Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate | Hacker News Reader

Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

medium.com

87 pointsmakinori108 comments

Flatiron School was nothing like this. We had long lectures every day by a great senior-level dev, and then review sessions with recent grads later in the day. It was a really polished curriculum, and a great environment to work hard in. $20k is indeed expensive, but it's only money. I used to do something I didn't love for a living and now I get to write code. Life is short. I'm thankful bootcamps exist and there was a path for me to transition into a challenging, engaging career.

I've been out for almost a year now. I hope they're still keeping the standards high.

How much was the tuition at Flatiron?

I think 15k plus living in NYC for a few months.

> "$20k is indeed expensive, but it's only money."

That is a very substantial amount of cash for most people. Not to mention the time commitment. (As you say, life is short.)

Eh, much cheaper than a $40,000 4-year commitment (from a public university, assuming $5,000 semesters - which is very lenient).

That's been brought up a few times in this thread. I don't think it's a fair comparison at all. You can borrow student loans for college, but the $20k comes out of pocket.

That >$40k+interest in loans still gets paid out of your pocket.

Or you could do what I did, get a shitty minimum-wage code monkey startup job beforehand so you know what you're getting into before you commit, then sock away some funds, take out a personal loan, and because you're a programmer you can turn the entire tuition into a business expense and also deduct the cost of moving to <insert tech hub here>.

Easily paid the loan off once I got my first job. Got a huge tax return last month. Now enjoying writing this from Mountain View.

Most bootcamp students already have college degrees. Many have families and mortgages, etc. Dropping from the workforce for four years to do another college degree isn't a realistic option. Tuition isn't the biggest cost of education at a certain point in life; lost wages is.

A second bachelor's is unlikely to take four years of full-time work; e.g., Oregon State's online second bachelor's in CS is a 1-year full time program.

That's cool and an option I didn't know about. Still, an entire year of lost wages is way more expensive than a bootcamp. I couldn't have made that work.

> Still, an entire year of lost wages is way more expensive than a bootcamp.

Plenty of people do online programs nearly equivalent to full-time (with loads like that of the 1.5-year track for the OSU second bachelor's, which is also available on 2-, 3-, and 4-year tracks with lower impacts, though longer terms) with full-time jobs and families, some even do full-time programs (like the 1-year track) that way. People that need to learn around an existing job and often family commitments are pretty much the core market for distance education.

That's not to say bootcamps don't have their place, but the idea that there is no other option for people who want to become programmers and can't afford to take a lot of time off of their existing job is just wrong.

You can now borrow for high quality, reputable Bootcamps. In fact, the lenders who do this are extremely diligent about researching our outcomes. They do not want to lend $20k to students to attend a program that doesn't have PROVEN high quality outcomes. Hack Reactor has demonstrated that we have those kinds of successes so we have a number of lenders willing to provide financing to our students.

Not true.

At least one program whose graduates I have worked with sets up a payment program that only starts after you land a tech job.

It isn't bad relative to what a developer earns in their first 10 years. Or even if it doesn't bring a great salary, working in software is fun.

Circa a year ago the remote HR experience was pretty great. While the lectures were pre-recorded (to be expected) we always had Q&A sessions to demystify any remaining questions. And our tech leads were from notable companies.

I figured the remote option was really as great as it gets - the majority of the learning still being applicable (many teams work via repositories rather than shared drives anyways) while getting to do the whole thing with no pants from my room in Arizona (much cheaper living expenses).

this is exactly what HR is like... just because someone breaks up with their girlfriend and goes on a rant doesn't mean the school actually sucks

Honestly I feel like the golden age of bootcamps is coming to an end. A lot of schools jumped into the market and it just seems like quality is dropping.

Having worked at a bootcamp as an instructor and having hired multiple bootcamp grads I've noticed that typically you'll have 2 or 3 really great students and then 20 who got little value from the program. Bootcamps work wonders for that small percentage of students though. A lot of people who had some pretty shitty career paths ended up going from $12.00/hr to $100,00/yr within a few years of the program.

That's life changing; sadly it's the exception, not the rule.

I didn't have any ability to follow my students' earnings but that '2-3 really great students per class' also correlates with my experience TA'ing CS110 students.

Exactly. I feel this is being overlooked a lot.

