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Education Technology

Early 'Coding School' Dev Bootcamp Is Shutting Down (axios.com) 106

Posted by msmash from the sad-state-of-affairs dept.
Dev Bootcamp, the original "coding bootcamp," is shutting down, the company announced on Wednesday. The company's last cohort of students, who begin the program next week, will graduate in December and receive job search help before the school permanently shuts down. From a report: Why it matters: Early coding bootcamps like Dev Bootcamp launched a boom in alternative education for programing skills, with some of the school's own alumni going on to found their own successful programs, like App Academy. Ultimately, the coding bootcamp craze highlighted not only the need to rethink computer science and programming education in traditional colleges, but also the increasing demand for workers with these technical skills.
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Early 'Coding School' Dev Bootcamp Is Shutting Down More

Early 'Coding School' Dev Bootcamp Is Shutting Down

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  • Coding is now VocTech. (Score:3)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Thursday July 13, 2017 @03:03PM (#54803105)

    Follow the multitude of other voc tech training paradigms and industry solutions and apply them to coding.

    Yes, this does mean coders should unionize if they want to stop getting walked on.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jimmifett ( 2434568 )

      Can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic...
      Personally, I'll never join a union. Nothing beneficial about them anymore.

      • Personally, I'll never join a union. Nothing beneficial about them anymore.

        Germans would probably tend to disagree.

        The UAW absolutely blows, but they're no less corrupt than the politicians and company CEOs they work with.

        • In Germany, the government runs the unions and there are required to be two competing unions for every industry, which by law cannot go on strike at the same time. It's just very different.

          In Japan to employer runs the 'union' for its staff.

        • In germany not many are in a union. Especially not in IT.
          And here 'workers are unionised' and not 'shops are unionised' (don't really understand what the later is meaning).

          Many people here don't agree with unions, they are the main reason for not having enough child care places, not having high quallified part time jobs etc. Bottom line they are even responsible for a unnecessary high unemployment rate.

          I never would join a union, regardless what profession I had.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by chill ( 34294 )

            In the United States, "union shop" is a workplace where membership in the union is mandatory. All non-management employees are required to be dues-paying members of the union as a condition of employment. Dues are automatically deducted from your paycheck.

            It is an artifact of the way our Congress passed laws regarded collective bargaining. By law, any benefits negotiated by a union apply to all labor employees, not just dues-paying members. You can not be a member and still get all the benefits provided by

            • Pretty strange concept.

              In Germany, no one can force you to be in a union or force a corporation to only hire unionized employees.

              That does not really make sense :D

    • Vocational Jobs != Unioned jobs.

      Trying to Unionizing coders has a lot of challenges.
      1. Coding is a safe job. White Collar jobs in general do not got a lot of support to be unionized.
      2. Compared to these other unionized jobs, you are not normally getting walked on. Your job may suck, for the most part you are getting paid a middle class salary.
      3. Most coders work for companies that don't specialize in coding. So if you are working for government, education, or some factories you will be under their union an

      • 1. Coding is a safe job. White Collar jobs in general do not got a lot of support to be unionized.

        This is opposite of what a majority of people here and elsewhere claim about it.

        2. Compared to these other unionized jobs, you are not normally getting walked on. Your job may suck, for the most part you are getting paid a middle class salary.

        Again, constant talk about being walked on.

        6. There is a huge range in skill set quality. Many unionized jobs are easily replaceable jobs. Some Entry Level coding jobs may be like this. But normally after people gain skills they tend to specialize, and become harder to replace.

        That's how Unions work as well. Especially the longer you've been on a job. You're not just going to go in and replace a master pipefitter with some H1B that's never touched a pipe before.

    • you can't get hired without a 4 year degree because you're automatically not qualified, meaning the employer gets to bring in a (much cheaper) worker on a Visa. That's why these schools fail. They had them all over the place in the 80s and 90s before the flood of visa workers.

  • Oh, Editors... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 )
    Half of TFA made it into the summary. Should have included the other half of TFA that explains why the coding camp went out of business. Of course, quoting the entire TFA would have violated fair use.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Are you an alumnus of this defunct coding school?

      • Are you an alumnus of this defunct coding school?

        Why do you ask?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Because you're a fucking incompetent who can't even read your own shit code [slashdot.org].

          Oh right, my mistake, I thought we were having a conversation; you were fishing for the meaning of the word "alumnus".

          • Because you're a fucking incompetent who can't even read your own shit code

            If you read the replies to my comment, you would discover that I'm not the only person who had trouble recognizing their own code.

            Oh right, my mistake, I thought we were having a conversation; you were fishing for the meaning of the word "alumnus".

