The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies.
Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have stepped in to bridge that gap - they essentially screen for people who learn quickly, teach them the bare essentials, and send them on their way.
This means bootcamps have a symbiotic relationship with the quality of students they're able to attract. The best bootcamps turn out the highest quality students, who then get the best jobs, which makes the bootcamp look better.
Dev Bootcamp was always in that awkward position where it was trying to be one of the "premiere" bootcamps, but never actually made it to tier 1 status. It's always lived in the shadow of Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, and to a lesser extent, App Academy. Having personally worked with Dev Bootcamp graduates, I've felt that on average, they were much weaker than the graduates from the other bootcamps I mentioned.
Since Hack Reactor in particular has been expanding its reach to additional locations, Dev Bootcamp was probably getting boxed out of the premium bootcamp space. The founders were unwilling to be relegated to tier 2 (or the demand was dropping too fast) so they had to pull out.
It's a shame, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised.
Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months.
So you can make it a year long, but then do you charge $40-80k up-front? No one has that kind of money.
The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.
Hiring based on IQ tests is illegal, but hiring mostly from certain universities is not.
I smell a business opportunity.
HR's recent purchase of Makersquare has me a bit worried that they are outstripping the supply of smarter incoming students but I can't say for sure yet without interviewing a larger sample.
There was a point in time where completely unqualified students memorized and gamed the admissions process. Someone who did the remote interview copy and pasted the answers around the internet.
This led to a very large amount of students that were just not prepared for the program in any way, and it also coincided with the window in time that HR decided that they weren't going to remove any students for performance issues.
It was a fucking mess. I know people who mock interviewed students from those cohorts and they decided to completely disassociate with the school because of the experience.
I know people who technically interviewed them at their companies and they blacklisted Hack Reactor after too many of those rotten apples couldn't write a simple for loop. Some of these interviewers were Hack Reactor grads themselves.
I know someone who hired one of the people from those cohorts and had to fire them for performance after trying to give them half a year and excessive mentorship to improve.
It's a shame that shit like this has happened, because in my eyes it's irreparably tarnished the Hack Reactor name. I've given away my hoodie/tshirt to Goodwill because it just doesn't mean anything special to me anymore.
It was several years ago, and Makersquare was by a long shot at least on par with Hack Reactor with their entry requirement rigamarole. If you're referring to the "merge" that happened in last October, that was merely the final stage in the purchase. Their curriculums and staff had long before been merged, the only final step was the name itself, which was hung up on Texas law regarding some financial aid packages students were able to receive.
They definitely were not "always" in that awkward position since DBC was the first of these bootcamps, and is where the entire term 'coding bootcamp' originated. Early DBC grads went on to start several of the other "top tier" bootcamps, including Hack Reactor.
DBC literally changed his life. Post graduation he immediately got a job at a dev shop as a programmer, and now 5 years later is a great developer gainfully employed in Silicon Valley.
Not sure why you would shit on the grave of a program that has done a lot of good for its graduates.
I'm certain if we saw actual numbers it would not be a pretty picture.
For the truly motivated it is much better to go to recurse.com or join a learning Meetup. Get a day job to pay the bills and learn at your own pace. Programming is not going anywhere even with all the fancy AI startups. In fact if I was just starting out I'd just learn Python and R.
Some people will succeed in development. Many won't. I received very little formal education, mostly self-taught, and I've been very successful. Put me in a bootcamp, I'd likely thrive there as well. I suspect your brother had a knack, and just needed a little direction.
Most criticism is focused at the false promise bootcamps provide. Many grads are barely qualified to be an intern, yet they were sold on promises of employability if they graduated. Even worse are the bootcamps that pad their employment numbers by hiring grads as teaching assistants.
As a hiring manager I reviewed many bootcamp programs and interviewed grads. DBC was one of the best and produced consistently good junior candidates.
There are a lot of crappy ones but DBC wasn't one of them.
Many current bootcamps were duping students into promises of jobs, and making them pay large tuition fees up front. Very similar to what the scam universities are known to do - promise how the degree will help someone get a job, and then charge them large fees.
A friend of mine did DBC, and my sense was that many of their friends in the program struggled for a long time to get jobs.
