SAN FRANCISCO – US software engineer Jonathan Kim began job hunting more than 50 weeks ago and tracked her efforts on a spreadsheet.
He applied for over 600 software engineering jobs. Six companies responded. The two gave him a technical screening. No one offered him.
That wasn't a plan when Kim paid nearly $20,000 in 2023 for an intensive part-time coding bootcamp.
“They were selling fake dreams of a great job market,” said Kim, 29, who works at her uncle's ice cream shop in Los Angeles.
Without a university degree, he believes his chances are low, but he will boost his resume by contributing to open source software projects. “I see a lot of destiny and darkness in everything,” he said. “It's difficult to stay positive.”
Kim decides to join a coding boot camp, just like an artificial intelligence chatbot like ChatGpt is taking off. By the time he graduated in 2024, AI began with simple party tricks like writing poetry, but perhaps the most impact on coding and was on the way to reshape the economy.
We've begun to eliminate the entry-level developer roles that Bootcamp has traditionally fulfilled.
Coding Bootcamp has been a mainstay in Silicon Valley for over a decade, providing a key route for non-traditional candidates to win six-figure engineering jobs.
But coding by bootcamp operators, students and investors told Reuters that this pass is disappearing rapidly thanks to AI.
Saturated
“The bootcamp had already left, but AI was a nail in the co,” said Allison Baumgates, a general partner at venture capital fund Semperbilence, who was an early employee of the Bootcamp Pioneer General Meeting.
Gates said the bootcamp has already declined due to market forces such as market saturation, evolution of employer demand and growth in international employment.
At CodeSmith Boot Camp, Kim attended at CodeSmith Boot Camp, only 37% of students in the 2023 part-time program secured full-time technical work within six months of graduation, starting from 83% in the second half of 2021.
Codesmith acknowledged the industry-wide challenges faced by graduates. “The market is tough today,” Reuters said in a statement, but said it continues to provide lifelong employment support to its alumni.
“This is the story of over 4,000 alumni,” the company said, adding 70.1% of people enrolled in infield employment who secured a full-time program within a year of graduation. It is no surprise that coding is a prime example of the skill of generator AI. Unlike more subjective tasks, such as writing jokes, code works or doesn't.
This black and white distinction makes it the perfect subject for training AI models. Additionally, a wealth of coding examples provide widely available training data. The AI is good at coding, so entry-level coding jobs have been reduced.
Signalfire, a venture capital firm that tracks high-tech employment, said in a May 2025 report that new graduate school employment had fallen by 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Nowhere has collapsed as much as the coding bootcamp industry. Bootcamp began to appear around 2011 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The demand for software engineers is growing, and many workers were keen to retrain them in high-paying technology jobs.
Released in 2012, Dev Bootcamp was the first to offer courses in web development coding languages such as JavaScript and Ruby. In the intensive 19-week program, participants will learn during the day and practice at night and weekends. Competitors were soon revealed, and by 2018 in-person boot camps in the US and Canada had surged to nearly 100.
Diversity
When companies began to embrace diversity employment goals, they found partners such as women's coding bootcamp Hackbright, said Michael Novati, co-founder of Formation DEV, which helps experienced engineers prepare job interviews.
Diversity employment is no longer a priority for tech companies, he said.
The entry-level software engineering job market has collapsed, but the opposite is true for experienced AI researchers who have created generative AI models and now have a bonus of 100 beans thanks to the escalating talent war driven by meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Although AI companies are also valuing, their employees' footprints remain small.
According to a LinkedIn profile, Anysphere's rating behind the coding tool cursor is $1 billion and about 150 US-based employees.
With thousands of employees, Openai is valued at $300 million. Novati said this trend primarily represents a return to the traditional model of adoption from elite universities.
“The highest tier of Silicon Valley companies are doubleping these classic ideas of using signals from universities to examine the smartest people in society,” he said.
They send recruiters to MIT and Stanford to beat top students and eat. ”
Codesmith founder Will Sentance said he is changing the school's curriculum to accommodate AI shifts. These include the development of AI Technology Leadership Programs to help mid-term career software engineers learn to use AI.
For bootcamp alumni like Kim, this offers little comfort. He hopes to continue working in ice cream shops in the near future, expanding his job hunting beyond software engineering.
“I had some friends who went through the boot camp where I was able to find work, and that was the golden age of 2020,” he said. “If my timing had improved, I think the outcome would have been different.”
Reuters