Yep. It makes sense though, if you were a cofounder at a bootcamp as of like 2-3 years ago, you went from struggling just to get students in the door, to showing the first 2-300 students your passion and teaching skills and delighting in their successes, to earning millions, to having to worry about mitigating legal/financial risks, to delegating lots of responsibilities and losing touch with the business. And now you're ready to move on with your life.

Happens to every super successful small business owner that doesn't consciously try to prevent that from happening. So it's no surprise that HR and probably lots of other bootcamps aren't as great as they used to be.

I hire data scientists, my experience interviewing through a boot camp for a year: the top 1-2 students in each class are great, the remaining 10-15 are anywhere from under-qualified to woefully unqualified. The one guy I hired from the bootcamp, easily the highest quality applicant from three classes we evaluated, told me he learned essentially nothing. He told me his teachers had no real qualifications or work experience. The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters. We were charged 10K to hire him.

Bootcamps are a good idea in theory, but the execution makes it clear most of them are cash grabs and part of a disturbing culture in this country to massively profit off post secondary school education (at the expense of the students).

> The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters.

Assuming you're going for a job, paying $X to get a job in six weeks sounds like much better value than paying $X to get a job in two years.

I think parent comment is suggesting a greater value because 15k bought him a whole year or two of supervised self-improvement, whereas it lasts only 6 weeks in the boot camp environment.

Yes exactly. I only brought up the money to transition to my rant about how I think bootcamps are a cash grab :)

I also think thaumasiotes is missing my overarching point, which is that the data science bootcamps didn't actually provide much value to their students.

This is a great post and more of these are surely needed. I think the reason we don't see many graduates speaking out is because they feel it might "de-value" their degree which I totally understand.

However the lack of transparency with bootcamps is frightening. Especially regarding how much they charge. I'm not saying all of them are bad. In fact I think it is refreshing to that so many bootcamps popped up since now you have a lot of options. However there doesn't seem to be a lot of price warring yet which I find kind of odd.

The weird thing is that the "price warring" that does go on seems very dramatic - there are plenty of bootcamps that are effectively "free". That being said, they often don't get rave reviews (nor do they seem to have much marketing going for them).

I went to a bootcamp in 2014. I think it was detrimental. I came out of it depressed and wholly unequipped for the roles their marketing suggested I'd be ready for.

I don't recommend them.

As an employer I'd look at bootcamp participation as a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago.

If you truly don't know how to program but want a coding job, then here's a $0 class. Start with JavaScript. Why? The entire internet is based on JavaScript, it can do anything, it runs on any OS, and it's easy to learn.

Google how to write a "hello world" web server program in node.js. (js stands for JavaScript. node.js is the most popular way to write web server in JavaScript). Follow that tutorial through.

Next, update it to make it tell the current time, updating once per second. Make a client-side and a server-side version of the app. Client-side means your code is in the HTML page and gets executed by the browser. Server-side means the code is on the web server, and your browser pings the server once per second for the correct time. Server-side is a bit more complex. Google is your friend in this. stackoverflow.com is a great community and resource to learn from (but search for existing answers before asking questions!).

Next step is to find a TodoMVC tutorial (google again) in node.js, follow it through, and publish to heroku. You probably want to google "node.js todomvc heroku tutorial". (I didn't but I'm sure something would turn up). This will teach you about databases, version control (specifically "git"), hosting, and deployment. At the end of the day you'll have fully functional web app that anyone can use just by knowing the URL! Really once you've worked through that, or, once you're able to do it from scratch without googling much, you're a coder. Rejoice.

At that point put your TodoMVC code on github (google again, but the place people share code via "the git"), and start mucking with it. Whatever suits your fancy: if you're into UX then spend time making the UX cleaner. If you're into databases or programming languages, adapt to different ones. If you're into performance, then blaze that path. Or if you're just not into todo lists, then use your newfound knowledge to start a project WRT something you do like.

Final step, ping potential employers and show off your github account. You'll certainly get a look from SMB owners who are looking for people with some intrinsic motivation. You'll put people who subcontract their drive to bootcamp programs to shame.

Given the volume of applicants you have to sift through, I don't blame you for generalizing that "bootcamp == noob".

