[justin]

My youngest brother went through Dev Bootcamp in 2012. He had graduated from a top 30 university but wasn't able to find a great job and had been doing some part time, low skill work.

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.

[dkarapetyan]

Trouble with anecdotes is that it is not data. I'm happy for your brother but that still doesn't change the fact that most bootcamps are overpromising and underdelivering on their promises of gainful employment. It's simply not possible to learn to program in bootcamp time frames.

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.

[Techonomicon]

I fully support this comment, and have been doubling-down for a while on the notion that people who come out of hacker schools and "do well" just had a knack for it in the first place.

We have been looking for a very entry-level dev to be in a pretty entry level role that would be perfect for someone to get their feet wet in the industry.

Every single person we've interviewed from a "hacker school" has been from Hack Reactor. I'd say something like 40% of them would actually be able to be some sort of "developer" given that they keep up the practice. About 20% (at best) are what I would consider an actual "entry level dev intern"

Entry level in this context is basically just the ability to code some basic html, css, javascript, with a computer given to you, and a task to work on over the course of a day. Many of the previous Hack Reactor students we had interview (at least 60%) (some even being "assistants"), in my opinion, have no business in software development. They were technical enough to understand "web dev" in conversation, but just couldn't manifest that into anything useful without huge amounts of guidance for menial tasks.

[temp20160423]

Are you paying below market? The good ones probably are shooting for better paying companies. I know some Hack Reactor alumni have made their way to Google.

[justin]

Love your use of speculation to counter my anecdotal data. Incredibly intellectually dishonest.

It is possible to learn enough programming to within 10 weeks to get a job programming. Of course they won't be the best programmers at that point. But I've hired bootcamp grads and have had other friends go through, and they have been positive outcomes. Yes, that is anecdotal data, but it categorically proves false that "it's simply not possible to learn to program in bootcamp time frames."

[toomanyrichies]

+1 to justin's comments. It's true that an anecdote isn't a complete data set, but it is one data point. Further, it's one more data point than the pure speculation that dkarapetyan's comment provides.

Let me add a 2nd data point- as a 2013 DBC grad, I would still be in my previous career (completely unrelated to engineering) if I hadn't attended DBC. My instructors and classmates were instrumental in helping me get out of a job I hated and into one I love. It wasn't a perfect experience, but it was a life-changing one, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

> For the truly motivated it is much better to go to recurse.com or join a learning Meetup.

Speaking of data, care to provide any which supports this opinion?

> most bootcamps are overpromising and underdelivering on their promises of gainful employment.

You generalize about an entire industry without providing evidence, and then you use that generalization to denigrate a specific company within that industry which may or may not buck a trend. A trend which you haven't even proven exists, btw. Nice.

[the_big_l]

Here's some actual numbers that HR released: http://hrhqdir.s3.amazonaws.com/outcomes/2017/April/CIRRRepo...

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

[komali2]

>for the truly motivated

No matter how motivated you are, you'll be casting around and learning aimlessly a bunch of random material about "programming" because you don't really know the nuances of the market as well.

Me: Turbo nerd, generally well-informed in the ways of technology, but outside the industry. Was working as a teacher and then a recruiter. I even took Harvard's CS50x class, so I knew the very basics of programming (some languages are compiled, others... aren't?), but I didn't really know that web development was the hot hiring field, I didn't know Javascript was the language of the web, that you could even use it for backend if you wanted. In fact, I didn't even really consider that there was a difference between front and back end.

So for 17,000 I was able to have all that sorted for me in 3 months flat, then kicked out into the industry a viable app developer. I went from a shit set of jobs straight into a bonafide, legitimate, and stable career trajectory. ~5 months total time investment. It simply would not have been possible to be so efficient by self-teaching, I wouldn't have known where to begin, what to study, that web dev had the lowest barrier to entry, etc. Literally the job placement stuff was completely useless and unused to me, I was a recruiter and so didn't use any of that stuff from my bootcamp, the thing that made it valuable to me was the curriculum.

[Muuuchem]

I worked on my own for about 6 months time with a job, but in the 8 weeks that I have been at a well known bootcamp, there is no way I could have developed 1/10th of the knowledge that I have now during the same time period working a shitty job.

[austenallred]

How do you know that? From anecdotes? :)

[PagingCraig]

Most top bootcamps are very transparent with their numbers.

[bdcravens]

I think the comment is really about bootcamps in general.

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.

[avremel]

This sounds very much on target. I've noticed quite a few bootcamps grads being hired as assistants, and waiting around for a regular job. Some sit around up to a year. This, and the fact that the industry is flush with bootcamp grads (I live in NY), are giving me second thought about the benefits of a bootcamp.

Instead of hiring bootcamp grads - which push grads to aim for salaries north of 70k - it would make sense for companies to recruit self tought programmers with an aptitude towards tech. By self tought I am not referring to child prodigies, but anyone who can complete the equivalent of freeCodeCamp.org's front end certificate. Such programmers would be happy to get a starting salary of 30k, and have the opportunity to get their feet wet.

It all boils down to networking. Universities are a form of networking by signalling to society who are the best and the brightest. IMHO, bootcamps can be viewed in the same light. If companies and potential hires weren't lazy and instead got involved in plain old networking, there would be less of a need for Bootcamps/Universities. Maybe due to the lack of community, companies must resort to other means in order to filter applicants.

[arikr]

I'm sure DBC has many good outcomes, but it's a fair comment.