Bloc

I had buyers remorse a few weeks into Bloc's UI/UX design track. You have reading modules that are brief then an assignment at the end that you ALWAYS have to do more reading on your own and watching YouTube or LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com videos to supplement... Read More it. If you had zero design background and come from another discipline it's even harder.

For instance they will ask you to use the program Figma to complete an assignment. They don't even point you to a tutorial, you're just supposed to figure out on your own.

Their competition, Careerfoundry makes very good videos on YouTube and I was watching them to help me

You have a mentor, but its a side gig for most of them, and some treat it more seriously than others.

They try to attempt to have a student community on Slack, but it cant come close to being in a real or even virtual classroom with other students you can get to know, ask for help, or ask to critique your work. People just use it for usability testing and surveys.

If you need structure, this is not the program for you

My experience with Bloc's Web Developer Track was outstanding. The curriculum focused on learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node, Express, and more.

On top of that, the support is what I believe really makes this program shine. From day one I was... Read More assigned a mentor that I had weekly meetings with. If needed I could reach out to my mentor between our weekly meetings as well. Mentor meetings were one on one and the discussion was always led by me and what I wanted to discuss. In addition to my mentor, there is also a chat service that I could access directly from the curriculum. If I was confused about a certain area I could open a chat session and receive assistance immediately. There were also workshops throughout the week where I could meet with an instructor as well as other students to get help.

Mock interviews throughout the course were another reason I picked this program. I feel that seeing how interviews involving technical questions and live coding challenges was vital. The more practice the better.

I've just graduated and am now receiving assistance from a career coach to find employment with my new skills. I would recommend this program to anybody.

Great platform but the material is too dated to be chosen as a bootcamp in 2020. Bloc was bought by Thinkful and you should just apply there. Thinkful has more name cache and more up to date material. During my time at Bloc in 2019, I ran into numerous... Read More issues where there was outdated code particularly in the " WDT Server-Side JS with Node.js " section but also old-school ways of using React. This is slightly cheaper than most online courses but it's not worth it. The instructors are knowledgeable and the help staff is active but 40% of the time the issue involved outdated course content, particularly in the final sections. Also, there were more than a few times where they were short staffed and getting cleared to the next section took days and the success team email was silent. This bootcamp would be worth it if all they did was update the course material.

I learned industry best practices and practical software development standards during an intense 8 month remote learning program while juggling my full-time job.
I created and deployed mobile-first applications while learning new languages and frameworks.... Read More
The program helped me evolve my career to a senior program manager dream job that leverages my prior work experience as a digital marketer and the full stack foundation I acquired.
This is a very, very challenging program that requires tenacity but the outcome is incredibly rewarding. The Bloc team is passionate about student success and provides a robust range of resources to support students beyond the online curriculum: this includes a dedicated mentor, online technical support, numerous live Q&A session options with instructors, meticulous assignment grading and feedback and highly effective career coaching. Joining and completing the program was one of the best career and life decisions I've made. Great job Bloc-Thinkful, you've made a huge positive impact on my life!