I know several people who had a CS degree and/or had been working as actual "Software Engineer"s for fairly reputable companies before attending a bootcamp. For people like this, there are several reasons to attend:

1) The same kind of reason why people do MBA's: you get a mental break, in that you do something very different than what you're used to doing, and then probably get to work in a more desirable city/company.

2) To learn things that were not taught in a CS program. At least as of 3-4 years ago, most CS programs did not teach you any kind of web development-- if you're lucky, there was a class on the LAMP stack, or you could do an independent project using whatever stack you wanted. Otherwise it was Java/C++ for data structures & algorithms. Going from that, to webapp development, can leave you feeling like you have no idea what you're doing. Especially if your coworkers aren't nice enough to help you out.

3) To meet technical cofounders. It sounds like nowadays some programs are basically letting in anyone with a heartbeat, but a few years ago at least, before bootcamps became "cool" or whatever, they attracted highly motivated risk-takers, many of whom had prior programming experience.

Agreed. Everything in perspective.

I took the SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer) exam back in the day. You did come out of it knowing details of the Java language very well. The Microsoft certs at the time were mostly how to use Visual Studio. The SCJP opened a few doors (many moons ago not in Silicon Valley), not bad for a $150 test. Once I had a few jobs, the cert disappeared from my resume.

One minor nitpick, it wouldn't be Sun née Oracle. The right side is the maiden or former name.

> a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago.

That's unfair. Don't tar everyone with vendor qualifications with the same brush. Many of us obtained them because the companies we worked for needed minimum numbers of vendor "qualified" staff to attain or maintain the various levels of partner status available. For example, I worked at a consultancy that needed to maintain a pool of Microsoft and Cisco qualified staff to maintain the levels of official vendor partnership (Gold was the top MS partnership back in the day, don't remember what the Cisco one was) that would keep opening doors at blue chips.

I guess the wrong signal is not that you have a cert, it's when you highlight it in your résumé.

I agree with this. I used to teach at a coding school. I told my students to emphasize projects on their resume, not the fact that they went through our program.

Or to put it another way, if you knew how to program you wouldn't need to take a crash course. One of the unique things about programming is that many places will hire you without formal certification if you have the (non-language-specific) skills, so there's no real reason to do a bootcamp just for the credential.

Conversely, even if you have credentials you're useless if you can't churn out decent code, and it's just not possible to get the chops to do that in a few weeks of study if you don't already have a basic level of skill. And if you do, there's again no reason to actually go to a bootcamp.

Not that we don't have our problems with stuff like brogrammer culture (particularly in startups) but in terms of credentialling we're actually remarkably meritocratic. Pumping out good code is what matters, not the credential. A credential is one signal that an individual may be competent, but just like any other signal it's by no means foolproof, and there's plenty of other ways to demonstrate competence.

I attended Hack Reactor last summer. The teaching style she describes was incredibly effective for me, and I couldn't have been happier with my experience there. It doesn't take long to pay off $18k when you get a huge raise.

Eh, I had a much better experience. But I don't chalk up my success to HR's curriculum nearly as much as I do the people (though getting exposure to Node.js has been a huge aspect of my life).

If you're going to any bootcamp/immersive and you're going for the curriculum all you're going to get out of it is the curriculum - which you could easily obtain from freecodecamp.com for... well... free. If you're going to go, you should be going for the people - your sprint partners, thesis groups, beer buddies, outcomes teams, tech leads, alumni network... that's what lasts after Hack Reactor and it yields dividends well beyond the (admittedly striking) sticker price.

Part of my concern with bootcamps is the sentiment expressed above that you need it to get exposure to some arbitrary technology. In my experience, the best indicator to success in an industry or technology is a desire to learn that technology. Not someone giving exposure. I a happy it is working out for you, but as Node falls out of fashion, it will be on you to learn the next wave.

I hate when people make the assumption that learning JavaScript is somehow a limiting factor. It hasn't stopped me from picking up Java, Ruby, Python, or PHP. I still have some trouble with Go structs and I still have some learning to do on Rust lifetimes... but seriously.

What "next wave" of server application development does Node.js leave me so woefully unprepared to deal with? Are people really having issues marshalling JSON/XML or sending templates down the wire?

haha seriously.. whether it's rails, larvel, express, play, or django it's all basically the same. let's not pretend like java is string theory

Was not my intention to imply javascript was a limiting factor. Nor that web frameworks for python, java, ruby, etc. are all that different. My comment was simply challenging the thought that a bootcamp is necessary for being exposed to technology. There are plenty of free resources online from which to learn. If a bootcamp helps jumpstart that, great. But picking up the next framework (while similar) will require diving in on your own.

