On Friday afternoon, hours after an announcement by founder and CEO Jason Straughan that he would be stepping down, employees at coding bootcamp Codeup announced they had all been laid off. Two former workers told the San Antonio Report that as staff learned Friday about the layoffs, the word was that the company would close its doors when the last students had earned their certificates.
“Layoff stories are never fun to hear or tell,” Leslie Torres wrote on LinkedIn Friday afternoon. “Unfortunately, this time around I am on the telling side of the story.”
Torres, who was the placement specialist at Codeup, dubbed the company “one of the most fulfilling positions I have ever had the pleasure to take.”
In a Facebook post, weekend instructor Kenneth Howell said he learned Friday that “Codeup will no longer be operating … and I will need to transition into a new job sooner rather than later .”
In a post on LinkedIn and X, Straughan made no mention of layoffs or his for-profit school’s future. “I’ll be stepping down from CEO and moving forward I’ll be supporting the team at Codeup any way that I can,” he said.
Straughan, in a text, confirmed he had resigned as CEO and referred other questions to Dori Salisbury. Girdley, too declined to comment and referred questions to Salisbury, “as she is the CEO.”
Salisbury didn’t immediately return an email Friday afternoon seeking comment.
Codeup cut about a quarter of its workforce in October, only weeks after it moved into its new home on the North Side.
Codeup announced an open house earlier this month at the new location.
Founded in 2013, Codeup employs 124 people with certificates in data science, cloud administration and web development; it was based in downtown offices at 600 Navarro St., according to a company profile on PitchBook.
“Our lens at Codeup has always been to make every decision by asking, ‘What’s best for students?’ It’s never led us astray,” Straughan wrote in his post. “The company needs different leadership for the next phase of the journey in service to our students.”
A laid-off employee Friday, who wished to remain anonymous for future employment prospects, said that the school would allow current students to complete their certificate programs, then wind down. According to this employee, the majority of the company’s leadership and its placing team had been part of Friday’s layoffs, although instructors would stay until their students finished up the program.
The demise of Codeup follows the roiling of the tech industry by layoffs, with an increasingly crowded competitor space within the bootcamp market. With the tighter job market have come robust discussions about the value of bootcamps.
It doesn’t list its tuition on its website, but the information is contained within the website for Ready to Work, San Antonio’s taxpayer-funded workforce development program: Codeup’s 20-week data science program comes in at $31,250; the 20-week full-stack web development program comes in at $27,500; and the 15-week cloud administration is $17,000.