Posted on 02/22/2025 8:52:42 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Back in 2012, “learn to code” was an optimistic mantra. Born from a viral marketing campaign for one of the earliest coding boot camps, it promised recession-burned career-changers a future-proof option. But that was when the future looked somewhat different.
Recent cohorts of aspiring software developers are now looking for jobs in a post-pandemic tech sector riven by rampant layoffs. The Coding Bootcamp subreddit, a community with 48,000-plus members, is teeming with recent posts from graduates who are struggling to find work. Prospects have gotten so dire that one of the leading boot camps, Launch Academy, recently paused enrollment, citing a lack of “concrete job opportunities.” The move wasn’t meant to send doomsday signals about the future of tech workers altogether, however, but merely to acknowledge the reality of the moment.
“We saw placement numbers and enrollment numbers as a leading indicator of what’s happening more broadly in the market right now,” Launch Academy cofounder and CEO Dan Pickett tells Fast Company.
What’s happening, in short, is that the supply for able coders has, for the first time, dramatically outpaced demand. So far, nearly 84,600 tech workers have lost their jobs in 2024—after nearly 263,000 tech workers lost theirs last year. Postings for software-development roles on the jobs site Indeed have dropped 30% from pre-pandemic levels, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The arrival of ongoing layoffs collided with a surplus of fresh tech-world job seekers, and now boot camp and university graduates are competing with experienced engineers for entry-level jobs.
The pause at Launch Academy follows a similar move in the adjacent entertainment industry earlier this month, when the Art Directors Guild suspended its training program, citing heavy unemployment rates among members. Although both industries are in similar states of upheaval, occasionally interlinked, the tech sector downturn has its own set of circumstances.
An early-pandemic hiring blitz—with Microsoft and Google bringing on thousands of new workers, and Meta nearly doubling its headcount—happened just before inflation set in, costs rose, and the market cooled.
Persistently high interest rates have also made it more difficult for many tech companies to get funding. Plus, there’s the feverish expansion into artificial intelligence, which can involve commensurate budget-shrinking in other departments. Mark Zuckerberg outright admitted as much, telling The New York Times in February that Meta’s recent layoffs were part of a cost-cutting initiative, “so we can invest in these long-term, ambitious visions around AI.” There may even be a bit of a herding effect driving layoffs.
When coding boot camps first emerged amid fallout from the 2008 financial crash, they presented the tech world as a welcoming sanctuary of gainful employment and upward mobility—and themselves as its passport.
Anyone willing to do the work, and able to afford the typically $15,000 to $20, 000 tuition, could technically become hire-ready in 18 weeks. While it’s a pretty hefty price tag, and some boot camps have been accused of being scams, the more reputable options with high-placement rates and career service resources offer a cheaper and faster alternative to a four-year computer science degree.
According to Pickett, the model worked as advertised for nearly an entire decade after Launch Academy opened its doors in 2013, with placement rates routinely topping 80% and 90%. (Sometimes even reaching 100%, Pickett claims, depending on the cohort.)
Even in the early phase of the pandemic, Launch Academy still saw placement rates in line with the increase in speculative hiring at the time. Only recently did the tide begin to turn.\n\n\n\n“We really started noticing increasing friction in fall of 2022,” Pickett says. “And then fall of 2023 is when we really started to recognize: There's a shift here in the market that we need to pay attention to.”
At that point, the career services team began ramping up its placement efforts. They overhauled Launch Academy’s postgraduate curriculum, intensified the interview prep program, and essentially pulled every lever available to maximize the students’ chances of success. Direct partnerships with companies like National Grid helped some graduates transition from training into full-time roles, but not enough to offset the low placement rates.
Earlier in 2023, the metric-driven organization had set placement goals at 75%, a fair dip from previous standards. By December, rates for some recent graduating cohorts were hovering below 60%, suggesting more than just a market correction. With open notices for software engineering positions seeing upward of 70 to 120 applications per post, according to Pickett, the team at Launch Academy realized it would likely remain difficult for graduates to secure employment until the market absorbed the recent influx of experienced developers.
In January, Launch Academy internally started making plans to pause enrollment for the coding boot camp.
“It fundamentally comes down to a value proposition,” Pickett says. “We promise students that if they come to us and study hard the odds are in their favor to secure employment. Those odds have to be better than a coin flip. We can’t continue to sell something that doesn’t deliver the outcome that the student is paying us for.”
Reactions to Launch Academy’s decision, on Reddit and LinkedIn, have mainly applauded the company for putting ethics over profit, with some even questioning whether any universities will follow suit and cap their enrollment. So far, Launch Academy has been the only major coding boot camp to address the reality of the moment with a pause in enrollment. (San Antonio-based Codeup abruptly shut down for good last winter.) During the pause, the company will continue on as a consultancy, offering professional services and private training for already-employed developers looking for a leg up.
As for when Launch Academy will resume classes with a new cohort, that depends on a number of factors. The candidate pool will have to shrink significantly, with a lower number of applicants per open position. Geographically, more software jobs will have to open in tech hubs like New York and San Francisco, rather than the middle states, which currently have more openings. Generally, the team will be waiting to see companies begin struggling, once again, to find engineering talent.
As bleak as the job market may appear, though, Pickett is still optimistic about the future of the industry, urging struggling tech workers not to get despondent.
“We see these ebbs and flows in the market all the time, and once interest rates improve, we’ll be back on the ride up rather than the ride down,” he says. “With hard work and intention, there’s still opportunity out there, and if you apply yourself, you can still get the outcome you want. It’s just more of an uphill battle than it once was.”
