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About Coding House (2014)

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Re: About Coding House (2014)

#31

Post by dragonwriter »

cansync1 wrote: post #27
xeromal wrote: post #2

HOLY. SHIT. I am sorry. :( 90% of these coding schools need to go. I thought my private school was bad. Also, there are plenty of free sources for education. Definitely enough to get you started building your own applications. Hell, ever pluralsight is a better bargain.

I am a founder at Coding House. Wrong. - Maybe the bottom 20% should go and that is natural selection. - The is a huge shortage of devs. - Most colleges are not doing a good job creating dev's (their are about 100 who do). - You can learn everything we teach on your own for free (near free). - btw Plursight is great if you are a JR Dev not if you don't know shit. - Boot camps expedite the process by 4x to 12x the amo…

> The is a huge shortage of devs.

If the high salaries for developers were due to a training-insufficiency-based shortage of qualified devs, the natural market for training programs would be hiring firms, not would-be devs.

The reason the market is would-be devs is because, insofar as there is a shortage, its a talent-and-inclination-based shortage, but you can sell it to would-be devs as a training-based shortage that they are taking advantage of by buying into your program.

> You can learn everything we teach on your own for free (near free).

Then why does anyone need you?

> Boot camps expedite the process by 4x to 12x the amount of time it would take.

Where does this quantification come from?

Re: About Coding House (2014)

#32

Post by better_no_name »

hikz wrote: post #18
zastavka wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think caveat emptor absolutely applies with bootcamps, but there are also ones that are certainly worth the money. I'm a recent App Academy grad (full disclosure) and almost all of my cohort are now at high-paying jobs at companies they love, including Google, Groupon and Tumblr. (I'm still looking for work right now, but only because of extenuating personal circumstances.) Having talked with my friends who are wor…

I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well My first impression of them is dishonesty. They claim to be "The CS degree for the 21st century" which is simply not true for an intensive web development course.

I went through Hack Reactor. It's not a CS degree, but I work next to people having one. I don't think they're necessarily better at their job. "The CS degree for the 21st century" can mean anything. It's just marketing bullshit. That being said, judging startups (and IMO Hack Reactor is essentially a startup) based on their marketing would mean that 90% of startups are - what you call - "dishonest".

I enjoyed HR, I'm valuable for the company I'm working for, I maintain a couple of successful Open Source projects (~ 500 stars each) in Go, JavaScript and Haskell.

Without being too arrogant, most CS graduates can barely code. And realistically that's what most of us either do or should do all day long.

Re: About Coding House (2014)

#33

Post by zastavka »

hikz wrote: post #18
zastavka wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think caveat emptor absolutely applies with bootcamps, but there are also ones that are certainly worth the money. I'm a recent App Academy grad (full disclosure) and almost all of my cohort are now at high-paying jobs at companies they love, including Google, Groupon and Tumblr. (I'm still looking for work right now, but only because of extenuating personal circumstances.) Having talked with my friends who are wor…

I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well My first impression of them is dishonesty. They claim to be "The CS degree for the 21st century" which is simply not true for an intensive web development course.

While it's maybe a bit of an exaggeration, good bootcamps have an emphasis on (ahem) marketable skills that a lot of CS programs don't. You'd be right that you don't learn a ton of theory like you would in CS, but App Academy at least (and I'd assume Hack Reactor as well) makes sure you have enough grounding in programming fundamentals that learning new languages/frameworks/stacks isn't hard.

That said, one weird thing I've heard about Hack Reactor is that they purposely will hold back students they feel aren't 100% where they want them to be and keep them from graduating. Whether that's out of genuine concern for students or it's just to inflate their job placement numbers (or both), I couldn't tell you.

Re: About Coding House (2014)

#34

Post by slapresta »

cansync1 wrote: post #14

Hi All, I am one of the founders at Coding House. Let me provide some insight on the post from last year. 1) 50% of the the post is true and my fault 2) 50% is untrue and students fault 3) It was our very first cohort and we had a lot to learn about what worked and did not work 4) The student has been refunded 5) We wanted to make it like a real boot camp and that was to hard on some of the students 6) We have fantas…

After reading your responses on this thread, I just hope your bootcamp does not teach PR disaster prevention. Or, uh, grammar.

Re: About Coding House (2014)

#35

Post by [deleted] »

xeromal wrote: post #2

HOLY. SHIT. I am sorry. :( 90% of these coding schools need to go. I thought my private school was bad. Also, there are plenty of free sources for education. Definitely enough to get you started building your own applications. Hell, ever pluralsight is a better bargain.

[deleted]

Re: About Coding House (2014)

#38

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

cansync1 wrote: post #21
joshrotenberg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should be more like "We take 100% responsibility for the issues and plan to do something about it."

Fair enough. We take 100% responsibility for taking a student in our first cohort over 1 year ago; who was not prepared, did not do the work in or after the program. We have learned from our mistake. We now have extensive per work, coding challenges (gates on all phases) and accept only 3.16% of the students that apply.

That's like a little kid who, when told to make an apology, says "I'm sorry you're so ugly."

Re: About Coding House (2014)

#39

Post by VLM »

nfoz wrote: post #4
rpcope1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I am incredibly dubious that "bootcamps" have any value whatsoever in any case, except maybe for introducing practicing developers to new technologies. I know tech is the hot place to be any more, but man it's amazing the number of charlatans that have started to show up surrounding "hot technology."

Different people have different learning styles. And many people do not have an effective or appropriate learning environment where they can learn new tech through free resources. So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people; even it can help wade through what's out there to understand what's important to learn, how long you should spend learning x, etc. But until this article, I had never thought…

"So I think direct-mentorship can be very helpful to some people"

Something to think about is when my father was still alive and retired/contracting he charged about $200/hr for very specialized database work in a very specific financial field. I've heard thats not totally out of line today. Anyway my point is some of these bootcamps cost $16K and for $16K you could hire "most specialized programming consultants" for 1:1 time for a rather amazing 80 hours. Obviously you'd be better off with a modest amount of hours across many consultants unless you've already found a specialty or someone you work very well with.

Now most tutors aren't going to charge $200/hr for some easy noob questions, then again the middleman (and they'll be middlemen) are going to want an unacceptably large cut.

Its just something to think about, throwing out the advice, that if you've got questions and $16K burning a hole in your pocket there's already a strong and established ecosystem of consultants willing to take your dough in exchange for some answers.

As a point of comparison, music teachers and flight instructors don't really make that much per hour, although much like programming the pros at the top of those fields do clear $100K/yr.

It seems like a rational alternative.

Re: About Coding House (2014)

#40

Post by zipWith »

Considering that the sales pitch of Coding House and every other bootcamp I've yet seen is "give us $$$$ and we'll land you a job making $$$$$$," I wouldn't be surprised if bootcamp graduates got a negative, mercenary-like reputation amongst their peers, who overwhelmingly got into programming for the love of it. Obviously you can't blame someone for trying to improve their standing in life, and not everyone discovers programming in childhood or young adulthood, but I don't really understand why code schools are needed when self-education has long been an established, effective alternative to a CS degree.

The whole bootcamp movement smells of opportunists cashing in on the naive and uninformed.

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