The money is always in selling the shovel, not digging.

$20,000 is about half of what my 4 year college education cost (although it's more expensive now, certainly). That seems incredibly expensive for a bootcamp. I'm obliged to ask what on earth that money is going towards, besides directly into somebody's pockets.

> Another observation, most people who get in, are already qualified people, with top university degrees.

I'm afraid to ask how large their student loans could be, this bootcamp included.

When did you graduate? Between 2009 and 2013 my college cost was roughly $40k per year. This was about the average for similar schools (RIT). My wife went to a small liberal arts school during the same time and spent roughly $50k per year.

$20k seems like an incredible bargain, but my view is probably warped.

Canadian schools don't charge that much

2009-2013 as well, (accredited) state school (of which I am a resident), cost me a little less than $10,000 per year for a Computer Engineering degree. However, my junior year, engineering classes level 300 and above increased by 25%, continually increasing per year until they were 100% more expensive. I narrowly dodged that bullet.

Perhaps the west coast is cheaper? $50,000 per year seems like lunacy to me.

UC Davis tuition is currently $14,046 a year.

There are plenty of state schools where 30 grand or so will get you a BS in CS. 15 years ago when I went that route it only cost 20k. That makes 20k for what's effectively one semester seem pretty pricy. Still I suppose it's the same as a semester at a expensive private college.

Thank you for sharing this. There needs to be a better system for bootcamp shoppers, but until then, these kinds of posts will probably save others lots of money.

I agree.

Drills, close quarters, hard work sounds like boot camp. App academy changed my life. "Anyone who tries for 6 months can get a job" really? You think that education is expensive? How much did you spend at college, and what job were you qualified for after that?

This post reads like the author holds the school responsible for the students success. Programming does not work that way. You MUST make yourself successful. Even giving a minutes thought to a schools "result stats" entirely misses the point.

Taking this to the next level, I don't think people should be paying to go to any sort of coding school. Spend the money on a second monitor and living expenses and sit at home and work on building something real. There is no better, quicker or more effective way to learn, and every bit of knowledge that you need is published on the Internet for free.

Stop learning, start doing.

Wait, I actually need to apply to jobs and sit through interviews before I receive my $100k+ comp package? Ugh, screw that...

I think this is a popular opinion that's just not realistic. There is a >0% of the population (much greater IMO) that is more productive learning in a structured environment. For those people there is an amount >0$ that they would be willing to pay for that structured environment. To say otherwise is basically just a glib, "Well I did it so why can't you?"

There is no "structured environment" when you get a job in programming. You are given goals and you need to get the result through learning and problem solving and just trying to make the damn thing work.

If the only context in which a person is capable of operating is one in which they are "taught" then they aren't suited to programming.

You have to do it on your own eventually so many as well get started on the task of becoming good at that.

Come on, that totally ignores reality. Just because you eventually need to problem solve by yourself doesn't mean that you should shun any help or guidance or structured learning to get to where you CAN do that.

I'm a self-taught developer. I learned to program the way that you did, it sounds like, by being curious and tinkering my way through, solving more and more complex problems.

But guess what: that's not how many programmers learned, including some great ones. They went to a structured program and learned there. Where do you get this idea that real programmers are self-taught, so any structured learning is a waste?

Every single online comment thread about coding bootcamps that I've read has had comments from people with your perspective, so you're not alone. But they've also all had people who had no experience programming, went to a bootcamp, and now have good jobs that they enjoy. I know multiple people like that myself...do you think they're all lying? Or maybe you think they must not be REAL programmers?

Programming isn't magical. It's a skill, and just because we taught ourselves doesn't mean everyone has to.

I had a good experience at MakerSqaure. I wouldn't disagree with some of the points brought up - at certain times the work is more solo-based and I too wondered what the instructors were being paid for. The "best practices" point is something that could definitely be more emphasized from a curriculum standpoint. This is kinda tricky when talking about React (for example) as best practices in a lot of ways are still being adopted.

