Ask HN: Did you go to a 3 month coding school? Did it work?

[0]http://teamtreehouse.com/

I wouldn't have been able to teach myself nearly as much using online resources. I learn much better being accountable to a group for my work, and there were so many times I got stuck and needed to just ask another person for help. I also learned how to work on a dev team, not just in my app-building silo. So, GA was worth it for me.

That being said, it depends on your background and your goals. Learning front end to change careers is different than learning it to be able to better communicate with front end devs at your work.

I personally wouldn't get $10k worth of knowledge from online resources, but your motivation may vary.

I think regardless of the quality of the instruction, the fact is that when you pay $10K+ for anything, you aren't going to schlub it off...in fact, these schools are pretty much run with the expectation that you're treating it as a full-time job during session, learning/working 6-8 hours a day at minimum. As great as the opportunities there are for learn-it-yourself, nothing beats the financial/social pressure of a structured class...and at the very least, employers have some validation that you can handle a structured pace (and part of this validation comes from the reputation of the school).

In fact, I'd argue much of the value of a traditional college degree is simply a signal that says, "Hey, I'm a relatively safe hire because I'm an adult who has figured out how to raise/access $50K-$150K, legally, have passed a battery of competency and social tests, and have managed to get along with hundreds/thousands of other students/faculty for four years without committing an egregious felony"

Worked out well for me, and I learned much more attending in person than I would have just doing the online stuff (many of which I had pounded through before going to the bootcamp)

That said, the person I spoke to had created a project similar in scope and quality to what I'd expect a CS undergrad to do as a class project, and clearly had the ability to get things done. I'd guess someone from such a program could be a good developer, but with big gaps in understanding beneath the surface ability to do Rails or Node.JS or whatever the bootcamp used. If you're only doing html/css/javascript then the coding school is probably a sufficient education to get a web dev/design job.

https://schools.techendo.com

The person who runs that website also runs SF Hacker News and its weekly email newsletter.

If you're considering any of these "bootcamps" send Hacker School an application. It's not a traditional school, or even a traditional bootcamp, but you'll learn buckets and at the end there's a job fair with many respected companies represented, and a support network to help you find a job that will be a good fit and will pay you fairly.

I was also able to squeeze by on a budget of about $5k for living expenses in NY when I did it, so this would be more expensive (but much better) than online courses, but much cheaper than pay-to-play bootcamps.

If you want to just work for the rest of your life, by all means, learn to program on specific thing and get a job to pay for something or live in the cube for the rest of your life.

I love programming and I love learning new things, but I value a lot more too.

Just like any other education program, you're going to get out what you put in. There is only so much that can be covered in a 3 month period of time. When starting from, essentially, nothing the instructors have to really push on the gas to get through a lot of material to get their students to a place where they can start being productive.

Unfortunately this means that a lot of fundamental programming concepts are glazed over, or skipped all together. That's not inherently bad, but the onus falls on the student to really research more, and apply lessons taught in different ways. A lot of people don't have the motivation to do this - and that really shows through when interview time comes around. It's very easy to spot the graduates who followed the program and haven't put in the extra time to understand all the information they've been given.

I think the key is to really evaluate what your expectations are. No one here can tell you which course to take, or which is best for you. It really depends on the style of learner that you are, how much work you're going to put in, and what you expect to come out the other side of the process with.

That being said, in my current position I've interviewed a number of applicants who graduated from rails specific bootcamps and I've been less than impressed. A lot of them seem to be able to build rails applications but have limited or no ability to write ruby code. We had one applicant with an impressive looking portfolio who couldn't tell us how to reverse an array, despite coaching from us.

I get the sense that a lot of the technology specific boot camps do a lot of hand holding and have the students follow a pretty rigidly designed curriculum. The result being that you have a bunch of graduates who technically built some applications, but have little understanding of how they did it.

So what I would ultimately say, is that the value of attending a 3 month program depends almost entirely on which program it is you're thinking of attending. My rule of thumb would be to stay away from technology specific programs and try to find one that focuses more on concepts and principles.

Of course, this is all based on my personal experience, other people here might disagree, and naturally YMMV.

I had joined the 2nd cohort at MakerSquare in fall of 2013. Prior to MakerSquare, I had tried learning Ruby and JS on my own, through countless books and online tutorials. Having completed a few guides, I realized that my ability to learn "how to code" was hindered simply by my style of learning. Moreover, while I had a good understanding of the basics, I had no idea what the 'best practices' of coding were. After all, if you're going to spend countless hours writing code, you might as well do it the right way, right?

Of the different programs out there, the one thing I would urge others to consider is that MakerSquare places a heavy amount of weight onto prework completed (how much work you've done ahead of time) and community-fit. If you're a solo worker and not a fan of collaborative environments, you may want to consider other programs.

