11–20 of 49 posts
My friend did a local bootcamp and now he's doing ASP.NET work and loves it! I'm just scared of doing that specific one because I don't really have interest in anything microsoft.
Kind of relevant: Are bootcamps worth it? I'm looking to get into programming, but I have a full time support job right now that I need to be able to live and eat. I can save my money and do a bootcamp, or I could learn how to program in my downtime. I'm not sure which route to go through. My friend did a local bootcamp and now he's doing ASP.NET work and loves it! I'm just scared of doing that specific one because I…
The hard part here is curation of resources and environment setup.
One reason that also explains why there aren't many reviews of universities, relative to the number of people who attend: When your career depends in part upon the esteem of your degrees or certifications, speaking negatively about the source (uni, a camp) is disincentivized.
I know this isn't exactly responding to your comment, but I thought it fit.
[1] ratemyprofessor.com
Kind of relevant: Are bootcamps worth it? I'm looking to get into programming, but I have a full time support job right now that I need to be able to live and eat. I can save my money and do a bootcamp, or I could learn how to program in my downtime. I'm not sure which route to go through. My friend did a local bootcamp and now he's doing ASP.NET work and loves it! I'm just scared of doing that specific one because I…
Our hires from bootcamps would have learned coding on their own, but the bootcamp just accelerated their learning. Their experience was that those who were already digging in and involved before the bootcamp were the ones who got the best offers at the end.
As a relatively recent bootcamp grad who hasn't written a review, here are my excuses/hypotheses for others who haven't: a) simple laziness. A good review takes time and thought to write, and the time isn't necessarily in the writing the review, but in processing the experience after graduation. By the time you have a more balanced (ie, graduated, employed/unemployed) perspective, you've probably moved on to other th…
I was reading Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance. In each of his shows for a tour, he polled the audience with two questions.
How should you let a person who is interested in you know you aren't interested in them: Pretend to be busy, say nothing, or be honest?
Overwhelmingly, most people practice the "pretend to be busy" and "say nothing" methods. Only a small sliver of the audience would say they were honest.
He then asked the audience to pretend the situation is reversed. Someone else is dealing with you. How do you prefer they handle the situation?
Overwhelmingly, the audience responded (with applauds) that they'd prefer the honest approach.
By that I mean the entry point for most participants are all different, the expectations for most participants are all different, the experience for most participants are all different (some students work harder than others), and the outcomes are all different.
I felt there was more to learn than there was time (I did a 12 week course), so how I felt after graduating was largely a reflection of my own confidence and ability in contrast to the effort I put in and not a direct reflection of the quality of the instruction.
The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition [0] is a useful reference here. Any program that claims you will gain mastery over a discipline in a dozen weeks is lying to you. The guys that ran my bootcamp were plain about that. They said they would help me help myself learn... which they did but not to the level I really wanted to get to. And that more than anything is why I am ambivalent about recommending them.
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0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisi...
Kind of relevant: Are bootcamps worth it? I'm looking to get into programming, but I have a full time support job right now that I need to be able to live and eat. I can save my money and do a bootcamp, or I could learn how to program in my downtime. I'm not sure which route to go through. My friend did a local bootcamp and now he's doing ASP.NET work and loves it! I'm just scared of doing that specific one because I…
> learn to program in my downtime The hard part here is curation of resources and environment setup.
If you're not ready for that, then practice with some "birdhouse"-like projects.
Many of the bootcamps are relatively young with not that many attendees per year. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: ~50 per cohort, 6 cohorts per year is 300 students per year, times 3 or so years is around a thousand total enrollees. 100 reviews is 10% of people reviewing - that seems pretty high to me. FWIW: I did a bootcamp, loved it, never wrote a review. Just laziness/generally don't write reviews for things. I…
++ Second cohort at Flatiron School - it has grown up so much since then that there is a time relevance issue.
Try yelp. Hack Reactor has 150+ Yelp reviews http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco
As good as the course sounds, and though it's small fish in the grand scheme, this turns me off: "Also, you get this hoodie for writing a review so...)" - http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco?hrid=mVJT...
But if you flip that bias on its head, 5 stars becomes a mediocre rating. That's ok if you've disclosed what you've done, but out of 165 reviews only one mentions that people are incentivzed to write reviews with free swag.