Holberton School

Holberton School is unparalleled in it's curriculum which is focused on prepping it's students to learn the full scope of coding to fully prepare them for a career in the software engineering field. The entire program consists of a two year dual-sided... Read More commitment in which you are given the time to grasp not only writing your own code, but in addition fully understanding how the hardware of a computer is able to utilize what you have been taught how to create. The curriculum accomplishes this by starting the students with a low-level language (C) to understand the logic of a program's inner workings. Once students have been able to grasp these concepts, a more complicated syntax of a higher level language (Python) is introduced; this enables the students to understand more thoroughly the mechanics of the web as well as the vast scope of other applications of computer programming. After my first nine months at Holberton I was able to get a job as a Software Engineer at a medical tech company, so it is personally proven that their innovative model of teaching and peer learning truly works. I would deeply recommend Holberton to anyone, regardless of their origins or experience that feels a true passion and desire for a vocation in this field; they will help you cultivate that passion into a life long career.

Traditional schools have information gurus who may not have real world experience, disseminating information in lectures. At Holberton, all that gets turned on its head. Holberton School gives students projects to complete. The students also receive the... Read More support of mentors who are currently employed in tech companies around the World. There are competitions you get to participate in as a team, completing projects that hone your skills to the industry level.

Holberton School is not so much a school as a community of learners. I'd encourage anyone thinking about a career in software engineering to consider Holberton School. You'll learn so much about yourself, and the way your brain works when you learn something. Plus, you'll make some great friends along the way.

Holberton School is all about project based learning and meeting awesome people from different tech companies. If you want to be a Full Stack Software Engineer, there is no better way than to get hands-on learning from a curriculum designed by professionals... Read More who have worked in big tech companies for years. It has literally been an awesome journey for me. Halfway through my program, I started getting multiple job offers from different tech companies; and right now I am working for a big tech company in the US. All the time I spent with this school was really worth it, and the skills I obtained in just a short amount of time has been a big surprise for me. I totally recommend Holberton School.

If you are looking for a program that will make you a great software engineer definitely consider Holberton School. No boring theory, hands-on only starting from the day 0! You get to start coding on the first day of the school. And the program is build... Read More that way that you get completely addicted to it - at least that's what happened to me. Now I spend 12-14 hours a day at the school :D . And I never felt bored. It does get hard and you might feel like programming is too hard for you and you might have doubts, but I never considered quitting. Because I loved it. With all cool projects we been working on it's hard not to like it. I love what we do at Holberton. We learn low level language like C, higher level languages like Python and Java Script. We also learn how to set up and manage our own servers and how to debug, Honestly, the variety of concepts you touch in your first 9 moths is amazing. As for a beginner like myself I find this extremely helpful to figure what aspect of programming I enjoy the most. So first 9 months of intense studying brings you to a descend level, so you can apply for internships. You need to study hard and a lot, but it's totally worth it. Especially looking at the success of previous years students you realize that the program is well designed to help you achieve your goal. That's a great motivation for me. And I am looking forward to upcoming internship and the second year specialization!

Holberton School has an amazing vision of fixing the education system. Their curriculum gives you challenging projects that teach you how to fix problems and build software.There are no teachers at Holberton School and the program teaches you how to learn... Read More instead of focusing on one specific technology. That makes a huge difference in how we address the projects and how we learn from it. The school highly focuses on peer learning and makes sure that you get the basics right. Their coursework, with plenty of hands-on projects, is just what anyone would need to transform themselves into a full stack software developer.

I am currently a student at Holberton School. In the first year, we covered algorithm, low-level programming, front-end, back-end, sys-admin and devops. In the second year, the program gets more intense and one can choose to focus either on System programming and Algorithms or Web Stack programming. I love the challenging projects and fear to miss the fun in either track and opted for both ;) . On top of those tech tracks, we also train on soft-skills like networking, public speaking and writing which gives us more confidence and also a huge advantage vs tech-only developers. I am hooked by the program!

