| | Anonymous | I attended Holberton school from January to October 2018 after a close friend attended for free as part of their first cohort. My review has a lot of negative and positive points but ultimately, my choice led to a successful career change, but not without a hefty price tag related to living jobless in San Francisco and signing over a large chunk of my income in the deal. I wish I had done more research into alternatives before signing on, but it wasn't all bad.
Because I was in the 5th cohort and based on the enthusiastic marketing I thought that the problems my friend experienced would be worked out, as they were in a new location, had many seemingly successful graduates and had expanded their staff. Instead I found a rigorous but partially complete curriculum with a lot of typos they made the students responsible for catching and reporting. I eventually gave up reporting errors to the staff because it was getting in the way of my project work. It may not seem like a big deal, but when you don't understand the vocabulary and technology, poorly translated and misspelled curriculum makes the "Google it" curriculum difficult to follow, because you don't know when it's an error or just a term you're not familiar with. The staff told me in one on one meetings that copy editing was not in the budget, but in the months since I left Holberton school, they've expanded to something like 8 more campuses. In the end, though, I went from having a little command line and CSS experience to being able to get some stuff running in C, which impresses people who think all boot camps are front end scripting only.
I got to know some of the students in their advertising posters and learned that they were using at least one of them with the caption "I am a software engineer" while they were still a student at the school, and the photos they used were taken by another student. Both of those students have successfully found jobs since then. When promotional photos were taken at the school they made up a reason for everyone to be on campus that day without telling us ahead of time that photographers and videographers would be on site. Then they singled out the only students of color in the entire building and featured them prominently in advertising, but the actual student body did not reflect their claims of diversity. Every student in those pictures is now among Holberton's biggest critics. Other students told me they felt people of color were not only overlooked but often more discouraged than their white peers, and when I brought this concern to the student support staff, they literally told me I was experiencing "group think." When I launched a campaign to have a sexist quote removed from the wall of the school, their response was to ask me repeatedly to remove the online petition and then they retaliated by speaking to the CTO of my company about it. To their credit, they did remove the quote but feigned ignorance as to why it would be offensive.
Lastly, I am one of the students who came to Holberton with the most information about what I was getting myself into, but found through talking to my peers that they were led to believe certain things about the curriculum and the payment structure that were different when they actually experienced the program. I got an internship through my company's connection to the school, but this only happened for a handful of the 54 people who started with my cohort, the rest were put into an extremely rigorous job hunting process that I think was devised to cover Holberton if hiring numbers didn't meet expectations. If someone couldn't find a job, it would be easy to say, "Oh well that person didn't send out x number of cold applications every week and we expelled them". Other examples are the advertised 3 year payment period (it's actually 3.5 years whether you get an internship or not), the second year specialization curriculum (more marketing fodder than practical expansion on the roles students actually end up in and from what I understand not entirely complete). The supposedly very selective application process was probably the biggest shock to me. I spent a lot of time on my application, especially the essay, only to find out that the entire process is automated to the point that they never read, watch, or view anything you submit and they accept basically everyone who completes the application. some people in my cohort were accepted along with everyone in the room at their "group interview." But after making huge sacrifices to come to Holberton, often moving, borrowing money, quitting jobs, etc. many of us tried to stay the course anyway. I tracked most of the people who completed the first 9 months and excepting the drop outs and people who were expelled, a majority of people *did* get some kind of tech job, but opinions vary on how much of a hand Holberton had in making it happen.
Ultimately, as stated before, I got a job after going to Holberton but the tuition cost is twice that of my bachelor's degree. I told myself in the beginning that this would be offset by Holberton being incentivized to make sure I got a job, only to find out that they accept everyone who applies and charge them the full 17% for 3.5 years if they complete even a fraction of the whole program whether they get a tech job or not. I could have gone back to my pre-holberton job and still technically owe them the money, which I imagine was part of their business plan in the first place. |
