What really bothers me about coding schools is that their application process pretty much sets them up for success.<p>They aggressively filter applicants (on prior work experience, passion, etc.) to only keep the ones most likely succeed and make their program look good (not unlike most private high schools, and a lot of private universities). And a lot of them charge crazy tuition (not far from the most expensive US universities if you bring it to a cost per week of instruction), further narrowing the funnel.<p>There's not a lot of merit in having a very high success rate if your students were going to succeed anyway. That's where the real educational challenges lie, and why public universities or non-profits who aim to reach precisely the people who couldn't get in those bootcamps have much lower success rates.<p>At my current workplace, we just hired a developer who came from a dev bootcamp. She's fantastic- but she also has an undergraduate degree in math, she wrote some C++ out of college, and has an MBA as well as pretty impressive work experience. Of course she was very likely to do well in a cookie-cutter Ruby course!<p>Try teaching former convicts, unemployed people, veterans, teenagers from poor neighborhoods, etc. But, it's much harder work, less glamorous, and surely less profitable (I've taught CS/programming in public universities and to disadvantaged teenagers).
>Our alumni tell us that learning how to code professionally is like learning a super power<p>I feel like the real super power is the ability to learn effectively. Not just how to write code, but how to do <i>anything</i>. I get the feeling that a lot of people who have had just the right combination of upbringing + opportunities take this ability for granted. They do it very naturally.<p>Coding is only as powerful as your ability to think. I don't care how many monkeys are coding in PHP you're never going to get Facebook.
When is this fad going to die out? You can't produce a competent web developer in 8 weeks. Maybe this would be useful to an experienced dev who is looking to pick up some web technologies in a structured atmosphere but there are so many resources available online, why bother?