

Ask HN: Which programming bootcamps do you take seriously? - cblock811

I am new to the tech industry and was one of the people who got in after doing a rails web development bootcamp. I was honestly pretty disappointed with my bootcamp, but I just wanted some direction with my education and validation with a credential.  Now that I&#x27;m in the industry I&#x27;ve heard a lot of back and forth.<p>Rather than ask IF you take graduates of these programs seriously (because I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s a conversation we have read before) I&#x27;m curious which programs you take seriously.  This might help me as I meet people who want to get into the industry and have shown they have the willpower to get started on their own.<p>Thanks for any feedback!
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ChristopherM
I would see participation at a bootcamp as a negative, if you can't pick up a
couple of books and use online resources to figure it out; how are you going
to manage once you get into a work situation that requires more than trivial
common patterns and solutions?

If you want to further your education. Build applications, websites or
whatever thing makes sense for your field of interest. Proof of your abilities
is the application. Other than prior work experience it is the only thing that
validates your knowledge.

A bootcamp is nothing more than a vocational school, it teaches just enough to
be dangerous but will never make you a serious software engineer. That
requires a much deeper background which would allow you to pick up any
language and any framework that might be required. After going to a bootcamp
you will have to spend years "practicing" and learning on your own to even be
considered a junior developer as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
xiaoma
This is a very ignorant view. Just as instructors are an invaluable resource
at a (human) language immersion school, the same is true of instructors at an
immersive coding school.

At least at the particular school I attended, I got a great deal out of time
and money I invested. It's true you can find great lectures online. However, I
found the that having a better than 2:1 student teacher ratio and having
instructors around while I was actually in the process of writing software to
be very helpful. Ditto for code reviews. While I could have learned everything
on my own with books and other resources, it would have probably taken closer
to 4,000 instead of 1,000 hours. It's also worth pointing out my classmates
_did_ generally end up with the kind of background that let them confidently
jump into another language and framework. Quite a few did in their first jobs
out of the program.

> _" After going to a bootcamp you will have to spend years "practicing" and
> learning on your own to even be considered a junior developer as far as I'm
> concerned."_

Fortunately for my friends and fellow alum, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber
and many, many start-ups don't subscribe to this point of view. The average
salaries of fresh grads of the program are higher than those of Stanford CS
grads. The gap after a year is even greater.

I certainly can't claim that every immersive school is worth it, but some
definitely are.

Update: The class hours were 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for 12 weeks (total
of 864 hours). I generally stayed a couple of hours late and kept working on
things and/or playing around with things from previous lessons. During that
time I was technically on my own but the instructors were actually still
around. I truly don't know when they slept. I also put in about 25 hours
during the break week halfway through.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Just to clarify - did you have 1000 hours of time at this immersive
school/bootcamp or is that including individual time building on things etc?
I'm just wondering because I don't imagine they come cheap (albeit I'm sure
cheaper than Stanford CS) and if you pay by the hour or something that's way
more expensive than I envisioned them to be. Also longer than I expected them
to be, 1000 hours presumably quite compressed sounds intense.

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zorrb
Everyone I've talked to who has taken a developer bootcamp has been severely
disappointed with the programs except for one, and it's the one that costs the
most. I've also heard good things about Hackbright.

The sentiment I got from a majority of bootcamp attendees is feeling like they
got legitimately scammed.

Examples include: * 95% of the time being spent with a "teacher's assistant"
who "graduated" 1 week before and had less experience coding coming out of the
program than most did going into it. * A week spent on basic HTML (which
should obviously be pre-requisite knowledge) * After bringing up legitimate
concerns about teaching material, and instruction being poor during the
program looking for any type of refund and to part ways being met with extreme
hostility. * Zero communication or follow-up on the job search a couple months
after the program (which since they obviously couldn't get a job after a very
basic program, they spent that time building out projects)

The advice people give is to not mention attending a bootcamp during
interviews. Whether or not it's "fair", the "credential" of having attended a
bootcamp is a negative signal.

~~~
EliRivers
_A week spent on basic HTML (which should obviously be pre-requisite
knowledge)_

Why? I thought these places were about learning to program?

