? How to
sort a lidt efficiently? What is a hash? All of these are arguably critical to
understanding simple, common code; you'd be lucky to make it through a year as
a junior dev without being fired if all the skills you have come from a
bootcamp.

Of course, Galvanize et all just hire their own grads to inflate the post-
graduation job placement stat. So maybe it's not necessary to know anything
outside the course to get a job!

~~~
austenallred
You have a point. Here's the problem the bootcamps will start to run into:

They're teaching as much as they can in twelve weeks, but lengthening the
program increases the cost dramatically. Why Mongo? Because they're already
using JS so they don't have to teach two languages (no time), and mongo is
super easy to pick up. They'll learn other stuff on the job. Why aren't they
teaching how to debug and what a hash is? Well we have to choose between that
and understanding what a database is, so you take your pick.

They would _love_ to have classes be six months or a year, but then they'd
have to double their prices (eliminating a lot of the demand) and people would
have to support themselves with no pay for twice as long (eliminating most of
the rest of it). It's hard enough finding people to take 12 weeks off and pay
$10k, and now we need to charge $20k for six months? No one can afford that,
what we have now works well enough.

In order to do something longer and more thorough/in-depth you'd probably have
to start with a fundamentally different business model.

~~~
vram22
>In order to do something longer and more thorough/in-depth you'd probably
have to start with a fundamentally different business model.

Interesting point. Maybe something in between bootcamps and full-fledged
4-year CS or Software Engineering degrees? Say a 2-year course, with some of
each of: tech stack topics, algorithms, data structures, and other CS-y
topics, and software engineering topics. That would make for more well-rounded
junior devs than the trend of just teaching the hot tech stack du jour plus
git plus some DB (and all at very basic level, as many of them seem to do).

Some Indian software training institutes (such as Aptech and NIIT) already did
have long courses (with corresponding high fees), but to the best of my
knowledge, they may not have had much in the way of the higher-level topics in
those courses, i.e. CS and s/w engg. ones - AFAIK they mainly had the hot
language and DB of the season, like Java and Oracle some time ago, now
probably something else like JS and Mongo, etc.

~~~
austenallred
Ya, I think so. I'm a co-founder of [https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-
science](https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science) and that's part of our
goal

------
austenallred
There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to start.

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.

~~~
ellius
Is there a good way to learn those skills at a professional level outside of a
university setting? I feel like I've taught myself a sufficient amount of
front end, back end, ops (Docker, IaC etc), but I'm at a loss for how to test
my ability with algorithms and data structures, memory management, etc. I've
picked up some books, but I don't have a good way to measure my ability or
demonstrate it to employers.

~~~
vinceguidry
I'm a self-taught web developer, and I can tell you that the skills and
knowledge gap between web development and "real" software engineering is huge,
enough to where I seriously consider going back to school to pick them up,
even though I already make $100k+, I've reached the top of my earning
potential.

If I knew a program tailored to people like me that would give me a
reasonably-accredited certificate and teach me the math and theory, I'd pay
perhaps $20k for it. I'd go back to college, but I really don't want the pain
of all that undergrad coursework.

~~~
staticautomatic
Have you considered the Georgia Tech online masters in comp sci?

~~~
auston
Do you need a degree to do that? Or can you test your way in?

~~~
vinceguidry
Yes.

[http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program-info/admission-
criteria](http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program-info/admission-criteria)

------
pjdemers
People are realizing that even though coding pays well, it's not a job for
everyone. We hired 4 people out of boot camps. All had a decent level of skill
(of course they did, we choose the 4 we liked out of dozens available).
However after a few weeks, two of them left, saying: "there is no f'en way I
can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades". And they went back to
their old jobs and old pay.

~~~
trentmb
> "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few
> decades"

Not a bootcamp grad, but I just hit my two year mark a couple weeks ago and
want to blow my brains out.

Writing internal web applications is the most mind numbing thing ever. It's
gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work.

The real issue is that I have no idea what field I'd pivot into.

