Now you see the average for-profit bootcamps being acquired by traditional for-profit colleges.
The duty to make financial returns for investors necessitates extracting money from students. Like an ecosystem with the oxygen slowly extracted out, the good things happening there eventually die.
I believe the only two non-profits in this space are Ada Academy in Seattle and our Turing School in Denver. At Tuting, we believe in a world where the people building technology represent the people using it. We'll still be here in 10, 25, and 100 years working towards that vision.
If people are interested in learning Ruby, Rails, or JavaScript in a "real" environment (running on your own machine, as a normal developer would), we have both a Environment Setup Guide (http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/topics/environment/environ...) and dozens of tutorials from complete walk-throughs to open-ended projects at http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/ , all Creative Commons Non-Commercial.
And at a community college you can qualify for traditional student loans, GI funding, etc -- making the equation a lot easier. If you know of anyone who's completed one of these programs and is now a full-time developer I'd love to meet them and pick their brain.
Having taught at Boston College's Center for Digital Imaging and Arts (CDIA), I was not impressed with the curriculum and, most importantly, the expectations for students were disappointingly low. It was more of a "pass the time, get the certificate" than a genuine learning environment. I hope it's different here in Denver.
Having a CS degree is going to be a tremendous advantage in a program like this, for sure.
But I'm guessing Bart, like me, has interviewed kids coming out with CS degrees who just can't program. To be honest, it breaks my heart. If you complete a four year program and can't program FizzBuzz in a language of your choice then you have been completely bamboozled. I would not have believed this possible until I saw it myself.
Assume that other people's economics sound a lot easier from the outside :)
One big consideration is that there'll be a three-month window in between sessions for the instructors to recuperate, revise the curriculum, and recruit a new class. A facility for 24+3, the laptops, administrative help, marketing, design...
If we were each making 300K the first thing I'd do is drop the price. The costs dictated the tuition.
Agreed 100%. There's a big difference between a developer with a big heart and a developer who actually knows how to teach.
Teaching, just like programming, takes a ton of practice. I spend four years in the classroom, another two coaching teachers, and have been running training classes for Jumpstart Lab since 2009. I don't think I'm a gifted teacher, I've just practiced more than most.
Frank Webber, who's joining me, spent a significant amount of time teaching a year-long course at the University of Washington as well as spending time 1-on-1 mentoring other developers in Seattle.
Steve Klabnik has spent a lot of time with me co-teaching private training sessions and spends a tremendous amount of time "teaching" online through open source work.
It's just a matter of understanding the methodologies of teaching and a bunch of practice. We've practiced more than anyone else.
Nothing will speak more clearly than the results, so I can understand some skepticism.
I'm the lead instructor for gSchool, Jeff Casimir. I've been teaching Ruby since 2005 and started Jumpstart Lab in 2009. I have both more classroom experience (total) and more hours spent teaching these technologies than anyone in the world.
I wish there were dozens or hundreds of people learning these skills by themselves on the web, but it's just not happening fast enough. The talent shortage is the #1 problem facing most small software businesses, and there's no fix in sight. This is just our little contribution.
Sure. All 24 of the apprentices were hired to the LivingSocial build team. They're about three months into their work now and are succeeding.
Sure, some have moved faster than others, but no one is doing intern work. One is working on rebuilding the payment system, another wrote the single-sign-on app that now every LivingSocial customer logs in through. The other 22 stories are similar.
Instructionally there were things that could have been better. We didn't do a good job cultivating our "permanent records" and didn't fulfill our plans for sharing everything we did. It's all there, but you'd need a tour guide to hop through all the disparate github repos. Apprentices made some great open source contributions (including Ruby core), but I want it to be more organized next time. These are two of the reasons that we've expanded from two instructors to three.
All in all, it far surpassed my expectations. And the next course, gSchool, will be better.
Hi, I'm Jeff Casimir from Jumpstart Lab, director of the program. I'll do my best to answer questions here over the coming days if you have them, or ping me directly at contact at jumpstartlab.com