Coming to the no of opportunities one receives, we get a ton!. In my case, I got a chance to work as one of the data scientists in a project for the NASA Frontier Development Lab 2016 program which was hosted at SETI Institute.

My wife and I moved from Indiana to California so I could be part of the first 'batch' at Holberton School. I had a strong interest in moving from a help desk role to software engineering. However, I needed to go from tinkering around with code skills... Read More I had learned on my own to being able to produce production-ready code. Holberton offered the chance to connect with and learn from mentors working for companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Salesforce. I took the leap, and I can honestly say that I have not regretted taking that risk. Holberton provides challenging projects whether you are just getting started or have learned a thing or two on your own. The goal is to learn how to learn with other students in a fast-paced, growing industry. Because of the experience I gained at the school, I work for a major tech company in Silicon Valley. It's crazy to think how much has changed in just under two years.

I came to Holberton with pretty much no prior experience in coding of any kind and was whipped into a full-stack software engineer in practically no time.
The pros of Holberton are many:
- physical space mimics that of a startup
- the staff is awesome and... Read More super supportive
- the delayed-payment model
- there's a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion
- project-based curriculum means you get your hands dirty on Day 0 and are really forced to engage with and understand the subject material
- the curriculum is also constantly under review to make sure it contains the most relevant skills needed in the industry
- emphasis on peer-learning means you'll always be interacting with, learning from, and teaching the other students, which will strengthen everyone's understanding of topics
- network of mentors means you get to interact with people actually working in tech, and get advice and guidance from them
- prep for and facilitation of interviews

The main con I think is having to live in SF while not working, which is definitely a challenge. However, the school is working hard to really enable everyone who gets in to actually be able to attend.
Overall, definitely worth the investment!

Full disclosure: I was part of the first experimental batch at Holberton School, which was able to attend without paying any tuition. Lucky!

Overview (lengthy, skip to get to my subjective review if you're more interested in my personal experience than... Read More a discussion of the school's model)

This school operates like a Silicon Valley start-up, all the way down to the funding. The school raised venture capital to be able to train students without charging up-front tuition. Instead, the school operates on a deferred payment model where a portion of your salary (17% the last I checked) is paid to the school for three years once you obtain your first software engineering job.

As the school touts, there are some positive implications to this payment model. The school only benefits from your enrollment if you are successful, so you can trust they are truly invested in your learning. There is less up-front risk to enrolling, and the model is more accessible to those with less savings who cannot afford to pay tuition for a school until they actually reap the benefits of their training.

That said, 17% of your salary is no trivial slice of your salary and earning potential to just hand over. Depending on the bootcamp (which Holberton does not identify as), tuition can cost as little as $2000 for a month-long bootcamp to $18000 (HackReactor), or $60,000 for a 2-year-long program similar to Holberton in length (MakeSchool).

[Skip in-depth calculations if desired]

Let's say you earn a cool $85,000 as your starting salary as a software engineer (lower end in Silicon Valley, depending if you start at a small start-up or larger $$$ company). Ignoring the salary raises you can expect to get within your first few years as a SWE, 17% of that salary over three years totals to $44,625. The salary you can expect to take home after taxes is $41,225 (usually ~$56,000 without the 17.5% cut). You can expect to be frugal your first three years as a software engineer if you live in SF, a very expensive city, but it should cover housing and living costs adequately and still let you earn some small savings, according to my calculations. You should do your own calculations, estimating living costs.

Anyway, you might be wondering why you would want to fork over 17% of your salary for three years to this school, other than the neat fact that you don't have to pay for the cost of the school up-front, when there are other more cost-effective bootcamps in the range of $3,000-$4,000 out there.

Those bootcamps are usually only one to a few months long. That's long enough to probably learn one framework well and build a functioning web app and ship it. This is a crucial experience that can help you get hired at a start-up. There are definitely people that have been hired successfully out of a bootcamp and have gone on to thrive as programmers.

