Coding ‘boot camps’ a hot draw
Students pay $20K on the promise of a high-paid tech career in months, but some experts aren’t sold
Starting almost from scratch, Henry Ng became a software engineer in three months.
Before enrolling in an intensive coding program in March, the 25-year-old business graduate of University of Toronto Scarborough worked at a financial services firm. But that was not as satisfying as he had hoped, and the work left him wanting more.
“I actually didn’t know what I really wanted to do. (Accounting) just didn’t match up with what I wanted to achieve and my own personal goals,” the Scarborough native said. “I wanted to change my focus and shift where I wanted to place my talents.”
While browsing the web, Ng learned about Hack Reactor, a coding “boot camp” in San Francisco. Such schools, which offer accelerated training, have sprung up in recent years to fill the demand for programmers. Most are not accredited and some hold out the promise of high-paying jobs in the tech industry. Previous academic or industry experience is rarely a prerequisite. Ng picked Hack Reactor because he liked the curriculum. California weather, he said, was a bonus.
After finishing the program in June, Ng is headed for the competitive world of Silicon Valley. He landed his first programming job at a company in San Mateo, Calif. So, what does it take to go from Bay Street to high-tech? Roughly $20,000, for starters.
Carmi Levy, a technology analyst based in Toronto, cautions that the performance of coding boot camps is difficult to evaluate. While schools often boast about graduates’ high employment rate, he said, statistics can be misleading.
“Let’s make no mistake, this is a marketing war,” he said. “And schools invest heavily in marketing to ensure that the numbers they come up with are telling the stories they need to tell in order to engage the next class of students and sell their product.”
Toronto’s Bitmaker Labs, a coding boot camp downtown, said its 90 per cent employment figure is accurate, citing as proof that its books are being audited by a top accounting firm. Hack Reactor, which claims a 99 per cent rate, said some boot camps lure students with false claims, but that’s not unique to this field.
“There are (boot camps) that perform way better than a lot of four-year computer science programs,” said Ruan Pethiyagoda, Hack Reactor’s chief strategy officer. “We’re just judging them by a higher standard because they’re new.”
But employment figures, even if accurate, don’t always tell the whole story, Levy said. While graduates can usually find short-term work, not all will end up with a long career in programming.
“Real schools work on giving you the skills to build your career, not just neces- sarily giving you one job and then walking away from you.”
Gregor Kiczales, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, has similar concerns. While it’s great more people are interested in coding, he said, short-term programs leave graduates with plenty to learn.
“You can take an eight-week program and get a job,” he said. “But you’ve got to know that there may be a lot of other people who took four years of school or eight years of school and they’re going to know some stuff that you might want to learn one day.”