
Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps? - jmstickney
Search results yield coursereport.com and switchup.org.<p>With the &quot;top&quot; ones like GA, Hack Reactor, Career Foundry, you are lucky to get more than 50+ reviews.<p>With some of these being over $10k, am I wrong to think there should be more reviews out there?
======
cenazoic
As a relatively recent bootcamp grad who hasn't written a review, here are my
excuses/hypotheses for others who haven't:

a) simple laziness. A good review takes time and thought to write, and the
time isn't necessarily in the writing the review, but in processing the
experience after graduation. By the time you have a more balanced (ie,
graduated, employed/unemployed) perspective, you've probably moved on to other
things.

b) in my case, it's mostly due to general ambivalence about the experience.
There were things I liked, things I thought weren't done well, and the overall
effect is to cancel each other out. Ambivalence doesn't encourage taking the
time (see above) to write down thoughts the way more extreme positive or
negative views do.

c) also specific to me: I genuinely liked the instructors and most of my
cohort, and writing anything negative seems impolite - not wanting to hurt
someone's feelings or seem ungrateful. Irrational, but there ya go.

~~~
colmvp
> c) also specific to me: I genuinely liked the instructors and most of my
> cohort, and writing anything negative seems impolite - not wanting to hurt
> someone's feelings or seem ungrateful. Irrational, but there ya go.

I was reading Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance. In each of his shows for a tour,
he polled the audience with two questions.

How should you let a person who is interested in you know you aren't
interested in them: Pretend to be busy, say nothing, or be honest?

Overwhelmingly, most people practice the "pretend to be busy" and "say
nothing" methods. Only a small sliver of the audience would say they were
honest.

He then asked the audience to pretend the situation is reversed. Someone else
is dealing with you. How do you prefer they handle the situation?

Overwhelmingly, the audience responded (with applauds) that they'd prefer the
honest approach.

~~~
recursive
One reason we (collectively) might avoid honesty in that scenario is that
we're afraid of a meltdown/confrontation/any kind of incident. When we're on
the receiving end, we all know that "ourselves" are reasonable, so we'd never
get into a fight over it. When we're delivering bad news to others, we can't
be so sure.

------
MrDrone
Having done an online boot camp I can say at least part of it is not wanting
to spread negative feedback that might devalue your investment.

I imagine many people go into these programs to gain skills to get a job. If
afterwards you talk about how the program failed to prepare you for that
you're shooting yourself in the foot.

As to why there aren't more positive reviews - maybe it's related?

~~~
pc86
> _As to why there aren 't more positive reviews - maybe it's related?_

I would look at the absolute lack of glowing 6/5 star reviews about how
amazing these boot camps are as proof of exactly the opposite.

There are presumably thousands of grads from the largest programs. If you can
only get 50 or 100 people to write a review about how your $10,000 course
helped them land a job, it should be a huge red flag about the actual value.

~~~
true_religion
I don't know about that. It's education. I've never written a review for my
university experience, although I'm sure somewhere there's a venue for me to
do so.

------
elevenfist
One reason that also explains why there aren't many reviews of universities,
relative to the number of people who attend: When your career depends in part
upon the esteem of your degrees or certifications, speaking negatively about
the source (uni, a camp) is disincentivized.

~~~
linkregister
Reviews of individual university classes are prolific. Last time I used one of
these websites [1] (years ago), there weren't any compunctions about posting
negative reviews.

I know this isn't exactly responding to your comment, but I thought it fit.

[1] ratemyprofessor.com

~~~
tonyarkles
As a total sidebar, my favourite ratemyprocessor.com review (of myself) reads
as follows:

"is always willing to help if you need help just make sure that you at least
try for a bit before you go for help from Tony otherwise he will not help
you."

And yet the student rated me 5/5 for helpfulness and clarity. Makes me very
happy inside to know that at least someone sees that that's a plus.

------
throwaway847027
A number of employers (at least in SV) are so biased against bootcamps that
the only sensible course of action is to pretend it never happened as soon as
is feasible.

If you review a bootcamp, you risk a permanent association with having
attended a bootcamp.

