Unpopular opinion: Web development bootcamps are failing their students.
How? By not spending enough time on the fundamentals.
With that provocative opening, and before you start wielding your pitchforks, let's dig in.
The Allure of Dev Bootcamps
Web development bootcamps are generally marketed toward individuals looking for a career change. These individuals may have a four-year college degree in an unrelated subject or no college education at all but have taken an interest in programming.
Software engineering is an alluring field that offers a high salary, flexible working arrangements, and many other perks common to the tech industry.
Dev bootcamps often boast in their ability to quickly ramp up individuals in a matter of three months, six months, or nine months, either on a part-time or full-time basis. In that time, graduates should have learned everything they need to know in order to land their dream software engineering job, at least as a junior engineer.
But what do these bootcamps actually teach their students?
What Dev Bootcamps Teach
There are three prominent dev bootcamps located near me: DevMountain, Lambda School, and V School. Each of these bootcamps offer unique courses and programs, but all three of them offer a web development course curriculum. Let's take a look at what they cover.
DevMountain's 13-week curriculum includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node, and SQL. Technologies like Express or MongoDB aren't mentioned in their course outline, but I wouldn't be surprised if those topics were briefly covered, as this curriculum feels very much like it's teaching developers the MERN stack.
Lambda School's 9-month curriculum covers HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node, Python, data structures and algorithms, and testing principles. Express and MongoDB are missing here while a few extra topics are included as a bonus, but this again looks like the MERN stack to me.
V School's 6–12 month curriculum teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node, Express, MongoDB, and Mongoose. This one is definitely the MERN stack.
So What's the Problem Here?
While these three bootcamps offer programs that differ in length and vary slightly in course material, they're all teaching the MERN stack. To be clear, this is great! The MERN stack, with React in particular, is a very in-demand set of technologies that are useful to know when searching for a web development job.
The main problem I see in their curriculums is not the topics covered but rather the amount of time allocated to each topic. Dev bootcamps are so eager to teach their students the relevant frameworks and libraries being used in the industry right now that they fail to adequately teach the fundamentals of web development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Looking at the course outlines, DevMountain spends 2 weeks (out of 13), Lambda School spends 4 weeks (out of 40 weeks), and V school spends 2 modules (out of 6 modules, however long that is...), on the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
This means that while dev bootcamp graduates claim to be "full stack developers", they often struggle to answer basic JavaScript questions like:
- What is the difference between
var,let, andconst? - What is the difference between
==and===? - What is the
thiskeyword and how/when doesthischange? - What do
bind,call, andapplydo?
A Quick Note
To be clear, and to avoid any hurt feelings, I'm not saying that all dev bootcamp grads don't know these things. Many of them do! I've met several dev bootcamp grads that have been excellent developers who have impressed me time and time again.
On the other hand, speaking from experience, I've encountered far too many dev bootcamp grads who I've either interviewed or worked with that have struggled to grasp or explain these kinds of basic concepts.
A Potential Solution
The web development ecosystem, particularly the JavaScript ecosystem, is constantly changing. I'm sure in the next five years there will be another hot new framework that will gain mainstream popularity. Will React remain the king? Or will it be Vue? Svelte? Will we be using Node or Deno?
The point is that the popular frameworks or libraries may change, but the underlying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript concepts will remain largely the same.
This is true of most things in life. Implementations and tactics may change to adapt to current circumstances, but principles endure.
If dev bootcamps will spend more time focusing on the fundamentals, I believe their graduates will come out more successful and better prepared to learn and adapt to whatever technologies their new employer may be using.
Thoughts? Are you a dev bootcamp grad? Does this accurately reflect your experience? Did I get something wrong here? I'd love to hear your comments.
Latest comments (35)
What resources would you recommend people studying web development look to in order to supplement their education on the core fundamentals? I'm actually a student in a coding bootcamp currently. Just bought Eloquent JavaScript, seems like a great primer on JavaScript.
This has not been my experience as I am a Lambda school student. And I do know the difference between var, let, and const.
I can't speak for the other schools but I went to Lambda School. They used to be MERN stack, but now teach sqlite3 and Postgres as db instead. I learned Mongo/mongoose in curriculum before it was switched to pg and then led student groups while they were learning postgres.
In CS, they teach DS & A in Python to get a second OOP language experience. In addition when I went through curriculum we covered concepts in C as well. I think they cut C out to focus more on fundamentals of Python and learning to think like an engineer...bc I can tell you from experience learning both in a short time was super overwhelming!
For me personally, I needed more time to learn to break down problems like an engineer would. However, Lambda gave that to me by allowing me to intern as a CS student leader.
The opportunity is there, but learning to ask for that opportunity is hard. I had to learn that it was okay to fail and flex the timeline to suit my needs. Lambda does this with no financial penalty.
