Choosing a coding bootcamp can be challenging. Not only are you weighing significant decisions about your future, but the number of bootcamps options can be overwhelming. “What’s the best coding bootcamp?” is too loaded to ask with so many coding courses at your disposal. Realistically in order to answer that question, you need to weigh the costs, benefits, and what’s the most attractive to you: Job placement, core competencies of the coding bootcamp (data science, web development, UI/UX, cyber security), and what eventual jobs the bootcamp will set you in NYC and beyond.

As we begin an analysis for choosing the best coding bootcamp in New York City, you have to ask some questions that that will put you on the right coding journey for your career:

• What’s driving your interest in coding? What are some of the projects you’ve dreamed of working on that a bootcamp will help you gain the skills to do?
• What is your current coding proficiency? Coding bootcamps offer programs to different abilities, and the introductory exercises in NYC-based coding bootcamps will help you answer this question.
• Consider your budget. Depending on the bootcamp you choose, this may become a factor. While The average NYC bootcamp has different costs, most have several financing options for their students. We’ll discuss this in more detail later in this article.

Consider these questions as you plan for a career in the tech industry in the heart of New York. There are several benefits to choosing a coding school in the five boroughs, so let’s explore the advantages of New York and discuss the type of coding skills you want to learn.

The Benefits of Attending Coding Bootcamps in New York City

For so many industries strategically placed in the business capital of the world, New York City offers the richest talent hubs for coding in the world. Startups can lure talent from many of the tech giants who’ve set up regional offices and corporate headquarters in Manhattan. And on the other side, maturing companies who need fresh entrepreneurial thinking are able to source from both recent bootcamp grads and tech industry veterans. The demand for talent post-graduation is high, so students do well to both learn and work in New York.

New York City’s attraction is more than professional. Those who have New York City on their shortlist for their coding education have a positive perception of the Big Apple and the type of talent the city attracts. There are several other reasons why New York is an attractive option for the aspiring software engineer:

• Coding professionals are in high demand. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the employment for software developers will grow 21% through 2028. This is four times higher than the average industry. Software developers earn a median six-figure salary, essentially a requirement for a single-income household in NYC, and why many bootcamps are transparent about their job placement numbers and the benefits to their students.
  
  Coupled with HackerRank’s findings that full-stack developers are among the toughest jobs to find qualified candidates for, selecting an immersive bootcamp with a program that specializes in your area of interest can be invaluable in the marketplace.
• Lots of opportunities to build products that can contribute directly to business challenges. After the Brooklyn Bridge and Broadway, New York’s ability to “build something” is undeniably a part of its reputation. The same is true for its bootcamps. The coding bootcamps in “The Big Apple” attract personalities of all types that share a commonality: they are hyper-focused on addressing big and small challenges in areas like web development, data science, and UX design that unlock potential for enterprising companies in competitive verticals.
  
  The coding bootcamps in New York City facilitate the type of coding class where students can code, collaborate on, and deploy projects that prepare them for real-world development teams. Demonstrating coding expertise and fundamentals is a pivotal interview step at tech startups and in increasingly competitive software engineering roles in corporations.
  
  Choosing the right bootcamp will offer you more than just a good coding class. It will create an opportunity to learn how to position yourself as a respected programmer, work collaboratively with a team, and ideally be a catalyst for building solutions that change the world, no matter the programming language that solution is built-in.
• Experience-based learning. One of the biggest challenges of aspiring software developers - whether fresh out of coding bootcamps or a standard computer science degree - is finding opportunities to work on practial, real-world problems. Coding bootcamps provide accelerated learning immersions that foster deeper learning with experience-based models.

What makes NYC a desirable place to attend a coding bootcamp?

New York City’s reputation precedes it. Outside of the Bay Area, New York is one of the powerhouses of global software development, surpassing Boston as the leading location for VC deals outside of Silicon Valley.

TechNYC, a NYC consortium of tech companies, notes that NYC’s startup ecosystem is estimated at $147 billion, the second most valuable in the world. New York’s startup valuation alone is roughly $30 billion more than the entire GDP of Morocco.

With an overflow of capital hitting New York, the city is a recruiting target for companies looking for full stack web developers and other web development roles. Students gravitating more toward careers in data science also have opportunities to network with companies looking for expertise in Python, SQL, and more.

Lifestyle. New York’s reputation for both working hard and playing hard is well-documented. Home to the lights of Broadway, the highest volume of Michelin-starred restaurants in the United States, and some of the most famous sites in America, it would be difficult to find a better city to learn coding languages. In recent years, New York’s infrastructure benefited from hiring coders - particularly data science experts - to reinvent the way 8 million people get to and from work each day. New York is fully committed to the coding community, even sponsoring a “Built in NYC” tech jobs hub that helps longtime coders and recent bootcamp graduates match with startups that need great talent.

As much care is put into the health and safety of the city following the global pandemic. New York’s significant vaccination success is an advantage to students considering an in-person curriculum in a bootcamp. In a world where remote-first experiences are naturally top of mind, New York City’s individual success at creating a safe reopening provides more options for students to attend a boot camp in person. Students interested in coding (physically) alongside other members of their cohort are communicating their desire to learn and interact with one another, and can now do so while being responsibly distanced.

