Why would that matter? They have your money either way, and op has an additional MIT degree, which I would imagine would only help one during a job search, likely boosting GA's placement rate stats.
It's actually quite hard for instructors to deal with classrooms with very uneven advantages between students. Given that these courses try to get the most of such short time periods, I'd imagine you'd either be unhappy with the pace or perhaps lead other students to feel like they're lost.
Are these types of schools worth the cost for people? I'd love to hear from a student. I took a couple months off work to learn new skills and it cost me nothing (except rent and no income), just a lot of Googling and frustration. What's different about this? Is it the class setting + mentor structure that makes it worth it?
In most cases, you learn more with a great teacher than you do by yourself, and teaching is a different skill than performing. Even Tom Brady has a quarterbacks coach, who couldn't throw the ball like he can, but can still offer constructive guidance.
This is especially true for complete beginners. If I sat down in front of a piano and practiced an hour every day for six months, I would probably not do very well, since I wouldn't know where to start, I wouldn't know good technique, and I'd probably learn a lot of bad habits. If I took just a few weeks of lessons and then practiced an hour a day for six months, I'd make a lot more progress since I'd have a better idea of how to learn piano.
I completed a program sort of like this one. My opinion is that it is probably not worth it overall. I learned a lot about how to build things, but I am very lacking when it comes to CS fundamentals, and I would struggle to build something complex from start to finish. A technical interview would be a real struggle.
I benefited greatly from the structured curriculum, but it didn't go much deeper than Hartl's Rails tutorial. Once you've got the basics, you're really only limited by your imagination and your desire to make interesting things that have a range of practical applications that might get you job ready.
I'm still quite lost in any conversation with advanced programmers, but I'm doing alright helping my sister learn to code at the moment. I've got a lot to learn, and I'm doing that on my own now. The program was a decent jumpstart.
Midway through the course I adjusted my expectations for where I'd be by the end, so I'm not really disappointed with how it turned out. Now, I'm basically a marketer with much stronger than average coding chops for someone in marketing.
I know someone who went who I also helped through the process. My opinions based on observations of her experience:
1) She didn't learn anything she couldn't have learned on code academy or learn python the hard way.
2) She didn't like the social environment. Quote: "I thought it would be frat boys calling me sexy mexy, not passive aggressive hipsters basking in the glow of steve jobs style superiority. At least some brogrammers are hot."
2b) GA is all about group projects and public demos. She wanted to do coding because she'd rather sit with her computer alone than deal with hipsters.
3) She said many interviewers looked down on the GA name after experience with underskilled GA leavers.
4) She got a coding job and the pay hike has probably paid for the cost of GA by now.
tl;dr; If you can just learn the new skills and post code to github, you probably just saved $12k over what GA offers.
I'm not a student, but I do think it's in general a terrible idea to go to a coding school. It's not only quite a bit of money for something which you could get for free online, but it's also a strong negative symbol on your job application. Most of the people who are hiring for tech positions either taught themselves or got a CS degree (frequently, both) and this leads to a significant anti-bootcamp bias which is compounded by the masses of incompetent bootcamp grads.
I'm attending GA's WDI cohort this November - March. I can't yet speak to whether or not its worth the cost; though I can highlight my goals during and afterward.
I've been writing code and researching CS in various capacities since I was about 14 (I'll be 26 in a few weeks). I contribute to FOSS as much as I can, I occasionally push out personal FOSS projects, and occasionally make screencasts / blog posts highlighting things I find interesting or have learned.
I get by at the moment doing freelance web dev for agencies in town, but its a dead market, and a lot of places have either gotten very complacent or segregated as far as design and development (we have lots of agencies that can make "pretty" things and lots of agencies that can make very "good" things, but no agencies that have a strong design _and_ development presence).
I don't feel like I have an opportunity to advance myself beyond where I'm at. There aren't any start-ups, developers don't talk to each other, and we're being taken over by three-letter-agencies (We're now home to US Cyber Command).
At the very least, from my perspective, I make serious improvements / contributions to local companies as a contractor, but get very little recognition / respect from the developers in those companies.
Its my goal at GA WDI, to gain better connections with individuals / companies that I want to work with and do interesting things with, and to get better understanding of where I'm actionable (right now I work in a lot of various environments doing a lot of different things; the only time I really get to discover where my interests and my strengths converge is in the evenings and on the weekends).
I learned from community college that you typically get out what you put in (at least in my limited experience)-- I'd like to think that if I'm able to put in what I already know and take advantage of an opportunity to learn more and be "in the right place", I'll be able to get a better and more stable job.
