How coding boot camps are filling the talent gap
macleans.ca
macleans.ca
How can we reduce costs without having to pay market rates? We'll hire someone with less experience than a college graduate in the field of web development!
Since most websites are nothing that difficult to implement, we can offer courses on teaching people basically how to build these apps, and then hire them at these companies! The employee is happy to be making more than they were (which was either nothing because their previous job has become irrelevant or less because the floor for software development is so high), and the employer is happy to be employing cheap labor.
My guess is the net effect can only be negative. If the business scales, it will need more talented engineers to help with that scale, and either keep these boot camp engineers to do the simple tasks or fire them for failing to continue to provide value. Or the business can't scale because the developers aren't talented enough to scale these apps, and they can't hire talented engineers because they refuse to pay market rates for quality workers. The third scenario I see is that it becomes a Mythical Man-month problem, where companies just decide that high quality engineers at these types of businesses simply aren't worth it, and would rather have a cadre of low cost boot campers, making the demand for quality software engineers drop, save for a few specialized roles.
That is the downside of capitalism.
Just take a look at what happened to Oracle when the most brilliant engineers left after they acquired Sun Microsystems. They literally could not find anyone for ages to replace these people just because there is not enough talent out there.
And that's Oracle. Who else is there that can afford to pay these people ? Google ? Maybe. Netflix ? aye IBM ? likely And maybe few dozens of other corporations.
But these people do not want to work for corporations instead they need to be treated as special unicorns.