| Granny-to-Guru in 12 weeks is clearly unrealistic. What about a mid-career move from infrastructure/operations with significant experience with Perl / Shell / etc. programming? Or a COBOL / C++ / Java developer that's been stuck in corporate-land for the past 20 years? Or a business analyst that's been pushing excel sheets and access databases around for years, maybe with some BI tools sprinkled in for fun. There are a ton of relatively experienced "computer people" facing uncertain times as cloud environments close down corporate data centers, and outsourcing eliminates developer jobs. The current dev environment is bewildering to say the least -- you don't just learn Javascript -- to be effective you need to learn a ton of other things -- HTML, CSS, Jquery, test-driven-development, grunt, git, various frameworks, jasmine, node and/or ruby on rails (or equivalent), pair programming, etc. Each of those leads down its own rabbit-hole of complexity and extra tools to know. It seems like these bootcamps, done well and with the right sort of student, would give a massive 'level-up' into the current dev world. For mid-career types where there is a need to minimize time away from a paycheck, a 12-16 week program is a good fit. There are few realistic alternatives: Go back to school for a CS degree, working on it nights, maybe with tuition re-imbursement from work. -- This is insane -- schools don't teach the above, they teach algorithms and specialize in toy projects, not the real world. Doing it part time while at your day job just adds years to the process putting you even further behind. Start or contribute to open source projects. This is easier said than done as it pre-supposes a knowledge of and familiarity with using the above stack of tools or their equivalents. For the dedicated self-starter with a lot of determination and energy to stay up at night doing this it could work. People with kids and other commitments would find it very tough. I don't think the bootcamps are going to turn a fine-art major with no prior computer experience into a $100,000+ web developer in 12 weeks. I _do_ think that it could turn a $90,000+ corporate programmer or infrastructure person into a $90,000+ web developer, now with a foothold in the world of the "cool kids" and an escape hatch from the stifling corporate world. |
I actually think that's an important niche that is being under-served right now. We often get career Java devs or .NET devs at our Ruby user group here in Dallas and they want to "break into" Ruby. Most employers won't give them a shot and they are then stuck in the "need experience to get experience" treadmill.
I was in the same boat and got lucky in that someone took a chance on me. But it wasn't a very easy path at all. Having a bootcamp focused on experienced dev with job placement at the end would have been worth its weight in gold.