I am a strong believer in disrupting our traditional education system. Hack Reactor fills an important niche. It is rigorously designed; staff care, but hold you accountable. If you are serious about making a switch to software engineering, then this will be a great, structured springboard to a new skill and potentially a new career. IF you are ***insanely*** self-motivated and already build your own applications, this course is probably not for you. Everybody else, consider it after doing some research. Don't go anywhere but a top tier program (HR, App Academy, and a few others). Although the program overall is great I worry that bootcamps in general have gone downhill. I have many friends that went through bootcamps in their early days, who are now engineers. Instructors at these early stages were all highly qualified engineers, with many years of experience, that had a deep interest in teaching. However, instructors for Hack Reactor now are almost universally former graduates, MANY OF WHOM HAVE SPENT LITTLE OR NO TIME IN INDUSTRY. Whether this is due to limited teaching talent and an excess of demand with too many bootcamps, I do not know, but the result is a much less experienced staff. You must go into the program realizing that the lion's share of learning will be done by you, yourself, and your cohort mates. Commitment to quality education is high at the very top. Marcus, the co-founder is stellar. You will learn from him personally, but those experiences are limited, and the excellent pedagogical skills he possesses are not well-distributed throughout the organization. In a similar vein, the curriculum is a few years old. Updates come slowly, if at all. The organization seems to have developed quite a bit of inertia, and its educational content is still running on the momentum of absolutely superstar instructors from the early days like Fred Zirdung. You will see quite a few videos from him explaining concepts. But in an industry that is so fast-paced, it is disconcerting to see videos that are so old. At the end of the day, these are challenges I assume many bootcamps have to wrestle. However, if the best value adds of the program are that it creates an environment for self-directed learning and provides a proven rigorous (albeit aging) curriculum, you really have to ask yourself, 'will I bring relentless focus and a commitment to explore and internalized outside resources to the table?' If so, then this is probably the right place for you, and it will change your life despite its limited drawbacks. If not, then keep studying coding on the side via free resources. The rest of the staff is incredibly supportive and committed to your success. Especially if you have not had a job, there is some good basic career advice most people never receive in high school or college. Finally the program is technically stable. Few changes and high throughput means few errors and a high degree of stability for all materials and resources you utilize. Finally, HR does a great job of ensuring quality via remote learning. So if you are worried the pandemic or distance learning will and asterisk to your degree here, don't. | 