Coding boot camps once looked like the golden ticket to an economically secure future. But as that promise fades, what should you do? Keep learning, until further notice.
When Florencio Rendon was laid off from his third construction job in three years, he said, “it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
He was 36, a father of two, and felt time was running out to find a career that would offer higher pay and more stability. “I’ve always been doing jobs that require physical labor,” he remembers thinking. “What if I start using my brain for once?”
An Army veteran, Mr. Rendon explored training programs he could fund using his military benefits. He landed on a coding boot camp.
At first, the intensive courses seemed intimidating. Mr. Rendon had gotten his high school equivalency diploma before joining the Army, and he had taken some college courses, but he didn’t consider himself book smart.
Still, he thought about his children, who are now 4 and 2, and reasoned, “If I can make this work, then I should at least give it a try.”
His application to a course run by the company Fullstack Academy was accepted, and he started classes in April 2023, with a grant for military veterans that covered the $13,000 tuition. While the material was challenging, he was pleasantly surprised to learn he could get the hang of it, and four months later, he graduated from an online program that he completed from his home in the Bronx.
The setback came after graduation: “Little did I know,” Mr. Rendon said of his new skills, “that’s not enough to get a job.”
Between the time Mr. Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a “golden ticket” to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting.
Mr. Rendon says he didn’t land a single interview.
Coding boot camp graduates across the country are facing a similarly tough job market. In Philadelphia, Mal Durham, a lawyer who wanted to change careers, was about halfway through a part-time coding boot camp late last year when its organizers with the nonprofit Launchcode delivered disappointing news.
“They said: ‘Here is what the hiring metrics look like. Things are down. The number of opportunities is down,’” she said. “It was really disconcerting.”
In Boston, Dan Pickett, the founder of a boot camp called Launch Academy, decided in May to pause his courses indefinitely because his job placement rates, once as high as 90 percent, had dwindled to below 60 percent.
“I loved what we were doing,” he said. “We served the market. We changed a lot of lives. The team didn’t want that to turn sour.”
Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent.
