After deeming the academic science career path too exploitative and fraught with landmines, I decided I wanted to being a transition into the tech industry as a software engineer. Only trouble was... I didn't have any of the necessary modern web development skills to actually get hired and it would have probably taken me over a year working 'on the side' to gain them. Having just completed a PhD, I was not in the state where I could have justified going BACK to school for a masters in computer science either. So for my level of experience, place in life, and motivation, the coding bootcamp I attended (Hack Reactor) was the best thing I could have ever hoped for. I worked hard during the program and got a great job as a software engineer only a couple weeks after graduating the program and have been happily employed in my new role for ~7 months so far.
I'm torn on this issue though, because even though I feel that Hack Reactor was worth every penny, I can acknowledge that the "coding bootcamp" space could potentially be littered with shysters and people trying to make a quick buck, taking advantage of students by promoting false hiring stats. I'd welcome for a light to be shined on those programs, but would lament if Hack Reactor specifically gets thrown under the bus or that the tech industry sours on grads of good schools like Hack Reactor because they are labeled as simply "bootcamp grads".
I'd wager that with a science PhD under your belt, you're not the typical green programmer.
Back in the early 80's, my mom taught the intro programming course at the local community college, after learning it herself a year prior. Her students came from all walks of life, and many of them got good jobs after a couple of semesters. Her observation was that someone with a science or math background could learn programming in a jiffy.
From what I've seen of bootcamps, they can be very useful for someone with a decent amount of software and computers already under their belt. For someone completely green, it's dicier.
That said, either way the real tests come later. Things like adapting to new technologies and new ideas, or self-teaching all the theory that bootcamps inevitably skip over.
Is your average bootcamp grad who had no real experience going in able to have a normal software engineering career trajectory? There's no good data, and there won't be for a while, but I have my doubts.
Because the bootcamp industry hasn't been around very long, you're right, there is no good data. But from my experience and the experience of my peers in my class, I believe that adapting to new technologies/new ideas is actually one of our main strengths. Those skills are essentially a pre-requisite to getting through the program.
Your question about the potential to have a normal software engineering career trajectory is a good one (one that I am particularly interested to hear the answer to) and that's why I wish that more employers would speak to this issue. I would venture to guess that my employer would speak highly of Hack Reactor and how prepared HR grads are because they have continued to hire from there, but it would be nice to see how employers actually review these schools and not just the students.
One of the common hazards in entering a field is that the neophyte tends to see everything through the lens of what they grasped first. In a traditional CS curriculum, this is intended to be a formal and mathematical understanding of computers.
When you start by learning a language, that becomes the basis for your understanding of computing. This isn't always a strength. Imagine someone who learned programming via C but now has to learn Lisp - they're going to have a hard time.
I've heard very mixed reviews of hiring from bootcamps. For people who needed the exact skillset the bootcamp taught, it was perfect. For those without that exact alignment, ran into the limits of the person's knowledge pretty fast.
>For those without that exact alignment, ran into the limits of the person's knowledge pretty fast.
That seems natural. They only have 3 months of experience. The company is simply going to have to help with that, along with ample googling and reading.
I think the expectations of those doing the hiring may have been out of line, possibly due to bootcamps selling them something they simply can't deliver reliably, possibly due to hiring managers not knowing the field.
A lot of it was that the bootcamp grads didn't have a good grasp of what they actually knew. They would claim to know a language, but in actuality only know one particular framework in that language.
> Because the bootcamp industry hasn't been around very long, you're right, there is no good data.
The training industry has been around for a long time. I would suspect there is years, perhaps decades, worth of data, just not under the name "bootcamp".
I really hope that, when he makes the actual Code Bootcamp Destruction post, he makes sure that he has more than a couple emails about each situation he exposes
not that I think a pile of lies were sent to him, but more along the lines of, what happened isn't always what was perceived to happen, or what was perceived from hearing about something happening.
I always cover my ass and being as I don't want to get sued I make sure to get reports of stories from multiple sources and research things heavily before I move.
I'm a "bootcamp" graduate who has been happily employed at a great company for around a year now.
