Flatiron School

I graduated from Flatiron School's software engineering immersive program in December 2020. Due to pandemic the program transitioned from on-campus to remote learning. We had to be on Zoom every day 9 to 6. Our day would start with a group discussion... Read More summarizing yesterdays lessons, we would then move on to pair-programming, then there would be a lecture and then we would finish the day with working on labs. I came to the bootcamp with zero programing knowledge and in four months graduated as a full-stack developer totally confident in what I've learnt. Honestly I was a bit skeptical before I've started this program, I couldn't understand how one can learn so much in such a short time. But the program is super intense and the curriculum requires you to learn and practice new concepts every single day. Every new skill you are taught comes with it's own labs which require you to use the skill until it becomes second nature. I like that Flatiron teaches you not only specific languages and frameworks, but they teach you how to learn, which is a great skill to have in life in general and certainly an important skill for a software developer. A word about instructors; the instructors we had were top-notch, super knowledgeable and helpful, and could explain complex, unfamiliar technical concepts in a way which anyone could understand. Our instructors were super supportive and they motivated us to keep going. The school's support does not end at graduation. Everyone is assigned a career coach who supports you for next 6 months and helps you during your job search.

Attending Flatiron Immersive Software Engineering Course was such a wonderful experience. Before I started I had a hard time grasping the concepts of software design and programming in general. I entered the course on campus, which made me feel at home... Read More and accepted every day. The course content and the way the teachers explained the concepts were very easy to grasp. Flatiron did a wonderful job of not only teaching but giving you the feel of daily control flow at a typical company, from solo to team project, to stand-ups and stand-downs. Ending it all off Flatiron career coaching was a wonderful experience helping me sharpen my skills to be a better candidate in a new career. I am very excited to start a new lease on life.

Oh boy...where do I begin.

My recruiter was Madison Delaney and I would sometimes go weeks without hearing back from her. You can't call Flatiron and get a single person on the phone...always goes to voicemail. I'd constantly have to follow up, and it... Read More was overall an unpleasant, unprofessional start from the get-go. That should have been the first red-flag.

I payed for the in-person program and received the online program. Flatiron still refuses to refund the difference after months of going back and forth with them. No points awarded for ethically. Here's 600 other Flatiron students who are upset about the situtation that Flatiron still ignores and refuses to address publicly.
https://www.change.org/p/flatiron-school-in-person-students-flatiron-school-in-person-students-partial-tuition-refund-effort

On another note, Flatiron's instructors always seemed busy. When in need of assistance, more often than not, you're told to google the problem instead. Why did you pay the tuition then...I don't know. Where is the money going towards...I don't know.
Flatiron is quite big on asking for feedback, and I sure provided a lot of feedback during my time there. For the most part they don't seem to follow up on too many of them...or at least mine.

The instructors are all very nice, many of them are hired right after graduating so they aren't as experienced as the lead instructors. You very rarely get any attention from the lead instructor and even other instructors, so you're on your own for the most part.
The aloted rough schedule they advertise on their website is misleading and false. Your division of the day will mostly result with you being on your own googling answers and teaching yourself. There's a lot of BS in the schedule, like attendance for a half hour, surveys for an hour, "stand-downs" for an hour, "feelings" for an hour, etc... After doing the math, 16% of our day was actually entirely unaccounted for and pair programming was at a minimal percentage. I would have thought they'd be extra careful to not have any false advertising because they lost a lawsuit for $375,000 for having false salary and placement statistics advertised on there website.

Upon finishing the program, I feel cheated out of $17,000. The money-back guarantee sounds nice, but in actuality most people are either ineligible or opt-out and I'm uncertain why. Flatiron even leaked everybody’s personal data in a mass email and it doesn't look like anybody has received the money-back guarantee.

CSS is not taught - maybe it's just touched upon. They do a decent job with Ruby and React, but discourage you from learning Redux. You can graduate this program not knowing CSS, a single algorithm, or have a personal portfolio page. That's a big red flag.

