The state of coding bootcamps with Monarch Wadia
It’s easy to punch an industry that is an underdog and get away with it. It’s easy to say, “Oh, these bootcamps, they’re shady. How can they even work? Let’s sue them. They’re liars. They’re cheats.” Nothing could be farther from the truth.
(This is a transcript of this conversation on the PodRocket podcast, which you can listen to for free. Thank you, PodRocket, for letting me speak my mind on your podcast).
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
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Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Hey, welcome to PodRocket. On this episode there’s me, Brian. The guest is Monarch Wadia. Hi, Monarch.
Monarch Wadia:
Hello.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
And then also, Kate Trahan, producer extraordinaire, is also making an appearance. Hi.
Kate Trahan:
Hello.
Monarch Wadia:
Hello, Kate.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
What we usually do, because the guests are better at introducing themselves than I am, is we just ask Monarch to introduce himself. So, what should the people know about you within 20 to 30 seconds? I don’t know how deep and metaphysical you can get on your initial intro.
Monarch Wadia:
Is there such a thing as a self? But anyway, before we go there… I’m a software developer. I shy away from the term engineer, because I don’t think software development is engineering, first of all. I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years. I have worked in Java, Rails, JavaScript, dabbled in the normal smorgasbord of languages, PHP, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I shouldn’t have started with PHP, but… And then I went into JavaScript, and then Rails. So, people are judging me hardcore right now. Anyway, I’ve run a software development firm for the past five years. During that time, I’ve served more than 40 clients, going all the way from massive enterprise, banks, financial institutions, all the way down to really cool startups doing really interesting things with super interesting architectural choices. And all of that was fun and it was great, but I started looking for a larger meaning and purpose for my life and my work.
Monarch Wadia:
And building code was always fulfilling, but what I was always missing in it was I was never connected to the person who benefited from my work. I was never connected to the person who would actually use the software. That was something that product does. That’s something that the customer service or the account management or the sales team does. The developer’s stuck behind the screen, picking up tickets from Jira. And I didn’t really enjoy that. I really love coding, I just didn’t enjoy being disconnected. So, I started iterating about almost two years, one and a half, two years ago on a product. And we iterated and we iterated. We started off as an HR kind of product. We didn’t really know. Wound our way around the market, and eventually, we landed squarely in the center of this massive quiet revolution called the bootcamp industry that’s happening right under our noses, and nobody’s talking about it, or they’re talking about it dismissively, like how people used to talk about JavaScript, or Rails, or Java when those technologies were new. They would all just be dismissive about it. Eventually, they saw the power of those technologies.
Monarch Wadia:
And the same thing is weirdly happening with the bootcamp market. And I’m here to talk about that. My work has been at Mintbean for the last, like I said, year and a half, two years. We do hackathons and events. We’ve done 86 hackathons, 180 or so online events, including the hackathons and various different webinars, workshops. And we speak primarily to the junior developer, especially bootcamp developers. And we are one of the largest advocates for the bootcamp grad after they come out of bootcamp and they’re looking for their first job. And at that point, you feel like Frodo in Mordor, and you don’t know what to do. You’re following all these weird little Gollum creatures around, and you need a Gandalf. I’m trying to be the Gandalf in the story, kind of, although Gandalf mysteriously disappeared right around the time they needed him most. Not going to go there. But yeah, that’s me in a nutshell, guys.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
No, that’s an impressive number of hackathons, for sure. I didn’t realize it was that high. Cool, so we’ll, for sure, talk about junior developers or new developers or people new to coding, but I want to start off with… And it’s basically super self indulgent just for me, but I want to start off with a spicy tweet, and then asking you to evaluate it. We can maybe talk about putting the link to the tweet in the show notes later, because I don’t necessarily want to blow this person up. I feel like they’ve taken enough abuse over the last maybe day or so. But I’ll just read it, and then let me know what you think, because I am curious. Okay, here’s the tweet. In the past two weeks. I interviewed more 30 junior front end developers. Most of them did not have formal CS education. They took online classes and attended bootcamps instead. Almost none of them knew SQL. All of them knew Mongo. Front end training is seriously broken. Do you feel… Do you agree, disagree with any of those things?
Monarch Wadia:
So, that tweet, the person who tweeted it, I looked at their Twitter profile briefly, nothing but respect for the person. But the idea here is so seriously out of whack and out of line with reality on so many different levels. I’ll start… And again, this is about the idea and not the person. And the idea here is really the thing that I’ve been working to change for a while now. First off, if you pick 30 random junior front end developers, you’re going to get 30 random junior front end developers. So, let’s start with that. You have to temper your expectation. And if most of them did not have a CS education, that to me speaks volumes about how fast computer science degrees are churning out developers more than how effective bootcamps and online education is at teaching front end developers. To me, it speaks to the fact that most computer science programs are just not churning out developers at the rate that the industry needs.
