Meta and Amazon abruptly shut down diversity initiatives, indicating a market shift that's terrible for bootcampers and could be the final straw :(

If I disregard AI then I would say that nothing at all would change and it's the new normal. And it's likely the new normal from "traditional SWE" roles. I think schools like Launch School that are very small and take a very long time to get into will produce exceptions to the norm and that's about it. I'm more optimistic in AI creating a ton of new jobs that are tech-adjacent but not tech jobs. And that people will need to transition from their non-tech job into these roles. E.g. accountant -> AI enabled accountant. Kind of like how accountants BEFORE Microsoft Excel had to learn Excel and now it's just a given. A ton of accountants will have to learn AI-enabled tools and it will be a given. Now SWE bootcamps might be done and over with, but maybe AI bootcamps that **VERY CLEARLY IDENTIFY THEMSELVES AS TRAINING YOU FOR ADJACENT JOBS AND NOT SWE JOBS** might be able to help people get a step towards the industry. And then a 5 year plan afterwards can be to become a SWE through taking SWE college courses part time and trying to do some SWE work on the side at your company. We're in a very awkward phase right now where the traditional SWE bootcamps are doing the following: 1. Abandoning ship on SWE programs (shutdown and "pause") but they want to milk the last $ to stay alive and some are still taking people. 2. Launching unproven AI programs that have no clear goals and are poorly implemented. "Become a Leader in AI".... sure.... former graduates with 0 to 1 year of experience will turn me into an AI Leader in an industry full of crazy engineers with 20+ years of experience who actually are leaders. Number 2 might be transition phase and maybe we'll see things like Gauntlet AI (BloomTech's full no turning back pivot to AI). The existing bootcamps like App Academy and Codesmith are really in trouble if they don't hard pivot away from "SWE". Codesmith's absolutely relentless drive to yell as loud as they can that they produce "mid level and senior engineers" and stubbornness to admit they do not, is going to be their downfall if they don't just drop it and switch to "take your current non tech job and be better at it with programming skills" stance that actually can work. I've told them for like 2 years that their labelling is broken and misleading and look where we're at now, they are down like 80% in enrollment and most staff left and loyal alumni are no longer standing behind them backing up these claims. Anyways, we'll see what happens. Not all AI instruction is the same either and we'll see what happens, I don't know!