Unfortunately, a few months at a bootcamp is not really sufficient to build a strong foundation and understanding of software engineering, in my humble opinion. Holberton does not attempt to teach you a single framework but instead aspires to train you to become a versatile full-stack software engineer who can learn new tools + languages easily and debug systems, thanks to a strong foundation and good soft skills.

There are the three main areas Holberton focuses on in their goal of training good full-stack software engineers, which are reflected in the curriculum tracks: low-level, high-level and sysadmin/devops. This means you will learn about how computer programs work at the low-level (such as pointers, memory allocation and typical data structures) by building your own C library from scratch. You will learn about higher-level programming concepts like object-oriented programming and the model-view-controller paradigm, and how APIs work by building them. You will also work on remote servers, learn to use the command line, deploy firewalls and dns servers, and set up databases for your apps.

Holberton actually pitches itself as an alternative to traditional 4-year universities which offers degrees in CS. Unlike universities, where the curriculum is often theory-heavy, taught passively and centered around academia, what you learn at Holberton is highly oriented towards the skills you will need on the job in the industry. There are no instructor-led lectures, other than some live coding sessions; instead, you learn to collaborate with peers and to learn from resources you find on your own to complete projects which are assigned through the school’s intranet. Best -- no student loans.

Onto my subjective review of my personal experience!

I personally found Holberton’s hands-on method of learning to be very engaging. There was always excitement about what we were learning to do. It was a contrast to an Intro to Computer Science class I took in college, which involved a lot more textbook reading and weekly labs where we built small Java programs. That was all right, but nothing thrilling (and was why I opted not to major in CS in college).

One thing I feel that makes Holberton different from any other school is that I felt the founders were personally invested in making sure we were learning to be good software engineers. I feel other bootcamps are fairly impersonal and mostly about generating revenue by training you to be a software engineer. Training good software engineers is a passion of Julien and Sylvain (co-founders of the school), who themselves worked at fancy tech companies (Docker, LinkedIn) and saw the shortage of quality junior talent in the Silicon Valley.

Was I successful after I attended this school? Yes, I think so - I started working a full-time job after nine months of training and was able to adapt to the role quickly. One of the strong advantages of the school is that Julien and Sylvain also had many connections in the tech industry from years of working in it themselves prior to starting the school. As French engineers, they started a global French engineer network called while42 prior to Holberton, and they draw upon the pool of connections they have at companies throughout the Silicon Valley for mentors for the school and job connections for students.

This relates to another important aspect of the school, which is that it strives to teach soft skills in addition to the technical skills needed to be a good software engineer. In addition to the project-based and collaborative curriculum, the school often hosts meet-ups which are open and free to the public with Holberton’s mentors. Your social network and ability to work with others are some of the most important assets you have for your career as a software engineer, and the school understands and encourages this.

The strong community feel was one aspect that had a huge impact my experience. The students come from a broad range of backgrounds, thanks to Holberton’s accessible application process (no previous experience necessary, no bars on age) and tuition model. You become very close with the other students at school due to spending so much time at the school, working together. I valued that my own batch and several that followed had a decent gender balance (generally around 40:60 female:male), which is atypical of Silicon Valley in general.

Please keep in mind that the curriculum is very intensive, and you will be spending most of your time at school trying to complete projects by deadlines. As much as I enjoyed the projects, I’m susceptible to burnout due to having experienced it in college before, and you have to take care to protect yourself from it during this program. It’s all right to take a step back and have some time on the weekend after the first few months -- you will need it to sustain yourself.

Something that deserves to be acknowledged is that students have dropped out of the program or decided to repeat the curriculum when they could not keep up with the pace. Julien and Sylvain’s earnest goal is to train anyone to be a programmer as long as they have the drive and collaborative mindset, regardless of prior experience. However, being able to adjust to the unfamiliar ways of thinking for programming can be a challenge and require substantial time and practice in some cases.

