I have a 4 year computer science degree and I didn't learn any of the listed topics either, so I'm not sure if the article is implying that other institutions do prepare new grads for these topics. The main advantage I see from bootcamps is that you basically code intensely for 4 months, learn the most important stuff to be productive (at least in small scale) right away, and then you're able to tackle more in depth topics by yourself.

An in a lot of ways the current problem is that outsourcing have killed the pipeline from college drop-out to sys-admin by way of the call center. as the call centre have now been outsourced to people far away in companies with no upward career path.

The boot camp industry were never about fixing the operations pipeline problem, but to fix the problem of how to turn domain specialist into programmers something it largely failed at by being way to valley and app centric.

What year did you graduate, out of curiosity?

In the group project classes I took, the instructors were only concerned with the final results. The process, tools, etc were left to the individual groups to decide.

SDLC is one of those things that every company seems to do a bit differently. Even if you are the GOD of SCRUM THEORY AND PRACTICE, most likely you'll wind up on a team that is kinda vaguely following scrum. Or more likely they've got a fish-ladder process with lots of little waterfalls that they call agile. Good luck effecting change, especially if you're straight outa school.

At best Agile methods provide an epistemology for project planning and estimation. At worst, it's a bunch of behaviors to mimic and terms to incant to justify bad or lacking processes.

I guess that going for a CS degree just helped me in the sense that it actually made me say "hey, this is gonna be you're career, so you better get serious and get into it", which in turn made me start learning a whole lot of more on my own. So, in a sense, I feel that a coding bootcamp can do the same, for a whole lot less money, and in a whole lot less time.

"DevOps" is not something you just "teach" to someone who knows 0 about writing software let alone how computers work. Most of these roles today require knowledge of at least a programming language like ruby (Chef), python (ansible), etc.

You dont 'teach' cloud computing either imho. Sure, you can point students to the Amazon CLIs or Web UI Console (or others). Maybe technologies like kubernetes or otherwise would be in this blanket 'cloud computing' (orchestration?) umbrella, but I would imagine very much outside the scope of a bootcamp.

Agile Methodologies? I mean really? Someone drank the koolaid. =D

Learning the syntax of the current hot language over 4 months is not an equivalent to deep understanding of CS or just good problem solving in general learned over 4 years.

Like anything else, there was a big race to capture the market once Dev Bootcamp proved it could work, and now the market is correcting itself. No reason to think bootcamps are going to stop existing altogether.

A grocery store down the street from me closed, I guess supermarkets are all dying!

No different to how Pets.com or Webvan bit the dust when the dotcom boom started winding down.

I'm also not a fan of the map on that page. They visually overweigh the closing bootcamps against open ones, when really there were 2 companies that closed many locations.

I think one of the reasons bootcamps may be closing is there just aren't enough people like this to train. 6 weeks can do amazing things for people who come in with years of intense analytical training, but it's not a curriculum that can create that core skill in 6 weeks - that takes years - actually, decades.

I have tried to explain basic computer hardware/software concepts to some friends of mine on many occasions. Some of them are right on board with what I'm talking about immediately while others are either completely uninterested or unable to grok the concepts. Usually the ones who grok it are people who already work in technical fields like my buddy who works in machining, or my other buddy who does welding, or my other buddy who is a market analyst(just helped him learn Python for data analysis).

Not everyone can be a competent developer, and that's OK. There are many other positions within a tech company that are just as important, like project leads or designers.

Bootcamps can direct an analytical inclination, but rarely, if ever, create it. I am not at all sure that the conclusion is that bootcamps are ineffective. The issue is not with bootcamps as such, but with those who believe that the hard work is done by just showing up for lecture or doing the minimum in homework. I like to think that bootcamps are just an extension or tool to employ as an autodidact.

There has always been a divide between those jobs which require a more rigorous foundation and jobs which need someone to bang out some semi-workable code for a website. Bootcamp grads are often under the wrong impression that they are qualified for the first type without some experience doing menial tasks.

