
About Coding House (2014) - p8952
[url redacted]
======
codinghouse
Hello!

Our mission at Coding House is to provide a viable alternative to higher
education; one that does not result in crippling debt and teaches the real
world skills necessary to get a job - in a fraction of the time.

We recognize that our program may not be for everyone. Periodically, a student
may decide to leave or will be asked to leave. We work hard to separate
amicably and to support that student with a hassle-free, dignified exit as we
did in this instance.

This student (in our first cohort ever) was unable to successfully complete
the program due to a number of reasons. About half of these were our fault and
we have taken full responsibility to ensure we don't repeat those same
mistakes. The other half were a result of the student's actions (or inactions)
that ultimately contributed to an unsuccessful outcome.

We have since held more than ten cohorts with over 85 students. All but a
handful of them got high paying jobs after completing our program. We have
also modified our price structure from $15,000 upfront (what's known as the
pay and pray method) to 18% of their first year's salary (with a down
payment).

We don’t break even until our students get a job. Because of this, we assume
the majority of the risk for our students (skin in the game). This guarantees
an incentive for us to do everything in our power to make sure our students
are technically competent and able to articulate well in a job interview, and
that we will help them get a great job so we can get paid as well.

Thank you.

\- Nick James, CEO The Coding House Institute

~~~
dang
We let this comment be posted after the thread had closed to new comments, as
we've done in the past when people's businesses are affected by material
posted on HN.

(Not an opinion about the subject.)

------
dang
We've taken the url out of this post. The author of the document asked us to
do so for legal reasons.

------
xeromal
HOLY. SHIT.

I am sorry. :( 90% of these coding schools need to go. I thought my private
school was bad.

Also, there are plenty of free sources for education. Definitely enough to get
you started building your own applications. Hell, ever pluralsight is a better
bargain.

~~~
rpcope1
Agreed. I am incredibly dubious that "bootcamps" have any value whatsoever in
any case, except maybe for introducing practicing developers to new
technologies. I know tech is the hot place to be any more, but man it's
amazing the number of charlatans that have started to show up surrounding "hot
technology."

~~~
nfoz
Different people have different learning styles. And many people do not have
an effective or appropriate learning _environment_ where they can learn new
tech through free resources. So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful
to some people; even it can help wade through what's out there to understand
what's important to learn, how long you should spend learning x, etc.

But until this article, I had never thought much about bootcamps requiring
accreditation, or the dangers of this type of training. Yikes!!

Thanks very much to the author for sharing this experience.

~~~
rpcope1
I get that not everyone can sit down and start grepping how a kernel works,
how to architect database solutions, or get what it means to be reentrant in
the context of parallel programming. Not everyone can be efficient successful
autodidacts; however we have places to learn, like colleges. I would rather
see community colleges or university start offering more individual courses to
help you get up to speed. There is probably some room for just emerging people
in technology completely for a period of time, like some bootcamps seem to do,
but these sort of operations reek the same way for-profit universities do,
feeling very strongly like whoever is teaching is in it for the money and that
the whole operation is a fly-by-night. Beyond that, I wouldn't hire someone
out of a bootcamp to do much more than maintain my generic off the shelf CMS,
as I'm not sure 6-12 weeks is enough to truly gain the experience and
knowledge to avoid anything but the most superficial problems when attempting
to build and maintain effective codebases.

~~~
rhc2104
One of the big "problems" with learning at college is the sequential nature of
Computer Science.

You have to take CS1 your first semester, then CS2 your second semester, and
then you finally have the prerequisites to take multiple classes at once.

Coding bootcamps have a semester's worth of material, so it would be cool if
colleges had a one-semester full-time class that covers Intro CS, Data
Structures, Web Development, and Intro to Software Engineering.

Because that basically is a coding bootcamp (except coding bootcamps have
class all day in lieu of giving out homework).

~~~
johnreddington
This was a big reason for me to do a coding bootcamp. I was switching majors
out of engineering and into CS. I didn't want to spend 2 years slowly learning
CS to find out if I liked it. It was faster and cheaper for me to do one of
these schools to see if I really did want to do this for a living. Now I'm
employed and do do it for a living and love it. I still push myself everyday
to learn and do more learning outside of work. Unfortunately this style of
teaching just doesn't fit the mould of traditional universities, but I think
it's a great way to find out if you really want to pursue a career in this
field.