            Nope. I was wondering if you were serious about having a conversation. Obviously not. As I suspected, you're just another 14-year-old wanker.

    • Should have included the other half of TFA that explains why the coding camp went out of business.

      The article doesn't state why it went out of business, but rather merely states that it couldn't find a sustainable business model.

      The real reason is such:

      1) Tell everyone that anyone can be a developer.
      2) Everyone and anyone signs up for the classes, creating an unsustainable bubble.
      3) The vast majority of them find out that developing software requires a particular mindset that they don't, and can't, have.
      4) Disappointment sets in, and the word spreads that not anyone and everyone can be a software develo

      • While we are speculating... Sometimes the oddball thing that attracts some kooks with real skills but needing brushing up in newer technology, just does not mainstream. To become profitable enough to become genuinely stable, they have to imagine who could be sold their service and sell, sell, sell. However the newer crops include people with no experience and wobbly potential. Your course may not have changed at all, it might have even improved, yet the graduates are very different. You get stuck with

  • I think I see the problem... (Score:3)

    by s_p_oneil ( 795792 ) on Thursday July 13, 2017 @03:08PM (#54803169) Homepage

    I think I see the problem...

    "with some of the school's own alumni going on to found their own successful programs, like App Academy"

    Dev Bootcamp failed primarily because its own students graduated and then decided to cannibalize its business.

    • So instead of being a coding bootcamp it was actually a coding bootcamp bootcamp? Xzibit aside, isn't that how it should be? There was presumably some weakness or omission in the original that the offspring remedied.

      Some people think that can happen with plants and even animals. Crazy talk, I know.

      • By the second iteration the only thing taught is how to apply for government grants to open a coding bootcamp.

    • Yikes. What kind of incompetence would that lead to after a couple of iterations?

  • Next up, they should open a brain surgery camp, because like software development, any idiot can do it. They just need to start early! Most of them still won't be able to figure out why you are giving them $5.27 when the bill only comes to $5.22, but programming isn't hard like that is!

    • By increasing the number of MD's you can lower the total cost of health care.
      However Med Schools are Selective, not because being a Medical Doctor requires the Best of the Best, but because it keeps the population of Doctors low to keep their salaries high.

      • By increasing the number of Brain Surgeons in the same way they are trying to increase the number of programmers the cost (loss of life) goes up quite dramatically actually. Likewise, increasing the number of programmers increases cost, because now I can't just write quality software, I have to deal with your incompetence on top of doing my job.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Which means that as a group, MDs are a lot smarter than coders.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      You can't patch a botched brain surgery job with v1.1.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I think this is an _excellent_ idea. The first patients can be the ones that are willing to hire coders educated in this excellent way and the ones that came up with this sure and cost-efficient way to educate coders and brain-surgeons! With these, obviously, these brain-surgeons cannot do much damage...

  • Five months and you're a programmer? (Score:3)

    by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Thursday July 13, 2017 @03:16PM (#54803253)

    Society is about to collapse!

  • IME, these "camps" are a scam. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As a senior developer, I have tried to fill Jr. positions with people who have completed these types of "bootcamps". As far as I can tell, they skim some basic skills, prod students through a single, simplistic project in which they may only do a fraction of the work and may not actually complete and show them the door. At some point $$$$-$$$$$ changes hands.

    I think they are a total scam. They don't teach a dedicated person more than they could learn on their own in the same time. What they may do is teach

    • I think you might be happier somewhere that you can be hands-on in the hiring process instead of simply having people jammed into interviews with you. If you don't feel you can provide effective feedback to the manager responsible for funneling people who're going to learn from you...good luck in general.

      There was a series of copycat "bootcamps" with varying selectivity and success. A lot are trash. I had pretty good luck with DBC in particular...found 2 of the brightest Python developers I know there (bot

      • Juniors take serious investment, and hiring them as cheap labor is another good sign you're just not in a terribly healthy company.

        It just means that management thinks that there is not all that much left to do that is genuinely hard. Which might be true. But, boy, it will suck for the conscientious engineers who stick around when that guess is wrong.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Quite frankly, I expect some large, well-known company to go bankrupt because they cannot fix their IT anymore in the next 10 years or so. And no, things are not getting easier, they are getting harder with everything virtualized, code that nobody can read without tool-support (I am looking at you, Java), a mix of old and new, both not really documented, experienced people retiring, etc.