Overview: For those of you in a hurry, here is a quick overview of Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in enrolling in their program, I recommend you read this in its entirety. The curriculum is simplistic in its explanation of topics and has several... Read More errors in the literature. At one point, they send you to Codecademy.com to learn from them. You can pay up to $8,500 to be sent to a completely different company to learn what they should be teaching themselves. The mentorship is inadequate, you will receive thirty-minutes, once a week, to talk with a mentor about any troubles you may be experiencing. Now if you are having a coding problem that you feel unable to solve yourself, and you would like to use the help of your mentor, this creates another issue. Thirty-minutes is an insufficient amount of time for the mentor to become familiar with your code and help you resolve the complication. It's not that the mentors aren't skilled or educated on the topics, it's simply a herculean task to resolve the problems in such a restrictive amount of time. They give you the illusion that you can finish this program at your own pace, that's not true. You will have eight months to complete the program. During this time, you can proceed at your own pace, when the eight months expire, you must pay, per week you wish to extend your program (about $140 a week if I remember correctly). My objection to this program is that when compared to so many other websites (such as Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools, Udemy) Bloc.io falls behind in content and doesn't justify the price tag. The Whole Story: To start, I have received my certification from Bloc.io. I successfully passed all of my assessments in my first attempt. I have not written this review out of anger due to not being able to complete the program. My complaint lies mainly behind the price and its syllabus. I enrolled in the Bloc.io program in December 2018, paid $6500 after applying two discounts. One was a thousand dollars off for paying upfront, the other was a thousand dollar scholarship program that I had received. I started with Treehouse.com, to begin my education into web development. I learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and began my understanding of JavaScript. After a few weeks of using other cheaper websites, I was excited to see what I would receive for my hard-earned $6500. Then my program began, within twenty-minutes, I instantly felt buyers remorse. I was met with large sections of tedious text, with an input box at the bottom of each page to write out my answers to the handful of questions. I tried to remain positive and hopeful that the curriculum would improve, I was wrong. The Curriculum: The first problem I noticed is how you send in your assignments. You are given a series of questions, then an empty input field where you have to format the questions and answers in MarkDown to submit it. Now, this isn't necessarily a problem, but it is time-consuming and annoying that you have to waste your time formating out your assignments. They also have a very odd design choice to not include any videos in their courses. Instead, they do live videos, like a web conference over Zoom or Google Hangouts, to somewhat resemble a lecture you would find at a college. This defeats one of the benefits of doing an educational program online. You can view the videos at a later time, but watching a teacher stumble through a lecture suffers in comparison to an edited video with animations and excellent footage like on Treehouse or Udemy. Most online programs I have experienced, have a comment section that you may use to ask questions on the topic at hand. This allows you to receive help from other students if something wasn't clear to you. Bloc doesn't include this, instead, they use Slack. With hundreds of different checkpoints, this becomes an issue. Simple questions and answers can't be related to a particular checkpoint. This leads to the same questions having to be answered repeatedly on Slack, or lengthy searches on Google for a simple answer. In the program, they will go line by line and attempt to explain the reason for that particular line of code. Here is the most important thing to remember about programming. Knowing enough to understand what the code is doing, and knowing enough about coding to solve the problem yourself is a big difference. One of the most important differences if you want to land a job. Coding takes practice, copying someone else's code, doesn't improve your skills. The facile explanations of the topics you will learn are concerning. Through this course, you will learn what is called a PERN stack. PERN, stands for Postgres, Express, React, NodeJS, and represent the frameworks and libraries of code you will use to create websites. While only four topics to learn, they are complex and can be difficult to master. That being said, after eight months of this program, I didn't have the in-depth knowledge that I wanted on these frameworks. Bloc is more concerned about giving you projects to put on your portfolio as opposed to providing a solid foundation on these subject matters. The errors in their code are abundant and are something you will have to fight with throughout the program. It is inevitable you will create your own mistakes while following the checkpoints, and you will have to learn from them. When the mistakes are created by them, it can become frustrating and extremely hard for a student to remedy. A couple of them even confused my mentor to the point where she couldn't figure it out. Mistakes happen, but according to my mentor, they are in no hurry to fix them either. The Personal Touch of Bloc: Every checkpoint you submit is looked over by one of their staff. If you made a mistake in your submission you will be asked to revise your assignment. Sometimes they do give some helpful advice on your mistakes and sometimes include links to help you find the correct answer. This is nice at first, but it becomes troublesome towards the end when your submissions are extremely large. On more than one occasion, I had made a mistake on an assignment or forgot to do a certain task, and the error wasn't caught by the reviewer. Having to do assessments after each module is a nice touch. You get the feel of what it's like to do a real coding interview. Especially in the last module, where you will take part in a couple of mock interviews. This is by far the best part of the Bloc program and is worth mentioning. The Time Restraint: What I found most concerning about the Bloc.io platform is the time frame in which you are to complete this program. You will endure six modules consisting of numerous checkpoints. At the end of every module, you must take a test conducted over Zoom (a web conferencing website) where you will be quizzed on your knowledge of that particular module and its contents. You must schedule an assessment with one of the staff at Bloc, and that person cannot be your current mentor. For the first few assessments, I was able to set a date within a few days. The last couple of assessments became a problem trying to create an appointment. Only two mentors were qualified to take part in those assessments, one of which was my mentor. That left me with only one person that could assess me on my progress throughout these final modules. One of which I had to wait over a month to be able to participate in. I was patient and didn't complain about the long duration between my evaluations. Until, the end of my eight months was up, and they told me I needed to pay them, per-week, to continue. At this point, I only needed to complete two or three more assessments to receive my certification. So I reached out to the Student Success Team, they were responsive but nothing was getting resolved until I mentioned the Better Business Bureau. The next email stated I had received a week extension. In the end, they did give me the extensions I required to finish, without charging me, but they did manage to waste an abundant amount of my time in the process. Final thoughts: Simply put, Bloc.io will teach you the buzz words of programing and their meanings. They will also give you the code to some projects that will make your portfolio look decent. You won't come out of this with a strong understanding of web development, but you will learn enough to get by. If you were like me, and you have no experience in programming, this is hands down one of the worst places to start. Now if you have some familiarity with programming and web development, this is an overpriced, low-quality online program that will let you down after gouging your wallet. The reason I have spent so much time writing such a lengthy review is to inform you and anyone else interested in Bloc.io that there are better places to receive an education on web development. Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools all offer certifications that hold more weight, because people have actually heard of these companies, unlike Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in getting into web development, don't worry about getting a degree or certification. Learning how to write clean code is more important than any certification. There is a reason why many companies do something called "whiteboarding." It's the process of giving an applicant a coding challenge and making them solve it on a whiteboard (or something similar) during the interview process. This weeds out a surprisingly large amount of programmers, who struggle with solving common coding challenges, due to them knowing how to read code and not write it. Learn the fundamentals of web development, focus on creating unique projects that you can show off on your portfolio and go to meetups with other programmers. Those are the three steps that several of the web developers I know have followed and now have jobs without any degree or certification. My recommendation: I wished I had paid the thirty dollars a month for Treehouse, twenty-five dollars for Codecademy. Waited for Udemy to do one of their sales, spend fifty dollars on a couple of their courses, and received a stronger education for a fraction of the price. If you decide to take that path, you will learn everything offered at Bloc.io and more.