Just got to meetups and learn on your own time man. Save yourself a ton of cash too. See if you can mentor/teach/assist there instead of attend as a student, that way you get way more connections, and you don't pay + you still consume course material. I did that, and it was wonderful.
I think an opportunity to mentor/teach at a place like GA would be golden, and would probably land me some place I'd actually like to be-- I've just run into so many problems with not having something tangible saying I know what I know and can do what I can do (I've never once had an interview that asked me to share or describe my own code and work, even though I've provided it and asked to talk about it). It could just be isolated instances with the companies I've interviewed with, but its still a problem I've had.)
The places I'm interested in working at probably wouldn't care much about me not having a degree in CS, but I would like the benefit of having someone outside of myself and my work stand behind my resume. I'd like to think GA will give me that benefit of the doubt when I go to apply for jobs I really want.
>The places I'm interested in working at probably wouldn't care much about me not having a degree in CS, but I would like the benefit of having someone outside of myself and my work stand behind my resume.
Work remotely for someone, work for some clients. I honestly can't think of a reason to attend GA. It's like the anti hustler attitude. Everything prettily packaged in a nice little box to be "an epic programmer!"
> Work remotely for someone, work for some clients.
I do work with clients, every day, often times remotely (my office is at a co-op, almost never on premises).
> I honestly can't think of a reason to attend GA. It's like the anti hustler attitude.
I can see where you're coming from with that statement.
> Everything prettily packaged in a nice little box to be "an epic programmer!"
That might represent some people's attitudes on going into and coming out of something like GA; it doesn't represent mine. I tried to convey that in my original reply, but I might not have done as good a job as I had hoped.
I taught front end at GA earlier this year. I can't speak at all to the immersive program, except that it seems pretty comprehensive.
My students came from many different backgrounds, and some seemed to get a lot more out of it than others. Some took tremendous advantage of office hours and 1:1 mentoring. Others barely tried. To some, it seemed to come completely naturally, others struggled even with all they help they could get. For something like front-end, there are so many ways to do it wrong, and so much bad (and outdated) information out there, that it really pays to have the mentoring, even for th students to whom it comes naturally.
One of the things these intensives provide that is absolutely killer for a student is the amount of effort and support put into getting you placed after. They really have to fight the doubters in the quality of the course - Getting great numbers of grads in employment immediately after the course is probably a key target for them.
You will get more help getting a job as a grad of these courses than I certainly did on my 4 year degree.
I have a gripe with all these online courses. They only target beginners or they target advanced users. I have done hours of googling to find a stuctured course which teaches "intermediate" CSS...I am not a CSS newbie but I am also not an expert who is interested in animations, etc
I can may be use bootstrap and make grid based layouts that are non responsive. I am yet to find a course which will help me make, lets say, a hacker news UI or reddit UI. I can guarantee you that all these courses fall short of that.
With CSS, it's a little more do it yourself and finding out the best/efficient hacks [sic] to solve a problem. If you can create a grid based layout, you can make a hacker news clone with html/css.
I'm not endorsing this program at all, but Bloc's Rails curriculum has students build a Reddit clone from the ground up. In fact, there's a wealth of free tutorials online for building Reddit-style sites. If all you're looking to build is the UI, I'm not sure you'd need much more than to tinker around with Bootstrap.
While GA has a minimal online presence, I'd agree that there is a notable lack of courses designed to take a practicing professional from intermediate to advanced. This is likely due to the problem of finding a classroom sized audience at any given time that shares a significant enough background on a topic yet still finding that there common set of things they all lack.
While I have ideas on how this could be solved to some extent, most of the time it's going to be a limitation of finding an audience that's willing to pay the same amount as someone who's looking to start a new career. Some of these students have a very strong drive to start something new. An established practitioner is unlikely to have feel as strongly and thus much less likely to pay the same sorts of rates.
I've been kind of knocking around the idea of drafting up online courses in that area. Shrugged it off as potentially not having enough demand, but your comment is interesting. Love to learn more about the courses you're hunting for, can you elaborate?
So,
Bit background about me. I am a compiler developer who has over the years picked up HTML/JS & CSS by reading/doing various tutorials. Now, I am good with HTML & JS but I am not able to make good looking websites. I know the very basics of CSS, have done various online tutorials, bought a bunch of books etc. Because of all this, I consider myself to be "intermediate" level CSS person (not advanced, not beginner). Now, 90% of courses on udemy, coursera start with teaching how to use HTML &(gasp) editor. Then they teach CSS tags, selectors etc. I am past the basics but cannot make Airbnb or Hipmunk quality. The projects they make you is basic portfolio. There are no courses (or they are very hard to google for)...
