Ask HN: Did you go to a 3 month coding school? Did it work?

I did Hacker School, which is free to attend, because it's funded by recruiting. It was life-changing, and provided me with a great network that I still talk to on a day-to-day basis with a very, very wide range of experience and interests, and it also landed me a great job, and I'm confident that in the future I can reach out to the Hacker School community again when I'm looking for a new opportunity.

If you're considering any of these "bootcamps" send Hacker School an application. It's not a traditional school, or even a traditional bootcamp, but you'll learn buckets and at the end there's a job fair with many respected companies represented, and a support network to help you find a job that will be a good fit and will pay you fairly.

I was also able to squeeze by on a budget of about $5k for living expenses in NY when I did it, so this would be more expensive (but much better) than online courses, but much cheaper than pay-to-play bootcamps.

If I found the correct twitter account, it looks like he went through the DevPoint Labs program (which seems to have a broken site now) in Utah. Then hired by https://www.masteryconnect.com/

google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ErvVfYw...

I get the sense that not all programs are created equally. I personally attended Hacker School in NYC. I made the decision because I discovered my interest in programming after I had already graduated from college, and at the time I knew very few programmers. A workshop like Hacker School seemed like a great place to go where I could focus on improving my abilities and surround myself with other people who had similar interests. It worked out great. I'm currently employed as a rails developer at a small company and I love what I do. I can honestly say that going to Hacker School was the best decision I ever made.

That being said, in my current position I've interviewed a number of applicants who graduated from rails specific bootcamps and I've been less than impressed. A lot of them seem to be able to build rails applications but have limited or no ability to write ruby code. We had one applicant with an impressive looking portfolio who couldn't tell us how to reverse an array, despite coaching from us.

I get the sense that a lot of the technology specific boot camps do a lot of hand holding and have the students follow a pretty rigidly designed curriculum. The result being that you have a bunch of graduates who technically built some applications, but have little understanding of how they did it.

So what I would ultimately say, is that the value of attending a 3 month program depends almost entirely on which program it is you're thinking of attending. My rule of thumb would be to stay away from technology specific programs and try to find one that focuses more on concepts and principles.

Of course, this is all based on my personal experience, other people here might disagree, and naturally YMMV.

Hi! I attended MakerSquare last fall.

I had joined the 2nd cohort at MakerSquare in fall of 2013. Prior to MakerSquare, I had tried learning Ruby and JS on my own, through countless books and online tutorials. Having completed a few guides, I realized that my ability to learn "how to code" was hindered simply by my style of learning. Moreover, while I had a good understanding of the basics, I had no idea what the 'best practices' of coding were. After all, if you're going to spend countless hours writing code, you might as well do it the right way, right?

Of the different programs out there, the one thing I would urge others to consider is that MakerSquare places a heavy amount of weight onto prework completed (how much work you've done ahead of time) and community-fit. If you're a solo worker and not a fan of collaborative environments, you may want to consider other programs.

On a regular basis, we worked in teams of 2-5 ppl. The small groups were great for focused learning, and it turns out, the larger groups were great for learning how to collaborate on code with version control (github). Would I have had this opportunity through a self-learn environment? Definitely not.

Long story short, I would 100% recommend this program. As classmates, I had former programmers, retail store workers, a professional photographer and even a former elementary teacher. Out of the program, each of the students were working as professional front-end engineers (junior developers) within a few months of graduating. MakerSquare has a great professional network for helping with placement (96%), and they know how to teach software development.

The classroom environment (the location on Congress ave) was a bit cramped at times. But from what I've heard the class size is now capped at 20, vs. 30 or so when I went through.

All the 'issues' I had (space constraints, less than ideal student:instructor ratio, and focus on advanced concepts (algorithms and data structures) has been completely addressed. According to the instructors, Cohort 7 is operating on a night/day difference of curriculum than what I had. As an example, we didn't really touch data structures and algorithms until week 7 of the program. Today, those two themes are introduced on day 3 of the program.

The biggest difference now is that MakerSquare focuses on making sure you understand the fundamentals of software development. Before you even get to use a framework, (Rails, BackboneJS, AngularJS), you build your own version first. This is so you understand what goes into a framework, how to troubleshoot, and how to customize it to fit your needs.

If you want more perspective of the program, these are their Quora, Google and Yelp links.

http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-MakerSquare

https://plus.google.com/+MakerSquareAustin/posts

http://www.yelp.com/biz/makersquare-austin-2

I went to the "graduation ceremony" of a NY school's 10 week program about a year and a half ago. (It wasn't GA) A few observations:

* The quality of the "graduates" varied immensely. Some graduates had been programmers before starting the course, and those students were just there to sharpen their skills. Others had no background in programming.

* All of the projects were group projects, so weaker students were able to hide behind stronger students and couldn't actually point at any code that they had been solely responsible for.

* All of the projects had been conceived of by the school, and so were very very limited in ambition and scope. (It took some digging to find this out, the groups were presenting their projects as if they had conceived of them)

* One of the student told me nearly verbatim: "We learned more in 10 weeks than we would have in our first 2 years of a traditional C.S. degree." I told this student that that was preposterous and to please never repeat that sentence again.

* The students had obviously been well prepped on their interviewing techniques and showed alot of enthusiasm and (over)confidence. But the average proficiency level was way below junior programmer status, and for 2/3 of the students I didn't see how they could work without active mentoring.

* I kept in touch with one of the students after graduation, and he said that virtually all of the students received offers . So hey, the demand for programmers is really that high regardless of quality. I couldn't see hiring one of these devs for what seemed (at the time) to be a 70-80k starting salary range, when another 20k would get me a legitimate junior developer. Of course, as I said before there were some quality candidates coming out of the program, but those were only the students who were programmers before embarking on the course.