Candid Chat About The Dev Market With a Coding Bootcamp CEO (Rithm School)

I brought on the CEO of Rithm School to have a candid conversation about the entry-level dev market; the coding bootcamp industry; and how Rithm School has adapted to it. To be honest, the transparency was refreshing.

Elie Schoppik (guest) - CEO of Rithm School
Free Rithm School events: https://www.eventbrite.com/o/rithm-school-11279356650/
Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1kv9TLn6VxfQJv-PxGBcuw
Site: https://rithmschool.com

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Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:13

All right. As many of you know, the web dev industry has been getting a little bit tighter. Entry-level market has been getting a little bit rougher, and I decided to bring on the CEO of Rhythm School to just talk about how they've adapted to the market. So, ellie, I really appreciate you giving your time for this. But, yeah, feel free to introduce yourself.

Elie Schoppik: 0:35

For sure. Thanks for having me on. I was appreciated. Big fan of the transparency you have here, so thanks for doing what you do. I'm Ellie. I'm the CEO and co-founder, one of the lead instructors at Rhythm School. I've been in the bootcamp space for almost 10 years at this point, previously at Galvanize, now Hack Reactor and General Assembly Before that. My background is in finance, originally with some engineering here and there, worked at a startup previously and then made my way into teaching. Just been very fortunate to be able to do this. I'm very passionate about education in this space and also dealing with some of the challenges that this space has to offer.

Don Hansen: 1:12

So, looking forward to chat about that. Awesome, let's just dive into it. So I'm very curious what changes Rhythm School has made to be able to adapt. I've heard a lot of changes from different coding boot camps, but I truly want to hear your changes, most importantly because I thought there was one thing that was very interesting about your program and that was the internship. I thought that was a very powerful thing and I think a lot of coding boot camps lack the ability to give students kind of some professional like experience. So I thought that was always interesting. But you know, companies are tightening up with internships and I kind of just want to see how you've adapted.

Elie Schoppik: 1:52

So, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a great question. I mean, the biggest changes we've made have just been upping the support as much as possible on the outcomes front In terms of the curriculum and the content that we teach. We've been making small incremental changes and introducing typing a little bit earlier and, you know, replacing Vite with Create React app and things that just make the flow of things a bit smoother. But there have not been, you know, substantial. We're going to drastically change the languages and frameworks and stuff that we focus on. The support on the outcome side has just been paramount for us.

Elie Schoppik: 2:30

So it's really tough out there and our numbers are way worse than what they used to be at the peak. You know we have on the website, I think, about 55% for the second half of 2022. The 2023 numbers for the first half it's about 38% and for the second half we haven't finished all the auditing and it hasn't been the full six months. Right now it's about 32% and that will probably get closer to 40. So it's been a really, really tough time.

Elie Schoppik: 2:53

As you mentioned, the hardest thing is kind of just getting your foot in the door. So what can we do on the outcomes front to help our students stay motivated, also be as transparent as possible from the very beginning, and those are conversations we have with prospective students of. I'm sure you are well aware of the market. But I want to give you the reality that it's going to be a really long search and it's been really tough on our business to be totally transparent. We you know our enrollments are down and our admissions is having a harder time and it's really difficult for us to still be really, really mindful of accepting students that we think can be successful, knowing that it's just a really tough market out there. So we've tried to adapt as much as possible to support our students as much as possible. But, like everyone else, it is a really difficult market. So we're kind of, you know, in it with everyone else. Like everyone else, it is a really difficult market, so we're kind of in it with everyone else.

Don Hansen: 3:39

Ellie, I'm going to be honest, that is refreshingly transparent, and I know there's. I understand coding boot camps feel the need to compete with this almost um I don't want to say dishonest, but um, yeah, this dishonest job placement rate that reflects 2022 that's placed on every coding boot camps website. They haven't updated it, and even the sales people or admissions when people are coming in, there's always some sort of manipulation in how they present the data, and I think that's what people want. I think they're just and I've noticed this with self-taught developers and even CS grads they're so sick of being fed BS over and over and over. It's okay to say that the market is rough, because when you acknowledge that you have to take action to overcome that adversity, you have to, and coding bootcamps that do. They're going to last Cause, like you said, your financials probably taken a hit. A lot of coding bootcamps are taking a hit. There are some that are going under, some that are getting sued, like it's. I think people want that refreshing transparency. So, honestly, like I just really appreciate that.

Elie Schoppik: 4:56

Thanks for saying that. It's really it's taken a while to get there and you know we've dealt with a lot of the. I've spoken to competitors of yours that say XYZ placement and we've had, you know, conversation. Our VP of education is also extremely passionate about this and has had very long conversations with prospective students of. I'll pull up the report and I'll show you the games that they play. And you know we're fortunate that we're a relatively small school so the numbers are relatively easy to report and we can be transparent about it. But it is tough when you know our numbers are 40% and someone else is 60% and if you don't really have enough of that drive to push forward or enough questions to ask about the numbers, one is just superior than the other. So it's been a challenge for us to stay in that line of how can we still be competitive and be transparent, but also in an industry that, as you were describing, can get very sketchy very quickly. That's a very tough part about this.

Don Hansen: 5:49

Yeah, yeah, it is. You had mentioned and I just want to clarify this with the curriculum you had mentioned. Replace V with create react app.

