

Show HN: A place to rate development schools - lowglow
http://schools.techendo.co/

======
rholdy
Are you planning on verifying that people leaving reviews have first hand
experience with a school? Do you allow people affiliated with the school to
respond to the reviews in order to share their side of the story?

As someone who has participated in one of the bootcamps you list on your site
I can tell you that your data will likely be skewed by a vocal minority, and a
request to "open the books" and provide the data on graduates is a faulty
proposition.

When I was researching which bootcamp I would attend, figures about job
placement after graduation were extremely important to me and my decision
process. However, having attended one of these programs and having worked
closely with the other students in my group, I started to understand the flaws
in that statistic as a measure of the program. Really, all that it measures is
how selective a program is of the students it accepts. Programs that choose
the top <1% of applicants are obviously going to place more people into better
jobs because they are starting with smarter, more experienced people to begin
with.

The type of person that is successful in these style of learning environments
has a few very specific personality traits. They are extremely motivated, and
they have the ability to learn quickly. No bootcamp program can force a lazy
person to learn how to code. Just like no company wants to hire a lazy coder.
It is not the fault of the program, the instructors, or the curriculum.

Obviously, there are some programs that are more thorough than others, but I
really found that one of the most valuable things I gained from my program was
access to the network of the founders. The people they invited to hiring day
and as mentors were awesome, and forming those relationships on my own
probably would have been harder than learning how to code.

TL;DR If nobody from a program gets hired, then there is a problem with the
program. However, if several people do get hired, the others have no business
crying "This is a scam!"

~~~
lowglow
> Are you planning on verifying that people leaving reviews have first hand
> experience with a school?

Not really. Honor system.

> Do you allow people affiliated with the school to respond to the reviews in
> order to share their side of the story?

This is more about personal experience from both students and companies
hiring. I'm not preventing people from replying, but that's not really the
focus.

> As someone who has participated in one of the bootcamps you list on your
> site I can tell you that your data will likely be skewed by a vocal
> minority, and a request to "open the books" and provide the data on
> graduates is a faulty proposition.

Well I would hope both sides would be represented that way we can get a better
view of how successful these places for students hoping to enroll.

> TL;DR If nobody from a program gets hired, then there is a problem with the
> program. However, if several people do get hired, the others have no
> business crying "This is a scam!"

Why? Are you assuming those that got hired were also hired by competent
companies and went through an interview process that validated what they
learned?

------
lowglow
This site was created as a response. The article "Are Dev Bootcamps a scam?"
had the owners and organizers of development schools up in arms defending
their schools. Unfortunately when I asked them to open their books and prove
their success rates with all of their candidates, they did not feel they
should.

I'm now letting the students and community answer the question of whether or
not the schools are a scam.

------
mjhea0
i recently launched [http://bootgrad.com](http://bootgrad.com) to tackle the
same problem. good points, rholdy. i believe though that there needs to be
some objective statistics. sure, every bootcamp has different requirements and
focus on different skills and have different lengths. i believe that if enough
data is put out there, then bootcamps will be forced to open up their books.