Bootcamps that fit your style. While we’re seeing some positive indicators following the pandemic, future software engineers and developers naturally have different work styles and levels of comfort getting back into the office. Some would like to learn coding outside a home they’ve been confined to for multiple months. Others are moving into homes that have a second bedroom they’ll use as a dedicated workspace.

Immediate Accessibility. On-ground boot camp instructors have the ability to provide quick feedback on questions or projects, whether it be questions on coding challenges, specific information about the curriculum of a coding course, or their advice for applying to that dream data science or web development job you’ve been researching.

Reputation & Prestige. New York is competitive and its bootcamps are no different. Famously selective and highly desirable bootcamps like The Flatiron School and Fullstack Academy are fully immersive, on-ground programs that are founded and headquartered in Manhattan. Fullstack Academy’s acceptance rate is 8%, which makes it even more selective than West Point and Cornell.

New York City is one of the few cities that doesn’t really need a tourism board. No matter where you live, the city’s reputation for unparalleled history, art, fashion, technology, and opportunity precedes it.

Before Attending a Coding Bootcamp in NYC: Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

Coding bootcamps in New York City offer several to students. Depending on the chosen programming language, data science immersion, and/or design tracks you choose, curriculums will vary both on content, breadth, and on length. A “typical” bootcamp curriculum will have several paths that require a base knowledge of the concepts. Let’s explore what skills an aspiring software engineer, full stack web developer, or data science professional will need before entering the bootcamp.

Prior to enrolling in your bootcamp, you’ll need to complete a short assessment on your coding ability. Most quality bootcamp curricula want to make sure you don’t feel overmatched in a coding class and don’t want you to struggle to keep up with the material. You’ll need to revisit the fundamentals of coding (e.g. the Python or Javascript logic you may not have used for a while). Highly reputable programs like the Flatiron School will offer free tutorials and support for less experienced, aspiring software engineers. allows each student to dive into the basics of coding in some of the most commonly used programming languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby.

One of the benefits of this important step before applying and then enrolling in the boot camp is that it allows you to assess your current skill level, and choose the programming course that best suits your budget and proficiency. Perhaps more importantly, preparing for your boot camp allows you to understand the nuances of coding languages, prepare for your boot camp interview, and engage in introductory projects with other students.

Preparing for the coding bootcamp and the evaluations you’ll complete will help ensure that you receive a return on investment from the time and money you put toward your coding education.

Cost of Coding Bootcamps in NYC

The cost of a full stack coding bootcamp in NYC isn’t that different from the national average. According to Nerd Wallet, the average cost for a bootcamp is close to $13,584, but several different payment options are available should you be exploring different ways to pay for coding school.

If you’re considering paying for a coding boot camp upfront with a credit card, you can consider opening a travel card to meet the minimum benefits of a bonus card while earning miles. However, several other options exist. Many students use third-party financing options like Meritize or Ascent, two popular bootcamp loan options that provide a loan and feature grace periods for repayment. This may not be a bad option for a student projecting to earn a software engineer salary and budgeting after the course is completed.

Considering the high cost of living in NYC, there are belt-tightening opportunities for all bootcamp students. Here are three great tricks to funding your coding bootcamp enrollment:

• Apply for every coding scholarship./ Several coding bootcamps offer scholarships geared toward increasing the number of underrepresented coding professionals in the tech sector. Coding Dojo - a bootcamp offering part-time and full-time software development bootcamps in NYC - offers scholarships incentivizing LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and military veterans to apply and attend the bootcamps. Several need-based scholarships are also popping up across different coding schools in the five boroughs.
• Research income-share agreements. Some bootcamp graduates pay for their tuition using income-share agreements (ISAs). An income share agreement is a written agreement between you and a bootcamp provider that says you’ll commit to paying the provider a percentage of your income for an agreed amount of time.
  
  A hidden advantage of ISAs is that they force you to calculate how much you will need to be paid per year in order to be able to live, commute, pay back your tuition, and save. Pay careful attention to the minimum salary you need to make before an ISA kicks in and that you don’t accept a web development job for too low of a salary. If your agreement stipulates that you must pay back the online coding bootcamp if you land a job making above $35,000 to $40,000 per year, that doesn’t leave you much room for living expenses. (The good news: The average salary for even an entry-level programmer is $50,000 per year, but those of you in high cost-of-living cities should be doing the math closely.)
• Project your salary earnings. Carefully evaluate the tech job you can realistically land and the median salary of your desired position. Is that desired position going to be paying you significantly more than your current role? Will it earn you a higher multiple several times over than the cost of the bootcamp itself? For example, if you want to be a full stack developer and or are also seriously considering data science roles, know the market rates for each of those positions.

Deciding to Attend a Coding Bootcamp in New York

There’s no place like New York City. The city that Bogart and Billy Joel called home certainly is known for its fast pace and hustle, and a community of top-tier web developers and tech companies awaits bootcamp graduates seeking a personal and professional network. Despite the pandemic, major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Salesforce are reinvesting in their office space and continue hiring full stack developers, data scientists, and software engineers at highly competitive market rates. The potential for an early-stage startup in New York City is limitless.

If you’ve been thoughtful about what drives your interest in coding, analyzed the benefits of attending a bootcamp in New York, properly budgeted for a life during and after becoming a bootcamp grad, and have a strong sense of what you want to pursue, we can match you with the right bootcamp. Click here to find your future bootcamp in New York City.