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Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

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Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

aczerepinski wrote: post #50
gk1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A second bachelor's is unlikely to take four years of full-time work; e.g., Oregon State's online second bachelor's in CS is a 1-year full time program.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#62

Post by [deleted] »

mageemooney wrote: post #55
gk1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can now borrow for high quality, reputable Bootcamps. In fact, the lenders who do this are extremely diligent about researching our outcomes. They do not want to lend $20k to students to attend a program that doesn't have PROVEN high quality outcomes. Hack Reactor has demonstrated that we have those kinds of successes so we have a number of lenders willing to provide financing to our students.

[deleted]

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#63

Post by daxfohl »

CloudYeller wrote: post #58
daxfohl wrote: post #31

As an employer I'd look at bootcamp participation as a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago. If you truly don't know how to program but want a coding job, then here's a $0 class. Start with JavaScript. Why? The entire internet is based on JavaScript, it can do anything, it runs on any OS, and it's easy to lear…

Given the volume of applicants you have to sift through, I don't blame you for generalizing that "bootcamp == noob". I know several people who had a CS degree and/or had been working as actual "Software Engineer"s for fairly reputable companies before attending a bootcamp. For people like this, there are several reasons to attend: 1) The same kind of reason why people do MBA's: you get a mental break, in that you do…

Agreed. Everything in perspective.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#64

Post by forthefuture »

paulcole wrote: post #41
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.

When I took the technical interview ~3 months ago there were very specific questions about functional programming ("implement foreach" kind of questions). Makersquare had the same exact questions, so I assume someone just posted them online and people could easily prepare without understanding.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#65

Post by nbclark »

seangrogg wrote: post #16

Eh, I had a much better experience. But I don't chalk up my success to HR's curriculum nearly as much as I do the people (though getting exposure to Node.js has been a huge aspect of my life). If you're going to any bootcamp/immersive and you're going for the curriculum all you're going to get out of it is the curriculum - which you could easily obtain from freecodecamp.com for... well... free. If you're going to go,…

Part of my concern with bootcamps is the sentiment expressed above that you need it to get exposure to some arbitrary technology. In my experience, the best indicator to success in an industry or technology is a desire to learn that technology. Not someone giving exposure. I a happy it is working out for you, but as Node falls out of fashion, it will be on you to learn the next wave.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#66

Post by CloudYeller »

49531 wrote: post #6

Honestly I feel like the golden age of bootcamps is coming to an end. A lot of schools jumped into the market and it just seems like quality is dropping. Having worked at a bootcamp as an instructor and having hired multiple bootcamp grads I've noticed that typically you'll have 2 or 3 really great students and then 20 who got little value from the program. Bootcamps work wonders for that small percentage of students…

Yep. It makes sense though, if you were a cofounder at a bootcamp as of like 2-3 years ago, you went from struggling just to get students in the door, to showing the first 2-300 students your passion and teaching skills and delighting in their successes, to earning millions, to having to worry about mitigating legal/financial risks, to delegating lots of responsibilities and losing touch with the business. And now you're ready to move on with your life.

Happens to every super successful small business owner that doesn't consciously try to prevent that from happening. So it's no surprise that HR and probably lots of other bootcamps aren't as great as they used to be.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#67

Post by yompers888 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #42
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.

I think parent comment is suggesting a greater value because 15k bought him a whole year or two of supervised self-improvement, whereas it lasts only 6 weeks in the boot camp environment.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#68

Post by seangrogg »

nbclark wrote: post #65
seangrogg wrote: post #16

Eh, I had a much better experience. But I don't chalk up my success to HR's curriculum nearly as much as I do the people (though getting exposure to Node.js has been a huge aspect of my life). If you're going to any bootcamp/immersive and you're going for the curriculum all you're going to get out of it is the curriculum - which you could easily obtain from freecodecamp.com for... well... free. If you're going to go,…

Part of my concern with bootcamps is the sentiment expressed above that you need it to get exposure to some arbitrary technology. In my experience, the best indicator to success in an industry or technology is a desire to learn that technology. Not someone giving exposure. I a happy it is working out for you, but as Node falls out of fashion, it will be on you to learn the next wave.

I hate when people make the assumption that learning JavaScript is somehow a limiting factor. It hasn't stopped me from picking up Java, Ruby, Python, or PHP. I still have some trouble with Go structs and I still have some learning to do on Rust lifetimes... but seriously.

What "next wave" of server application development does Node.js leave me so woefully unprepared to deal with? Are people really having issues marshalling JSON/XML or sending templates down the wire?

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#69

Post by gk1 »

testerofwaters wrote: post #60
gk1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. The author feels as though they've lost $20k and months of their time, and the co-founder thinks the right response is to offer a beer and a chat.

Why do you feel like he is entitled to a refund?

I never said that.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#70

Post by rm999 »

yompers888 wrote: post #67
thaumasiotes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think parent comment is suggesting a greater value because 15k bought him a whole year or two of supervised self-improvement, whereas it lasts only 6 weeks in the boot camp environment.

Yes exactly. I only brought up the money to transition to my rant about how I think bootcamps are a cash grab :)

I also think thaumasiotes is missing my overarching point, which is that the data science bootcamps didn't actually provide much value to their students.

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