| | Paul Stanley | Pros:
-Accomplished my goal of stepping away from IT support/ops and into a JS engineering role
-Provided a good framework in which I could code every day (including 8-12 hrs per weekend at my own pace) for three months
-It's a small startup with hard-working staff who care about your success personally
-Cohorts are limited to ten people, so you really get to know everyone including the instructors
-Attempts to teach concepts in a logical order, sometimes taking the harder route of learning an older framework first so that you have more context for the new one. Flipside of this is that we were stuck in outdated land for a long time.
-Took me from being shaky at simple scripts to writing a functional full-stack app.
-Projects provide real artifacts to show off (or to hide forever ;) )
-Price was reasonable for quantity, quality, and availability of training and staff, and for the increase in salary I saw before/after the camp.
-We had an awesome TA who went way above and beyond and truly made the difference in all of our success. Can't praise him enough.
-Public demo night was an awesome opportunity -- I had three people from name-brand companies approach me about jobs after watching me present. That's value.
Cons -
-Growing pains. I was part of the third cohort. They're still figuring things out, such as:
-Unrefined training content was littered with spelling, grammatical, and code errors. Daily struggle. I hope they're working on it but I really didn't see any acknowledgement of the issue or action taken to fix it. Everything is usable but... it can feel unprofessional.
-Logistics. We moved offices three times in three months. Future cohorts shouldn't run into this, but it was a distraction and we were treated like second-class citizens by one of the offices ("go park half a mile away in a sketchy lot where people don't feel safe at night").
-Geared towards people truly switching careers, so they sometimes don't really know how to handle tech professionals with overlapping experience. With an IT background I often did not find any value in the trainings geared towards teaching computer science, and there were sometimes inaccuracies in the material. They should really structure this in a way that allows for opting out and focusing on coding.
-I did not use job support services as I found a job myself part way through the program. The requirements to get the services felt like they would be pretty burdensome, so have a frank conversation about expectations for both parties prior to enrollment. I don't think they explicitly offered this service when I enrolled, as we never talked about it until like halfway through the program.
-There were a couple instances where I felt like staff went too far towards acting like cool kids -- keep finding the right balance of teacher/mentor vs. student. |