Elie Schoppik: 6:03

I'm sorry if I if I said that incorrectly, but yeah, we are, you know, introducing more and more TypeScript into the curriculum and introducing that earlier, introducing ESM modules earlier, and with that comes the need for some tooling. So we've been fortunate to use a starter that is powered by Vite and stripped out a lot of the abstractions and complexity, just so you can get the basics up and running and really trying to lean on, you know, especially with things like Python, as much of the introducing those ideas of typing in a slightly friendlier way as opposed to just throwing it all on at the end. So those are really the changes that we put a lot of investment in. Every exercise we have has solutions with tests, and that just goes through iteration after iteration of just how can we make it better, how can we make sure that this point in the exercise, this code review that we have, is really hammering home the things we want to teach and so on. So that's really where a lot of time is spent, kind of training and training that process.

Don Hansen: 6:52

Okay, I've found a lot of developers truly struggle with TypeScript too early on. It's a bit heavy and I think there's a huge benefit in really understanding the quirks of JavaScript by going through the frustrations of JavaScript, and I'm really interested in hearing your thought process on bringing TypeScript in earlier so they could get more comfortable with types. Where do you bring it in and why do you decide to do that?

Elie Schoppik: 7:24

Yeah, absolutely so. As for the why it's everywhere, and whether you're going to use it at your job or whether someone in a job requirement says so, you're going to see a lot of documentation that has it and that part is important, or you're just going to use.

Elie Schoppik: 7:36

VS code and hover over something and see what is that thing it's doing for me. So I think just enough of that baseline is important. The hope that we have this is a work in progress. We currently introduced TypeScript in week 10, and then we do data structures and algorithms all in TypeScript. So that way you just kind of have and with that it's not a You're not going to be doing an insane amount of typing.

Elie Schoppik: 7:59

We actually give you a lot of the type annotations and you kind of work within the frame, because the hardest thing in TypeScript is not is this a number, is this a string, it's generics and making your own custom types, and that's where the learning curve just goes through the roof and that's where a lot of that kind of frustration hits.

Elie Schoppik: 8:20

So what we hope to be able to do is actually cheat a little bit by doing it in Python, and Python typing is a little bit more friendly, it's a little bit easier to get up and running with, and we don't want to introduce TypeScript in the very beginning of our program because we want to make sure you get your fundamentals down first. But I think the hope is that we can use Python the same way that we use Python as just a nicer introduction to the backend and a better way to learn your fundamentals there and then migrate to Node. The hope is we can do that with typing as well, so get them some reps with typing a little bit earlier and then layer on some more of those tougher ideas in typing after they've seen just the basics for a couple of weeks.

Don Hansen: 8:56

That's completely reasonable. I'm just thinking because, as you know, as I mentor individual aspiring developers, I'm trying to be able to fit that in in the right location. And you're right, typescript can be fairly simple to get set up with basic types it, but it does scale and difficulty and I think that can be separate. I think that's a really good idea.

Elie Schoppik: 9:15

The tooling is also very difficult. So you know, if you're building static websites and now I say, go, layer on TypeScript, you can't just throw a ts and everything works. So it's also just tough for beginners when they can't even make it to the browser or they can't make it to the command line because the code doesn't even compile. So that extra step of hassle I think you know you and I have done this a bunch and see a lot of the benefits but especially for folks that are newer, it's just this extra headache on top of the thing that I'm just trying to get to work.

Don Hansen: 9:41

Sure, absolutely. So you focus on. I guess, if you had to split the amount of focus you had on Nodejs and then building something with Python, yeah, for sure I'll give you like a high level arc of the curriculum.

Elie Schoppik: 9:54

So the first two weeks are front end focused and really just what we like to call pro coding. So let's undo a lot of the habits that you've had from your self study and focus on the testability of your code, the readability of your code, your good variable names, good functions, documentation, modularity. We'll teach you know more principles with object orientation and just a lot of good ideas on program design. We'll also introduce big O notation, just as kind of a framework as we think about ways to make things you know more optimized as they scale. We don't hammer that home a ton over the course of the next couple of weeks. It comes back more in data structures, algorithms, but we hammer it in certain projects as ways to think about how we can optimize. So it's a couple of those core CS ideas as well as just good program design. And we're doing this all in the land of front end. So we'll also talk about making network requests and how the web works in HTTP and build some slightly larger applications with a bunch of JavaScript files where you can start to see things like separation of concerns and how to put your models here and your UI here and so on. We then shift gears to Python for three weeks and the focus there is just learning the fundamentals of backend, you know, request responses and working with databases. We talk about SQL for a bit and then we layer on an ORM with SQL alchemy, which is a very, very, very tough and abstract tool to use, but it's also very commonly used. So give it kind of a benefit of the doubt there. And the focus with that is a. I mean, python is a beautiful language. Knowing more than one language is a great way to also just diversify the ways that you think about code. And Python also high level but has some really interesting pieces that JavaScript doesn't. So it's a nice way to shift gears a bit and, as silly as it sounds, it's nice for students to know this is Python, that's the back end, this is JavaScript, that's the front end. So when you first start that kind of this JS file, where does it live? I saw that a lot when we just taught Node and it's, you know, just more hassle than it's worth After three weeks of Python.

