Are Bootcamps dead?

Lambda school recently shut its doors, bringing an end to one of the most infamous bootcamps of its time.

In 2017, I was looking for a career change, and Lambda School was one of the most recommended coding bootcamps. But it had an allure all its own – driven mainly by “Income share agreements”, or ISAs. Before signing up for Lambda School’s course, you would sign a contract that saying you didn’t have to pay for your education up front. If you got a job as a SWE paying more than 50k, you would pay a portion of your earnings back. Otherwise, you would pay nothing.

Lambda school was on your side, unlike all those other bootcamps. Too bad they lied and went bankrupt.

It’s hard to pinpoint where it all went wrong, because Lambda School’s early cohort(s) did work out – but then they got onto the growth bug. There are many people who want to learn how to code, but very few who are willing to go the distance. Quality instructors are hard to find – and you have to teach droves of students in a compressed time (most of these bootcamps are from 3-9 months, and some are part time). Programming isn’t easy, and it takes a lot of grit.

On top of that, Lambda School’s ISAs bled money. They were earning about $6000 per student, and paid $13000. You can’t run a business that sells a dollar for 50 cents forever.

It takes a long time to build a successful department. The college that I went to ran into the same problem that Lambda School did – the government wanted to attract overseas students to study in the country. They did that by giving grants to a few select institutions if they met some criteria for the funding, which meant offering classes in English and having a certain percentage of foreigners in that department. The university did that, received its grant money, and started its program, accepting many students.

Unfortunately, there weren’t enough professors that spoke English, so the classes were difficult for non-native speakers of the mother language. The professors didn’t know what classes they were teaching until a few weeks before the semester started, and lots of professors didn’t even want to teach the classes.

The result? After the grant funding dried out, professors were cut, and people weren’t able to meet their major credit requirements to graduate.

Success in teaching means taking it slow, because quality instructors are very difficult to attract. Likewise, finding qualified students is also hard.

It’s a shame because I think alternative paths to getting a quality education are sorely needed – universities in America haven’t been increasing their enrollment rates by much, leaving a glut of students trying out these new schools.

I’ve seen some arguments that a CS degree couldn’t be taught in 6 months because it requires depth and engineering maturity that takes time, but I think there are plenty of jobs where you can understand the basics and be productive, and 6 months is plenty of time to be “on the job ready” as a junior engineer. Yours truly taught himself how to code in 6 months, enough to get a job where I made more money than I had ever seen before, so I don’t think its impossible to make a bootcamp that’s successful, just hard to make a fast scaling one that’s successful.