Turing School of Software and Design

Modern life is so saturated with unwarranted uses of the phrase “life changing” that it’s status is largely reduced to paper-thin cliché with scant genuine meaning.
But, in stark contrast to this sublimely negative intro, I can unequivocally say that Turing changed my life for the better - and not merely through a career upgrade - but through the memories, community, and work ethic that I gained in the journey.

Too often the chief metric of success is post-completion salaries - which, of course, makes basic sense, the field is dominated by a perspective rooted in stats and hard numbers. But when weighted above all else, it misses the forest for the trees, leaving no room for the perspectives, confidence, and work ethic one can gain - and it is precisely in this dimension that I fee...

Pros:
- Very solid instruction. The four modules lasted six weeks each, and covered:

Mod 1: Programming in Ruby, Object Oriented design, testing, etc.
Mod 2: Sinatra, Rails and ActiveRecord basics
Mod 3: Advanced ActiveRecord, Authentication/Authorization, creating/consuming APIs, etc.
Mod 4: Node and JS frameworks. A little React.

- Job hunting and technical interview prep throughout
- Culture "stuff" throughout. Gender and bias problems in tech, how to be an advocate for marginalized groups, etc.

Cons:

- I did a ton more pre-work than was required, and felt well prepared going in, but I feel like the recommended pre-work between the mods didn't quite serve the goals. I felt behind the ball on mods 3 and 4.
- Large group instruction is hard for everyone, but I fel...

This program was tough and requires an incredible amount of time and dedication for 7 months almost non-stop. 10-12 hour work days are pretty normal.
But if you follow through, it has the power to complete change your life!

The Turing School of Software & Design changed my life. I am now making twice as much money as I ever have before at a fulfilling job. I am incredibly grateful to Jeff Casimir and the staff at Turing for their work and vision. I can vouch for the legitimacy of the program and career prospects for graduates. I am not an anomaly, either. Read the Jobs Report. The numbers are in line with what I saw. I won’t say that the program is necessarily a good fit for you, though. I saw a lot of people drop out of the program, so I encourage you to try to determine if this is the right path for you or not before dropping 20 grand on it. I’ll spend the rest of the review describing what I think a prospective student should do or consider before signing up.

Turing did not hand me anything. It’s not...

The decision to take a break from life to spend a lot of money to go back to school was hard but MORE than worth it. Turing was the hardest 7 months of my life. There is no getting around the fact that it is a HUGE commitment and sacrifice, but it is truly life altering. I went from having zero career direction to a lifelong career with the ability to provide for my family. The education I received at Turing is invaluable and I recommend it to ANYONE willing to sacrifice 7 months of their life. 7 months is NOTHING compared to the rest of your life.

I will admit, my choice to attend Turing was a little biased. I worked at LivingSocial when the Hungry Academy(the predecessor to Turing). I saw first hand how successful the graduates were at that program.

Pros: Turing taught me how to learn and how to think with an engineering approach. It was a lot more than just memorizing the syntax. Learning how to learn was critical when I took my first development job that did not use Ruby on Rails, but I was able to apply the concepts and be successful.

Mentoring. Turing has a great mentor network that is very active. As a student, I relied on mentors to solve problems when I was stuck. Now I help by using my contacts to help people get their feet in the doors at companies.

Curriculum - they do a great job at iterative learning wher...

I enrolled in Turing on the recommendation of a close-friend and completed the program in 2015. Being an adult with a previous career and history I hope this will be a more clear-eyed and less infatuated review.

Anyway, what they expect out of you at Turing can border on the unreasonable but what can you expect when they are trying to pack 4 years into 7 months? They are trying to take someone with no experience and make them hirable as a junior software dev in 7 months. You need to be very serious about becoming a dev, intelligent, and not a dick if you want to succeed at Turing.

Honestly, to their credit they pull it off brilliantly.

I feel like overall my Rails and Ruby knowledge that came out of the program was very strong, with my JavaScript knowledge being somewhat weak. ...

Attending Turing was one of the best decisions I have ever made. If you want to work in Ruby and/or Rails (and if you are just starting out, it's a wise first step) there is truly no better place to learn.

I had been working as a technology coördinator/person-who-handles-everything-that-plugs-in-and-teaches-classes-on-the-side for seven years prior to enrolling at Turing. Unfortunately none of that transferred to programming and I started with basically nothing.

The program was rigorous. All those water analogies (drinking from the fire hose, being thrown into the deep end, &c.) described my experiences, especially at first. As the program progressed though, so did my understanding and looking back week by week, my progress was real and impressed me.

The staff are committed to turning out the best alumni in the world. That goal is lofty and they take it very seriously. Add in a non-trivial social justice mission, and you can see that the staff are holding themselves to at least as h...

I attended the Turing School of Software and Design back in 2015, so while some of my specific information will be outdated, my perspective of my experience now out in the industry will hopefully be helpful for perspective students.

Be forewarned, this program is hard. It is also a more than full time commitment. Also while you don't need to have experience with coding/programming beforehand, it will definitely give you a leg up when you start. I have now been out in the industry for two years, and Turing gave me a great foundation to start with. I think Turing's advantage though is the growing network of Turing Alumni and connections through mentors. With the saturation of junior developers coming from "bootcamps", having the foot in the door through Turing's network and their emph...