Monarch Wadia:
And then we can go into the average quality of the university developer, we can talk about that stuff, and compare that to bootcamps. But in my experience, it’s actually not that different. And this person just spun it in a way that really irked me. They said most of them did not have formal CS education, they took online classes and attended bootcamps instead, almost none of them knew SQL, all of them knew Mongo. So, I really don’t understand where this traditionalist mindset is coming from in an industry that’s been so forward thinking in so many other areas, that’s so progressive, and that is, in many ways, the poster child of industries for many, many different reasons, be that we take a lot of flack for diversity, equity, inclusion, but at the same time, I don’t think there’s another industry that does as much or tries to do as much for DEI. We are constantly pushing the frontiers of what humanity is capable of, and how we work, and how we live.
Monarch Wadia:
And in a world where we’re constantly testing first principles, a traditionalist mindset that says you need to know SQL, it feels like an anachronism. It feels like, where’s that coming from? And it really started bothering me. And so, I replied and started responding to this person. I don’t know if I quite stepped into a flame war territory, but I really wanted to address what they said. And then they ended with front end training is seriously broken. And that just completely… I don’t know, I don’t know. It just really irked me. First off, as a front end developer, you don’t need databases. You don’t need databases as a front end developer. On top of that, to pile on and say, not only do you need databases, but you need something that requires a rigorous education to fully understand, which is SQL, which is a completely different paradigm, it’s a thought pattern, a kind of thought pattern unto itself. It’s not like any other programming language paradigm at all. It’s declarative. You need to know set theory. You need to know how to combine different sets of data. All of that is completely irrelevant to front end development.
Monarch Wadia:
And I constantly see this traditionalist mindset everywhere right now. Thankfully, it’s dying. Thankfully, it’s declining. But whenever I see it, I have to take pause, try and be compassionate to the person who’s expressing those viewpoints, and realize that, okay, well, maybe what I’m seeing is not what that other person is seeing. What that other person is seeing is something that they’ve been trained to see by their university education, by the, until five years ago, very traditionalist, very engineering driven mindset that used to be in the market and is slowly declining. We’re no longer… I don’t think there’s a strong case to be made for front end development to be called engineering. I do not think it’s engineering. Backend development, it’s becoming less and less engineering. As far as you can even call software development engineering, it’s becoming less and less engineering, and the entire field of software development is becoming more democratic. And asking a front end developer to know SQL is just gatekeeping. It’s just pure gatekeeping. And that’s what irked me over there.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
There’s a lot to unpack there. And I don’t… I didn’t even see that you had replied. I saw it because Laurie Barth had replied, and we had her on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. And her response was… And I want to make sure I get a quote. I think she was like, “You’re not serious, are you?” I’m paraphrasing.
Monarch Wadia:
I saw that one. [crosstalk 00:10:25].
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
And I was like, “Okay, yeah, yeah, that sounds familiar.” Yeah, the other thing that jumped out to me, which made a lot of sense is, well, if you need to learn SQL for whatever company, for whatever job, for whatever client you have, you can, just like you would have to learn any other new framework or any other piece of technology. It doesn’t, to me… It says more to me, what does this person think about Mongo? Perhaps they’re not alone, but I’ll leave that alone for now. Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know. I-
Monarch Wadia:
So, let me jump in, because I addressed that. And in the thread, they were asking, “Why are they teaching Mongo? They should be teaching SQL. And education is not complete without SQL,” is their thought process. And I made the point that the choice to teach Mongo is a pedagogical choice. It’s a teaching choice. It’s not… It’s defining the scope of the course, and it’s defining the bare minimum that this developer needs to be viable in the market without making a fool of themselves, and establishing a foundation from which they can grow their skills. Mongo is about an order of magnitude easier than SQL, but it teaches you the fact that a database is a separate component. It gets spun up. It takes up a port. You need authentication to get in. There’s such a thing as connection string. You can do transactions. Those transactions have certain ACID properties. Those transactions are create, read, update, delete, list. You can be creative with those transactions, so on and so forth. Or queries, maybe I’m just mixing up terminology.
Monarch Wadia:
But anyway, these choices that these bootcamps are making are to lay a foundation for the developers within 12 weeks. How would you expect them to teach them all of front end, or at least a large chunk of front end, and then also teach them backend? That would be at least a year long course if you wanted to give them a full, fundamental, solid foundation. And a year is a long time in this day and age. The magic of bootcamps is that you graduate in three months, a lot of people find work immediately, a lot of people find work within three to six months. Some people, I would say the majority of people find work within a year. The official statistics are within a year, 80% median are employed in the industry within a year. Some bootcamps sport a 95% rate. Some of them sport a 60% placement rate. So, they’re wildly successful in filling a market demand. And they really have to scope down and decide which niche in the market they want to fill.