> I like to think that bootcamps are just an extension or tool to employ as an autodidact.

If you are an autodidact, a bootcamp isn't even required. The Internet is chock full of resources for learning programming that makes it extremely simple to learn on your own. I look at a bootcamp as paying for connections. A Bootcamp should help get you in touch with prospective employers or connect you with other developers with similar goals. Learning how to program is the easy part when compared to learning the soft skills required to be part of or build a successful company.

Without initial guidance and a firm commitment, we end up with questions like, "Should I learn Java or Javascript?" or "Can I learn Go in a week?" Is it possible to self teach completely? Yes. But you would need both discipline and analytical rigor as well as the humility to find help when you run into issues. I went into the bootcamp looking for both a mentor, which I found, and connections, which I also found.

I assume you mean the self teaching part? Agreed. That's why I said simple. I should have been more clear.

> Without initial guidance and a firm commitment, we end up with questions like, "Should I learn Java or Javascript?" or "Can I learn Go in a week?" Is it possible to self teach completely? Yes. But you would need both discipline and analytical rigor as well as the humility to find help when you run into issues. I went into the bootcamp looking for both a mentor, which I found, and connections, which I also found.

I think this is a good way to look at it. I'm personally 100% self taught. I actually dropped out of college(financial issues), but I'm glad I did. I was able to learn so much more on my own. I can understand how a lot of people wouldn't be able to do what I did because they just don't see things the way I do I guess. For the type of people who require guidance from the more experienced, I think what you said above makes a lot of sense.

I would, however, caution anyone who is an autodidact from going to a bootcamp simply on the premise of it being extremely expensive. If you have the ability to teach yourself these skills, there's really no good reason to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a bootcamp to learn at a pace dictated by your peers.

When I studied mechanical engineering we had to work in a shop for 8 weeks doing a lot of manual stuff, welding and using a lot of machines. You don't learn this stuff in university and it was immensely valuable to me.

Of the successful boot camp grads I've worked with, they came from wildly diverse educational backgrounds. Creative writing major, classical musician, public relations, lawyer...

> While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies. In other words, they don’t teach students the other important entrepreneurial tech skills. This makes sense seeing how their focus is coding. But as I stated in my last article, many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers – those who have strong leadership, communication, and team-building skills. Being a coding god is one skill set, but knowing how to work collaboratively on a technical team and manage a product is another skill set in itself.

This type of belief in what "coding" is, is hugely responsible for both the rise and fall of these horribly designed, while possibly well-intended, "bootcamps."

Being a good software developer has absolutely nothing to do with "important entrepreneurial tech skills." Knowing how to tackle problems, envision loops and algorithms, write pseudocode, understand the basics of how requests on the Internet work, or how your computer accesses databases or files; these are skills of a good software developer.

The end goal of being a software developer is not CEO.

"many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers"

No, recruiters all over the world are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because they can't find any competent programmers anymore. There are hundreds of people who were taught how to write a conditional in Ruby on Rails available, but ask them to tackle a problem like: "how would you store 1 million strings, search through them while caching results, and make sure only certain individuals can access certain strings," and you get a deer in the headlights look. So recruiters don't ask questions like that anymore. They ask questions that can be simply memorized and regurgitated.

When there's no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we're not in a good spot.

The sooner we can dispel the myth that programming and software is just "coding," "hustling," and "entrepreneurial skills" the sooner companies won't have to pony up over $150k/yr to find a competent software developer.

Your "1 million strings" example is exactly the kind of thing that can be memorized, and is actually a quite common class of interview questions in certain segments of this industry. It's also only tangentially related to engineering. If I may, I'd draw an analogy with engineering a satellite system: your "million strings" example is more like the act of selecting a bolt from a catalog that fits the spec than it is engineering the spec in the first place.

They pay it because they can't identify and source competent programmers, not because there aren't enough. Thus, when they (think they) find one they pay through the nose for it.

