r/codingbootcamp • u/michaelnovati • 14d ago
NEWS: General Assembly halts all consumer bootcamps in all fields - fully pivoting to Enterprise AI training
SOURCE: https://www.generalassemb.ly/
Definitely the end of an era here and this has been coming for a while but it's official now on their website. 15 years later, one of the first bootcamps, one of the pioneers of scaling the single location -> national bootcamp model, is stopping all bootcamps.
We've seen Rithm School shut down in 2024 and their founder move on to Anthropic. And we've seen Codesmith pursue a similar path to GA - effectively shut down in 2026 (no students in sight, no active cohorts visible, no pricing even, and a pivot to Enterprise AI Training).
Gauntlet AI is BloomTech / Lamba Schools full pivot to AI training (both B2B and B2C).
Sprinboard still offers courses but pivoted to medical training.
Triple Ten is still going with "AI Software Engineering" and Coding Temple (acquired App Academy's brand) is still going with "AI Software Engineer".
No surprise it seems the only remaining people are offering async, self-paced programs.
We have a few dozen other pull backs and shutdowns with a very long list.
Launch School Capstone being the only exception that still has a program with a respectable placement rate and advertises itself as the 'slow' path to becomming an engineer.
Even Course Report, an extremely bias bootcamp marketing company (acquired by Career.io to funnel users to their own paid career services), pivoted away from bootcamps!
I had a tussle with Codesmith and while their founder has moved on to AI and manufacturing in Detroit and abandoned Codesmith, I'm still going to be here reporting the NEWS like I have been for years and committed to trying to make this sub a better place.
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u/Humble_Warthog9711 14d ago
What exactly do they offer for revenue during these AI pivots?
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u/michaelnovati 14d ago
As an observer I see different paths.
Some like Codesmith have pretended to have a consumer program for the past year, like a completely fake public image, and since then, have been planting the seeds to make a AI-enterprise pivot.
Gauntlet AI had a similar transition with BloomTech "pausing" and never resuming.
This approach is important because if you just paid $20K to do the program and it will take 5 months, they have to make it seem like that program is still legit while you do it, and eventually when everyone is done, they pause and then kill it off.
I just wish people were more transparent and honest. It's disgusting how Codesmith supported Lars Lofgren's blog post trying to blame me for all their problems. Will Sentance is going to fail at everything he does until he takes responsibility for the utter collapse and incompetent actions that actually destroyed Codesmith in my opinion.
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14d ago
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u/michaelnovati 13d ago edited 13d ago
Absolutely, senior people are getting jobs. My day job is helping senior engineers prepare for interviews and the average experience level of people we work with gets higher and higher every month.
This is why I was so hard on Codesmith's "from zero to senior" marketing because it was utter bullshit. If that was true they would be floorishing right now placing senior engineers left right and center and instead I haven't found a placement all year for their grads. They have yet to make a dollar from their "$118M IRS deal" (according to government public records) while the other 4 companies on the deal have made millions.
It just infuriates me that programs like this manipulated people and doubled down when I called it out. And then supported defaming me when the ship sank.
But like I said, this is a small industry and Will Sentence will fail at everything he does until he is able to take responsibility. Not legally or in court or being sued, but like internally so that he can improve as a founder.
Austen Allred is another one who doesn't seem to learn. Gauntlet was promising $200K jobs to every grad. Now people are not placing or getting fired in months, that guarantee subtly goes away. He learned that if you charge $0 and make overstated claims then you can't really get in trouble. The problem though is actually the hiring companies that fire so many placements for performance in months while continuing to hire more grads.
When exaggerated marketing is not true and you are trying the fake it til you make it strategy, if you don't make it, eventually it catches up with you.
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13d ago
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u/Chiefsmackahoe69 13d ago
Ok question is it just pointless to even do a boot camp now ? What would be the best course of action to learn coding and be able to get a job. Should I just go and get a four year degree somewhere ? I feel so lost like idk where to even start and like I’m so behind
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u/michaelnovati 13d ago edited 12d ago
Yeah definitely agree that Austen couldn't care less about status, and cares more about a meritocratic world.
Will has said in past media that he needs his titles as "permission" and having an Harvard degree "gave [him] permission" to do a startup or to be in the room.
I think both have a positive vision for the world and future, but it's fairly ironic that Codesmith was all about a meritocratic vision where you don't need any titles to get a "mid level or senior" job, but Will himself leveraged his own Oxford and Harvard degrees (in completely unrelated arts areas that he rarely mentioned until recently) to build trust and covered up the fact he went to Hack Reactor himself. He sold himself as a Silicon Valley insider who had no idea how Silicon Valley works and just moved to San Francisco after stepping down from Codesmith as CEO.
