Coding bootcamps boomed in the 2010s. Do grads think they worked?

Over the last few months, periodic conversations on social media have painted a gloomy picture of coding bootcamps. 

There is no shortage of declarations that bootcamps are approaching the end of an era, and the hype of the 2010s is over. But then again, coding bootcamps were declared dead before COVID, and again after the height of the pandemic.

Now that coding bootcamps have been around for more than a decade, we can start to see at least anecdotally how those pre-pandemic bootcamps have often translated into long-term work in tech.

Whether they’re creating technologists in the best way possible still remains an open question.

“Many of those programs are being built around something that’s pretty easy to deliver and pretty easy to measure,” Barry Wright III, chief of staff at Noom with years of tech hiring experience, told Technical.ly. “But are maybe not as effective as we hope.”

Some of the oldest coding bootcamps are large for-profit bootcamps like General Assembly, Flatiron and Tech Elevator, while smaller, more community-facing nonprofits including Zip Code Wilmington, Coded by and Girls Who Code have sprung up in a similar model as well.

But the market for bootcamps became so glutted, and tainted with scammers, that it lost some of its shine.

For-profit startup coding bootcamps of the early 2010s, the kind that attracted people with money who wanted to make more money, including Dev Bootcamp and the Iron Yard, have shut down. Still, smaller and not-for-profit coding bootcamps are thriving in many parts of the country.

Finding the good bootcamps among the crowd

Coding bootcamps have evolved somewhat in the last decade into a model that lowers the barrier of entry to tech jobs, allowing people with little-to-no formal education in tech to get jobs in the industry. 

The term “bootcamp” could mean front-to-back tech workforce training, including interview training, resume writing and mentoring — or it could mean an unscrupulous certificate mill. These bootcamps may even have state or federal workforce development funding, and offer a more complete employee training program, including soft skills.

For example, Khalil Saboor, a Brooklyn–based software engineer for American Express, chose Zip Code Wilmington, a nonprofit bootcamp in Wilmington, Delaware, after a traditional university path at Arcadia University didn’t work out.

“But I still kept building,” Saboor said. He went the independent route for a couple of years, determined to get into tech without a college degree using free online resources. 

Aspiring technologists can learn software development from free resources. Using free resources, such as FreeCodeCamp or YouTube tutorials, can be a slow route, with none of the networking or soft skill lessons, though 

So, when Saboor saw a Facebook ad in 2018 for Zip Code, he decided to save up enough money to apply. While he didn’t land a job immediately afterward, he does work in tech today.

The Zip Code-style access model lines up with the earliest ethos behind these educational programs. While the now-defunct San Francisco-based Dev Bootcamp is sometimes credited as the first in-person intensive coding bootcamp, founded in 2012, it was preceded by Code Academy. In a 2017 Medium article, Code Academy cofounder Mike McGee expands on how these organizations came to be.

“The first coding bootcamp started in 2011, not 2012,” he wrote. “Also, it was launched by two Black guys in a Chicago apartment on the South Side, not in downtown San Francisco.”

The approach at for-profit institutions can look a little different.

In 2015, Lyn Muldrow of Baltimore relocated with her two young children to San Francisco to participate in a 12-week General Assembly web development bootcamp on an Opportunity Fund scholarship. 

General Assembly, which has one of the oldest and largest coding bootcamps, is a private for-profit education organization that offers a wide range of programs and services for job seekers and employers.

“I found it to be rigorous and intellectually taxing, but deeply worth it at the time,” Muldrow told Technical.ly. 

Muldrow was one of only two Black women in the cohort, and one of the few with little experience with programming languages, making it harder to fit in. 

“I felt like an outsider, and during that time struggled with finances and imposter syndrome,” Muldrow said. “I'd never been so stressed and felt as much pressure to succeed as I did during my time at bootcamp — my two kids were counting on me to get us to a comfortable place.” 

Despite the struggle, Muldrow still landed her first tech job, as an engineering instructor for Hack the Hood, halfway into her 12-week bootcamp experience.

Landing an immediate tech job was never a guarantee

Nearly every bootcamp will highlight the potential for dream jobs and high salaries when they finish their program, but not everyone gets hired right out of the gate.

Saboor ultimately went through the 2018 Zip Code summer cohort, but after graduating, things didn’t go exactly as planned. Zip Code works with corporate partners that offer sponsored scholarships and often hire entry-level software developers through its cohorts.

Though he received a couple of corporate sponsorships, that didn’t guarantee him a job with one of the companies.

“I wasn't able to get a job with a partner,” Saboor said. “So I went back to Philadelphia, and I just kept going to a lot of good meetups that were around the area.”

One of the people he met while networking was a director for biopharma company GSK who was interested in his story. Saboor ultimately got a job at the company through its early talent program, an opportunity ordinarily offered to college students. 

After three years at GSK, Saboor landed a higher-level software developer job at financial services company American Express in 2022, also the result of networking. 

Like Saboor, Muldrow had some early challenges, too. Even though she did land her dream position working as a software engineer for a big company when she got a job at social networking site LinkedIn in 2017, she didn’t stay in software development long-term.

One of her biggest takeaways, though, was that she found her passion in tech education. While she’s currently searching for a new job since a layoff in 2023, she’s worked as an engineering instructor for Flatiron School and a technical writer with DigitalOcean.

Employers have a different point of view when it comes to bootcamp trends.

Wright has been on the other side of the bootcamp discussion, as a hiring manager in tech for more than ten years. He’s seen bootcamp hires rise and fall depending on the job market.

“Bootcamps to me feel like they're like a lagging indicator of the actual economy and the job market,” Wright said. “When demand for jobs rises, then bootcamps subsequently rise because there's jobs to fill, and there's an opportunity to make money on people looking to get those jobs.”

The problem, Wright says, is that when the job market decreases, bootcamps continue until there's a market backlash. 

“We're seeing a lot of that play out right now, where there has been a contraction in entry-level software roles, but bootcamps remain,” he said. During these periods, bootcamp graduates will have a more difficult time finding entry-level jobs.

The bootcamp industry is expected to continue to grow 15% a year through 2030

Despite not landing a job right away, Saboor is satisfied with his bootcamp experience and still recommends nonprofit organizations to people looking to get into tech.

“I still tell people to go to Zip Code Wilmington, even if they just finished college,” Saboor said. “Because it's a nonprofit bootcamp, and the material that you're learning would set you apart from a lot of other boot camps.”

Saboor has since continued to support accessible, non-traditional tech education. In 2020, he co-founded Black Tech Philly, a meetup group that evolved into an educational non-profit organization. 

Muldrow says her bootcamp experience taught her how to learn, and gave her a tenacity that has proven to be helpful in different facets of her life. But, unlike Saboor, she doesn’t think the bootcamp route is the way to go today.

“The rigor and intensity of the learning programs have amped up quite a bit with new technologies, and are not, in my opinion, a safe entryway for those newer to tech,” Muldrow said. 

The rise of AI is changing things, too. There’s no shortage of think pieces on whether coding will still be a thing in a few years, rendering coding bootcamps useless. 

Still, financial projections are optimistic. By 2030, coding bootcamps are projected to be worth $2.4 billion, expected to grow 15% a year from 2023, when it was valued at $899 million, according to Verified Market Research. 

So, it may be more likely that bootcamps will become even more necessary with how fast tech evolves in the 2020s. Ongoing upskilling, including in AI technology, could be necessary for businesses to keep up. 

“I wish people were using bootcamps more as upskilling or continuing education,” hiring manager Wright said. “I'd love for our product managers on my team to go to a UX bootcamp, for example.”