I had a decade-long career in teaching before I decided to pivot to software engineering. I had a lot of friends (and a family member) go through Hack Reactor, so I was already familiar with its content, expectations, outcomes, etc. That familiarity did NOT diminish the difficulty of the program. You will likely hit wall after wall after wall. Each time you fail, you have to pick yourself up and try a difference approach. Basically, you have to learn to deal well with failure and not allow yourself to cave in. This is by design, as Hack Reactor stresses autonomy its benchmark skill. They attempt to simulate a workplace as best they can, and this strategy proves itself effective in the results of the percentage of Hack Reactor grads that gain employment as software engineers. Additionally, you get out of the program exactly what you put into it. You can skirt by and do a whole lot and still complete the program, but you will be essentially unemployable. You have to approach this program with the mindset that your success is up to you, your effort, and that the program itself intrinsically owes you nothing beyond serving as a competent guide. Pros: • The staff and instructors take student feedback seriously. When things aren't working, they care about what you have to say and will do their best to improve things. • Feedback is constant. If you are not doing well, the support is there immediately for you. You can also elect to have office hours (private one-on-one sessions) with instructors and instructional assistants (SEIRs) as much as you want, even outside instructional hours, to reinforce concepts you don't fully understand. • The focus is on becoming employable literally the whole time. You don't just become a better coder, you receive soft skills training as its relevant to the industry. You face not only technical challenges, but they rip off the bandaid of having to deal with interpersonal conflicts in a constructive, professional way when they inevitably arise. • The emotional support is there. The instructors know the program is hard as hell and extremely taxing both intellectually and emotionally. There are weekly check-ins and elective office hours with someone whose job it is specifically deal with student-wellness issues. • The vast majority of what is taught is still industry relevant. They don't just teach the bleeding, cutting edge, but also slightly older technology as well because you will inevitably deal with refactoring or working with legacy code in your job. • The senior phase focus on building full-stack apps was great, and those apps are meant to go on your resume. As of right now, October 2020, they are also currently re-tooling that aspect of the course to be more enriching, so that's nice. Cons • Especially during the junior phase, the solution lectures to sprints (two-day cram sessions where you are introduced to a concept or a technology and then work on a project relevant to that concept/tech with another student) are often six-year-old videos during which you don't get to ask questions. The implementations discussed are often above the level of understanding of someone who has just been exposed to a certain technology. And because they're presented in video format, you don't get to ask your own questions like the students in the recording made six years ago did. • Contact with instructors was surprisingly low. I did enter at a unique time of transition on my campus where the instructors were short handed, but that did impact my experience. • There is currently no professional code review. You write a lot of code and not one line of it was ever reviewed by someone who has had a job in the industry. Logistically this would be difficult, and that concern was addressed when I complete the program. Those cons being said, I know those things are on the minds of the program designers. They aren't stagnant, they have a growth mindset, and I do know they are constantly working to improve things. So by the time you read this, those cons might not exist anymore or they've at least been addressed to some extent. | 