Monarch Wadia:
So, I don’t think this person fully understands how bootcamps work, which is a shame because bootcamps are going mainstream. Universities last year, they graduated… I don’t know if you guys saw my LinkedIn video that I posted yesterday. But universities over the last, let’s say, three years, they graduated 63,000, 70,000 and 77,000 students across the fields of computer science and software engineering in three and four year degrees in universities and colleges. Meanwhile, bootcamps graduated, in those same years, they graduated 13,000, 20,000, 33,000. So, bootcamps are growing at a 70% year-over-year rate, universities are lagging behind that rate at 10%. In about three or four years, we’re going to be talking about bootcamps as the preferred way to send your kid to a technical education. We’re going to be talking about the diversification of the bootcamp industry. Bootcamps are starting to stack on top of each other. Many, many, many students decide to take two bootcamp courses rather than just one in order to enhance their skills. So, we’re talking about a basic change in how education is delivered and how training is delivered in this industry. And I really wanted to… Maybe this is a good segue into that conversation, which is really what I would love to talk about on this podcast.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Yeah, sure. I’m done with that tweet anyway, except, I guess, maybe the final thing I’ll say is you’re talking to junior developers, what did you expect? Even if they had three years of experience, you’re not going to know everything. It just seems like unrealistic expectations and perhaps a flawed understanding of how education works.
Monarch Wadia:
I think so, I think so. That tweet irked me, and I was trying my best not to just rip into the person, just the [inaudible 00:15:20].
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Yeah, but then I was like, “You know what would be perfect to talk to Monarch? This tweet.”
Monarch Wadia:
It’s a fantastic opener, that tweet. If you link it, there’s, I think, 74 comments now, 85 retweets, 150 likes. And not many of those comments are kind to this poor soul.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Well, everyone makes mistakes. Everyone is imperfect in some way, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Okay, so let’s segue to actual just bootcamp and discussion, but also education discussion, and all that stuff. I always think about it like, what are the best ways to get started? How do you evaluate? How do you pick a good one if you’re interested in that sort of thing? And then the other side of that is, if you’re hiring, how do you know which bootcamp, because there’s so many of them, how do you know which ones have, I don’t know, a better reputation, or in the end, produce better candidates? On both sides, how are people supposed to evaluate?
Monarch Wadia:
That’s a great question. Let me hit the first one first. So, all of these bootcamps are regulated federally, I believe, maybe on the state… I think in the States, it’s… No, across North America, USA and Canada, it’s on the state or province level, they’re regulated. Most if not all states and provinces regulate these bootcamps and require them to publish their numbers, their statistics for the year. So, how many students did they take in, how many graduated, you can find that report on most bootcamps’ websites. If you don’t find it there, I’m sure you can call them up and ask them for their numbers. And they’ll give you a relatively… I’m saying relatively because they’re publishing it, and they only want to present themselves in the best light. But you’ll get a relatively fair estimate of how good a certain bootcamp is from that number.
Monarch Wadia:
Another possible way to judge a bootcamp is take a look at their alumni on LinkedIn, see where they are, see how many of them are in a certain type of company that you wish to work for, or a certain field like front end development or backend development, or even the non-technical fields, product management. They have sales engineering bootcamps now. Just take a look at those bootcamps’ students, the alumni, and see how well they’ve done in their careers. Yet another way to judge it is it’s not just the bootcamp you’re judging, it’s also you’re judging the field that you’re going into. So, if you’re going into, say, front end development, if you have a choice between a school that teaches you… I’m going to pick an obviously wrong choice, jQuery, and a school that teaches you React, then pick the school that’s going to teach you the more viable technology for this market.
Monarch Wadia:
In the backend, if you have a choice between a school that teaches you Java, or Python, or JavaScript, Java will get you more enterprise jobs. It’s more traditional. You’re going to have to do… If you’re really geeky, and you really want to dig very deep into software engineering as it’s perceived by enterprise companies and people who want solidity and varied performance systems, or just very large companies, if you want to go into work like that or companies like that, then you would go for the Java bootcamp. If you wanted to work in the web, if you wanted to be a front end developer, or you wanted to just work in an environment where a little bit of cross-disciplinary skill is appreciated, JavaScript bootcamp might be better for you, because that leads from backend to front end, and you can start exercising your design skills, it becomes a very natural transition for you to become a full stack developer. And that’s actually a great way to even maybe start a consulting business.
