Current students of the homegrown coding bootcamp Codeup learned last week that they would not be able to complete their coursework and graduate, according to an email shared with the San Antonio Report.
On Dec. 28, an email from staff.inquiries@codeup.edu to the remaining employees announced that “effective today (12/28/2023) Codeup will cease all operations and classes. As a result, your employment is terminated effective immediately.”
The Dec. 28 email said all students had been notified that all classes would be canceled except for a cohort that had completed coursework and would receive “Certificates of Completion.”
“In the coming months, we will work with the Texas Workforce Commission to issue any available refunds to them,” the email continued.
Many employees were laid off on Dec. 8, just hours after CEO Jason Straughan announced via social media that he was stepping down. At that time, students were told they would be able to finish out their programs.
Codeup had already laid off roughly a quarter of its staff in October, just weeks after moving into its new home on the North Side.
An email to the organization’s staff inquiries account bounced back on Tuesday morning, an email to the interim CEO and texts to Codeup founders Straughan and Michael Girdley were not immediately returned.
No one in leadership or on the board, which includes the third co-founder, Chris Turner, has spoken publicly about the layoffs or the shutdown at any point.
Codeup’s slow-motion collapse comes as the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and the bootcamp space has become crowded with competitors.
A timestamp on the Dec. 28 email shows it was sent out at noon that day.
“Within two minutes, the leadership team had removed access to the content, curriculum, and code that was stored on a commonly used Website for code and project management called GitHub to the former staff and student body,” wrote a Codeup instructor, who shared the email with the San Antonio Report. “In no way was this discussed or announced to the former staff of any department.”
The instructor, who said they attended Codeup between 2019 and 2020, asked to remain anonymous. They also sent screenshots that appeared to show that the Codeup Slack channel had been deleted and another that appeared to show that instructor’s access had been removed from Codeup’s GitHub account.
The instructor wrote that they drove to Codeup’s offices in the Petroleum Towers on Tesoro Drive roughly an hour after the email was sent to find “the building was locked down. The security guard refused access to two students and one employee on site seeking to retrieve their personal property.”
“On a positive note,” they wrote, “staff were paid one last time today thankfully.”
Codeup, founded in 2013 in San Antonio, offered certificates in data science, cloud administration and web development. It employed 124 people when its offices were located downtown at 600 Navarro St., according to a company profile on PitchBook.
Codeup offered three programs: a 20-week data science program for $31,250, a 20-week full stack web development program for $27,500 and a 15-week cloud administration at $17,000.
