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Education Programming

Coding School 'The Iron Yard' Announces Closure of All 15 Campuses (ajc.com) 101

Posted by BeauHD from the difficult-decisions dept.
McGruber writes: The Iron Yard, a South Carolina-based coding school with 15 locations, announced that it plans to close all of its campuses. The four-old company posted a message on its website delivering the news: "In considering the current environment, the board of The Iron Yard has made the difficult decision to cease operations at all campuses after teaching out remaining summer cohorts." The note said the company will finish out its summer classes, including career support.
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Coding School 'The Iron Yard' Announces Closure of All 15 Campuses More

Coding School 'The Iron Yard' Announces Closure of All 15 Campuses

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  • Bootcamp bubble popped... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    but all education is hurting. I work in "traditional" higher ed, and our enrollment is down too. Basically, the trump economy is so damn good that people can get jobs without having to pay the education shakedown first. Bad for bootcamps and middle ranking state schools, but great for workers.

    • This place appeared to not teach general coding, but was focused on web development. It's not the equivalent of even a trade school. I suspect it's most useful for people who are already able to program but who want a crash course in web development. But it was the current fashion to panic that we don't have enough coders, and that everyone from kindergarteners to grandmas should be learning to "code", which created a market opportunity.

      • Re:Bootcamp bubble popped... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday July 20, 2017 @06:06PM (#54849591)

        I suspect it's most useful for people who are already able to program but who want a crash course in web development.

        If you already know coding, you can learn webdev in a few days from free on-line tutorials or maybe a $20 book from Amazon.

        everyone from kindergarteners to grandmas should be learning to "code"

        Nearly everyone can benefit from coding. I have written many Google Sheets triggers, plugins for Quickbooks, etc. for friends and relatives. These are usually a dozen or so lines of Javascript, and maybe a few regexes. If you can code, this is trivial, but if you can't then you are stuck.

        All of these people took algebra in high school. None of them have used algebra, even once, since HS. So it is silly that our schools teach algebra and not coding ... and please don't say "You need algebra to understand coding" because that is patently false. I have taught 4th graders to code, and they certainly haven't learned algebra.

        • If they had taken 'coding' instead of algebra in high school, they'd have forgotten it since then. Sadly, the truth is it doesn't matter what people study in HS, they forget it quickly unless it directly applies to their job afterwards.

          • Even if they hadn't, whatever they'd been coding in would be obsolete.

            • Re:Bootcamp bubble popped... (Score:5, Informative)

              by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday July 20, 2017 @08:01PM (#54850111)

              Even if they hadn't, whatever they'd been coding in would be obsolete.

              I went to college 35 years ago, and learned C, along with data structures, algorithms, and TCP/IP networking.
              Amount of what I learned that is now obsolete: 0%.

              • You still use Class A networks in your CIDR work?

                • Back then when you learned something in college it was about concepts, not petty details that change every few years. Thus learning the prinicples behind networking are still viable today. Queueing theory is still a vital tool, congestion is still a problem. But sheesh, 35 years ago IPv4 was already old, and it's still the dominant network today.

                  • Did they teach reading comprehension in college?

                    See, the article is about coder mills and this branch is about highschool.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by jon3k ( 691256 )
                  Still important to know what that is, I've seen RIPv1 running in some strange places.

          • But, you learn A so that you can learn B, and you learn B so that you can learn C. Maybe you forget details about A but at least you've learned C.

            Think of education as exercise for the brain. So what if you forget what you learned if it made your brain stronger?

        • I use algebra all the time as a professional programmer. Even more complex math*. Programming is hard and requires domain knowledge. But algebra? Why wouldn't they use it? You need algebra I to learn it to learn geometry, calculus, etc. You need geometry to do UI design. You need algebra to deal with circuits. Sure you don't need to remember the details of the quadratic equation, but you need to have learned this stuff so that you can learn other more complicate stuff. Even if someone wants to be an

          • You need geometry to do UI design.

            What is taught in a geometry class that is relevant to laying out a webpage? Do you use Euclid's axioms to properly pad a text field?

            algebra helps you figure out how many dollars you're making for every page you wrote and how to invest your profits wisely.

            No it doesn't. That is just arithmetic.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by skids ( 119237 )

          If you already know coding, you can learn webdev in a few days from free on-line tutorials or maybe a $20 book from Amazon.

          Not that this place actually taught it, I dunno, but this is no longer true. Proper web development these days involves learning to integrate tons of really bad declarative "code" from conflicting committee-designed standards together in a way that runs on tons of different poorly or only partialy implemented browsers and then integrating that with whatever flavor of backend was popular back when your predecessor implemented the last backend refactor. A good web developer knows a crapton about a lot of re

        • You don't need algebra to code, but consider https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/68026042/ which is a (not so shitty) Q-Bert clone I wrote while sitting in my daughter's 'Summer of Code' with Scratch class. It could have been done without much Algebra, and for the most part, I don't use much Algebra in the code. I do however make use of discrete mathematics... quite heavily. And to use discrete mathematics, you can be the person who says "I ain't got no pizza", then try to solve your problem because the person

      • So when they say "coding school", what they really mean is "diploma mill/student loan scam".