Monarch Wadia:
JavaScript has a low barrier to entry. You can go there, you can learn it, you can learn enough to fit to be really good at it. And then if you have a management background, or if you have an entrepreneurial background, a JavaScript bootcamp might be the right step for you to get those technical skills you need to start a consultancy or a startup. If you’re going into Python, then that’ll give you data science. It’s very close to data science. You will be able to work with very, very smart statisticians and computer scientists if you go into Python, potentially. It won’t close the door to backend web development, but it might not be easy to get into front end web development through Python, not necessarily. But it does open an avenue into machine learning and AI and data engineering.
Monarch Wadia:
So, you have to know what kind of field you’re currently interested in, and what field you want to commit to for one year or two years. Of course, after the one year or two years are over, you can, of course, change your field. Software development is really easy to move around in once you get in. But the first one or two years, what is it that you want to do? So, that’s how I would evaluate. It’s not just the performance of the bootcamp, but also match your personality and your background with the field that you’re going into. So, that’s from the student’s perspective.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Yeah. A lot of that makes sense, I think the sort of safety in numbers, almost. If a lot of people are going, I don’t know, to me, that just make… Because I’m at heart, a rebellious teenager, and I’d be like, “Well, that’s confusing. I’ll pick something that’s people don’t necessarily go to, or maybe doesn’t have hundreds of thousands of students,” but that could also be a really dumb way to make a decision, which I can actually attest to in other parts of my life. Okay, so let’s say you’re hiring, right, and somebody has a bootcamp on their resume. How do you know if that’s a good… Is it the same formula, or are there other things that you should be thinking about?
Monarch Wadia:
Hiring is my favorite topic. We’ve perfected it on our end, partially because we do these hackathons so frequently. So, we never have a lack of talent. For us, from our perspective, the talent shortage is a lie. That’s how we feel in Mintbean. But of course, we know that the greater industry doesn’t have the advantage of having an in-house hackathon that you can hire from. But what we’ve done is, we’ve managed to figure out exactly what it is that you should be filtering for at every single step of the hiring process. And when you’re hiring for a junior developer, forget bootcamps, but let’s just call it junior developers. I’m going to include self-taught developers like myself in that category. I’m going to include university grads in that category. Junior developers as a whole, unfortunately, there’s no industry standard certificate or seal of quality that’s going to tell you, yeah, this developer knows what they’re doing. There’s no such thing. I don’t care if you graduated from MIT or Waterloo. That might make it more likely that you’re a good engineer, doesn’t mean you’re a good engineer.
Monarch Wadia:
So, companies are, they have the unenviable task of having to filter and test all of these developers. And it’s really expensive task. It’s really expensive to do that. And I haven’t really seen a compelling solution in the market that does it for you. Like pre-vetted developers, if there was a source of pre-vetted developers, that’s a great market to get into if somebody can figure that out. Maybe somebody will after listening to this episode, I don’t know. But that’s probably the biggest missing chunk in the puzzle right now in the industry, is we don’t know how good a developer is without testing them. And we don’t even have any idea how good they are. Forget no, we have no idea how good they are.
Monarch Wadia:
So, most companies have three tier or four tier testing process or vetting process for developers. Some of them have two tiers. One tier is so rare, it might as well not exist. They have one tier acceptance for senior developers sometimes, or architects sometimes, and that’s unwise. But usually, there’s three steps or four steps in the interview process. And about 70%… This is an estimate, about 70% of companies in my estimate don’t optimize that funnel. And that’s where they lose out on getting really sharp junior developers. They either test too early, or they test for the wrong things, or their job description is out of whack and they scare away all the good juniors, or their expectations are misaligned with the hiring manager’s expectations, so on and so forth.
