Co-founder of Lambda School here.

The problem with the bootcamp gold rush is and has always been the business model. You have a few major variables:

1. How much can a person pay you?

2. How many people can you fit in a classroom?

3. How long can the classes be while still maintaining a profit margin?

Based on those constraints bootcamps try to teach as much as possible. Within those constraints bootcamps found one model that worked and cloned it hundreds of times: A bunch of people in a classroom for 12 weeks paying $10-15k each. Some will try to chop off a couple weeks, some charge $18k instead of $10k, but it's fundamentally the same.

Every single bootcamp recognizes that this is not a great way to train engineers. 12 weeks simply isn't enough. But there's enough of a shortage or engineering talent that bootcamps could get away with it for a while.

Sure, in an ideal world you would actually train the students based on what they need to make hiring companies happy, but change any of the variables in the above equation and the whole business model falls apart. If you want to make the classes 2x the length you'd have to charge 2x the price, and can you get large numbers of people to pay $25-40k out of pocket? Not a chance.

We had to really start from first principles, and start with a new business model, which changes everything else.

The main thing we wanted was incentives aligned with our students; so we started from, "What if we didn't get paid unless students get a job?" That forced us to change everything else. I actually thought it might not be possible for a while.

I don't consider Lambda School to be a code bootcamp. We're six or seven months long full-time, which is 2.5x the length of a code bootcamp, plus a month of pre-course work. A few graduates have applied to Lambda School after having paid another school $15k and haven't even been able to pass our prep work.

I think we're on the _short_ end of what a solid engineering education should be. But we have enough time to teach true fundamentals, our students don't just write JavaScript, but also Python and C, they have an apprenticeship where they ship real projects that make real money on real teams, and they actually learn to think and write real code, not just pump out quick apps then struggle when confronted with anything new.

We can be flexible on class size so long as we keep a good teacher:student ratios because we're entirely online (which, by the way, is actually a superior learning experience to offline). We can pick the best students regardless of financial ability because our pool of potential students isn't limited to people with 20k in their pockets that can move to San Francisco. We actually have _more_ support for students, because our instructors scale across classes when they're not teaching, and we can do some tricky financial stuff on the backend to make sure students are guaranteed a job before they pay.

All of that combined lets us open up a promise, which is what really matters for students at the end of the day - attend for free until you get hired.

I think we'll see massive consolidation in the bootcamp space in coming months, and it's already started (Dev Bootcamp, Iron Yard, Bloc, Viking Code School, and more have either been acquired or closed). That's very healthy, and frankly there are some sleazy bootcamps that only exist because of marketing. You could wipe the bottom 80% of bootcamps off the face of the earth and it would probably be a net positive for everyone. I think we'll get there in the next 3-4 years.