Dev Bootcamp

» see devbootcamp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dev Bootcamp started in San Francisco in February 2012, founded by Shereef Bishay with two co-founders, and it is generally credited as the first of its kind. The pitch was nineteen weeks, of which nine were remote and nine were on site, with a final week spent entirely on getting hired. You arrived knowing nothing in particular and left claiming to be a junior Ruby developer.

It grew into six campuses, adding Chicago, New York, Seattle, San Diego and Austin to the San Francisco original. Tuition ran between $12,700 and $13,950. The official commitment was forty hours a week and the actual one was closer to eighty, which was part of the product rather than a complaint about it. The school claimed 95 percent placement for its San Francisco graduates at average starting salaries above $85,000.

Kaplan bought it in 2014, which was read at the time as the traditional education business admitting the format was real. Three years later Kaplan's own chief executive said competition had not been the deciding issue, that the problem was whether the business could sustain itself at all. Dev Bootcamp put it more directly in its own announcement on 12 July 2017: tuition costs were not enough to cover the day-to-day operation of the campuses.

I have a computer engineering degree and I have never been anywhere near this market. The bootcamp existed because of an American arithmetic where a person could reasonably borrow fourteen thousand dollars against a job that would pay eighty-five, and where a four-year degree was expensive enough that skipping it looked rational. Neither half of that equation held in Turkey, and no equivalent industry grew here in those years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what nineteen weeks bought ~

The curriculum was Ruby on Rails with the front-end basics around it, aimed squarely at the web-shop hiring of 2012 to 2015. What Dev Bootcamp is actually remembered for by the people who went is the other half of the program: pair programming enforced daily, and a strand of the course given over to emotional intelligence and group feedback that most of its imitators dropped as overhead.

Over 2,700 people finished it across the five and a half years. That is a small number against the marketing weight the school carried, and it is the whole problem in one figure.

~ the arithmetic ~

Around 450 students a year against 175 staff and six leased campuses in expensive cities is a ratio that only closes if tuition goes up or class size does, and both of those attack the thing being sold. Leadership named the trap on the way out. Anyone could open a competing school, and nobody could demonstrate quality to a prospective student who was not yet equipped to evaluate it. Staying visible in that market took capital the tuition was never going to generate.

Kaplan kept it alive longer than it would have lasted alone. The school said so itself, that it would have closed much earlier without that support. An owner with money is not the same thing as a business that works.

~ eight days later ~

On 20 July 2017 The Iron Yard announced it was closing all fifteen of its campuses after the summer session. Eight days after the first bootcamp said it could not make the numbers work, the largest chain in the category said the same thing.

That fortnight is the marker for when the sector stopped being a growth story. Dev Bootcamp taught its final class through the autumn and shut on 8 December 2017, five years and ten months after opening the format that everybody else was still trying to run.

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