Hack Reactor vs. The Iron Yard, Part 1: Autonomy and Pacing
Thus begins the epic series which will track my thoughts and experiences on the differences and similarities between the Front-End Engineering track at The Iron Yard versus the Makersquare/Hack Reactor bootcamp. My experience is with the Austin, Texas campuses of both, specifically, so I can’t speak to any regional differences that may exist, though I believe both programs attempt to keep their curricula more or less the same between campuses. My experience is also with these organization in 2016, and these are both programs that are constantly shifting and evolving, especially Makersquare/Hack Reactor, who are constantly updating/shifting their programs in small ways in the process of merging the two different curricula.
I am writing this series for two reasons:
- I would have greatly benefitted from this information when I was considering bootcamps the first time around.
- Having done the first third or so of the The Iron Yard and (at present) the first half of Makersquare/Hack Reactor, I have the unique perspective of knowing both programs from the inside.
A caveat: I did choose Makersquare over The Iron Yard and do feel it was a better fit for me personally, but that doesn’t mean I think it is the best fit for everyone. I definitely think there are many people for whom The Iron Yard is a better fit, and as such I will attempt to describe the benefits and drawbacks of both approaches.
This particular blog post focuses on the question of autonomy and pacing in both programs.
In General:
Bootcamps are intensive. Coding bootcamps are trying to prepare you for a career of continuous learning, often on your own, while still pushing you to be as active as humanly possible during the course of their program. As such, the balance between enforced structure and autonomy is a tricky and very important one. Finding the right program that has the right pace and right balance for you, individually, is key.
When you’re on the job, after the bootcamp, you’ll be learning primarily through whatever tutorials you can find online the the often tricky mess of official documentation. Any bootcamp worth it’s salt is deeply aware of this and tries to force you at every turn to struggle through that process of learning on your own, while still offering the resources and support you need to learn as much as possible in as short a time as possible.
Different programs will find that balance in a way that works better or worse for particular people. This can often be a hard thing to gauge before you’re actually in the thick of it, so I’m going to breakdown the approach to autonomy that each program takes, as I understand it. Anybody with a different experience, or anybody from the staff of either program who thinks I may have missed the mark, please comment! I’d love to hear alternative perspectives.
The Iron Yard (TIY)
In short: The Iron Yard requires more specific autonomy on individual assignments through the first half, but less macro-level autonomy around the admissions process, navigating the bootcamp itself, and assessing your progress. In general there is a corporate atmosphere of wanting to check in more, not less, to make sure you’re ok. It also moves noticeably slower in terms of curriculum than Makersquare/Hack Reactor, which is more forgiving but also means less gets covered, in total.
When you’re checking out the Iron Yard, they’ll gently walk you through a lot of their expectations and answer a lot of questions before you need to ask them. You’ll talk to the campus head and your instructor before you start, and they’ll try to get a really good sense of whether their program will meet your needs. You’ll see the campus. They’ll invite you to their free crash courses, which I definitely recommend, since they’ll give you a fantastic preview into the instructor’s teaching style and the feel that the bootcamp has. All of this will give you a very good picture of what you’re getting.
That sense of what you’re getting extends to their good communication and frequent check-ins, one-on-one consultations, Friday huddles, and so forth. They give feedback on every assignment, and also have general progress one-on-one check-ins with the instructor every two weeks, so you know exactly where you are standing at all times.
Their entry requirements are also much less demanding, and if you’ve been doing much preparation online on your own, you’ll likely have most of them done by the time you are accepted into the program.
The only way in which they offer more autonomy is the structure of the assignments. All assignments that aren’t explicitly group assignments are solo, so you will be doing all the coding and all the work on your own. There are massive benefits and massive downsides to this model:
TIY Benefits:
You write everything yourself, and it’s all public on Github, so your future employers can track your development and see lots of your work. It’s great for introverts, who work best on their own, and there’s support there for the first few hours when you need it. It also offers the closest parallel to most future work environments, where you’ll have to struggle through and learn on your own, but can ask for help occasionally if you need. Also, since you do everything yourself, you can take as much or as little time as you like, and that means it’s on you to challenge yourself and go above and beyond. It also means it’s more flexible in terms of scheduling, since you can leave anytime after noon most days to work anywhere you want, and are free to stop working once you’re done with the basic assignment.
(Personal take on time: I managed to treat Iron Yard rather like a 9–5 job, for better and worse, since I finished the assignment most days by 5. On the one hand, I felt like I could maintain a pretty active social schedule and still be a person outside of the bootcamp; on the other, it thus only became a bootcamp in the truest sense if I became my own drill instructor, which I found frustrating. To me, I felt like if I was paying literally thousands of dollars to learn intensively, I wanted the program itself to push me and require me to keep working, so that I didn’t have to manage both the emotional labor of pushing myself and the labor itself. Makersquare, since it requires you to be there literally 11 hours a day and continue improving/refactoring your code once you’ve passed the basic requirements, worked much better for me in this regard.)