I would definitely say that my experience of grinding out 60 hour weeks of programming was very much aligned with learning something the hard way, so I really hope that Zed at least manages to acknowledge the successful programs in the space.
While I share the concern that many of these programs may not live up to their claims, it should not be overlooked that there are a few quality ones that really change people's lives.
A couple months ago I decided to start a dev bootcamp here in the midwest. We only had one other dev bootcamp school where I live so I decided to give it a try. I work a full time job so I really didn't need the money. After talking to so many people full of passion and desire to become a programmer that have little to no money, I have decided to do it for free so I can network with people and collaborate on ideas. It's a 6 month course that covers just about everything. It is done at night from 6-10pm monday - thursday, with one on one mentoring all other times from 8pm - 1am. It is done over Skype, HipChat, Webex, and IRC. Look forward to meeting you.
http://www.midwesthackerschool.com
As someone who learned to code long before the whole "boot camp" thing, I would be very interested in hearing stories of what they are all about. I would hate to give someone bad advice in either direction.
"I’ve been for them because they aim to help people learn to code and try to keep costs low compared to a similar degree from a university. I’ve been against them because most just take my books, teach my material, then rip off students for $15k programs that don’t actually get anyone deployed."
Isn't that what traditional education/university courses do?... but over a much longer period of time and more money?
Light is the best disinfectant, I hope your post spark some strong discussion because that rarely happens with universities and the stakeholders.
I wonder very strongly what happened to the students of Livingsocial's Hungry Academy experiment led by Jeff Casimer and JumpStartLabs in 2012. It was a initial class of 8-15 or something with promised contracts at the end. LivingSocial chose not to continue the program and I believe gschool(galvanize) spawned off of that model.
I started Dev Bootcamp in early spring 2013, signing up after lamenting that http://pragmaticstudio.com/ in Reston, VA was 2-3,000 for a 3 day course. It just made sense in comparison.
I've found Dev Bootcamp to change and evolve as time moved due to student feedback(I parttime coached students there to stay in touch). The curiosity to learn everything and knowing how to find the answers was my favorite takeaway from the bootcamp.
I worked at LivingSocial while Hungry Academy was happening. I believe there were about 15-20 students and they were promised jobs with the company if they successfully completed the program.
Most of what I heard about it was second-hand, so my information may not be entirely accurate. That said, I believe the outcome was pretty mixed. Some of the students did very well and ended up becoming respected members of the engineering org. Others were just OK. A few left for other companies shortly after completing the program -- pretty tacky stuff, since LivingSocial PAID them the entire time they were students. I also heard one or two of them didn't pan out at all and were eventually let go.
I think the primary reason LivingSocial chose not to continue the program was because they started running out of money. The first class finished around the time it became clear that daily deals were not going to be the cash cow that everyone expected. LivingSocial saw their valuation drop dramatically, and started being much more careful about how they were spending money.
I left the company about a year after Hungry Academy ended, so I have no idea where these folks are now.
I've had my suspicions about the rebranding of vocational schools as "hacker schools" and "bootcamps". Regulation and accreditation, while stifling, does allow government aid and ensures some kind of minimum quality (like restaurant health inspections).
That being said, I still think there is a valid business in training developers who want to change "stacks" (i.e. Embedded dev jumping into web dev, C# dev jumping into Erlang). The stacks, and ecosystems, are just complex enough to require allocating a lot of free time to becoming proficient and employable. Not everyone is an autodidact. (Perhaps, this is also the solution to the old "developers burn out at 35" axiom.)
I for one feel quite vindicated by this endeavor I attended a bootcamp in Pearland, TX and it was terrible. Luckily I was able to get a job later in a programming related field, but it was nonetheless a ridiculous and terrible experience. If anyone is interested in my experiences they are over at sprky.co I have also reached out to the other people from my camp that had a terrible experience. Overall I think the idea of coding bootcamps is on the right track and really hope to see it succeed. However the instance of what I went through has left a bad taste in my mouth.
[1] http://joselcontreras.com/about-coding-house/