I disagree. Knowing where to apply your skills at a company is just as important as having those skills. If your stakeholders aren't happy, it doesn't matter how beautiful the code is. You've failed to deliver. That being said, it's a balance you have to strike. You can't just focus entirely on making stakeholders happy, other wise you'd have a patchwork quilt of an application.

Also, that's why I like side projects, you're the stakeholder and can focus on the tech/what you think is important.

You have got to be joking right? Not only is the intro-level algorithms class in universities a known-difficult class almost everywhere, MS and PhD students continue to try and discover better algorithms and new data structures.

Sure if you're working on a CRUD web app then it doesn't matter, but if you're working on Postgres, it sure as hell matters.

Tech interviews are 40 minutes max. There is only so much stuff that can be asked and programmed in such a short amount of time.

The stuff being asked in tech interviews is "traverse a tree in this interesting way". There are only so many ways to traverse a tree.

And no, I am not talking about crud interviews, I am talking about Google interviews, and similar. (Although Google hits the very high end of difficulty, most interviews are much easier).

Perhaps there really is a way to do the mythical, problem solving, IQ test of a whiteboard programming interview. But that is NOT the way the industry does things currently.

The way that the industry currently works is that literally half of interview questions are almost word for word listed in cracking the code interview (I counted!). And the ones that aren't are still quite common.

When I did tech interviews with a dozen or so companies just recently, a full 90%! of interview questions were ones that I had been asked or studied before. Interviewers are lazy, and whiteboard algorithms as things are CURRENTLY is just about who can cram the most.

I have seen far more 6+ hour interview loops that 40 minute ones.

Maybe each session within the full loop accounts for 40 minutes.

That being said, people have their pet questions they use to sort the wheat from the chaff--if you can't fizzbuzz your way out of a wet paper bag, I am not hiring you. The best questions are more about process than the final answer. Solve an easyish problem, add some features, add some more features. What other ways could you have solved that problem? Why did you choose this way? When would you use a different approach? How does your solution scale?

The worst questions are gotcha questions with a right and wrong answer, `what does the C99 standard indicate is the correct size of a stack frame?`

Usually 20 minutes out of a given hour long interview is just BS resume and chit chat.

And yes, there are often 5-6 interviews in a row. But that still leaves the fact that there is only so much that can be covered in an interview with 1 person in the 40 minutes you are given to code a problem.

And those 40 minute coding problems are all taken straight out of cracking the code interview, most of the time. Even at Google.

Process questions are good, and conversational interviews are also good. I wish people would do more of them. But unfortunately it is mostly just algo questions that you have to cram for.

No, his argument is that what makes a person a good software engineer is the ability to think about an abstract problem and come up with a solution to it.

I'd agree with his argument if that's what it is, just not his example.

I guess I wasn't very clear, then. The parent is correct, my argument did include: "ability to think about an abstract problem and come up with a solution to it."

I was trying to use a bit of brevity in my example but these responses make me believe I oversimplified an actual recent problem I had in mind (which is what I believe make the best interview questions). I do try to attach more business needs to the questions I've asked during interviews. Instead of:

"how would you store 1 million strings, search through them while caching results, and make sure only certain individuals can access certain strings"

What I really had in my head was: "We have tens of thousands of PDFs that we need to extract text from to make available. That text needs to be normalized. Only certain members of certain teams should have access to different types of text. Additionally, this is going to produce millions of strings. How would you get the PDFs to a place you could use them, extract the necessary text, normalize it, store it, utilize caching to make retrieving it snappy, and ensure correct access?"

Technical interviews should be more full of questions that spark conversations where additional inquiries come naturally. What kind of software? What version? What framework? Could you do that faster? And so on. Rattling off whiteboard questions is definitely what I was trying to make an example of avoiding.

By being smaller, bootcamps should have more ability to pivot content to match market demands, and give students advice on directions to persue. Front end development needs for entry level people are getting satisfied, so it's time to how some new teachers and refocus curriculum. Camps need to market as great learning spaces, rather than throwing their whole rep behind a single specially.

