Why Dev Bootcamp Is A Sham

Hey,

I'm also a DBC New York grad. Full disclosure: I'm married to a former DBC NY Teacher and know a lot of the staff a little bit in a non-student/teacher capacity (emphasis on little bit) From the sound of things, I must have graduated either a cohort or two ahead of you.

First off, it sucks that you had a shitty experience and I get the need to vent. I do agree with some of what you say. But I did want to address a few of things you said and share my experiences about them as well. Yeah, organization wasn't great and I think the NY office was going through some growing pains. I certainly had my complaints that I made pretty vocally while I was there. Some more realistic expectations would have been nice (IE: we were told to read 1,000 pages a week as well as code 12 hours a day. This is obviously very silly and resulted in nobody doing any reading). It was actually my cohort that they changed the teacher and I was super pissed.

I think the big difference is this: Several of us complained about the phase 3 teaching debacle. The result was that teacher getting his shit together in a hurry and another teacher coming in to help. I generally felt like my complaints were heard and addressed. Not all of them...they are a company, they have dozens of students and staff to deal with and don't bow to my every command...but I felt pretty heard.

About the teachers not caring: Again, I know some of them a bit, and have been privy to overhearing many work gossip sessions when they were talking with my spouse. Trust me: they cared. If they didn't, they wouldn't be staying past 5, taking a below market gig and constantly discussing ways to improve in their off hours.

I can't speak for jobs numbers. A lot of people in my cohort were younger and weren't necessarily looking to launch into dev career right away. Personally, I don't have a job, but that is largely because I moved and just started looking. The careers team is an enormous help. If you reach out to them, they bend over backward to get you contacts, tips, put you through mock interviews, etc. I actually think this might be the most valuable aspect of DBC. I do know that the employment numbers do match up for some of the earlier cohorts. They've been pretty successful in finding jobs.

I say this not as someone who thinks going the Bootcamp route is the greatest. DBC New York absolutely had problems when I was there and probably still does. In my case, I absolutely could not figure out how to whittle the immense amount of programming resources down to something I could manage and build off of. DBC did help that a lot. But I'm glad I went.

/r/learnprogramming Thread