In a last hope to survive, bootcamps are going all in on "Gen AI" programs aimed at their own alumni - 3.5 major bootcamps pivoting to Gen AI courses (Codesmith, BloomTech, App Academy, Deep Atlas (original Hack Reactor team)). AA and BT have PAUSED all SWE programs as of today (Opinions Inside)

In a last hope to survive, bootcamps are going all in on "Gen AI" programs aimed at their own alumni - 3.5 major bootcamps pivoting to Gen AI courses (Codesmith, BloomTech, App Academy, Deep Atlas (original Hack Reactor team)). AA and BT have PAUSED all SWE programs as of today (Opinions Inside) DISCLAIMER: These are my personal opinions based on my observations as a self-proclaimed industry expert in the top-tier SWE industry and in the bootcamp industry. My company offers interview prep mentorship for generalist SWEs with experience. We are not offering Gen AI programs at this time and aren't working on it at this time, and I do not consider that a conflict of interest. I noticed today that App Academy's SWE courses are all "waitlisted" now and no longer enrolling. For me that was the impetus for this post, which has been a month or two in the making. First, summarizing the state: bootcamps had a rough 2023. Some shutdown and the survivors were crossing fingers and hoping for a better 2024. 'Things are starting to turn around' is something you heard from bootcamps at the end of 2023. Well they didn't and 2024 gutted a number of remaining programs. Today we have the following: 1. App Academy: no longer enrolling SWE programs (waitlisted), actively enrolling "Gen AI for Software Developers", a self-paced course, part time course where you get access for 10 weeks. 2. Codesmith: still offers SWE programs, but has reduced number of cohorts by 75% since peak and people say they have not been full. Now offering $4600, 4 week course, part time course for engineers with experience (with a hefty alumni discount). 3. BloomTech: paused all SWE programs (waitlisted) and has been iterating on a Gen AI course for existing engineers offered to company partners for about $5000 for 8 week course, part time. 4. Deep Atlas: the Hack Reactor original team have started a new AI bootcamp for people with 5+ years of experience. Cost isn't listed but they have 4 week part time and 2 week full time options. # What does this mean about the bootcamp industry? Well it means that SWE bootcamps for 0 to 1 might be on the outs. I know Launch School and Turing are very very committed to their SWE programs and are keeping small, lean cohorts with "reasonable" (my subjective opinion) placement rates. Every placement feels like an edge case to me, but some places are able to identify those edge case people reasonably well, and nurture them to a job with hopefully a better than 50% chance of getting a job. Codesmith is still doing this for SWEs, keeping small cohorts and trying to select for people likely to get jobs. Looking at their recent promotional videos, a person with 10 years of experience but took a 10 year break from coding, or a person who was a VC before and wanted to be a SWE to become a better leader, or a person who did Codesmith in College a few years ago and self-taught ML to himself later on .... these are all edge case unique backgrounds that you don't see every day. Now if you are a bootcamp and trying to survive you can't just shutdown your SWE overnight and try to pivot. You have to carefully promote those SWE programs (that you know have terrible placement rates) so that students continue to enroll and pay you $20K, and you have enough cash to try to build a new Gen AI program... and when the Gen AI program is ready, you shut down the SWE, abandon all the alumni and pivot is complete. It seems like BloomTech and App Academy are in the final stages of the pivot. Codesmith is mid pivot. # My Concerns about "Gen AI" 1. "Gen AI" is a fast moving target and I don't feel good about a program claiming to teach you Gen AI. You notice how short these program are. Their curriculums all look the same and cover all the "buzzwords" in quick lectures and projects. 2. Since Gen AI is such a moving target, how are people able to call themselves "experts" who teach it? Codesmith's teachers - 3 of the 4 listed are Codesmith Alumni and only one of those 3 has worked as a SWE industry - for a year. App Academy and BloomTech claim experts are making their courses. Well I know thousands of Meta/ex-Meta engineers and I don't know anyone who calls themselves a Gen AI expert that isn't happily working there making $2M a year... so I don't know which "experts" are developing the curriculum for these programs. 3. I'm very concerned these programs are trying to get die hard alumni to keep paying up to keep these programs alive. It's a rational business strategy called "increasing LTV" (Google it). # My Opinions **1.** I do not think it's prudent to enroll in any program as SWEs right now if the program is simultaneously pushing Gen AI courses. 2. If a bootcamp IS offering standalone Gen AI courses, I would be VERY suspicious about the quality and if it's actually teaching me anything. Look into their teachers, ask them how much they have vetted the programs, ask them what you are actually learning. # BONUS: How I learned Gen AI for free. I use Gen AI every day on the job, from using the tools and building tools, etc... I learned it by: 1. Reading API documentation and watching YouTube videos. 2. Building a bunch of stuff (related to resumes and job sourcing and such). 3. Iterating on those projects daily for MONTHS to keep improving and learning difference techniques. 4. Attending OpenAI developers meetups available to me as a A16Z backed startup.

20 people did too until over 10 minutes the vote count dropped to 0... Codesmith (or their Marketing team) hasn't gotten the message after dozens of accounts have been suspended to stop paying people to manipulate Reddit... Reddit is on to you.

\+1. I should have maybe talked about this more, but I think AI will create a ton of new jobs that don't exist at the intersection of tech and other fields. I actually think Codesmith is philosophically most aligned with me on this of the 4 but they are going about it in a really weird way for marketing it haha, which is an artifact of this pivot. They can't say overnight "all you 3500 SWEs that paid us $70M over the past 10 years.... we're no longer making SWEs and we're instead making prompt engineering lawyers" They can do the following over the course of 2 years though: 1. redefine SWE as the "modern engineer", someone who is less coding focused on has broad capacities to solve any problems 2. re-target the definition of the "problems" to "legal prompt engineering" 3. most of these "SWEs" start getting these "X prompt engineering" roles. 4. they remove the word SWE and call themselves a prompt engineering/AI-tech-jobs bootcamps. It's not a bad strategy, but it hinges on short term misleading people that those 2021 and 2022 CIRR numbers are still real and there is an 80% chance of getting a SWE job and few people are falling for that. If they still have a lot of that $70M left in the bank then maybe they can pause indefinitely and reboot as a purely AI immersive when those jobs are more well defined.

Update: an alumni told me they can't even book any mock interviews with anyone anymore and that November has no times available for mocks, resume evaluations, etc... I'm super concerned Codesmith is going all in on AI and the SWE immersive is imploding behind them :(

Yeah exactly, that's why people tell me this stuff, they need the support and aren't happy about it. It can make people feel like they have to pay for this AI course to continue to get people's attention. I stand by my opinion that if they have the resources to build this AI course, those resources should first make sure their SWE immersive is in good shape first. The instructors working on AI should be doing these career services. Again, I see the argument for abandoning alumni and going all on in AI stuff - which is the trend - they just can't in the same breath say that SWE students are getting a world class best experience.