On a regular basis, we worked in teams of 2-5 ppl. The small groups were great for focused learning, and it turns out, the larger groups were great for learning how to collaborate on code with version control (github). Would I have had this opportunity through a self-learn environment? Definitely not.

Long story short, I would 100% recommend this program. As classmates, I had former programmers, retail store workers, a professional photographer and even a former elementary teacher. Out of the program, each of the students were working as professional front-end engineers (junior developers) within a few months of graduating. MakerSquare has a great professional network for helping with placement (96%), and they know how to teach software development.

The classroom environment (the location on Congress ave) was a bit cramped at times. But from what I've heard the class size is now capped at 20, vs. 30 or so when I went through.

All the 'issues' I had (space constraints, less than ideal student:instructor ratio, and focus on advanced concepts (algorithms and data structures) has been completely addressed. According to the instructors, Cohort 7 is operating on a night/day difference of curriculum than what I had. As an example, we didn't really touch data structures and algorithms until week 7 of the program. Today, those two themes are introduced on day 3 of the program.

The biggest difference now is that MakerSquare focuses on making sure you understand the fundamentals of software development. Before you even get to use a framework, (Rails, BackboneJS, AngularJS), you build your own version first. This is so you understand what goes into a framework, how to troubleshoot, and how to customize it to fit your needs.

If you want more perspective of the program, these are their Quora, Google and Yelp links.

http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-MakerSquare

https://plus.google.com/+MakerSquareAustin/posts

http://www.yelp.com/biz/makersquare-austin-2

I took it as a summer sabbatical of sorts from my marketing job. When I got back I interviewed for an iOS position at the same company, got it, and spend just under two years learning from an amazing mobile team.

Almost two months ago I left and joined a startup, ironically founded by someone who briefly did App Academy while I was there.

Not only was it incredibly rigorous and tons of fun, it was by far the best career decision I've ever made.

* The quality of the "graduates" varied immensely. Some graduates had been programmers before starting the course, and those students were just there to sharpen their skills. Others had no background in programming.

* All of the projects were group projects, so weaker students were able to hide behind stronger students and couldn't actually point at any code that they had been solely responsible for.

* All of the projects had been conceived of by the school, and so were very very limited in ambition and scope. (It took some digging to find this out, the groups were presenting their projects as if they had conceived of them)

* One of the student told me nearly verbatim: "We learned more in 10 weeks than we would have in our first 2 years of a traditional C.S. degree." I told this student that that was preposterous and to please never repeat that sentence again.

* The students had obviously been well prepped on their interviewing techniques and showed alot of enthusiasm and (over)confidence. But the average proficiency level was way below junior programmer status, and for 2/3 of the students I didn't see how they could work without active mentoring.

* I kept in touch with one of the students after graduation, and he said that virtually all of the students received offers . So hey, the demand for programmers is really that high regardless of quality. I couldn't see hiring one of these devs for what seemed (at the time) to be a 70-80k starting salary range, when another 20k would get me a legitimate junior developer. Of course, as I said before there were some quality candidates coming out of the program, but those were only the students who were programmers before embarking on the course.

I went through Fullstack Academy in NYC and received five job offers. (Full disclosure--worked as a teaching fellow at Fullstack shortly afterward, so I was on the payroll.) Had one of the best learning experiences of my life there. Absolutely worth the cost of tuition--there are real tangible pedagogical differences between distance/online learning like One Month Rails or Lynda and a physical classroom. You'll be a stronger coder, by an order of magnitude, from an in-person bootcamp.

The signal-to-noise ratio in the bootcamp space is currently EXTREMELY low. Currently, there are really only two data points prospective students can act on 1) the name-brand value of the first-to-market bootcamps, like App Academy and Hacker School, and 2) testimonials and hiring experiences of former students.

Neither of these data points are reliable. Plenty of students fall through the cracks at the oldest, most well-established bootcamps, and anecdotes (like this one, incidentally) can't represent the average experience.

Even though I had a wonderful, incredibly-high-leverage experience at Fullstack, I've known students who have gone through other bootcamps and have had HORRIBLE experiences--lackadaisical instructors working on side projects, courses exclusively by recent grads of the bootcamp with no industry experience, etc.

If you're considering bootcamps, COLLECT AS MANY SIGNALS ABOUT INSTRUCTION QUALITY AS POSSIBLE. This means speaking to former students, speaking to instructors and co-founders (if they're a bootcamp of any quality, they'll allow prospective students to chat with co-founders), sitting in on classes, visiting the school.

The bootcamp space is lucrative, and becoming increasingly crowded. Before someone comes along with a method of ranking them, DO YOUR RESEARCH.

The purpose of these schools is to force you to immerse in a learning environment for about 10 weeks - which will help you go up the learning curve. There are also some cheaper schools you should consider, also on www.switchup.org. Talk to alums, instructors, and read as much online before committing to anything!

Happy to chat more if you want to shoot me an email at jonathan@switchup.org.