The keys to success as a startup and as individual coder in the present world is not technical prowess, but culture and cultural fit.
There is a running joke in San Francisco that companies looking for "Code Ninjas" and "Rockstar Programmers" are not worth working for, because they haven't gotten the basic truth that the team matters more than the individual. They're falling prey to the "Talent Myth" (a reference to a Malcolm Gladwell article where he describes among others the reasons for the spectacular failure of Enron.)
What devbootcamp has cultivated in a classroom format is the actual vibe of a startup doing well: Excitement, vibrant, infectious energy. I visited at week 3 and at week 8. In any typical multi-week courses (e.g. college), the enthusiasm wanes pretty quickly after a few weeks. Not so with devbootcamp, it kept growing.
It's not the individual's technical skills that matter so much (there is always some else to ask or Google anyway), than it is to build a culture of resourcefulness and team spirit.
In full disclosure I should say I was a guest instructor, and I felt aweful that we let students run head-first into database joins--a concept we hadn't explained at all, but which was necessary to complete the exercise at hand (which was, coincidentally implementing a ranking for a Hacker News-like site). If you hit this in self-study, 99% of the students would give up and shelve their dreams of becoming a developer. Not so in devbootcamp. To my big surprise, not knowing joins didn't present much of a hurdle. Through pairing, people's resourcefulness quickly led to a variety of usable solutions. Perhaps not the textbook solution, but that's not what matters in real life.
It's this type of can-do, resourcefulness and team spirit which creates solutions and being exposed and immersed into that is what people paid the money for. This cannot be replicated in self-study, in my opinion, and it's well worth it.
There is a running joke in San Francisco that companies looking for "Code Ninjas" and "Rockstar Programmers" are not worth working for, because they haven't gotten the basic truth that the team matters more than the individual. They're falling prey to the "Talent Myth" (a reference to a Malcolm Gladwell article where he describes among others the reasons for the spectacular failure of Enron.)
What devbootcamp has cultivated in a classroom format is the actual vibe of a startup doing well: Excitement, vibrant, infectious energy. I visited at week 3 and at week 8. In any typical multi-week courses (e.g. college), the enthusiasm wanes pretty quickly after a few weeks. Not so with devbootcamp, it kept growing.
It's not the individual's technical skills that matter so much (there is always some else to ask or Google anyway), than it is to build a culture of resourcefulness and team spirit.
In full disclosure I should say I was a guest instructor, and I felt aweful that we let students run head-first into database joins--a concept we hadn't explained at all, but which was necessary to complete the exercise at hand (which was, coincidentally implementing a ranking for a Hacker News-like site). If you hit this in self-study, 99% of the students would give up and shelve their dreams of becoming a developer. Not so in devbootcamp. To my big surprise, not knowing joins didn't present much of a hurdle. Through pairing, people's resourcefulness quickly led to a variety of usable solutions. Perhaps not the textbook solution, but that's not what matters in real life.
It's this type of can-do, resourcefulness and team spirit which creates solutions and being exposed and immersed into that is what people paid the money for. This cannot be replicated in self-study, in my opinion, and it's well worth it.