Also, the founders I know stopped looking at some bootcamp grads, as they found them to be very low quality (this was noted to me back in 2014, may have changed).
2+ years on and all of us are still working in the industry.
It really does depend on the bootcamp. How valuable a bootcamp is depends on its style and the individual. Even though I had a positive (but probably unnecessary) experience, I'm not exempt from feeling like they're a bit scammy sometimes.
In my case, they give you a curriculum of the minimum that you need to get a job (really) and some serious pressure to get it done and get that job. Almost anyone who actually gets through it is going to be an asset to most companies that don't need an extremely diverse or exceptional skill set.
For roles I'm looking to hire, would I hire a fresh bootcamp grad? No. Would I hire one with two years experience? You bet your ass.
It's diamonds-in-the-rough from a recruiting standpoint, but you get to vet a lot of people very quickly (it was exhausting) and if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that their motivated (good bootcamps are not cheap, and they're hard work).
How things worked out for the rest of the graduates I don't know... Both people I hired had some experience before bootcamp
What does that mean? It seems like this should've been a profitable business - 3000 graduates @ $10k/piece = $30mm revenue.
Kudos to them for making that kind of hard call rather than compromising on their values.
There also seem to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps running that are doing fine, so this is confusing.
Though the existence of what seems to be a number of other bootstrapped bootcamps working fine confuses me. Also, pretty sure dev bootcamp was bootstrapped - if they didn't put in outside capital, then either they were profitable from day one or they were running break even. I'd guess they were profitable.
Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No.
Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No.
Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really.
But I did learn an enormous amount of practical knowledge in a very short time (basically: "How to build and deploy a database-backed CRUD app with a reasonable UI while working as part of a small fast paced team" and "How to research stuff you don't know the answer to and figure out how to do it on your own").
They taught me what I needed to know to teach myself the rest of what I needed to know to get where I wanted to be. And for that, it was worth it for me.
But I do have mixed feelings about the bootcamps in general.
They can be really helpful for people in certain circumstances (in my case: career changer who needed to jumpstart the learning process and get some practical guidance), but they sell themselves as something else ("Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!").
Sorry to hear they are shutting down. I suppose it was Kaplan's decision and the space has become so crowded that there must be pricing pressure on the programs and a limit to how many graduates the job market can absorb. Will have to go look into this some more and see what I can find out.
>Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No.
>Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really.
This perfectly describes my experience with LaunchCode in the midwest.
Never underestimate the benefit of being around motivated people.
Now, of course, being a "computer programmer" is way more complicated than that.
But I don't know a single person IRL who regretted doing a bootcamp (only know people who went to App Academy and DBC); they all still consider it a) a good investment and b) the reason they have their current jobs.
I don't really think DBC promised more than that. In fact, in my cohort they were all about "will code for food"; the idea being this was the first step and the next one was to find a place to continue learning.
If I hadn't been employed I probably would have done it. I was working full-time and then came home to do some more open source work. There was no money on the table for the problem ($200 ~ $400 would seem reasonable for a pre-interview project like this). I sent them an e-mail with 5 major tasks I was working on, all for open source projects or things I would open source. They could pick one, I'd finish it and I'd do a full presentation on it.
They said they had tried to do reviews based off Github pull requests in the past and that, no, I had to do the original problem they gave me. I didn't contact them back.
I really want to teach, but I was weary of these for-profit boot camp programs. They also talked about how they wanted teachers to push/promote the programs at events and such. I have another friend who went through a different boot-camp like program and told me she felt really rushed through it, but she didn't want to swear them off either.
It's cheaper to go to a state community college and get a 2-year programming degree in many places in the US. It will take longer, yes.
I know CS majors with masters degrees who've only written in C/Java and don't keep up with tech. I've know people without degrees at all who have learned BigO notation and learning algorithm development all on their own. You get out of any program what you put into it.
They seriously stop at "hey deploy a CRUD app?"
That's rough. There's no way students are getting jobs with that in this environment. Maybe when they first started that was enough, but now the market is flooded with not-quite-competent junior devs.