~~~
markbnj
Look, writing software is a trade. If you're not getting satisfaction from the
act of creating something and doing a good job of it, even if that something
is less "amazing" than you were hoping it would be, you probably need a
different career. In any skilled trade the majority of the projects you do
will be of the more mundane sort, but a skilled practitioner derives
satisfaction from the doing and the mastery. You wouldn't work for years as a
watchmaker, hunched over a bench 8 hours a day, if you didn't get satisfaction
from making watches. Programming is more analogous to that than not, imo.

~~~
EpicEng
>Look, writing software is a trade. If you're not getting satisfaction from
the act of creating something and doing a good job of it, even if that
something is less "amazing" than you were hoping it would be, you probably
need a different career.

Maybe. I've been doing this for about 12 years now and, if I were writing
typical IT/web dev stuff, I'd move to a different field. Most software is just
boring and unrewarding, the money wouldn't keep me if the interest fell away
(though I have a family to consider at this point, but that's beside the
point.)

------
TheAdamAndChe
I think the biggest factor causing these bootcamps to go out of business was
stated in the article: there is no IT worker shortage. The fact that most of
the people attending those bootcamps already held Bachelors degrees strongly
implies that. If there was a real worker shortage, employers would be hiring
people without degrees and have them do the best they can.

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.

~~~
matwood
> there is no IT worker shortage.

There is no junior worker shortage. A bootcamp grad is competing with other
bootcamp (100+ boot camps) grads, and people who just self started and got to
coding.

Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging.

~~~
maxxxxx
"Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging. "

Strangely finding a job is also quite challenging for senior people....

~~~
sokoloff
I think there's a market for lemons problem at play. Mid and senior developers
who are effective at what they do are incredibly valuable and valued and
therefore don't generally have to look via the main queue of job applicants.
They often get retained well at their current place and are poached/referred
more often than the average or ineffective developer.

(This breaks down when a company suddenly closes or does a layoff so deep that
it puts a lot of good people on the street.)

The flip side of the very effective using a different mechanism is that the
people in the main pool have a harder go of it, as hiring managers are used to
seeing a parade of people who interview poorly (and therefore interview A LOT)
or who join and fizzle out (and therefore job hunt A LOT).

------
tptacek
A 250k Haskell programming job in SFBA is _prima facie_ evidence of a "skills
gap". The law of supply and demand says that's how you evaluate an inadequate
number of available programmers. It's facile to suggest there's an adequate
labor supply because employers can acquire developers simply by paying 5x the
national median income.

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.

~~~
NDizzle
I wouldn't move myself and my family to the SFBA for a $250k job. Perhaps
that's cliché to say that kind of thing at this point. It needs to pay more
due to the cost of living. I'm making > 200 now in a city-data.com cost of
living index 91 city. SF is COL index 170.

The people who would take that job already have a similar job, more or less.
It's not a skill gap so much as a "willing to put up with SF bullshit" gap.

~~~
KirinDave
Probably wise. I live in Daly City and my current cash salary pre-tax is just
a bit south of $200k (ignoring nonsensical dollar-for-dollar comparisons to
income like ISOs, performance grants and bonuses). I'm not struggling to make
ends meet, but I am glad I have a big balance from prior my prior payouts, as
I'm not saving much (it's even possible to go in the red for the month if I
need to buy a non-trivial purchase over a few hundred dollars, like say
replacement computer hardware or a major baby related purpose).

I know friends making 30-50% less who actually save more per month than I do,
in Colorado. Now, the downside is they live in Colorado (compared to the
weather and allergy situation on the coast, I prefer this life), but unless I
do yet another startup they'll retire with more money saved on average per
month than I have.

It's pretty fucked up that the entirety of SF life is basically priced around
the few post-exit people who set the tone of the market. That is actually only
a tiny number of people. Most younger devs I know save 0 money and just hope
their wages will grow fast enough to offset that in the long run.

Oh and ironically I am certain I could get a job as a Haskell developer,
though that's not my job. :)

------
baron816
The article makes good points, but the author, nor anyone here really knows
why they're going out of business, or even if it's a systemic thing. The
industry is becoming more mature and competitive. It's inevitable that at this
stage, some firms will fail and there will be consolidation. I know plenty of
people who were able to get great jobs right after graduating from a bootcamp
and quickly become valuable members of their teams.

Do bootcamps adequately prepare people to work as software engineers? No, but
neither do most CS programs. I think the more pernicious problem they pose to
their graduates is that they flood the hiring market will low quality talent.
They don't do a good job of screening who will be any good, and just push them
through their programs without ensuring that they know the material.

At the same time, employers aren't focusing on the things that really matter
to them in the interview process. Making someone write a contrived algorithm
on a whiteboard in under 30 minutes doesn't tell anyone anything. I get that
companies need to search for a signal in all of the noise bootcamps are
putting out, but they need a better way of doing that.

------
eliben
Economics 101 - because there are too many of them? There was demand; with
demand, supply found its way into the market. As often happens, supply then
overshot demand which led to lowered prices which led to shrinkage of supply.

... none of this will prevent a "Why are new coding bootcamps springing up
like mushrooms after rain" piece of journalism appearing in a few weeks...

------
brudgers
The two examples in the article were owned by large educational conglomerates:
Apollo and Kaplan. They are clearer examples of big companies end of lifeing a
product than examples of the Bootcamp market.

Since the salary a skilled and experienced developer can make in the current
job market does not really align with University of Phoenix's adjunct pay
scale and tuition rates, it is hard to see how a Bootcamp could generate
similar rates of return to UoP's accredited college degree programs. UoP has a
widget making process via the sharing economy similar to Uber's. The analogy
might be if Uber recruited professional race car drivers for a service
claiming to get riders to the airport faster.

Both Kaplan and Apollo have a different economic model than many bootcamps.
Many bootcamps generate significant revenue from job placement in addition to
or in lieu of tuition. Currently, the sweet spot of bootcamps looks like it
might be outsourcing on the job training more than as traditional private
business schools. Over the long run, programming will be better suited to the
private business school model as programmers become common in small businesses
in the way bookkeepers are.

------
lisa_henderson
Great teachers are expensive. This needs to be emphasized more. Even if there
is strong demand for the dev bootcamps, the bootcamps still have to hire great
teachers. The teachers are highly experienced developers, the kind of people
who could be making something between $120,000 to $160,000. So the schools
face some very high expenses.

A comparison might be made to retail. Sometimes you'll see a store that is
very busy, full of customers, and then it goes out of business. Why did it
fail when it was so busy? Often the reason is that the landlord raised the
rent.

High costs can kill an otherwise good business idea.

~~~
arcanus
What is the average boot camp instructor salary?

------
telecuda
As a neighbor and local supporter of Iron Yard Tampa Bay (St. Petersburg FL),
losing our growing economy's only code school was a big letdown this week.

In my experience, admittedly Iron Yard graduates were often too green to join
our small engineering team (and we don't utilize .NET or Ruby). I'd like to
say we have better training and mentorship for junior devs, but we don't yet.
However, when we listed an iOS position, it was The Iron Yard's campus
director who spread our ad through their national network. She found an
Atlanta Iron Yard graduate who spent two years at a large company, receiving
on the job training that now qualified her for our role.

The Iron Yard St. Pete was meaningful in that it provided a starting point for
people in our area to make a career change and offered a meeting place for
tech (located in the same building as our co-working space). The closure for
us here locally is less about losing a code school and more about losing an
anchor in our developing startup ecosystem.

------
JoshMnem
Many bootcamps are terrible and promise things that aren't possible. (People
generally can't learn how to code professionally in 12 weeks.) The bootcamps
that tend to deliver do so because they only accept people who already have
put significant work into programming before they start the bootcamp.

I organize a programming club in Berkeley that meets twice per week (over
4,000 members on meetup.com), so I meet a lot of people who go through various
bootcamps. I think that I could help demonstrate how to fix many of the
problems with the entire bootcamp model, if we could obtain funding for
opening a physical space in Berkeley. I've been doing it for over three years
and have a pretty good idea about how to find people who will succeed, without
limiting opportunities or even charging a lot of money.

------
CM30
Maybe because too many people got into the business and completely saturated
the market with coding bootcamps. I mean, maybe I'm wrong here, but I get the
impression most people running these things didn't really do it because they
were passionate about the field or knew how to run a teaching business, but
because it was seen as a quick way to make extra cash.

There are just too many of the bloody things, and it's a pain to compete in
the field as a result. Just look at how many this site seems to list for
example:

[https://www.coursereport.com](https://www.coursereport.com)

426 schools listed there alone. And that's likely just the more
promoted/credible ones.

It's like any type of business really. The more popularity a trend gets, the
more competition there is, the more people who don't know what they're doing
get involved and the more businesses/sites go out of business. It's happened
to web hosts, to mobile app developers, to people trying to run social
networking sites and marketing blogs alike.

The fact they're offering a service facing competition from both real world
schools/colleges and online help sites probably isn't helping their chances
either.

------
ryanmarsh
_" than there are people looking to pay, on average, $11,000 for 12 weeks of
intensive training"_

...able to pay $11,000 and not work full time for 12 weeks

FTFY

 _There isn’t really much evidence of a “skills gap”_

Except that hiring is nearly everyone's biggest problem in tech and, you know,
that whole crazy H1B thing.

Companies and Gov't job programs should be paying for dev schools not poor
people. If they did it would all work out fine. As a matter of fact Iron
Yard's corporate dev boot camp has been the profitable part of the business
for some time.

I'm flabbergasted by this article. I'm not going to waste the time to reply to
every one of the ridiculous assertions.

America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market. Dev
boot camps can and do get people to work. Many people in the position of
needing a dev boot camp can't afford to go without work and pay for it at the
same time (or at all).

