San Francisco Coding Bootcamp & Job Market Study (2020)

App Academy recognized as top San Francisco bootcamp

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This post was originally published by BootcampsSanFrancisco.

San Francisco is home to a number of coding bootcamps, and top bootcamps such as App Academy…have a reputation for placing graduates at top San Francisco companies.

San Francisco is a city known for its booming technology industry and for being ahead of the curve when it comes to new innovations. The vibrant startup ecosystem in the city and the surrounding areas means that residents of San Francisco have been able to try out many of the greatest technological innovations before anyone else. Uber, for example, launched their first pilot in San Francisco. 

The CBRE’s Scoring Tech Talent report, which tracks 50 U.S. and Canadian job markets according to their ability to attract and grow tech talent, ranked San Francisco as having the fastest-growing tech job market in 2019. According to the report, San Francisco has a tech labor pool of more than 50,000 workers, and in the last five years there has been an influx of more than 55,000 tech jobs to the region.

In addition, Crunchbase reports that, as of September 27, 2019, San Francisco-based companies have raised around 45 percent of all seed through pre-IPO funding to California companies. In the same report, Crunchbase uncovered that, as of September 27, 2019, there were at least 57 private, venture-backed companies with valuations of over $1 billion.

San Francisco’s strong job market has resulted in a growing demand for training programs to support local workers in entering into technical jobs. Over the last few years, coding bootcamps have become increasingly popular in the region, and the city has become home to both local and national bootcamps that serve its residents’ technical training needs.

For this report, the BootcampsSanFrancisco team collected information from LinkedIn and Glassdoor to assess the strength of the programming bootcamp and job markets in San Francisco. We discuss the number of bootcamp alumni in San Francisco, the size of the bootcamp market, the top tech companies that hire bootcamp talent in the local job market, and more.

To conduct this study, we analyzed data from 21 local and national bootcamps serving San Francisco and surrounding areas. 

Top San Francisco Employers for Bootcamp Graduates

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Almost every major technology company you can think of has headquarters—or at the very least, an office—in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is home to companies such as Twitter, Netflix, Slack, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Facebook, Adobe—to name just a few. In addition, the city is home to thousands of innovative technology startups.

We used education and employment data from LinkedIn to identify the top companies that hired San Francisco coding bootcamp graduates in 2019. This data also helped us make assumptions about which bootcamps placed the most students into these companies, based on the number of students of each bootcamp who also reported working for one of these companies on LinkedIn.

Here are the 10 companies that, per LinkedIn data, have hired the most graduates from Bay Area bootcamps:

  • Google
  • Wayfair
  • IBM
  • Facebook
  • Microsoft
  • Uber
  • Bloomberg, LP
  • Amazon
  • Twilio
  • Apple

Tech Job Market in San Francisco

The cost of living in San Francisco may be on the rise, but the city’s technology job market remains strong. Indeed, no matter which tech field you specialize in, you’ll have no trouble finding a job offering a salary commensurate with the local cost of living.

We collected data from Glassdoor to determine the average salaries as of March 2019 for top technology jobs in San Francisco. Here’s what we found:

San Francisco Tech Job Sectors

High salaries are not the only reason why San Francisco’s job market is strong; there are also large numbers of jobs available in every major technical field.

Indeed, as more technology companies set up shop in the city, the demand for technical talent increases. Given the growth of the city’s technology sector over the last few years, this has resulted in a massive number of new positions opening up. Here are the number of positions open in a few of the top San Francisco tech career paths, according to Glassdoor:

San Francisco Bootcamp Student and Graduate Skills

San Francisco coding bootcamps teach a vast array of technical skills, which is not surprising given the diverse range of technical positions that comprise the SF job market.

Using LinkedIn data, we calculated that 3,311 SF coding bootcamp graduates have learned JavaScript, 2,907 know how to use SQL, and 2,845 know how to code in CSS. Both JavaScript and CSS are in-demand web development technologies. The next most popular skill reported by graduates was React.js, with 2,124 graduates reporting experience with this popular web development technology.

In addition, Ruby and Rails and Python—which are popular frameworks and programming languages used in software engineering and web development—both made our top 10 list of skills taught at San Francisco coding bootcamps. 2,027 graduates reported knowing how to code in Ruby on Rails, and 1,783 reported knowing Python.

Here are the top ten most commonly self-reported skills of San Francisco coding bootcamp students and graduates:

Skill Name Students and Graduates
JavaScript 3,311
SQL 2,907
CSS 2,845
React.js 2,124
HTML 2,116
Ruby on Rails 2,027
Git 1,874
Ruby 1,873
jQuery 1,854
Python 1,783

Conclusion

San Francisco is one of the best places—if not the best place—to break into a career in technology. The city has a large number of open positions in its technology industry, and the average salaries for top technical jobs are impressive. In addition, San Francisco is home to a number of landmarks and events, like the Golden Gate Bridge and the city’s Pride parade, which make San Francisco a great home for any technical worker.

As if that were not enough, San Francisco is home to a number of coding bootcamps, and top bootcamps such as App Academy and Hackbright Academy have a reputation for placing graduates at top San Francisco companies.

Written by App Academy

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