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/immersive training in various flavors of web development.

This type of school has not been around that long and have only graduated a handful of cohorts. There's no accreditation for these schools and I haven't found a website that offers reviews of these schools (maybe somebody here should make that site).

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 'outcome' matters more than 'education'.

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?

If you'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?

Thanks.

(edited for structure)

[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.

[mr_spothawk]

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

[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.

[mr_spothawk]

Thanks for the info. Good luck.

[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.

[Throwadev]

Interesting. A friend of mine is planning on switching careers and is looking into these hack/code schools. I told him I couldn't give any opinion one way or the other because I don't know how much experience the students have before taking these classes, and I also didn't know what the success rate was for students after they finished these programs.

So anyway, can you elaborate on your programming experience before you took the course? And how much of your free time have you devoted to learning programming before, during, and after the program?

[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?

[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.

[mr_spothawk]

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