In my case, the outcomes have been good (graduated earlier this year and make $20k more than my previous job) but I would agree that it's been an uphill battle getting an interview and negotiating salaries when there are more junior developers in the market. (HR/MKS markets grads as being more as "mid level" which is accurate for some - but it really is a spectrum.)

Overall I recommend these programs to people who are passionate about the field - but a lot might be motivated to attend for the wrong reasons.

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.)

It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!)

Here's a bit of inside baseball:

This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less supportive of the school. We care and we've made big moves to fix it. 1) Candidates were gaming the admissions process -> we rewrote it. 2) Students only had access to 2014 data and didn't know how it was calculated -> we published our 2015 data (and some stuff on 2016) and we published the world's first guide to "how to publish employment statistics that aren't bullshit", and we ramped up messaging to students "expect that your job search might be harder".[A] 3) Students stopped knowing who we were and stopped feeling like they could trust us -> we bought back two leaders to focus full-time on the campus (vs working at the umbrella organization). Lots of smaller changes as well.

Even during this difficult period, students are generally having a great experience and getting an ROI that we are proud of. Our most recent NPS measurements have all been above 80, which is bonkers. (This means that nearly everyone is a 9 or a 10 on a 1-10 scale of "how likely are you to recommend HR to a friend?")

There are a lot of details in this post that I don't disagree with. Eg "Ironically the number of lectures drops dramatically after the first week." This is true and we tell students about it during w1. It's the correct design decision. Etc. For other students, those same details have added up to a different gestalt. We care and we try to fix things when things aren't adding up. The diagnosis is not linear (you can't just fix the problems that alums cite) but we listen and try to sort out the right decisions.

I empathize with a lot of things going on and I want recent alums to know we care. I also think it's bonkers that our 98% placement rate in 2015 (94% in 3 months, ~85%ish in 3 months for one recent cohort) is being cited like it's weak sauce. That's a towering accomplishment of staggering magnitude in my books, and we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise and we employ lots of staff to make that happen.

<3, Shawn

[A] http://www.hackreactor.com/student-outcomes, http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardSt...

Have you considered a career in politics?

Sounds like you owe the poster more than a beer

Seriously. The author feels as though they've lost $20k and months of their time, and the co-founder thinks the right response is to offer a beer and a chat.

Why do you feel like he is entitled to a refund?

I never said that.

Yes, but you basically implied he deserves "more."

No. Imagine offering a stick of gum to someone whose dog just died. If I suggest that's an inappropriate response, I am not implying they should've offered more gum.

Grandparent is asking for help, not offering repayment in the form of a beer. It's certainly not going to happen if the article's author also sees it as a compensatory transaction. Recognizing that the author has taken some time to consider what may be serious flaws in his program, GP is hoping that the author's desire to pave a better path for others may extend to helping him think about his own program critically.

The author also landed a job paying 6 figures after the program. To me it sounds like she got exactly what she paid for, the process just wasn't as perfectly amazing as she had hoped. She claims she could've done it without the program, but that's a pretty easy claim to make with no way of backing it.

"we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise"

Horseshit alert if I've ever heard one.

Yeah, my raise was more along the lines of $140k. But I went from Shift Lead Walgreens to contract Web Developer at Google, so... there's that.

Right, because you can hire from the graduating class of Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, MIT, etc., and instead you choose a Walgreens Shift Lead from a "coding bootcamp."

Sounds legit.

Parent is being disingenious. They held 5 positions (plus military reserve) over a period of 4 years between "Walgreens Shift Lead" and "Web Application Developer" at a staffing agency.

I, too, got a six-figure "raise" from middle school to today.

Considering there was less than a year between AudioThrift (where I was making ~$20k) and ink on the Google contract... I wouldn't think it's all that disingenuous.

Yeah, im gonna call bullshit on this one too.

You got into google because google actively recruits military vets, not because of the bootcamp experience, which might have helped get you over the hump, but unlikely caused it.

It took you 3 years between shift lead and google.

~your lovely neighborhood ex-people search engine founder.

P.S. thank you for your navy service (in all seriousness)

Google doesn't care about veteran status when it comes to their contracted employees as that pool comes from the ranks of the staffing agencies.