------
xiaoma
I wrote a fairly detailed review on my blog. [http://logicmason.com/2013/hack-
reactor-review-life-at-a-hac...](http://logicmason.com/2013/hack-reactor-
review-life-at-a-hacker-school/)

It lead to several sites emailing me and asking me to write a review or to
link to their sites. Here is what I wrote to coursereport:

> _By completely ignoring the issue of student outcomes, your resource does
> prospective students a disservice. How about listing average salaries,
> listing graduation rates, linking to yelp profiles and linking to student
> directories for those schools confident enough in their outcomes to share
> them?_

I hadn't looked at any of these sites in a long time, but to the best of my
knowledge, very little has changed. They offer a comparison only of the costs
of the various options, not the value. The person who emailed me did seem to
express some vague interest in adding that kind of information later but two
years later it's still not there.

At least for me, the main reason I avoided the "bootcamp review" sites is that
I didn't feel any would have given me useful guidance as a prospect (whereas
Quora, Yelp and HN threads would have if they'd been around when I applied).

~~~
jhylau
Disclaimer: I run switchup.org

The reason we don't have average salaries and grad rates is because the only
org publishing that is the school itself. Can we trust that number? Has it
been reviewed/audited by a third-party? Only one school does that and we
report their number on the site.

However, we constantly publish data on industry trends and overall placement
rates and job stats to help guide the conversation.
[https://www.switchup.org/research/coding-bootcamp-
survey](https://www.switchup.org/research/coding-bootcamp-survey)

We do have independent school by school database of job outcomes based on our
independent surveys, but sample sizes are generally small and we are not at
liberty to disclose school specific info.

~~~
xiaoma
Yes, I've encountered this argument. Are you aware of the legal trouble a
school misrepresenting its numbers would be open to?

It's extremely useful to include self-reported salaries and hiring stats.
That's actually one of the key pieces of information I myself was looking at.
List the stat and link to or summarize or link to their explanation of how it
was calculated.

As for your own independent surveys, they are almost certainly far less
accurate than that of the schools themselves. Considering the effects of
selection bias on top of those of the small sample size you mentioned before I
suspect they're essentially useless for someone making a decision.

Similarly, what good are "overall stats" that average the results of random
respondents from world class institutions, low-end operations, experiments and
all kinds of other projects? It would be kind of like looking at "overall
stats" for a bucket of participating businesses who had taken money from YC,
Techstars, unknown funds, crowdfunding, banks or their parents. That would
yield some data, but the data wouldn't be useful for an entrepreneur actually
considering taking on funding.

I don't think bootcamp review sites (except possibly Yelp) "help guide the
conversation". I think they tend to mask the huge gulf between the several
schools that a fantastic investment and the many more that aren't.

------
marktd
Many of the bootcamps are relatively young with not that many attendees per
year. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: ~50 per cohort, 6 cohorts per year is
300 students per year, times 3 or so years is around a thousand total
enrollees. 100 reviews is 10% of people reviewing - that seems pretty high to
me.

