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Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#31

Post by bcassedy »

hatsix wrote: post #15
skyyler wrote: post #11

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…

Why not both? 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.

I attended App Academy and am one of the people who had already started digging in and used bootcamp as an accelerator of sorts. That is actually the reason I've never written a formal review.

I've written reviews on a message board a couple of times and provided specific advice re: bootcamps to posters as well. Ultimately it's a very personal experience. While I think the experience was great for me, some of the people that didn't have as much prior exposure and effort really struggled and I worry about their long term prospects.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#32

Post by trowawee »

I loved my bootcamp experience, am still plugged into the alumni network, am not ashamed of it (why would I be?), but I'm probably never going to write a review of it. I'm happy to talk to people about it, but I'm not going to take the time to go write a review. There's no particular pay-off for me, and besides, the program changes constantly; I mentor where I graduated and in the 1.5 years since I finished, tons of things have changed in terms of how they organize things. I'd feel like an idiot if I said, "Oh, this was a part I didn't like," and then somebody who worked there emailed me and said "Hey, that doesn't exist any more." (Which has happened, except in conversational form.)

And sure, I'll freely cop to self-interest here. Bootcamp grads get enough shit from people in tech who want to dick-measure. I'm not going to do anything to further the cause of people who already think I'm an incompetent chimp with a keyboard.

Also, like the SwitchUp person already said in this thread, there's no reliable source of data for outcomes. I can tell you how long it took to get a job and what I made fresh out of the course, but why would you believe me, especially if you're already primed, like a bunch of people here clearly are, to believe that bootcamps are bullshit and their grads are rubes desperate to cover up the fact they got bilked? Maybe I'm just a plant; maybe I get paid a combined $200k a year by DBC/GA/HR/Flatiron to fire up 100 sockpuppets and argue that bootcamps are a good investment to con people on Reddit/HR/wherever. (That actually sounds like a super fun, super immoral job. Maybe I can trick them into actually paying me to do that. OR MAYBE I AM STILL MESSING WITH YOU. ~spirit fingers~)

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#33

Post by trowawee »

skyyler wrote: post #29
Terr_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer to this depends on how much experience or practice you already have with programming. It sounds like you're just starting out and you're nervous about your situation. In that case, I'd focus on a bit of simple private learning that will help prime you to get more out of any bootcamp or formal-learning stuff you may do later. For example, set up a basic Python interpreter, grab one of those "teach y…

I am pretty much just starting out. I took a few classes in high school and I've done some really minor projects since then, but I'd definitely still call myself a complete noobie. I've been considering trying out Learn Python the Hard Way, it comes up in pretty much every "I want to learn programming" thread on /g/.

How sure are you that you want to write code for a living? How much debt do you have? What kind of savings do you have? How many external obligations do you have?

DBC was worth it for me; I moved to a new city, got a great job, didn't have to take on too much debt, and I am generally happier and better off now. But it's not a flat yes or no, it's very much a question of your circumstances and your commitment level.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#34

Post by accountatwork »

davegonzalez wrote: post #24
accountatwork wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's shady. Normally, there's a bias such that people who are disgruntled are more likely to post a review than people who had a good experience. If you take that bias into account, a 4 star rating is pretty good, 5 stars is excellent, and so on. 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 peo…

Disclosure; I graduated from Hack Reactor in October 2013. The lack of negative reviews may seem strange, but I genuinely believe that everyone who has written about HR does so in a sincere manner (whether it be positive or negative). I can understand how it seems shady, but with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.

> with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.

That's intuitive but factually incorrect. There's a large body of empirical research that shows that giving away trivial tokens has a significant impact. This is true for everything from charitable donations to sign-ups for services to survey responses. Not to mention ratings for college courses, which are, in the aggregate, more expensive than Hack Reactor.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#35

Post by trowawee »

jrumbut wrote: post #25
afarrell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> learn to program in my downtime The hard part here is curation of resources and environment setup.

It's funny to hear that because I just typed "learn to code" into Google and the first page (ads included!) are all fine and mostly free resources, many requiring only a web browser to start. Just 10 or 15 years ago the process was completely opaque, a lot of books in your local store had omissions or bugs that made them impossible to follow, it was a seriously frustrating process unless you stumbled into the right c…

There're enough options that it can be overwhelming. It's hard to see the place to start, because if you're completely outside the bubble, it's hard to even know what the options are, or why you'd pick one of them. Say you type "learn to code" into Google. You go to Codeacademy, because it's the first option and maybe you've heard of it. You log in, then you go the courses page. You don't want to drop $20 on the personalized plan right away, so you skip that; you don't know what "web development" means, or how it's different from anything else, so you skip the web dev stuff. You go down to the language section - that's a good, basic start, right? - and you see six boxes:

HTML & CSS: Learn how to create websites by structuring and styling your pages with HTML and CSS.