I would definitely recommend Bloc's Web Developer Track to anyone seeking to learn how to become a full stack developer. I had some self-taught coding experience in VBA coming into the program, but this was my first formal code training since a basic... Read More Fortran class back in college over 15 years ago. The curriculum is great at building a good foundation and then diving deep into some of the latest and greatest concepts and strategies in use today. The course is challenging and requires that you put in the time to learn the necessary concepts, but if you trust the process and stick with it, you'll come out the other end blown away with the new skills that you have.

The general layout of the curriculum requires you to read a written lesson and then complete a set of exercises. Occasionally, these exercises will be reviewed for completion and accuracy, but oftentimes they are just for your own benefit and understanding. Once per week, you'll meet over the web with your mentor. This is a great time to help work through the areas where you're stuck or get some higher level understanding of how exactly the new skills you're learning would come into play in a real-world tech job. In between mentor meetings, you'll have access to loads of technical coaching through Slack where you can talk to coaches or other students working through the same content you are.

It might seem like a lot to figure out and accomplish while you're in the middle of it all. It certainly did for me at times! Trust the process. You can do this!

I am a Bloc graduate after being in the Web Developer Track from July, 2019 to March, 2020. I feel this bootcamp does a great job of teaching you the essentials of modern-day web development. My mentor was great at answering questions and the technical... Read More coaches on Slack were superb in addressing my coding issues. I liked the fact that mock interviews and job prep were integrated into the curriculum as they are a great primer for getting me ready for the job market. I liked the online self-paced structure of the program as well. I would highly recommend this program to others!

I currently work at a well established tech company in the Bay, but I will not attribute any of my success to the wasted time and money spent at Bloc.
Upon finishing the program, I did not receive reimbursement given the standard protocol.
While I was... Read More in the program, I spent more time self-studying on different sites (medium, uxdesign.cc, youtube, etc)
The mentors are extremely hit or miss. Mine was clearly in it just for the money. I did not receive much professional help after I got through the course. Bloc promises that you will have presentable work to put on a design portfolio that you can use to break into the industry. Let me just say that the design projects that they bring you through won't get you anywhere close to breaking into any design industry.
An absurd amount of time was spent on ensuring that you learn basic HTML CSS and Javascript at the very beginning of the course. I didn't pay thousands of dollars to learn code. I paid for design. And even the design lessons seem outdated - industry best practices were nowhere to be found.