Turing is designed to push you to your limits. Every day is packed with several new concepts that you are expected to absorb and begin using right away. It's difficult, the pace never slows down, and it is exactly the program I was looking for. The pros and cons are tied together: you will have to drop everything else going on in your life at the time to focus on this program, but without that, you wouldn't be able to graduate so quickly with so much exposure to so many topics. After starting my first job after Turing, I was able to contribute to development right away, without much additional training (other than processes very specific to our team). Turing prepared me very well for my career, taught me how to continue learning on my own, and even though I look back on my time there as...

I graduated from Turing some time ago, so it is likely that some portions of my review will be out of date but hopefully still helpful.

First the good. As a whole, I was pleased with my experience at Turing. I went from being very technologically experienced to being a reasonably solid Ruby on Rails dev who got a job in San Francisco and now makes a reasonable living doing it. The course is rigorous and intense, with little time for anything else. Most of the instructors were extremely helpful, genuinely want to see students succeed, and have a passion for education. You are likely to become very close with your classmates as you will all be going through this difficult (and somewhat traumatic) experience together.

Where Turing could improve: As I mentioned above, many of the shor...

I joined Turing because I knew I wanted to get into coding and I didn't feel like a 12 week program would be enough. Turing is one of the longest programs in the country, 7 months. It also is very challenging and instructors believe in you but will not pass you along if they don't think you're ready for the next level. I loved the program, it's non-profit mindset and the job opportunities they came with it. I was hired for a job 10 days after graduating and found that most of my classmates who job hunted aggressively were able to get a job quickly within the first three months. I felt very prepared in the real world with the skills I had learned at Turing.

This program requires a huge amount of commitment (both time and mental energy) but it's entirely worth it. I received a great job offer on the last day of class and I felt well prepared by Turing to complete my work assignments. The only downside isn't Turing's fault at all but being located in Denver means an incredibly competitive job market for junior devs and if you want a job you'll have to be comfortable putting yourself out there (meetups, networking, making connections any way you can really).

I seriously doubt there is a better education of it's kind out there.

I worked in the trades and had no real good way to get into a new career with our going back to school but was not happy about the idea of another 4 years of schooling. I was very lucky to find Turing. I started with zero knowledge of computers, and and finished with a very solid understanding of programming and development and got a really great job as a full stack agile software developer immediately after graduation.

The pace was insane. It was too fast for me and I repeated 2 modules but I still wouldn't have gone anywhere else. They are not looking to just let anyone in and graduate. They hold a very high standard of education and it transformed me into someone ready for the work force. The curriculum is t...

Turing is tough, very tough. It is not easy to devote 7 months of your life coding and coding only. But if you want easy then pick another school and learn a minimal amount in comparison.

Pros:
Great workspace with people of all levels around to collaborate with
lengthy, but you learn the most
great teachers who genuinely want you to succeed.

Cons:
Some of the curriculum does not focus on Coding, but being a "better" person, useful if you lived under a rock, but for those of us who didn't, lets get back to the code.
class sizes are no longer super intimate. 2 teachers, 1 TA, and 31 students
they market "we can make anyone a developer," yes they can but if you have 0 background plan for an extra mod.(not a big deal, but plan accordingly)

Before Turing, I studied computer engineering and worked at a satellite dish company writing firmware for various parts of our systems.
For fun, I had hacked together a small web project and put it online for friends to try.
I decided to make a jump from hardware to software and my sister (who studied computer science) found this program and attended the cohort before me.

The students ranged from people with no experience coding to people who studied computer science. Even with this wide range of students, the curriculum was still able to satisfy the needs of the experienced while still catering to those who were learning something brand new. This also allowed more experienced developers, like myself, to work on our soft-skills and help others out with their course-work, or focus o...

I was dabbling on my own and Turing made me a professional. The staff is dedicated and the curriculum is great!

I attended the Turing School of Software and Design's Back-End Engineering program in August 2016. I first heard about the program from my brother who completed the G-School program a few years prior and began new career as a result. I didn't attend college, and before coming to Turing I was in and out of retail service and management jobs. I spent most of my adult life jumping in and out of community college, went through a program to became a paralegal, and never really settled down into any role. In five years I had changed jobs three time, moving from a waiter and bartender at a local restaurant in Arizona to the General Manager of a national fast food chain.

Cue 2016. I turned 31 at the beginning of the year, my seven year relationship dissolves, and I quit the best job I had e...

If you haven't yet familiarized yourself with NESTA, you should. The point of the organization was to set standards for coding bootcamps that the students may be protected. While bootcamps weren't required to participate, Turing volunteered. They had 1 year to comply to a public audit and failed to do so. Turing's founder, Jeff, later published their own "audit" in order to "maintain transparency." Their internal "audit", however, hand-picked (and intentionally failed to contact those who had a poor experience) less than 70% of their total students, with a few red herrings amidst in order to show that their placement rates are much higher than they actually are.

Placement rates are also a bit of a misnomer in judging a camps success as you must graduate to even participate in the st...