Elie Schoppik: 11:51

We do cover Node for two weeks, but it's relatively quick because it's Node with Express and you know a lot of these ideas from Python with Flask, so it's more of the translation to that idea. But the things that we hammer home a little bit more than testing architecture, talk a lot about TDD, mocking some more kind of complex ideas in the testing ecosystem and then just let them build a larger scale API. So Node is more of the we're going to show you this ecosystem, we're going to show you some of the differences, we're going to show you how to build APIs with it. But you've seen a lot of the concepts.

Elie Schoppik: 12:22

We also and this is, you know, a different philosophy. There isn't really a big winner in the ORM ecosystem in Node. So we actually just dropped down to raw SQL and just make students write raw SQL and understand how that works and think about SQL injection and prepared statements and transactions and things that are actually going to be important when you're just working with that at a lower level. So we give them reps in the Python and ORM ecosystem. We give them reps also with just writing raw SQL. So trying to hit both of those. So it's a very long way to answer your question of three weeks of Python and about a week or so of Node and the rest of that is really spent just building stuff.

Don Hansen: 13:03

That's really interesting that you found it more difficult to learn Nodejs and combine it with JavaScript on the front end. After or before you would actually teach that division of backend and frontend with a probably a little bit more of a traditional language on the backend. So many coding bootcamps stick with full stack JavaScript. Why do you think that is?

Elie Schoppik: 13:28

Time is a big piece. You know we're 17 weeks. If I was much more constrained with time and all I knew was JavaScript, it would technically be easier to do that. I think that you know there was a lot of craze when Node came out, and then it was Mongo and then it was JavaScript's going to be everywhere, and I think some people haven't adapted as much there. So that's part of it. But to your point, I think you're teaching front-end fundamentals and you get how things work in the DOM and you get to build stuff in the browser, and then I throw this entire runtime on you that is dealing with server side things. Oh, also there's all this async stuff you have to worry about, and then you find yourself just throwing all sorts of async awaits and not understanding just to make web pages appear, and we just found it not a particularly helpful learning environment.

Don Hansen: 14:15

Do you think most coding bootcamps, at least their students, would see more success if they linked in the program?

Elie Schoppik: 14:23

You know, it's really funny you mention that because when I went from General Assembly to Galvanize, a big thought I had as an instructor was at GA I had three months with you At Galvanize.

Elie Schoppik: 14:32

At that time it was six months, was six months and the thought process was, if I only had three more months, oh, the things we could do, the things I could teach you and we could dive super into operating systems and all of these really interesting ideas. But at the same time there's just a burnout and you can only do this at this pace for so long before you just kind of reach that. I'm pretty burnt out, as I'm sure you've seen with many folks. For what we saw it was around month four or four and a half at Galvanize, where doing that grind every single day, that pace, that commitment just kind of halted. So I do think that there is some value in having a slightly longer program. I think, unless you are admitting folks who either have some previous experience or a lot of pre-existing knowledge, it's really hard to do in 10 weeks, 12 weeks and such. I think there are places that are like we'll teach you four stacks in 12 weeks and you know, I think your smile kind of tells it all, so it's tough to do.

Don Hansen: 15:27

Yeah, I get to review their portfolios and their projects, so I know the results of those programs. What about a part-time program? You say they get burned out, but I think probably at a full-time pace. So what about maybe a nine-month part-time program?

Elie Schoppik: 15:41

I think we get a lot of interest in it and I think it's a really interesting offering. Given where the market is and given the folks, especially folks that are in really solid positions and are just waiting for that moment to switch gears but don't want to do it yet, it's a very reasonable thing to do. I'm not sure because I've never really run one or taught in one, so I can imagine that you can cover more over that period of time and burnout might be less. But I do worry about someone who is working a job nine to five or has kids or other obligations and then you're going to layer on a six to 9 pm and then six hours on a Saturday, kind of thing. It just seems like a different class of problems, but I think there is. In terms of your overall learning and retention, you can stick with it If you can maintain that schedule, if you can still keep that pace with your other obligations. I can. I can see that working.

Elie Schoppik: 16:31

Tell me about the additional support you're providing on the career side of things, cause you said you really upped that, first and foremost, we've always had a pretty rigorous technical interview process where you know you got to do a short coding challenge, which is do you know your fundamentals and can you do something under a little bit of time pressure? Those problems are relatively easy and we're not trying to throw things at people, but it's just the first level of are you serious about this and do you have your fundamentals down? After that, when we were in person, we did a whiteboarding interview, which is very different, but the goal was, if I strip away your ability to run consolelog, run test, run test, run, test, run test, can I really assess your problem solving, because that is the thing that is a much more of a predictor of your success than can I regurgitate the second argument of splice or whatever that may be. So, as we've shifted to online, that whiteboarding has become. You open up your text editor, I give you a prompt and you write some code, but you can't run it and if it doesn't work, we'll talk about it and you'll be the computer and you'll step through your code and I'll see your debugging process. As part of our interview, we also give you a bunch of code, some of which has bugs, some of which is not implemented. And it's that skill set of can you read code, can you understand what other people are doing, can you communicate your thoughts while you're doing that, because for us, that's what we believe is a much stronger predictor than do you know some topic and can you just. You know spew, you know leak code, easy problems or whatever that might be. So we've always really, I would say, been serious on the technical front and it's why you know, it's why our business is having a harder time, because there are less people out there that are passing that bar and getting in there. But if we change that, then you know what are we doing this for.