    • higher ed has loans that can't be discharged. Schools like this do not.

    • Ah, yes, making America great again by popularizing the phrase "Education Schmeducation". Thanks Donnie T-Bag!

    • I work in "traditional" higher ed, and our enrollment is down too.

      Is that necessarily a bad thing? While I understand that education and vocational training aren't the same thing, shaking out a few Klingon Studies and Underwater Basketweaving courses wouldn't be a great loss - even to the students taking them.

  • ... what is the current environment?

    In considering the current environment, ...

  • would go to a coding school? Coding schools churn out code monkeys. There's nothing wrong with that but there are damn few code monkey jobs to go around between outsourcing and H1-Bs. You're typically competing with kids rocking real degrees (e.g. a C.S. degree from a State University). You're better off saving your money and spending time on a git hub account.

  • Seems the scam has run its course (Score:4, Informative)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday July 20, 2017 @06:29PM (#54849729)

    And the stream of victims is drying up now. Good.

    • And the stream of victims is drying up now. Good.

      Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. There will be other scams, other victims (even some of the same victims). When people want to believe something, proof to the contrary is ignored, or all too often, not even looked for. Just look at all the people who are dependent on Obamacare who want it killed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I was talking about the stream of victims for this particular scam, of course. Scams will always be around, and so will be people falling for them. But the "easily learn to code" scam is hurting society as a whole far more than other scams, because it holds back the development of coding as an engineering task that is difficult, needs talent, needs a real education and needs to be paid well. Before we reach that, software will continue to suck, and that comes with huge costs for society.

        • It's not the schools that are holding back coding as an engineering task that is difficult, needs talent, needs a real education, and needs to be paid.

          This is what happens to any field where the barrier to entry becomes lower thanks to progress. Today anyone can write software, be a journalist, make movies, etc.

          The failure of the people coming from these schools isn't going to affect the course of software development, because they won't get hired for anything important. The software that already sucks w

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            That "AI coder" is not going to happen anytime soon, if ever. The current attempts to do this are the 3rd (or 4th?) attempt to do so and all those before have not failed because of lack of computing power. The basic mistake is seeing coding as "commodity" and not the creative engineering task it is. Current weak AI will not do anything here, it cannot synthesize things, it can only do statistical classification. And while it is bigger and faster and that moves some problems within its grasp, coding will not

            • And you think engineering tasks can't be commodified, spec'ed out, and turned over to AI expert systems? Anything that can be boiled down to a system of specifications and rules can be automated. Including engineering. Doesn't need strong AI.

              Humans no longer do the design layout of the most complex cpus. It's beyond us. So we've automated it. Apply enough money (there's LOTS of money in chips) to any problem and it WILL be automated.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by gweihir ( 88907 )

                Wrong. And that is exactly the faulty argument used last time. Fist thing is that creating a spec that can actually be synthesized is significantly _more_ effort than directly writing code from a rough spec. Second thing is that even with an exact spec, you cannot synthesize good software for it. Seriously, have a look into the literature before claiming complete BS, and I do not mean the popular press by this.

                The money argument is pretty bogus as well and just shows you do not understand how things actuall

                • You misunderstood. The original code will be written by humans. It will be improved over time by AI. And you're wrong about chip design. It HAS changed over the last 20 years. No team of humans can manually lay out a chip with 7 billion transistors. Not in their lifetime. That's why it's no longer done manually by humans, except for certain portions, which will become fewer as time goes on. This was true even in 2010 [anandtech.com]. From an intel engineer

                  All of the analog circuitry, arrays, and performance-sensitive parts are definitely hand-drawn (schematics) and hand laid out. We're one of the few places that actually still do this (apparently Apple does too). You can tell which parts were laid out by hand if you look at die photos.

                  It's only a matter of time before they have to go full automation, a

      • No doubt some around here will blame the victims - I won't name names - but it's a special kind of meanness to prey on those who are genuinely trying to better themselves.

        • No doubt some around here will blame the victims - I won't name names - but it's a special kind of meanness to prey on those who are genuinely trying to better themselves.

          And yet the victims do have to share in the blame. They didn't do even the most cursory of checks, because they were blinded by the idea of making a living without investing any hard work.

          • Citation for "without investing any hard work".

            • From personal experience. I've worked with a few of these monkeys who were taken on temporarily for "training purposes" to finish their 1-year course. One didn't even know how to use a mouse after 9 months. The only one I'm able to track down still hasn't found work in the field, and he was the best of the bunch. He actually did study on his own - he already knew how to set up a linux vm before he took the class. The rest obviously just sat in class and got passed based on attendance.

              A decade before that I

  • SC based Coding School (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Let's open a surfing school in Alaska next.
    Or a have a Tofu eating contest in Texas...
    Snow driving course in Florida?

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