The notion that the space is overcrowded is bullshit; it just depends where you set your sights. I don't think we would call university education an overcrowded space, in spite of serving many orders of magnitude more students than the bootcamps currently are... One can argue that there are too many law schools, charging to much to create too many entry level lawyers. Hand wringing about these two camps closing is like worrying that there are too many law schools specializing in bankruptcy law.

Ultimately I think the closures are more about these two companies failing to adapt than any kind of general lesson about bootcamp education.

It's also well known theres too many law schools and too many lawyers. It's a bad market to enter into now.

As as a civilisation we massively over-educate, but under-train...

Problem is they aren't teaching enough in bootcamps. You're not going to learn enough in 3-6 months to be hirable. There's too much else to the job, unless you can go to work for those magical companies that use a STACK that is a 1:1 match for what you learned in bootcamp. Most companies aren't interested in hand-holding.

If bootcamps would partner with companies to bring in bootcampers at $30k/year and let the real learning begin, it would be a successful model. Unfortunately, the bootcamp marketing is selling something far more grandiose.

On some level I feel as though businesses need to get real and just pick someone for the job even entry level. There is nothing wrong with a business investing in its talent rather than expecting everyone to come in with prepackaged with everything you want them to know. Most of the people hiring these days didn't know how to do any of the stuff people are doing when they come out of bootcamp when they started their careers.

Do you? I certainly wasn't "ready" for the workforce after graduating, but that's because I wasn't taught how to use version control software, how to manage a project, how to do proper estimates. I knew how to do Big-O estimates of algorithms, but in practice, this actually comes up rarely. (Although, admittedly, can bite you right in the ass if you don't understand what's going on.)

I don't know what sort of training bootcamps do, but if they offer practical training, it seems like there's a place for them.

Or do we want plumbers to take advanced hydrodynamics courses, rather than apprenticing?

On the other hand, if they're just teaching people to pump out code, then yeah, that's fairly useless.

Coding bootcamps are an incomplete idea. You need a program that takes you from Bootcamp to the coding equivalent of Navy Seals, and everything in between. And just as in the metaphor, for the 100 in bootcamp, maybe 1 makes it to the Seals- through years of training and real world experience.

(Meanwhile, there are a handful of Stanfords cranking out what are supposed to be the Navy seals, and not meeting demand...)

If any educational institution gave you everything you needed to know, we'd all be DaVinci's. Being too basic isn't a problem if people don't expect the learning to stop after graduation, in fact, I think this is the biggest misconception about boot camps. You're going to need to teach yourself as much as they do to be successful. Same with college.

> On some level I feel as though businesses need to get real and just pick someone for the job even entry level. There is nothing wrong with a business investing in its talent rather than expecting everyone to come in with prepackaged with everything you want them to know. Most of the people hiring these days didn't know how to do any of the stuff people are doing when they come out of bootcamp when they started their careers.

Totally agree, great dev teams, have no problem on boarding people regardless of knowledge set.

It simply isn't rational for a company to spend long periods of time on training if it expects that employee to leave not long after he is finally becoming productive.

Are you sure about this? I think it's actually the opposite: today you don't need to know anything about digital electronics, information theory, theory of computation, computer architecture, OS design, formal methods, PLT, etc. to be a very successful software developer. You just need to know how to deal with one DBMS, one high-level language, one ``framework'', and after literally a couple of years in the industry you will be making a 6 figures salary.

There have always been a large set of practical skills that aren't really taught as core CS curriculum, but most professional software engineers are going to need to be comfortable with: the version control software of the day, ways of managing runtime considerations of an application (which has obviously evolved a lot recently), certainly programming languages as well.

I have several friends who went to bootcamps had no deep technical interest beforehand. They just heard that computer programming was good money, and they enrolled. To me, the ideal bootcamp student would be the person who dabbles with programming or programming-tangential technologies on the side, but just needs that little extra boost. That is a very small number of people if experience is any guide.

