For $10,000, you could franchise a Chick-fil-A restaurant, buy an engagement lobster roll, or jumpstart your career in software development in less than a year through a coding boot camp. Though some question if the latter is still attainable.
For more than a decade, coding boot camps have served as a promising investment, dangling the promise of large salary, work-life balance, and in some cases, a promise of securing a job within a year of graduation to anyone willing to pay the price.
However, the boot camp industry—which once lured mid-career professionals seeking a job change, students looking to quickly break into the tech industry, and developers looking to expand their skill set to digital and in-person classrooms—has turned somber in recent years. Once popular programs such as Rithm School, a 17-week full-stack web development bootcamp, have shuttered their doors to new applicants, while others such as the Bloom Institute of Technology, a for-profit San Francisco-based boot camp, have been hit with lawsuits over their allegedly deceptive marketing practices, leading some to wonder if the accelerated programs are still a viable talent pipeline.
Things fall apart. Dan Pickett, founder of Launch Academy, a Boston-based coding boot camp that temporarily paused student enrollment earlier this year, told IT Brew that things started going sour for the boot camp industry around 2016 when players filled the space and cared primarily about “putting butts in seats,” diluting the “saleability” of boot camp graduates.
“A lot of employers kind of got turned off to boot camp graduates because there were so many of these programs that were churning out unqualified engineers,” said Pickett.
Eric Wise, founder of Software Craftsmanship Guild, an Akron, Ohio-based .NET and Java bootcamp that was later acquired, told IT Brew that the boot camp industry began to crash around late 2022 due to the cyclical nature of the job market.
“During that peak demand cycle, you can get by with very superficial skills and because there’s so much demand, employers are willing to kind of take the extra step and onboard you and train you,” Wise said. “In a competitive market like this where there’s way more applicants than jobs now, companies are less willing to make that investment.”
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Without quick job placements, Wise—who has moved on to be the founder of Skill Foundry, an online full-stack development course offered through a subscription model—told IT Brew that students have become less willing to pay the “premium price” for these accelerated programs, leading to low enrollment.
“You cannot profitably run a class at a big name boot camp company with less than 20 students,” said Wise, adding that these profit concerns have caused some camps to cope by laying off instructors or pausing enrollment.
Don’t call it a comeback. While the past couple of years have been less than stellar for the boot camp scene, self-taught developers don’t seem to think any less of the accelerated education option. According to a 2024 Forbes survey, 90% of boot camp graduates said they were satisfied with their programs.
Industry professionals also remain optimistic that bootcamps still have a place in the industry. David Roberts, managing director at Crushing Digital, an online course intended to help software developers land jobs in the industry, told IT Brew that he believes smaller players in the space still have a great offering.
“We shouldn’t be looking at coding boot camps going, ‘Is it churning out top talent?’” Roberts said. “That’s not what they’re designed to do. They’re designed like those ‘Learn to Code in 24 Hours’ [books].”
Pickett added that Launch Academy and other “reputable players” have already proven that the accelerated learning model is capable of working. However, he cautioned that bootcamps thrive when there is more demand than supply, enabling post-bootcamp graduate students to obtain the employment they anticipated when signing up for these courses.
“Without the ‘I get a job’ piece, there is no whole product and those that continue to oversubscribe classrooms do the industry a disservice,” said Pickett, adding that he hopes to see employers have “more skin in the game” by taking on a more involved role in the accelerated learning model moving forward.
Wise told IT Brew that he believes bootcamps will continue to be a viable option for budding and established developers, just not at “[venture capital] numbers.”
“The ones that are just hype-driven, superficial cash grabs, [are] gone, and they’re probably not coming back,” he said.