Career services will follow up with you often which is nice, no complaints about that. They do leave everything up to you and it's mostly hands off on their part.

I do believe that at one point in time they used to be good. I came into this program looking to love it, but they definitely left a bad taste in my mouth and that's wildly unfortunate. There are way better alternatives from my understanding - even just teaching yourself is a better alternative...you can do it, don't be discouraged! Udemy looks like they have some great full stack courses for $20. I'd do that if I could go back in time.

At face value, Flatiron's promises and guarantees (such as the money back guarantee) seem flawless. Flatiron seems like a reputable school with great values and, with hundreds of great reviews online, there's no reason to believe otherwise. But beware:... Read More due to coronavirus, you're paying $15,000 for an online education, one that flatiron values at $13,000. They rip you off at every turn and are a greedy, money-hungry, company with zero interest in student success.

Instructors:
We were promised lead instructors and assistants.

Three days into the bootcamp, every single lead instructor on my campus quit. We were then taught by TAs that apologized for their lectures because they had, and I quote, "never taught before." Flatiron attempted to remedy the situation by flying in leads from DC and NYC, but neither instructor stayed longer than a week (a mod is 3 weeks) despite being told we would have them for a whole mod. This meant our TAs stepped in and taught a couple of lectures, while most of the time we were just sent pre-recorded lectures from the prior year. To add insult to injury, they finally hired someone named Lyn to come in and be our Lead Instructor for the last 3 weeks before our final project. She taught us one 30 minute lesson, "Who is Lyn?" and then was conveniently sick/caring for her sick wife for the rest of the three weeks.

In the event that you did not experience instructors leaving (which would be a miracle considering lead instructors are hard to come by these days), lead instructors are NOT what is promised on the website. Now, please don't think I'm calling out every lead instructor, there were a couple great ones, but one of the best ones quit 3 days into my first week.

Curriculum:
Have you ever heard of code academy? Flatiron certainly has as it seems all of their curriculum is either poorly TA-written (and I mean, POORLY), or ripped off from code academy. The amount of times we looked around and scratched our heads at what on earth we were supposed to be doing is far too many to count. Sure, you might think we were just a particularly stupid group, but it turns out that most Alumni feel the same way about the curriculum.

Also, you cannot go from "beginner" to "job ready" upon graduation. You are not taught enough basic fundamentals (hello, react hooks?!?) to even get a jr. level job and far more people spend 6+ months after graduation absolutely grinding out lessons from places like code academy and leet code to get up to par that Flatiron would like you to believe. There is no curriculum after the 15 weeks (technically, it's only 12 because the last 3 weeks are spent working on a project) to further your education and you will find yourself scouring youtube videos on how to code just like you did while attending flatiron.

Job Assistance:
I've said it once and I'll say it a hundred times: I got a job despite going to Flatiron.
My previous work experience played a HUGE role in getting a job and Flatiron does NOT have a "robust employer pipeline" as their website would like you to believe. Their money back guarantee is also a scam. If you do not do every single thing they ask for 6 months (and the requirements are really, really tough) then you are disqualified from getting your money back. I think 2 people in the history of Flatiron have gotten their money back and I know of 8 in the last couple months that have tried.

We did not have "Lunch and Learn" meetups with people in the industry, I was not contacted by Employer Partnerships more than once regarding a job paying over $12/hr ($24,900/yr)... the going salary for a SE in NYC is $75,000/yr.

Overall:
Flatiron has one silver lining. Their alumni community.

BUT, If you want to spend $15,000 on a bootcamp that barely gets your foot in the door, potentially rips you off for $20,000+ if you do an ISA, or screws you over by disqualifying you for a "Money Back Guarantee" that is nothing short of a legal scam, then go ahead, be my guest. But as for me? I do not recommend Flatiron. There's so many better options out there that are free.