Monarch Wadia:
So, when you’re hiring for juniors, regardless of whether you’re hiring for a bootcamp or not, the first thing you should do is you should just optimize your hiring funnel. And I think this is… It sounds like table stakes for HR companies and recruiters. This is table stakes stuff. I’m not talking about anything revolutionary. But when you’re hiring for a junior developer, this is really important, because you’re dealing with volume. If I put up a junior developer ad today, I’ll get, by tomorrow, 100 applications. By the end of the weekend, today’s Friday, I’ll have maybe 300 or 400 on a free job posting on Indeed without any spend. So, that’s a lot of people that I can get. So, it’s a problem of high volume, very low signal. And in that situation, you have to optimize for that. Unfortunately, most companies either hire the… They either don’t optimize their funnel, so they’re hiring costs become so extravagantly expensive that they don’t think it’s worth hiring the junior developer.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Yeah, no, that was exactly where I was going next, is I feel like a lot of companies make that decision where it’s just too hard. For whatever reason, it’s, too, organizationally, they’re just not equipped for that, or they’ve maybe brought with them some preconceived notions of what a junior developer can do, or how long it would take to, I’m using air quotes, ramp, because that means something different to everybody. And also the interview. I mean, we could spend an entire other episode on what it’s like to interview as a developer. I’ve never done it, but my understanding is that there are a handful of standard questions, but then everything else is bespoke, or some random twist, or ultimately so esoteric as to be like, you can’t really figure out if it’s a joke or not.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Because as someone who makes content, the number of times that I see dev interview questions written, and then compiled, and then put up on a blog somewhere, there’s hundreds of them. So, yeah, that seems to be… That’s a signal of a problem, or at least an inefficient system, right? How could you possibly… If it’s… I could understand some vary if your industry is super narrow, or there’s some kind of skill you’re optimizing for. But otherwise, it feels like… Ooh, I almost said vanity. It almost seems like personal preference. This is just what you like as the hiring manager, and so that’s what you’re going to ask. Maybe the organization itself.
Monarch Wadia:
The worst part is when they ask algorithm questions when the job is a front end development job. And nobody cares about algorithms in the front end. I think the second worst is when they ask you to whiteboard, and they don’t test you at all. They just ask you to whiteboard, and most junior developers who are worth their salt, they suck at whiteboarding, because they’re so hands on in the text editor. They’d rather just code something up, but if you asked them to do a whiteboarding session in the first interview, they fail, and you reject them. And this is Bayesian, right? Every single step is a percentage probability. And if any one of those steps is near a 0% probability of finding a good developer, then your entire funnel fails. So, it’s an insidious problem. And most companies don’t look at it in terms of analytics. They just look at it in terms of, oh, yeah, we’re just gonna filter them in. Well, guys, you got to be a bit more mindful and compassionate for the developer, I think. If we have time, I’d love to hear from Kate about her experience after she graduated from that bootcamp.
Kate Trahan:
Yeah. So, I did do a bootcamp. It’s called Epicodus. It’s West Coast. It was in Portland, Oregon, and then have one in Seattle. They’re now remote. They have a full time remote program. As we’re listening, so I did a course, Java Android. Definitely didn’t have the self awareness that you were talking about earlier on what course to pick. But that was the course I did. And it was actually… The reason I picked it was actually because it was a little bit longer than some other ones I saw. So, it was five weeks, Java, five weeks, JavaScript, five weeks, Android, then a five week internship. So, that was appealing to me. But again, it’s a lot of time, and not everyone has that time, right? So, that’s why I picked it. But then I had in my mind that I just wanted to learn more about tech, and I wanted to work in tech, but not necessarily be an engineer, so I might be part of the problem, because now I work in marketing.
Kate Trahan:
If anything, it gave me a visual of, oh, this is what people are talking about when we talk about this. This what people are talking about this. And now I’ve been working at LogRocket for almost three years, and that’s a lot of reading about code. Now, between talking to people about code, I’m now just, I’m still learning. I’m just now fully getting, okay, this is actually what this looks like. And so, it’s not like I just came out of the bootcamp ready to go. It’s still definitely a lot to learn, for sure.
Monarch Wadia:
Definitely. I think it’s just the beginning of your journey after you graduate bootcamp. And I think when people think about bootcamp, they have this vision in their mind, oh, yeah, I’m going to graduate and I’m going to become a software developer, and I’m going to write code. Sometimes what ends up happening is you find your passion in the tech industry. And the bootcamp enables you to get into a really awesome position that’s tailor-made for your personality and your interests, but isn’t code.
Monarch Wadia:
It happened to my wife, Navi. She’s my partner in Mintbean as well. And she graduated from General Assembly in Toronto, in Canada. She did Ruby on Rails, and she didn’t really want to code. She isn’t somebody who really enjoys sitting down and typing away at a desk for hours and hours at a time. It’s just not part of her personality. And I love her for it. She’s awesome. If she was like me, I think I wouldn’t be… I don’t think I’d be very happy if she was a lot like me, and she could just be quiet for long periods of time, not talk to each other. No, she loves talking to people. And that’s the best part about her personality. She’s now running this company with me. And if she didn’t have that bootcamp education, she wouldn’t be able to do the marketing and relationship work that this industry requires. You can’t work in this industry unless you know what’s being… It’s like working in the car industry, in the automotive industry without ever having driven a car.
Kate Trahan:
Sure, yeah, totally. And I think, as you’re talking… So, I graduated, I got a four year degree, and then I worked for a little bit, and I was like, oh, crap. I realized that maybe I should have focused more on this tech stuff, because I like it, I just don’t understand it. And I think that maybe it’s a smaller percentage of people at the time, but I think there is a lot of people who will be in that boat as tech gets bigger and more jobs around and stuff like that.