TIY Downsides:
Less material gets covered. Because you have to struggle through every step on your own, it goes slower. And because everyone is struggling through it on their own, if most of the class gets bogged down they’ll take an extra day or two on the same concept. As such, how far the class gets as a whole depends entirely on the cohort you’re in, and if you’re mismatched with the rest of the cohort it’s easy to get frustrated.
Also, it can get very lonely, unless you fight hard to not let it. It can be easy to not interact much with your cohort mates unless you push for it, and there’s something singularly depressing about spending 40+ hours a week surrounded by people you don’t feel like you’re really substantively interacting with or getting to know beyond the surface. This obviously depends on your cohort, and they try to push for socializing on Fridays to fight it, so this might not be your experience, but be aware it can get like this if you let it.
Hack Reactor(HR)/Makersquare
In short: Hack Reactor demands significantly more macro-level autonomy from you, especially throughout the admissions process and assessing your progress in the program itself. It will be on you to think to ask and figure out what to ask, if you’re not sure. On the other hand, their pair programming model in the junior phase (first half of the program) means you’re never alone, but can also allow you to get passive and miss a lot if you’re not careful. In terms of pacing, they are more focused on making sure all the material gets covered than making sure everyone keeps up, so if even if the whole class cannot get through all the requirements of an assignment in time, they’ll still move on and still expect each of you individually to figure out the rest on your own. And it’ll definitely still be on the assessments (I’ll talk more about the Hack Reactor/Makersquare .
In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, pair programming in their model means working on a problem in a team of two, with one person typing and the other person ‘navigating’, i.e. telling the person what to type. Both talk it through together when they get stuck.
This makes it much easier to bond with people from your cohort on a deeper level, because you are spending a lot of time with them. It also means if you end up working with someone who doesn’t match your personality, it can be a frustrating two days (each ‘sprint’ assignment spans two days). Both this and the physical environment of Hack Reactor/Makersquare (housed in the Capital Factory co-working space) can make it difficult on introverts or anyone who needs fewer distractions/more time on their own to figure things out. There are plenty of break times and solo-learning opportunities, to be sure, but the core of the work on assignments is still done together.
HR Benefits:
You’ll be exposed to a lot more material, covering the full stack (front-end, i.e. the web pages people see, and back-end, i.e. the databases and servers that do all the work in the background). They cover not only what works, but to a much greater extent why it works that way, even covering a lot of computer science basics most bootcamps do not. You’ll always have someone there with you, so you never feel totally alone, even if it’s both of you struggling to understand the material together. You have to explain everything you’re doing OUT LOUD. I cannot overemphasize the benefits of needing to articulate every step to a person, because you understand code so much better when you can translate it into English. Form what I understand, this training helps immensely during the job search, since white-boarding is essentially talking someone through your plan for how to code something.
HR Drawbacks:
Hack Reactor/Makersquare enforces a truly grueling, exhausting pace, and it remains up to you to finish learning anything you personally didn’t get to in the program. The admissions process can be extremely frustrating, because they expect you to learn and do an immense amount entirely on your own at every step. That baseline of common knowledge that you establish through that process of working on your own is necessary, because it allows them to move much faster in the program itself. You will need to push yourself more than you probably believe humanly possible before the program starts, and then, once it starts, it will not really slow down (though it will be much easier to keep up with a group of others going through it with you).
The help you get will vary widely, both before and during the program, because most of it will come from their ‘fellows’, recent graduates of the program kept on as TAs. Most fellows are fantastic, but mileage does vary, and they are not teaching professionals. This is most noticeable during the pre-course, when you can’t necessarily expect them to check in on you or always respond to emails right away. Again, it will be very much on you to make sure you get the support you need. If you have the time and funds to do Makerprep in the preceding months and come in on Saturdays to work on pre-course material on the campus, I highly recommend both (I did neither, and the final week before the program started was the hardest thing I’ve done since my PhD exams).
In conclusion:
Both programs are going to be very difficult. A bootcamp is demanding, by definition. And the learning will, in the end, be on you, regardless of what program you enter. The Iron Yard, on the one hand, will take pains to make sure that you can handle everything given to you, and will leave a lot of the pacing/timing/scheduling up to you. If you are deeply independent and want your challenge to come more from within yourself, The Iron Yard might be the right pick. Hack Reactor/Makersquare, on the other hand, will enforce a stricter, harder pace, and will require you to keep it. There’s support there, but it will be on you to take advantage of it. If you want to be challenged from the outside, to have someone pushing you harder and harder like a true drill instructor, and you like working in teams, Hack Reactor/Makersquare might be the right pick for you. It’s the model that works best for me, to be sure.
Hopefully that gives you a better sense of how The Iron Yard and Hack Reactor/Makersquare look from the inside! Leave a comment if you have any questions, want to argue with anything I’ve said (I love a good debate, and I am also happy to update anything I’ve got wrong), or just want to say ‘Hi!’