FWIW: I did a bootcamp, loved it, never wrote a review. Just
laziness/generally don't write reviews for things. I would guess many people
don't write reviews for the same reason.

~~~
pickitupsnake
Agree.

++ Second cohort at Flatiron School - it has grown up so much since then that
there is a time relevance issue.

------
cpymchn
I'm a grad... and I would say part of the phenomena -- and this might sound
corny but I will explain -- is how bootcamps are a personal journey.

By that I mean the entry point for most participants are all different, the
expectations for most participants are all different, the experience for most
participants are all different (some students work harder than others), and
the outcomes are all different.

I felt there was more to learn than there was time (I did a 12 week course),
so how I felt after graduating was largely a reflection of my own confidence
and ability in contrast to the effort I put in and not a direct reflection of
the quality of the instruction.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition [0] is a useful reference here. Any
program that claims you will gain mastery over a discipline in a dozen weeks
is lying to you. The guys that ran my bootcamp were plain about that. They
said they would help me help myself learn... which they did but not to the
level I really wanted to get to. And that more than anything is why I am
ambivalent about recommending them.

\--------

0
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition)

------
trowawee
I loved my bootcamp experience, am still plugged into the alumni network, am
not ashamed of it (why would I be?), but I'm probably never going to write a
review of it. I'm happy to talk to people about it, but I'm not going to take
the time to go write a review. There's no particular pay-off for me, and
besides, the program changes constantly; I mentor where I graduated and in the
1.5 years since I finished, tons of things have changed in terms of how they
organize things. I'd feel like an idiot if I said, "Oh, this was a part I
didn't like," and then somebody who worked there emailed me and said "Hey,
that doesn't exist any more." (Which has happened, except in conversational
form.)

And sure, I'll freely cop to self-interest here. Bootcamp grads get enough
shit from people in tech who want to dick-measure. I'm not going to do
anything to further the cause of people who already think I'm an incompetent
chimp with a keyboard.

Also, like the SwitchUp person already said in this thread, there's no
reliable source of data for outcomes. I can tell you how long it took to get a
job and what I made fresh out of the course, but why would you believe me,
especially if you're already primed, like a bunch of people here clearly are,
to believe that bootcamps are bullshit and their grads are rubes desperate to
cover up the fact they got bilked? Maybe I'm just a plant; maybe I get paid a
combined $200k a year by DBC/GA/HR/Flatiron to fire up 100 sockpuppets and
argue that bootcamps are a good investment to con people on
Reddit/HR/wherever. (That actually sounds like a super fun, super immoral job.
Maybe I can trick them into actually paying me to do that. OR MAYBE I AM STILL
MESSING WITH YOU. ~spirit fingers~)

------
zindlerb
Try yelp. Hack Reactor has 150+ Yelp reviews [http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-
reactor-san-francisco](http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco)

~~~
FireBeyond
As good as the course sounds, and though it's small fish in the grand scheme,
this turns me off:

"Also, you get this hoodie for writing a review so...)"

\- [http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-
francisco?hrid=mVJT...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-
francisco?hrid=mVJTsZiT6kT7DkTeI_vT9A)

~~~
accountatwork
That's shady. Normally, there's a bias such that people who are disgruntled
are more likely to post a review than people who had a good experience. If you
take that bias into account, a 4 star rating is pretty good, 5 stars is
excellent, and so on.

But if you flip that bias on its head, 5 stars becomes a mediocre rating.
That's ok if you've disclosed what you've done, but out of 165 reviews only
one mentions that people are incentivzed to write reviews with free swag.

~~~
davegonzalez
Disclosure; I graduated from Hack Reactor in October 2013.

The lack of negative reviews may seem strange, but I genuinely believe that
everyone who has written about HR does so in a sincere manner (whether it be
positive or negative). I can understand how it seems shady, but with a $17k
tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.

~~~
accountatwork
> with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way
> or the other.

That's intuitive but factually incorrect. There's a large body of empirical
research that shows that giving away trivial tokens has a significant impact.
This is true for everything from charitable donations to sign-ups for services
to survey responses. Not to mention ratings for college courses, which are, in
the aggregate, more expensive than Hack Reactor.

~~~
accountatwork
I'm past the edit window here, but it's also not to the point. The point is
that, by incentivizing reviews, you skew the sample of reviewers. Even if we
didn't have decades of research showing that giving people toys changes their
behavior, it would still change the sample of reviewers and make the rating
both meaningless and misleading.

------
lsiebert
Hmm... there is probably space for a service here. Find out who applies to
boot camps, interview them, find out who gets accepted to boot camps,
interview them, then interview the graduates and any drop outs/people cut
after the program is over. Use questions drawn from standard sociological and
psychological surveys like the Grit-S Scale
[http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20S...](http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20Scale.05312011.pdf)

Provide ratings and info to the general public that don't just show rates, but
trends, who drops out, comparisons of success rates for different groups, etc.
Provide more structured but still anonymous feedback, for a price, to
bootcamps as a consultant, or get a grant from a large tech firm. Publish
papers in conjunction with academia on a delay.

