It’s as cliché as it is misleading. The promise is that you can switch careers, shell out $10,000 and go to a coding bootcamp for six weeks and get a coding job that pays a six-figure salary.
If that’s what happens to you, that’s a-typical. A more likely scenario is that you shell out $10,000 and go to a coding bootcamp for six weeks. Then, you continue working on side projects and learning from free online resources such as freecodecamp.org, Udemy, and YouTube for six months. After applying to about a hundred companies, you accept a job for about $65,000.
“In Course Report’s most recent study of 3,043 graduates, we find that coding bootcamp graduates earn… a median salary of $65,000 in their first jobs.”
Course Report, Web Developer Salaries After Coding Bootcamps
That’s not a bad result, truly. To go from making a salary of about$44,000 (the average salary according to CourseReport before a coding bootcamper graduates) to making $21,000 more in their salary in just a year is a solid result.
Congratulations, you just gave yourself a 47% raise.
If you went into it knowing you could give yourself a 47% raise in less than a year, maybe that would be enticing. For many, it’s the allure of easy money that draws them to going to a coding bootcamp. I can tell you from experience building a career in software engineering isn’t easy. While a six-figure job right out of a coding bootcamp is possible, it isn’t typical.
If you want fast, easy money, bet on black. If you want well-compensated for doing a challenging job, albeit one with many perks, welcome to software engineering. If you stick with it, you are all but guaranteed to get that six-figure salary somewhere down the line.