MY EXPERIENCE AT FLATIRON (JULY 2020) Full Time Software Engineering I would not recommend Flatiron to anyone, period. My Student/Admissions Rep had terrible communication skills (which is not acceptable) and would take days and days to answer 1 email... Read More after asking again after 2 or 3 days and then CC'ing the general info@flatiron email to try to get an answer. This went on the entire 3 months of correspondence leading up to the class and even after, when I tried to switch to Self-Paced (more on that later). I voiced this concern to the Senior Manager of Admissions and Enrollment, after my Student rep emailed me (for the first time to tell me) at 2 PM that my Enrollment Agreement had to be signed THAT NIGHT. I was literally in the middle of driving a 26' Uhaul truck full of my possessions with my car on a tow dolly on the back driving halfway across the country when I saw the email later that afternoon. Sr Mgr at first seemed interested in my concerns only to quickly brush them aside and just say sorry that I have concerns. (The great customer service continues) I feel for you if you get my rep as an Admissions/Student Rep, she seems unorganized and lacks responsiveness and the communication skills needed to be a Rep. They have what's called a First Mile, which is just your first 2 weeks of school, and it has requirements to complete before time is up or you fail and have to be placed in the next Cohort (if it's your 1st time failing). Unfortunately, due to my wife contracting the Coronavirus, that left me beginning my First Mile while taking care of her and our 3 kids. This caused me to get behind, so behind that I spent days on Iterations and had to ask a Teacher's Assistant (TA) for help on every lab. By the time I got it, I was out of time to complete the rest of the curriculum. The curriculum is a joke. I am not exaggerating when I say it is a few paragraphs, sometimes with a video, as the lesson. The videos are poor quality, it just shows a screen capture and the narration sounds like it was recorded on a laptop mic from 2008. To say it's poor quality is an understatement. The curriculum, more often than not, does not teach you how to do what they then ask you to do in their labs, which, as you can imagine, makes things very difficult. (Why did you guys wait until after iterations for ANY code-alongs??) You will either be Googling Ruby syntax to try to piece together the code yourself from Quora, or you'll be copying/pasting former student's code from repl.it, or asking a Teacher's Assistant to help walk you through it. Though others were offered help via screen share, this was not offered to me until 3 days before the First Mile ended. (I didn't even know it was an option) Most of the TAs are not great at teaching, they were not skilled at breaking things down in a simple-to-understand manner. This made (most of) them almost useless. My instructor was a former (2018) Flatiron student (her only coding education and experience, apparently), now teaching her first Cohort with absolutely (apparently) zero experience coding outside of Flatiron. This led to many confusing Lab demos where she would go 'chasing rabbits' that weren't helpful, having students correct her and ultimately made the videos of little help. Call me crazy, but I kind of want someone who has actually coded for companies outside of the Flatiron school bubble, teaching others how to code for the first time. She was a nice person. However, according to Flatiron instructors are supposed to assist students via Slack. The entire 2 weeks, she helped 0 students via Slack. She ONLY posted once a day in Slack, a morning update with how many assignments should be completed by the end of day and what they are called. That was the extent of the "Instruction" at Flatiron. I voiced this concern to someone at Flatiron (not sure what she does because her email signature doesn't say and neither did she), which disregarded my experience for a canned response about methods for getting help with curriculum. Again, see lack of customer service skills and poor communication. Upon not completing the First Mile, my instructor contacted me about whether I wanted to continue with the program and be put into another Cohort or withdraw and receive a full refund. I was confused as to why your instructor, especially a now former instructor, would be