The devbootcamp is so freaking expensive, you can rather invest that money and let it grow and learn Ruby on Rails on the side on your own. There are so many free resources for beginner to advance developers.
The keys to success as a startup and as individual coder in the present world is not technical prowess, but culture and cultural fit.
There is a running joke in San Francisco that companies looking for "Code Ninjas" and "Rockstar Programmers" are not worth working for, because they haven't gotten the basic truth that the team matters more than the individual. They're falling prey to the "Talent Myth" (a reference to a Malcolm Gladwell article where he describes among others the reasons for the spectacular failure of Enron.)
What devbootcamp has cultivated in a classroom format is the actual vibe of a startup doing well: Excitement, vibrant, infectious energy. I visited at week 3 and at week 8. In any typical multi-week courses (e.g. college), the enthusiasm wanes pretty quickly after a few weeks. Not so with devbootcamp, it kept growing.
It's not the individual's technical skills that matter so much (there is always some else to ask or Google anyway), than it is to build a culture of resourcefulness and team spirit.
In full disclosure I should say I was a guest instructor, and I felt aweful that we let students run head-first into database joins--a concept we hadn't explained at all, but which was necessary to complete the exercise at hand (which was, coincidentally implementing a ranking for a Hacker News-like site). If you hit this in self-study, 99% of the students would give up and shelve their dreams of becoming a developer. Not so in devbootcamp. To my big surprise, not knowing joins didn't present much of a hurdle. Through pairing, people's resourcefulness quickly led to a variety of usable solutions. Perhaps not the textbook solution, but that's not what matters in real life.
It's this type of can-do, resourcefulness and team spirit which creates solutions and being exposed and immersed into that is what people paid the money for. This cannot be replicated in self-study, in my opinion, and it's well worth it.
I think it best not to make decisions solely based on monetary risk/reward. There are many free resources out there...agreed. However, I have developed my own tight community of junior developers, many who will go on to be intermediate and eventually senior level developers. I have an entire network of mentors who are already senior developers. I'm taking interviews for junior dev jobs. I just learned how to code 2 months ago. Good luck spending 300+ hours in front of a computer in 2 months AND building up a network this large. I don't know what monetary value to put on that...it will vary from person to person.
Devbootcamp doesn't make sense for everybody. It made sense for me. I would rather learn how to program with a pair or several pairs than sitting in my room learning from a book and the internet. I've tried that already. It's not for me.
I watched my roommate study development independently and in Dev Bootcamp, and Dev Bootcamp was way more productive. His earning potential has gone up ~$40k/year during the program, so I'd counsel any interested parties to keep the cost contextualized. (And, of course, it's free if you get recruited, which he has.)
well in my experience people are just lazy and they will pay to get the same material they can for free. Good to hear that he got hired and it was free for him!
you might say the same thing about college. the majority of the stuff is just being taught straight out of books in large lecture format and a lot of its available for free by universities and online resources.
personal trainers at the gym mostly tell you things that you can figure out online too.
its a mistake to think of devbootcamp or code academy or any of those programs as strictly "cash in exchange for knowledge in your head".
you do it because you get other benefits. some people learn faster in that environment, for example. or having an experience resource available on call the entire time. or access to mentors that would be harder to get in touch with otherwise.
anyways, i didn't do devbootcamp, and this is NOT an endorsement of it, but i think you're missing the point, and why would you come rain on someone's parade by telling them that what they did (and saw value in) is pointless?
"you might say the same thing about college. the majority of the stuff is just being taught straight out of books in large lecture format and a lot of its available for free by universities and online resources."
The mentorship, networking, and experienced devs to bounce questions and misconceptions off of is such an important that you really miss in Udacity, etc.
also, people talk a really big talk about how its great to invest money and let it grow, but in my experience those people really don't 1. do that, 2. know how to do that well.