          • Back when Arnold Swarzenegger was governor of CA and got in a tussle about the budget, he had the bright idea to only pay every CA employee the minimum wage as a stopgap cash preserving tactic until the crisis was over, effective immediately. The CA head of IT told the governor that change would take 10 months. The best guess about why was that the skilled and knowledgeable cobol programmers were probably on contract, and the contracts are all suspended during a budget crisis.

            I do not think that a big com

      • That first paragraph is brilliant. I used to let *anyone* who'd be working directly with the hire sit in on the interview. They knew more about what they needed than I knew. This worked remarkably well.

        And yes, I mean anyone. We didn't actually have an HR department.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, I don't think your observations came as any surprise. But you state the real problem very well:

      ... management thinks they can get bright young devs with brand new skill for dirt cheap.

      As long as management keeps not understanding what is going on, the problem will persist or get worse.

  • 1999 is calling....coder schools are nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday July 13, 2017 @03:54PM (#54803569)

    Remember MCSE bootcamps? If you're in IT and of a certain age, you probably do. These schools sprang up to soak up the demand for system administrators at the peak of the First Dotcom Bubble. I got my MCSE on NT 4.0 (wow, I'm old) through self-study at the time, and these schools were what helped coin the term "paper MCSE." Basically, they'd force-feed total newbies the exam details in a cram session, and teach them a little bit about network and system administration. Microsoft's exams were notoriously easy to game back then, so tons of people who didn't really know anything got certified and were hired in admin positions they weren't qualified for. It took _years_ to clean out some of the paper MCSEs, and some would argue we're not done yet.

    I wasn't shocked when I read that web coder bootcamps were starting to pop up as the Second Dotcom Bubble was inflating. I'm not a web developer by any means, but I can't imagine these schools teach anything beyond the absolute basics. Already, if you're starting with one of the JavaScript frameworks, a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight. You have to learn the basics if you want to do anything the framework can't do for you, and I bet these coder schools don't teach much beyond how to do front-end coding in one or two frameworks.

    It's similar to how the MCSE bootcamps were -- my company paid for me to go to one for a certification upgrade because I was a consultant at the time and they wanted to bill me out at a higher rate. If you were there for a refresher, the model made sense. If you were a former plumber, truck driver, or similar as many of my classmates were, you were in for a world of trouble if you passed and hit the real world. Maybe these coder bootcamps will produce people who can work at some startup banging on front-end code for 16 hours a day, but nothing beats first principles when it comes to really learning.

    In the IT world, things move too fast these days to capture everything in a single certification, and I'd argue that it's difficult to learn everything the way you could when products, systems and networks were simpler. I don't know much about web coding though -- is it possible to boil things down enough to make a bootcamp graduate semi-useful?

    • a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight

      There's another insidious flip-side to this trend - I've been coding professionally now for 25 years (with four years of college before that and five years of hobby programming before that), and along the way I've picked up on things like pointers, recursion, memory management, algorithmic efficiency, TCP/IP, encryption, SQL, file systems, backwards compatibility, versioning, design, release planning, unit testing, and maybe a few other things. What I haven't quite gotten around to learning, though, is ho

      • full of security and scalability problems and ignores any advice I might give him because he knows all this new-fangled Angular stuff and since I don't, I must be obsolete anyway.

        It seems possible that you aren't taking your responsibility to mentor seriously. While you've been "meaning to get around to" learning modern technology, you could ask for assistance from that kid, impart some wisdom along the way, and actually build a good relationship and your import in the office.

        I'm not entirely certain what your skills vs. hypothetical new guy are supposed to mean, either...those are two very separate job descriptions. Your skill set as stated doesn't make you much of a fit for web de

    • but at the other end the theory loaded 4 year places don't really teach you the needed hands on skills / teach you really out dated stuff.

      Why not have 2 year tech / trade schools?

    • I get that MCSE mills gave you a bad taste, but these bootcamps are really trying to get people started in coding. I followed the narrow traditional path: coded since I was young, did some web dev, got my CS degree, spent my whole working life so far as a comfortable software engineer. I have also volunteered at bootcamps, think they are doing good work, and I wholeheartedly support the trend.

      There are some bad bootcamps and they deserve to be regulated, but the growth should show you there's a real demand

  • Not useful for producing developers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I have never seen any competent developer who originated from a 'coding academy' scheme. Nearly ALL of the people from these schemes ARE completely unqualified to write software, and lack anything more than superficial knowledge of software engineering. What can you do with such people on a real software engineering project? Nothing in my experience. 'Coding academies' exist to enrich the people who run them, not to help the people paying the money. People with a few weeks to year of training are still unt

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Fully agree on that. Hardly the first, widely hyped thing, that is only good for the separation of fools and their money.

  • node.js and ruby puppy mills

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