Are Coding Schools The Way 2 Go ?

If your job search has yielded little by way of employment, one
 must  eventually ask if the product itself is the cause. Many technical people devote
110% of their  energy to doing the best job they possibly can and so have little left
over for improving their skill sets to keep pace with the times. After only a few years
the sharpest knife now appears dull.

High paying technical jobs are an obvious target for cost reduction by sending
the  work offshore. There's hardly a bean counter or MBA worth their salt that
has not proposed such a move. Their advice is often taken to heart because the
cost savings are simply too attractive to be ignored. The end result for many
technical Used2B_AllStars is a frustrating  period of undeserved unemployment.
The market is quick to detect and  reject trailing edge skills, increasing age and
lack of current employment. If your former occupation  has become an export,
it may even be difficult to maintain the positive references you've actually earned.

The obvious remedy to this situation is to retool. 
This is almost certainly the best investment that can be made.

In other countries dislocated workers find more concrete support from their
governments, but rugged individualists we Americans are, we look after ourselves.
This means that individuals take on all of the cost and risk involved in creating their
own futures : Choose wisely, young Skywalker. Select the training that is inadequate,
or a sector of the technical world that proves to be short lived, and you can lose
your investment and possibly your career as well

The range of choices is vast. There are online courses, bootcamps,
university extension courses and a plethora of certification and degree programs
competing  for your career investment dollars.  If this was not enough to warrant
extensive and serious  investigation, several immersive coding schools have now
joined the fray in San Francisco. Many of their graduates, including those with no
previous coding experience, have gone on to  work with outfits like Facebook,
Twilio and Twitter at enviable salaries.

App Academy, Catalyst Class, Hackbright and Dev
Bootcamp have recently emerged as technical education vendors that promise
 to take you  from zero to in demand, in three months or so. Bear in mind that you will
probably be coding and  sleeping for those three months, but isn't that what software
engineering often looks like ?  These schools are also selective about who they train.
Everyone wants the best chance at success here.  The cost is not inconsiderable either,
with fees running to $12K. This compares favorably to  degree programs and is near par
with many bootcamps and certifications.

There is a legitimate question about such rapid retooling :
Does it really work ?  Having spent more than a few years
writing code myself, I never found a course that did more than get me started
down the road to becoming productive in a given technology.  Application of
copious amounts of elbow grease over a period of several months was necessary to
achieve anything  that looked like routine competency. If there was no relevant project
to work on immediately, then my hard  earned  'extertise' evaporated quickly.  The real
target here seems to be entry level competency in the technology of choice.
Depending on  how prospective employers define the expected skill set at this  level,
this objective is realistic.

One difference in this latest incarnation of the retooling game is that some of the
vendors, such as App Academy, do not charge students anything
up front, opting instead  for 12.5% of the first years' salary once they are hired.
This effectively  shares  the risk involved and  strongly suggests that these vendors
really believe that their training will make you saleable.

This is simply astounding. Education is an unusual product in that it must
be  completely consumed before its quality can be judged. You will always pay for what
you get,  but the obverse is not always true. This is the first group of education vendors
I've ever heard of that proposes such a business model. As a result, I think the answer
is  simple :

 Get Thee To A Coding  School As Fast As Ye Can.

App Academy : Ruby, JavaScript, CapStone
Catalyst Class : Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and server-side Javascript and Ruby on Rails.
Dev Bootcamp : Ruby, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript
Hackbright Academy : Women Engineers.
SF Business Times Source Article 12/14

ScN 12/12