Monarch Wadia:
I think so.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
The other thing that I think maybe not everyone realizes when they come out of a bootcamp, and they decide, you know what? I don’t necessarily want to write code, it was, still, for me, when I was looking to build the team, Kate was the first hire after me. And it was like her having attended a bootcamp put her so far ahead of other candidates. So, if the job is to edit technical content meant for front end developers, it’s a no brainer that we should probably spend some time talking to Kate. And it-
Kate Trahan:
Yeah, Brian hired me. It was full circle.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
And it worked out, yeah.
Kate Trahan:
It worked out. I do have…. I would be curious, we just had Anthony Campello on the episode not too long ago, and he talked a little bit about Lambda School. I’m curious your thoughts around Lambda as a bootcamp.
Monarch Wadia:
I think Lambda is fine. I don’t… When I see students from Lambda, they’re fine. They know their thing. I don’t have any negative connotations with those students. I haven’t worked with enough of them as a mentor. I mentor some of them for free just as part of my work. And I haven’t mentored any Lambda School students directly, so I can’t say that… I can’t recommend, but I can’t not recommend either. I don’t have a negative opinion about Lambda students from what I’ve seen from a distance as a hackathon host, from seeing their work. I think they’re fine.
Monarch Wadia:
Now, just as a recap, for people who are listening, Lambda School does something that a lot of bootcamps do, which is income sharing agreements, or ISAs. And ISAs are a way to finance your education without taking on debt or loan, without really spending money upfront or going into credit card debt. You can promise the bootcamp, so you pledged to the bootcamp that in return for a 12 week or a 16 week or a 20 week education, you promise that you’ll give a certain percentage of your first year or your first two years’ check, your paycheck to the bootcamp. And the percentage, I believe… I don’t know what the percentages are. I know they’re not super high. I think it’s something like five or 10%, maybe. Maybe 20 at most, which for somebody who really wants to get into the industry and maybe doesn’t have the financial backing or support they need to get in, that’s a game changer. That’s a way for somebody to become a software developer, potentially earn $60,000 in their first job after bootcamp, potentially. It’s a game changer. And it’s an excellent, in my opinion, way to democratize the software development industry.
Monarch Wadia:
Now, they came under some scrutiny, and I believe they were either fined or they had a lawsuit, I can’t remember what the exact circumstance was. But they got into some trouble for certain, I believe, marketing practices, if I remember correctly, where they were over-promising their students, something along those lines. Of course, they made a mistake, and that was proven. And they were found to have crossed the line, and they were fined. But I want to do a reality check on everybody who is familiar with the topic. And even if you’re not familiar with the topic, I just wanted to do a reality check. Bootcamps are 10 years old. The first bootcamp was started in 2011. And, of course, for a sector that’s only 10 years old, that’s… A lot of us our age have kids. That’s younger than a lot of our kids these days. My nieces are 13 and 16, bootcamps are younger than my nieces. And come on, right? New industry. They’re going to make some mistakes. Now, I’ve done stupid things in my past as a kid. I got into trouble as a teenager, sure. Nothing too serious.
Monarch Wadia:
And I’m looking at this from the perspective of, okay, this is a brand new industry, regulation just came in less than five or six years ago. We’re just starting to come into our own as an industry. And if one large player got into trouble for over aggressive marketing tactics, which they’ve then fixed, and they’ve paid a penalty for, I don’t think that should be held against them. Because that’s just a mistake that they made while maturing as a company and also as an industry. So, yeah, they absolutely got in trouble. And sure, they probably did something wrong. I would even say something bad. But what does that say about us as a society? That we’re unforgiving of innovation? Does that say that we’re unforgiving of people who want to strike out on their own, be rebellious, go against the trend, buck people’s expectations, and teach people how to be actual software developers in 12 weeks? We have a nationwide, well, economy wide, I’ll include the Western world as a whole, we have a massive shortage of software developers. And what we should be doing at this point is subsidizing bootcamps, funneling money towards them, getting them the grants they need, getting them the help they need in order to grow, because these people are actually churning out developers at a speed that universities cannot keep up with.
Monarch Wadia:
I would go as far as to say that they might possibly make the university sector obsolete in technical training within the next three or four years. And a lot of universities are starting up bootcamp programs. The University of Toronto has a bootcamp program, for example. I know I’ve heard whisperings of other universities who also have bootcamp programs of their own. And this whole sector needs to be subsidized and helped, not kicked down while they’re still… I mean, they’re babies. This is a young industry. We should be encouraging people who are solving real industrial economic problems of talent shortage, not taking one mistake that one player did and painting the whole industry with that one off mistake as bad or disreputable. I think that’s unfair. And I think we’re maybe losing sight of the big picture over here.