I just don't think it's reasonable to go from 0 to junior developer in 12 weeks if you don't have that technical history. It's why you can't become a doctor in 12 weeks, generally. The four year degree programs force exposure to programming and programming-thinking for 4 dedicated years. This is enough to close the gap for non-technical people, but 12 weeks is surely not.

I think this is the biggest possible problem with them. I've known a few people who've gone through it and done well. The different between them and others is that they want to be programmers. The 12 week course didn't teach them everything, but it taught them enough to go and figure out what questions to ask and search for. Those people who are in it for the money are going to burn out, because it takes a lot more dedication than a 12 week course.

When I interview interns for the upcoming summer, I always ask the same question, "Why do you want to do this?" They always get this puzzled look on their face, and then I explain to them that dollar per hour, this is one of the lowest paid fields if they want to be successful. You'll end up working nights and weekends, not because of the company you work for (although maybe), but because a lot of developers want to know more. They go home and think about what they did and how to make it better. People who are strictly in it for the money won't do this, and so many of them won't succeed.

After this thread ages for a day or so, head over to the Twitter feeds of bootcamp CEOs and directors to hear how they describe this thread as being "all anecdotal evidence of a few who "Don't Really Know What IS Going On"" instead of taking this information in... in a meaningful way and making actual change for the students they already have and the ones they hope to get in the future. That costs too much money and time. Money and time they would prefer the students spend. So these students are squeezed on both sides- by the camps who false promise and the employers who want them to arrive job-ready out of the gate. Jumping up and down and saying it ain't so isn't going to make this un-so.

I think we need to stop degrading people for wanting a job and calling that "just in it for the money". Everyone does a job "for the money". Why should a worker not want compensation for hard work? Come on! We call those people "artists" don't we? And we know how much they get paid. This isn't heading in a good direction. Let's show some vision.

However the idea that "a true love of the subject emerges", "the help of fantastic teachers".. I don't think I've ever met anyone who had that path to excellence AFTER entering a field, find it difficult to imagine, and I've always disliked the uncritical use of "passion for x stable, responsible profession that their parents approve of". But I might be weird and blinded and I'm going to try to notice if such people exist. It probably doesn't help that most of these professions are made of people that have never done anything else.

Computer scientists often begin as children (like the others) but never have to leave their field because after all the gaming and taking stuff apart and building, they go on to be computer scientists who have excellent money making prospects when compared to literature majors.

I do know that medical schools have been trying to attract individuals with other backgrounds -- was recruited myself, and admissions committee members told me one reason is that doctors have the impression they may have screwed themselves by being monoculturally ignorant of economic forces, technology, etc. So they're encouraging people who aren't from the traditional biological sciences backgrounds.

I'd expect the med school literature courses to have about as much effect as med school statistics courses, though -- little to none. Plus, there's been interest in shortening med school.

I agree with you there about the lit courses. And shortening med school is a great idea, as is allowing residents to sleep full nights on a regular basis.

The Recurse Center: It seems like a great place! I would not include it in any bootcamp discussion because it is more of a retreat than anything else-- an artist colony for programmers or something more akin to Yaddo or McDowell for coders without the snobbery. I think they might be the only ones who have gotten it right. And I agree that they are closer to a good meal. I think a transitioning person would have a good chance of finding inspiration there among its participants due to the flexibility and internal/self motivation that is emphasized and selected for.

And...no one would ever need to hide the Recurse Center (or any related GitHub repositories) from their résumé—they would highlight it.

I'm not sure many people do think that. But it was an experiment. If you assume that the tooling around "programming" or "product building" or whatever you want to call it will eventually be good enough that you can slot a generic human into a well-defined role then these bootcamps might make sense.

We may get to a point where building software is more like building a car, and we just need humans to work on the factory assembly line. But we're not there yet. So the experiment failed.

I've seen this sentiment being thrown around a lot lately. I don't think it will ever be the case. There will always need to be someone who can build the tools or the tools that build the tools or the tools that build the tools that build the tools.