I think what bootcamps could do, if they were willing to, is be much more
agile in changing how they work based on research then a 4 year school, and
actually do research and experiments to find better ways of teaching, and
improve the industry as a whole.

------
skyyler
Kind of relevant: Are bootcamps worth it? I'm looking to get into programming,
but I have a full time support job right now that I need to be able to live
and eat. I can save my money and do a bootcamp, or I could learn how to
program in my downtime. I'm not sure which route to go through.

My friend did a local bootcamp and now he's doing ASP.NET work and loves it!
I'm just scared of doing that specific one because I don't really have
interest in anything microsoft.

~~~
afarrell
> learn to program in my downtime

The hard part here is curation of resources and environment setup.

~~~
jrumbut
It's funny to hear that because I just typed "learn to code" into Google and
the first page (ads included!) are all fine and mostly free resources, many
requiring only a web browser to start.

Just 10 or 15 years ago the process was completely opaque, a lot of books in
your local store had omissions or bugs that made them impossible to follow, it
was a seriously frustrating process unless you stumbled into the right
community, were a genius, or had lots of guidance.

~~~
trowawee
There're enough options that it can be overwhelming. It's hard to see the
place to start, because if you're completely outside the bubble, it's hard to
even know what the options are, or why you'd pick one of them. Say you type
"learn to code" into Google. You go to Codeacademy, because it's the first
option and maybe you've heard of it. You log in, then you go the courses page.
You don't want to drop $20 on the personalized plan right away, so you skip
that; you don't know what "web development" means, or how it's different from
anything else, so you skip the web dev stuff. You go down to the language
section - that's a good, basic start, right? - and you see six boxes:

HTML & CSS: Learn how to create websites by structuring and styling your pages
with HTML and CSS.

JavaScript: Learn the fundamentals of JavaScript, the programming language of
the Web.

jQuery: Learn how to make your websites interactive and create animations by
using jQuery.

PHP: Learn to program in PHP, a widespread language that powers sites like
Facebook.

Python: Learn to program in Python, a powerful language used by sites like
YouTube and Dropbox.

Ruby: Learn to program in Ruby, a ﬂexible language used to create sites like
Codecademy.

Apparently you can use...all of these things to build websites? And they're
all languages? The goals section is better, because those are concrete things
that make some of these choices for you, but your rookie who just wants to
learn some code and maybe see if they like this is already being asked to make
a bunch of choices with relatively little data. And when they start
researching, they're going to find a bunch of sites that say PHP sucks, a
bunch that say the criticism of PHP is overrated, a bunch that say Ruby is the
best beginner language, a bunch that say Ruby is terrible, and a bunch of math
nerds (<3 u, python). Plus, they're going to stumble into the CF that is the
wide world of JavaScript.

None of this makes it impossible, but choice paralysis is a real issue, and I
know a fair number of people who want to get started coding, but can't figure
out where to get a handhold. That's one of the benefits of bootcamps - they
make some of the initial choices for you, so you can get started learning the
building blocks.

Weirdly, I think that well-written books (huge caveat) might be better,
because they do something similar: lock you in a path and then tell you to put
your nose to the grindstone and get to work.

~~~
afarrell
> choice paralysis

Yes. This is what I'm really getting at.

That, and for environment setup, some choices will genuinely send you down a
rabbit hole of wrestling with with unfamiliar tools.

------
mdeggies
I believe there can be legal repercussions if you write negative reviews about
some of these bootcamps.

------
ldn1854
I did a GA bootcamp, during which time we were all encouraged to blog about
our experience on a weekly basis (and we did). I'm not sure where I'd
necessarily write/post a proper review.

~~~
officialchicken
My GA review: I did GA coworking space before their pivot to full time
bootcamp. Startups and an established community that had been there for years
were all given one month notice at the end of the year and were kicked out...
seats for learning are more profitable than desks for doing. Now all of the
grads need jobs, which used to be across the hall. In summary, they're short
sighted.

------
Joof
Theory: If you disliked it, reviewing it poorly could reduce the credibility
of your education. If you liked it, you don't care enough to review it.