It’s definitely easier if you have are familiar with the thinking required for math and science subjects. If you feel these are weak subjects for you, I suggest trying to familiarize yourself with programming a bit in advance with the abundance of online or local resources available. It’s not impossible if you don’t, but it will be harder. Be prepared to ask for help when you need it, and to learn how to problem solve without giving up!

Other considerations -

You will need to be able to handle the cost of living in the Bay Area for the duration of the program if you are moving. This may require savings and budgeting.

The school is still fairly new (close to 2 years at time of writing), and the founders/staff are refining the curriculum and resources available with the start of each batch. Ideally, they will be able to assist with the cost of living or relocating to the Bay Area of the school one day, but this is a future goal you will need to inquire about to find out the current status.

Final word:

Would I have attended Holberton School if it were not free for my batch? Probably not, for reasons totally unrelated to the quality of education. I come from a low-income background and am quite financially risk-averse, so even though the tuition is not charged up-front, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate both the cost of relocating to SF and the subsequent salary cut without additional resources or scholarships.

I might have ended up going to School 42, a free school in Fremont, because of these reasons. However, the culture at School 42 and Holberton School are far different (theirs is more of an elitist sink-or-swim hands-off model, and the gender balance is terrible in comparison), and I personally vastly prefer the education, support and community feel that Holberton provides. As it is, I lucked out and am super grateful for everything I have gained from attending Holberton.

My advice is to do your research, look into all the various boot-camps and alternatives out there, and find the one that best fits your personal preferences in terms of learning experience. Finally, balance that consideration with your needs regarding length of program and cost. Good luck!

I come from a career in media where I worked for most of my 20s. When I turned 30 I decided to switch careers. After doing a lot of research I stumbled upon Holberton and it seemed like the perfect fit. It wasn't too short and looked like a lot of fun.... Read More Now, after 6 months of attending, I can honestly say that this is one of the best decisions I've ever made. At Holberton not only do we get to work together but we also get to meet and hangout with great mentors from the industry, who help us with our projects and give us great advice. The workload is pretty intense but it's a lot of fun and if I ever need help my classmates are always willing to explain concepts and problems. I have made friends that I will keep for the rest of my life and I am getting solid training to go into a very exciting industry. If you're willing to dedicate your life to studying, collaborating and learning SO MUCH, Holberton might be the right place for you.

Holberton is not what I would consider a bootcamp in a colloquial sense. The curriculum is 2 years long (most bootcamps are around 8-16 weeks) and they teach bash and C (most bootcamps teach a high-level language and front-end languages). I would consider... Read More Holberton School a computer science degree alternative.

PROS:

1. In-depth curriculum
This may sound like a stretch, but they actually teach most of the same concepts you'll find at a CS program. This includes algorithms, code modularity, binary trees, Huffman coding, hash tables, stack & heap, ASM, networking, etc. The advantage is that Holberton is only 2 years long, and within 9 months you will already be hired if you want to intern or find a job (which I'd recommend, because who doesn't want to get paid to learn?).

2. Payment model
Another reason I chose Holberton is the payment model. There is no paying before-hand; instead, you pay 17% of your income for 2 years afterward. It's nice because you don't get screwed over if you don't find a job and it gives them more incentive to teach you well.

3. Learning style
One big advantage over a CS degree is the learning style. Instead of sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher drone on and on, you build stuff. An average day at Holberton is a lot like working at a startup. You go to school, you get on the computer, and you start doing writing code for the project you're currently working on. It's very nice because it's all self-paced, so if you get all of your work done quickly you can go do something else, and if you need more time to understand concepts you have all the time you need. This is IMO wayyyy better than classroom teaching. It wastes no one's time and those who need more time will not be left behind.

CONS:

1. Living in SF
The one caveat to attending Holberton is financing your living situation in the first 9 months of school. Currently, the school provides no assistance for living in SF, so you'll need to figure that part out for yourself.

CONCLUSION:

With all that said, this is a 5 star school. It holds a niche that I haven't seen any other school fill yet, and it's a niche that I could see growing a lot in the future. If you want to get an in depth, CS-level education, Holberton is your best bet.