My recommendation:
self-study - look at other people's work and observe what they have done and how they did it
contact a few designers in your area and ask for feedback on the things you've been working on (people will respond, help and actually mentor you)
don't code your portfolio if you don't know how to code (some of the best portfolios I've seen are the ones made from website builders... and I've seen hundreds of portfolios given that my current role requires me to interview candidates)
don't be a sucker - don't fall for these quick success schemes from bloc... they show all these success stories about former students joining companies like google, dropbox, etc. but they don't show how much work these people had to do outside of the bloc curriculum.

I went to Bloc in late 2015 to early 2016. I joined because of the policies that made me comfortable. One of the main policies stood out was guaranteed tuition reimbursement as long as protocol was followed. Which I did. Still they refused reimbursement.... Read More

There are a lot of things I wish I had known about this program before signing up so I'm here to tell my story hoping someone finds it useful if you're on the fence about this. I'm surprised at how many 5 star reviews are on here. The program pesters... Read More you to complete a review 2 - 3 weeks into the curriculum which was really annoying. I'd take some of these 5-star reviews with a grain of salt.

Curriculum: Once you're enrolled, you're given access to their Slack channels and to their site to begin the program. You then choose a mentor that you'll meet once a week to go over any problems or questions you may have. The material consists of a series of checkpoints with practice problems that you need to complete in order to move onto the next. There are slack channels for each section/modules you're on to ask technical mentors for help when you're stuck on a problem. You'll take an assessment after each module through online video conferencing which will unlock the next module upon successful completion. In the end, you take your final assessment along with a final project to see if you get your certificate.

Pros: It gets you started with web development. Some of the mentors seemed to genuinely care about my success and learning. The git workflows. Career services were solid.

Cons: This is going to be a lot - The material was pretty disappointing. I was expecting video content at least to explain difficult concepts, but it was just plain text with external links to other resources. It's no different from going to a library and checking out a book on web development. I learned most of the material through Google, Udemy, YouTube - All significantly better resources.

The slack channels where you ask for help was extremely inefficient and clearly suffered from having understaffed technical coaches. This was really frustrating and really slowed down momentum when you're trying to solve a checkpoint and have limited time in the day. Sometimes a response could take 20-30 minutes since they had so many questions from other students. If a technical coach's shift is ending midway through a problem, a new one will jump in and you'll start the process over again. This is a HUGE problem when you're trying to complete the curriculum within 8-months. The program is aimed at working professionals, but after an 8-hour workday, I only had about 4 hours before the technical coaches leave for the night. This along with the fact that they were understaffed with 20-30 min response time was painful.

My mentors were hit or miss. As I said, some of them seemed to really care about my growth, while others seemed like they were just there for a paycheck and riding the hype train. You're expected to come prepared for these mentor sessions, but the mentors seemed to be disconnected from the curriculum and didn't come prepared by looking at your status in the program (even though they have access to it). Sometimes going over the checkpoints, they don't know what the projects or problem statements are so you have to spend extra time just familiarizing them. You only have 30 mins a week with them which is sometimes just enough 1 problem and familiarizing them with the curriculum didn't help. I also don't think that the mentors, technical coaches, and graders were all on the same page - There have been numerous times where they would have conflicting feedback on the checkpoints.

Overall: In the end, I did eventually find a job in the industry, but I wouldn't give too much credit to Bloc for that (Thanks Google, Andrei Neagoie, and Brad Traversy!). I know Bloc and Thinkful were going through a merger throughout this time so that may have contributed to the issues, but either way, it wasn't good for the students. If I could go back, I'd definitely attend an in-person, well-known Bootcamp to alleviate all the inefficiencies. I didn't know this going in, but a bootcamps network and reputation is pretty crucial in the job hunt phase. They can introduce you to more companies along with past alumni's in the industry to help get your foot in the door. While Bloc's career support was ok in job leads, their network is small in comparison. Also, after going through the job search, no one is going to care about your certificate of completion from the bootcamp. Networking, grit, portfolio, and interview skills will be key.