------
danso
The OP says they were required on a daily basis to fill out a Google form that
asked them things like how many tweets and reddit posts they made the previous
day. And there's the LOL-worthy question, "What is your Klout score today?"

If Groucho Marx were alive, he'd say "I refuse to join any club that would
care about my Klout score"

Besides all of what OP posted in terms of Coding House being a joke, another
sign would be that such questions had to be asked and put into a Google
form...all of those metrics could have been automated in their collection. In
fact, that should be one of the assignments for any proper coding school.

~~~
hsod
"If Groucho Marx were alive, he'd say "I refuse to join any club that would
care about my Klout score""

No, he wouldn't. His original line was self-deprecating, yours is self-
aggrandizing.

~~~
danso
_WHOOSH_

------
zipWith
Considering that the sales pitch of Coding House and every other bootcamp I've
yet seen is "give us $$$$ and we'll land you a job making $$$$$$," I wouldn't
be surprised if bootcamp graduates got a negative, mercenary-like reputation
amongst their peers, who overwhelmingly got into programming for the love of
it. Obviously you can't blame someone for trying to improve their standing in
life, and not everyone discovers programming in childhood or young adulthood,
but I don't really understand why code schools are needed when self-education
has long been an established, effective alternative to a CS degree.

The whole bootcamp movement smells of opportunists cashing in on the naive and
uninformed.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I don't really understand why code schools are needed when self-education
> has long been an established, effective alternative to CS university
> education.

There's probably a real utility to vocationally-focused coding schools; OTOH,
there's also quite a lot of opportunity for those who are sharp salesmen
without a lot of training or technical acumen to take fleece the naïve who are
aware of the high pay in the industry and aren't equipped to evaluate the
quality of the institutions.

Unregulated, unaccredited educational programs (heck, even with regulated,
accredited programs, less-than-stellar programs of this type are _still_ a
problem, though there are more checks and balances to identify and weed them
out) promising to get people into highly-paying careers have _always_ been a
problem.

------
vinceguidry
I'm trying to figure out what the relevant criteria should be for the decision
of whether to go to a code school or not. I have a friend that sees how hot
the market for talent is and wants to get in on it. I showed him mhartl's
Rails tutorial but he's too busy to really dig in and when he does ends up
burning a lot of time spinning his wheels.

I suggested two Atlanta-area code schools, both of whom have been around
several years and are well-connected with the development community. The
problem with a code school is the same reason why there's a market for code
schools at all. The market for talent is so hot that the people you want to be
instructors can make way more money elsewhere than you could ever pay them. So
you should know you're signing up for sub-standard instruction even before you
start looking for one.

I still think my friend would be well-served at one of these spots, I've
offered to help him out, but he's just too busy, he needs a situation that
will force him to focus that has people on hand to help him cut through the
noise. Then his natural intelligence will start coming through and he'll be
able to make progress on learning.

Code school is an option, but you still really need to be resourceful and able
to pick stuff up on your own because your instructor is pretty much guaranteed
to be of the amateur-hobbyist variety.

~~~
dustincoates
"So you should know you're signing up for sub-standard instruction even before
you start looking for one... your instructor is pretty much guaranteed to be
of the amateur-hobbyist variety"

I don't think this is a fair assessment, especially at the more established
code schools.

For one, the instructors are probably making more than you think they are, so
the difference between what they could get for a full-time gig and what they
could get as instructors likely isn't that differently.

You also need a very special skill set to be an instructor at these kind of
schools. You need to know the code very well, but you also need to be a good
instructor which is a completely different skill set (communication, patience,
understanding of how and when to introduce concepts). A vast bulk of the
talent at the very top end you're referring to who would be completely
unaffordable for the coding schools may not have that second component.

But, you're right in your suggestion that you choose a good school. The number
of code schools, in my opinion, has become far too crowded and I expect that
within the year we'll start to see most of the schools either go under or
merge.

(As a disclaimer, I (until recently) worked at General Assembly which runs
coding schools in several cities, but I don't speak for them and I never
worked directly on the Web Development Immersive program during my time at GA,
though I did take it and was happy with the outcome.)

~~~
cansync1
Somewhat agreed:

(oh btw a disclaimer at the bottom of a post like oh I may be biased or still
work there but....)

