In recent months, social media has repeatedly painted a bleak picture of coding bootcamps.

There are numerous declarations that bootcamps are nearing the end of an era and the hype of the 2010s is over. On the other hand, coding bootcamps were declared dead even before COVID and again after the peak of the pandemic.

Now that coding bootcamps have been around for more than a decade, we can see, at least anecdotally, how these bootcamps often translated into long-term work in the technology field before the pandemic. Whether they are training technologists in the best possible way remains an open question.

“Many of these programs are based on something that is relatively easy to implement and measure,” Barry Wright III, chief of staff at Noom with years of experience hiring engineers, told Technical.ly. “But they may not be as effective as we hope.”

Some of the oldest coding bootcamps are large for-profit bootcamps like General Assembly, Flatiron, and Tech Elevator, while smaller, more community-focused nonprofits like Zip Code Wilmington, Coded by, and Girls Who Code also emerged from a similar model.

But the bootcamp market has become so saturated and infested with scammers that it has lost some of its luster. For-profit coding bootcamps of the early 2010s that attracted people with money who wanted to make more money, like Dev Bootcamp and Iron Yard, have closed. Still, smaller and nonprofit coding bootcamps are thriving in many parts of the country.

Different bootcamp structures lead to different results

Coding bootcamps have emerged over the past decade as a model for lowering the barriers to entry into technical careers, allowing people with little or no formal training in tech to get jobs in the industry.

The term “bootcamp” could mean comprehensive training for technical professionals, including interview training, resume building, and mentoring—or it could mean an unscrupulous certificate factory. These bootcamps may even receive state or federal funding for workforce development and offer a more comprehensive training program for employees, including soft skills.

For example, Khalil Saboor, a Brooklyn-based software developer at American Express, chose Zip Code Wilmington, a nonprofit bootcamp in Wilmington, Delaware, after a traditional college route at Arcadia University didn’t work out.

“But I kept building anyway,” Saboor said. He went the independent route for a few years, determined to get into engineering without a college degree and with the help of free online resources.

Budding technologists can learn software development from free resources. However, using free resources like FreeCodeCamp or YouTube tutorials can be a slow path as there are no networking or soft skill lessons offered.

When Saboor saw a Facebook ad for Zip Code in 2018, he decided to save up enough money to apply. Although he didn’t get a job immediately afterward, he now works in technology.

The Zip Code-style access model matches the earliest ethos of these educational programs. Although the now-defunct Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco is sometimes cited as the first intensive in-person coding bootcamp, founded in 2012, there was Code Academy before that. In a 2017 Medium article, Code Academy co-founder Mike McGee explains how these organizations came to be.

“The first coding bootcamp started in 2011, not 2012,” he wrote. “It was also started by two black guys in an apartment on Chicago’s South Side, not downtown San Francisco.”

For for-profit organizations, the approach may be somewhat different.

In 2015, Lyn Muldrow from Baltimore moved to San Francisco with her two young children to attend a 12-week General Assembly web development boot camp on an Opportunity Fund scholarship.

General Assembly, provider of one of the oldest and largest coding bootcamps, is a private, for-profit educational organization that offers a wide range of programs and services for job seekers and employers.

“I found it rigorous and intellectually demanding, but at the time it was really worth it,” Muldrow told Technical.ly.

Muldrow was one of only two black women in the group and one of the few with little experience with programming languages, making it harder to fit in.

“I felt like an outsider and struggled with financial issues and imposter syndrome during that time,” Muldrow said. “I’ve never been so stressed or pressured to succeed as I was during my time at boot camp – my two children were counting on me to get us to a comfortable place.”

Despite all the difficulties, Muldrow landed her first job in tech as an engineering instructor at Hack the Hood in the middle of her 12-week boot camp.

Finding a job in technology right after bootcamp was never guaranteed

Almost every bootcamp touts the possibility of a dream job and a high salary after completing the program, but not everyone gets hired right away.

Saboor eventually graduated from Zip Code’s 2018 summer cohort, but things didn’t quite go according to plan after graduating. Zip Code works with corporate partners who offer sponsored scholarships and often hire entry-level software developers through its cohorts.

Although he received some corporate sponsorships, this did not guarantee him a job with any of these companies.

“I couldn’t get a job with a partner,” Saboor said. “So I went back to Philadelphia and continued to attend a lot of good meetings in the area.”

One of the people he met while networking was a director at the biopharmaceutical company GSK who was interested in his story. Saboor eventually landed a job through the company’s junior program, an opportunity normally offered to college students.

After three years at GSK, Saboor landed a job as a senior software developer at financial services company American Express in 2022 – also through networking.

Like Saboor, Muldrow faced some challenges in the beginning. Although she landed her dream job as a software developer at a large company in 2017 when she took a job at the social network LinkedIn, she did not stay in software development long-term.

One of her biggest realizations, however, was that she discovered her passion in technical education. While she is currently looking for a new job after being laid off in 2023, she has worked as an engineering teacher for the Flatiron School and as a technical writer at DigitalOcean.

Employers have a different perspective when it comes to bootcamp trends.

Wright has been a hiring manager in the technology space for over a decade and is on the other side of the bootcamp debate, having seen bootcamp hires rise and fall depending on the job market.

“To me, bootcamps are a lagging indicator of the real economy and the job market,” Wright said. “When demand for jobs increases, bootcamps increase because there are jobs to fill and you can make money off of the people who are looking for those jobs.”

The problem, says Wright, is that when the job market is down, the bootcamps will continue until there is a market reaction.

“We’re seeing a lot of that right now because there’s a decline in entry-level jobs in the software industry, but bootcamps are here to stay,” he said. During this time, it’s getting harder for bootcamp graduates to find entry-level jobs.

Bootcamps today require new considerations

Although he didn’t get a job right away, Saboor is happy with his bootcamp experience and continues to recommend nonprofits for people looking to get into the tech field.

“I still encourage people to go to Zip Code Wilmington even if they’re fresh out of college,” Saboor said. “Because it’s a nonprofit bootcamp and the material you learn there is different from a lot of other bootcamps.”

Saboor has continued to support accessible, non-traditional tech education since then. In 2020, he co-founded Black Tech Philly, a Meetup group that evolved into an educational nonprofit.

Muldrow says her boot camp experience taught her how to learn and gave her a tenacity that has proven helpful in various areas of her life. But unlike Saboor, she doesn’t believe the boot camp route is the right path today.

“The demands and intensity of the learning programs have increased significantly with the new technologies and, in my opinion, are not a safe entry point for those new to technology,” said Muldrow.

The rise of AI is also changing things. There is a lot of speculation about whether coding will still be relevant in a few years and whether coding bootcamps will become useless.

Still, financial projections are optimistic. According to Verified Market Research, coding bootcamps are expected to reach a value of $2.4 billion by 2030, representing an annual growth of 15% from 2023, when the value was still at $899 million.

So it is more likely that bootcamps will become even more necessary in the 2020s given the rapid pace of technological development. To keep up, companies may need continuous training, including in AI technology.

“I wish people would use bootcamps more for training,” said HR manager Wright. “I would love it if our product managers on my team, for example, attended a UX bootcamp.”