Let's use your auto assembly line idea to illustrate this. A good portion of auto manufacturing these days is completely automated, the body is assembled by robots for instance. Well, a factory had to build those robots, right? That factory probably bought some robot control software from another company who specializes in that. The company that built the robot probably didn't manufacture all of the components for the robot. For instance, their welding robot may have a wire feed spool that was manufactured by a company that builds welders. However, the company that manufactured the spool probably didn't forge the metal themselves, they bought it from a forging company. That company in turn bought ore from a mining company. The mining company mined that ore using an automated tunnel boring machine. The automated tunnel boring machine was built by another company that manufactures automated mining machinery, and the trail starts anew.

Somewhere down the line in every industry is an engineer who designs and possibly even builds components that are necessary for that industry to operate.

Now, applied to software engineering:

Even if we did have software that could automatically build a web application tailored specifically and exactly to what any given company wanted down to website design and SEO, that software would have still need to have been built in the first place. If that software was built by another piece of software and so on up the line, at some point there is a person who built the progenitor. Regardless of who built the original, wouldn't these pieces of software still have bugs? What if these pieces of software involved more software that could fix their own bugs? Well , who fixes the bugs in the bug fixing software?

Beyond this, what if there is a new feature that needs to be built out? Will the software be able to build out that new feature and integrate it with the existing application? If so, how will it handle conflicts?

As it currently stands, it takes a team of multiple professionals to simply maintain any non-trivial codebase. I don't personally believe that it is possible to design an AI that is powerful enough to do this kind of work without this AI having human levels of intelligence and creativity. In order for this AI to be able to reach this kind of proficiency it would have to be self aware. And then we are forced to ask the question: is self aware AI still AI, or is it alive? We are not ready to answer these questions. Until we are, there will always be a need for flesh and bone engineers of all sorts.

That ended up way longer than I intended.

my theory is that bootcamps exist for these people and take advantage of everyone else in order to stay afloat. now the "everyone else" is realizing what happened and the market is collapsing.

The cynical answer is because they saw an ad telling them that the bootcamp would get them A SIX FIGURE JOB!!! and they want to believe it. It's an incredibly attractive pitch.

The other 3 are companies that have a bit of a reputation and I wouldn't even consider working at anyway.

How is that relevant in this context? Regardless of company it's obviously a trend to refuse bootcamp graduates.

I think you need to reevaluate what you consider obvious/significant.

Many others probably just drop the resume right in the trash.

What I can tell you is that I know many, many bootcamp grads and virtually all of them got good jobs, at good companies and not always junior. I still don't take that as proof of anything and am willing to take evidence to the contrary where it exists though.

No, of course it isn't. The only question is how much larger the number is. That is not assuming but extrapolating and is how statistics works.

You know some bootcamp grads that got jobs. Great. That isn't in dispute though. Perhaps some bootcamp grads getting jobs is what led to the "will not hire from bootcamp" policies. Now _that_ is an assumption. Or rather speculation.

There's no evidence for an industry trend here, just people letting their personal biases get the better of them (all around).

I'm just saying the number who will not is likely larger than the number who state they will not.

The biggest downfall I see in the idea behind the Boot Camps is that they are great at pumping out entry level coders, but don't seem to offer much in terms of career growth or learn trajectory outside of the basics. I'd be much more inclined to pay for one of these programs (which is another issue when you add the cost of tuition on top of regular living expenses + time away from work) if they offered some sort of career mentor-ship for a designated time period after landing that first role. They could offer counseling for career growth, additional classes, etc. I think that would create more return on invested from a student prospective.

Overall I think the boot camp space got way too crowed too quickly, which is understandable considering the amount of people trying to land that entry level paycheck.

I'd say that overall they focus more on the interview phase, though I see a potential to extend the curriculum to get engineers ready for promotion or a management role.

Go back to 2004-2007. There were tons of "training schools" for developers. They all cashed out right around the time of the financial crisis.

