Bloc

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 Read More issues where there was outdated code particularly in the " WDT Server-Side JS with Node.js " section but also old-school ways of using React.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 The instructors are knowledgeable and the help staff is active but 40% of the time the issue involved outdated course content, particularly in the final sections.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!

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.

I honestly feel really lucky and happy that I chose to go through Bloc to learn UX Design. As compared to other programs, I found Bloc to be really extensive and feel confident now that I'm a graduate, that I am ready to find a job with those skills.... Read More I had a good experience with my first mentor, but felt that my second was not helpful in ways that I needed. I also noticed that some students finished the program and got their certificates, even though their actual designs were not very good. So I think my main grain of salt is that I wished that we were also graded for how good our designs were and not that we passed the given criteria for assignments. I'm currently job searching and am really happy with my assigned career coach. It's definitely not the easiest to get a job as a junior, but I've appreciated our weekly chats and strategy.

I graduated last week. It took me just over 15 months to finish the program. I had an overall good experience with the program and feel it is a good value and useful for accelerating my new career path.

Pros: Student success really listens well and has... Read More always responded in a timely fashion with relevant information. The actual content is engaging and well drilled, each time in greater detail and demanding of more refinement. There was no filler content. Every checkpoint I felt was relevant and had a valuable lesson to teach. If I had a question about the content, or became stuck, I was eventually led into the right direction. I feel I can speak confidently on what UX is and I came out of the program feeling energized and optimistic, not beat down or jaded. A handful of the people in the program are absolute gold at instructing and I had gained much valuable insight from them.

Cons: I utilized my mentor rarely. I didn’t need them to get through the program. I had tried out three mentors, each with variable quality. The grading team can have a slow turnaround time. Often, I waited 80 hours to get input. During a few parts of the course, I was able to apply myself elsewhere... but often I would need to sit and wait before I could move forward. Sometimes, the feedback conflicted with other graders visions and advice which could be annoying. Some of the demonstration videos Bloc uses are well edited... but I found many did not have any editing at all and it felt like a slog to get to the relevant information. I didn’t ever feel there was a community of students to bounce ideas off on the slack channel. I think this is a powerful tool that could be refined and be a great asset. The technical coaches were hit or miss. Sometimes I would get exactly what I was looking for. However, other times, I felt I had to explain simple ideas of what I was struggling with and was not given pertinent feedback and had to re-re-re explain the situation. Bloc asks for 3-4 checkpoints a week. I would say this is an unrealistic pace for most weeks. Some of the more involved checkpoints took me two weeks just to finish one.

I would recommend this program to others. If I were to do it again, I would have studied on my own what UX was instead of going in to the course totally fresh. The most important aspect for me was the feeling of optimism at the time of graduation. I feel fresh and ready to step into the UX job market.