Nearshore Americas
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A Premier Coding Bootcamp Tries to Recover from PR Nightmare

Holberton School is one of the world’s most notable coding bootcamp schools. In 2021, the company reported that an astonishing 86% of its graduates found employment within 6 months of graduation. That year, the Inter-American Development Bank praised its model, which founder Sylvain Kalache showcased in our own Nexus 2018.

The program promises to address the shortage of coding experts that recruiters face in Latin America. Moreover, if sufficiently promoted, the system could help alleviate profound social inequalities and diversify the sector.

Holberton was founded in Silicon Valley in 2016. Nowadays, its French site is its main headquarters. Their Latin America chapter extends to sites in Bogotá, Cali, Guadalajara, Guatemala City, Lima, Medellín, Mérida, Mexico City, Miami, Panama City, San Juan, and Quito.

Paula Andrea Forero, Marketing Acquisition Lead at Holberton Coderise.

According to Marketing Acquisition Lead Paula Forero, the Colombia and Ecuador offices have enrolled 2,182 students and graduated 800 over the past five years.

Yet it could’ve been much bigger. One of Holberton’s teaching assistants told Nearshore Americas that there are currently fewer than twenty active students in Colombia’s main site.

Communication Breakdown

A comparison of group photos at the company’s Bogota location reveals a stark decline in student participation between the 2021-2022 and 2024 batches, with significantly fewer students pictured alongside their supervisors in the more recent photo.

This is partly due to the passing of the cyber education hype that came with the pandemic, and partly because of a 2021 scandal and ongoing legal feud around Holberton’s operation in Colombia. According to local media, students agreed on the “pay after finding a well paid job” model, which allowed them to distribute payment in up to three years. But later, Holberton directives allegedly forced them to sign documents that changed that as students were allegedly told their progress would be put at risk.

We reached out to various former or current Holberton students, most of which refused to voice their opinion. As one of them pointed out, they don’t feel they are “in a position to highlight the positives of the model out of respect for peers undergoing judicial and contractual processes against Holberton”.

Many chapters, such as the ones in Bogotá and Guadalajara, have a lot of negative online reviews (just one star). They come from people who say they were misled by false promises, especially about the paying agreement.

Holberton School logo

Last Friday, Bogtotá site’s empty classrooms were filled with dozens of turned-off 4k computers screens and dusty keyboards. There was tension amongst personnel: some employees were notably eager to speak to us in order to make Holberton more widely known and coding education more widespread and accessible. Others, understandably scared of any further PR stress, asked us to leave and come back another time.

Holberton joined forces with the Coderise Foundation in 2019 to bring their coding program to Colombia. The former exercised its social impact vocation working together with Globant to focus the Code Your Future program‘s scholarship offer on the country’s war victims and refugees.

Now that they’re merging with Coderise Foundation, Holberton in Colombia (and other parts of Latin America) will need to figure out what they are going to do next. They will also have to deal with negative media attention and find a way to move on from crisis mode.

The Holberton Method

Participants learn by way of solving real problems in collaboration with peers from day one”, says Paula Forero. The curriculum emphasizes equipping students with in-demand tools and the peer-to-peer learning (P2P) model.

According to students interviewed for this article, the P2P learning model provides invaluable insights into the collaborative nature of software development. This hands-on experience better prepares graduates for the challenges and realities of a professional coding career.

“One never learns everything there is to know about coding. But everything I’ve learned at Holberton has been beneficial to my job. That does not happen with university programs, which have a broader approach. In some working instances, I feel the model made me more prepared and flexible than people who studied these things in college,” said Jesús, a Holberton School Colombia graduate who now works as an engineer and chapter supervisor.

He explained the educational workflow: Students upload their code to a designated GitHub repository for each assignment. An automated checker then analyzes the code, identifying errors and preventing progress to the next level until the issues are resolved. This model naturally encourages peer collaboration as students assist each other in identifying and correcting coding challenges.

After the 101

To graduate, students need to complete challenging coding projects that are reviewed by their peers. Valerie Gill, who’s now a blog writer for Academized.com, built a web app to manage task lists. “This project covered the entire process, from Node.js backend development to React frontend development. We added authentication and built the app in the cloud, which helped make the project a complete exercise in all the knowledge we had gained in the program.“

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After the nine-month program, Jesús continued learning about Virtual Reality and AI, while Valerie focused on web development. Others chose Machine Learning or Blockchain. This year, they’re launching a new program in Cybersecurity. All these skills are widely sought-after by Nearshore services providers.

What makes Holberton unique is how they charge for tuition. Students only begin to pay after they find a job that pays more than three times the minimum wages.

 

And when they do, the agreement is to give Holberton a portion of their salary (17% to 23%) until they’ve covered the cost of their education or for a set period (usually three years). Although this payment plan was the root of the scandal, Holberton plans to insist and focus on the future. They plan rebuild confidence through offering new programs, more personalized support, and better career development tools.

Yet the scenario begs the question of whether Holberton will be able to reconstruct enough confidence to make their impact goal a reality. And furthermore: are they doing enough to bounce back?

Juan Diego Barrera Sandoval

Colombian business, politics, and cultural journalist. Managing Editor for Nearshore Americas and El Enemigo.

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