As far as the 3 years since Walgreens goes... - 1 year spent in college for CS before dropping out - 1 year spent self-teaching and working for a startup where I learned what "jQuery" and "AJAX" and "PHP" did =p - 3 months Hack Reactor - 6 months contract with Intel - currently at Google

50k to 100k median doesn't seem too far fetched to me. Myself and many people I know were in that range.

Hack Reactor grad here and former civil engineer. My raise was $40k and I came from a fairly high paying job relative to the rest of the civil engineers I knew. If I had come from an average civil engineering salary the raise would have been more along the lines of $55-$60k.

Code Fellows grad here. I went from a $50k mechanical engineering job to a $130k web dev job (consulting) directly after completing the program.

Hack Reactor 25 Grad here... I got a 93k raise after HR working at Google. Left to go to Apple less than a month after that.

I was in HR15. I got a $70k raise. Went from working as a Junior accountant making $40k to Software Engineer making $110k (not even counting my $15k signing bonus). The ROI from the program is beyond ridiculous. Best experience of my life.

HR06 grad here, went from making 25k at a restaurant to 110k at my first job out of HR. Obviously if you're working in the field beforehand the increase won't be as much, but far from horseshit for most grads.

chiming in here - i went from making salary ~80k at google in a non tech role, to 106k salary at a start up working remotely. i'd say with all the benefits at google, i probably made more with bonus, stock, and perks, but i'm happier now with what i'm doing - my work is more fulfilling. the investment i made in HR was worth it to me.

another HR06 grad here. worked as a customer support rep making $43k/year to $110k/year + 5k signing bonus right out of Hack Reactor.

Hack Reactor Cohort 32 graduate here -- 50k bump in salary

Went from 55K consultant mech eng to 95K. Took a lot of self hustle and the HR marketing and alum outcome results.

If not this would have got to that number after maybe 2 years so definitely helped.

So you were part of the group of schools that refused to agree to a transparency initiative (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11872261) but you think self-publishing your own methodology with zero breakdown of what your categories mean is just as good?

Like, where are all of the grads employed by Hack Reactor to pad the numbers accounted for? What percentage of your students already have a CS degree when they walk in the door? Why is the size of the average class increasing at the same time the price is going up? Most importantly, why do some big name companies effectively blacklist your graduates now, and what are you doing about it?

Your "towering accomplishment of staggering magnitude" looks like marketing hype and a lack of transparency.

Just because they were one of the companies present does not mean they necessarily refused to agree to transparency.

On Gregorio's blog post: We're on the side of the good guys. I introduced the point that Gregorio blogged about (has to do with how one accounts for tech-adjacent jobs) and we already keep track of the stats that way. You can read about what counts as "employed" in our methodology[1].

On grads employed by HR: they are not counted as successful job seekers. Again, you can read about this in the methodology.

On big name companies blacklisting our grads: I have literally never heard of this. Google was our # 2 employer in 2015.

[1] http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardSt...

Grads who choose to apply to mentoring jobs with Hack Reactor are not counted in the hiring stats. Once they leave and begin their engineering job search full time, they are.

Also, I believe there is only a single company that has 'blacklisted' HR grads, and it was because they had a bad interpersonal experience with a few people from a single cohort.

> 1) Candidates were gaming the admissions process -> we rewrote it.

Would love to hear a more thorough explanation of this.

When I took the technical interview ~3 months ago there were very specific questions about functional programming ("implement foreach" kind of questions). Makersquare had the same exact questions, so I assume someone just posted them online and people could easily prepare without understanding.

If that's the case, the lack of follow up questions to identify that kind of faking it is pretty horrifying. Was there nothing like, "explain this technical concept as if you were talking to your grandpa/non-technical person?"

I think even with follow up questions there's only so much you can ask. It was entirely possible to design a response such that your solution takes a good 20 minutes and doesn't leave much time for discussion. I ended up going over time on a recursion problem but still got in.

I actually liked the problems but it seems like there weren't enough different kinds of questions to filter out people with the answers beforehand.

What is your profit margin per student at Hack Reactor?

This post shows a lack of owning up to mistakes and makes me question whether things are moving in the right direction. It wasn't that people were gaming admissions, the admissions process was broken. I took the admissions challenge twice, my second test was virtually identical to the first one. People I talked to from cohorts before and after me took basically the same test.

