Why does nobody warn you about paid coding bootcamp projects that just don't work

I spent $200 on a 12-week Python bootcamp and their final project template was so broken the instructor just said 'figure it out'. Ended up building my own portfolio piece from scratch anyway. Anyone else feel like you're paying to teach yourself?

2 comments

2 Comments

richard_wells591mo ago

Gotta disagree here man. The whole point of bootcamps is learning how to fix broken stuff. Real dev work is just debugging someone else's bad code all day. Sounds like you got $200 worth of real world experience.

troyp371mo ago

You ever notice how every trade or skill has that one piece of gear that everybody swears by but nobody actually knows how to use right? It's like when someone buys a fancy torque wrench but still tightens lug nuts by feel until they hear the "click" (which is the sound of a broken stud, by the way). Same thing with bootcamps - they hand you a shiny toolbelt full of frameworks and jargon, but you don't really learn the craft until you've spent a Saturday afternoon elbow-deep in some janky legacy code that's older than the person who wrote it. That $200 ticket they got is just paying for the lesson that the real world doesn't care about your perfect bootstrap template, it cares about why the thing snapped at 3 AM.