Absolutely!

We just graduated our first cohort, and after 8 weeks, they've learned enough to get entry-level ruby jobs techcrunch.com/2012/05/10/dev-boot-camp-is-a-ruby-success/

There are also less intense courses out there like bloc.io

Or, in my case, entry-level Python/Django jobs :-)

I appreciate the question. I like your naming better. Will change it.

Scaling is over rated.

Thanks Jared.

While we're at it, if anybody can't come to SF for dev bootcamp, and/or can't afford it, I highly recommend Jared's http://www.bloc.io/

There are couple of inaccuracies in this article:

First, I only had 200 applicants, and they were all a result of this post about 6 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133

Second, the article seems to give me and dev bootcamp all the credit. In truth, the spring cohort was a collection of some INCREDIBLY motivated people. I had all these ideas about how I was going to keep people motivated, and by day 3 it was clear that I wouldn't need any of them. Instead, I started worrying about how I can get them to go home and get some sleep every now and then.

I am committed to making any and all of our numbers public. Ask me anything and you'll get the straight facts (as long as it doesn't violate any of my students' privacy).

This is a great achievement. I'm interested to know why you didn't just accept anyone who was willing to pay the fee, as some other training institutions do. Was it limited to 20 due to your teaching resources on hand?

Not speaking for Shereef...but, he mentions that the spring cohort was incredibly motivated. Accepting anyone willing to pay the fee would really take away from the power of the program. I don't know if that was Shereef's plan, but the spring class motivated themselves and each other. It was an infectious environment to be around others who were determined to bang their head against the wall until they broke through. If the class was not pre-filtered for these qualities - it would have been a very different atmosphere.

My biggest constraint was talented, and heart-ful teachers.

And, like Andrew said, I put a lot of weight into students' attitude.

I just taught 20 people ror. It took 8 weeks. They worked their butts off, and now two thirds of them have entry level dev jobs.

The talent gap is big enough now that it doesn't take much for someone who is talented and motivated to get to a point where they are getting paid to continue to learn.

Thumbs up for you personally and for innovation in the space.

He suggests "managing humans" as a good book for managers to read. Just started reading it, and it seems decent. Anybody have other good resources?

'First, Break All the Rules' is a great read. For new managers, I highly reccomend 'The First 90 Days'

Remember not to just accept everything in these books. They should be read with the expectation that you will have to pull out the useful pieces that are relevant to you.

Peopleware and Slack by Tom DeMarco are must-reads. I re-read Peopleware once every few years. I also liked Delivering Happiness (by @zappos) and Tribal Leadership, although they are more about organizations than management per se.

Found a copy here: http://law.indiana.edu/instruction/profession/doc/16_1.pdf

30 companies interviewed 20 students this last Friday for 5 minutes each.

On average each student was invited to 6 companies for further interviews. This experiment only works if we're totally transparent so I'll be updating this community and our blog with numbers as soon as we have them.

The spring's tuition was 6k, and 100% refunded on hire. The summer is 11k with 5k refunded on hire. Summer will be 2 weeks longer and will have at least twice as many mentors per student.

Thanks Kabuks! I am glad the team is being transparent with the numbers and that you clarified the rise in tuition.

At 11K this still provides a lot of value. Does the team do any exit interviews for the graduates? I would also love to know what percentage of the class went from 0 programming experience to junior developer (I am assuming these types of people would be very rare like an overnight success).

Yes, we did an exit interview, we're pulling together the numbers and will post them in the next week.

We're definitely very interested in your second question too. It's going to be a few weeks before folks get offers and accept them, but I'm 100% committed to these numbers being transparent. Stay posted.

I am sure there will be another Hacker News article announcing the numbers. Thanks again for the responses.

I think that's a really good question.

My goal in designing the curriculum was to graduate world-class beginners, not to quickly hack together one or two rails apps.

The first half of devbootcamp was just Ruby. We covered basics of OO design and TDD.

One of my students blogged every day, if you're interested in the details of what we covered: http://douglascalhoun.tumblr.com/

Overall, I feel strongly that folks graduated with a strong sense of what's involved in building software, some basic knowledge and more importantly feeling resourced to learn what they don't yet know.