I am currently enrolled in Coding-Dojo’s part-time MERN boot camp. Before deciding on a boot camp, I took a semester at community college on web fundamentals and VB.Net that lasted 5 months. There is no way I would have been able to go blindly into a boot camp if I didn’t have the fundamental concepts that I got from the community college class. However, I feel like now I have a good grasp on the pacing and more difficult concepts.
I totally agree with you, but I believe bootcamps are offering what the market wants. To change how programming is thought , it is necessary to rethink the hiring process. While companies require projects, stack and experience to be a junior, I don’t believe that it will be possible to change how bootcamp works.
I think having a separate tracks for FE and BE would be a better option for 2 reasons:
Bootcamps have limited time to train hundreds of students so quality should be primary focus rather than quantity. Here, the T rule really helps out or "to know everything about something and something about everything". This also keeps students less distracted and helps them in getting more confidence about the knowledge
A lot of companies (mainly established/stable) had separate positions for FE and BE. If bootcamps can train students by keeping this context in mind, it would become easier for them and students to transition from towards the field of SWE.
At the end, it's all about empowering people enough to the point where they feel confident and are able to get job in I.T not to spoon feed everything.
I can see how this is true. I’m currently attending a coding bootcamp at the University of Miami. The thing I recently discovered is that some of the student have some misconceptions of the program. Maybe, I new what questions to ask when I was looking at the program. On average I’m about 20 years older then most of the students in the class. The first thing asked was; what are the actual expectations of learning all the concepts over 6 months. Will I really be able to learn everything you’re selling? Their answer: Yes, but on average you will need to allocate and additional 20 hours a week to truly get an understanding on these concepts. Fast forward a few weeks into the program and we are working on a group project. We are working with API’s and I’m good to go with these concept, but the two other students I’m working with have to idea on how to get a response from any API. Turns out they are still struggling with basic JavaScript concepts. They say it’s because the teacher doesn’t know how to teach. I ask them if they are doing anything outside of class to bridge the gap between the concepts they don’t understand. Their response: No, why they are supposed to be teaching those concepts during class. Maybe what you get out of it depends on what you’re willing to put into it.
My bootcamp experience was great, and there's no way I would have gotten work in this field as quickly without it. It definitely helped that I had been self-learning for a while. And after it was over, I did have to learn the data structure & algorithm approach to interviewing (which undoubtedly made me better at my job).
At Flatiron we did three weeks in vanilla Ruby and three weeks in Rails (via Rack and Sinatra, so we could see some of the concepts at work). Then three weeks of vanilla JS and three weeks of React. I see this in other replies as well - a layered approach with an appreciation for fundamentals. I like that we were exposed to two languages, even if both are dynamically typed; it emphasized the common basic ideas of many languages.
I think "the fundamentals" is a wide and debatable pool of knowledge. To me, that's basic data types, iteration, logic flow, and tool coverage (what kinds of interactions are covered by which parts of your stack). But that's programming only, and most jobs are 50% soft skills. We were also asked to complete projects together and alone, write and present on technical topics, conduct mock interviews, and informally help each other learn. By emphasizing all of this, I think we were put in a good position to continue to grow and thrive. Much of it is up to the student, of course, which is true anywhere.
Basically I think you are focusing in too sharply on the idea that specific pieces of knowledge are key to being a good developer. Yes, one must appreciate the workings of the world they work in, or they'll make bad choices. But I can count on one hand the times I've actually used
==in JS (though, yes, very common interview question). More important for the somewhat impossible task of learning a new field in 15 weeks is to teach an appreciation for the concepts that bind modern programming and web development, and the soft/research skills to dive into new problems and discuss them with others. As a bootcamp grad I'm obviously biased, but it worked for me, and I enjoyed it!You wrote almost exactly what I was going to reply with. I attended Flatiron as well (online) and feel the same in terms of the curriculum there. I think something that this article misses is that, at least at Flatiron and especially with the online program, you learn how to learn. I’d think it would be seen as a strength that a person is able to complete such a rigorous course and actually develop skills rather than be overwhelmed.
I can only speak for myself but I went into the bootcamp knowing that graduating isn’t the finish line. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t excited to go out and start expanding their knowledge in different directions after graduating.
I find it hard to believe that anyone, from any training or educational background, walks into their first dev job (or any new job) 100% ready to hit the ground running.
Bootcamps and even a CS degree will only get your foot in the door. After that, it's up to you to continually learn and improve.
One of the most valuable things that I got out of my bootcamp was that they emphasized they weren't teaching us specific concepts - they were teaching us how to learn. We were introduced to concepts and then taught how to hunt down an answer. I think that learning how to learn is a huge make or break point for bootcamps.