Elie Schoppik: 18:05

To be totally honest, on the behavioral side, we've added a behavioral interview to start, and that's been done by Sophie, who is our director of career services, previously from Hack Reactor. She's fantastic at what she does. But it's really important from the very beginning for us, a, to have a conversation about what this program is going to look like, but, b, to make sure that, behaviorally, you are the right person for our program. And it's not us being exclusive by any means, but it's us being selective where we can make sure that we are doing right by you.

Elie Schoppik: 18:36

We have this kind of phrase ethical admissions that we talk about. So it starts from the very beginning introducing outcomes earlier to have an honest conversation, and then throughout the course of the program, it's a little bit more support for folks that need technical interview prep, it's more support for folks that need one-on-one coaching. So just making ourselves more available, making sure we have more resources to help those folks that are struggling, doing as much as we can from the technical education side of just maintaining community. A lot of the challenges in the job search are when students get burnt out and ghost and don't come back, and really trying to keep them in the fold is where we've tried to invest a lot of our time.

Don Hansen: 19:14

I really like your application process. I've heard good things about it in the past. It still sounds like you're maintaining those standards, which I'm sure is very difficult to decide to continue to do during this market it is.

Elie Schoppik: 19:29

Definitely.

Don Hansen: 19:31

Yeah, I must have talked to close to a thousand students who were led into programs, like one-on-one conversations, who were led in, and I would do, maybe I do a little bit of a code review, I would do a portfolio review, I'd do a resume review and I'd kind of see where they were at. But I would, I would hear these arguments, um, especially when I would challenge the quality of software engineers coming out of programs. This admission process needs to be more rigorous, it needs to be you want people to be able to pursue education.

Don Hansen: 20:08

You want to try to make education as accessible as possible, but giving someone a free in when they are not prepared to complete the program, just to give you $10,000 to $20,000, is literally setting them up for failure and a huge burden on their shoulders and they give up.

Don Hansen: 20:27

Now they're severely in debt. The number of people that I have talked to that come out of coding boot camps with this philosophy of just let anyone in it just feels incredibly unethical. Anyone in it just feels incredibly unethical and it's just sad to see so many people start this and end with like $20,000 worth of debt. They quit their job. They have no like they're just burned out. They have nothing left in them to pursue this path. It's so incredibly sad. I think it's way more ethical to have a rigorous assessment to make sure they're actually going to be successful in this program and be successful in this career. That's a really hard thing to do because you don't make more profit off of it necessarily, and that's I mean it's tough from a financial standpoint. You probably get a little bit of pushback with that, but I think it's one of the most ethical things coding bootcamps can do and they should do.

Elie Schoppik: 21:18

I mean a lot of thoughts there. I completely agree. I think we started this company with an ethos of for-profit. Education doesn't scale and the theory with that being, this is not a software business that you can spin up and throw 10 more servers and now you can handle all the incoming traffic. Your class is 20, you have four instructors. Your class is 60, you have four instructors. Your quality just can't continue.

Elie Schoppik: 21:43

So we sought to start this business as being a little bit more of the boutique in the market and we got a lot of flack for it to start of. You know places that were admitting students that had little background and were charging much less than we were and were getting their foot in the door and all that stuff was working. I think we're fortunate that in this time we can be more transparent and just kind of lean into the fact that we've always kept the class size at 20 and we've always tried to keep that admissions bar a little bit higher. That being said, like we're still going to make plenty of mistakes, I mean our outcomes are far from where we'd like there to be and students that we admitted that we really thought could be successful have not been successful yet or are still kind of in that job search and that sucks. That's the stuff that makes it hard to sleep at night doing this kind of work. So we feel like we're doing good, but it's just a really tough time right now.

Don Hansen: 22:34

How many talk about your career services. So they're at the end, they finished your program Because I'm sure, like you know, this seems like it probably eats at you a little bit and your career services are probably talking to these people weekly or at least monthly, trying to kind of just keep them going. I don't know if you guys communicate or like offer practice interviews or anything like that, but I feel like career advisors at the end of a program. I see them get burned out so often, I see them quit so often and it's sad to see because they're so passionate about actually bettering people's lives, at least the ones I've talked to. So I kind of just want to hear what you're doing with career services and how that's going with Rhythm.

Elie Schoppik: 23:20

It's really hard. I have a ton, a ton, a ton of respect for the work that Sophie does, because you know I take on a tremendous amount of emotional labor in 17 weeks with these students and you feel responsible for their progress. You feel responsible for their outcome. You feel responsible for you were the one that admitted them and now they're kind of, you know, under your purview and you got to do right by them, I think, the part where we loop in career services or the things that we can do on that front. We've also extended the program length by one week, so we were a 16-week program.

Elie Schoppik: 23:51

We added a 17th week where the last three weeks are completely focused on interview prep. So the 15th week let me get that right is strictly technical interview prep. So we're going to talk about whiteboarding and take homes and coding challenges and basically how to you know, talk about your technical portfolio, talk about the projects you've built, get your resume in good shape from a technical front, do some technical phone screens, and the last two weeks are completely dedicated to the job search as a whole. So what we've tried to do on the career services side is actually just make sure that all your job search assets are done way before you finish the program really end of week 16, 17 at the absolute worst, because we saw a lot of students who would finish the program and then on Monday say, oh, my resume is not ready, so let me go spend a couple of days doing that. And then, oh, I haven't done anything with Flask in two weeks, so I'll go build something there. And that spiral is really, really brutal of then coming back a month later with I forgot everything about data structures, algorithms, or I haven't applied anywhere, or so on.

