Coding bootcamps in San Francisco with IRL component?

Yeah Rithm was fully in person before COVID and was a pretty cool office. I don't know any that are left honestly. Office space is still to expensive, despite being very empty and no one wanting to work downtown. You could maybe just get a co-working space membership for $500 a month and go there to do remote lessons, you'll probably make friends with engineers and learn some stuff they are doing and working on haha. Maybe work your way into an internship. All of the bootcamps you mention are having struggles :( **THESE ARE MY PERSONAL WELL-INFORMED OPINIONS HERE**, do your own research too: App Academy recently downsized yet again a few weeks ago and is allegedly cutting back part time programs. It's relying more and more on "AI helpers" and it's all untested and hard to know if it will work. After some extremely loud and angry employee departures, I think it's risky to go because morale isn't great. The new CEO has a side company that does AI training, so App Academy is kind of a proving ground for her technology and it's definitely risky. Codesmith is in a very tough spot as well. They have downsized significantly from their peak. Had two waves of layoffs and a recent departure of a handful of long time staff. Their website was like janky and broken this past weekend and no one seemed to notice for days. Their outcomes are significantly down from the peak, and 2023-2024 cohort alumni are reporting absolutely tanking placement rates in the range of half of what was last reported to CIRR. Placements trickling in are largely at lower tier companies and lower paying than in the past and going largely to people job hunting for a year or so and worked at Codesmith after graduating. I'm also extremely concerned their ONE curriculum person (who himself is a Codesmith grad and never worked as a SWE in industry) has spent many months building 5 Gen-AI lectures and a new paid add on for alumni. And he is being marketed as an "industry expert".... They also started paying people to post positive things about them and 'reputation management' to attack people on Reddit using fake accounts that almost all got suspended at this point. Finally, they have the gaul to raise prices in 2025 after all this. I'm strongly recommending to avoid them right now. Hack Reactor. It's fully rolled into Galvanize and they have fully rolled in Tech Elevator recently too. The Hack Reactor of old is not really here anymore and the founder and leaders that built the Hack Reactor of old have all moved on to make a new AI bootcamp that just rolled out. Launch School is one to consider. It's not for everyone, but they have very transparent outcomes accounting for everyone. I'll add Turing in here too, that is also not for everyone, but claiming to be more transparent on outcomes (but with a more positive spin than Launch School's dead serious transparent take on things). Both these founders are on the ground trying to help individual grads get placed in a hard market.

Sorry, I normally disclose more, Formation isn't remotely an option so I hadn't mentioned it but we do work with a number of bootcamps later on in their careers and a big reason I have a broad real time pulse on them and pay attention to the bootcamp industry. That context is indeed helpful. I would look at structure linear courses that are less intense. Bootcamps are kind of a pressure cooker where you retain little of the actual stuff and instead are forced to learn how to learn under that much pressure (which is how your first job feels on day 1). The people who succeeded at getting jobs quickly already self studied and were ready to go hard. If you are sure you can't do self paced, then I would do part time that isn't too intense. Or you can do some classes first to get a headstart and THEN to a bootcamp. But given your goal of starting a company/working at a brand new startup, I might consider doing like a single local community college class in programming, something focused on learning but still part time and structured. And then build a bunch of stuff on your own after that is life to the public and iterate on those projects from real feedback. Startups are extremely hard and a bootcamp will not give you enough technical skills to be a technical founder. You might be able to be a non technical founder with better ability to hire engineers and support the team and configure to code, but the first engineers at successful startups tend to be the super experienced FAANG types.

Honestly out of those ones Codesmith is still probably the best if you are entrepreneurial. Recent students and grads have reported that the bar has dropped from the past for technical skills, but it's high on communication and people tend to be driven achievers who go there. For all of the mess I mentioned, former employees describe it as even a mess internally during the peak times that was never run like a "real company" (reference from employee), and ultimately I think they try to produce a consistent experience for you the student. It's a very uniquely weird one of all the others (which are more similar to each other)... it has a "cult-like following" (not in the religious sense, but colloquially). People who go in skeptical, tend to see it for what it looks like under the hood and feel like it's overpriced, the instructors almost all have no SWE experience, lots of superficial stuff, 'trust me, the 3 week project DID MAKE YOU A MID LEVEL ENGINEER', it's not imposter syndrome", like stuff that is like really sketchy. BUT if you have lower self confidence and you fully drunk the koolaid then the atmosphere TRULY helps you build self confidence. But again, absurdly controversial. A number of those people that "drank the koolaid" years ago I have chatted with to various degrees years later and the perspectives have changed. Some full out hate Codesmith after they get more industry perspective and have done a 180 degree spin on that. Some have closed the book and said it was a means to an ends and they have moved on. Some still strongly support it for the 'life changing impact' it CAN have, but do so cautiously and don't want to mislead the masses than just anyone can show up and do that - whereas a few years ago their tone was more along those lines.