
Ask HN: Have you attended an 'immersive dev school' or hired somebody who did? - mr_spothawk
Schools like AppAcademy, Dev Bootcamp, Flatiron School, General Assembly, gSchool, Hack Reactor, Hacker School etc... offer 9 - 12 weeks of intense&#x2F;immersive training in various flavors of web development.<p>This type of school has not been around that long and have only graduated a handful of cohorts. There&#x27;s no accreditation for these schools and I haven&#x27;t found a website that offers reviews of these schools (maybe somebody here should make that site).<p>There are clearly going to be differences between attending this type of trade school vs. getting a CS Degree, but for employment considerations I would expect that &#x27;outcome&#x27; matters more than &#x27;education&#x27;.<p>If you attended a school like this, what was your experience? Were you prepared for employment as a professional developer after the course? If you encountered troubles, what were they?<p>If you&#x27;ve hired somebody from a school like this, how did you make the determination to hire that person over other candidates with similar skill sets. Also, how do you feel their performance compares with other hires from CS backgrounds?<p>Thanks.<p>(edited for structure)
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JHof
Haven't attended but really want to. One thing I wonder about the boot camps
vs. teaching myself is: Even if I'm able to reach a level of proficiency equal
to that of, say, a Dev Bootcamp grad, would I be able to find a job?

Graduates of these programs seem to be 'in' and can get hired much more
easily. For a relative beginner learning to code, that's a great place to be
and, I think, part of the value of a boot camp. My assumption is that a
similarly skilled, self-taught newbie will have a harder time getting looked
at by the same employers.

Maybe someone can comment on this as well.

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mr_spothawk
From what I've read, half the benefit of these classes is the portfolio &
exposure you get.

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reiko516
I think it also depends on how hard you feel you can work and learn on your
own. I'm looking into the bootcamps right now because I learn better in a more
regimented environment with clear goals (I'm terrible at setting goals for
myself). Also, I have almost nothing in my portfolio that's programming
related, and I think that a bootcamp will help me build it out more. I also
want to speed up the rate of my learning, which is another advantage of the
bootcamps, as far as I can tell.

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caphill
I am currently in Code Fellows. I just started so I can't give you a graduate
perspective. The advantage I would say Code Fellows has over other programs is
that we work in the Techstars building alongside new startups.

I am already a developer but I am not quite there yet in terms of skill level.
I'm good enough to churn out WordPress sites and do basic PHP work which is
what I have been doing through out my career. But I want a more serious
development role and that's the purpose of a lot of these schools they take
someone that is probably 60% of the way and gives them the extra 30% to make
them more employable.

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mr_spothawk
Thanks for the info. Good luck.

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xiaoma
I did Hack Reactor. AFIK, it's got by far the heaviest workload (and highest
tuition) of the above mentioned programs and it paid off beyond my
expectations. I was looking for two things—hard skills and some social proof
due to having made it into such a selective program.

The social proof didn't happen. The program was just too new and employers
hadn't even heard of it yet. Fortunately, the hard skills I gained from the
course were substantial enough that it didn't matter. I actually leap-frogged
past where many of my acquaintances with CS or engineering degrees were. From
what I understand, the current Hack Reactor classes actually are getting some
significant name recognition along with the skills.

By the end of my course, I had serious interest from Google, Groupon, a
Japanese game company, a cool consultancy doing cutting edge stuff with Ember
and a couple of start-ups, one of which is building on Meteor. I went with
Groupon, mostly because of the team and the tech stack. Another factor was
that it's well enough known of a company that working there will pretty much
ensure my liberal arts degree won't be held against me in the future by any
but the most credential-obsessed companies. Only Google offered more in that
regard, but I didn't get the impression that people there were too into
JavaScript, or any dynamically typed languages, for that matter. It's possible
I just caught the wrong interviewer, though.

Hack Reactor did well for me in several areas. Coming into the job at Groupon,
I was being able to contribute right away and I was already familiar with the
technologies in our office (Rails, Node, Backbone, CoffeeScript, CSS
preprocessors, git, etc). Another great thing has been the network. I know
tons of motivated smart people who are now working all over the bay area. When
I set out to do a start-up, I'll very likely be teaming up with a fellow HackR
Alumni. The final big help has been just a general solid CS grounding. Having
already implemented hashes, trees, prefix trees, map, reduce, once, memoize,
etc. has definitely been helpful. We certainly didn't learn everything, but we
learned enough to have some idea what we don't know and where to go to learn
more.

