Bit of context: I used to live in Denver, and I would hang out at Galvanize a lot. I was friends with a number of the instructors and students.
I worked at a company in Denver that hired at least 5 people straight out of gSchool, and I was one of the employees on the team who was given the task of onboarding and mentoring the gSchool graduates and helping them when they got stuck (which was pretty much constantly).
Each one of the graduates had at least a basic, fundamental understanding of programming with Ruby on Rails and Javascript, but they were all very much junior-level. They were all deeply brainwashed in TDD and Agile dogma, but would often become paralyzed when encountering real world problems.
Most of them had sub-par developer instincts (as was expected), and all of them required about a year-long ramp-up and a lot of on-the-job mentoring and training before they were really pulling their weight.
When you look at the quality of the code that was being created and the sheer amount of manpower and money being thrown at mentoring all of the junior level code school graduates, I would rather have had a single senior level developer than 4 juniors combined.
But that's not how the pay worked out. A senior dev doing the same amount of work as 4 juniors was only making like $120K, and I happen to know that every one of the code school students was hired on for at least $65K a year (if not more).
The worst part? After about a year, half of them had leveraged their new year's worth of real, on-the-job experience into job offers from other companies, where they were presumably hired for even more.
My personal opinion is that the company I worked for kind of got shafted a little bit by their enthusiasm and optimism with the idea of bringing on so many junior level developers straight out of code camp. Especially after we spent so much time and money mentoring them, only to have them leave for better jobs elsewhere.
I have a strong suspicion that many other companies have suffered from similar experiences with code school graduates and were left with bitter taste in their mouths.
If so, that would certainly explain why so many code schools are starting to encounter difficulties and are having to downsize or close. Companies are starting to catch on to the fact that they are still going to have to dump a good year of mentoring and training into each one of these "graduates" before they are earning their keep.
TL;DR: The gSchool graduates that I had personal experience with seemed to make out like bandits. That was before the market cooled down, though.
I know someone who interviewed there as a teacher. They put them through 7 weeks of hour-long interviews and teaching demos and applauded them at every step, telling them they would come back with an offer, and then just didn't hire them. Their faculty and staff are not as diverse as one might hope for a tech company that teaches those who will become junior pros in these times.
Curious as well. I went to Makersquare / Hack Reactor and it seems the experience depends hugely on which bootcamp you actually went to, based on my conversations at meetups.
t0mbstone|8 years ago
I worked at a company in Denver that hired at least 5 people straight out of gSchool, and I was one of the employees on the team who was given the task of onboarding and mentoring the gSchool graduates and helping them when they got stuck (which was pretty much constantly).
Each one of the graduates had at least a basic, fundamental understanding of programming with Ruby on Rails and Javascript, but they were all very much junior-level. They were all deeply brainwashed in TDD and Agile dogma, but would often become paralyzed when encountering real world problems.
Most of them had sub-par developer instincts (as was expected), and all of them required about a year-long ramp-up and a lot of on-the-job mentoring and training before they were really pulling their weight.
When you look at the quality of the code that was being created and the sheer amount of manpower and money being thrown at mentoring all of the junior level code school graduates, I would rather have had a single senior level developer than 4 juniors combined.
But that's not how the pay worked out. A senior dev doing the same amount of work as 4 juniors was only making like $120K, and I happen to know that every one of the code school students was hired on for at least $65K a year (if not more).
The worst part? After about a year, half of them had leveraged their new year's worth of real, on-the-job experience into job offers from other companies, where they were presumably hired for even more.
My personal opinion is that the company I worked for kind of got shafted a little bit by their enthusiasm and optimism with the idea of bringing on so many junior level developers straight out of code camp. Especially after we spent so much time and money mentoring them, only to have them leave for better jobs elsewhere.
I have a strong suspicion that many other companies have suffered from similar experiences with code school graduates and were left with bitter taste in their mouths.
If so, that would certainly explain why so many code schools are starting to encounter difficulties and are having to downsize or close. Companies are starting to catch on to the fact that they are still going to have to dump a good year of mentoring and training into each one of these "graduates" before they are earning their keep.
TL;DR: The gSchool graduates that I had personal experience with seemed to make out like bandits. That was before the market cooled down, though.
unknown|8 years ago
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unknown|8 years ago
[deleted]
brooklyn_ashey|8 years ago
komali2|8 years ago