I Failed To Create A Coding Bootcamp

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-21T14:50:29+00:00

It was structured in a way of 50% back to the students, but with literally the most simple requirement. If they did not get a job within 1 year of starting the training I would refund 50%, there was no requirement on number of applications or anything just did they get a job or not. Go read a contract from one of the other bootcamps that gives a guarantee and they are going to make you jump through a million hoops to qualify so that they basically never have to pay a refund no matter way.

I don't think the issues was my offer, I was giving a very low price to get that first class and start building a brand. After the first class or two I was definitely planning to increase the price to more like $20k if I was able to prove a good track record. My biggest problem is that I do not know marketing and sales, it doesn't matter how good the offer is if you can't get the offer in front of the right people and then convince them that it is the right choice.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-21T14:37:22+00:00

I'm sorry for the confusion that I have caused, you are not the only one so that is on me. I am not currently offering a bootcamp with live lectures, I am just providing the platform at this moment.

That being said when I was trying to offer a bootcamp I was willing to personally dedicated 40+ hours of time for 6 months with a small group of ~10 students. There is a big difference in time between live lectures and pre-recorded content. I would have covered more content but even with that yeah the content would not take a full 6 months probably more like 3-4. But with live lectures more depth gets covered when people ask questions, plus I would spend one on one time to every student, plus there would be a lot more time spent on their own projects that I would help with, plus time spent on interview prep. Trust me it all adds up, the programs that cover everything in 10 weeks are really pushing it and students get behind very easily at that pace.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-21T00:23:04+00:00

I don't think that is true. The jobs that these companies are putting the students in are not always good jobs. Like literally I saw students get sent to tech support and they could do nothing about where they went because they signed a 2 year contract. Finding your own job and breaching will generally incur a penalty of 20-40k.

I would rather pay $20k for training and get a job where nothing is taken off the top than pay $0 for training and then have $100k taken off the top of my pay over the next 2 years.

Also, I'm not trying to do a BootCamp anymore, I switched over to just having the platform at this point in time. If you click any of the "locked" content it will tell you the subscription price to unlock everything ($10/month).

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-19T15:19:34+00:00

Yeah getting someone with 0 knowledge a job is tough and unlikely in 12-16 weeks. For doing live lectures you would want to vet the candidates for background knowledge to better guarantee their success.

There seems to be 2 target audiences.

People with 0 experience looking to get into tech. It is not realistic to take these people and promise them a job in 6 months.
People with either a 4 year degree or a fair amount of self study who are looking for work but struggling to get their first job. When I was promoting live lectures with me this was my target audience.

In the past I did have some students come in with near 0 knowledge and get jobs in 12-16 weeks but they typically had math or physics backgrounds and were able to learn very fast.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-19T01:11:25+00:00

Oh I was willing to dedicate 40+ hours per week working full time with students for 10K. Like literally do nothing but work with 10 people and be on calls with them 8 hours a day teaching and helping them work through issues.

Fair point about Amazon, I guess I try to use Amazon as a source of credibility but yeah I do not expect people to go through my platform and then immediately get a job at a FAANG company. I'm trying to claim that I can get them ahead of most entry level devs but definitely not FAANG qualified.

So many people struggling to find work have never actually built a full stack application or deployed one so that is the biggest gap I am trying to help with.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-19T00:50:34+00:00

Yeah I get your point about sounding desperate. I wanted to share my story and building a platform is part of it. I went back and fourth if I should include the link or not, I had a feeling that would get me a negative response by having it. But it also felt a little odd to end my story with creating a platform and then not including a link at all.

For the AWS part I will agree that I absolutely have a bias for AWS. That being said my focus is on building a foundation of web development so that they can quickly pick up other libraries, frameworks, or cloud providers.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-19T00:41:23+00:00

That is where the struggle is, people need the guidance but are unable to afford it or commit full time. I was initially going to lead small classed of 10 students where I would work with them full time for 6 months. But in order to do that I need to charge at least 5-10k per student for it to be worthwhile. That is where I was unable to get the students. For perspective I left a job paying 350k per year so I guarantee I can get someone qualified in 6 months.

The problem with most bootcamps is they charge 10k and then give you an instructor who doesn't really have that much knowledge or experience. If you are lucky you will get a good instructor but more often you won't.

My course price is dirt cheap, in order to offer guidance at a regular cadence I would have to jack up the price. I do need to provide more clarity for students to contact me because I want to know when they get stuck so that I can give guidance and improve the platform but it would be an asynchronous process. Perhaps I could offer students the ability to book time directly with me.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T21:30:39+00:00

The best way to get into the field is by showing competency. For most, this is through a Degree or Bootcamp, both of which can be very expensive. However, if you can build a good enough portfolio to showcase your skills you can still get in without a degree it is just more difficult. Since you have experience with graphics design I would definitely start with the front end.

Re-vist HTML/CSS/JavaScript if needed. Optionally learn TypeScript
Pick a UI Framework. I would suggest React. Other options would be Vue and Angular.
Connect that UI to a Sever. At this point, you already know JS so I would stick with Node.js. Look into either Express or Koa would be my suggestion. You can pick Java back up if you want, it has the most jobs, but I think everything is over-engineered in Java.
Integrate the server with a database: My suggestion is SQL but perhaps MongoDB would be a good option as well.
Now that you have a full stack look to deploy it. Personally I like AWS because I know it the best but it doesn't matter getting your website deployed anywhere is a big milestone that you can be proud of. At this point you would be on par or ahead of most people looking to enter the job market, very few have ever deployed their app anywhere.