Elie Schoppik: 24:50

So really try to invest a lot in the momentum starts in week 15 or 16. You can job search for a little bit while we hold your hand, while you're with community, while you have people doing stand-ups every day, and try to get that to continue, because it's really challenging for our career services people to find people who have not been in touch for a while and loop them in. We're a lot more successful when we build a really awesome culture in the classroom and that continues into the job search, where students are building with each other, going to hackathons together, having stand-ups together, mock interviewing each other with problems, or so on. So it's really trying to invest in not only the work career services does but building community and camaraderie so that that continues in month three, month five, when things are tougher, and so on. So I think it's kind of been where we've tried to invest.

Don Hansen: 25:38

I like that idea of building up momentum, especially getting them started with a job search while they still have that support, because I think a lot of coding bootcamps will wait and they'll say, no, focus on the technical. And I like that switch and I think that can work given that the workload isn't too much.

Elie Schoppik: 25:59

We've really seen both. We've seen, you know, I worked at places where career services came in in week four and started talking about the job search and then all the students who are just trying to build a crud app and something are like, oh my God, I need to think about the job search. So it really is a fine line. We've definitely kind of pushed back and forth of can it be week 12?, can it be week 14?, can it be week 15? And I think once you are out of the curriculum phase and once you are ready to start, you know, maybe the later stages of the project period, that's where you know get your head into job search. Because especially now you mentioned the job search to a student in week one and two there's anxiety in this market. It's just exponentially more so definitely a tug of war there.

Don Hansen: 26:40

That's fair. So, like I said when we started, I mentioned your policy and your focus on internships and getting a little bit of professional experience. What has that evolved into?

Elie Schoppik: 26:55

So the intention of that was originally how can we get our students working on a large scale code base, just so that they can get used to what it looks like when you got more than five or 10 folders, or what it looks like when you have a more complicated dev environment to set up? And we tried to play around with lots of things, whether it's let's go do open source or let's go do some volunteer work or let's go find a large project and it's been really really, really tough to nail that down because we're kind of at a back and forth with. There's the marketing around it where students come in and are like in three weeks I'm going to contribute to a large code base at a company. But I think we both know that in the real world it usually takes a lot of time to get up to speed on a code base and make valuable contributions, and there's a whole code review process.

Elie Schoppik: 27:40

So it's not like you're just pushing code on day one and you've, you know, added some gigantic feature. What we've been able to do, fortunately, is work with two, three companies consistently, where the instructors are also familiar with the code base, which is another big challenge of you know how can we help the students when we're experiencing a new code base every three to six months? So we got that down to two or three companies that we work with relatively consistently. These are smaller startups that have the engineering resources to help our students give code reviews, help us when we have questions, but also large enough code bases where the students will take a couple days just to try to figure out what's going on. So the challenge that we have on the marketing front is students think that they're going to build all these things and get all this work done.

Elie Schoppik: 28:26

What we know honestly is you're probably not going to get a tremendous amount of work done. But are you going to be able in interviews, to combat one of the biggest stigmas against coding bootcamp grads? They can't get up to speed quickly, they haven't written serious code, they haven't really gone through a code review process. What did they know of modular, testable you know, et cetera? That's the stuff that we're really trying to combat against. So how can you tell a story of a large code base that you worked on, features that you added to code review processes that you went to and also just staying in line with being a professional software engineer?

Elie Schoppik: 29:06

So it's always a bit of a challenge from the marketing side and kind of bringing down the student expectation of when we get to this point. I'm going to tell you what it's really going to be like. It's going to be a lot of learning a particular new technology or getting up to speed on something. What's been hard for us and what we've really just, I'd say, gotten much better at, is having a sustainable list of projects where they're well-scoped enough, we know the engineering team well enough and we can kind of help curate the right set of issues that students can get enough done so that they have something to talk about but also have something more realistic where you know it's mimicking what the real world is offering.

Don Hansen: 29:34

I like that way of thinking. Does every student have a one-on-one opportunity to get that internship experience with another company?

Elie Schoppik: 29:42

No, there are some situations where and this has actually been quite helpful for us we have a very, very large LMS that we built. It's a very large Django application. Majority of it is written by our VP of Education, who is an extremely experienced Django developer, and we've worked on that as a tool for students to have during the project period. It is very large software in a very real world that we use internally, also that we white label to other companies who are interested in our curriculum and our LMS, but it's something that we can really curate and control.

Elie Schoppik: 30:12

So we had, you know, for example, two or so years ago we had an opportunity to work with Slack and we were working on a you know their bolt product and it was this open source TypeScript application to get things up and running with one of their bots and it seemed incredible on paper but we worked on it for three weeks and barely heard from their engineers. We had PRs that were waiting for days, didn't get feedback and it was not a great experience for the students, but it was the I did something with Slack For us. I'd much rather you work on the LMS that we have build really meaningful features on a very large code base, very well-tested code base, very well-documented code base, so that you know what it's like getting up to speed, building things in that kind of production ecosystem. So, depending on the project, depending on the time, depending on the staff member that's managing it sometimes it's internal tools and other companies, sometimes it's companies. Sometimes, especially with smaller classes, it's just internal tooling that we can do.

