Why coding bootcamps can suck
By: Olivia Mo
Tags: JavaScript, Learning, Programming, Codingbootcamp, Coding

I made the transition into web development in late 2017 and have been working as a full-time front-end developer since early 2018. Like many other bootcampers, I come from a non computer science background; I didn’t know much about web development nor the trends in the industry.

What made me choose a bootcamp over university or TAFE was the structure of the bootcamps, alumni and people in the industry. I’d reached out and talked to them about their experience during the bootcamps, with alumni raving about the bootcamps and the quality of the education, and engineers and hiring managers praising the quality of the bootcampers they’ve hired. I felt secure enough in my choice to take on a student loan and go with a bootcamp.

Fast forward to the first week of the bootcamp, we had an overcapacity of close to forty students and by the end of the week, the class had dropped to about thirty students. By the end of the entire bootcamp, twenty people completed the course and graduated. While I don’t know the reasons why some students dropped out, I can bet most, if not all, were disappointed with the quality of the education we received. My fellow graduates and I also agreed it could’ve been much better.

Here’s what went wrong…

Unqualified teachers

The course is taught by multiple teachers, with one as the lead and the others as assistant teachers. It starts us off with ruby and ruby on rails to familiarise us with programming concepts. The lead teacher was freshly hired by the bootcamp because the previous teachers had left the organisation. The new lead was primarily a javascript developer and wasn’t familiar with ruby and so it was clear knowledge mismatch. While programming concepts are similar across different languages, the amount of time that the lead teacher took to understand and write correct syntax for ruby took away valuable time to teach and mentor students.

Another disappointing experience was when they gave us our first test on HTML and CSS. The test was simple; they gave us a design to replicate with an hour time limit. After the test, the lead teacher did a live coding demo to show us his solution. He took more than an hour and was struggling to replicate the design correctly. In the end, he did not complete the demo.

The same teacher’s incompetence was made clear when he was demonstrating git, struggling to use it to merge some code. The class chimed in and helped him out and while eventually it was resolved, this took away valuable teaching time. From all these disappointing experiences from the same lead teacher, I lost confidence in the bootcamp.

Unavailable teachers

After witnessing the lead teacher’s poor performance, my class complained to the administration This resulted in the teacher’s demotion and later dismissal, and previous teachers were brought back on a temporary basis while they sought a replacement. For some time, the classes improved and I was hoping that the teachers would stay on permanently. Unfortunately, they were only the start of a revolving door of temporary teachers. From the beginning to the end of the six month bootcamp, we had a total of SIX different lead teachers, averaging one different lead teacher per month. Even worse was that some of those teachers were only part time, meaning we had days where we had no teacher at all or they could only stay for a few hours.

Having six different teachers was detrimental to our learning because they didn’t learn each students’ capabilities and needs. Each time we got a new teacher, the process repeats itself. That time spent on getting to know the students could’ve been time spent on teaching us.

Internships

The bootcamp offered students internships at the end of the course. They sourced the internships for us so we didn’t need to stress over looking for one, and all communications were handled by the bootcamp. We just needed to turn up for the interview. I interviewed at two companies. The internship organiser for the bootcamp told me that only one company accepted me. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until a few weeks later, I bumped into one of the interviewers that had supposedly rejected me. Turns out they also wanted to take me on but the internship handler had told them I decided to go with the other company. I’m grateful that I did get an internship either way but I didn’t appreciate the dishonesty.

Disorganised

After we finished the bootcamp, including the internship, we had a small graduation ceremony. One by one, each student was presented with their diploma except me and one other student. When they finished calling out the names and told us to pose for a group photo, we all looked at each other bewildered. Most of us laughed it off. I didn’t know whether to laugh or face palm. Our class was small too, only twenty people graduated and they still mixed up the diplomas and sent ours off to a different city.

BUT… it’s not all bad

Our class went through a lot and I know we deserved better. However, it wasn’t all bad. The best thing that we all gained from the bootcamp was the people we met. They’re wonderful classmates, always a cheerful lot to meet up with, and now we are peers in the industry and friends outside of work. Most of us work have found jobs in tech in the same city and meet up ever so often.

Despite the unexpected poor experience at the bootcamp, I don’t regret signing up and committing to it until the end. It exposed us to the what technologies the industry commonly works with and it did help prepare us to find a job in tech. Some of us were very lucky in that some internships offered the same students a full-time position. Others (including myself) needed to spend some time to look for one and most of us have found permanent roles.

Should you sign up to a bootcamp?

My cohort was very unlucky that our expectations for the bootcamp was very different to what we actually experienced. It’s unlucky because the previous teachers left just as we started so no one had any idea whether the new teachers were actually capable, and it went downhill from there. The other examples in this post like the dishonesty and missing diplomas doesn’t happen at every other bootcamp; these were very specific events and unlikely to be widespread throughout other bootcamps.

So should you sign up to a bootcamp? It depends on your personal circumstances and what you are looking for. If you’re super motivated, prefer a fast-paced teaching environment, have finances set up to support yourself (full-time bootcamps are typically forty or more contact hours per week), and want to get into the industry within a year or two, boot camps would be the better choice (although this may lock you out of graduate programs with larger companies that only accept fresh grads with a university degree in computer science).

The university route offers a slower-paced teaching environment, a much deeper dive into computer science, and hundreds or thousands of other students in your cohort also studying the same degree. Taking the uni route allows you to immerse yourself in college campus life, and possibly be more exposed to various companies’ uni programs.

If you’re considering the bootcamp path, make sure to do your due diligence and scope out who your teachers will be, what the curriculum and structure of the course will be, and whether they offer out of class learning such as tours of local tech companies or class trips to conferences.