| | Anonymous | So first and foremost, please please please understand that General Assembly is a BUSINESS. They are not a school and not a university. They are a for-profit company whose goal above all else is that keep you from dropping out so that they can collect and cash your tuition checks. And to achieve that goal, they will tell you pretty much anything before and during the course.
You will be exposed to everything in the Software Engineering Immersive bootcamp (multiple coding languages, multiple frameworks, front end + back end) but you will not master any of these things, you will not be good at any of these things, you wont even be competent at any of these things by the time you finish the bootcamp. I would say that at the completion of the GA Software Engineering Immersive you are 60% of the way to the starting line of being able to apply for jobs. You are looking at a MINIMUM of 6 months of work on your own, after you finish the bootcamp, before you are ready to apply for dev jobs. I had 14 students in my bootcamp and 12 months after finishing, 1 had a job. And that 1 developer had previously worked doing HTML / CSS, so he had experience, and the job that landed was doing more HTML / CSS.
DO NOT believe the graduation and job placements stats that they tell you. They do everything that they possibly can to disqualify you from "graduating" so that they don't have to count you in their job placement statistics. If you are 1 minute late to class more than 3 times over the 3 month bootcamp, you don't "graduate" and you don't get counted in the job placement states. After finishing the bootcamp, if you miss a class with the career services people, you don't graduate. If you don't finish a single homework on time, you don't graduate. Out of the 14 students in my bootcamp, 3 ended up "graduating" even though we all finished the course, we were there on the last day, did all the projects, and finished all the homework. GA's graduation statistics are a farce and they do everything they can to juice those stats. Oh and if you don't "graduate" the career development department will smile as they refuse to lift a finger to help you get a job. After paying $15k for the bootcamp.
For the course itself, you get exposed to lots of development principles, and lots of areas of development. The instructors are competent but they also refuse to answer most questions under the guise that "you learn better if you figure it out yourself." Yeah that gets frustrating when you are paying $15k for their instruction. At the end of the bootcamp and after paying $15k, you will be months of work away from being able to apply for a job, you wont have any of the skills to be able to build anything on your own, you likely will have zero support from career services, and you will feel like you got scammed. I regret taking General Assembly's Software Engineering Immersive |
