Unpopular opinion: those $500 coding bootcamps are a complete waste

I dropped $500 on a '12 week full stack bootcamp' last month thinking it would fast track me into a job. Turns out it was just a pile of outdated videos and a Discord server where no one answered questions. The instructor barely showed up and the projects were copy-paste from GitHub. I could have learned the same stuff from free YouTube tutorials in half the time. Honestly felt like I flushed my cash down the drain. Anyone else get burned by a cheap online coding course like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_charles15d ago

Is there really no middle ground between a total scam and a life-changing deal though? I actually feel for @patriciap52's point that a known developer's link probably isn't worthless, but $500 for a GitHub repo still feels steep when you could just follow the same dev on Twitter and get the code for free. A fair price tag doesn't equal a good learning experience when the course itself is the problem.

grace_knight7026d ago

The real scam is making you pay $500 for a GitHub link.

patriciap5226d ago

Is it really that different from paying $500 for a weekend workshop that just hands you a PDF? People lose a lot more money on useless courses and coaching calls that promise the moon but deliver basic stuff you could Google. At least with a GitHub link you're getting actual code that might work, not just someone's recycled blog posts. The real scam is thinking you can skip the hard parts of learning by spending money on shortcuts. If the link comes from a known developer with a solid track record, the price tag just filters out people who weren't serious anyway. Maybe the problem isn't the price but how much people expect to get handed everything for free.