responsible for this part. It seems like the aforementioned lady or even the Admissions rep should be responsible for handling all of this. Regardless, I emailed aforementioned lady and asked her when the next Cohort would be, only to be told that she didn't know, but that it could be as early as mid-late August or early September, an entire month to 2 months later. Not being satisfied with this huge of a delay, I asked if I could switch to Self-Paced. That way I could pickup where I left off, I still got TA support, didn't have a useless Instructor, saved $6k versus Full Time and might could even still finish on time as the original Full Time program as I wanted. She said it was against policy to allow me to switch. I asked if I could withdraw and reapply for the Self-Paced one instead and she said yes, but it could take weeks to be accepted again (no kidding with my Rep), trying to force me into staying Full Time at the $15k. So I withdrew and reapplied 3 days later. I was told by a 'customer service' rep I would be contacted by "finance" to discuss the refund and everything. I withdrew July 22nd, it's been weeks now and I still have not heard anything from "finance." I had to email the aforementioned lady and ask about whether I would receive my $500 seat deposit back, whether they tell Climb Credit or I do, whether they refund Climb Credit or me for me to pay them back. (Again, see poor communication skills) I wrote her on Aug 5th asking for an update regarding finance or Climb and still haven't received a response after weeks now. Then I receive and correspond to my rep again as she (much to my utter disappointment) is assigned again as my Admissions Rep for my July 25th application, it went like this: "Jul 29 @ 12p, me to Flatiron: Hi, I applied last week (Jul 24) and haven't heard anything back. Jul 30 @ 9a, my rep: Did you previously withdraw from the program? <> Jul 30 @ 9a, me: Yes. Jul 31 @ 2p, me: Hoping to hear back about my application before the weekend. Aug 3 @ 10a, my rep: It is our understanding that you recently withdrew from the program. <> Aug 3 @ 10a, me: Yes, I withdrew from the full time program after not completing the curriculum within the First Mile allotted time. I am re-applying for the self-paced program since I was not permitted to switch to self-paced. Aug 5 @ 10a, me to my rep and info@flatiron since she wouldn't respond: Can I please hear back about this? It's been almost 2 weeks since I applied. Aug 7 (FRIDAY) @ 5:00p (she waited until close), my rep: Appreciate the follow up. At this time we have decided not to proceed with your enrollment in the self-paced program." Imagine my surprise. I guess they are doing well enough that they don't want $9,600 (they don't even refund it because it's self paced so they are literally just being petty because I didn't submit to their greedy Policy for preventing students from switching Paces based off of what the student needs). Flatiron is not interested in your success, they are not interested in your best interest, they don't care if you or your spouse have had the Coronavirus and needed to switch paces because of it. They just want your $15k+ and nothing less. Flatiron has switched to entirely online due to the COVID panic generated by the government and media. However, they have not provided an equivalent product to the Immersive experience and yet want to charge the exact same price. They have claimed to do just such a thing, which makes them dishonest and unethical. Having used Treehouse for a couple of years, Flatiron's curriculum is pathetic compared to Treehouse, leaps and bounds in terms of video production and instruction quality. They are equal in educational support. Treehouse is $25/month. TL;DR: my rep was horrible, as does the rest of the staff have poor communication and slow responsiveness and there is zero accountability for the staff, the instructor graduated Flatiron and started teaching others, they won't let you swap Full Time to Self Paced, curriculum is basically $15k to Google search to pass the Labs that they don't teach you how to do. How Flatiron can sleep at night charging $15,000 for this pile of junk that they call a school is beyond me. Terrible staff, horrible curriculum, overpriced Google searching for what they call an "education," and the worst part is they just literally don't care about the students.