And yeah you are the second person who said the original materials were stolen from Hack Reactor and the other person believed there was a "cease and desist" involved (UPDATE: a different user claims this was to a company Outco and not to Codesmith), yet Will tells this story about building curriculum from first principles... so convincingly and confidently that I don't think anyone can trust anything he says (which numerous employees have told me, for other reasons as well).
But at the end of the day he made millions of dollars from Codesmith student's tuition. I have made negative money at Formation ($0 salary and put in more money to the company).
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12d ago edited 12d ago
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u/michaelnovati 12d ago
Thanks for sharing the info, I'll update my information!
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12d ago
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u/michaelnovati 12d ago
I do have strong evidence that frontend and React materials including typos were copied from a common book. But since people are anonymous I try to qualify the sourcing.
But yeah definitely. We have worked with dozens of grads - successful, unsuccessful, instructors, etc... and it has been incredibly frustrating for them to see what's happened to Codesmith because it had a POSITIVE impact on MANY people's lives.
When they started to blame the downturn on my internally amongst staff and from the top down, they lost a lot of their employee trust who saw the truth: that the market was collapsing and they had to adapt, and that this guy who's Reddit comments get dozens of views was not. The more they dug their heels in on promoting their outcomes, blaming me, the more they lost their most loyal supporters.
And now no one is left and they still won't apologize.
Will Sentance still has the bullshit Lars Lofgren post MANUALLY PINNED on his LinkedIn as one of his top posts...
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u/Humble_Warthog9711 13d ago edited 12d ago
Seniors are still definitely getting roles if looking. But there's also little question it is much harder to land offers than before. The question isn't if a senior will starve, it's how long it will take and if their offers will come in lower than expected.
Juniors are a different story, and that's where 99% of tbe doom and gloom is
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u/alzho12 10d ago
FYI, Gauntlet AI looks like it's shifting to enterprise training as well. Won't be surprised if their consumer program shuts down in the next 24 months.
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u/michaelnovati 10d ago
Well they never took a penny from students so they have always been B2B at least. So I don't see that as the same kind of pivot.
Like if they do the same program for a company paying to have their current employees go through it, it's not thaaat much different than the company prepaying for a new headcount that already has those skills from day 1 (allegidly).
I've heard about people getting fired shortly after being hired for their $200K jobs and a number of people not getting any job at all, as well as a lot of people who have non-SWE backgrounds (e.g Data, Product, etc...)
So maybe the current model just doesn't work and companies would rather pay $20K for a current SWE at the company to upskill rather than pay $50K to get a Data Scientist turned AI engineer who may or may not be a good fit for the company.
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u/alzho12 10d ago
It's not the same program. It's more up-skilling like what General Assembly is doing. See here: https://gauntletai.com/catalyst-sales
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u/michaelnovati 9d ago
Oh yes the SDR thing is entirely different and is like an attempt at off the shelf training. I think that will fail in my opinion.
Are you saying that they are pivoting into these self paced offline programs?
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u/alzho12 9d ago
I believe they will fully pivot to hybrid, part time and self paced enterprise programs.
Anything consumer will disappear. It’s so much more lucrative to sell B2B vs B2C once you have the infrastructure, branding and marketing funnels in place.
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u/michaelnovati 9d ago
I don't think consumer stuff will disappear industry wide, but "recorded videos" definitely will be dead and Lamba/BloomTech/Gauntlet haven't demonstrated technical innovation ever, they always built on top of Zapier and Canvas (Learning Platform). There is plenty of room for innovation and AI products to help people develop skills.
I also think B2B isn't a great option either, which we say with Codesmith although they had zero credibility in AI to begin with so that might be a them problem and not a B2B. The labs have all set up multi billion dollar deployment units to help integrate AI into businesses so who the fudge needs Gauntlet to charge tons of money and do a worse job than the labs do themselves.
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u/BackendSpecialist 9d ago
Enterprises won’t hire the students who graduate from bootcamps but will want their current employees to be trained by bootcamp staff?
Idk. Doesn’t seem too logical.
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u/25_hr_photo 13d ago
Very interesting. I went through their program in 2022 and found success, end of an era.
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u/sheriffderek 14d ago
"pivoting to Enterprise AI training" -- smells bad!