Don Hansen: 31:10

I think that's a really interesting alternative and coding boot camps have often shied away from getting non-teachers assistance, from contributing to the internal tools. It's difficult and it takes a while to ramp people up and you know, I've managed. I used to host a meetup in Chicago for people that just needed help becoming a developer and I tried to create this project and I tried to bring in as many people as possible and be the project manager and come up with all these features and I was overwhelmed. I feel like it's a really difficult process to come up with all these features and the right features to be able to give everyone kind of a fair amount of work, even to, you know, just just learn a little bit more. I guess professional architecture, something just to get them past their personal projects where they're just getting the code of work and teaching a little bit of architecture and organizational patterns. But I was overwhelmed Is your learning application that big where you can accommodate some of the other students and actually give each of them features?

Elie Schoppik: 32:23

Yeah, very much. So. It's a very large Django application which lends itself nicely to. You and I can work on some features for admissions and reporting. You and I can work on some features for uploading lectures and calculating metrics or building dashboards around lecture views and so on, and you and I can build funnels for sending confirmation emails, and you and I can work on referral workflows and such. So it's not something that 16 students could work on by any means. It caps out around that 10 or 12 number and you got to then at that point have multiple instructors managing it. It's also just a.

Elie Schoppik: 32:54

It's a big reason why this doesn't work if you have a class of more than 20, 25 and so on. So it works because of the small class size, but at the same time, we've also been very thoughtful when building it of what are some things that students can do that are very, very, very small, low-hanging fruit. Sometimes that also is hey, this you know, we've got I don't know 95% test coverage. Let's go ahead and write some tests for this last piece. The students will then learn a bit about that code-based through writing tests, as you would at most places, and then go ahead and layer some things on, but a lot of it kind of like you mentioned.

Elie Schoppik: 33:24

It's why it's much easier for us to use internal tools versus a company that then says, oh, we're interested, or a startup that is not technical, that says, cool, we'll take three weeks of free labor and there's no code quality, there's no control. So it's really trying to be diligent about that piece, which is the personal projects are great, but when you have to write code where there's actually a stakeholder, there's actually a customer, there's actually mission critical pieces that if it doesn't work you're in trouble. It's just a whole different world and it's really trying to expose them to that kind of stuff, as opposed to the trying to convince someone that you worked at a company for three weeks and now you are a senior engineer or whatever you want to use there.

Don Hansen: 34:09

Sure Titles, uh, tossed out quite a bit for new developers, um, people. So I have a good sense of the culture of aspiring developers. I've talked to so many and there is a growing hatred, like a true hatred, for the coding bootcamp industry in general, and it's just, it's regret. It's like a lot of coding bootcamps I think incorrectly are labeled as scams and I think it stems from people kind of just forced to going through their own route. There are a lot of self-taught developers that don't have a lot of money right now and they want to shit on CS grads, they want to shit on coding bootcamp grads, but a lot of it is also coding bootcamp grads who have been screwed over by coding bootcamps and they have a lot of anger. You know, understandably, but there is a growing culture of true hatred and distrust for the coding bootcamp industry and I'm curious because I feel like you're someone that you know keeps your finger on the pulse. I'm curious if you've picked up on this culture and what you just think about the coding bootcamp industry in general.

Elie Schoppik: 35:23

I want to at one 10 minute glance at the subreddit for coding bootcamps and you will get everything you need to know about how people are feeling. So yeah, I mean for profit, education gets really scummy really quickly and this is kind of the reckoning for our industry and it's really tough. It's really tough trying to combat that stigma while also acknowledging that because there is a truth, there are lots of unemployed bootcamp grads out there, some of whom that are went to rhythm, so it's not like we're perfect by any means, but at the same time it's something we're well aware of. The same time it's it's something we're well aware of and I think there have been a lot, of, a lot of places that have and you know I'm curious about your thoughts here but a lot of the taglines of the.

Elie Schoppik: 36:11

Anybody can learn to code and I've always had a really hard time with that because the second you start fighting that it's a you know well how dare you.

Elie Schoppik: 36:18

But there's also a reason you know I'm not a heart surgeon or a jazz flautist or whatever it is because this is really hard and this takes a lot of time and it takes a certain kind of person who really wants to do this to be successful and we were very fortunate that in the hiring market there was a shortage a long, long time ago and there have been booms of sword and money was cheap and VC funding was all over the place and you could get a six figure job if you were somewhat decent, and then maybe you figure it out, or now you are unemployed and back into that vicious cycle.

Elie Schoppik: 36:49

So it's just a really, really difficult time and we have our finger on the pulse. I think my hope is that over time, as some of the bad actors or more challenging situations fade out and less boot camps exist or less demand for boot camps exist, we can go back to a place where we're still staying small, we're still doing our thing and a bit of that stigma kind of goes away. But it's always been there. There's always been the knock against coding boot camp grads, you know, even since dev boot camp in the early days. But there's a lot more more, and rightfully so. So our fingers on the pulse, but I think we're leaning into it and just acknowledging it as much as we can, because I can't fight that there's a lot of truth behind it.