Extremely disorganized, poor quality of instruction, very scammy. I had to file a dispute with my credit card to get my payment back (despite their promise of refunding within 5 wks of program start if you disenroll they ignored all my emails about a... Read More refund per guidelines). Instructors do not care about you at all, and will ignore questions about coding/real questions while answering easy logistical ones like 'do I have to attend ___. Look up previous grads of cohorts - many do not have jobs. It felt like a scam and I'm just relieved to get my money back through my cc company instead of wasting time.

I did the self-paced boot camp. I was initially required to complete it within 15 months, but Flatiron School offered a three-month extension due to COVID-19. I would've dropped out otherwise because I found a full-time job that consumed most of my time... Read More shortly after getting into the program.

The technologies I learned are ruby, ruby on rails, Sinatra, HTML/CSS/Javascript, react, redux, and thunk.

The structure of the program is articles consisting of paragraphs explaining concepts. Those articles frequently have code samples and videos. It is written in the style of a blog, with many memes. (This boot camp is why I installed a meme blocker extension.) There are also many metaphors that explain difficult concepts. Overall, it's very accessible.

Outside of written lessons, there are code-alongs (coding exercises that supply the answers) and labs (coding exercises that don't supply the answers). Labs generally supply tests that must be made to pass, but the code-alongs might not.

There are also final projects. These are coding exercises that include a list of requirements that demonstrate knowledge of recently learned concepts. They are unstructured enough that Flatiron School doesn't supply tests, but the student can optionally write their own. The types of projects are: ruby command line interface, ruby with Sinatra web framework, ruby with rails framework, ruby with rails api and HTML/CSS/Javascript frontend, and ruby with rails api and react frontend. Students must submit a blog post and video explainer as part of the project.

Along with completing these, a student must schedule time to explain their code to an instructor. First, they must explain what it is and why they made it. Then, the student explains how the project meets all requirements, and then do some live coding.

There were really good options available for getting help. They included participating in chat or viewing a lab's repository. My experience of chatting to get help was that the person who responded (an instructor, I think) gave me hints about how to structure a method. I still didn't understand, so the instructor eventually gave me the answer.

I preferred not to have to start a chat to get help, so I dug around a little. I found that Flatiron School's repositories often had multiple branches. The Solution branch of repositories associated with labs offered me quick help that didn't require reaching out. And, obviously, being able to read code is a very different experience than someone telling me to incorporate a certain data structure. I think it would be good if Flatiron School advertised that solutions are available in their repositories, but I can see why they might not want to.

These help options aren't available for the final projects.

After formally graduating, I found that there is actually more content for studying. There is a section that discusses launching final projects live on the web, and there are explainers on data structures and algorithms. Finally, there is a list of algorithm problems to help a new graduate get used to solving new and unusual problems. My critique would've been that devops/live environment setup, algorithms, and performance were completely neglected, but the post-work section makes a good save on that front.

I found the self-paced program to be flexible. There is an unenforced expectation that students complete the material in order. For example, each final project is situated after material a student would've just learned. Instead of doing them in order, as full-time students are required to do to keep up with their group, I saved them all for the end. I also completed some final projects out of order. I even waited months to schedule an instructor review after indicating that I completed one of the projects. I also found a lab that could be done in a group. I was going to do it in a group, but after not visiting that page for a long time, I was somehow switched over to doing it on my own, so I just completed it alone.

I started looking for a job before completing the boot camp. That wasn't necessary because Flatiron School brings very promising prospects to graduates. Relying on Flatiron School's career services was the difference between recruiters constantly telling me they wanted experience and recruiters sending code challenges to see what I could do (often before a phone screen). It was also the difference between having to figure out where are jobs in industries I wanted to work in, versus jobs I was really interested in reaching out to me after deciding I'm a good candidate.

My career coach helped me create the job search I wanted. Historically, I've found work via cold calls on job posting sites, so I expected to go that route. She had ideas that were very different from what I wanted to do, but she was willing to help me stay within certain requirements to qualify for Flatiron School's career services. I'm not a fan of LinkedIn or showing pictures of myself online as a way of pursuing a job, so I was glad the only change we settled on was me adding my last job. Ultimately, outside of relying on Flatiron School's pool of prospective employees, I did find a job without relying on any networking lead-generation practices.

I also found Flatiron School's tools for finding a job to be very different from what I had used before. Although it was basically a spreadsheet and a word document, it allowed me to organize in a way that I didn't know the value of.

Easily the biggest waste of your money. The classes are LITERALLY self taught. Part of the reason I planned to pay money for instruction is to get an organized lecture and the ability to as question as things come up.

Flatiron is all about reading on your... Read More own and you get an hour of lecture 4 times a week. It's really a waste of time and money. When you request a refund, student services take so long to get back, you owe the money from the time it took them to get back to you. They got back to me in 2 weeks, which is ridiculous.

If I was going to teach myself, I would have done udemy classes or odin project.

I'll give it you straight after going through the whole 6 month experience along with some of the after program career services track.

