Turing School of Software and Design

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I graduated from Turing some time ago, so it is likely that some portions of my review will be out of date but hopefully still helpful.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

Turing is HARD. I thought I knew what hard was when I started this program and I couldn't have been more wrong. Turing is one of, if not THE, hardest things you'll do in your life.

That said, Turing is also the best decision I've ever made. I've spent my entire career around technical teams, always longing for more and feeling like I hadn't answered the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I found coding on my own and tried (rather unsuccessfully) to learn on my own. I waffled for a while on the choice to attend Turing, mostly because I was scared of giving up a nice income to do something totally different. I'm generally a risk-averse individual, so this was a huge leap of faith for me.

Like other reviews have said, this is a program for self-starters. It's not a wrap...

Module 1, Sunday, beginning of week 5... One may judge that a review like this should not be written this early into the Turing program, but it's happening. 22+ years of experience in public education may give readers more initial respect for one 47 year old woman's opinion. This experience totals 15 years from CCSD (Dell H Robison MS, Las Vegas) and another 7+ in DPS(Denver): all inner city/at risk, all middle school (primarily 8th grade), teacher (math, art, title 1, yearbook, writing), learning strategist(custom created position supporting all subjects in the classroom+ data analyst). Education awards, accolades, professional organizations, committees, workshops, peer tutoring programs, state school improvement teams etc... are available upon request. Masters of Education in Curric...

I wasn't even going to write a review here but somebody using my name wrote a really negative one so I feel the need to set the record straight.

First of all, I was their for 9 months, not 7. I got sick and had to miss a module. The course goes in four 6 week modules with a week break in between each.

Ironically, what the fake me said about being able to do the same thing on my own in half the time of self study is the exact opposite of how I actually feel. I went to Turing specifically because I was getting nowhere with self study. It was at Turing that I received the structure and support to really take my abilities as a web developer to the next level.

Even though this shouldn't matter, since the fake me brought up Jeff supposedly having a huge ego or being a problem I w...

A year ago, I recognized that I was unhappy with my career and decided to make a change into Software Development. After researching several programs, I ultimately decided on Turing for a few reasons:

1. Their emphasis on the importance of pedagogy
2. A (relatively) longer program sounded appealing
3. The reputation of Jeff Casimir within the industry

Overall, I am beyond satisfied with my decision. At the risk of sounding fanatical, it's probably the best choice i've ever made.

As a student, you are surrounded by a wonderfully weird and diverse group of intelligent, driven, and empathetic individuals, all working toward a similar goal. Most of the instructors come from an education background, and do a remarkable job of patiently walking you through very complicated subject...

Cons => It eats your entire life and soul for 7 months (seriously I'm pale and have only been on like 3 dates in the past 6 months).

Pros => Its exceptionally challenging. LONG HOURS. Don't come here and expect to coast (seriously... you've been warned).

I have built (from scratch):

A Binary Search Tree (an almost logarithmic searching algorithm).
An ORM (Object Relational Mapper) similar to ActiveRecord.
A webserver to observe web traffic (kind of like google analytics).
A complete e-commerce platform => http://fasterfood.herokuapp.com
A job platform with multi-tenancy and user auth => http://githired.herokuapp.com
A twitter clone (can do all of the base functionality of twitter).

Many, many more assorted tutorials and small projects.

This is a 5-star program.

I graduate in three weeks, was a university student before this and have a non technical background.

Turing is by far one of the toughest and most rewarding things I have ever done. Jeff Casimir and the Turing staff have created a great program where - if you are motivated and work hard - you can become a software engineer in seven months. The instructors at Turing won't teach you how to code, rather they will teach how to learn and how to solve problems by yourself. We learn Ruby and JavaScript, but alumni are offered jobs writing Go/Python/Java/* because they are confident Turing students know how to get up to speed with new languages and concepts quickly. Working as a software engineer requires constant learning and if seven months of code-alongs would be a waste of everyone's ti...