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

Yeah, I read his/her post a few times to try to figure out if (s)he had any experience and wasn't sure, and not seeing anyone mentioning Hacker School, I thought it'd add to the discussion.

Since (s)he doesn't specify his/her level of experience, I thought it'd be worth bringing up.

I was the lead instructor for MakerSquare's first cohort, and I've also taught shorter, on-site courses for clients like Comcast (Lord forgive me), Huffington Post, and LinkedIn. I'm also exclusively self-taught, no CS degree. Here's my take.

You need to know your own learning style to make the decision on the investment. I'm pretty obsessive and learn things better on my own working towards a goal than I do in a classroom environment. (I was homeschooled, so whether I thrived in a homeschool environment because my brain works this way, or my brain works this way because I was homeschooled, or some of both, I'm not sure.) This plays out into my real life, too—my wife has found if she sends me follow-up emails on some things, I'm better able to act on it, as I have a lot of trouble retaining auditory information. (She is very gracious.)

But many people thrive in a classroom environment, and for them, a coding school and the energy of being in a room with 30 people driven towards a common goal makes starting the journey a lot easier. So, analyze your own learning style from the past, and weigh this into your decision.

Another angle to consider is that being in a program with MakerSquare is like getting into YC: it buys you access to a lot of wicked intelligent people who you might not get to rub shoulders with otherwise. I know some really, really smart developers in Austin. Many of them mentor MakerSquare students, and the students are privileged to have access to their time and expertise. If I could go back to when I first started learning and pay $20K to have these guys mentor me, I would do it in a heartbeat. But if you go this route, make a conscious effort to seek out their help and learn from them.

Finally, if cost is a major concern, I would look at Austin's MakerSquare program. Cost of living is lower than say SF, tuition is lower (I think, haven't cost compared in a while), and our community is very welcoming to motivated beginner developers.

Good luck! I'm nj@third.io if you want to ask me more questions offline. :)

I know a close friend who went to coding school. She basically wanted to change her career and this was a good way of going about it. Coding schools are usually worth it if you are

1. Motivated enough to make it work - There will be a lot of long hours and toil. You will be trying to cram in a 4 year degree in a 3 month course so be prepared.

2. Question the logic - Programming languages came from humans and not the other way around. So there will be a distinct train of thought to how a system works. Never shy away from asking this. Never shy away from asking the seemingly dumb questions. You will be much more comfortable with a scenario if you know the mechanics of how something works

3. Focus on system design instead of UI - UI and UX experience correlates strongly with experience. System design experience (how do i code this particular component?, Design patterns etc) is contingent on you having strong fundamentals. So focus on that. It will make you a good engineer and not just a coder.

Lynda etc is very self driven and you dont get to have the same immersive experience a la General Assembly. If you do go the Lynda route, try out something like AirPair to complement the experience.

I'm an App Academy graduate from the January 2014 class.

To answer your questions:

I enjoyed the experience. This is by far the easiest question. I had zero prior experience in software engineering or computer science, but I've always been a puzzle-solving sort of person. To go from a life of dishwashing / retail to all-day high-speed learning was absolutely a positive experience.

Is it worth saving money, and just learning on your own? Maybe. In order to get the same result as I would have at a/A, I would have spent a lot more time hunting down answers to questions online, googling naive things like "what does this error mean? why is it still here, I solved the problem!" I also would have needed the self-discipline and insight to understand what exercises would best teach me core concepts, and pad my github with visible work. Finally, I doubt I could have stuck to the timeline. Ruby in two weeks was hard, I don't think I could have done it 100% on my own. For me, it was worth it.

*Did it work? I got two offers in the 85k-90k range. If I'd wanted to look longer, I could have gone higher.

TL;DR: I graduated from Hack Reactor last year and received four job offers, the one I accepted was close to the average salary Hack Reactor advertises, and the 99.XX% hiring rate is actually true. I credit the program's success to their selectivity, the resources they pour into hiring instructors from the industry, and choosing to focus on JavaScript. You can read my review of HR on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Hack-Reactor/review/Jake-McG...

I graduated from Yale with a history degree, then taught high school science in Mississippi, then stayed on for an extra year to lobby for charter school legalization in Mississippi. Given that background, I'd like to think I'm someone who can be thrown into new situations and learn quickly, so the bootcamp format was attractive to me. I agree that it's not for everyone though.

I found Hack Reactor through the Twitter account of a graduate in their second class. I was pretty skeptical about giving $17000 to some strangers in San Francisco, but I asked a lot of questions and was impressed with their answers: they didn't ask students to repeat sections like Dev Bootcamp, they've only asked students to leave for extreme failures to act appropriately towards students and staff, and the instructors (especially Marcus Phillips) have bonkers credentials. I decided to take the plunge.

The program is intense (6 days/week, 11 hours/day minimum) but if I was going to be unemployed for three months I would rather put all my efforts into learning than having free time. The first six weeks were instruction with two-day sprints, progressing from algorithms and data structures on to the front-end and ending with back-end (Ruby/Sinatra briefly, then a deeper dive into Node, then SQL and NoSQL databases). The second six weeks I did paid contract work through the program and worked on an open-source government transparency app using Angular and Node. When I went to interview it was great having a fully-functional Angular/Node app to discuss, and it seemed like employers felt a little better being able to inspect an actual product I had built.

Throughout the program we did practice interview problems every morning, several of which I got as whiteboard questions during my on-site interviews! (It's pretty cool to tell an enterprise interviewer "I'm happy to do that problem, but I just want you to know I've seen it before.")

Maybe the biggest surprise was that after the program was over, I picked up books like "Cracking the Coding Interview" and realized how much of it the program had already addressed without me knowing it. (I recently bought "High Performance JavaScript" and was genuinely surprised how much of it was just the way Hack Reactor taught me to write JavaScript.)

I was sort of worried the entire time I was in the program that it was all a big scam, like we'd show up one day and the office would be empty with wires dangling out of the walls and these guys had made off with $17000. I kept waiting for it to fall apart... and then it didn't. I got four job offers within a week of graduating and the final salary was well within the band advertised by Hack Reactor. I took on about $15000 in debt to do it and I'm on track to pay it all off within a year of graduating. It was definitely worth it financially.

I ended up at a startup (Ziploop) using the MEAN stack and I really love it. I wanted to be humble about my post-bootcamp professional development: I know that I have a lot to learn and so I want to collaborate with supportive senior engineers -- especially about CompSci fundamentals I missed out on in college -- while also building more expertise in JavaScript that a lot of CS grads don't have. I felt like I was able to contribute value to my employer my first week on the job without any hand-holding. We ended up hiring two more engineers from Hack Reactor as the company has grown and we're pretty impressed with the skills new Hack Reactor graduates are leaving with.