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

Search results yield coursereport.com and switchup.org.

With the "top" ones like GA, Hack Reactor, Career Foundry, you are lucky to get more than 50+ reviews.

With some of these being over $10k, am I wrong to think there should be more reviews out there?

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 things.

b) in my case, it's mostly due to general ambivalence about the experience. There were things I liked, things I thought weren't done well, and the overall effect is to cancel each other out. Ambivalence doesn't encourage taking the time (see above) to write down thoughts the way more extreme positive or negative views do.

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.

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 would guess many people don't write reviews for the same reason.

> 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 actual value.

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...