Thoughts on this article? The bootcamp space is growing again!

100% there's going to be a ton of people who need upskilling in a lot of ways with AI. 1. a large amount of that won't be for software engineers, though it will be for people in adjacent roles who need to get better at their old jobs, not people who want to become software engineers. 2. another large amount of it will be demand for software engineers who need to build all of the tools that all those non-engineers are using. An evolution of the bootcamp model can help with 1. The problem with two is that we don't know if Junior Engineers with little experience will be the people who are fulfilling that demand or if senior Engineers are going to be multiplied by AI such that there isn't a huge demand for junior Engineers. we might see upskilling within the job of for Engineers themselves be more important than creating new Engineers. or it could be that there's just so much demand that we see him as of increase for Junior Engineers and AI helps those Junior Engineers be more impactful.

I do think it's sneaky how they mentioned a bunch of other bootcamps at the end for SEO :(

What's not true about it? I didn't say people didn't get jobs, I said they were the lowest ranked in priority and still are, so if there is more demand for engineers - bootcampers get jobs and less demand - they don't make the cut. On an individual basis you are you and you might get a job no problem, maybe in 1 month. We don't need more bootcamp weight loss commercials "I lost 50 lbs in 8 week" type things - I'm speaking to the entire top tier tech market and they bootcamp grads were the bottom of the list of priority, even self taught people that made it past the first rounds were above them. Of the four million software engineers, a single fraction of a percent came from bootcamps, probably 100K out of 4M

I don't disagree at all that some people from bootcamps had good outcomes but I also strongly believe this view is why in the past 3 years people ran to bootcamps as a magical path to get a $100K+ job in 12 weeks that was very much not the case. Take Codesmith for example, which in 2021 had a median $130K salary or something. Out of thousands of graduates ever, something like 100 placed at the canonical FAANG companies. Almost all of the Meta placements were contractors who left within a year. So historically what happened was this (I was there and this is what Is saw): 1. Big tech wants to source more broadly to have more diverse candidates than just MIT and Stanford grads 2. Big tech looked at local bootcamps in Silicon Valley - Hack Reactor, App Academy, and Hackbright are three big ones. 3. Big tech made relationships, sending engineers as mentors and paying to get first crack at candidates. 4. Engineers interviewing the people got upset because almost no one was qualified. 5. Companies shutoff the pipelines and stopped recruiting from bootcamps. 6. Some companies setup apprenticeship programs (LinkedIn, Pinterest, Airbnb, Microsoft, for example) and these programs took bootcamp grads 7. These programs were like 8 to 12 months internships that aimed to convert full time. And they did convert ok. Not amazing, but reasonably well to justify continuing the program. 8. The 2023 layoffs crushed a lot of recruiters and DEI program managers and these programs significantly shrunk. 9. As hiring resumes in 2024-25, the new government's stance on DEI resulted in 2/3 of these programs not coming back, and only a few remain - and in much more limited form.

Yeah talk to some Engineers that worked at these companies in the mid-2010s. basically when you have Engineers being paid like $500,000 a year. doing an interview is very costly The mentors and recruiters who are working with the boot camp would try to pick candidates who they think had the best shot but maybe they had a number of slots like 10 slots for interviews and they would try to choose the 10 people most likely to be qualified. and then other Engineers would actually conduct the interviews, without really knowing much context or also would create bias. but what happened was that the people did so poorly on the interviews there are complaints about where the candidates came from and complaints that they shouldn't have made it to the first round technical interview which looks really bad on the recruiters because the recruiters passed through some people who then wasted engineer time. when these complaints got escalated to like recruiting managers and directors, it really puts a lot of pressure to make sure that if this program ever continued that the next candidates would be stronger. so in some cases the companies just abandoned the relationships and gave up and in some cases they kept going but put more pressure on the recruiters to make sure that people are qualified. there's a lot of pressure on companies legally to have fair processes that don't have any biases. --- there were a handful of people I think like three or something that actually did pass and I don't want to go into all the specifics, but it wasn't like widely known that those people were boot, camp grads, and generally speaking they also struggled more to ramp up. it took some of the people much longer and I think they're doing really well today like 10 years later, but that slower ramp up was one of the pieces of evidence that led to the apprenticeship programs in the later stages above. the realization that bootcamp grads aren't remotely ready to work at top tier companies, but their drive and vision and determination made them stand out with a lot of potential, so these apprenticeship programs could maybe help nurture that into being actually qualified. ---- the ultimate realization is that no matter what someone's capacities are or potential is big tech companies can't hire people for potential. they have to hire people that are qualified for the job and have a lot of potential and the boot camp rads were just unanimously not qualified for the job and they could not be given it regardless of the latter.