But companies rarely make the difference between a CS major (especially those with multiple internships or coops often spawning longer than the bootcamp on their own) and bootcamp graduates.
So they both start as SWE or Junior/Associate SWE. Often there's a drastic difference in ramp up and output, and people around them won't always know why (unless people stalk them on linkedin or ask).
That puts a ton of burden on teammates that may not be properly prepared to coach these people (they go through the same hiring process, same onboarding process, etc). Don't get me wrong, its a failing on the companies who hire people they are not prepared to handle, but they're often pressured to.
It's a really awkward situation.
Most of the first 3 weeks of the class was focused on writing Ruby programs to do different sorts and searches, and to model and manipulate different objects (suduko boards, battleship boards, etc.).
I left with a good practical knowledge of working with arrays and hashes in Ruby and when I would prefer one structure over the other, but what I mostly learned was how to model data objects for a SQL database and set up a web app to manipulate those objects (and how to integrate w 3rd party APIs).
But if you asked me anything about a Linked List or a Trie or when it was better to use which one, I would not have given you a very satisfactory answer (still might not, about Tries at least...).
And, yeah, getting a job was tricky. Partly because I still had a lot to learn (still do), but also partly because there is a lot of knowledge that every computer science grad has learned backwards and forwards and then forgot about that most bootcamp grads have only barely been exposed to.
Everyone on the bootcamp had a list of things they'd have liked to cover as well but there simply isn't time for everything. When planning the bootcamp's curriculum you have a difficult balancing act between giving people a firm grounding and teaching them things that are going to be directly helpful for getting jobs (which is most people's priority, given that they're not earning).
Students on my bootcamp who had been able to put together a portfolio of decent (albeit simple) websites that met users' needs didn't have trouble getting jobs. No, they weren't engineering roles at large tech companies but they're the first step in a new career.
Learner’s Guild https://www.fastcoexist.com/3068200/when-this-entrepreneurs-...
42 (completely free) https://www.42.us.org/
Holberton School https://www.holbertonschool.com/
Lambda Academy https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science
We're not a bootcamp, but we are 100% free until you get a job, and have live instructors from UC Berkeley, NASA, etc. We have a very rigorous curriculum that is closest to an uber-practical CS degree, but there's not really a close proxy to it anywhere.
We cover all the CS & programming fundamentals employers want you to understand, and get much closer to the metal, covering things like architecture/scaling, functional programming (hence the name), use compiled languages, etc.
We're also online, so you don't have to move anywhere, but we're live and on a strict schedule, so it's not something you can do asynchronously.
Has that been a benefit in terms of graduates getting easier access to remote positions? (The fact that they've demonstrated the ability to work remotely through your course)?
Do you work directly with potential employers, helping students get a foot in the door, or is that up to students themselves? If you do help out, do you "sell" the remote idea?
Finally, are you open to non-US students?
In a nutshell: we are training SWE using a project-based and peer-learning approach. No formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by practicing and collaborating with peers - pretty much like in the workplace.
We haven't graduated any cohort yet (our program is 2 years long, but students can start working after 9 months) but have already students who intern/work at NASA, LinkedIn, Tesla, Apple, Dropbox, Nvidia, Docker, CreditKarma...
Big difference between us and bootcamps: we are covering the fundamentals of CS + we are not focusing on teaching students specific tools but rather developing their critical thinking, problem-solving skills and guiding them on becoming self-learners. All good Software Engineers know that you must constantly learn to stay on top of your game, being about to retrain yourself is the most valuable skill that a professional should have to continue to grow career wise.
The school is 100% free as in no upfront cost and no later charge. The difficulty is to get in, one has to make it through a 26 day C heavy selection process and pass logic tests beforehand.
The school is really meritocratic in the sense that formal background is irrelevant and financial assistance makes it accessible for almost everybody.
No, not every bootcamp was legit. No, making assumptions about all bootcamps based on a handful of bad apples is not an honest critique. No, your anecdote about a bad bootcamp grad does not hold more weight than someone else's anecdote about a bootcamp completely changing their life.