~~~
acdha
> America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market.

Outside of a few hotspots like SF, do offered wages really back that up? It's
good being a developer but it certainly doesn't look like a desperate
shortage.

~~~
sokoloff
In metro Boston area, we're paying new college grads $100K to start and
sometimes losing on comp.

We're not "desperate", but for the overall market wage for new college grads
to be 1.5x the state median _household_ income, that smells like shortage to
me.

~~~
nilkn
The state median household income includes high school dropouts working at
McDonald's, and it includes folks living in very affordable rural areas with
low wages. It's not a meaningful point of comparison when you're looking at a
subset of workers who are highly educated and seeking jobs in a technically
demanding field at companies located in almost exclusively expensive metro
areas.

To add to that, the Massachusetts median household income is nearly $70k. And
in Boston? It's almost $80k. Moreover, the median _family_ income in Boston is
$100k.

[http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/massachusetts/boston/](http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/massachusetts/boston/)

~~~
matwood
You made sokoloff's point. A fresh college grad on day 1 of working makes the
median _family_ income in Boston.

To say that wages are not reflecting the shortage (the comment originally
replied to), is ignoring the statistics.

~~~
nilkn
Not at all. In fact, as far as I can tell, you completely ignored the point
_I_ made, so I'll just repeat it:

> The state median household income includes high school dropouts working at
> McDonald's, and it includes folks living in very affordable rural areas with
> low wages. It's not a meaningful point of comparison when you're looking at
> a subset of workers who are highly educated and seeking jobs in a
> technically demanding field at companies located in almost exclusively
> expensive metro areas.

Replace "state median household income" with "Boston median family income" if
you wish. Many elements here still apply after that substitution and must be
addressed in detail if you wish to claim that I "made sokoloff's point".

The part you replied to and didn't ignore was just a correction to incorrect
statistics that had been cited without reference. It seems pretty warped to
suggest that I made his/her point by indicating that the cited statistics were
off by a factor of 2 -- and not in the direction that favors their argument.

I think it would also help if you defined precisely what you mean by
"shortage". You seem to be using an extremely loose definition that claims a
shortage exists any time new workers in a particular industry are paid above
the median family income. We must then conclude that there is a shortage of
all kinds of workers across countless industries. For instance, because new
engineers in the O&G industry are typically paid $80k-$100k, there must be a
shortage, even though the industry has been having layoffs for years and
certainly does not struggle to fill needed positions.

~~~
sokoloff
> It seems pretty warped to suggest that I made his/her point by indicating
> that the cited statistics were off by a factor of 2 -- and not in the
> direction that favors their argument.

Which statistic did I cite that was off by a factor of 2? Your figure of
$70,628 is 4% higher than the google search result featured snippet for
"median household income massachusetts" of $67,846, but even using your
figure, my saying that $100K is "1.5x the state median _household_ income"
isn't anywhere near wrong by a factor of 2.

1.5 x $70,628 is $105,942. My claim is at the very most wrong by less than 6%,
not the 100% you seem to be claiming.

