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Comment by jknightco | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic: does anyone have any experience with GA's courses? I'm considering taking one now, but I don't know anyone else who has.

If so, would you recommend them?

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I took several of their classes about a year and a half ago, one of which was a long-form evening class. I never had a good experience... I get more out of watching a good meetup presentation on youtube. GA is defined by over promising and under delivering. At least all of their operations out in San Francisco have been terrible, i hear they are better in NYC where they started.

So they're the modern tech version of University of Phoenix? I wouldn't surprise if GA gets acquire by a for-profit.

I've taken a marketing and design course with them in NY, and I would say that was pretty worth the money - concise knowledge that's actionable in areas I have little familiarity with being a product gal. Would definitely do it again for a 1-2 hour class, but I wouldn't pay 4k for an immersive.

This is probably a good indicator of what Apollo is interested in:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230458500...

"Apollo Education Group Inc., APOL +1.38% best known for its University of Phoenix for-profit college, is expected to launch an "online marketplace" dubbed Balloon on Tuesday. It will start with a catalogue of nearly 15,000 technology classes from big-name course providers including Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.84% , Adobe Systems Inc., ADBE -0.89% Coursera and Udacity, and explicitly link them to job opportunities."

They will try to acquire some company in this area, GA or other.

I took the web development immersive. I will say, the experience you have depends mostly on two factors: 1) your instructor, and 2) your own ability to want to learn and the amount of effort you put in.

That said, they did try to fit a lot in the 12 weeks, but there are so many facets of the tech stack they didn't cover (they rushed through html/css quite a bit, so those that don't know it will still feel lost after the course unless they dedicate some time to get it down. They also don't cover things like how to host your app on AWS, only Heroku).

The redeeming quality they have is that they do seem to care a lot about students' outcomes. After the course ends, they try their hardest to get everybody a junior dev position or apprenticeship. There's a great support network for this and people on staff dedicated to students' outcomes.

For me, the course was worth it because:

* I had some background in web design before

* It was hard for me to teach myself, not knowing what to google or what path to take

* I got an apprenticeship afterwards which turned into a full time position

But about half my classmates did not get a job or full-time position. Your mileage may vary.

THIS: My limited experience so far in a Data Science course in DC is that the people in the course (easily spotted) who have an aptitude and the basic skills are going to get a LOT out of the course and plenty of job offers. The people who aren't self-starters and don't have a grasp on the basics will get nothing. I told a classmate that if he wasn't putting in 6-8 hours a week (minimum) on out of class readings and assignments, he's not going to learn shit.

For those of you trumpeting code school: It's fucking awesome, but for people like me with full-time day jobs, it will never work. I like GA, and I hope they don't turn into a University of Phoenix dressed up like an Apple store. That would be sad.

I took their Product Management class. It was good, albeit a little more basic than I was looking for and it tended towards too much group work driving the class. I do also really like all the alumni events though.

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