Don Hansen: 37:35

I think two things are going to happen. One, there are a lot of people. When the pandemic hit, there were a lot of people that really questioned their careers and they wanted a change and I understand that, and they wanted a better life. And they were misled with a misconception that anyone can code. Anyone can learn to code. I actually believe, you know, aside from like a severe learning disability disability like there are going to be exceptions to this but anyone can learn to code if you truly love it, if you have that curiosity because, like you said, it's lengthy and you're going to hit so many roadblocks and like, do you have what it takes a drive to push past those roadblocks? Eventually you will land that position. If you really do love it, you just keep pushing forward. But I think a lot of people just want more money and they went into this industry and there are a lot of content creators and there are a lot of coding boot camps that sold this dream that it was a get rich quick scheme and it's not. And I think a lot of people are facing a brutal reality. Especially with the market getting rougher, they're facing that even more. I think a lot of people are just going to quit and so I think a lot of people that weren't really serious about this they might find another area in tech which is great Like I would love for them to have a better life but they will quit and they'll leave and I think the market will start to self-correct. The intro market will self-correct in time for a few reasons, but I think that's going to be one reason and that's okay. If it's not for you, it's not for you.

Don Hansen: 39:05

But also, like you said, a lot of coding bootcamps, a lot of them that really tried to scale and they try to push as many people as possible into their remote programs with in, like you know, 50 people per class size and they haven't really thoroughly tested it or stress tested it and they just everyone came out with like a low quality education.

Don Hansen: 39:25

Like those coding boot camps that truly try to scale during the pandemic, I think they're the ones that are hurting the most and I it sucks for the students. But I am truly glad to see those coding boot camps going under, because the coding boot camp space used to be about providing an alternative education to people that couldn't get a cs degree. That's what it used to be about providing an alternative education to people that couldn't get a CS degree. That's what it used to be about and empowering people and like there are bad actors that just truly ruined it. Uh, but I I do think it's going to self-correct and I but I do think that trust for coding bootcamps it's going to take a while to recover.

Elie Schoppik: 39:57

Yeah, I completely agree on that. I think you can. You can learn a lot about a coding bootcamp from whether the founders or co-founders are people who have been in the classroom or just behind a desk, and that tells you a lot about the boot camp. And you do not get to meet or see your teacher or teachers or the people who are going to be educating you when you're forking over five-figure amounts of money over multiple months is just madness. So the best thing that we can do is hand over more control to the customer and let the customer make the smart decision, because with the market and you know, with the more angry customer comes a wiser customer. So to your point, I do hope that as there is more negativity and as that kind of continues, the people who really do want to do this, or the people who are serious about it, can kind of look at that negativity and realize what are the real questions they need to ask. And when am I getting these kinds of messages that clearly don't work, that I should not be listening to?

Don Hansen: 41:05

I like that and I think your students that do sign up are those people. And you're right, there's a big difference between, because I think it's so easy to vent on social media, it's so easy to vent on social media. It's so easy to vent on Reddit and really distract yourself from actually being self-critical about your path. Do I really want to do this and how do I make this work and how do I shut off this noise to be able to do it? The people that truly want to do this will figure that out and it's going to be rough in the beginning, but they, they will. Um, I think I want to wrap up with this Um, who is successful in your program and who is probably going to take a very long time to be successful? Who's struggling a lot more? Are there personality traits? Are there actions that they're taking or not taking? Who's successful and who's not successful?

Elie Schoppik: 42:03

Great question. We get this many times, obviously from prospective students. I think, to lean into something you said earlier, it's curiosity. It's the when my code doesn't work, do I fix it and move on. Or do I ask gtbg or Claude or whatever and move on. Or do I try to figure it out and then ask why didn't that work? Or when I use some library, do I ask myself how does this work? And then get to that fork in the road of I probably can figure this out, or this is something React is doing and I'm just not there yet and I'm going to move on. So curiosity is a huge part of it. That's a really good tell of. Is this something you want to do? Is this something you're interested in? Or is it just I wrote the code, the code works and now I'm done, because this process is it's always evolutionary. You're always going to take code and refactor it or think about how to better design it or share it with other people and talk to them about it. So the curiosity piece is super, super important.

Elie Schoppik: 42:57

Some folks are stronger problem solvers out of the gate than others. Some of that is their background, some of that is just their general aptitude. I think that is something that can be improved with time, but I do think that some folks are better at problem solving than others, and I think that is a part of it and that's what our interview also aims to suss out. At the same time you know this as well as I do the job search is equally, if not sometimes more, behavioral than technical. So are there folks that have either existing networks, are there folks who have job searched before, have been in careers before and know this process?

Elie Schoppik: 43:30

We see this challenge with folks that have not really had much time in industry, in any industry of sort graduating a bootcamp and searching for a job. This is their first job and that's really challenging for a lot of folks, because not only is this a job in a new industry, but this is the first time you are job seeking. So do you know what to expect? So there definitely is a skew, for if you have some experience in some industry you've demonstrated some aptitude in a different industry that can often translate to showing your abilities in software engineering. Curiosity, and then it sounds cheesy, but grit, it's just really the number one thing.