~~~
nilkn
That's fair enough. You should really be using $80k though. It makes little
sense to average over the entire state. You're then off by 20%, which is not
really a negligible error. You're right, though -- I made a stupid error
either way.

It doesn't really matter though because it's a deeply flawed comparison to
begin with, as already discussed twice. This is all tangential to the points I
was making and that both you and matwood have declined to respond to.

~~~
sokoloff
OK, if we take the Boston household figure or even the family figure, a
21-year-old SWE new college grad their first day on the job is making more
than any of those.

That's evidence against a shortage?

I'm not replying to your other points, because I think I'm not understanding
them.

~~~
nilkn
The only point I was trying to make is that these general median statistics
across the entire state or even Boston aren't controlling for enough factors.
Programmers are generally well educated and the work is technical in nature.
This does not describe a very significant portion of the individual workers
rolled up in the general median statistics. I was trying to suggest you should
be comparing to similar professions, such as engineering in general.

Programmers don't look like nearly such an outlier then. Would you say most
engineering disciplines are experiencing shortages? I don't think that's true.
O&G is one potential counterexample. Chemical engineers are still very highly
paid, the big oil companies don't struggle to hire the best students from the
best engineering schools, and yet there are also lots of layoffs going on. The
layoffs and hiring freezes seem inconsistent with the notion of a shortage.

Law is another interesting example. There's no shortage of students graduating
with law degrees. In fact, there's a vast excess, and a good chunk of them are
unemployed or underemployed and will never work as an attorney. And yet many
big law firms are still paying new associates big six figure salaries, and
partners at major firms are still earning $250k-$700k.

I find this especially interesting and even counterintuitive because it
suggests that if there _is_ a shortage, throwing an endless supply of entry
level talent at the industry won't necessarily solve anything.

~~~
sokoloff
I'm not sure there's anything that really needs "solving". I think there's a
shortage (but not a desperate shortage) of programmers in the job market, at
least a shortage of qualified ones.

Many of the factors you describe "well educated, work is technical in nature
[presumably implying a requirement of intelligence on the worker" I see as
rarity factors, increasing the market-clearing price for that work.

[https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Entry-Level-Engineer-
Salarie...](https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Entry-Level-Engineer-
Salaries,-Massachusetts) has some stats on engineering job postings with
salary. Overall engineering is eclipsed slightly by programming (replace
"Engineer" with "Programmer"), but both have a fairly high starting salary
range.

Oil and gas has a perennial boom/bust cycle that makes it an oddball.
Everytime oil falls under $50/bbl or so, a lot of companies find themselves in
trouble who expanded predicated on $60+/bbl oil. It's almost as reliable as
the sun rising in the east that O&G will have more booms and busts in the
future.

------
bsg75
Because becoming a developer, like any other discipline, is much more than
than just learning to use tools (as quickly as possible).

Its probably that employers and students alike are starting to realize that
expensive crash courses are often not the best investment.

------
brightball
I got the impression that The Iron Yard shut down because the company who
acquired them made them. Everything else seemed to indicate that they were
doing great.

------
mcguire
Parts of this sound like exactly what I was worried about when I first heard
of the boot camps. An expensive training program producing a very limited
skill set isn't really a sustainable model.

Coupling that with the for-profit schools and an investment environment
looking for a big payout, this just sounds like a train wreck.

------
learc83
The best bootcamps (in terms of placement rates with SV companies) are
equivalent to 12 week long interviews that the interviewee pays for.

They screen for people who already know a good bit, and are really good at
interviewing in general.

Then they put those people through an intensive 3 month long coding interview
and place the people who make it through.

The problem with this business model is that there is a small supply of people
that are capable of making it through, are willing/able to pay $10k+ to do it,
and are willing/able to go 3 months without pay.

It's a joke to think that Joe JobChanger is really going to pick up all the
skills and knowledge he needs to get a job at Google in 3 months.

Professional programmers with years of experience regularly spend that long
just practicing white board problems to get try to get a job at Google.

The amount of students who can do that is just too small to build an industry
around.

------
wishinghand
> Google’s director of education echoed this sentiment: “Our experience has
> found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for
> software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous
> programming roles in the industry.”

No shit? Of course 12 week programs won't help anyone get into Google. None of
them advertise that. They're all web development or app development
curriculums. Google is an aspirational position that requires a brilliant
graduate with some great internship experience.

