Owen Abbott
3 min readDec 29, 2020

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The bootcamp I went to offers a money back guarantee — so long as you jump through their hoops, you get your money back if you don’t get a job making X amount of money within x amount of months. Reviews on the internet say that they come after you regardless of whether or not you jump through said hoops and you have to be prepared to fight them legally sometimes, which is difficult for the poors like myself, but I’m prepared for it.

One of the things they do to ensure you’re on the hook is they hire you on a contractual basis as a coach. That way you’re on the hook, because you have a job making X amount of money, and you were hired during the timeframe before the money back guarantee kicks in. They pay you, but you pay them back and the benefit is they basically get free (or very cheap) labor out of you — say they pay you 25k for a six month contract, but as you owe them for your training, you pay 20k back to them. So essentially they had a coach that they only have to pay 5k. A lot of bootcamps are set up like this.

A member of my former cohort was just hired as a coach.

This all seems very savvy on the bootcamp’s part. However.

The tech world is rapidly changing.

The only Ruby on Rails jobs you find today are jobs for older companies that built their backends in Rails, so all that code is grandfathered in. New companies shy away from it, because it’s harder to scale or something like that. Django is rapidly gaining popularity as a replacement. This is the nature of Tech. The landscape is ever shifting. It can always shift back depending on optimizations in updated versions, but the fact is things are always shifting.

They assured us in the beginning that the company looks at trends and teaches the most up to date tech stacks. So why don’t they teach Django instead of Rails? But a business model that relies on hiring recently graduated students is an impediment to such an adaptation. Think about it.

You train people to use Rails and React. You then hire them to teach rails and react. They’re green, these are the two frameworks they know because these are the only two they have been trained in. And then, suddenly, the industry begins shifting —Vue begins overtaking react. Django begins overtaking rails. But your business model relies on cheap labor, and *all of your instructors only know Rails and React,* because that’s all that your previous instructors were able to teach them, and the reason *they* only knew rails and react is because that’s all their previous instructors knew and were able to teach, and so on — so you can’t exactly shift gears to new tech, as that would require significant and expensive changes to your staffing. It’s turtles all the way down. The curriculum is basically cemented that way from the start and destined for obsolecense.

So you continue milking those frameworks and that curriculum. And because that’s all that you’re training prospective recruits in, that’s all you’re going to train people in the future in. And because the business is owned by investment firm sharks who don’t understand the tech landscape and necessary changes, the business will never change and will, one day, go under. The business model of hiring talent with only the training made available by your previous talent means that the model isn’t nearly as adaptable as the tech industry requires — because the curriculum can’t change very much from it’s initial state unless you have instructors across the board that know additional frameworks.

My advice, as ever, for anyone reading this, is to avoid bootcamps. Period. Learn the trends and learn on your own. Because the business model itself is broken.

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