Felix Tsai was as far from a hacker as you could get. He was a lawyer.

In the mid '90s, he practiced corporate law for a firm in Manhattan. During the dot-com boom he did mergers and acquisitions. But he never loved his work. After quitting law and starting a pair of tech-minded companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, he realized that what he really wanted to be was a programmer. So he went to bootcamp. And now he is.

Yes, bootcamp. Dev BootCamp. Tsai spent nine weeks studying at a mini-school in San Francisco whose only mission is to immerse you in things like the Ruby on Rails programming framework, the Git version control tool, and the Agile development methodology. Students work 12 to 16 hours a day, and life doesn't get in the way because you're not allowed to have any other life.

"In a bootcamp model, you're only making one decision," says Dev BootCamp teacher Jesse Farmer. "Once you show up, you can't split."

For Felix Tsai, this tough love was just what he needed. He had taken some programming classes as a undergraduate at Stanford and liked them, but thought it was too late to change majors. After quitting law, he took some Java courses at a local community college, but nothing really stuck. "As much as I enjoyed the community college classes, they were pretty slow and academic," he says. "I spent a year on Java and still didn't really feel like I could program."

>'In a bootcamp model, you're only making one decision. Once you show up, you can't split.' — Jesse Farmer

Dev BootCamp was different – and now he's an engineer at TapJoy, a mobile advertising company based in San Francisco.

This kind of immersive coding school isn't for everyone – especially when you consider the $12,200 tuition. But Felix Tsai isn't alone. Dev BootCamp sessions run every three weeks with 16 students per group, at locations in both San Francisco and Chicago. According to Farmer, 25 of the 29 summer graduates who were looking for jobs got offers within two months. These jobs, at companies such as Twitter and Pivotal Labs, pay at least $80,000 a year, he says.

"Most of these students have demonstrated a substantial commitment to learn to program, but have hit walls," he says. "They know they need to jump onto a rocket ship."

Some are mid-career professionals, often in technology marketing, who want to change jobs. Others are experienced programmers who want to re-tool and learn Ruby instead of the older languages they already know. Some, like Tsai, are entrepreneurs who want to actually be able to build their own products. But what they all have is common is that they all really want to be there.

Tsai was a lawyer, but he was always looking for something more. His first job out of college was with the Urban Youth Corps, and he left only for law school because he realized the income of a career in nonprofits wasn't sustainable. "Probably to appease my parents," he says. Once he left law, he gravitated towards software, co-founding Vervago, a company that taught critical-thinking skills to employees at Microsoft and other companies, and later Deciduo, a decision-making software startup that didn't work out. He was at Deciduo when he caught the programming bug.

Dev BootCamp Students won't get the same thing they'd get out of a four-year computer science degree, but that's the point. It's designed to prepare its students for a very entry-level software engineering position. The goal is "extreme employability."

At the end of the nine weeks, Dev BootCamp hosts a job fair meets speed-dating-style event where recent grads and potential employers have the chance to meet. Sometimes, Dev BootCamp gets a finders fee for filling these positions, and when it does, it reimburses students for their tuition.

The downside is that students generally have to pay up front, and this isn't the sort of thing you can take out a traditional student loan for. It's also selective – only about 20% of applicants are typically accepted.

Kristin Wolff, an economic and workforce development consultant, says the operation faces more than a few challenges. It has to establish its reputation and find ways to scale. But she also says it's the sort of experiment the U.S. economy and education system needs.

"Our existing students are failing certain groups of people," she says. "Older workers who have been laid off, and young people." In the case of younger workers, many completed degree programs that didn't provide a marketable skill set.

Many people are in desperate need for job training, but going back to school for 2 to 4 years isn't always an option. Dev BootCamp is a nice compromise. And they'll take you even if you used to be a lawyer.

"I didn't mind being a lawyer, but I don't think I could say I woke up every day saying that I was happy doing the work," Felix Tsai says. "Every day when I wake up I'm really happy coding."