Over 5k Bootcamp Grads Have Founded Organizations... But Is It Enough?

I attended a front end Bootcamp.

Did I learn web dev? Yes.

Did I gain chances to take on freelance and front-end work as my day job? Yes.

Am I at the bleeding edge of front-end work? No.

Is the front-end my primary job function? No.

Does having a working knowledge of a few scripting languages and web dev basics help when working for a SAAS startup? You bet.

This is all anecdotal. Many of us likely know successful self-taught engineers. We also likely know people who attended four (+?) year programs and are sort of mediocre in their craft.

Just like any customer-interested educational org, coding bootcamps seem to spend a decent number of resources “proving their worth.” Similar to the university I attended, I get periodic emails from the bootcamp I attended asking about career outcomes. For bootcamps with decent data, they publish reports. But many don’t. And when I last looked there are now over 700 bootcamps, many not nearly as established as the few well-known programs.

There are a few journalistic takes that dive in aggregates here. But there’s really no regulating body here. There are no true standards for what enables an organization to be called a “bootcamp.”

The most cynical take one could have could say that bootcamps are essentially for-profit trade schools. The connotations here are precisely why the Department of Education invests in and publicizes information on traditional school outcomes in bulk in places like the National Center For Educational Statistics and the College Scorecard.

With all this said, the outcome information is out there. Individuals into tech tend to promote and interact online. Those as new entrants into tech job markets certainly do.

What we have here is a good case for web scraping. Looking for individuals who mention they attended a bootcamp wherever they host their online resume, and then scraping their future jobs as well.

I should rephrase… what we have here is a good case for some monumentally EPIC web scraping.

The most attended bootcamp had over 40,000 graduates when last posted online (c. 2 years ago). And as I mentioned, there are now hundreds of bootcamps around the world.

I’ll admit, that was a bit of a bait and switch

While the outcome data for many, many bootcamp graduates is available online, this is web scraping far beyond me. Even far beyond most teams that focus on web scraping.

I just happen to work for a company that initially made its name with web scraping, and that is presently one of only a few companies with a claim to routinely crawling most of the web.

What do they do with all that data…?

Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph is one of the world’s largest databases of organizations, products, articles, and people. All are sourced from AI-enabled web crawlers who read web pages and extract facts.

As you might expect, some of those organizations employ bootcamp graduates. And of the people in the Knowledge Graph list their bootcamp experience as part of their education.

With two handy fields from the Knowledge Graph, we can compute -- what to my knowledge -- is one of the most comprehensive reviews of whether coding bootcamps ‘work.’

So do bootcamps work?

You bet they do

Among the top 10 bootcamps by attendance, over 5,000 graduates have gone on to become founders.

Admittedly, I’m not being particularly clear about what it means for bootcamps to ‘work.’ But presumably (for many) the function of learning how to code is to make something they want to bring into the world.

Additionally, this data isn’t normalized. General Assembly is potentially the most well-established bootcamp, and has had a significantly larger number of graduates than any of the other listed bootcamps above. So let’s see what this looks like for graduates by percentage.

Almost 10%! That’s approaching the number for graduates of top MBA programs.

For a program that ranges between 6 months and a year, is often part-time, and costs considerably less than an MBA, we can say that there are definitely bootcamps that work for the purpose of becoming a founder.

Founder of what?

Here’s the caveat, many of us know “founders.” And many founded organizations never amount to much. So what scrapeable fact can we rely on to filter a bit here? Luckily, almost every organization that raises funding publicly discloses this fact, particularly if it’s a noteworthy amount. And funding rounds is another set of org-related data in the Knowledge Graph.

So first let’s simply filter by organizations that raised any funds at all.

This quickly narrows the field. And from the c. 4,000 General Assembly grad founders, we can see that this number has dropped to around 40. Still an exceedingly respectable number for an organization that’s not that old.

And yet again we can filter among this cohort to see the distribution of funding.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest cluster is below $500k. It’s seed money but not a particularly noteworthy amount among high-flying startups. With that said, close to 100 bootcamp grads have raised significant funds, with one verified unicorn founder in the mix. Again, compared to any but the very best and most entrepreneurially-minded universities in the nation, it’s hard to find a collection of 10 traditional schools that can boast these numbers.

So what about the other grads?

Perhaps having your idea validated by millions of dollars is the dream, but plenty of bootcamp graduates have more modest (and reliably attainable) goals centered around switching up careers.

Within the Knowledge Graph, we have around 30,000 employment records where individuals have publicly disclosed they attended one of these top ten bootcamps. As I mentioned earlier, not every bootcamp attendee puts their bootcamp attendance on their online CV. But this number is approaching a significant portion of the total reported attendance of our bootcamp cohort.

For seniority, almost 10,000 hold current roles our NLP is able to associate with senior management (30%!). This number jumps to roughly half of our aggregate count when accounting for all managerial roles.

For job function, we see another view, while the top 5 distinct business functions are all related to tech, a large cluster of managerial job titles are less specific and in bulk harder to parse through. With this said, almost exactly half of all grads within the Knowledge Graph from top-producing bootcamps are presently employed in tech roles.

So do coding bootcamps work? For many, yes.

Can any educational program guarantee to push you along a given career path… that’s up to you.

Sources

• Career Karma “State of the Coding Bootcamp Market Report 2020”

• Business Because “22% Of Full-Time MBA Graduates Become Start-Up Founders”

• The National Center For Educational Statistics

• The College Scorecard

• Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph