Lighthouse Labs

From day 1, I struggled to keep pace at Lighthouse Labs' data science bootcamp. For 3 weeks, I worked harder at this program than I've ever worked at anything, but I was unable to keep up, and was asked to leave. At that point, I wanted to regroup and... Read More try again by joining the next available session, but alas I was told I was not welcome to return.
There is a lot wrong this school's approach. They tell students not to stay stuck on any given problem for more than 5 minutes, but they don't provide their support team with an answer key, so at one point I wasted over an hour as the "mentor" who was supposed to help me flailed away, ultimately unable to solve a problem that was assigned to the class. When I complained about that incident to the program director, he seemed uninterested in actually listening to me as a human. Instead, I was directed to fill out a form. (Why bother actually listening to students' concerns when you can simply use computers to analyze their data?). Student success never felt like a priority here.
Lighthouse Labs gave up on me, but fortunately I never gave up on myself. I subsequently enrolled in a competing data science bootcamp with a similar curriculum but much better culture, where I was satisfied with my experience, learned a lot, and earned a good grade. I continue to remain interested in data science, and I write code often. But I often wish I hadn't started my journey here. You have better options than this.

Disclaimer: I was eligible to take this bootcamp under its ICT Boost Initiative, meaning that my enrolment was funded by the Government of Canada and I was able to attend for free. I was based in Ontario and did everything remotely as part of a Data Science... Read More cohort, which is the same as the Data Analysis program except for having a few extra weeks to learn materials that the Analysis cohort does not. The Format: To start things off, course delivery was primarily through Discord for peer-to-peer coordination and announcements, over Zoom for lectures, and through their own portal, Compass, for the delivery of daily activities and readings. You are 100% required to use all three of these things, and in particular you should be prepared to spend most of every day and a good chunk of every weekend completing these activities. In my case, things started with SQL and were actually slower paced than I was lead to believe; don't worry though, things pick up very rapidly once the Python and later machine learning/AI segments begin. It is worth mentioning that activity completion is typically based on the honour system, so you can flag something as complete even if you didn't do it and 95% of the time they will have no means of verifying it. If there is an activity you struggle with and are unable to complete you can always flag it as complete anyway and do it on your own time later. You can do this as an aid to avoid falling behind and dissuade LHL staff from raising concerns about your progress. Just note that, if you do this, you should be sure to actually do it later and to not do this too often because it can be hard to track what you have actually done if you just flag everything as complete (as a couple students in my cohort found by the end of the program). The Good: My cohort was great overall, with some people who were very passionate during the bootcamp and a few who all but refused to contribute to group discussions or even engage with other students unless absolutely required to. The people who were good at it are those who took the time to ask questions and be engaged with each other and the material. I also found that instructors and mentors were more than willing to take the time needed to help when help was requested, meaning that there may have been times when some of us struggled but we could almost always get help within 30 minutes of requesting it. Additionally, it was encouraged that students help one another when they were equipped to do so, and there were times when we were able to help each other understand some material better. I firmly believe that your time in a bootcamp like this depends very heavily on the personalities of the people you will be interacting with every day, and in this regard it worked out well for me to get a taste for programming in a professional setting. Also, even if I am about to talk negatively about some of the readings and the fact that the bulk of them are just links to free online resources, you retain access to them once the bootcamp is over so you can always review everything at your leisure. The same goes for "Stretch" activities, which are optional readings and activities you can do whenever you have time to do so. Everything has been compiled and more or less organised for you by professional data scientists and analysts, so for the most part none of it is inaccurate. You just won't have the same level of quality you can come to expect in an academic setting, which is what I am more accustomed to. The Bad: A lot of the materials provided were links to free blog posts (get used to seeing Medium links), free code practice sites, or free YouTube videos. This in itself isn't strictly an issue, just keep in mind that a large proportion of the materials are free and some of what is provided within Compass is either outdated or hard to follow along. We straight up had some activities where fellow students spent more time either fixing them up instead of doing them, or else used ChatGPT to do it because the sample code either didn't work or was contradictory and hard to follow along with. I also feel like some of the material, despite being free, was not worth our time to read. I remember one such article that was a blog post where the author was practically a caricature of a tech bro, constantly quoting Dune and fantasizing about how cool the future will be but having almost nothing to say about the material we were learning that day. It was so pointless that my notes from that article were condensed into a single sentence footnote at the bottom of my own document. In fact, many of the blog posts are still full of fluff to a lesser degree and knowing what to absorb and what to skim is an invaluable skill you should possess if you are to enrol in this bootcamp. Lastly, I am not sure what to think of career services. I like my advisor, and I have not been putting as much into my GitHub and as I have been advised to so that may be contributing to my lack of a job so far, but I have been given different advice from other professionals in the field regarding the importance of some things. The big difference between my advisor and these professionals is that he is not a programmer; his understanding of code and programming is very basic, and this is standard for career services as a whole. My biggest issue with the advice that is consistent between them is that I am very used to being ignored or ghosted on LinkedIn at this point, only having consistent success forming connections with other job-seeking alumni who lack the same leads I lack. One of the weekly/daily goals is to get x number of connections every time we use the site, but I am not convinced that looking at connections as a metric is a valuable use of the service. Either way, most of my cohort is not working yet after almost two months and many other LHL alumni that graduated in the months before us also appear to still be looking for work. Things tend to be presented through a set of rosy lenses based on the perspectives of those lucky enough to snag a job right away, which seems to be rare despite the apparent demand for people in these kinds of roles. Conclusion: I may have felt scammed if I had to pay money for the materials we were given, but again I enrolled for free and had no prior experience with bootcamps or programming so I can not comment on whether the whole package is worth whatever LHL normally charges. I can say that it gave me a taste of what coding in a professional setting would be like in a structured format that can be highly beneficial for some learners, and I now know that I ultimately want to become a career coder. I am not certain if data specifically is my future, but I believe coding will be and that I am a great fit for that line of work. If you do enrol, then you should try to form connections with your fellow students and even set up a study group so you can work together to learn more effectively. This is the main strength of the bootcamp, and if you are unwilling to try to work with your cohort then this will be a waste of time and money unless you have an extant programming career and want to change paths into data science. All in all, it gave me a taste of a career that I am actually excited to pursue so for that I am happy with the time I spent doing it. I think my plan now is to go back to what I was doing before enrolling so I can earn some means of funding higher learning in a proper college or university program. Having a co-op in my resume will go a long way into getting my foot in the door, and the bootcamp does not provide such an opportunity.

While the teachers were excellent. That's all I can really recommend. The pace is challenging (which I expected with it being a boot camp). The online mentors were hit and miss, and in my time there, you could wait well over an hour for a mentor to get... Read More back to you, with the result being they couldn't help you and you've just wasted your time. The 'support' staff would be happy to give words of encouragement, but that's about it. When I asked a couple of weeks into the program to restart because of some issues I was dealing with, in my personal life, they said to 'think about it for a couple of days'. When I told them after a couple of days I still wanted to restart the program as I thought that best, they brought in their supervisor, who made sure to shut me down and said that this wasn't something they did often. However, when the new cohort started, I saw 4 members of my group had restarted with the new cohort. In the final week of the program - with just days left, they booted me out. The reason (from the same supervisor) being that they thought I was unemployable. When I said I'd continue studying on my own, they wished me luck. But then a week later they shut me out of my profile at the school. When I reached out to them they stated, 'Only graduates can access their school curriculum'. So good luck, really meant get lost. For a long time I had taken this hard, feeling I'd failed. But the truth was they had failed, and let me down.

I highly recommend that you avoid this bootcamp. The workload is demanding and also everything is remote so you get help from people all over the world and a lot of them are not good mentors. You can get kicked out of the program at anytime even if you... Read More pay

Your journey will begin when you attend the first call of their "rigid" interview process. The process itself is a group interview and a surprise assessment that tests your ability to solve problems. A 6th grader could pass this assessment. Then you're... Read More required to complete the fundamentals of any coding bootcamp which is between a 50-100 hour pre-bootcamp course. This course just teaches you the fundamentals similar to a FreeCodeCamp or CodeAcademy course. The truth is that the marketing behind LHL is the reason why they receive so many applicants and host cohorts over and over again. The course itself is not great. You're basically given a FreeCodeCamp or Udemy course that's been marketed as if it was a $15,000.00 program instead of a $15.00 program. You end up with a cookie cutter portfolio as the projects that you complete (aside from your mid-term and final) are identical to projects from the early 2010's. You can actually find the code to all of the projects online already. The mentors are just students that previously attended the course and can't find work (some actually want to teach). The video meetings for each class are useless. You learn nothing and every student is at a different spot in their journey for each class. You either attend it and ask a million questions because you're way ahead of everyone or you ask none because you're confused. Finally, you graduate. Your hand has been held throughout the entire process and you've passed every test and exam not because you learned enough to pass each but because they've willed you through the course to boost their numbers. The truth is that many students that are in this course should not be and that many students graduate and never become developers. I almost forgot to mention career services. You are now forced to purchase career services for over $3000.00 extra on top of your tuition. They do not know the industry and want you to apply to 3-5 jobs a week. If you take that route you'll be applying for the next 12 months. They have you look at everything through rose coloured glasses when in reality landing a development job is very hard. This is the most useless service that they offer and most of the time if they get you into a job its for a start up with less than 10 employees on a contract. Most of their recent students fail to land a job for 3-12 months and are forced to learn for 3-6 months and develop incredible projects and a portfolio to even begin receiving offers. Students don't graduate job ready. Most of the students that I know from my cohort are still actively looking for their first dev job and work at Starbucks or a local restaurant throughout the day. 1/5 stars.

