My Impressions of Four NYC Coding Bootcamps

I’m 21, reached a wall in my journey towards becoming a web developer, and thus started looking into attending a bootcamp. I often run into issues that take me hours/days, and having the guidance of a bootcamp will reduce that to mere minutes. I did a good amount of research the past few weeks, so I figured I’d publish my findings in hope that it’ll be useful to others.

Optimizing

You’ll be happy to hear that all of the bootcamps I looked into seem great. I’d probably be happy attending any of them. However, my (and your) job is to choose the best among an array of good options. To optimize.

• The instructors and students all seem to be genuinely good people. People often talk about how it was such a life changing experience and how the people they met were so amazing.
• The instructors seem to be good at teaching, and seem to care about the students and willing to go the extra mile for them.
• The students seem like a bunch of smart 20-somethings who are eager and motivated to learn to code.
• Most bootcamps seemed to be pretty good investments. They’re all about $12k for 12 weeks and have good placement rates (80-90%) and average starting salaries ($80k). This seems to be true for the more well-known bootcamps, but might not be for other ones.

Other similarities:

• They run from 9am-6pm, Monday through Friday. But students often stay late (until 9 or 10pm), and the instructors also stick around to help out. People also often work on Saturdays too. It’s intense.
• There’s a prep phase, where you’re given links to a bunch of tutorials to do about a month before the program starts. They want everyone to start the program with a certain baseline understanding of things like HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby, Rails, Git, the command line etc. This prep phase is supposed to take a few hours of work per day, so they say you could still work at your normal job during the prep phase.
• The structure of the day is similar. You get there, start the day off with a short lecture, break off into groups to pair program and solve problems, with the instructors available if you need any help. Then break for lunch. Come back, do another lecture and pair session. Maybe one more iteration of that before the day officially ends at 6pm. Then people might get dinner or something, and then come back to work until about 9 or 10 pm.
• The size of the groups are similarly sized: 25-40 students, with a student-teacher ratio of about 7/8-1.
• The curriculum involves going over the basics for the first 7 or 8 weeks, and then focusing on personal/group projects during the last third of the program.
• After the program is over, there’s some sort of Demo Day, and they work hard to help you find a job. They usually have a bunch of companies they work with to recruit.

With that said, I’ll give my impression of the four bootcamps I looked into, and then talk about my decision and why I made it.

Dev Bootcamp

• They take empathy seriously, which I think is cool. They want their students to be able to empathize with customers (be better product people), with coworkers (be better communicators) and other people (be better citizens). They have a yoga break around noon for about an hour.
• They seem to be geared a little bit more towards “beginner beginners” rather than “intermediate beginners”. It seems that most people don’t enter Dev Bootcamp having done a few months of tutorials already, and that the curriculum is a little less in depth.
• They’re a pretty well established program, and have been around for a while. The job placement rates and starting salaries seem pretty good. I think the placement rates were about 85%, and average starting salaries around $80k.

App Academy

• To sum them up in one word: intense.
• They have the lowest acceptance rate (~5%) and are serious about taking really smart people. Like people with strong analytic/science backgrounds, and people coming out of top colleges.
• The curriculum is very comprehensive and difficult.
• People work very hard there. It seems to be long hours. They even let you sleep there, which should be an indicator of the types of hours people put in. Another indicator: I was told that there’s about 4 hours of “after hours” once the day ends at 6, and I should be able to go to the gym if I keep it under 30 minutes during after hours. Um, what??
• They have the best job placement and average salary rates. “98% of our graduates have offers or are working in tech jobs. In SF, graduates receive an average salary of $100,000; in NY, graduates receive an average salary of $84,000.” And they put their money where their mouth is: you don’t have to pay tuition until you get your first job! It seems to be a very well established program that has been around for a while and knows how to get jobs for its students.
• They seem to care a lot about these stats. Maybe a bit too much. They have tests every week, and kick you out if you fail twice. And they’re really serious about choosing super smart applicants who will be able to keep their job placement numbers high. Also, of the four interviews I had, App Academy was the only one that didn’t even really ask anything about me personally, and seemed to be just interested on how I did on the coding exercises. I found this to be a bit concerning, and furthered the suspicion I was developing that they are too concerned with the numbers and not concerned enough about their students.
• Also, the reviews here weren’t too encouraging.