I am ready to pay 200-300$ for someone who will teach to make me quality, complex UIs(like Hipmunk).
So courses I am looking for
1) CSS for backend engineers
2) Advanced bootstrap (or other frontend foundations)
3
At this point, I am able to think of any course I would be interested in.
Feel free to email me. Address in my profile.
As stated by others, GA's focus is 12-week intensive full time "career-changer" courses. The company I work for recently took in 4 graduates from Makers Academy (similar to GA WDI) and after a 3 month trial we've decided to keep 3 of them on as Junior Full Stack devs.
I'm incredibly impressed at the standard that comes out of Makers Academy in particular, and think they are trained to be better suited for work than a 3 year Comp-Psi bachelors in the most part.
I dont want to sound like a dick - but how many coding schools equates to too many coding schools. I would love to see some stats on how many people are trying to attend these sort of things. At some point, supply is going out strip demand and its not going to be financially viable.
Coding schools are gaining popularity because there's demand, obviously. Many people see them as a way out of their stagnant earnings and soul-crushingly boring middle-class jobs.
I'm curious how sustainable these schools are in the long term. It seems like there is a limit to how many entry-level devs in a given language and framework you can pump into the local market before it becomes saturated. I suppose you can cycle through technology stacks and hope the market has soaked up enough devs before the next class comes around, but it seems like there is a limit to how big the schools can grow. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out with many of these schools getting pumped full of venture funding.
i think the elephant in the room is that you can't just graduate one of these coding schools and compete with someone who has been coding for X more years than you have.
So true. I was particularly humored by Bloc's comparison chart where they failed to compare themselves against other online cram-sites but instead listed full-cost options like GA and University of Phoenix tuition! LOL!
Free/cheap online options often won't take you past basic syntax or building a simple, static web page, while programs likes Bloc have students work on complex web apps under a senior engineer (simulating on the job experience). The outcomes are more comparable to those of on-site bootcamps, as opposed to Udemy, Codecademy, etc.
There's a reason that in order to become an actual engineer you're required to pass a professional engineering exam. In many states you're literally breaking the law if you put PE on your business card[1].
Putting it mildly, with all of the asshats that can barely create CRUD apps calling themselves software engineers and making an amazing salary when compared to their pathetic skills its a wonder the median salary hasn't plummeted like a rock.
I honestly think having someone legally responsible is necessary for proper programming and security practices to be put into place. It works with HIPAA and the real engineering profession. The people going through these classes are no more than weekend woodshop students and the spaghetti they string together will show them to be.
I would guess that there are lot of qualified "engineers" (not certified) with just cs, math or other non engineering degrees. How could we keep certification from excluding all these bright people?
41 comments
[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadCompare that with their fees
This is especially true for complete beginners. If I sat down in front of a piano and practiced an hour every day for six months, I would probably not do very well, since I wouldn't know where to start, I wouldn't know good technique, and I'd probably learn a lot of bad habits. If I took just a few weeks of lessons and then practiced an hour a day for six months, I'd make a lot more progress since I'd have a better idea of how to learn piano.
I benefited greatly from the structured curriculum, but it didn't go much deeper than Hartl's Rails tutorial. Once you've got the basics, you're really only limited by your imagination and your desire to make interesting things that have a range of practical applications that might get you job ready.
I'm still quite lost in any conversation with advanced programmers, but I'm doing alright helping my sister learn to code at the moment. I've got a lot to learn, and I'm doing that on my own now. The program was a decent jumpstart.
Midway through the course I adjusted my expectations for where I'd be by the end, so I'm not really disappointed with how it turned out. Now, I'm basically a marketer with much stronger than average coding chops for someone in marketing.
1) She didn't learn anything she couldn't have learned on code academy or learn python the hard way.
2) She didn't like the social environment. Quote: "I thought it would be frat boys calling me sexy mexy, not passive aggressive hipsters basking in the glow of steve jobs style superiority. At least some brogrammers are hot."
2b) GA is all about group projects and public demos. She wanted to do coding because she'd rather sit with her computer alone than deal with hipsters.
3) She said many interviewers looked down on the GA name after experience with underskilled GA leavers.
