| | Anonymous | I was part of the first fully remote cohort. By the end, I was really blown away by the non-competitive and supportive atmosphere that I felt with my cohort. It's a safe space to be honest about your struggles and not feel alone, which I think is an important part of such an intensive experience. I definitely confronted my fear of failure, resistance to asking for help, perfectionism, all the things. They actively try to cultivate a culture of empathy.
People are very willing to help each other with project stuff and share job opportunities. The alumni network is really great - I often find someone working at a company that I'm interested in and they're very willing to chat with me about their experience and provide referrals.
The curriculum is very methodical, but you will need to do a good amount of interview prep when it's over to be able to pass the technical interviews. I also tell people to be prepared for this to be your life for 3 months. The class time is 40 hours a week and then there are weekend assessments (which are reasonable in length and useful), homeworks, mentor meetings, and project season (where I worked a lot on the weekends, partly because I enjoyed my project and wanted to keep progressing). They also recognize that it's not useful for you to learn and code all day and then do hours of work outside of class, and encourage balance and self-care.
Pros:
- see above
- labs help you to solidify concepts each day in a practical and engaging way (sometimes a little spoon fed)
- instructors were engaging and usually humorous, answer questions well, definitely want students to succeed
- matched with mentors who are in the field who commit 1 hour each week to talk about whatever you want - class concepts, project scoping/struggles, whiteboarding
- Hackbright is a good name with a proven curriculum that produces good engineers
Cons:
- Career services curriculum is a little repetitive if you already have a good handle on behavioral interviews and networking practices
- I think that I had some unrealistic expectations about job assistance - I sort of thought that part of what you are paying for is access to their network of company partners, which is not really true. While there are good resources, like alumni groups, Slack channels, career fairs, etc, I felt mostly on my own with finding a job. |