The course and experience itself were great and felt that I had developed all the skills needed to land a junior developer job. My biggest gripe is that career services are pretty much useless and a huge cash grab. They give you very basic information... Read More that people should already know and the "network" they have is non-existent.

Lighthouse Labs is most definitely not meant for beginners. They throw you in right to the deep end with little explanation or instruction on mostly all of their Modules leaving you absolutely clueless during their prep with their useless prep forums... Read More full of Imposter Syndrome, Compass which is where you learn is constantly out of date leaving you to google on how to fix everything, they say google is your best friend yet they don't give you any useful tips on how to google anything properly I somewhat learned how due to the students in my cohort being awesome everything that was both useful and knowledgeable I learned is through them and not Compass because they weren't beginners and yet they had struggles too it's so frustrating because there were so many useful things and tools LHL could tell you about to use yet they don't. Their pages in both prep and main Compass are 10 feet long with 1 quintillion lines of text on them asking you to do a billion different things adding onto their lack of explanation and instruction leads you to get overwhelmed each time and you think going to a Mentor will help? While they're are a few good ones, good luck getting them through their ridiculous wait times and mentor to student ratio, they hire fresh clueless Jr Developers out of their course with zero job experience or teaching experience who just give you the answer and hang up mid sentence on you through Google Meets, they say leave reviews to help us i've left alot and they've gone no where. The instructors either have a thick accent you can't understand or a crappy microphone thats unbearable to listen to, they constantly use and have to be reminded of concepts that we haven't learned yet always making mistakes in "beginner code" we learned and expect you to understand technical terms on top of everything else you had to learn on day one. People are constantly deferring or dropping the full time and even the flex courses which proves their curriculum is simply put trash. They have you do a free Udacity course which on Udacity's website says takes two weeks to complete, Lighthouse Labs expects you to finish it in nine hours and thats all your Javascript Fundamentals, this is their whole curriculum they link you a page(s) to read (even wikipedia articles) which are often as long as their Compass Modules containing so many technical terms it's just so easy to get overwhelmed in then they give an explanation that makes no sense and have to do something with jack instruction, they leave you in tutorial hell with you just making your own methods through functions, at the same time teaching you Javascript, Command Line, Git, HTML and CSS all at the same time theres so much more I want to add to this but it's similar to how long some articles they link you are to so i'll stop and sorry this is kind of messy this is partially just my rant and a warning of LHL.

Even though they allow you to go in the web development bootcamp with minimal experience (ie. knows a tiny little bit of HTML, JS), don’t. This bootcamp is NOT meant for beginners. Don’t know about others but I’d say most of the time I had no idea what... Read More I was doing during the bootcamp. It was like trying to swallow without chewing. The quality of instructors and mentors varies greatly. I’d say overall, the Vancouver-based instructors/mentors were of much better quality than the rest. And yes, you do spend a few hours per day just waiting in the queue for a mentor. Often times you encounter apprentice mentors who are as clueless as you. The curriculum definitely needs an update. There was a week where you self-teach Ruby on Rails - no instructors giving lectures that week. This was a HUGE waste of time IMO. This week could have been used to let us learn more about React. Last but not least, the absurd “career service”, again the Vancouver-based ones seem to be more on the balls, the rest just make you think: what’s this person’s qualifications and why are they even hired? There is no accountability for their “career service” at all. No accountability for any other aspects really. Even though they constantly ask you to rate their curriculum, rate their instructors/mentors, NO IMPROVEMENT was being made anywhere. It was a huge waste of the already cramped bootcamp time. And by the time you get out of the bootcamp and get to the “career service” part, they don’t even bother to ask for your input anymore. If you were unfortunately someone who went in the bootcamp with very limited experience, the employment outcome is likely not gonna be pretty for you. And no one cares, they’ve already collected their paycheques.

