| | Anonymous | Where to start.. so, I completed the full stack evening course last year. I came to PDX Code Guild already with several years of IT, and programming/scripting experience. So I knew that some material would likely be redundant for me, and that I would need to keep an open mind and view it as a refresher. Unfortunately, a large portion of the material was very shallow, and didn't go beyond the level of your standard "Intro to Programming" YouTube playlists, or guided beginner tutorials like FreeCodeCamp.
Assignments were extremely basic for the most part, and a lot of them felt like simple, academic, first-semester CS 101 questions rather than exercises that would build competency in modern Python/JS/programming. Again, if you have *any* programming experience, you'll be knocking these assignments completely out of the park, rather than feeling like you're being challenged and having to grow as a developer. Also, it was pretty clear that the curriculum really hadn't been updated for several years, and personally I question why the focus was on Django, when that is definitely a fringe web framework at this point. It also feels very disjointed and jarring to whip from Python to JS/HTML back to Python over the duration of the course. I would have strongly preferred a full stack JS curriculum, but at least on that note, I can't blame them - they don't hide the fact that they're going to teach you Django.
But how about the experience for new/zero experience developers? Well, in a nutshell - I saw those classmates completely drowning, and neither the instructor nor the TA jumped in to "save" them by taking them aside, recommending additional resources, or otherwise engaging them. Additionally, no one's work was really reviewed or critiqued, and I definitely saw some people graduate without being able to code any better than they could before they started. You might say "well, they should've spoken up", and I would agree, but it's also the responsibility of an instructor to talk to the person if they're not turning in assignments, and are clearly struggling. But I got the distinct impression my instructor either didn't care, or was too uncomfortable approaching struggling students - and that the bootcamp itself was just happy to take the money of folks like that.
I could really go on and on about how low effort this bootcamp was, but I'll just make my final gripe that the career assistance is completely non-existent. I was never approached by anyone, given any leads, or otherwise contacted after I graduated. I felt like they got their money, and were done with me.
The two upshots for me were - I used the curriculum as a starting point to learn modern web development (by supplementing it with Udemy courses and online tutorials), and a lot of my peers in the course were fun to meet. Aside from that, I would strongly recommend you avoid this place and go to one of the more respectable PDX bootcamps, or go the much cheaper, yet far superior route of using online resources. Shame on Sherri and PDX Code Guild for basically being a super expensive Web Bootcamp Diploma Mill.. |