4) She got a coding job and the pay hike has probably paid for the cost of GA by now.
tl;dr; If you can just learn the new skills and post code to github, you probably just saved $12k over what GA offers.
I've been writing code and researching CS in various capacities since I was about 14 (I'll be 26 in a few weeks). I contribute to FOSS as much as I can, I occasionally push out personal FOSS projects, and occasionally make screencasts / blog posts highlighting things I find interesting or have learned.
I get by at the moment doing freelance web dev for agencies in town, but its a dead market, and a lot of places have either gotten very complacent or segregated as far as design and development (we have lots of agencies that can make "pretty" things and lots of agencies that can make very "good" things, but no agencies that have a strong design _and_ development presence).
I don't feel like I have an opportunity to advance myself beyond where I'm at. There aren't any start-ups, developers don't talk to each other, and we're being taken over by three-letter-agencies (We're now home to US Cyber Command).
At the very least, from my perspective, I make serious improvements / contributions to local companies as a contractor, but get very little recognition / respect from the developers in those companies.
Its my goal at GA WDI, to gain better connections with individuals / companies that I want to work with and do interesting things with, and to get better understanding of where I'm actionable (right now I work in a lot of various environments doing a lot of different things; the only time I really get to discover where my interests and my strengths converge is in the evenings and on the weekends).
I learned from community college that you typically get out what you put in (at least in my limited experience)-- I'd like to think that if I'm able to put in what I already know and take advantage of an opportunity to learn more and be "in the right place", I'll be able to get a better and more stable job.
I hope that makes sense; its been a long day.
The places I'm interested in working at probably wouldn't care much about me not having a degree in CS, but I would like the benefit of having someone outside of myself and my work stand behind my resume. I'd like to think GA will give me that benefit of the doubt when I go to apply for jobs I really want.
I could be mistaken, however.
Work remotely for someone, work for some clients. I honestly can't think of a reason to attend GA. It's like the anti hustler attitude. Everything prettily packaged in a nice little box to be "an epic programmer!"
I do work with clients, every day, often times remotely (my office is at a co-op, almost never on premises).
> I honestly can't think of a reason to attend GA. It's like the anti hustler attitude.
I can see where you're coming from with that statement.
> Everything prettily packaged in a nice little box to be "an epic programmer!"
That might represent some people's attitudes on going into and coming out of something like GA; it doesn't represent mine. I tried to convey that in my original reply, but I might not have done as good a job as I had hoped.
>but I would like the benefit of having someone outside of myself and my work stand behind my resume
Well it looks like you already solved that then.
My students came from many different backgrounds, and some seemed to get a lot more out of it than others. Some took tremendous advantage of office hours and 1:1 mentoring. Others barely tried. To some, it seemed to come completely naturally, others struggled even with all they help they could get. For something like front-end, there are so many ways to do it wrong, and so much bad (and outdated) information out there, that it really pays to have the mentoring, even for th students to whom it comes naturally.
You will get more help getting a job as a grad of these courses than I certainly did on my 4 year degree.
I can may be use bootstrap and make grid based layouts that are non responsive. I am yet to find a course which will help me make, lets say, a hacker news UI or reddit UI. I can guarantee you that all these courses fall short of that.
While I have ideas on how this could be solved to some extent, most of the time it's going to be a limitation of finding an audience that's willing to pay the same amount as someone who's looking to start a new career. Some of these students have a very strong drive to start something new. An established practitioner is unlikely to have feel as strongly and thus much less likely to pay the same sorts of rates.
I am ready to pay 200-300$ for someone who will teach to make me quality, complex UIs(like Hipmunk).
So courses I am looking for 1) CSS for backend engineers 2) Advanced bootstrap (or other frontend foundations) 3 At this point, I am able to think of any course I would be interested in. Feel free to email me. Address in my profile.
I'm incredibly impressed at the standard that comes out of Makers Academy in particular, and think they are trained to be better suited for work than a 3 year Comp-Psi bachelors in the most part.
With that in mind I think they hold up pretty well.
Putting it mildly, with all of the asshats that can barely create CRUD apps calling themselves software engineers and making an amazing salary when compared to their pathetic skills its a wonder the median salary hasn't plummeted like a rock.
I honestly think having someone legally responsible is necessary for proper programming and security practices to be put into place. It works with HIPAA and the real engineering profession. The people going through these classes are no more than weekend woodshop students and the spaghetti they string together will show them to be.
[1]http://sce.uhcl.edu/helm/SWEBOK_IEEE/papers/10%20reprint%205...