About Coding House (2014)

I suggested two Atlanta-area code schools, both of whom have been around several years and are well-connected with the development community. The problem with a code school is the same reason why there's a market for code schools at all. The market for talent is so hot that the people you want to be instructors can make way more money elsewhere than you could ever pay them. So you should know you're signing up for sub-standard instruction even before you start looking for one.

I still think my friend would be well-served at one of these spots, I've offered to help him out, but he's just too busy, he needs a situation that will force him to focus that has people on hand to help him cut through the noise. Then his natural intelligence will start coming through and he'll be able to make progress on learning.

Code school is an option, but you still really need to be resourceful and able to pick stuff up on your own because your instructor is pretty much guaranteed to be of the amateur-hobbyist variety.

I don't think this is a fair assessment, especially at the more established code schools.

For one, the instructors are probably making more than you think they are, so the difference between what they could get for a full-time gig and what they could get as instructors likely isn't that differently.

You also need a very special skill set to be an instructor at these kind of schools. You need to know the code very well, but you also need to be a good instructor which is a completely different skill set (communication, patience, understanding of how and when to introduce concepts). A vast bulk of the talent at the very top end you're referring to who would be completely unaffordable for the coding schools may not have that second component.

But, you're right in your suggestion that you choose a good school. The number of code schools, in my opinion, has become far too crowded and I expect that within the year we'll start to see most of the schools either go under or merge.

(As a disclaimer, I (until recently) worked at General Assembly which runs coding schools in several cities, but I don't speak for them and I never worked directly on the Web Development Immersive program during my time at GA, though I did take it and was happy with the outcome.)

Having talked with my friends who are working now, there are definitely things a/A doesn't teach you much about (e.g. deployment/devops, advanced Git) but on the whole we all feel like we learned more than enough to prepare ourselves for working in software development. I've heard very good things about Hack Reactor as well, though they expect you to come in with some coding experience already.

So yes, there are good/great ones out there, but I'd agree that your bullshit detector should be set very high if you're looking into bootcamps.