192: Developer Bootcamps and Coding Schools: Doomed or Thriving?

Where is the best place for you to get the skills you need to get a high-tech job, to advance your career, or to just satisfy your desire to improve? You’re not going to find a specific answer in this episode to the question of what’s best for you. The reason is that we’re all different and have different needs, desires, and starting points. We also learn differently. There is no single best place for everybody to get coding skills. What I’ll explain in this episode is how I think about this topic and hopefully give you some things to think about as you make your own decisions. I recently read an article about Dev BootCamp announcing that they will be accepting their last cohort and closing business at the end of this year. The term cohort is a common way to describe a group of students that all start an intensive training program at the same time. The news about Dev BootCamp shutting down got me to thinking about this industry and seemed like a good topic this week. There’s several variations of bootcamps teaching slightly different technologies but from what I’ve seen, they all have the following four things in common: Bootcamps usually focus on web technologies and call this full-stack development. What this means is that students learn about everything needed to build an interactive website. There’s HTML and CSS for displaying and formatting the web pages. There’s JavaScript to add actions and behavior to the web pages. There’s languages like Ruby or PHP that run on the servers and that prepare the web pages to be sent to the website visitors. And there’s databases to store information on the server. All of these technologies build on one another and the idea is that by learning all of them, you can become a full-stack developer. Bootcamps usually enroll several students as a group for an intense, multi-week program. The days are long and leave no time for anything else. You need to be committed because students are expected to keep up with the fast pace. The programs will mix lectures with hands-on work. Bootcamps usually have students work on projects that can be demonstrated at the end to show everything that was learned. Bootcamps usually charge about a thousand dollars per week. Some want this money paid in advance and charge even more if you need to split it into multiple payments. Some offer financial aid. Some offer partial refunds if you can’t find a job. And some don’t charge anything until you get a job. Personally, I’m not a big fan of bootcamps for most situations. I think the structure makes it hard for students to afford them. You would have to leave your current job for 2 months or more. For most people, this means quitting their current job. And at the same time, either pay or commit to paying anywhere from 8 to 16 thousand dollars. This is, however, a lot less than you might pay for a Bachelor’s degree. So it seems like a good deal. I mean, you’d probably have to quit your job in order to attend college full time too. And the option to skip college, pay a fraction of the cost, and finish in a couple months instead of a few years, is very compelling. The reason I’m not a big fan is because of that time. It takes time to learn something well. Our brains need time to grow into our skills. Without that time, most people will quickly forget everything they learned. It would be different if bootcamp students were already programmers familiar with some of the technology and just wanted an intensive program to learn a few pieces and how to apply this new skills in the larger web development picture. But to take a person who knows nothing about programming and expect them to learn an entire stack of technologies in such a short amount of time is where I think bootcamps are going wrong. When I went to college, I studied electrical engineering and thought that I was already on a fast track because my college finished i