| | Rohan Paul | As to my relation with The Hacking School - After completing this bootcamp (April to June 2018 cohort), I got my first Developer job as an Associate Software Engineer in full-stack web-development ( MERN stack / Mongo, Express, React, Node) coming from a completely different educationl (MBA) and career background (Banking).
One can absolutely launch a career in Software Engineering with what you learn at here, if you’re dedicated to the program from start to finish. The Hacking School creates engineers by focusing students time on projects and coding challenges - with conceptual lectures to complement. Curriculum include teaching some of the basic computer science (data structures and algorithms) fundamentals and focusing on a single language - JavaScript - for both backend and frontend.
Daily Routine at the bootcamp - It was super intense. Mornings were spent learning a new concept along with an instructor and afternoons left us mostly on our own to apply the new concepts in daily challenges. I rarely left the classroom before 10pm and indeed have on many occasion stayed back overnight. Weekdays were basically wake up at 6-30 am, work in class all day and night, then go home, go to bed. Even weekends, though there was normally no classes, rarely offered a reprieve, as we will have weekend showdown or weekend hackathon project to show off for the next week, or tech-talk to be prepared for. By the end of the 13 weeks I couldn’t imagine going any longer, I was so exhausted. But I loved every moment of the entire 13 weeks.
Overall Environment - Good mix of healthy competition and mutual support among the students to continue the intensive learning environment.
Industry contact and support in getting you the interview - Meraj’s contact in the startup indsustry in Hyderabad is probaly the most important asset to leverage for anybody coming to this bootcamp. There’s hardly any CTO’s or CEO’s or Tech-Founders in the city’s startup and tech-scene that Meraj does not know :) . In the last couple of weeks of the program itself, he arranged for two or three interviews and company vistis and the placement season was on full swing.
Meraj’s (Hacking School’s founder and CEO ) personal leadership in moving the students toward their goal - He takes a genuine and sincere interest in moving people and their projects forward to the next stage. Personally I am hugely lucky and privileged and honoured to have the opportunity to get to know him and getting to hear his inspirational talks. He also gave us this hugely valuable opportunity that if anybody of us can build a really intersting project during the bootcamp, he will arrange a tech-talk and invite some of the founders and captains from city’s tech-scape and we can show-off my projects to them.
Fantastically knowldgeable and genuinely involved instructor. For my batch the instructor was Prshant, who is always super energetic and full of enthusiasm to teach new concepts to the batch. He also runs his own startup in Hyderabad, and thats why could give us the first-hand knowdeldge from the industry best-practices (which a full-time trainer probably would have missed). Personally for me, he took a mock interview over the phone to simulate the exact environment of an actual interview.
Great support for outstation and international students - The school has very involved and super-helpful Program Member (Ashar) who will very patiently explain all your questions and doubts before joining the bootcamp. He also arranged the accomodation before I reached this city. And then after reaching here, he helped me all the way, to get settled down in the city and gave me all the relevant local informaton important for the next three months of journey. He also greatly supported in scheduling the interviews and co-ordinating between companies and students.
Some areas, in my personal opinion, I think The Hacking School can probaly do better ( or future students should take take more initiatve in these aspects themselves, because learning for a web-developer is after-all a self-propelled journey ) - And assuming the end goal for most boot camp attendees is to go in and 12/13 weeks later emerge with the coding chops and confidence to not just get a job as a full-time software engineer, but build a career out of it.
A) More planned mock interviews during the last four weeks of the program to make the bootcampers Interview-Ready for each of the seperate topics, so we can survive a two, three or four hours of a solid technicjal interviews.
B) More frequent online timed-tests in platforms like HackerRank ( we only had one during the whole program) - this will make us perform substantially better on actual interviews.
C) More stringent time-mangement and sticking to course-schedule (both on a daily basis and for the whole of 13 weeks ), becuase for our cohort and also my immediately junior cohort, the the ReactJS sessions were a wee bit messy and hurried. Similarly I thought, more time-mangement and planning needs to be applied in completing the final comprehensive project. |
