My partner went through a bootcamp, and there was an interview process after the application process. In my partner's case, they hold an advance degree in a STEM field from an Ivy League. A few of their peers had similar backgrounds, and that group didn't have trouble finishing.
I wonder if the push to scale out these programs meant lowering standards, since folks with the ability / discipline to finish are few.
If so, the unintended consequences are interesting:
Letting in more folks -> more folks with issues finishing -> more customer support -> more issues -> more doubts about the worthiness of the credentials from employers -> more folks having trouble finding placement -> lowering standards to let in more folks.
I graduated from a bootcamp 7 years ago and even back then it was becoming clear that despite admissions clear preference for people that would be successful regardless, there were those in the group that would struggle to find work.
A large portion of my cohort came from top tier universities and a good chunk of them with degrees in Engineering, CS, or Math. Those folks did well and found jobs relatively easily. Career switching folks that had tech exposure through product or UX experience also did well. Folks that struggled a bit seemed to come from good but not great schools and with a major/work experience in a non-technical field.
Working together day to day I started getting this impression and then I saw it play out in hiring. The top tier folks either got jobs almost immediately or held out a few months to land at a FAANG type company. The middle of the pack seemed to find jobs at around the 3 month mark and the bottom group took as long as 6 months.
There isn't this huge pool of students from very good schools with technical degrees that allows these camps to scale up their enrollment while maintaining their initial success
I've interviewed a few candidates in a similar situation to your partner. My impression is that the bootcamps had very little to do with their success. I would put it more down to personal drive and possibly the programming STEM grads tend to get exposed to.
It's interesting that you call this having "very little to do with" the success. It's a philosophical argument, I guess. If there's boulder at the top of a hill and I give it a little nudge so it rolls all the way to the bottom - did I have very little to do with the boulder rolling down, since gravity did most of the work? Or did I play the most important role?
Even if it's true that selection bias is huge and the best qualified people going into a bootcamp are the best performers coming out, that doesn't necessarily mean the bootcamp wasn't useful. These people could have otherwise gone their whole lives always being one small nudge away from becoming a great programmer, but would have never realized it without the right conditions. If a bootcamp simply creates those conditions for them to make it happen for themselves, that still seems important.
Right, I agree. I think that's the problem. Misattributing initial successes to the program, and not the people you filtered in, meant it became progressively harder to achieve the same placement rates year over year.
I imagine the above coupled with investor pressure and your own hype / marketing makes for a situation like Lambda School.
This was for an intern program we run for individuals with non-traditional backgrounds (self taught, degrees in non-CS subjects etc), so I don't imagine it having much impact. We were looking primarily at the coding test and the candidate's Github profile.
I wonder if the push to scale out these programs meant lowering standards, since folks with the ability / discipline to finish are few.
If so, the unintended consequences are interesting:
Letting in more folks -> more folks with issues finishing -> more customer support -> more issues -> more doubts about the worthiness of the credentials from employers -> more folks having trouble finding placement -> lowering standards to let in more folks.