I used to work for a coding bootcamp (not Flatiron) and made good money with a month off in between each of the three classes I taught each year. I eventually left because it felt like I was complicit in selling a lie. I totally agree with the article. Students graduating from a bootcamp are definitely not "job ready" without additional training / mentorship. Three months is just not a lot of time to acquire all of the good instincts that you naturally learn over years of doing development. Also the number of junior developers coming out of these bootcamps, combined with graduates from traditional CS programs is way more than the Bureau of Labor statistics suggests that the job market can bear and I saw these effects in action. Each class I taught had a harder time finding jobs than the one before, despite being <i>more</i> qualified on average.<p>That's not to say bootcamps are not worth it for anyone. There are some really good ones out there that honestly want to help improve peoples lives. The catch is that the students that have the most success are not the ones who come in knowing nothing. The most successful students have spent months (if not years) of dedicated self study. The bootcamp acts as a way to fill in some gaps and provide confidence in the job hunt.
> Flatiron, a for-profit school, has seized on a clear need in the economy that some academic experts say reveals a failing among traditional universities.<p>Teaching highly specialized skills currently in demand has not traditionally been the mission of universities. In professions like architecture and medicine there is an expectation that new graduates won't have much in the way of practical knowledge about current practices, and so apprenticeships are more or less built in to the transition from student to practitioner.<p>Is a disinterest in teaching current professional practice really a failing of universities?<p>It seems more likely that bootcamps are simply a way for software firms to outsource part of the apprenticeship process. Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp.
<i>"The Flatiron School’s 12-week course costs $15,000, but earns students no degree and no certificate."</i><p>Over $1000 a week per student, and their classes look big. Somebody is making lots of money off this. What do they pay their instructors?
<i>When Apple Inc., for example, announced in 2014 a new programming language for its products, Swift, Flatiron adjusted its curriculum within days</i><p>I don't see how this is possible, who is teaching this course? How do you go from 0 to instructor-level expert in "days"?
A coding camp graduate can be considered with respect to a computer science graduate what a paralegal is to a lawyer, or what a nurse is to a doctor.<p>They can perform some procedures, but not all of them, and at some point there might be supervision.<p>Now to be fair, paralegal and nursing programs take much longer than 12 weeks, are very strict and are regulated occupations that require a license that you can actually lose under certain circumstances.<p>Their purpose is to provide extra productivity and cost efficiency, but at some point they might require supervision and some procedures might exceed the skills learned during their training.
"Average starting salary: $74,447."<p>So they are paying them less than they would a recent college grad by something like 25%? no wonder they love hiring people out of these things.