The entire website is filled with false advertising! There aren't enough mentors to help you. So even if you were proactive, seeking help, you are going to wait an hour or so on queue to get help. Once help does arrive, it's sourced from India, and they're... Read More unfortunately incompetent. When it comes to the work itself, everyone has the same projects. You won't stand out when it comes to employers. They will promise you the world and say whatever they have to say for you to sign up. Once you do, the course is very easy until week 6, where the contract states refunds are no longer permitted. That's when they simply leave you alone. Without any resources, help, or lectures even. The lectures themselves are very short and dry. Often unorganized and redundant. The lectures do not follow an organized and linear fashion when it comes to learning. Often times, you will go through a lecture and think to yourself, "I already learned this from a Compass (their self-teaching website), effectively wasting your time" Although the instructors and mentors (some) are trying, you can tell that they are somewhat tired and burnt out due to LHL's recent poor business decisions. The entire course is basically you self-teaching. Be warned. You will not be given as much attention as they promise. The website promises the world. Unfortunately, the entire thing is simply a cash-grab. Please avoid if you can. As for the curriculum itself, it's very outdated. They haven't changed it at all. Our current cohort, approx 200 of us (counting all cohorts over Canada) have been told that they will change the course content. I decided to reach out to former graduates, and it turns out they were told the same thing, unfortunately LHL changing the course content is a lie. They even have the audacity to link Wikipedia articles, instructing us to read the article, and calling it "course content". Furthermore, 200 students per regional cohort, that's many people. The market is currently over saturated with web dev boot camp students. Getting a job will be close to impossible. They claim their careers services will make it happen. Unfortunately, the career services were not worth it. They make promises that they simply cannot maintain. Their advice is often outdated, and easily Googled. Literally Google "resume advice" and you will get just as good, if not better, advice regarding your resume. Career services is basically non-tech, HR, Karens, ensuring that their customers (you) are happy with the services they provided. It's a complete joke. They're actually convincing some of their students that they can end up as software engineers, at a superb Fortune 500 company, by the end of this course. It's a complete joke. Their entire career services guidance is this: Make a good resume, Always code, Apply every single day, Know yourself (whatever that means), Be positive That's it. That's your $3,000 worth of careers service material. If you can't Google that now, you shouldn't be in this course as the entire course is based on Googling for help as the course and LHL won't provide genuine help. All this to say, avoid if you can. There are no reasons for anyone to use any services that they offer. Another reviewer argued that there will be job connections/networking opportunities. That's a lie. How could this legitimately be a thing? You have 200 students in your cohort. What's even sadder is that they have the audacity to claim a 95% hiring rate, meanwhile, they are hiring their own graduates as mentors, offering them minimum wage, and giving them part-time hours so that they can boast this number. To conclude, why would you be happy as a graduate of this boot camp when the mentors, instructors, former students, and current students are not happy with LHL? Upper management have screwed over staff and their students. Due to COVID-19, they unfortunately sold out, branched out into online education, which drastically decreased the course quality. Simply avoid and move on. Find another boot camp or better yet, teach yourself. Since that's what you will be doing anyway, like the rest of us LHL graduates. Many of us are doing what we should've done first, and buy courses online instead of dealing with LHL and their predatory business practices. Do yourself a favour, and avoid. Do not get buy into their presentations like the rest of us suckers.

Pro: • you learn pretty relevant stack • Cat is very nice and helpful where she can be Cons: • The mentorship throughout the course is not helpful, it is usually students who have recently graduated that lighthouse has asked to come back and work for... Read More 10hrs a week so that lighthouse can maintain their 85% hiring rate post bootcamp. This in itself is a scam. • career services will not help you. I was in Calgary and did not receive more than a 10 minute chat about my resume. I paid 3000$ for this conversation. We only had 1 advisor for Alberta and no one has even been able to get in contact with him • there are currently over 1000 people in the career services chat, to be one of a thousand feels useless • 1300$ is too much money, if you are doing this online anyways there are much better options • everything is online and you are not going to get the same value out of the course as anyone who did it pre-covid If you have any questions or concerns, either as a prospective student or a lighthouse employee (I doubt you guys would ever follow up on this) please don't hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn Lliam McBean