If you use the same test for months the fact is the answers will leak. People that take it again will do well the second time, regardless of whether they are qualified. This is a failure on your part, not on the applicants part. You need to own up to this and not blame applicants for gaming the admissions process.

It is understandable that we didn't know who you were and couldn't trust you. I have never seen you in my life. I saw Marcus one time in the first week. Talking about how you are going to change things for the future is fine, but it doesn't help those who went through the "troubled period".

It just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth when things go south that you rush to blame people "gaming the admissions process" and not we screwed up, we are fixing it for the future, and here is how we are helping those affected.

We screwed up, we are fixing it for the future, and if there is any unemployed recent grad that isn't already hearing from us weekly they should email me. Thanks for the feedback -- I agree with you 100% that we're accountable for these things.

Former HR grad here. I gotta back up Shawn, and HR in general. Hack Reactor is filled with lots of staff who care deeply. I graduated before the author's cohort, so I can't speak directly to the author's issues. But I can say the founders and the staff care deeply. If there was a rough patch, I know they'll fix it, and it sounds like they already have taken great strides to do so. But the author's main points just don't make sense. A 98% job placement rate is ludicrously good. Does a CS program have that rate? Maybe. But even if they do, it takes 4 years and 250k. HR is more than an order of magnitude less in both time and money, and this is being cited like they could do better? Seriously? Also, could you learn stuff on your own? Yeah of course you could. But you pay 20k because HR gives you an environment and team mates to learn from that you just can't get on your own. Also, they've iterated on the curriculum literally hundreds of times at this point (they do (or at least did) sprint reflections every 2 days, and actually implemented the feedback given). It's an excellent curriculum. The school is 100% worth it. I had a friend who just graduated a week ago, and said that "he had high expectations, and even those were blown away."

Even the author said they got a job after a couple months! Which is exactly what the school promised. How does the poster feel like they wasted their time/money??

Also, the author has no grounds to say HR isn't the best, cause they haven't been to others. I can't say it's the best either. I can say I had an excellent experience, and so did all of my class, and many others. And I do have 3 friends off the top of my head who have gone to other bootcamps, and they all cited those as having major problems (no help finding jobs, bad teachers). Anyway, this post sounds whiny. HR does excellent work.

Creating a dev bootcamp is not easy. I was there in almost the very beginning as a guest instructor. It's hard. Hack Reactor did a great job overall. It helped change the lives of many. The ROI is 200-300% over traditional CS degrees.

Ouch! As a hiring manager, the "Javascript only" model is a serious roadblock.

Nothing against node.js, but a candidate would be marketable to a broader range of shops if the program gave them a basic grounding in Python and SQL. Python is well accepted for both web servers and sysadmin type scripting. SQL is the most common choice for databases. I don't think either one would be a incremental burden and would really open up the number of potential employers for the grads.

Out of curiosity, what kind of scripts can you write in Python that you cannot in Node.js?

Don't get me wrong, Python is great and has a number of really great number crunching libraries just a pip away, but if all you're doing is developing web apps and hashing out some scripts via the terminal... they'll need to know JavaScript for the client - but do they really need to come away with two languages after 3 months?

"a candidate would be marketable to a broader range of shops if the program gave them a basic grounding in #{LANGUAGE} and #{DB}"

Seems like people fail to realize that the language is the medium through which they teach concepts (algorithms, data structures, etc).

I'm an HR06 grad; we focused on fullstack Javascript, but that hasn't stopped me from working in Ruby/Rails, or more recently, Go.

Beyond that, we did actually have lectures/sprints on MySql, Postgresql and Mongodb. Not sure if that's changed at all.

Ugh, how could anyone hope to teach programming by beginning with "Data Modeling and Classes?" That stuff only becomes interesting after you've become enthralled by getting the computer to do stuff.

I thought the same thing - weird way to start off.

This maybe a bit off topic, but hopefully someone can provide some insight.

Do Udacity nanodegrees fall under the same category as these bootcamps? What is the quality one can expect there?

Full disclosure: I am part of the instruction team at Hack Reactor. This amazing team that I work with are completely committed to our students, their experience and their success. I have colleagues who almost don't go home, who work weekends, obsess over how to help our students succeed. We lose sleep. We worry. Truth is, I find the tone of this article dismaying knowing what these remarkable people do for our students and knowing how successful most of those students go on to be.

