WARNING: The Harsh Truth about Coding Bootcamps in 2024

I appreciate the transparency, I am going through a coding boot camp now but well aware the outlook of getting a job right out of the gates is slim! I already have in mind I will need to learn as much as I can on my own and go back to college but I felt hey why not since uncle sam is paying for it lol

I've been doing the Odin project. I can't recommend it enough

I’m with a boot camp now. The program has been very intense so far. The two instructors are very talented and have plenty of experience. Only 9 students too.

Indeed we are now start working with C# along with JavaScript

Will it work out? Will I get a job down the road? Don’t know. But the curriculum has been very good so far.

If you are trying to get your first job in tech since boot camps are a rip off how should you go about this? I'm self taught and was heavily thinking about going through a bootcamp so my resume doesn't get thrown in the trash. I was also afraid of just this that boot camps would just take your money and give you a worthless certificate that wouldn't get you a job anyhow. So for someone in my shoes what is then the path? Everyone seems to say you don't need the CS degree. Assuming that is true what will get you to the point where you actually get interviews?

I appreciate your openness to discuss this. Have been on the fence about learning coding for future cloud jobs I would like to obtain. Thanks for pushing me away from this...almost predatory issue in the industry right now.

The potential to scam a person is always directly proportional to the size of the carrot being dangled.

I appreciate this.

The music is hilarious

I am at the end of a bootcamp. And i agree with almost everything.
Instructors. Curriculum. And they hooked me with university name.
I learned. But it felt like independently.

I’m a Hack Reactor grad from 2018 and it was already showing signs of problems then, I can only imagine it got worse

Boot camp grads rarely get hired by good stable companies. They end up at phony baloney plastic banana good time rock n roll fly by night startups.

You are absolutely right about EDX and the two you company. I signed up for one of their university partner boot camps and it was a mess. It was a hot mess. It was for web development. The cohort had about 45 people in it. One teacher, two TAs. The instructor and the 2TA's were very kind and patient. However, the biggest red flag for me was 2 and 1/2 weeks before classes began I put damn my down payment for the class so they gave me access to the pre-work and the pre-work was fine. It was very helpful. Very encouraging. Very supportive. Just very good all around. So a week before classes start I was getting emails from one of the student experience managers and she was reminding me and I'm assuming several others to make sure that we got our pre-work done how important it was and how we would go over everything the first week of class. I probably got those reminder emails. Maybe two or three times during the week before classes start. So I got through the pre-work. I had some questions. Nothing too major but just some little questions here and there, especially about using GitHub and I had my questions already for the first week of class cuz I assumed we would go over the pre-work and our teacher just completely bypass the pre-work!!! and we jumped into the regular class assignment w/o knowing if we even did the pre-work correctly and going over any of the steps that some of us might have got stuck on ! but so many people in that cohort did not get the pre-work done and some of the people who started it may have gotten stuck on SSH keys. Things like that. I mean it was just really crazy. It was like I was in the twilight zone and I couldn't believe how big our cohort was versus how little TAs were available for a cohort of 40 people. You should have way more TAs way more support. It was like we were always waiting in the zoom rooms for help or for assistance and they do the paired programming which is fine but imagine being paired to program with a person who has zero experience in coding? That's a disaster. Imagine being paired to program with the person who didn't do their pre-work. So not only do they not have experience but they didn't even get any of the concepts because we were told the pre-work was this big deal and it was so important to have it done. I thought that if my pre-work wasn't done I would have gotten kicked out of the program. That is how nervous I was about having the pre-work done. I couldn't believe how unorganized EDX was! To anyone reading the comments in this section, just go to a regular boot camp. There's plenty of them. General assembly flat iron coating dojo tech elevator all of them have been around at least 10 years. I will go with one of those. And if you can't afford one of those or don't want to pay, I can understand that. Go on udemy and by the course for $25 there's a Chinese lady named Angela. I can't think of her last name, but she sells a great class for web. Coding is set up just like a boot camp. It's awesome!

Hey,

I just got graduated high school this year in June. And right off, I joined AA (App Academy). Hoping to break into tech faster than my peers who are doing the classic 4 year bachelor route.

I fear this current, idk where it'll take me upon graduation, I'm also getting some tech certifications (AWS, Oracle, and etc on the side). But please let me know your thoughts.

I, along with 25 other students graduated from a well-known bootcamp in June of last year. Not one of us has broken into tech!!! 😢

I took a bootcamp in 2022. I was one of the extremely lucky ones to find a full-time job a few months out. Everything you stated was completely accurate to my experience, from learning Ruby, to the school quoting 90% placement when only 25-50% of my classmates got jobs. Also some of those people only got 3-4 month internships and haven't found another job since. This has been the single most accurate video of the current bootcamp situation I've seen on YT.

Thank you so much for being honest and real, you're one of the very few.

This is why I switched to IT. I want to be in the industry while I continue learning. I'm almost done with my A+. I'm not sure if I want to get any more TIA certs just yet. Perhaps Azure 900 and python. I'm on a journey but I also have to eat.

I really appreciated this video! When I did my own investigative research a year ago as I looked for boot camps, I came to the same conclusion about the inflated placement rates and lack of a thorough education. I already have a masters in mechanical engineering and didn't want to go back to school, eventually settling for the Launch School curriculum which is one of the "slower paced" programs you mentioned. I did love that you validated my doubt in learning Ruby for back-end, as I also had gone on Linkedin and found a severe lack of Ruby jobs and one of my concerns has been learning an outdated language. If you are familiar with the Launch School curriculum, do you think it would be good to engage in their capstone program that functions as a 3 month boot camp (once you have a year of study under your belt) and build out an app with a team for my portfolio, or spend the next 6 months learning Java, C#, or another ubiquitous language and building a project on my own in that language?

Great advice. I am 52 and looking to change career, I have some experience with java, js and python and was focusing on the js route. This has been a wake-up call that I needed to hear.

great video.