Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 115 posts

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#91

Post by arian19 »

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 25 Grad here... I got a 93k raise after HR working at Google. Left to go to Apple less than a month after that.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#92

Post by arian19 »

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 25 Grad here... I got a 93k raise after HR working at Google. Left to go to Apple less than a month after that.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#93

Post by WalterSear »

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.

Not true.

At least one program whose graduates I have worked with sets up a payment program that only starts after you land a tech job.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#94

Post by dragonwriter »

aczerepinski wrote: post #89
dragonwriter wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's cool and an option I didn't know about. Still, an entire year of lost wages is way more expensive than a bootcamp. I couldn't have made that work.

> Still, an entire year of lost wages is way more expensive than a bootcamp.

Plenty of people do online programs nearly equivalent to full-time (with loads like that of the 1.5-year track for the OSU second bachelor's, which is also available on 2-, 3-, and 4-year tracks with lower impacts, though longer terms) with full-time jobs and families, some even do full-time programs (like the 1-year track) that way. People that need to learn around an existing job and often family commitments are pretty much the core market for distance education.

That's not to say bootcamps don't have their place, but the idea that there is no other option for people who want to become programmers and can't afford to take a lot of time off of their existing job is just wrong.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#95

Post by RegEx »

invaliduser wrote: post #83
teh_klev wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's unfair. Don't tar everyone with vendor qualifications with the same brush. Many of us obtained them because the companies we worked for needed minimum numbers of vendor "qualified" staff to attain or maintain the various levels of partner status available. For e…

I guess the wrong signal is not that you have a cert, it's when you highlight it in your résumé.

I agree with this. I used to teach at a coding school. I told my students to emphasize projects on their resume, not the fact that they went through our program.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#96

Post by bwest87 »

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…

Former HR grad here. I gotta back up Shawn, and HR in general. Hack Reactor is filled with lots of staff who care deeply. I graduated before the author's cohort, so I can't speak directly to the author's issues. But I can say the founders and the staff care deeply. If there was a rough patch, I know they'll fix it, and it sounds like they already have taken great strides to do so. But the author's main points just don't make sense. A 98% job placement rate is ludicrously good. Does a CS program have that rate? Maybe. But even if they do, it takes 4 years and 250k. HR is more than an order of magnitude less in both time and money, and this is being cited like they could do better? Seriously? Also, could you learn stuff on your own? Yeah of course you could. But you pay 20k because HR gives you an environment and team mates to learn from that you just can't get on your own. Also, they've iterated on the curriculum literally hundreds of times at this point (they do (or at least did) sprint reflections every 2 days, and actually implemented the feedback given). It's an excellent curriculum. The school is 100% worth it. I had a friend who just graduated a week ago, and said that "he had high expectations, and even those were blown away."

Even the author said they got a job after a couple months! Which is exactly what the school promised. How does the poster feel like they wasted their time/money??

Also, the author has no grounds to say HR isn't the best, cause they haven't been to others. I can't say it's the best either. I can say I had an excellent experience, and so did all of my class, and many others. And I do have 3 friends off the top of my head who have gone to other bootcamps, and they all cited those as having major problems (no help finding jobs, bad teachers). Anyway, this post sounds whiny. HR does excellent work.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#97

Post by azey47 »

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.

I was in HR15. I got a $70k raise. Went from working as a Junior accountant making $40k to Software Engineer making $110k (not even counting my $15k signing bonus). The ROI from the program is beyond ridiculous. Best experience of my life.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#98

Post by shawndrost »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #28
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…

So you were part of the group of schools that refused to agree to a transparency initiative ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11872261 ) but you think self-publishing your own methodology with zero breakdown of what your categories mean is just as good? Like, where are all of the grads employed by Hack Reactor to pad the numbers accounted for? What percentage of your students already have a CS degree when they w…

On Gregorio's blog post: We're on the side of the good guys. I introduced the point that Gregorio blogged about (has to do with how one accounts for tech-adjacent jobs) and we already keep track of the stats that way. You can read about what counts as "employed" in our methodology[1].

On grads employed by HR: they are not counted as successful job seekers. Again, you can read about this in the methodology.

On big name companies blacklisting our grads: I have literally never heard of this. Google was our # 2 employer in 2015.

[1] http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardSt...

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#99

Post by shawndrost »

hrgrad wrote: post #88
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…

This post shows a lack of owning up to mistakes and makes me question whether things are moving in the right direction. It wasn't that people were gaming admissions, the admissions process was broken. I took the admissions challenge twice, my second test was virtually identical to the first one. People I talked to from cohorts before and after me took basically the same test. If you use the same test for months the f…

We screwed up, we are fixing it for the future, and if there is any unemployed recent grad that isn't already hearing from us weekly they should email me. Thanks for the feedback -- I agree with you 100% that we're accountable for these things.

Re: Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

#100

Post by lindsbot_ »

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.

HR06 grad here, went from making 25k at a restaurant to 110k at my first job out of HR. Obviously if you're working in the field beforehand the increase won't be as much, but far from horseshit for most grads.
Post reply on HN