As employment has fallen, pay growth has lagged that of total U.S. workers. Between January 2018 and January 2024, the median base pay for developers grew by 24 percent while pay growth for total U.S. workers grew 30 percent.
Quotes for emphasis, because I'm pretty certain this is related to all of the code camp nonsense that told people they could make six-figures after the course.
I don't doubt that there are a lot of developers that succeeded after those camps...
However, there were definitely a lot of people that shouldn't have been there in the first place and were only after the large paycheck dreams that were dangled before them.
Interviewed a lot of them, it was obvious which was which.
One interesting factor is learning the skill and acquiring the love.
I know a smart guy who went to a Python bootcamp.
He had coded in his spare time and built a simple chess program.
So he was already familiar (if not proficient) in Python.
Autodidacts miss so many things, but he knew that.
He also had nascent perfectionism, a taste for quality and a curiosity about how it could be achieved.
He aced the course, but also displayed social intelligence.
After the course, they offered him a job as course manager:
some admin duties, presenting occasionally, wrangling the experts, timetable for lectures/workshops, handling issues
and also mentoring students who got stuck.
He aced the manager role too and continued to code,
but did not pick up hacker love.
He tumbled around looking for jobs
and ended-up in a different non-coding role
in the tech industry - customer support and scaling various teams.
