The Quality Wedge for Coding Bootcamps
Consistent quality will be the wedge that divides the emerging technical training industry (aka “coding bootcamps”): credible brands will strengthen their value proposition with consistent delivery of desirable outcomes, while purveyors making specious claims of grandeur unsubstantiated with successful graduates will race to the bottom and flame out.
Let’s start with our bona fides: Bloc was the first online coding bootcamp, founded in 2011 while the first Dev Bootcamp (DBC) cohort was in-session. Grads from that first 8-week DBC cohort went on to found many other in-person coding bootcamps, while Bloc’s founders focused exclusively on delivering comparable job-ready outcomes online, with an experienced mentor.
So we know (intimately!) how much mentorship and earnest hard work is required for students to become “job-ready” as a junior web developer. We’ve got a prodigious list of successful alumni. Our original courses back in the day in Rails and Frontend web dev required at least 480 hours of study, and we found that those programs left some graduates short of their goal as a junior web developer.
So we launched longer programs. The resulting Web Developer Track is perhaps the most demanding night-and-weekends coding bootcamp in the market. Our students spend 20 hours per week over 27 weeks to build a full-stack portfolio with experienced mentors, and prepare for their first technical recruiting process.
The last 5 years spent working with thousands of students allow our team at Bloc to speak with conviction about job-readiness derived from online coding programs. When we see outlandish job-readiness claims from other companies, I feel compelled to comment.
We’ve seen “fast followers” plunge into the market with disingenuous “shortcut” options that claim to get you “job-ready” on the cheap with a low-intensity program. Understandably, that’s just what many prospective student *want* to hear. It is enticing to believe that learning the craft of software development can be done with modest allocations of time and money.
But acquiring professional-caliber software development skills *is* hard. The learning curve can be a grind to climb, requiring persistent effort and sound counsel from those with deep experience to pull from. Some days you’re cheering with your rubber duck, and other days you want to pile-drive your laptop. It’s HARD.
And when you covet roles on the most competitive engineering teams? Those teams told us that bootcamp grads needed even more robust training, and we answered with the most rigorous program in the industry. Our Software Developer Track was designed to replace a CS degree with a tuition reimbursement guarantee. It requires 20 hours per week for 54 weeks to complete.
If you know someone mulling a full-time or part-time coding bootcamp, encourage them to consult with a professional software developer about their options and see which side of the Quality Wedge *they* would advocate for. Our team is betting long on real outcomes for graduates as the best way to counter the proliferation of unscrupulous claims.