JavaScript: Learn the fundamentals of JavaScript, the programming language of the Web.

jQuery: Learn how to make your websites interactive and create animations by using jQuery.

PHP: Learn to program in PHP, a widespread language that powers sites like Facebook.

Python: Learn to program in Python, a powerful language used by sites like YouTube and Dropbox.

Ruby: Learn to program in Ruby, a flexible language used to create sites like Codecademy.

Apparently you can use...all of these things to build websites? And they're all languages? The goals section is better, because those are concrete things that make some of these choices for you, but your rookie who just wants to learn some code and maybe see if they like this is already being asked to make a bunch of choices with relatively little data. And when they start researching, they're going to find a bunch of sites that say PHP sucks, a bunch that say the criticism of PHP is overrated, a bunch that say Ruby is the best beginner language, a bunch that say Ruby is terrible, and a bunch of math nerds (None of this makes it impossible, but choice paralysis is a real issue, and I know a fair number of people who want to get started coding, but can't figure out where to get a handhold. That's one of the benefits of bootcamps - they make some of the initial choices for you, so you can get started learning the building blocks.

Weirdly, I think that well-written books (huge caveat) might be better, because they do something similar: lock you in a path and then tell you to put your nose to the grindstone and get to work.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#36

Post by AlexWest »

FireBeyond wrote: post #9
zindlerb wrote: post #2

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...

That's a valid point, but they are trying to incentivize behavior to fix the issue OP asks about, so it's probably a good thing overall (it's not a hoodie for 5-star reviews only).

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#37

Post by true_religion »

pc86 wrote: post #7
MrDrone wrote: post #4

Having done an online boot camp I can say at least part of it is not wanting to spread negative feedback that might devalue your investment. I imagine many people go into these programs to gain skills to get a job. If afterwards you talk about how the program failed to prepare you for that you're shooting yourself in the foot. As to why there aren't more positive reviews - maybe it's related?

> As to why there aren't more positive reviews - maybe it's related? I would look at the absolute lack of glowing 6/5 star reviews about how amazing these boot camps are as proof of exactly the opposite. There are presumably thousands of grads from the largest programs. If you can only get 50 or 100 people to write a review about how your $10,000 course helped them land a job, it should be a huge red flag about the a…

I don't know about that. It's education. I've never written a review for my university experience, although I'm sure somewhere there's a venue for me to do so.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#38

Post by afarrell »

trowawee wrote: post #35
jrumbut wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to hear that because I just typed "learn to code" into Google and the first page (ads included!) are all fine and mostly free resources, many requiring only a web browser to start. Just 10 or 15 years ago the process was completely opaque, a lot of books in your local store had omissions or bugs that made them impossible to follow, it was a seriously frustrating process unless you stumbled into the right c…

There're enough options that it can be overwhelming. It's hard to see the place to start, because if you're completely outside the bubble, it's hard to even know what the options are, or why you'd pick one of them. Say you type "learn to code" into Google. You go to Codeacademy, because it's the first option and maybe you've heard of it. You log in, then you go the courses page. You don't want to drop $20 on the pers…

> choice paralysis

Yes. This is what I'm really getting at.

That, and for environment setup, some choices will genuinely send you down a rabbit hole of wrestling with with unfamiliar tools.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#39

Post by accountatwork »

accountatwork wrote: post #34
davegonzalez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure; I graduated from Hack Reactor in October 2013. The lack of negative reviews may seem strange, but I genuinely believe that everyone who has written about HR does so in a sincere manner (whether it be positive or negative). I can understand how it seems shady, but with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.

> with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other. That's intuitive but factually incorrect. There's a large body of empirical research that shows that giving away trivial tokens has a significant impact. This is true for everything from charitable donations to sign-ups for services to survey responses. Not to mention ratings for college courses, which are, in the aggregate, m…

I'm past the edit window here, but it's also not to the point. The point is that, by incentivizing reviews, you skew the sample of reviewers. Even if we didn't have decades of research showing that giving people toys changes their behavior, it would still change the sample of reviewers and make the rating both meaningless and misleading.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

#40

Post by recursive »

colmvp wrote: post #16
cenazoic wrote: post #3

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…

> c) also specific to me: I genuinely liked the instructors and most of my cohort, and writing anything negative seems impolite - not wanting to hurt someone's feelings or seem ungrateful. Irrational, but there ya go. 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…

One reason we (collectively) might avoid honesty in that scenario is that we're afraid of a meltdown/confrontation/any kind of incident. When we're on the receiving end, we all know that "ourselves" are reasonable, so we'd never get into a fight over it. When we're delivering bad news to others, we can't be so sure.
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