The first 2 phases or around 3 months was great. The instructors were knowledgeable and enthusiastic when it came to... Read More teaching and about the field itself. They were there to help when they could and assist you in succeeding. There was a lot of work to be done on time during this phase and a lot of additional reading as well. I can say that I learned the most from these 2 phases. It also seemed like the instructors for these 2 phases were from the original Designation school based in Chicago which had a great reputation (part of the reason why I enrolled in the program).

So the first 2 phases went great, and I came in excited and bright-eyed for the in-person phases on the NYC campus. Now this is where the program goes downhill. While I did learn some new things about UX design and research, the instructors were not attentive or great at teaching. I understand the importance of repetition when it comes to the end-to-end design process, and I don't have a problem with it. Actually, I found it helpful that it was repetitive so we had the chance to use our skillset we learned from the previous phases and apply research/design methodologies that worked in specific situations. I also found the repetitive nature of weekly presentations to be helpful in a sense that we had more experience in creating slideshows and presenting.

Now comes the bad stuff. The most amount of design feedback anyone in my cohort received on our presentations and project was in phase 1 and 2. The instructors in the in-person phases would just deflect any relevant questions with "it depends". Of course, "IT DEPENDS". Students are asking because they are weighing out certain decisions within the project framework and asking for a seasoned designers opinion on it. I value autonomy, but at that point when everything triggers the same "it depends" response is, honestly, infuriating and condescending. It's more of an excuse not to do an instructors job. We are in a bootcamp and it's the safest place to fail there--but there was no guidance in any design choices through the in-person phases. The most amount of feedback we received were about the presentation slides and style. While, this is helpful, it's not the feedback we are solely looking for as designers--at a certain point, we don't care what you personally think about certain slides as long as the content is good (but no feedback really there so we will never know). Additionally, the attitudes of the instructors were unprofessional. Personally, I had no issues with any but a lot of my classmates in every cohort had problems with the attitude of most instructors. There was a very passive-aggressive cattiness that was directed at students and was not controlled in a professional, learning environment. Most of the time, the instructors came in later and left earlier than students.

I think the quality of instructors went way down after Flatiron purchased Designation and scaled up to many locations. Being a design instructor at Flatiron seems to be the easiest decent paying job ever. We were more micromanaged about student benefits that we expected to have but couldn't because of their process mess-ups. The programs conflict resolution was a joke and their student selection measures and support were also laughable. I've seen this in many cohorts as they ruined the experiences of many students by not selecting capable designers. Honestly, it makes sense that the organization got rid of the design program because if they wanted keep that program up, Flatiron really needed to look inward and make a lot of changes.

Now career services is iffy at best. The way Flatiron sells you their program is that they have 96% successful job rate after the program for it's students. First off, this is highly contestable as the numbers seem to high to be true. Also, they sell you that the school has a great (already) built-up network with employers to help with prospective job-looking alumni after they graduate. The iffy part of it is that covid definitely took a toll on their "network" so that is due to uncontrolled external circumstances. However, the coaching is subpar and the Money-Back-Guarantee is really a sham (don't enroll because you think you will get your money back--they will fight you tooth and nail on everything to not give you the money back). They have many organizational problems within their employment team which causes alumni to face negative consequences of their bad company management. The amount of employers they have in their "network" is seemingly 0 to few very unrelated positions--which is mind-blowing if they already had a great network before when advertising. And after all that, all they do is deflect responsibility at the alumni seeking jobs about personal accountability. I am telling you right now that job seeking alumni are doing everything they can do network and apply to get jobs because it's our career and our life, so make it seem like we are dropping the ball. For the $17k price point with the advertisement before enrollment, certain services are expected.

Overall, it is a bloated organization that does software engineering really well. But I would stay clear of their design programs if they relaunch in the future.

They won't do the job for you, you need to work hard on your own, but if you know what you want, go for it! I met a lot of interesting people and gained a ton of priceless experience. For 15 weeks I learned more then I've tried to learn online after work... Read More for 3 years. Flatiron school is not the only option, but it was my choice and I don't regret it.