[biznerd]

I did one.

I HIGHLY suggest vetting the placement "statistics". For me, I just read 95% get a job, went to the open house, listened to a couple "rah rah" testimonials and did it. It was a big mistake.

A friend of mine from the class estimated that only 30-40% of us got actual dev jobs. The rest are either in customer service at a tech company, sales or testing (keep in mind this is people who dropped $15k+ to do the bootcamp), back in our old industry or in the case of one, working at Trader Joes.

I was under the impression that 95% get good jobs. If I had known only 30-40% did I would have never done the boot camp.

How did they manipulate the numbers? I never dug deep but here are my thoughts:

* to qualify as "actively looking" you can't have a job to support yourself. That's right you're supposed to not have an income while job searching, kinda hard when it can take more than six months. If you get a job, you get dropped from career support and your statistic gets placed in the "not actively looking" category

* "industry related jobs". If you go to a dev boot camp, you want to be a dev. You're paying $15k to do it. A customer service job at a tech startup is better than nothing but you don't have to pay $15k to do it. Likewise for sales.

As a positive point, all the females in our cohort got dev jobs, including the only one who actually failed the class. Startups are pretty aware of the gender discrepancy and actively looking to hire those with double x chromosomes. Not complaining about affirmative action, just wanted to give you as full picture as possible

[liquidise]

As a dev in Denver who routinely interviews candidates from some of the nations top bootcamps, i can corroborate these claims. Many graduates from these programs are hired by the bootcamp itself, as tutors or web devs. Rarely are these hires profitable to the school, instead the are done strictly to maintain the placement statistics that are paramount to their continued enrollment.

[StClaire]

Uh... I don't normally do this, but any chance you guys are hiring? I'm in Denver looking for an entry level position. I can do machine learning

[eagsalazar2]

Things have changed over the last few years and what was true in 2013 is no longer true.

In 2013, the few bootcamps that existed and the fewer cohorts they each had were much more selective and they were producing in total many fewer candidates. The result is that bootcamp grads were very high quality (albeit very junior) and they got snapped up quickly.

In 2017 there are bootcampers everywhere flooding the market.

So I'm not sure they are outright lying but maybe they are using data to market their programs that is out of date.

[Hydraulix989]

The first two CS courses at my top university are enough to be qualified for your entry-level junior engineer: the intro course "Programming with Java" (recently changed to Python now), followed by the second course, Data "Structures & Algorithms."

All the bootcamp would have to do is be similarly very selective and do the same exact curriculum, and the people who "survive" these two weed-out courses (you needed to score higher than half your classmates in each course to receive a passing grade, otherwise you had to keep re-taking it) would be the ones able to get hired with nearly 100% placement.

[klinskyc]

On the flipside, there are more total people who want to do bootcamps. So there's definitely more noise, but also more good signal as well

[bbcbasic]

The % of people who get jobs doesn't matter. Those people are not you. Maybe the 70% decided they didn't like coding after all. Or maybe the course was crap. Who knows?

[tmnvix]

You have a good point but I have to disagree with you when you say that "The % of people who get jobs doesn't matter." It does matter. I'm sure you'd agree if it were 1% and not 70%.