u/dowcet wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Almost no successful bootcamp grads are coming in starting from "zero". They've already learned the basics, and they still have months of work to do post-bootcamp. The majority are also professionals with degrees and a few years of experience, shifting from another career. Those
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I agree they are just one tool and each person will use them differently. But they are also an expensive tool that tie their legitimacy to their job outcomes.
I am super strong proponent that a bootcamp should be judged by the quality of the education and experience that it provides and in the provable skill gains it produces, rather than job outcomes.
If someone wants to pay $20K to level up as a stepping stone, and then spend up to 12 months finding a job, and are satisfied, that's great. A very large number of people I talk to expect a job out of a bootcamp, and I think in 2023 people started realizing that they shouldn't be expecting that anymore - but the bootcamps that are hanging on continue to publish job outcomes reports to validate themselves.
NuCamp gets some flak for publishing satisfaction reports instead of job reports but I actually agree with this in spirit. I'm not judging the actual reports, just agreeing with the strategy and trying to set expectations for what NuCamp is.
A good question for bootcamps to ask themselves is if they didn't market their job outcomes and use those as ways to encourage people to join, would people still join? If the answer is no, then there's probably some major improvements that the bootcamp could make.
Codesmith is a program that relies extremely heavily on it's CIRR outcomes, and it would be a good experiment to see if people would join without them. My personal opinion is they would, because Codesmith has a fantastic and infectious community that would be appealing to many people, but it's hard to tell because their outcomes one of the first things people talk about - both staff and graduates.