Metis

• At Metis, you only work 9-6pm. No after hours. Their philosophy is that they don’t want to burn their students out.
• The instructors are from Thoughtbot, which is a very good Rails consultancy firm. I’m not sure if this means that they’re good teachers, but at least it should mean that they know what they’re doing with Rails.
• It’s a smaller program. About 15 students, with 2 instructors.
• It’s a very new program. As of 7/12/14, they are on their second Boston cohort, and first NYC cohort (I think; could be off by 1). There wasn’t anything that made me suspect that they weren’t good at teaching or finding jobs for students, but the fact that they’re so unproven reduces my confidence, and the programs are so similar that something like this turned out to be a notable factor.

Fullstack

• The most notable thing about Fullstack is that they teach JavaScript instead of Rails. See Why Javascript?.
• The cofounder Nimit was great. I asked him a bunch of questions about getting a CS degree instead, about other programs etc. and he was very honest with me about the merits of all of them. He was very patient and willing to answer all of my questions. He also seems like a really smart and interesting guy who knows a lot about startups, and I enjoyed talking startups with him for a while.
• From what I gather from Nimit, they seem to care a lot about their students and be willing to go the extra mile for them. They understand that even when going the extra mile for the student might not be in their short-term interest, it’s in their long-term interest.
• It seems to be geared a little bit more towards “intermediate beginners” than “beginner beginners”. And the curriculum seems pretty comprehensive. I like how it really covers the full stack.
• Nimit talked about how he tries to get the students integrated with the tech community by taking them to meetups and talks and hackathons and stuff. The environment seems very friendly and fun.
• As for numbers, the placement rate is about 94%, with average salaries around $80k. The founders have been teaching for a while (they’re starting their fifth class, and had taught code to MBA students beforehand). As for getting jobs for students, they’ve been in NYC for a while and have a big network there. Plus, they’re a YC company and thus benefit from that network as well.

The Decision

It was overshadowed by LeBron’s announcement that he’s returning to the Cavs… but I’ll be taking my talents to Fullstack!

Again, I’d be happy attending any of them, but nitpicking:

• App Academy seemed to be overly concerned with numbers, and not concerned enough with their students. Honestly, it probably isn’t to a huge extent, but it’s enough to make me prefer the alternatives to it.
• Metis seemed fine, but is unproven. And more importantly, I didn’t feel the same vibe with them that I had with Dev Bootcamp and Fullstack. I didn’t really get much of a sense of what the culture would be like, but my impression was that it was more “fine” than “cool!”.
• Dev Bootcamp seemed to have a really cool culture. I heard lots of stories about great experiences there, and they seem to really care about their students. As professionals and as people. However, it seemed to be geared a bit more towards “beginner beginners” than “intermediate beginners”. Really, I just connected well with Fullstack. I sense that I’d learn a little more there, and I hope Nimit could be a mentor to me as I learn to code and eventually start another startup.

Edits:

• Before applying to Bootcamps, I spent a good amount of time learning to code. I’ve tried a lot of resources and struggled to find good ones. The Odin Project is by far the best resource I’ve found. 1) It aggregates all the best resources on the net into a curriculum. 2) The founder writes some articles. He’s a very good teacher. I think he’s really good at a) explaining things, b) teaching things in the right order and c) teaching things that are actually useful (not wasting your time). So I’d recommend The Odin Project to anyone who’s teaching themselves to code.
• The founder of The Odin Project (Erik Trautman) is starting an online code school called Viking Code School. It’s online and only takes 20–30 hours a week, so it’s for “busy professionals”. I obviously haven’t tried it, but based on what I see from The Odin Project, I suspect that it’s great. Erik is cool guy and a great teacher.
• I should also mention Hack Reactor. They say they take you from 20–120 instead of 0–60. Meaning you have to start off knowing a decent amount about of coding, but the program is more intense and takes you further. It’s also about $5k more expensive than the other programs. I don’t know much about it other than that. It’s not in NY so I didn’t look into it, but in retrospect maybe I should have.