The fact is DBC, which spawned an entirely new industry, was an overwhelmingly positive force. DBC has always made inclusivity and community a priority. For the vast majority of students, DBC has been a much higher ROI investment than a 4 year college degree and changes the way people think about modern education systems. There are thousands of capable engineers (including myself) out there today thanks to DBC, which often operated with high stress and, apparently, minimal funds.
It's a shame each bootcamp topic has its share of otherwise reasonable people making unfounded claims. In a community that values programming, startups, inclusivity, and helping others, you'd think the negativity and baseless accusations would be a lot more infrequent. It's been 5 years since DBC began and yet commenter ignorance still requires graduates to come in and defend their bootcamps.
If you have no idea what you're talking about, it's fine, ask and I'd be happy to answer. But this community really ought to be celebrating what DBC has accomplished.
Source: I'm an early 2013 DBC grad who has worked in SF tech since graduating. I've also helped hundreds of bootcamp grads with their job search post-graduation (meaning I have my fair share of honest criticisms for DBC). The vast majority of people I've talked with are now employed at companies most people on HN would love to work for.
Out of all the bootcamps I expected to fold DBC was at the bottom of the list.
This sentences describes about 80% of the comments in HN. We computer nerds like to think we know about everything.
A lot of the negativity is insecurity.
The best bootcamps invariably have a selective recruitment pipeline ensuring that they train students who have both natural aptitude as well as a baseline technical skillset. These aren't really "random" people at all : programming isn't particle physics, but it's not as easy as the sales pitch makes it sound.
I interviewed for a role at Dev bootcamp in 2016 and got an odd feeling from the place and the woman who interviewed me. She took several months to get back to me after I followed up multiple times and wow am I soooo glad I didn't get that.
You were in it for yourself and it would have been better for everyone if you could have admitted it. Sounds like you're still believing your own stories.
Kudos to you for hiring and inspiring an amazing team. Too bad you didn't know what to do with it.
You may not be responsible for the decline of DBC, but part of the reason it is crap now is because they expanded to like 30 locations. I'm almost certain that's the model you pitched to Kaplan because you sold right after the New York Campus opened.
I'm sure you made out with money but that doesn't mean you sold out the mission. This person is just upset they didn't get a job at what was an awesome institution.
Source?
But that's not a reasonable position across the board. Of course universities offer more than mere information, and I would say that bootcamps(at least DBC) focus mostly on those other things and far less on the information. By that I mean learning to code at home online isn't going to give you the same experience as spending days or weeks hacking on your first mobile app with a bunch of other people, non stop, while chowing on beer and pizza. Yes, there's tremendous value in that, especially if you need to learn to work on a team and self-organize. In theory, you can emulate that environment on your own, but there's a reason people pay for that kind of experience. A person of novice experience can't or won't come up with a substitute for that. It's an introduction to a world, of sorts. At least it was for me.
With all of the free learning materials online you can literally get a university education from top schools for free.
If I was starting out now I would considered it because it's a fast track to employment. When I started out I knew how to program but no one would consider you without an education. That forced me to go to college and learn fun things like COBOL and jcl and many other languages in a short period of time. In the end I rarely use most of those language but if a mainframe opportunity comes up I'm ready. Being forced to learn so many things at once was the real education because it helps in the real world where you are expected to pickup new languages. For some reason my mainframe dev resume bullet points have never been mentioned during an interview. If you can develop for a s/390 that should somehow give you a slight boost for your next javascript role in my opinion.
We're Lambda Inc. Incorporated in Delaware. Haven't announced our fundraising yet but that will be public soon. Clearly need to work on making the site look more legit.
They really couldn't find anyone, even someone that you could lookup on LinkedIn to give a reasonable quote?
That being said, I'm extremely lucky to have enrolled during the narrow window I did. The entire bootcamp industry is suffering, not just DBC. They've now totally saturated the market with juniors and refused to adapt to that reality by extending and improving their product: they should be offering longer courses, covering more material, interspersing their offerings with internships, and providing intermediate-level bootcamps for engineers looking to graduate to the next level. Today's bootcamp graduates have to compensate for this themselves by continuing to teach themselves new content as they fight for jobs after graduation. This is difficult - don't get me wrong, it's still doable and still very much worth the effort - but it's hard, and this explains the current embarrassingly low rate of bootcamp graduates winning jobs as developers. If this describes you: keep your chin up, find a friend to practice interviewing with, and know that you're going to need to work through this material eventually: https://teachyourselfcs.com. And feel free to reach out to me.
