Coding Boot Camps Get the Boot: Why the Industry Is Shutting Down
I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re going away.<p>&gt; While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies. In other words, they don’t teach students the other important entrepreneurial tech skills. This makes sense seeing how their focus is coding. But as I stated in my last article, many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers – those who have strong leadership, communication, and team-building skills. Being a coding god is one skill set, but knowing how to work collaboratively on a technical team and manage a product is another skill set in itself.<p>This type of belief in what &quot;coding&quot; is, is hugely responsible for both the rise and fall of these horribly designed, while possibly well-intended, &quot;bootcamps.&quot;<p>Being a good software developer has absolutely <i>nothing</i> to do with &quot;important entrepreneurial tech skills.&quot; Knowing how to tackle problems, envision loops and algorithms, write pseudocode, understand the basics of how requests on the Internet work, or how your computer accesses databases or files; these are skills of a good software developer.<p>The end goal of being a software developer is not CEO.<p>&quot;many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers&quot;<p>No, recruiters all over the world are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because they can&#x27;t find any competent programmers anymore. There are hundreds of people who were taught how to write a conditional in Ruby on Rails available, but ask them to tackle a problem like: &quot;how would you store 1 million strings, search through them while caching results, and make sure only certain individuals can access certain strings,&quot; and you get a deer in the headlights look. So recruiters don&#x27;t ask questions like that anymore. They ask questions that can be simply memorized and regurgitated.<p>When there&#x27;s no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we&#x27;re not in a good spot.<p>The sooner we can dispel the myth that programming and software is just &quot;coding,&quot; &quot;hustling,&quot; and &quot;entrepreneurial skills&quot; the sooner companies won&#x27;t have to pony up over $150k&#x2F;yr to find a competent software developer.