Then around 2012, they all resurfaced as "boot camps".

Rising interest rates, saturated employment environment and 10 years of insane growth probably means that they don't see much room for growth in the near term so they are closing shop.

They'll be back in a few years under different branding once the environment changes.

I think the sweet spot for a coursework in programming is a year to two years. That's essentially how long my university degree was if you remove the non-CS required classes.

The ones that are only a month long...well it's a nice introduction to coding I suppose, but I can't see it as much more than that. There's definitely a "too short" but it depends on a lot of factors as for where that line will be.

https://www.42.us.org/

Why would anyone pay for online course work when there is so much available for free from places like MIT and Stanford? I paid for a boot camp to have access to an instructor with industry experience. Not to learn language syntax and build projects.

I think the main advantage there is the peer to peer learning and long hours. There's group projects. Yes, your coursework is all on the computer, but you are there morning to night surrounded by people doing the same thing, so you help each other out. That also ends up being a great network later on, which is one of the best things people normally get from college. They also have some special industry guests. Even Paul Graham was praising it. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/847844863727087616?lang=en

You have to pay for travel to get there and food, though they do have a fairly cheap cafeteria on site. Also if you need a visa they can't help you with that, they are not an accredited school.

Check out the FAQ for more questions https://www.42.us.org/admissions/faq/

42 is free to attend though so if you're talking how they fare as a business, it's funded by a billionaire.

Many top computer science programs are not in their university's engineering department and many top universities are not ABET-certified.

As I said in a thread about this very topic, I feel that a better title is "software technician" (in the same sense as a automotive technician or a dental technician)

These "Bootcamps Are Dead" stories will to some degree be self-fulfilling. Regardless of any realities in the junior dev job market, exposure to this wave of (sinking?) submarining would give me great pause were I making the same school decision today.

And it's hardly a new idea, but why pay when a quick Google search provides a mountain of free training material? Self-taught coders are a bit more impressive.

We don't see the same trends in Europe, where university degrees are mostly cheap or free.

I didn't want to waste 2-3 years getting an additional degree, and a bootcamp filled in nicely (simply a personal anecdote but it worked fine for me)

Since the for-profit education industry had rushed in, I assume they just went for their typical milk-the-student-loan-system scam

If you look at bootcamps as an education/career on a platter, sure. But they're no different than how a typical school should work; you get as much out of the experience as you put in. My experience at Dev Bootcamp was that those who put in the effort and had the right perspective were the ones who made it into the field after their graduation. Some people, actually many, simply don't have what it takes to be a programmer, and that shouldn't be seen as a failure on the part of bootcamps. It'd be one thing if few to none of the graduates from bootcamps succeeded in their profession, but that's simply not the case. I and many people I know wouldn't be where we are now if we didn't have the kind of bootcamp style education where we could dedicate our time to educating ourselves and hacking on shit. Yes, yes... we might have been able to do that without paying a bootcamp, for "free", yet we'd be paying the overhead of organizing people, consistently getting people together to spend time hacking on projects, etc. I was lucky enough to get one other person to hack on a project with me after bootcamp – everyone else was either too busy or out to make money from the free work of others. I'd much rather spend $20k to go to Dev Bootcamp and be able to hack with people on Node.js & Ruby projects, be in the bay area, and go to hack-a-thons every other night than spend far more than that sitting through a bunch of non-tech classes I hate to come out with some abysmally outdated skills in PHP & Java.

Just because some bootcamps have shut down doesn't mean that the model itself is a failure. Though I had some minimal experience coding on my own prior to bootcamp(let's just say I could make Hangman in Python but had no idea what object-orientation was), I was able to become proficient enough to build a live YouTube chat(before YouTube had that) with shared video controls... as a result of the experiences I had through Dev Bootcamp. You CAN learn to code in a few months, but you have to want it enough. Strange as it may seem, not everyone wants to succeed as much as others. Even if 80% of bootcamp graduates didn't become programmers after the course, that's no reason to see the bootcamp model as a failure. Not everyone is cut out for it, and yet it has changed the lives of numerous people. Though I'm sad that Dev Bootcamp is no more(which I'd still argue is a result of terrible management both prior to and after the Kaplan acquisition), I hope the idea of coding bootcamps can evolve to be more successful.

