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Jonathan Lau discovered his passion for programming while working at an environmental consulting firm where he processed data with his own automated scripts. It wasn’t a big part of his job, but he loved it. So he decided to leave the firm and look for work as a web developer.
Now, years later, he’s come up with an idea designed to help out other developers who decide to finally get serious about their coding. It’s called Switch; Lau thinks of it as a kind of Yelp for programming schools.
It was his own experience that gave Lau the seed for the Switch idea. Although he had taken a programming class in college, Lau didn’t know anything about coding for the web. He didn’t want to learn strictly on his own, but having already shelled out for a master’s degree in civil engineering from MIT, he wasn’t keen on returning for another degree.
So he did what thousands of other aspiring developers do. He signed up for one of many so-called “code boot camps” cropping up across the country. These small, generally unaccredited and for-profit schools offer to teach students how to program in anywhere from four weeks to four months. Lau was happy with his bootcamp, Launch Academy, but he saw a huge need for more information on all the different boot camps on offer. So he did what any hacker would do and put his newly acquired coding chops to work building a web app to solve the problem. The result is Switch.
Although Lau built the prototype on his own, he quickly realized that he would need help making it into something truly useful. So he brought in co-founders Michael Suen and Jeremy Schwartz and turned the project into a company. The site now has over 200 reviews of 120 different schools across 10 different countries. But it’s more than just a review site. It also helps connect potential students with mentors, help them find jobs, and, soon, connect with other resources to learn job skills. The next step is a tool called Switcher that helps students figure out what type of web work they want to do, and which code schools offer the skills they need to learn. It comes with a quiz that helps match people to programs that fit their interests. Think of it as OkCupid for code boot camps.
As somebody outside the industry I didn’t have perspective to know who was worth listening to and who was full of shit.
There are now at least a couple competing boot camps in every major city. But each one has a different curriculum, covers different technologies and has different educational methods. Some expect students to already have a certain amount of programming experience before they start. Others are designed for absolute beginners. Many try to accommodate students with widely ranging levels of experience.
And while they pretty much all claim to have great placement rates, these numbers can be hard to interpret. “Does a part-time job count? Does getting an adjacent position that isn’t software development count?” Lau says. “It’s really confusing for the consumer.” Regulators in places like California and Ontario are starting to look into how to deal with these schools; there’s still not much guidance for students.
Switch
George Bonner, who attended Hack Reactor in San Francisco last year, says these issues made selecting a bootcamp a real pain. “The biggest problem I had was reliable info,” he says. “As somebody outside the industry I didn’t have perspective to know who was worth listening to and who was full of shit. And I knew that I didn’t know.”
But that’s the problem. If he were to go through it all again, Bonner’s not sure whether he’d be able to trust the information on Switch. The company makes its money by partnering with boot camps, which will make many prospective students cautious of the information.
Lau is well aware of that issue, and says the company will clearly label all the schools that Switch partners with, and won’t alter or reject the reviews it receives, even if they are unfavorable to a sponsor. After all, the site’s value depends on developing a reputation for cultivating fair and impartial reviews. And Bonner says that having more information will always be helpful, even if it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
The Boot Camper’s Social Network
But Lau wants to the site to be more than just a collection of reviews. After all, there are already other code bootcamp review sites, such as Bootcamps.in and Techendo, and as Bonner points out, even Yelp itself includes many reviews of these schools.
That’s why the company built the new Switcher feature. So far it will only ask a few simple questions designed to help potential bootcamp students decide what sort of work they want to do, such as web design, front-end development, or backend development. But eventually Lau says it will expand to add more questions to help learn about your personality and how much experience you already have.
“The long game is to help people customize a curriculum for themselves,” Lau say. “There are a lot of online resources, but deciding which resource to use is a big deal.” For example, a student might want to start out with online tutorials from Codecademy, then move on to a code bootcamp in their city that specializes in front-end development, and then follow that up with some advanced tutorials on the site or Treehouse. He hopes Switcher could help those students pick the right tutorials and the right bootcamp, and eventually, even help them land the right job.
Lau says the company will eventually branch out into other fields as well. The first, he says, will be graphic design, which there are already boot camps for. But eventually the site might include reviews and data on traditional vocational schools, such as those for welding, nursing and other professions.
In the meantime, though, the company needs to collect more information about the code boot camps of the world. Getting more alum to write reviews is key to that process, and Switch has a full-time person dedicated to finding alum and asking them to write about their experiences at various schools.
Ironically, Lau’s quest to help other people learn to program has led him away from programming full-time. He now spends most of his time managing the company and talking with students and schools. But he says he does still get to spent 30 to 40 percent of his time coding.
“Getting that mix is really satisfying,” he says. “Doing 10 hours of programming a day isn’t as fulfilling and as doing 4 hours of programming and 4 hours of product work. I think I’ve found my calling here.”
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