If you want to make a successful bootcamp just follow the recipe: 1. Thesis Project Kickoff / Thesis Sprint 1.Thesis project part of the program, lectures are now all about job search ~6 weeks Technical Assessment (full day assessment on what you learned for the first 6 weeks).Data Structures and Complexity Analysis.Technical learning part of the program ~6 weeks I have included the current curriculum ( publicly available at the time of publishing) to give you an idea of what the program teaches. You’ll learn the same and you’ll be $20K richer. Study the material yourself (see the medium article by Andrew Charlebois) or join a cheaper bootcamp. You should know what you’re getting into. I wish, that myself, read something like this before signing up. I felt the need to write this for potential students who are interested in the program. Why increase tuition knowing the cost hasn’t changed but your outcomes stats have worsened ? I’m guessing they want to cash in as much as they can while they can. They have just increased the tuition by $2,000 it now is $19,780. Most employers don’t know the difference between bootcamps. Having Hack Reactor on their resume might actually repel potential employers, not because of the name but simply because it’s a bootcamp. I was lucky to have found a job after a couple month but I know dozens of intelligent graduates who are currently still looking for a job several months after graduation. These statistics are really there to wow you, but after a short analysis, you realize how little is means. In reality anyone actively looking for a job can find one within 6 month.
These very people will now take up to 6 month to find a full stack job with this pseudo degree. They just updated their outcomes data going from 99% of grads find a job in 3 months, to 98% of grads find a job in 6 month that just does not seem reasonable by any standards.Īnother observation, most people who get in, are already qualified people, with top university degrees. I even had an interview where the interviewer happened to be a hack reactor graduate, he was complaining about the latter. But between us grads, we talk about how overpriced the program was. The reason you don’t see bad reviews is the alumni program, they invite you to meet your old classmates in “reunions” about once a year and they promise they’ll help you review your resume at anytime in the future should you decide to go back on the job hunt. It would make grads much more competitive in the job search. For an “Elite program” I would have expected to learn at least one additional language, maybe a back end one such as Python or Java. And a lot of veteran programmers, however wrong they might be, regard it as a lesser language. There are too many bootcamp grads nowadays, people want you to know more than one paradigm. They have squeezed the actual technical teaching time to the first 6 weeks.
You’ll receive endless lectures on how to find a job and how to present yourself. The third month you’ll work on your thesis project with a team chosen for you. You would expect more for the price you’re paying. With wireless peripherals that keep breaking all the while you’re trying to hack your way through the curriculum.
Mind you, the first 6 weeks (instructional weeks) you have to use 4 years old mac mini, plugged in to a shamefully slow internet. They do not know best practices that comes with real work experience, that they don’t have. They offer certain students to work part time as instructional help for 3 month after they graduated. The students assigned to help during the sprints have graduated just before you started. To resume: You’re getting an hour long lecture, after which you have two days to work on the new topic, after which you get a 1h long video of the instructor explaining how he would have solved the assignment. After a 2 day sprint you see a rushed video you’re supposed to learn from, if you need help during the sprints you get in queue to get help from a recent graduate who himself barely knows the material to help you. The material is divided in “sprints”, you have to understand and remember the topic in 2 days, hacking through it, while paired with another student. The second 6 weeks you’re basically learning on your own. After which lectures are every other day, 1 hour long each, for the first 6 weeks. Ironically the number of lectures drops dramatically after the first week. They offer you to drop out within the first week with a refund, minus the $2K+ deposit you paid. The first week is here to set your expectations, they have hours of lectures specifically on what to expect for the next 11 weeks. The “Elite” program generates a cool $3.56M every 3 month. In this article I’ll review the curriculum of the bootcamp and the reality graduates are facing. A quick reminder: Hack Reactor was created in late 2012 by DevBootcamp grads.