Turing is closing
After over ten years of changing the lives of thousands of students, Turing is closing its doors. What began as a countercultural coding school in the basement of a Patagonia store grew into one of the most respected software development bootcamps in the country. In an industry increasingly dominated by venture capital and profit motives, Turing's nonprofit model focused on a singular mission: transforming diverse students into successful developers and creating pathways to middle-class stability. Its closure marks the end of an era in tech education and reflects the dramatic shifts in both the economy and the software development landscape. As a 2016 graduate, I've experienced firsthand how Turing changed lives—including my own. I've written extensively on my time at Turing, but I still have more to say.
I enrolled in Turing almost ten years ago in 2016. At the time I was a new father of twins and I had been pursuing a career in education for the previous ten years. Education was not a credible path to a middle class life.
When I enrolled, Turing's website was barely a landing page. Its facilities were in the basement of a Patagonia in downtown Denver.
Turing was countercultural. Its facilities looked like a cross between Hackers, the record store in High Fidelity, and your favorite neighborhood coffee shop. There were screens, cheap IKEA furniture, wires, and students huddled around new MacBooks. The ambiance of exposed pipes and unfinished walls marked the space as very different from and subversive of the wider tech world. We were making our own backdoor into the middle class, meritocracy and the American dream.
There were other programs that seemed more polished at the time. These programs and Turing were part of an explosion of bootcamps addressing the endless need for software developers. At the time we were about half way into a decade of zero interest rates where capital was flooding the tech industry and there were thousands of startups that just needed to hire a few hundred developers to scale, get their flywheels spinning and IPO.
While other bootcamps had VC backing and glossy marketing materials, Turing had its nonprofit status. Turing needed to enroll students and turn them into successful developers. There was no profit, scale, or cash outs in the equation.
I joined Turing right at the start of a major expansion. Prior to my time, Turing had four modules. The first three were focused on Ruby and Rails and the final was focused on Javascript. While Node and React were already prolific in 2016, Ruby on Rails was nearly as popular particularly among scaling startups.
Five years earlier, when many of top startups began, Ruby on Rails was the obvious choice. So many platforms - Shopify, Github, AirBnB, Instacart, Groupon, Zendesk, and so many more - that started in the late 2000s and early 2010s are built on Rails. These are the companies that had just raised new VC rounds and desperately needed developers to ship features.
When I joined, the best students were leaving Turing with two and sometimes three job offers ranging from $75 to $100k in salary. Multiple students in my cohort had a job before graduation. It was rare for someone to actively job search for more than four months.
With that kind of track record, who wouldn't try to expand? Turing opened a front end program and total student capacity increased from about 100 to 200. As a result, Turing could no longer fit in the Patagonia basement and moved into a beautiful office 17,500 square foot space at 1331 17th St.
And then the Pandemic hit. Turing went from an in person program that drew people from all over the country to Denver to a fully remote program. Initially the results remained strong. In fact, Turing decided to stay fully remote even as it became safe to congregate indoors. The data showed that more students from diverse backgrounds were able to break into the tech world - one of the last middle class careers - because of the flexibility of the remote program.
And then the tech world decided to go insane. Zero interest became a thing of the past. Suddenly recent graduates were having job offers revoked. Many more were not getting job offers at all. The quality of the Turing program hadn't changed, but the market forces had.
Close to the time when we were all getting our first and second doses of Covid vaccines, a tremendous tragedy struck the Turing community. Lovisa Svallingson, an alumnus of the program and community leader was killed crossing the street in a freak hit and run accident.
Lovisa gave so much to the Turing community. She was one of those people who you are shocked to find out is so young because she seemed to be so on top of everything. She taught classes and mentored students including me. She left her lucrative startup job to take a chance on a small climate tech startup at the time with much lower compensation. She was incredibly cool and made everyone she interacted with feel special.
Lovisa's handle in Turing slack is BigLovisa - a funny irony referring more to her energy and impact than her diminutive size. You can find so many Turing origin stories that start with something like, I met this incredible woman named Lovisa who convinced me to take a chance on Turing.
This was a remarkable person. I don't think it can be overstated how terrible this tragedy was and it brings me to tears thinking about to this day. She was the spirit of Turing in so many ways and her death marked a turning point in Turing's story.
In November 2022 ChatGPT was released to the public. While it remains to be seen what the long term effects of AI will be on the software industry, in the short term it has completely decimated the market for inexperienced developers.
Obviously the market is making the prospect of paying the same tuition for a riskier bet less appealing to many would-be career switchers. Falling enrollment led to staff cuts and program reductions.
But there is more to the story. Turing had been trying to exit its office space lease since going remote in 2020, five years ago. While attempting to exit the lease and since the last Turing student ever set foot in the leased space, I have it on good authority that Turing paid a small fortune in rent.
Of course contracts are binding. But also, who hasn't been in a situation where you are technically forced to pay for something you don't want and can't use? There is always an internet subscription that is impossible to cancel. Sure the end user agreement says words. But that doesn't make it right.
And that's why the justice system is called "the justice system" and not the contract enforcement system. It is meant to evaluate claims of justice. And here we have one such claim. A nonprofit school, whose mission is to lead students from every possible walk of life to a solid middle class existence by way of fulfilling technical careers, is ordered to pay $450k to landlord CIM Group. It's an obscene version of David and Goliath.
Let's look at the scale in question here. $450K for a nonprofit that charges $25k tuition per student is 18 students, which is an entire cohort. In contrast, CIM Group operates approximately $30.8 billon of assets according to their 2023 annual report. Recent data suggests that CIM group revenue at over $200 million per year. At Turing's peak $450k represented roughly 12% of its total yearly revenue, but only 0.225% of revenue for CIM group.
Turing's mission is to unlock human potential. It does so by training diverse groups of students for high fulfillment technical careers. If there was justice to be done, Judge Jill Dorancy who presided over the case would have ruled in Turings favor and forgiven the debt. If we lived in a just society, why not just let CIM group write it off their tax bill at the end of the year. The mega corp gets their money and society can continue to benefit from an institution of tremendous good.
But that is not the world we live in.
I will always look back at Turing as one of the best decisions I ever made. I feel incredibly fortunate that I attended and turned the skills it taught me into a life for my family. I am grateful to the founder, Jeff Casimir, and the rest of the staff for what they have done for me personally and so many others.
While Turing may be closing, Alumni are already organizing to keep the professional network and community thriving. If you are a fellow Turing alum reading this, I'd love to work together on the next chapter of our community. Let's talk in slack - #alumni-association.
There are over a thousand alumni now working across the tech industry - a living legacy that is changing companies from the inside, mentoring new developers, and bringing diverse perspectives to an industry that sorely needs them.
Whatever shape the next wave of technical education takes, Turing's decade-long experiment proves that when education prioritizes human potential over profit, everyone benefits. The challenges that closed Turing's doors haven't diminished the need for what it offered - they've only made it more essential.
Jeff Casimir
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