I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry.<p>The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies.<p>Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have stepped in to bridge that gap - they essentially screen for people who learn quickly, teach them the bare essentials, and send them on their way.<p>This means bootcamps have a symbiotic relationship with the quality of students they're able to attract. The best bootcamps turn out the highest quality students, who then get the best jobs, which makes the bootcamp look better.<p>Dev Bootcamp was always in that awkward position where it was trying to be one of the "premiere" bootcamps, but never actually made it to tier 1 status. It's always lived in the shadow of Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, and to a lesser extent, App Academy. Having personally worked with Dev Bootcamp graduates, I've felt that on average, they were much weaker than the graduates from the other bootcamps I mentioned.<p>Since Hack Reactor in particular has been expanding its reach to additional locations, Dev Bootcamp was probably getting boxed out of the premium bootcamp space. The founders were unwilling to be relegated to tier 2 (or the demand was dropping too fast) so they had to pull out.<p>It's a shame, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised.
So, three years ago, I was attending DBC and getting my first exposure to web app development. Today, I write code for a living and am enjoying the work I do much more than what I had been doing before.<p>Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No.<p>Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No.<p>Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really.<p>But I did learn an enormous amount of practical knowledge in a very short time (basically: "How to build and deploy a database-backed CRUD app with a reasonable UI while working as part of a small fast paced team" and "How to research stuff you don't know the answer to and figure out how to do it on your own").<p>They taught me what I needed to know to teach myself the rest of what I needed to know to get where I wanted to be. And for that, it was worth it for me.<p>But I do have mixed feelings about the bootcamps in general.<p>They can be really helpful for people in certain circumstances (in my case: career changer who needed to jumpstart the learning process and get some practical guidance), but they sell themselves as something else ("Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!").<p>Sorry to hear they are shutting down. I suppose it was Kaplan's decision and the space has become so crowded that there must be pricing pressure on the programs and a limit to how many graduates the job market can absorb. Will have to go look into this some more and see what I can find out.
It always frustrates me when commenters are overwhelmingly undereducated about a topic but continue to make broad, sweeping generalizations. There's a ton of negativity, outright assuming, and misinformation being thrown around here. It happens in every bootcamp-related thread (and topics in other subjects of course).<p>No, not every bootcamp was legit. No, making assumptions about all bootcamps based on a handful of bad apples is not an honest critique. No, your anecdote about a bad bootcamp grad does not hold more weight than someone else's anecdote about a bootcamp completely changing their life.<p>The fact is DBC, which spawned an entirely new industry, was an overwhelmingly positive force. DBC has always made inclusivity and community a priority. For the vast majority of students, DBC has been a much higher ROI investment than a 4 year college degree and changes the way people think about modern education systems. There are thousands of capable engineers (including myself) out there today thanks to DBC, which often operated with high stress and, apparently, minimal funds.<p>It's a shame each bootcamp topic has its share of otherwise reasonable people making unfounded claims. In a community that values programming, startups, inclusivity, and helping others, you'd think the negativity and baseless accusations would be a lot more infrequent. It's been 5 years since DBC began and yet commenter ignorance still requires graduates to come in and defend their bootcamps.<p>If you have no idea what you're talking about, it's fine, ask and I'd be happy to answer. But this community really ought to be celebrating what DBC has accomplished.<p>Source: I'm an early 2013 DBC grad who has worked in SF tech since graduating. I've also helped hundreds of bootcamp grads with their job search post-graduation (meaning I have my fair share of honest criticisms for DBC). The vast majority of people I've talked with are now employed at companies most people on HN would love to work for.
Attending Dev Bootcamp in March 2013 is the best decision I've ever made, it totally altered the trajectory of my career and I'm happier and more fulfilled as a result. I'm not sure I would have been able to make the switch from consulting to software engineering without DBC.<p>That being said, I'm extremely lucky to have enrolled during the narrow window I did. The entire bootcamp industry is suffering, not just DBC. They've now totally saturated the market with juniors and refused to adapt to that reality by extending and improving their product: they should be offering longer courses, covering more material, interspersing their offerings with internships, and providing intermediate-level bootcamps for engineers looking to graduate to the next level. Today's bootcamp graduates have to compensate for this themselves by continuing to teach themselves new content as they fight for jobs after graduation. This is difficult - don't get me wrong, it's still doable and still very much worth the effort - but it's hard, and this explains the current embarrassingly low rate of bootcamp graduates winning jobs as developers. If this describes you: keep your chin up, find a friend to practice interviewing with, and know that you're going to need to work through this material eventually: <a href="https://teachyourselfcs.com" rel="nofollow">https://teachyourselfcs.com</a>. And feel free to reach out to me.<p>I don't think anyone close to the bootcamp industry would see this as a surprise, and I think we'll see many more bootcamp closures/M&As in the near future. Hopefully the industry will evolve and adapt, not die - everyone deserves the opportunity, not just the lucky few who had it easy before the market got saturated.
