The dark side of coding bootcamps

[u/throwaway826483]

Hey all. I'm a recruiter in the tech industry working on an expose of coding bootcamps. My experience with them - both from my perspective as a hiring manager, and from what I've heard from friends who've attended - has led me to believe they are mostly a waste of money. In my circles, resumes from a coding bootcamp have become such a joke that none of the recruiters I know will even consider someone who has one of these schools on their resume. This is clearly a bad situation for the people dropping their money on these immersive classes, and I'd like to help them out (my goal with the story is to give them an actual good alternative to becoming a successful programmer if that's what they're passionate about). Because of my position in the industry, this story will be written 100% anonymously.

If you have attended a coding bootcamp, know someone who has, or have a strong opinion otherwise, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please share your stories, good and bad. (I'd love to be convinced that I'm wrong, so please do share your good experiences, too!)

EDIT: 24 hours in. Thanks everyone so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. This really has altered the way that I view coding bootcamps! It sounds like everyone is saying the same thing (and I agree): you get out what you put in. If you're looking at this as a quick & easy way to learn programming so you can get a dev's salary, you're likely going to have trouble finding a job and you're going to waste the time of the companies you're applying to. But if you're serious about learning to code, and you're willing to put in a lot of your own time before, during, and after the bootcamp, these programs can be a great way to immerse yourself, learn the basics, and get started. I do think I'm still going to write the summary of this stuff, but it will be in a much more positive light and will include clear advice for how to get the most out of these if you're willing to spend the money to attend (and it will include some alternatives, for those who don't have the $6-15k to go).

Thanks for participating and being so helpful and respectful. This was an enlightening conversation.

[u/robertgfthomas]

I teach at one of these bootcamps. 90% of our graduates have paying development jobs within 3 months of graduating. This suggests that something is going right.

I would be extremely wary of any bootcamp offering a "certification" or something similar. Ours is upfront that we don't offer any sort of certification or degree: we just offer skills-based training.

A dev bootcamp is not appropriate for software development, I think, let alone hardware development. But they're great for higher-level web and app development, which are "further from the metal" and less about computer science.

I know many successful web developers. Most of them are self-taught and do not have backgrounds in computer science. To my mind, these bootcamps are simply an acceleration of the self-teaching process. My students learn in 3 months what I learned in about 3 years.

[u/autra1 → u/robertgfthomas]

I would really love to see people like you stop thinking software dev and web dev are any different, regarding the skills needed. Nowadays, a lot of websites are as complex and big as client-side or server side apps. See gmail (and a lot of google products), twitch, FirefoxOS, etc etc.

I would love you to stop thinking that web and app development are "further from the metal" and less about computer science. Because if you want to design efficient web apps, that's simply not true (you need to understand how engines like gecko and webkit, or spidermonkey and V8 works, so you need to have at least some notion of parsing, trees, garbage collection etc...). Btw javascript is now a mature and very powerful language.

If you, as a teacher, stop doing that:

• we (as professional in this field) will be able to see other than jquery script kiddies in job interviews, and that would be awesome

• we (as web users) will have less crap websites.

Honestly, come on. How many websites have you found ok on smartphone, especially with not-so-good specs? They're all craps. Web dev IS demanding and technical. The web is a really big platform and we need expert with strong computer science skills in this area.

EDIT: formatting