~~~
cblock811
Many bootcamps cover web development. Also, HTML is what I started with so I
could get used to: I type code, something happens. Sounds super simple to
people in tech, but I came from the hotel industry. I wanted to start at a
very foundational level and build up.

~~~
EliRivers
_Many bootcamps cover web development._

Oh right. Well that explains it. Web dev does seem to get an enormous amount
of press and attention for such a small part of the industry, but then it is
the most obviously visible and as you say, it can have a very tight feedback
loop for the coder[1].

[1] I expect, based on your words :) Never touched so much as a single line of
it.

------
morningwarrior
As a co-founder of one of the first in-person programs, I can say that just by
asking this question we have come a long way in just the past 3 years! But as
the field grows it becomes harder for a prospective student to make the right
choice for the next step in the career.

I understand that you're asking for opinions we might have on which programs
to take seriously, but I feel that narrowly focusing on that can create a
flamewar that won't be productive for you as you talk with friends and others
about which program to apply to.

I'll at least start by pointing out some great external resources to help you
verify your own opinions, learn about new programs, and help people make an
informed decision.

\- Quora ([http://quora.com](http://quora.com)) is a great resource to get
information about which programming bootcamp to choose from. Yes, you can get
subjective advice from people inside these bootcamps, but just searching
"programming bootcamp" will send you through a wormhole of information.

\- If you don't feel Quora provides you with enough objective data, there are
a rising number of bootcamp review sites popping up. From our experience with
these sites, I can say that Switch (switchup.org) and CourseReport
(coursereport.com) have their stuff together.

I will also add that there are other options besides just 3-month programming
bootcamps. There are even more intense programming bootcamps like the Turing
School of Software & Design ([http://turing.io/](http://turing.io/)) or
gSchool ([http://www.galvanize.it/school/](http://www.galvanize.it/school/)),
and 30 Weeks ([https://www.30weeks.com/](https://www.30weeks.com/)), a new
design school created by Google.

 _Taking objective cap off_

We have also created a 9-month program in Chicago called Starter School
([http://starterschool.com](http://starterschool.com)), which not only teaches
web development, but web design, product development, and entrepreneurship. If
you want to get a graduate's perspective of this program, I encourage you to
read this post ([https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3771-jack-mallers-from-
dropou...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3771-jack-mallers-from-dropout-to-
starter)).

 _Putting objective cap back on_

Final cautionary note: If prospective students have the goal of getting a
"validation with a credential" the chances of being disappointed at the end of
the program are extremely high. These programs were created in direct
retaliation to that premise. It's all about what you learn, what you build,
and what type of person you are. The more serious you are about your
education, the better chances you have of being successful after you are done
with your bootcamp education.

------
hello_newman
I went to General Assembly's Inaugural class in Santa Monica, California. I
thought the instructors were incredible, and my fellow students were awesome,
and I still keep in touch with some of them. However I do think, and this is
my sole opinion, that General Assembly as a company has many, many things to
work on.

There are still are many people (like some who have given answers in this
thread) who have never been to a bootcamp, know nothing about them, and
continue to shit on them just because it is a different way of doing things.
On the other hand, I have heard of some bootcamps basically just doing things
you could do online, so YMMV. I dropped out of college and enrolled, and I am
currently writing code for a living, so these programs definitely produce
value despite what ignorant people may say.

The bootcamp I personally take incredibly seriously is Hack Reactor. I applied
and had a great interview, but they told me to reapply again because my js
wasn't were it needed to be for their bootcamp (which is fair, as I have
focused way more energy on ruby/rails). I took that as a challenge, and I will
be having my second interview in the next month, and I hope to go spring of
2015.

Hack Reactor seriously produces top notch people, rivaling that of many CS
degree programs in my opinion. The instructors are incredible, the founders
are very empathetic who have been in the position of many people coming to the
program, and the students are all top notch. I could not think of any better
way to spend 12-24 weeks.

------
shawndrost
I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor, and I take myself extremely seriously. Here's
a list of "people I take seriously that aren't the handsome devil in the
mirror": Flatiron, Turing, Zipfian, Epicodus (dark horse -- a very good
bargain choice), MakerSquare, App Academy.

Cool to see people repping Hack Reactor in this thread! Thanks <3

------
netskrill
I, myself didnt have any programming experience, and took an online rails
bootcamp, graduated and got a job from a fortune 50 company as a SW engineer.
I was able to ramp up with the codebase relatively quickly and
committing/completing user stories in weeks. I did all those tutorials you can
think of...code school, code academy, coursera(that rotten potatoes app), and
the one I took had a lot of structure and built a production worth app as the
main course, all through TDD, capybara, factories, stripe payment integration.
The instructors were focused on teaching how to build shippable code.
Comapleting the course,and writing a kickass readme files on your github
projects, should land you some interviews. Of course, i had to go above and
beyond to get past recruiters, who focus on rails experience only...

------
krrishd
One that I do take seriously, but is local to Colorado (Denver, Boulder) is
gSchool ([http://www.galvanize.it/school/](http://www.galvanize.it/school/)).
It 100% guarantees job placement within a well-to-do startup as a software
engineer, and teaches everything from software engineering as a broad concept
to building specific types of application (if that makes any sense).

Another one with the same premise, made by the same guy is
[http://turing.io](http://turing.io), and it works very similarly and some
consider it to be gSchool 2.0

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jtfairbank
Bloc.io has a pretty good program, at a reasonable expense. Full disclosure:
I'm friends with the founders (we all went to U of I), but my recommendation
is based on what I know about their program.

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rhgraysonii
I attended Epicodus, and though I had prior experience I ended up with a
wonderful job afterwards and found the experience amazing. 90+% of the rest of
the class got jobs as junior devs or better as well. Email me if you wanna
chat, its in my profile.

------
ChristianBundy
I don't take dev bootcamp graduation seriously because I've never heard of
anyone washing out. I can only speak for myself personally, but activity on
GitHub and having projects are the two things that I look for.

------
piratebroadcast
thoughtbot's Metis program (Rails) is top notch and have been impressed with
their graduates.

