What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps
I used to teach front-end development at a bootcamp several months ago. What once was a great opportunity to share my 15 years of experience with various startups and fortune 500 tech companies ended up being a nightmare with management.<p>First and formeost, I liked most of my students. They came from all kinds such as: Background Actors, wives of programmers, students, military veterans, teachers, and a hodgepodge of characters. They were eager to learn a step-by-step procedure of HTML, CSS, and Javascript Fundamentals with a bit of web design elements.<p>What struck me as odd was the President&#x2F;Founder of the bootcamp first hired me to do my job and observe the videos of what their past instructor did. So I did and found out he was too aggressive in his approach to teaching his students. He was talking too fast and went off in some awful tangents that wasn&#x27;t on the itinerary. I told the founder, my boss at the time, about what changes I could do to make it less aggressive and with a flowable and presentable approach to the fundamentals of front-end development and he agreed.<p>In my first five days, things went well. Then the boss wanted me to stick with the previous itinerary while forcefeeding javascript trends in one week. It wasn&#x27;t enough to teach them basic syntaxes, array methods, loops, and other things I learned in 1 year of CS studies (I finished my undergrad in Economics). He wanted me to feed AJAX, jQuery, Angular, and APIs with javascript in one week. I hesitated at first, but he insisted as his &quot;board of directors&quot; feel this would give my students a reason to keep buying more advanced courses in the school I don&#x27;t want to give out.<p>I find out the real reasons for my services to my students is to not just give them a new career perspective, but to also have the boss read the idea proposals his students have as startup ideas and he would be the bridge to their funding. Except, he&#x27;s the end of the bridge as an angel investor looking to own a huge chunk of their startup property before he prepares his elevator speeches to real angel investors. An another thing is he&#x27;s also aiming veterans for their GI bills to be spent at his coding school.<p>I left after a month. I felt dirty and icky just looking back at it.