I am a founder at Coding House.

We have the instructor (co founder) who wrote the RoR curriculum for General
Assembly 3.5 years ago (that they still uses to date) and was there lead
instructor. He also wrote the curriculum for Nashville Software School, and
Flat Iron School. That they all still uses!

There is not an instructor out there that has more experiences.

[http://codinghouse.co/#!team?team=chyld-
medford](http://codinghouse.co/#!team?team=chyld-medford)

------
sleazebreeze
EDIT: Turns out this Quora review is written by a different Jose who attended
Coding House. My bad!

Was this review by Jose written under duress or legally compelled somehow?

[http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Coding-House](http://www.quora.com/Reviews-
of-Coding-House)

It is written by the OP, but it is quite positive and recommends the
experience from Coding House. It was written in April 2015. The article was
from September 2014.

Something is off here...

~~~
danso
I'm assuming two different Joses?

edit: Keep reading that Quora thread. In one of the hidden responses (hidden
because it really isn't a review), it mentions the source of the OP, which has
apparently been removed since its original posting:
[http://joselcontreras.com/about-coding-
house/](http://joselcontreras.com/about-coding-house/)

~~~
huac
Different Jose's.

Looks like the OP was removed under legal threat (read the end of the PDF),
but not before somebody saved it to their Google drive.

------
slapresta
Looks like Amy's Baking Company has branched into coding bootcamps.

~~~
icpmacdo
haha I look forward to laughing at the MS paint conspiracy story boards that
result from these kind of events

------
clavalle
I can see what Coding House was trying to accomplish from this description:
give the attendees a 'solved' but real problem that they could start building
day 1. Show them how to be self reliant in terms of finding answers for
themselves (important for any development career). Address the commonly
neglected area of interpersonal networking and personal branding (I can't
believe I just used that phrase with a straight face, but there it is).

But it seems like it was geared toward people who already had a handle on
programming. This, along with inflated marketing promises (welcome to the
business world) is where things collapsed.

These are fixable problems. First, time should be split between instruction on
concrete beginner level topics and the project. Preferably relevant to the
task they will be tackling in the project itself. The instructor should be
very well versed in the technologies at least so far as the previously solved
project the students build is concerned. The project itself and the steps
needed to accomplish the project should be very well understood. The
instructor should have a step by step guide from start to finish. This would
take doing the project from scratch a few times using the notes from the
previous one as a guide. That guide shouldn't be shared with the developers
but it should serve as a reference to get them unstuck after beating their
head against Google and Stack Overflow.

And, of course, you shouldn't make promises of employment that you can't keep.

Now, those seem to be very core problems but I do see the logic behind a lot
of the rest. Exercise is important to work into your routine. Networking is
important. Learning to solve your own problems is important. Working with
others is important. Doing promo photoshoots and locking your laptop? Not so
much.

I can see why this person would want their money back and if I were Coding
House I'd pay it, but I don't think everything is as damning as this letter
makes out. With some serious tweaks it is recoverable. I think their heart was
likely in the right place.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
See also: [http://www.demon-sushi.com/warning/](http://www.demon-
sushi.com/warning/)

~~~
MCRed
The relevance of that site is not immediately obvious.

------
childplease
I recently completed the Coding House program and have been actively
interviewing for four weeks. I had three offers this morning from different
companies - all six figures and above (yes - $100,000+). I am accepting one of
those now. I also turned down several other opportunities because they didn’t
fit my career interest. This didn’t happen by chance and it certainly would
not have been possible without the exceptional program I attended at Coding
House. These post come at the perfect time for me to voice my opinion on
coding bootcamps. And by the way this has nothing to do about money - it has
to do with an amazing program that provided me with thousands of career
opportunities.

For complete transparency I graduated college with a business degree, worked
in the software industry (project management/account management side) for 5+
years, and completed multiple online certifications for various programming
languages. I am telling you this not to brag (because this experience doesn’t
mean shit) but to demonstrate these programs can benefit individuals who have
a solid work/education background, as well as those wanting to make a career
change.