I worked at Dev Bootcamp for four years. A big part of why the company is going out of business is that it put students ahead of profits.<p>I wrote a post about this here:
<a href="https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didnt-fail-3a4e456899be" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@abinoda/dev-bootcamp-is-dead-but-it-didn...</a>
DBC 2013 alumnus here.<p>I'm super disappointed to hear this news. Although I could see it coming, because how often does this kind of thing NOT happen when a small company gets purchased by a larger corporation?<p>DBC was quite an institution. As I've stated before, it's not about what they can teach you – it was simply an invaluable resource to allow those with ambition to figure out aspects of app development on their own and with other people. If you're expecting a series of lectures, exams, and knowledge to be bestowed upon you at DBC, you're looking at it wrong and you will fail. To have a place to go where you can spend months hacking on things with other people while going through a learning process, right in the center of the action in technology, was so unique and valuable. I met so many cool people and had far greater experiences than my time in college. It changed my life tremendously. I have Shereef and everyone whom I shared my experience with to thank! I really could be living in a van down by the river right now if I didn't discover DBC.<p>The greatest thing I got out of DBC was not coding ability, which I mostly picked up on my own, but a mindset/philosophy about learning and problem-solving. I know that many of these things come naturally to people software engineering, especially those far more brilliant than I, but not everyone figures these things out. They summed it up as the "growth" mindset vs. the "fixed mindset", which seems fairly accurate to me.<p>I really hope someone can continue(or at least hold a candle to) DBC's legacy. A lot of bootcamps seem like junk, but I'm sure that's not all of them.
Kudos to the school who started it all, and the vision behind it. Thinking about the future, and the million of people who could benefit from learning coding, is DBC going to open source their curriculum?<p>I think they should consider it, and I think that they could reach out to Free Code Camp to see if they can do something together. Hope to see this happening! What do you think?<p>From the European side - <a href="https://codeworks.me/" rel="nofollow">https://codeworks.me/</a>
Burst of bootcamp bubble? Dev Bootcamp seems to have been the first ever coding bootcamp. Think Hack Reactor (another popular bootcamp) was founded by Dev Bootcamp grads. Or maybe the herd would just distribute to other bootcamps? Even if the failure of Dev Bootcamp doesn't directly hurt the business of other bootcamps, it has a psychological effect on the bootcamp industry: suddenly the bootcamp experience doesn't seem so attractive anymore. If the school failed to survive, does it affect the survival of its graduates? Is this going to have a psychological effect on how industry views bootcamp grads, and consequently affect the job prospects of bootcamp grads?
Here's the thread that started it all:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133</a>
I don't know if I <i>should</i> feel sad about this, but I do feel sad about this. As others have mentioned, DBC was the first company in this industry, and their excellent execution seems to have been what led to so many other entrepreneurs becoming convinced that this concept could work; they really did a great service for people in this country who didn't graduate college with a hard-science / engineering degree. I considered going to a bootcamp back in February of 2013 (one year after DBC launched), met Shereef and his cofounder Jesse Farmer at their SF location, and left very impressed with what they had created and with them personally.
So I graduated from DBC 3 years ago and I agree with most of the sentiments already stated in this thread. However, I think the red flag for me was seeing some of my cohort graduate and then immediately after become instructors at DBC. I don't care what you say, you cannot teach programming after being exposed to programming for 12 weeks. For one thing, a "good" teacher isn't just someone who has been coding for a while (which obviously you lack if you have just graduated from the program); you actually have to understand pedagogy and take an actual interest in being a mentor or guide. If DBC had hired instructors with industry experience, I often found that they lacked the proper skills to make them effective educators.
DBC was acquired by Kaplan back in 2014 [1]. Was this Kaplan's decision or DBC's?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-development-school-dev-bootcamp-1403660869" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/kaplan-to-buy-software-developm...</a>
Top tier boot camps are essentially 12 week long interviews that the interviewee pays for.<p>It's a great business model for those top tier boot camps, but there's a limited number of students who can make it through, pay for it, and take time off to do it. It's just not that scaleable.
"Hi Andrew, we had actually been working too find a sustainable business model since the very beginning. Ultimately we couldn't find one that didn't sacrifice on our commitment to provide the highest quality program possible while keeping our program open to the most diverse students possible."<p>What does that mean? It seems like this should've been a profitable business - 3000 graduates @ $10k/piece = $30mm revenue.
That's too bad.<p>I've worked with many DBC grads and some nice people came through there. I interviewed many DBC grads and they were definitely all over the place in terms of ability and understanding, but some had everything it took to grow into solid software engineers.<p>I've worked with some of the instructors as well and they're great folks.
DevBootcamps work over the last 5 years have been super impactful and paved the way for many bootcamps. Like many in the industry, and as a founder of DevMountain bootcamps, we all knew DBC as the golden standard. DBC changed tech education and positively affected many! Much respect and best wishes to everyone involved.
Is this announcement official? I don't see anything on their website <a href="https://devbootcamp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://devbootcamp.com/</a>. Also, the timing is off -- it seems announcing this at this time is going to put a damper on the entire next semester.
I was a graduate of one of the 2015 cohorts. It was a good school that really prepared me for a solid career. However, I remember running the numbers on the camp when I was there and was having trouble coming up with how they could still be profitable given their location, staff, and cohort sizes.
Who needs bootcamps? All you need is a decent machine and an internet connection to learn. That's how we learnt "web" back in the day. Cynical me hopes all commercial (and often spammy) bootcamps and conferences and meetups die a quick death. Also death to the hipster culture in tech. /rant over
Hard to compete against things like Lambda Academy where there's no up front cost and you only pay if you get a job: <a href="https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science" rel="nofollow">https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science</a>
Relevant thread with comments from competitors and people who were there at the beginning: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364</a>
I think Dev Bootcamps are awesome but would probably be better served as an online service without the live classroom setting. I would rather do acloud.guru and udemy.
Shereef Bishay sold out his staff and sold out his mission and he's going to the do the same to his staff at Learner's Guild in Oakland! He sold it off to Kaplan for 80M and his staff (with equity) got nothing!!!<p>I interviewed for a role at Dev bootcamp in 2016 and got an odd feeling from the place and the woman who interviewed me. She took several months to get back to me after I followed up multiple times and wow am I soooo glad I didn't get that.