~~~
learc83
>None of them advertise that.

App Academy does. They list Google on their home page.

They do seem to place some people with Google, but from what I've learned
looking into them though, I think it has more to do with selection than
training.

To me, it seems like top bootcamps are 3 month long interviews that the
interviewee pays for.

------
cribbles
They aren't. Two specific coding bootcamps that 1) had been acquired by for-
profit education conglomerates and 2) underwent relatively rapid expansion
into second and third tier tech markets went out of business.

As evidence of a larger trend, this article cites a single quote from the CEO
of "a private lender and an alternative accreditor for the fast-growing boot
camp sector." This is unpersuasive.

------
barns-n-moguls
If the skills gap/demand for 'coders' is correlated with the closing of two
'coding bootcamps' closing; does the author of this post also assume that some
spontaneous, profound event will reverse our current trajectory? That h1b and
other visa abuse by primarily tech companies will be permitted to continue,
perhaps even expand? Will the direction of 'america first' soon make a 180 as
well, perhaps the cost of outsourcing IT/programming will be reduced by
imminent unprecedented legislation?

While I understand that the majority of our greatest thinkers can attribute
the University of Phoenix to their sudden rise from obscurity, is their any
sort of data available displaying how well they educate their students? I have
seen far too many students graduate from university with computer science
degree, with little to no understanding of the real world, or anything other
than the concepts required to learn to program with java(exaggeration), but I
can only imagine what sort of education another 'for-profit university'
provides all the kids who want to become cool, hip, programmers and make 250k
for browsing reddit remotely.

My guess is they spend most of their time/money figuring out how to locate and
market to unemployed/underemployed Americans with access to student loans, and
little certainty or direction in their lives; while spending zero time coming
up with a metric via quiz/survey to determine good candidates for programming
jobs, as that would likely reduce profits for said for-profit university.

I don't know much about these bootcamps, but I'm sure some of them do great
things, however, I don't think the author of this post considered any of the
likely relevant factors to the conclusion they are drawing about a possible
trend here. Quality front page nothingburger rambling.

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timwaagh
Those prices are too high. I dont think anyone has these amounts lying around
unless they already have good jobs (and hence do not need this). These
programs should compromise on immersion and cost about $2000 for three months.

~~~
wishinghand
I don't think someone able to teach the basics of programming would want to
settle for $6,666.67 a month(assuming a class size of ten). That's also
assuming they had no gaps or dropouts between classes. Sure, in your example
it's no longer immersive but:

1\. Immersion is what gets even the weaker programmers through. Non-immersion
will drop the placement rate greatly.

2\. There's still a lot of prep work so the teacher will still basically be a
full time teacher. And that's assuming a one person operation. They'll need
someone for advertising, outreach to local companies, and their own technical
needs.

------
blfr
Teaching people in general isn't a very good business. Even the lauded head
start programs that last much longer than boot camps and target kids (so they
have both much more potential influence and more time to recoup the costs)
achieve meagre results if any.

In fact, there are reasons to believe that human capital is mostly what you're
born with plus (or maybe it's more of a multiplier) the accumulated
achievements of your predecessors with very little input from organized
education.

[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.html)

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-
graduation-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-
speech/)

------
Animats
The demographics indicate that coding bootcamps are mostly retraining people
who already educated and giving them a new set of specific skills. That's a
good thing. Jobs change, and people have to learn new skills from time to
time.