The name 'boot camp' doesn't really imply that they would be.

Right, same with MOOCs. I am a pretty experienced engineer already, I recently took a course on EdX[1]. I wanted to round out my R (mainly a Python guy but there is some cool stuff in the R ecosystem), revise some of the maths from undergrad 20+ years ago, try out a MOOC, and take a peek into an area of computing I'd had no exposure to. I enjoyed it and I got a lot out of it and would recommend it to others. But could I have been a non-programmer, completed that course, and been adequately prepared to begin a career in industry? Absolutely not.

And to be fair that is not how that course is pitched, but there are some that are, that have even less content in them. $200 is a bargain for a working engineer who wants a new skill, or is even just curious. $20000 is a massive scam for a beginner who thinks they can kickstart a career that way.

[1] https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-analysis-life-sciences

> Are Coding Boot Camps Worth It?

- If the first time you're touching code is at a boot camp, it's not worth it. By the time I had started a boot camp, I had been reading books and doing tutorials on and off for 2 years. Thinking in terms of product life cycle, and your programming skills are the product, you want to go to a boot camp at the beginning of the growth phase.

- If your instructor or TA is a graduate of the program, it's not worth it. We had instructors who had worked at F500 tech firms and a small class size. To me the real value was having 3 months worth of access to someone who in many cases made hiring decisions at those companies.

- If the boot camp focuses more on their curriculum more than their people, it's not worth it. Curriculums are garbage, it doesn't matter what language you learn, you should be learning how to think like a developer. It's not all about focusing on the instructors too, if you've been self-studying for 2 years, and your peer doesn't know how to open a text editor, they're going to hold you back. You want a boot camp that is selective with their applicants.

- If you're doing it for money, it's not worth it. You're not going to make an average salary right out of the school. In fact, you probably won't even be a full-time employee, plan on being a contractor for the first year. If you don't know how to find work on your own or research how to, knowing how to program isn't going to change anything.

- You're starting at the bottom, every opportunity good or bad is an opportunity to learn. Paid or unpaid take it, eventually, you will have enough opportunities to start saying no to less valuable opportunities, but until you're 100% booked, you're a yes man or yes woman. In fact don't wait until graduation.

- If you can't afford to take 6 months off and devote them entirely to programming, it's not worth it. I had saved for 2 years, paid off my debt, and instead of using the remaining money for a down payment on a house, I paid for tuition/living expenses to dedicate 3 months of uninterrupted time. I know I was fortunate enough to have this opportunity, but if you're going to do it, you need the resources to do it right. Otherwise, continue with self-study and find a mentor at a meetup.

- If you're not in a tech hub, it's not worth it. San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Portland, Chicago, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Denver, or Montreal are good. Maybe Boston or Atlanta, don't know enough about the tech scenes there.

- If you have medical/family issues, it's not worth it. It is stressful if you have any other things going on in your life sort them out first.

I've seen a lot of people fail, but it is still very much worth it for some people. I went to a boot camp to accelerate something I was already doing. What is said about boot camps applies to education in the broader sense as well. In many cases college isn't worth it, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't go.

I was also seriously considering https://www.appacademy.io/, I was impressed by their interview process and what they expected you to do prior to getting there, but don't know anything else about the school.

I'm not sure where they are now in terms of reputation, though.

I think it may be that there was an unserved pool of natural talent that the first boot camps quickly served to train, and now we're down to the trickle of trainable talent that thinks boot camps are the way to go.

And as schools like NYU (where I'm currently teaching a fairly new Python certificate program) begin to grab market share as substitutes to boot camps, with their stellar reputations, the bootcamp niche will become even more difficult to compete in.