Shawn responds with some details about recent changes we had to make to address, among other things, applicants figuring out how to game our admissions. For a few cycles there were notably more students than usual who struggled with the program, not getting out of it what other students do and who subsequently struggled in the job search. That placed a huge demand on instructional resources which has impact throughout the student body.

Whether those students got in by deliberate exploitation of vulnerabilities in our process (some did) or earnestly researching what HR wants and studying "to the exam" is immaterial -- they entered unprepared for the program. Regardless, they received the same world-class curriculum as our phenomenally successful students. I don't believe it's coincidental that the most vindictive account of a student's experience at Hack Reactor came hot on the heels of that challenging period in our history.

I do want to address a few assertions that were made that suggest a deliberate attempt to mislead readers. The Hackers In Residence are not Instructors at Hack Reactor. They aren't represented as such. HIR's are not intended to be experts in technology nor to provide answers to all possible questions the current students provide. Any instruction they provide is either ad-hoc coaching, whiteboarding collaboration, in the form of brown bag talks they offer or by presenting toy problem solutions in the morning.

What they are is a group of very gifted and empathetic engineers who are sharing their talents with other students, coaching them through problem solving, providing first line Help Desk support, pitching in on other efforts at the school while they continue their own studies beyond the scope of our curriculum. They are among our brightest students who choose not to go immediately into the job market where they can command impressive salaries but rather stay to learn and study more and to support other students. They're fabulous, talented people.

More specifically, HIR's are recent grads who understand the experience of the current students and who know from direct recent experience the kinds of support they found most helpful or most hoped for and seek to provide that support to students. Questions that are beyond the scope of their understanding are escalated to engineers (like me) on the Instruction Team. They are an additional set of eyes and ears that allow me to even more insight into the experience of my current students than I can gain on my own.

As to the lectures and the difference between the first half and the second half of the program. The curriculum is very specifically designed to develop autonomous engineers. It is WHY our grads are successful. They don't excel in the workplace IN SPITE OF that structure. We guide them more early in the program where they need more support and very consciously, over time, reduce the hand-holding in favor of their own discovery and collaborating with classmates to learn. Mentors and Lecturers continue to provide support and instruction as needed during the latter half of the program.

With respect to languages. Many schools teach more than one language. Not many schools prepare engineers as well as we do. Hack Reactor is not a Javascript school. We use Javascript as a context to teach software engineering. Our students often tackle new languages on their own in the second half because they are well-prepared and appropriately autonomous. We've had students and student teams use Swift, Python, Ruby on Rails, Rust, Processing, dabble in IoT, ... And HIRs tackle Scala, Haskell, and more. That's not in spite of the program, that's because of the program..

I understand that a critical reader will have to take my response with a grain of salt but I think it's reasonable to ask readers of the Medium article to do their own research and contact alums for direct feedback before drawing conclusions.

>"...the most vindictive account of a student's experience at Hack Reactor ..."

You give yourself so much benefit of the doubt, but offer none to the author, who you've decided is out to get Hack Reactor? That one swipe at the former student is more concerning than the rest of your comment is reassuring, to me.

An alternative reading of the situation, if you're not seeing one: the author has attempted to better herself by one common approach in the programming world, and having a bad experience, she is sending a warning back to others who are seeking the same improvement, telling us, 'this may be the wrong direction.'

I do not represent the school, I speak only for myself and believe it's reasonable for me to express an opinion as someone who believes in and works hard for our school and our students. Further, 1) I am not tone deaf. The author's disdain was thinly veiled and their accounting was full of exaggerations and inaccuracies. This wasn't a simple sharing of how they program works and how it didn't meet their needs. It also raises concerns because I am dismayed that they apparently didn't raise any reasonable concerns they may have had during the program when I and my colleagues were in a position to improve their experience or they would have reported it differently here. Why do you suppose they wouldn't give us that opportunity to make their experience more fruitful given their investment? Constant iteration and openness to feedback is a regular mantra around HR. I wonder (reasonably) if there isn't something else going on here than they report. And 2) I sought to share another perspective. I provided full disclosure about my role in the first sentence, highlighted some specific skewed observations made by the author and encouraged readers to investigate for themselves.

Seems reasonable to me.

OP is unhappy with HR, though the school is top notch

Reply on news.ycombinator.com