I am a graduate of the Flatiron School. With some reservations, I would say that it was a great investment. However, I would not say the same of General Assembly and some of the other boot camps.
What was great about Flatiron:
- Really good faculty that cared not just about tech, but about teaching
- Really good curriculum that fosters basic CS skills and an 'engineering mindset' instead of just 'learning Rails'
- Fosters an attitude that encourages learning for learning's sake
- Great support through the job placement system.
What was not so great:
- You really can't come in with 0 experience and come out a competent developer. Most of the people in the program had at least some prior familiarity with coding, even if the experience was shallow.
- Instruction focuses on the students at the middle of the individual semester's bell curve. Students with no experience (or lacking basic computer skills) can get left behind, students with way more experience (or more aptitude) can get bored.
- To me, the average salary touted by the school is inflated. Most people seem to have landed in jobs that pay around 50-60k initially, although many people are able to move to higher paying positions quickly.
I haven't personally been through the GA bootcamp, but I know two people who have and have worked/interviewed with others that have. GA seems to not really give a shit about actually educating people or getting them jobs, just about making sure they pay tuition. There is little to no job counseling, instructors are of (at best) mixed quality, and the curriculum is extremely confused.
Like anything else that you're going to spend 12k on, do your research before you commit. Some schools are great, some are not, and what you get out of it always depends on what you put into it. Look for one (like flatiron) with great job placement, and connections to companies.
Additionally, the idea that 'most companies' require a CS degree for web devs is just not true. Most job postings that are out in the wild might ask for that, but most companies hire new devs through job placement services, or connections that can vouch for the skills of non-degreed developers, rather than through cattle call services like Linkedin, Craigslist, etc.
I am a graduate of a code/bootcamp school. I will say that the instruction was good but definitely were areas that were lacking. I think the short timeline is the biggest factor in that. Most of these schools are ~12 weeks but I think an additional month would be better suitable.
Where this school did lack however, is the staff. The people behind the scenes that are supposed to be helping us find jobs and get us ready for interviews. I had no support in this area. In fact I was really surprised by the fact that my former class mates were more helpful in reviewing my resume and my portfolio and interview tips than the staff. After we finished our class they moved on to the next one interviewing new students and didn't give 2 fucks about us. For that reason I could not recommend the school I attended.
I know most if not all of the instructors and staff read HN so hopefully they read this and reevaluate how they handle graduates.
These schools are popping up everywhere and growing at a rapid pace, so I hope they don't succumb to the University of Phoenix reputation however unless there is some type of standard by which they must operate I don't see a good future in the long run from these places. There is too much discrepancy between cost, curriculum and standards of acceptance right now.
Yeah, you need to name names. There are lots of us who had great bootcamp experiences and it's irresponsible to sully their reputations because you had a bad experience at one school.
At least do it to help other students avoid paying a bunch of money for a bad experience. That kid who posted about the nightmare at Coding House did the whole community a big favor.
I would love to call them out, however I know at least a few of my classmates are still seeking their first employment and I'd hate to cause them to miss out on an opportunity to get a job because an employer sees my post.
The school in question has a campus in Georgia. I'll be more than happy to update this in the future however.
Even saying that the school is in Georgia is helpful. I would expect that it's harder to run a school outside of SF, if only because it's harder to find instructors and the tech jobs are less dense.
Hey, I wanted to offer the perspective of an instructor at General Assembly - I guess take my response with a grain of salt, but I'll do my level best to be objective.
I think, perhaps unsurprisingly, the statement that
> "GA seems to not really give a shit about actually educating people or getting them jobs, just about making sure they pay tuition"
is flat wrong. We have a large, dedicated "Outcomes" team whose sole job is to educate and prepare students for the workplace and find them positions after they graduate. Unlike other bootcamps, GA does not act as a recruiter by taking fees from employers for placing candidates, nor do we take a percentage of students' first year salaries as tuition. I think this is great, because it means that our Outcomes team is only concerned with finding the best fit for each student, rather than placing them with a "partner" company or in the highest paying job, which may not be suitable for them.
We also integrate workplace related programming throughout the entire course by bringing in developers from other companies to talk about what it's like to work in the industry, taking students on tours of potential employer offices so they can see what a typical dev environment might look like, encouraging students to participate in meetups and local dev events to grow their own development communities, and more. Also, GA has an excellent (90%+) success rate in helping our students get relevant (i.e. something that uses the skills they just learned) jobs post graduation.
As far as the curriculum: frankly, most of the bootcamps (including us) are teaching on the same stack (Ruby, Rails, Git, and obviously HTML, CSS/Sass, Javascript, jQuery and some JS framework). I would be very surprised if the curriculum was wildly different amongst bootcamps. What we've found is that the quality of instruction and an emphasis on problem-solving techniques is more important to long term success than particular technology stacks. I'd be very interested to hear if Flatiron has some groundbreaking new way to teach the Rails stack.
Finally, on instructor quality: I'm obviously very biased here, but the other instructors I've met and worked with at GA have been some of the best I've seen. I suppose it could be argued that I must not have seen great developers before, but if that's true then I have been faking my way through the last several years coding at prominent VC-backed startups. My co-instructors are experienced, knowledgeable, and most of all they take pride in their craft and care about their students. I have a lot of respect for Flatiron and think they're a great bootcamp, but I wouldn't trade the developers I get to work with on a daily basis for anyone.
What was great about Flatiron: - Really good faculty that cared not just about tech, but about teaching - Really good curriculum that fosters basic CS skills and an 'engineering mindset' instead of just 'learning Rails' - Fosters an attitude that encourages learning for learning's sake - Great support through the job placement system.
What was not so great: - You really can't come in with 0 experience and come out a competent developer. Most of the people in the program had at least some prior familiarity with coding, even if the experience was shallow. - Instruction focuses on the students at the middle of the individual semester's bell curve. Students with no experience (or lacking basic computer skills) can get left behind, students with way more experience (or more aptitude) can get bored. - To me, the average salary touted by the school is inflated. Most people seem to have landed in jobs that pay around 50-60k initially, although many people are able to move to higher paying positions quickly.
I haven't personally been through the GA bootcamp, but I know two people who have and have worked/interviewed with others that have. GA seems to not really give a shit about actually educating people or getting them jobs, just about making sure they pay tuition. There is little to no job counseling, instructors are of (at best) mixed quality, and the curriculum is extremely confused.
Like anything else that you're going to spend 12k on, do your research before you commit. Some schools are great, some are not, and what you get out of it always depends on what you put into it. Look for one (like flatiron) with great job placement, and connections to companies.
Additionally, the idea that 'most companies' require a CS degree for web devs is just not true. Most job postings that are out in the wild might ask for that, but most companies hire new devs through job placement services, or connections that can vouch for the skills of non-degreed developers, rather than through cattle call services like Linkedin, Craigslist, etc.