As for difficulties, I'd say the biggest was not being fully prepared for
large codebases. It definitely took more time to get oriented and figure out
where various data was coming from at work than it did on the projects I was
working on at Hack Reactor. It was also a little jarring to see how OO-focused
the programming world at large is, since I had been working more with
functional maker patterns than pseudo classical patterns. Writing a scheme
interpreter in JavaScript was one of the things I worked on as a personal
project.

I don't know Java yet. That definitely causes a bit of friction when looking
at general CS resources online. I'm not terribly concerned though. I'm pushing
onwards, taking coursera classes and doing my best to maintain some of the
momentum I've carried over from my 80 hour weeks at Hack Reactor, within the
framework of a more balanced life.

tldr; The program was fantastic. It's already paid for itself and the network
is amazing.

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mr_spothawk
Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Did you consider any other schools? Did you have prior experience with code
like when you decided to apply?

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xiaoma
I appreciate the encouragement! It's always a bit disappointing to get no
karma from such a long thought out comment.

You know, I've actually written about that stuff on my blog linked in my
profile. I also put up some videos of me reflecting on my time at the school
that I hadn't initially planned on sharing since so many people have emailed
and asked me about it.

~~~
mr_spothawk
I'll check out your blog tonight, thanks for the help.

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hello_newman
I was absolutely the LEAST technical person I knew. I realized I wanted to do
this last year, when I was in college studying Business & Finance. I was
working on a side project/start up and realized I wanted to code so bad, and I
wanted to be writing the code instead of business dev. That in and of itself,
helped me get into these programs.

I applied to App Academy first. Because I dropped out of school, the no
tuition appealed greatly. Ned and Kush are awesome. I was "accepted" pending
the prep work and final interview. I was a total noob, and still had a PC so
setting up an environment was hard. I didn't pass the final interview, but Ned
was incredibly encouraging and said I could apply again.

I applied to DBC at the same time as AA and was accepted as well. I have the
best parents in the world, and they bought me a refurbished MacBook Pro which
helped immensely. I spent a couple months going to my local library every day
for 4+ hours and made great progress. I went up to the Bay and saw the class
room. I had regular "office hours" with Keith and Karim who are awesome and
incredibly patient.

Unfortunately my mother was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. I live in
Orange County, and the 8 hour difference from here to San Fran played a role
in hesitation. DBC also said I needed to simply wait another month or 2 (I was
supposed to go in May) but because of the cancer, I decided to stay.

Around that time (late April) I applied to somewhere closer, and was accepted
into General Assembly Web Development Immersive in Santa Monica. Because I had
already been doing prep work, I completed it quickly and started class June
17. I am currently starting my 5th week of a 12 week course tomorrow.

So far we have been going really fast. The first segment was the class doing a
résumé generator project in bootstrap, JavaScript, and a ruby backend also
using MongoDB. We then paired off, and in groups of 2 the whole class is
building any project we want, but it will be done in 3 weeks. Then with the
remaining time left, we will build 2 more project each lasting 3 weeks (3
projects).

What I like most about General Assembly is after the program they have an
Apprenticeship Program where you work for a local tech company (a partner
company) for 3 months, 4 days a week. Every Friday you come back into GA and
talk about what you did during the week, and then they offer more workshops to
hone your skills further. I am working my ass off to make sure I am one of the
students who gets accepted into the Apprenticeship Program.

I like the apprenticeship because of the subtle transition from student into
junior dev. I like being close to my mom as well. The partner companies seem
really cool, although GA hasn't told us that much about it, because they want
us to remain focused.

If I can get into the Apprenticeship Program, I will obviously do that. I
still want to get up to the bay as well. I applied to Catalyst (now Hack
Reactor) in January because I like JavaScript, and am considering going to
either DBC, AA or HR after this program, but that might be unnecessary and
would put me in another 10-15k in debt on top of the 12k I am already in from
GA.

Overall, these are great schools. Having had some experience with 4 of them,
they are all awesome and have great teachers with great experience. From being
a strictly bis-dev guy who is actually able to hold his own in the class...if
I can do it anyone can as long as you realize it will be VERY hard and you
have to make sure this is what you want to do.

If you have any other questions, my email is on my profile.

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mr_spothawk
Thanks for your feedback :) Glad to hear you're enjoying GA. The
apprenticeship option sounds interesting, good luck!