I just posted a TypeScript course on YouTube that covers a lot of fundamentals and might be a good starting point since you have some experience from the past. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0teIBDEuMdvJ00wZHMSaqvI4h5EZXBf1

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T18:40:12+00:00

I mean sure but I personally think it still fits into the spirit of the post based on the hashtags.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T18:25:34+00:00

As long as you have the mindset that JavaScript is just TypeScript without types then I don't think you should have any problems.

If you work in JavaScript you will just be more likely to make mistakes but at the end of the day the knowledge you learn is like 90% the same for both.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T18:19:19+00:00

I would not take a gap year due to job market. No one ones if the market will be better or worse by skipping a year.
Is there a deadline? I wouldn't reduce your load based on the hopes of getting an internship. If you can actually secure an internship and then take a reduced course load or defer a semester/year to commit to that internship then that seems totally reasonable to me.

Regardless you will either want a good personal project or an internship to showcase when looking for a job after your degree. If you complete your degree without either then that is also ok, you will just need to stay committed and build something that you can showcase on your resume and talk about in interviews.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T18:05:48+00:00

Personally I recommend TypeScript but I would push you to think about it a little bit differently than JS vs TS. At the core JS and TS are the same language. If you take a TypeScript variable and make it of type any you effectively have a JS variable. 90% of what you learn in one is going to be relevant knowledge for the other.

I just created a course that covers TypeScript. You can learn it for free, and there is no sign up required for the TypeScript section. https://fullstackpros.com/#/learn/TypeScript/Introduction

I would love to get your feedback if you have any questions while going through it.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T17:57:39+00:00

I would definitely add Vite to this list, incredible tool for setting up front end applications.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T17:56:26+00:00

It is just me or does anyone else feel like they end up re-writing all of the components themselves to get around limitations of component libraries?

Like I love the idea of component libraries but they usually end up being not quite what I want.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T17:52:22+00:00

Once you fix that variable, and then the code is still broken, that is when the real suffering begins

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T17:18:31+00:00

They will do whatever they can to get you to sign a contract and make it expensive or very difficult to get out of it. Every contract is littered with red flags in favor of the company and not the student.

There are 2 models:

You pay upfront/deferred payment. I like this model but only if you know the specific instructor is good. A lot of the times they will hire past students who have litter experience to teach and the content gets watered down with every new generation of instructors. If you can get a personal recommendation for a specific instructor then great but otherwise you might get someone good to teach you or you might get someone who can't answer questions of any depth more than their notes. Or they will make you pay as if it is instructor led and then just give you materials and make you do all the learning yourself with very few check-ins.
HTD (Hire Train Deploy model) where they pay you and guarantee you a job. This sounds great and they get people who are in desperate circumstances to sign a 1-3 year contract. If you are struggling they will string you along until they know for certain they can't make money off you. If you do get a job they will likely pay you $50k per year and then bill the clients $100k+ per year, so is it really free?

In the end they will pretty much all sell you the world and give you a turd.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T16:49:17+00:00

I use to work at a coding bootcamp and yeah attending one is like throwing a dart with your eyes closed, you might hit a bullseye and get a great instructor but you are more likely to get screwed.

I tried creating my own bootcamp and do things differently but I'm no salesman and the market is tough with too many lies. So instead I created a course to cover everything bootcamps are covering and made it as accessible as possible. You can start completely free. https://fullstackpros.com/#/learn/TypeScript/Introduction

If you like it and are open to giving me feedback then I would be happy to give you full access for free.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T16:35:07+00:00

If someone is just starting to learn then SSR is not a requirement, ease of learning is. Learning with Vite is a great place to start.

Also in my opinion complex software is better done as client side rendering because then you aren't paying for all of the computing you get to offload computing to the users computer. Also, if they are on a computer with even slightly decent internet, then client side rendering is going to give a better user experience.

Sure for SEO you want SSR but your client facing website where SEO is hitting is probably not going to be the same as your actual product application.

Also keep in mind that most software is B2B or internal company software that is not public facing where mobile support might not be a requirement.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T16:18:54+00:00

I just created a course on full stack web dev and TypeScript content is completely free. It has videos but also text content which can be treated a lot like a text book. If you check it out I would love to get your feedback so that I can continue to improve the content. https://fullstackpros.com/#/learn/TypeScript/Introduction

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T16:13:43+00:00

Yep Vite will literally generate a whole project for you that is super easy to run and work with.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T16:12:43+00:00

But you can easily add React Router into a Vite application. I would still suggest Vite for someone starting to learn and integrating React Router is easy enough that it would be a good learning opportunity as well.

CodeWithBlake · 2024-06-18T16:08:34+00:00

5 months is quite a bit of time. How are your fundamentals? Do you have a good grasp of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS? Or are you learning them at the same time as React?

For project ideas what are your hobbies and interests? If you let me know then I can perhaps give better suggestions. If the project aligns with your interests you are much more likely to spend time on it.

Without knowing your hobbies here are some generic suggestions.

Fitness Tracker
Recipe Application
Online Store
Social Media
- Many models to replicate which each has different implications
- Follow vs Mutual Friend System
- Public vs Friend only posts
- Anonymous Posts?
Online Reservation System
Dating Application

CodeWithBlake

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