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Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

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Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#41

Post by paulcole »

shawndrost wrote: post #9

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.) It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!) Here's a bit of inside baseball: This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less s…

> 1) Candidates were gaming the admissions process -> we rewrote it.

Would love to hear a more thorough explanation of this.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#42

Post by thaumasiotes »

rm999 wrote: post #26

I hire data scientists, my experience interviewing through a boot camp for a year: the top 1-2 students in each class are great, the remaining 10-15 are anywhere from under-qualified to woefully unqualified. The one guy I hired from the bootcamp, easily the highest quality applicant from three classes we evaluated, told me he learned essentially nothing. He told me his teachers had no real qualifications or work expe…

> The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters.

Assuming you're going for a job, paying $X to get a job in six weeks sounds like much better value than paying $X to get a job in two years.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#43

Post by seangrogg »

gk1 wrote: post #29
seangrogg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, much cheaper than a $40,000 4-year commitment (from a public university, assuming $5,000 semesters - which is very lenient).

That's been brought up a few times in this thread. I don't think it's a fair comparison at all. You can borrow student loans for college, but the $20k comes out of pocket.

Or you could do what I did, get a shitty minimum-wage code monkey startup job beforehand so you know what you're getting into before you commit, then sock away some funds, take out a personal loan, and because you're a programmer you can turn the entire tuition into a business expense and also deduct the cost of moving to .

Easily paid the loan off once I got my first job. Got a huge tax return last month. Now enjoying writing this from Mountain View.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#44

Post by mkhpalm »

shawndrost wrote: post #9

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.) It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!) Here's a bit of inside baseball: This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less s…

What is your profit margin per student at Hack Reactor?

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#45

Post by ryanwaggoner »

hoodoof wrote: post #18

This post reads like the author holds the school responsible for the students success. Programming does not work that way. You MUST make yourself successful. Even giving a minutes thought to a schools "result stats" entirely misses the point. Taking this to the next level, I don't think people should be paying to go to any sort of coding school. Spend the money on a second monitor and living expenses and sit at home…

Come on, that totally ignores reality. Just because you eventually need to problem solve by yourself doesn't mean that you should shun any help or guidance or structured learning to get to where you CAN do that.

I'm a self-taught developer. I learned to program the way that you did, it sounds like, by being curious and tinkering my way through, solving more and more complex problems.

But guess what: that's not how many programmers learned, including some great ones. They went to a structured program and learned there. Where do you get this idea that real programmers are self-taught, so any structured learning is a waste?

Every single online comment thread about coding bootcamps that I've read has had comments from people with your perspective, so you're not alone. But they've also all had people who had no experience programming, went to a bootcamp, and now have good jobs that they enjoy. I know multiple people like that myself...do you think they're all lying? Or maybe you think they must not be REAL programmers?

Programming isn't magical. It's a skill, and just because we taught ourselves doesn't mean everyone has to.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#46

Post by lukebp »

analognoise wrote: post #14
shawndrost wrote: post #9

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.) It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!) Here's a bit of inside baseball: This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less s…

"we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise" Horseshit alert if I've ever heard one.

Hack Reactor grad here and former civil engineer. My raise was $40k and I came from a fairly high paying job relative to the rest of the civil engineers I knew. If I had come from an average civil engineering salary the raise would have been more along the lines of $55-$60k.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#47

Post by stevewilhelm »

MattyRad wrote: post #8

$20,000 is about half of what my 4 year college education cost (although it's more expensive now, certainly). That seems incredibly expensive for a bootcamp. I'm obliged to ask what on earth that money is going towards, besides directly into somebody's pockets. > Another observation, most people who get in, are already qualified people, with top university degrees. I'm afraid to ask how large their student loans coul…

UC Davis tuition is currently $14,046 a year.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#48

Post by seangrogg »

jtchang wrote: post #4

This is a great post and more of these are surely needed. I think the reason we don't see many graduates speaking out is because they feel it might "de-value" their degree which I totally understand. However the lack of transparency with bootcamps is frightening. Especially regarding how much they charge. I'm not saying all of them are bad. In fact I think it is refreshing to that so many bootcamps popped up since no…

The weird thing is that the "price warring" that does go on seems very dramatic - there are plenty of bootcamps that are effectively "free". That being said, they often don't get rave reviews (nor do they seem to have much marketing going for them).

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#50

Post by aczerepinski »

gk1 wrote: post #29
seangrogg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, much cheaper than a $40,000 4-year commitment (from a public university, assuming $5,000 semesters - which is very lenient).

That's been brought up a few times in this thread. I don't think it's a fair comparison at all. You can borrow student loans for college, but the $20k comes out of pocket.

Most bootcamp students already have college degrees. Many have families and mortgages, etc. Dropping from the workforce for four years to do another college degree isn't a realistic option. Tuition isn't the biggest cost of education at a certain point in life; lost wages is.
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