Prior to Coding House I was making roughly $50,000. I was teaching myself
programming on the side on platforms such as Pluralsight, Codecademy, and Code
School. I also took took three classes at O’Reilly School of Tech. I can say
from personal experience NO ONE can become a Jr. Developer in a reasonable
time using these resources. These platforms teach you programming in a kiddie
pool environment far away from real world environments. Try developing a
production ready application after completing those courses - it isn’t
possible for 99% of people. You don’t have professionals showing you the ropes
of Version Control Systems, framework architecture, Test Driven Development,
Design Driven Development, development tools, deployments to AWS, Digital
Ocean, Heroku, and API integrations. Anyone who is claiming someone can make
the transition with only using these educational resources is clearly
uneducated on software development. Those individuals are so far disconnected
from reality its laughable.

Making a transition into software development is far more complicated than
taking a few free courses online. Programs such as Coding House (and several
others) prepare their “students” for real world application development.
Bootcamps are extremely intense and mentally exhausting. You have to be
resilient and willing to make a million mistakes. Yes the reward can be great
on the other side (great pay and work) but you have to be honest with yourself
prior to attending a camp. 2 months is a short time for anything. You have to
put in countless hours before and after the program. Nothing is going to be
handed to you. Welcome to life - mommy and daddy will not be there to hold
your hand. These camps provide a huge stepping stone that modern Computer
Science programs are not providing. I am not saying CS programs are not worth
time + investment because I have never attended such a program. CS programs
and bootcamps are different on so many levels and have different goals.

My Accomplishments at Coding House: -Accepted employment offer one month after
program was complete -Won 1st place at Launch 215 Hackathon building an
application with Sabre Cord API -Invited to speak with the CEO of Codecademy
based on a blog post I wrote. -Interviewed at PayPal and Apple and completed
all final rounds of the interview process (and I turned all those offers down)
-Developed a mobile application that allows anyone to scan a barcode of a food
product and know instantly if they are allergic to any ingredients.

Prior to coding house these accomplishments were not within my reach. I can
honestly say I accomplished more in 2 months than would have been possible in
a 18 month timeframe on my own. My money and time was well worth the
investment.

What makes Coding House successful: -Extensive pre-work prior to attending. I
spent well over 200 hours or more dedicated to preparing myself for the
program. -One of the best damn instructors the industry has to offer. I have
worked with very talented developers throughout my career and this instructor
is top notch. He can teach, coach, challenge, and push you to your limits.
-The curriculum (Javascript Stack) builds extremely well and allows for great
progression -No others worries but coding and collaborating with other
students -Application based learning with a solid portfolio to display at the
end of the program

So what does this mean? Bootcamps are what you make of them. Are they perfect?
No. But they can help propel you in many different directions for your career.
Anything worth pursuing is difficult and a lot of people will fail achieving
it. I swam for 4 years as a NCAA Division I athlete (again -this isn’t too
brag). 20 of us started as Freshman, and 4 of us completed our Senior year.
Why? Because it was hard and demanding. Bootcamps are the same. They are hard
and require 110% dedication to achieving your goals. The weak will fail and
blame everyone around them for it. Those people are everywhere and it’s sad
they can’t take ownership for their own failures. The tough will succeed and
continue to push the limits of education and software development.

------
ired
here is the link to the story (copy of the original pdf):
[http://gapurov.com/files/codinghouse_tell-
all.pdf](http://gapurov.com/files/codinghouse_tell-all.pdf)

------
cansync1
Hi All,

I am one of the founders at Coding House. Let me provide some insight on the
post from last year.

1) 50% of the the post is true and my fault

2) 50% is untrue and students fault

3) It was our very first cohort and we had a lot to learn about what worked
and did not work

4) The student has been refunded

5) We wanted to make it like a real boot camp and that was to hard on some of
the students

6) We have fantastic instructors you can find there bio's on our site

7) We have change our policies to insure it dose not happen again

8) Look up all the reviews of Coding House and you will find we have great
outcomes and satisfied students

~~~
wyc
> 50% is untrue and students fault

This statement does little to make me feel any better about Coding House.

~~~
joshrotenberg
Should be more like "We take 100% responsibility for the issues and plan to do
something about it."

~~~
cansync1
Fair enough.

We take 100% responsibility for taking a student in our first cohort over 1
year ago; who was not prepared, did not do the work in or after the program.

We have learned from our mistake.

We now have extensive per work, coding challenges (gates on all phases) and
accept only 3.16% of the students that apply.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
That's like a little kid who, when told to make an apology, says "I'm sorry
you're so ugly."

