According to the New York Times, the number of coding boot camps in the United States has tripled to more than 90 since 2013. While this growth may seem positive at first, it’s actually been rather strenuous for many leaders in the industry. In the past summer alone, two large coding boot camps (Dev Bootcamp and The Iron Yard) announced they are closing their doors nationwide. Combined, the two schools owned a total of 21 locations across the United States, creating quite a large dent in the industry after their respective closures.
Here is a map that provides a stronger visualization of this impact:
An Overcrowded Industry
In the shortest amount of words, coding boot camps were becoming an overcrowded industry. While there was a strong demand for coding education, students started to shift their interests to boot camps that had a good reputation and strong job placement rates after graduation. Even Dev Bootcamp’s president wrote: “We do think that as the boot camp industry continues on, it will be important to create stronger alignment with employers.” Coding boot camps that make it their business to not only provide education but guarantee a job after graduation have the best chances of surviving.
Are Coding Boot Camps Worth It?
It may be a challenge for the coding industry to keep this promise of job placement though. Last year, Bloomberg ran an article stating many students were still not prepared for the tech industry even after their extensive training. Even Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education, has said, “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.”
It’s More Than a Lack of Coding Experience
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.
Alternatives?
Coding boot camps aren’t cheap, ranging up to $26,000 and more. The great thing about the tech field is there are plenty of inexpensive alternatives to boot camps. Many languages, frameworks, open-source tools, and even online schools are free or affordable:
- Learn the basics of coding: Codeacademy, Udemy
- Learn interaction design: Interaction Design Foundation, Designlab
- Become a data scientist: Dataquest
- Learn DevOps culture: Udacity, DevOps.com
Of course, there are many faults to these methods of learning as well. Point being, if you do go into a coding boot camp, do your research and know what you’re getting into first. Find the ones that guarantee you a career, or at least connect you with a strong mentor after you’re finished. In this world, there is no time to be a starving artist or a hungry engineer for that matter.
2 Comments
I teach CS at Mills College in Oakland, California, which has academic programs aimed at people who want to get into tech after majoring in something else in college. Our program isn’t as fast as boot camps (1.5-2 years), but our grads get software engineering jobs at companies like Google (where I worked for 11 years), Apple, Salesforce, Splunk, Intuit, Mozilla, etc. Mills is another option that people considering bootcamps should be aware of. https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/computer-science/index.php
An interesting alternative, but it appears to be quite costly. If I am reading it correctly, the requirements are 43 units @ $1,285/unit = roughly $55k. That is not counting opportunity cost of spending 1.5-2years to obtain the degree.
While I agree that coding bootcamps aren’t in-depth enough for a complete beginner to be job-ready for a place like Google, I saw plenty of people have successful outcomes when I went through one.
I like that Mills offers CS masters for those without CS backgrounds, but it seems like we are comparing apples and oranges here. Maybe the ideal balance lies somewhere between the two? I also know people who taught themselves everything from scratch, and went on to land solid SWE jobs.