u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
From what I've observed it's the following reasons, some good, some bad, and not in any order:
- Recent grads just went through the curriculum and might relate more to the struggles you went through. It's additionally good practice for those grads to reinforce their learnings.
- Some programs count people who are hired by the program as "placed" to boost their placements stats. Codesmith is bootcamp that hires back a lot of grads, currently about 50 to 60 of the 150 or so staff are former grads but they explicitly do not count these people as placed. They do however not consider them graduated either so they don't count at all on the CIRR stats until their 3 months contract is done. Most other bootcamps hire people back indefinitely while they are job hunting, which might result in them leaving suddenly and is a bad experience.
- If there are too many former students teaching, you don't really have anyone with real industry experience teaching you and it's a slippery slope. A lot of the bootcamps with most complaints have more and more students over time.
- Former students often are paid very little and the bootcamps are charging so much, so it's good for the company running the bootcamp to have more students.
- Most bootcamps are described as a "firehose" and really who is teaching is less relevant when a lot of bootcamps are a selection process for the hardest working and naturally talented people more than actually teaching anything the way a college or private tutor does.
- Most bootcamps that have alumni at FAANG have them getting there on their 2nd 3rd and 4th jobs... Hack Reactor and Hackbright are two where people end up at FAANG very often down the road but not in their first job. Codesmith has alumni enter less strong companies that pay higher right out the bat, but alumni don't seem to end up at FAANG any more likely down the road than some others. FAANG companies have a very high data structures and algorithms bar that no bootcamps meet (I've been challenged on this and Hack Reactor and Codesmith do some data structures and algorithms, but it's not nerely enough to hit that bar consistently for most grads)