Bootcamps, bootcamps, bootcamps… Theyre everywhere, and everyone has an opinion.
On one end of the spectrum are the hard-skeptics.
The hard-skeptics believe that bootcamps are selling snake oilits impossible to teach what they claim in three months.
If you went to a bootcamp you were a victim.
On the other end of the spectrum are the evangelists.
School has a lot to learn from bootcamps.
If youre only exposed to strong opinions, it can be disorienting.
Its challenging to know what to believe.
It doesnt help you want to believe in bootcamps and there are pushy salespeople feeding into your desires.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
I consider myself relatively well-informed, if a touch out of date.
I was the first instructional hire at an early, highly successful bootcamp.
I helped write the curriculum.
I conducted admissions interviews.
I even opened our second campus in Chicago.
I firmly believe that we were doing good, interesting things.
The vast vast majority of our students got more than we promised.
I brought in friends and family as students and staff.
It worked, basically.
Thats not to say it was flawless.
Just because bootcamps can be executed successfully does not mean the one you are looking at is.
Just because a bootcamp was terrific five years ago doesnt mean it is today.
So what are you to do?
I hope to offer some guidance.
Admissions exists for a reason.
You want them to be cautious about taking your money.
Others might struggle with the format of bootcamps.
The list could go on.
There is variance in the human experience, and a lot of it.
The amount of time it takes to go from first line of code to professional engineer varies.
The experience level of the applicant pool varies more.
Theres a lot of BS gatekeeping in tech.
I believe that the vast majority of people who like programming can get jobs doing it.
Good bootcamps screen out students who are not likely to be successful for the sake of the student.
If a program does little to no screening, that can mean one of two things.
I think this jot down of thing would be fantastic for kids.)
2: Good bootcamps are serious about metrics
What percentage of students are hired after 6 months?
When was that data sampled?
Be skeptical of data and ask questions.
Good bootcamps treat data gathering as a serious task, not a marketing activity.
Before I worked at a bootcamp, I might have also been somewhat skeptical.
But, Ive seen it work really, really well.
We had a smart, talented and energetic student body.
They knew our curriculum, and we knew them.
Why wouldnt we hire them?
Instructor-alums also remember what its like to not understand something.
That can make them very effective teaching partners.
Its not a red flag if a school hires former students.
I actually think it says something good: people went through this program and didnt want to leave.
But, I think there is a precarious balance to strike.
When a school relies too heavily on recent alums for its staffing needs, things can become insular.
When questions come up about how things work in the real world no one knows who to ask.
Its a good idea to ask bootcamps about how many of their staff are alums.
check that that some of the people teaching you have non-bootcamp software engineering experience.
4: Good bootcamps strike a balance with curriculum updates
Tech changes really fast.
Bootcamps cant write their curriculum once and be done.
They need to keep it current enough.
That said, if theyre constantly rewriting it, it can be unstable.
Good bootcamps strike a balance.
They have very different ends.
Computer Science is an academic discipline.
Computer Scientists are in the business of discovery.
Bootcamps are entirely industry-focused.
I taught several CS grads/dropouts (from pretty good undergrad programs!)
who were not planning on continuing on in their academic CS career and also werent job-ready.
Bootcamps are not a panacea.
They are not the solution to every problem you’ve got the option to think of.
You cant take a random laid-off worker, stick them in a bootcamp, and expect consistently good results.
Why do bootcamps work anyway?
Ive sometimes joked that our school could have been just as successful if we had no curriculum.
This is an intentionally provocative statement, but I really wonder if its true.
Most of our success can be explained by a few factors.
Thats why Im not naming them.
But I can say that they can and do sometimes work.
This article fromOff-by-oneis a stream of thought about computers.
The author, Zeke Nierenberg, writes about programming, education, tech-enabled thinking tools, and product development.
Find the original articlehere.
