"Between the time Mr. Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a “golden ticket” to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting."

The big question for me is how much of the reduction in available job for boot camp graduates is because of AI-assisted programming productivity boosts, and how much is because they are now competing with 100,000+ more experienced people who got laid off in the last couple of years (due to a retraction in market size after an over-exuberant hiring period by tech companies during the pandemic).

Anyone seen any credible studies about that?

Seems hard to do a credible study on that. You'd need hiring managers to answer "how many more bootcampers would you have hired in a counterfactual world without AI", which seems very hard and subjective.

Intuitively you'd expect AI to be a big win for bootcampers. Their productivity is typically low because they're constantly hitting roadblocks and getting stuck, even on simple tasks. Unsticking them is an AI strong suit so they should be able to plough through tasks much more effectively despite still asking for the same low starting salaries.

Problem is, AI also benefits the more experienced types, even if less. And if you can pick between a desperate senior or a bootcamper, and the price gap isn't that big, why would you go for the bootcamper? The senior will still be much easier to work with even if they both would have access to top of the line models.

So it's got to be the layoffs (ending of ZIRP and COVID stimulus).

For experienced developers, copilot and friends seem to be a slight win. (Maybe 2x one day out of five.)

That’s as not as big a boost as, say, IDE autocomplete.

However, for entry level Lego style coding, I can imagine it’s a bigger improvement.

I’d be curious to see a study that breaks productivity gains out by task. (Including learning new languages/frameworks/code bases).

My prediction is that the sorts of jobs coder camps target will get hit harder than most, because most productivity gains will be there. That probably implies that type of development training will need to focus more on higher level tasks, like incorporating requirements or making tactical design decisions.

I 100% agree that this is the right question. My intuition is that higher interest rates, lower multiples, and layoffs are the cause. AI is just what we point to to give ourselves comfort that our smaller teams can accomplish as much as our bigger teams used to.