Elie Schoppik: 44:05

It's, you know whether you have a STEM background or whether you just work retail for a couple of years. It doesn't matter if you are the person who is going to sit down with that code and bang your head against the wall for a long time and go through that kind of tough learning process to really understand what things are doing, because that's just the way that you accelerate and that's the way you do better. So curiosity, grit and the ability to know how to job search and having an existing network is always helpful, but knowing how to make new ones is equally as valuable.

Don Hansen: 44:36

That's all really good advice, even to people outside the coding bootcamp industry, and I think a lot of people that have just dealt with a lot of shit in their life, that have overcome that that adversity, like a lot of them, are going to have a higher success rate as software engineers because that grit is so important. You just you talk to some aspiring developers who will just give up so much more easily than some other people and it's really hard to convince them to keep going long term. It has to come internally and I think it comes from solving problems in your life and dealing with a lot of crap in your life and getting through it and having that confidence that you can get through it. Grit is underestimated. That needs to be highlighted more. I think one thing I got to give you guys credit for him.

Don Hansen: 45:26

So, like when I review coding boot camps, like I'm an asshole. I'm an asshole because I want students to. It's for the students. I quite frankly, I don't give a shit about the coding boot camps. If, like, any coding boot camp goes under because of like just producing a bunch of lower quality education, that's fine. I'm not married to any coding boot camp and I know I'm an asshole and I know I pissed off staff, I know I pissed off CEOs and I noticed a very interesting thing A lot of the coding boot camps who are producing or continue to produce quality students and adapt to this market to be able to be successful are not coding boot camps who were so sensitive to my criticism that they just would not take any of my suggestions or any of their students' suggestions in my podcast episodes.

Don Hansen: 46:23

Because I know all of them have seen my podcast episodes and some handled it better than others and, like I said, like I can be a jerk about it, but it's always for the students and I think one thing and I was fairly critical of rhythm and one thing you guys did very well you did not take it personally at all, um, you handled it very well, um, because we're very kind.

Don Hansen: 46:43

I remember talking to someone that that reached out, but it just gave me a good signal that you guys actually care about improving because you have to be able to um. I mean like you're getting a lot more crap from the entire community now just being a coding boot camp and you got to be able to just distinguish between good advice and just noise and you can't take it personally and you just have to kind of go with a bit of a gut feeling and data-driven decision to actually improve your program. But a lot of coding boot camps that had higher ups that were sensitive to feedback I feel like I'm just starting to see them truly struggle and they're not adapting well. So I just want to give you credit for that. You guys did a really good job.

Elie Schoppik: 47:28

Appreciate that. Yeah, I mean I think we, we know who we are and with that obviously there are strengths and weaknesses. But you know we, every lecture we give, we have students fill out a survey. Every two weeks in the program we have students fill out a survey. It's anonymous and it's really helpful for things like how's the pace, how's the quality of the instruction. Most of the time that feedback is very positive because you know we're confident, we're good at what we do, we spend a lot of time in the curriculum and we care about the students. But other times it's not the case. So you know, we get, we get a lot of those punches and as educators and as experienced educators, there is that mix of you know, actually Don's right or there's a you know that's Don's opinion and that's cool. So I think we you know, we know what we are and we roll with it.

Don Hansen: 48:11

I like it. Well, ellie, I really appreciate you coming on. I want to give you a chance to like if I didn't ask, um, or I missed out on a question you wish I would have asked. I want to give you a chance to kind of just wrap it up with any other thoughts you want to share and, uh, please feel free to shout out whatever's going on with Rhythm for coming on to my podcast.

Elie Schoppik: 48:31

Sure, yeah, I mean. Thanks again for having me on. I really appreciate the frank conversation. I know it is a very, very difficult time in this space. I think we've both spoken about there's optimism for the future, but it might take a little while.

Elie Schoppik: 48:42

So we just encourage anybody that is looking at prospective coding bootcamps to make sure you get a chance, like we mentioned, to see those teachers that you're going to spend time with teach or meet them or talk to them and get a chance to know what you're really getting yourself into. Be cautious with every conversation and trust your judgment with what you're looking at. You know we've got programs starting in June and programs starting in August. We run every eight weeks and we plan to be around for a while and hope to be around for a while, but at the end of the day, it is a tough time for our industry and if you are hearing otherwise, I would really really question that. So just kind of keep that in mind. For folks looking at this space, getting into the space and I think you're doing some good work here, even if the feedback is critical it's important to get the word out.

Don Hansen: 49:31

I really appreciate that. All right, well, everyone watching. Feel free to comment below. I'm kind of curious what your thoughts are, and you know, I know most of my community. They're full of self-taught developers. I know a lot of you are self-taught. I know money's tight, but I think there was also a lot of good advice that truly does carry over from the coding bootcamp industry to more of the self-taught path and hopefully that was helpful. But I want to hear your thoughts. Ellie, stick around for a couple of minutes, but thanks so much for coming on.

Elie Schoppik: 50:01

One last little thing for those folks who are self-taught and do not have the resources. We do a ton of free meetups. I love to teach for a living living, so we've taught all things from general problem solving and data structures and you know, working with uh, building things with ai and such. So take a look at the website, come join us for some events. They're totally free and you can just get to get a, get a sense of what we're about. So I hope to uh get some of your folks in our community love it all right.

Don Hansen: 50:24

Well, thanks for tossing out that offer. All right guys, that's it. We're gonna wrap it up here. Uh, good luck on all.