Good advice. People need to have employment in something they like and that is productive. Unfortunately, it will not be possible in a few years (less than 5) for most people to have a productive, paid job. The robot company Figure is planning a production line this year that incorporates their robots helping to build other robots. They are in their second model. As they bring out their 3 model with enhanced intelligence by the end of this year, it will able to function in most ways as well or better than a human worker in factory conditions. Robots building robots for a fraction of the price of human workers, but able to work day and night. They will build vast numbers of robot very quickly. And if Figure, Tesla or Boston Dynamics don't do that, the Chinese will. They are, in fact.
AI will take the white collar jobs and robots with everyday common sense AI based intelligence will take all the blue collar jobs. Think of the robot intelligence that is coming as the equivalent of "full self driving" cars. Yes, I know it wasn't very good in the past, but suddenly it is about equal to humans in driving safety, and quickly moving past us. The same thing with robot intelligence and dexterity. Moving very fast.
The "good news" is that Elon Musk and Sam Altman and the rest want to give unemployed workers a monthly welfare payment called "UBI." It won't be much, but it will keep you from starving. The crazy thing is there are a lot of people out there who are sold on UBI and can't wait to start getting their checks.
I suppose that can work but we would have to require people to accomplish a task in order to collect their UBI checks. This is where our government will have to be proactive to ensure we are content once automation truly takes off.
We are not evolved to stay at home and to do nothing without a clear purpose in life.
Written by an A.I.?
Regards,
Back in the day, early- mid 80’s, I worked at a software house and was on a development team that decided to use a code generator - TELON. The powers that be thought it would speed up development.
It might have been useful, but a few of things...requirements had to be exact and its compiler stunk and we had no training on the product.
We eventually had to pull out the code, go back to the starting point and develop\code like before.
As an aside, my son - born in ‘81 - had a year to go to get his bachelor’s degree in accounting.
He had no school debt.
The agreement was, pass the course I pay the freight.
Fail and he pays the freight. He never failed anything.
He took a summer job before his senior year and liked it so much, he never went back to school.
He’s been a union member since. He is a certified battery & charger technician. He’s certified in other operating and engineer devices.
He’s now a journeyman mechanic. Is vested in his pension and makes a spit load of dough.
Been there about 20 or so years...and is already talking about retiring.
A lot to be said about the trades. He’ll never starve because he can turn a wrench\screwdriver - use power tools and can fix things.
How about those t.v. commercials for "Data Entry" jobs back in the 1970s?
High-heeled ladies in their early 20s, holding up sheaves of continuous paper for young, cardigan-sweater-clad gentlemen to inspect - all at a snail's pace.
Regards,
Bfl
The commodity programming market is saturated. Only specialized coding is apparently in demand now.
-PJ
No, they’re not, given employer’s love of H1B/OPT workers.
All that matters is price.
I’ve rewritten resumes of tech workers with MCSE certifications.
Truth is, they’re 60+ years old now. I don’t have the heart to telll them it’s over for them.
AI is code, friend. It didn't code itself, and nobody has even come close to writing software that can write software more complex than itself. That belongs to the category of "probably impossible" things.
And you're welcome to be first in line to use a mission-critical system, like aircraft avionics or a computer-controlled medical device with the capacity to kill you, whose software was designed, written, and tested by AI without humans being involved.
(It was a long time ago, but I earned a master's in computer science. My research area was in AI, specifically computer vision.)
Learn how to run telecom low voltage cable, fiber and how to certify those installs.
Field is growing and its precision work.
its = it’s!
RVERY job that was able to be accomplished remotely during covid can be done by AI.
EVERY job.
They’re getting ready to replace as many as they can.
I remember those.
Crash course to be an MCSE.
I couldn’t afford to and earned some certifications in Windows NT and 2000 when they were supposedly valuable. I couldn’t get the time to day for an interview.
All anyone cared about was my nothing A+.
I retired and went back. They couldn’t find anyone to fill the position. 100% remote too
Is it possible I have a long-lost brother?
I have found that the Arduino environment has given the world a lot of cut-and-paste programmers who cannot do much useful innovation. They don't really understand what they are doing with sensors/actuators.
Heaven help me! Find a PDP-11 instead.
I design microcontroller-based devices and then write the software for them. I have an endless supply of work.
Coders? The prompting to develop applications will be more like writing out exact specifications - good old software engineering stuff. It will just happen faster and with more iterations.
Do you have experience working with this stuff?
I do. I have used AI generated materials in real software development for commercial projects. It does not work the way you suggest that it does.
The best AI's for writing software can generate skeleton programs and methods with careful prompting. You can proceed from there with extreme caution.
All of what they "generate" is clearly derived from published content that was originally written by human beings and stored in public forums. The code snippets require a great deal of modification and subject matter expertise to incorporate into a production application.
It is not yet cost effective to write software using AI's. If that changes, a specialized AI will simply be one more tool in the chain from Assembly Code, High-Level Languages, Integrated Development Environments, and Source Code Management Systems.
AI is not getter smarter. It is getter improved training sources and models. All of what it can do depends on those factors. The critical factors originate from a bunch of really smart human beings who build these systems and curate their training data.
AI systems of today are pattern-matching inference engines. They are not capable of improving themselves and cannot distinguish between reality and fiction. That requires the people who train the AIs.
There are never enough really smart human beings alive to do all the things we need them to do. And people of superior intelligence are often resented by people of lesser intelligence. That resentment may be fully justified in many cases. The ultimate limitations on AI development may well be cultural rejection of what AI's are imagined to be, and the people who are creating the dreams.
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