Kate Trahan:
Sure, yeah. No, that was a great answer. And I think Anthony had talked to, in his episode, about we can give all this advice, but ultimately, these are people’s lives, right? This is people’s livelihoods, life paths. It weighs a little heavier when you’re dealing with those sort of decisions.
Monarch Wadia:
Yeah, it absolutely affects people’s lives. Now, how many people that we all know over here collectively, how many people graduated from whatever university program we all went to individually, how many people do you know as a percentage from your cohort or your graduating class that actually found work in the industry that they graduated in?
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Well, if you’re asking me, I don’t use my degrees at all.
Monarch Wadia:
There you go.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Kate has some. It really depends. I think if you have, let’s just say, a business degree, it’s pretty likely you’re going to end up in some business field. If you have an accounting degree, you’re probably going to end up in accounting. Yeah, any other… I happen to have liberal arts majors, and that can be flexible. So, yeah.
Monarch Wadia:
Well, how many people do you know, how many ex-classmates, friends from back then do you know who struggled after graduating from university? I know many. I graduated in finance myself, and I had to work two and a half years in retail, managing retail stores, because finance just didn’t have the opportunities back then. There were too many finance grads. Most of my class ended up not in finance. They ended up either in operations or in another field altogether, marketing, operations, nothing related to finance. And if they all went and they sued the university for failing them, I think that’s a little… I don’t think that that would be fair to the university. I think the bootcamps are doing what they can. And don’t over promise, for sure. And I think that was a reality check that Lambda School and the rest of the industry needed, that, okay, we need to be more fair, and we need to be more transparent about our outcomes.
Monarch Wadia:
But I think it’s easy to punch somebody who’s an underdog and get away with it. It’s easy to say, “Oh, these bootcamps, they’re shady. How can they even work? Let’s sue them. They’re liars. They’re cheats.” And that problem exists, I think, mainly because bootcamps are new. They’re not trusted yet by the mainstream, because they are new. And their PR problem stems from them being new, not from anything else. And when somebody has a PR problem, it’s really easy to go cancel culture on them. It’s real easy. But you try and pull that with the university, they have lobbyists, they have lawyers, they have the funds they need to keep them safe. They have the friends they need in high places from 400, 500 years of tradition and old money, and they have the connections in high places they need to keep their industry safe. Bootcamps don’t have that. And they don’t have the reputation either. So, it’s really easy to punch them and to come down hard on them.
Monarch Wadia:
And most of the public will even agree with you right now that, oh, yeah, how can you become a software engineer in 12 weeks? It’s hard to argue with that without sitting the person down and explaining to them over a cup of coffee that software development, A, is not engineering, and B, yes, you can learn how to code in 12 weeks, and here is the data to prove it. It’s just a sound bite that you have to fight right now. And I think that PR problem is going to solve itself in the next five to 10 years.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
I’m thinking a lot about the comparison between what kind of responsibility do the universities, formal institutions have to students, and bootcamps, and comparing them. It is possible to evaluate each of them independently. You don’t necessarily have to tie whether or not a bootcamp is necessarily acting ethically versus, say, a university, where, as someone who carries a lot of student loans, I’m not thrilled about it. So, yeah, no, I don’t think there’s a short answer for that, right? I’d feel like yes, ultimately, I’m not sure that anyone would… I’m not sure that I’d want to meet someone who wasn’t interested in protecting those students at a bootcamp, yeah? But I don’t necessarily disagree with the overall thrust of what you’re saying. I do have one last question that’s unrelated, but I do feel that we’ve been so… We’ve spoken so highly of bootcamps and talked about the advantages a lot. What are they not good at? What are some things that, whether it’s because they’re new, or just because of the format, what are the things that… If you had to pick one thing, how about that? I’ll make it easier.
Monarch Wadia:
This is that interview question where, what are you not good at, right? Let’s talk about it, let’s talk about it. I mean, I’m not-
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Mr. workaholic.
Monarch Wadia:
Yeah, I think bootcamps are not very good at computer science. They’re not really good at giving the student the fundamental knowledge they need to advance their career past the two or three year mark. Most students from bootcamps, after establishing a career, if they really want to go technical and they want to go deep on the technical stuff, they want to become, say, a software architect, they probably have to supplement their bootcamp education with possibly a degree. So, I did most of a master’s degree in software engineering after I was established as a self-taught developer. And I would in no way, shape, or form denigrate or disparage university educations. All I’m saying is bootcamps are better at some things. But bootcamps are not good at giving you that knowledge of how computers actually work. And that stuff is invaluable when you want to keep up to date with your skillset, when you don’t understand how variable assignment works, and all of a sudden, a memory managed language might become popular for whatever reason.
Monarch Wadia:
There’s a chip shortage, there’s a whole situation in Taiwan with TSMC and a chip shortage, where computers are becoming more and more expensive. And we don’t know how that whole supply chain problem is going to end up. Maybe we’ll end up in a semi dark age, where we have to actually care about performance again for computers. Anything could happen. The science fiction scenario, I’m just going to throw it in there for color, but let’s say you had a memory managed language that was important for performance. A bootcamp would not have prepared a student for that kind of drastic career shift. And those kinds of drastic career shifts have happened every decade in this industry. So, I don’t think they set the student up for that. They set them up for a tactical move into the industry, but not for a strategic long-term career. That’s something that’s on the students own shoulders. Universities are fantastic at giving you that knowledge base.
Monarch Wadia:
So, that is definitely… You get what you’re paying for in many ways. A four year degree will give you four years of theoretical knowledge. A 12 week tactical crash course will give you the skills you need to get into the industry. But in terms of long term, you are getting what you’re paying for. And you will have to supplement your education with something a bit more solid, a bit more theoretical over the course of your career, maybe part time.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
That makes sense to me. Monarch, that is it for us. I really enjoyed the conversation. I think this was an interesting one.
Monarch Wadia:
Thank you, I did too.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Nice. This is the time where we ask you if you’d like to plug anything, anyone? What are the things that you think people should know about? The floor is yours.
Monarch Wadia:
As of the recording of this podcast, we haven’t announced it yet, but by the time the podcast comes out, it’ll be announced. We’re going to be hosting the first event of its kind. And we’re going to be hosting a conference, a very large conference in October for bootcamps, bootcamp students, educators, faculty, and staff, and hiring managers, companies, recruiters, tech companies who want to talk about this conversation that we just had in this podcast. We want to continue that conversation about bootcamps, learn more about this bootcamp industry, get involved, make connections, and maybe get educated about what bootcamps are bringing to the table in 2021. This is the first time I’m actually announcing it, so maybe this might actually be the first time I announce it on the air by the time this comes out. We’re announcing the Eon conference. You can find it at eon.mintbean.io. And the conference is a celebration of the bootcamp industry, of the 10 year anniversary of the bootcamp industry. It happens on Teachers’ Day in October, on October 5th through 8th.
Monarch Wadia:
And we’ll be having conversations that do away with all of the misperceptions, the prejudices, and perhaps the ignorance of where we find ourselves today when it comes to education. I think we have a lot of work, a lot of groundwork to do before we can fix the overall education problem that exists today in the United States and Canada, where people are going into debt, where people are taking on student loans and going into debt. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to fix that situation. And bootcamps are a viable solution, or part of a mix of solutions to that problem. We’re going to be talking about that. We’re going to be talking about what they’re good at, what they’re not good at. And along with that, we’re also going to be talking about developer relations. We’ll be talking about online education, APIs, serverless, all that good stuff, but with a focus on bootcamps and how they fit into this massive ecosystem of the tech industry that we’re all in today.
Monarch Wadia:
So, that happens on October 5th. So, early bird tickets are probably going to be open by the time this podcast goes out. If you’re a bootcamp student, you can get a ticket for free from your bootcamp. And if you are an educator, you can get in touch with us to get those free tickets for your students. And yeah, I’m very, very excited about it. And I think it’d be a very valuable experience for any bootcamp student or bootcamp staff or hiring manager or tech company or recruiter to come in and get connected with what’s going on, get a feeling for what’s going on on the ground floor here.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
That’s very cool. We’ll have all of the relevant links and stuff referred in the show notes, for sure. It does make me wish that we, okay, just maybe for future episodes, it makes me wish that I had like a breaking news button I could hit with a cool sound. I don’t know how slick we want [inaudible 00:50:29] to be, but I do. So, every now and then, we break news on PodRocket, and I want to be able to sound like a cheesy radio show.
Kate Trahan:
Noted, yeah.
Monarch Wadia:
I will send the both of you tickets. Thank you for having me on the show, and I really appreciate the time you guys have spent. This was a great conversation, and I got to know you all better. So, thank you.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Yeah, no, it was a pleasure. Thank you.
Kate Trahan:
Thanks so much, Monarch. We’ll see on the web.
Brian Neville-O’Neill:
Hi, thanks for listening. Please remember to like, subscribe, email me if you want, even though none of you do. Go to logrocket.com and try it out. It’s free to try, then it costs money. But yeah, we’ll see you next time. Thanks.