I don't think anyone close to the bootcamp industry would see this as a surprise, and I think we'll see many more bootcamp closures/M&As in the near future. Hopefully the industry will evolve and adapt, not die - everyone deserves the opportunity, not just the lucky few who had it easy before the market got saturated.
Just like the credentialed schools, there's a wide variety in quality and outcomes, but I think it's pretty clear they're doing better on ROI (and at least people aren't going into decades of debt for them en masse).
> "If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?"
If someone learns nothing after finishing their courses and has nothing positive on their resume for several years, they'd probably be in a tough spot. That's not really very different from the case for other types of schooling, though. If someone is learning and growing though, why would it? Only an extremely strange employer would ignore a candidate's performance in their last job and reject them based on schooling they did before it.
The income based repayment plans are also retroactively available to all Federal borrowers.
It's not actually as big of a problem as it sounds.
Edit: I also didn't realize you're the DBC founder? I owe you so much and i owe my entire career (thus far) to DBC and the entire industry you started with some crazy idea of teaching people to code in a couple months. Thank you for everything you have done.
To think, this is the post that launched an industry!
I'm currently working through week six of Phase 0, and I'm so, so sad that DBC isn't going to last. I did tons of research about different bootcamps, but ultimately I chose DBC because I wanted to be a part of a program that has such a commitment to being a corrective force in the embarrassingly un-diverse tech world.
It really is incredible that the thing you created has empowered so many students to both maximize their ability to learn and gain more agency in such an inequitable society.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. I'm glad I decided to dive into this while DBC was still around. (And now I should probably get back to work with attributes and modules...)
Is the fad over?
In other words, I don't think it's fair to say "there's an over-abundance of graduates from XYZ university. It's hard to choose among them." Regardless, stereotyping job candidates based on where they learned to code is poor practice. A good hiring manager ought to take the time to treat a candidate respectfully, but I know this behavior is rare. If your organization simply doesn't want to take on junior/entry-level programmers, it should be clear in the job post _and_ IMO, you shouldn't be open to receiving college-grad applications, either.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-developm...
I wrote a post about this here: https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didn...
I'm super disappointed to hear this news. Although I could see it coming, because how often does this kind of thing NOT happen when a small company gets purchased by a larger corporation?
DBC was quite an institution. As I've stated before, it's not about what they can teach you – it was simply an invaluable resource to allow those with ambition to figure out aspects of app development on their own and with other people. If you're expecting a series of lectures, exams, and knowledge to be bestowed upon you at DBC, you're looking at it wrong and you will fail. To have a place to go where you can spend months hacking on things with other people while going through a learning process, right in the center of the action in technology, was so unique and valuable. I met so many cool people and had far greater experiences than my time in college. It changed my life tremendously. I have Shereef and everyone whom I shared my experience with to thank! I really could be living in a van down by the river right now if I didn't discover DBC.
The greatest thing I got out of DBC was not coding ability, which I mostly picked up on my own, but a mindset/philosophy about learning and problem-solving. I know that many of these things come naturally to people software engineering, especially those far more brilliant than I, but not everyone figures these things out. They summed it up as the "growth" mindset vs. the "fixed mindset", which seems fairly accurate to me.
I really hope someone can continue(or at least hold a candle to) DBC's legacy. A lot of bootcamps seem like junk, but I'm sure that's not all of them.
It's a great business model for those top tier boot camps, but there's a limited number of students who can make it through, pay for it, and take time off to do it. It's just not that scaleable.
I think they should consider it, and I think that they could reach out to Free Code Camp to see if they can do something together. Hope to see this happening! What do you think?
From the European side - https://codeworks.me/
I've worked with many DBC grads and some nice people came through there. I interviewed many DBC grads and they were definitely all over the place in terms of ability and understanding, but some had everything it took to grow into solid software engineers.
I've worked with some of the instructors as well and they're great folks.
