Just weeks after moving into its new Northside location, Codeup, the homegrown coding bootcamp founded in 2013, appears to have laid off up to a quarter of its staff, according to posts on LinkedIn and conversations with local industry insiders.
Codeup, a for-profit company that offers certificates in data science, cloud administration and web development, employed 124 people when its offices were located downtown at 600 Navarro Street, according to a company profile on PitchBook.
Neither CEO and co-founder Jason Straughn nor co-founder Michael Girdley responded to requests for comment.
One of Codeup’s laid-off employees, Christian Torres, posted on LinkedIn that Codeup had a “roughly 25% reduction in force layoff round on Friday” — the post is timestamped “3w,” indicating that it was posted three weeks ago.
Torres served as a senior account executive, according to his post, and moved to Dallas to help the company open a branch there in early 2020, just weeks before the pandemic hit. Codeup opened virtual locations in Houston and Austin in 2021.
He thanked Straughn and more than a dozen others in the post about what his almost five years with the company meant to him.
The jobs cuts at Codeup come as the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and the bootcamp space has become crowded with competitors — including universities. For example, UTSA’s School of Data Science, which offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate degrees, also offers 24-week coding bootcamps in partnership with edX, a for-profit online education platform. With the tighter job market have come robust discussions about the value of bootcamps.
In March, Codeup announced plans to consolidate its locations downtown and at Rackspace into a single campus, signing a lease for two floors at one of the Petroleum Towers at 8700 Tesoro Dr. On the first and eighth floors, Codeup has 33,000 square feet of space for classrooms, “quiet” rooms, offices, a cafe and event center, according to the San Antonio Business Journal, which toured the space on Oct. 12. Straughn told the outlet that it employed “25 to 30 instructors.”
Since 2016, veterans have been able to use their VA education benefits to cover tuition at Codeup, and the company has targeted this population in its marketing. According to Codeup’s 2022 diversity equity and inclusion report, 36% of its students are veterans. The company was recently reauthorized under the VA’s VET TEC program, according to a spokeswoman from that agency.
In 2019, 99% of Codeup’s graduates “received job offers in their field of study within months of graduation,” according to a commentary Straughn wrote in the San Antonio Express-News in July 2021.
That level of success has not continued, likely in large part due to the contraction of the tech industry. Crunchbase’s layoff tracker estimates more than 276,000 employees have been laid off by tech companies over the past two years — but Codeup’s job placement rate appears to remain high.
The company’s latest graduate hire data covers January through June 2022, via the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting, or CIRR, which was formed to vet participating schools’ graduation and salary claims.
Codeup reported 85% of its 40 graduates in its data science program in San Antonio landed a job in the field within 180 days, with a median salary of $73,000. Almost 74% reported finding an in-field job among the 101 graduates of the company’s web development program, with a median salary of $56,000.
Codeup doesn’t list its tuition on its website. Ready to Work, San Antonio’s taxpayer-funded workforce development program, lists tuition for Codeup’s 20-week data science program at $31,250, 20-week full stack web development program at $27,500 and 15-week cloud administration at $17,000.
The company advertises that more than 80% of its students receive some form of tuition assistance, including VA benefits, scholarships, loans and grants, according to its website. Codeup also offers a 100% tuition refund to graduates who are not hired within six months of graduation in its data science and web development programs — although that policy comes with dozens of caveats and requirements.
