Dev Bootcamp

Dev Bootcamp is worthless, you don't need anyone to teach how to code. You can learn on your own starting at code academy and taking bootcamps in udemy. 13k and quit your job? Plust the market doesn't demand Ruby on Rails, most jobs now a days require to know MEAN stack. JavaScript is on demand not Ruby. Quit scamming people. I left Dev Bootcamp because I honestly thought the program was trash. It's not worth 13k, plus the guy Greg that was supposed to refund me my check kept me going around in loops to get my money back, the only way I got it back is lying that my dad was sick and I needed the money. For 3 weeks I kept asking him when will I receive my check, what he said was, "we are working on it". I had to contact another office to make it appear as it was an emergency to receive my own money back. After I talked to a girl in an office up north, a day after I had my check expressed mailed to my house. Yeah stay away

I was hesitant to make such a huge leap (from being a history teacher), particularly as I'd just finished my master's degree in 2013, but attending Dev Bootcamp (DBC) was definitely one of the best decisions I ever made. I had no prior programming experience (well, I'd tweaked the CSS on my tumblr once or twice to see what would happen), and I came out of DBC with not only a solid foundation in Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript basics, but also a great foundation in how to learn that will help me learn other languages and/or frameworks that come across my path.

One of the things that I appreciated the most about DBC was that they really meant their request for feedback. For example, two cohorts ahead of me had submitted some feedback that they felt they didn't learn testing early enough, and when I got around to Phase 1 (and even in some Phase 0 prep work), they made sure that we wrote tests at every stage.

Getting a job if you live in (or intend to move to) a city not near a DBC location can be harder because they might not necessarily have contacts there, so more of the work is going to be on you, but in the end it's always going to require effort on your part. My instructors were always willing to give one-on-one time to go over things that I was struggling with, but I had to speak up and request it. I think this speaks generally to their expectations of personal responsibility that you'll speak up and/or try, which I think serves people best in the long run.

One thing I always tell people about what surprised me about DBC, and it sounds corny to say, is that I honestly think I came out of DBC as a better person. I don't know whether it was any one area of instruction (even considering engineering empathy), or whether being more satisfied with my career path made the difference, but it seems true nevertheless.

I look back on my experience very fondly. Before DBC I was at a point in my life where I needed to try something new, wanted the rigor of a learning something challenging, and was feeling desperately out of touch with what I was capable of and how I was making a living. Because of this, I went into DBC with only the expectations that I was paying for an experience and that what I gained from it would be directly connected to what I put into it. 

Phase 0 was admittedly a little unorganized, but I had fun doing it and pushing myself to take direction of my own learning. Once I arrived on site, I saw how much feedback they gathered from us and I was actually surprised by how much the curriculum has changed and continues to evolve based on what the students ask for. This strategy does open up the possibilities for things to be shaky, unclear, or just simply fail, but I took more comfort from the fact that I was a part of something that was willing to try new things and be flexible. 

My cohort turned out to be a really wonderful group of people: surprisingly diverse in personality, previous skills, gender, race, and home country. I recognize that this is not always the case. If you are looking for a hand-picked, curated group of classmates, this unfortunately doesn't exist at DBC due to the nature of their schedule. It comes as a tradeoff with the fact that you can apply quickly and get started immediately. Once I realized I wanted to make a change in my life I wanted it to happen quickly and on my terms. DBC allows you to apply and interview within a week and choose your own start date. I appreciated this flexibility and freedom. I guess in this aspect of the program I just got lucky. I do feel strange looking at cohorts before and after me that only had one or two women. As accepting and open as DBC is, it just unavoidably changes the dynamics of the conversation. I can't speak for everyone, but I wouldn't want to be in a conversation about diversity when I am the only minority in the room. What separates DBC from other bootcamps is that they make a conscious and strong effort in their Engineering Empathy curriculum (and daily on campus) to talk about what it means to be mindful when working on a diverse team. Technical skills completely aside, I do feel that I am better at communication and able to at least recognize the joys and frustrations of working with people who are different from me.

In the end, what made my experience were the teachers and staff. Getting to know them, befriending them, and trusting them was the highlight of my education. I continue to ask them for advice and look up to them when I think about my future path as a developer. I can't say that I'd reccomend DBC (or even a bootcamp) to everyone, but that's because it is an intense and sometimes random environment. I found that I succeeded because I was at a very specific point in my life: one where I felt responsible for my own education, open to most anything, and also just a bit lucky.

I'm surprised to read the negative reviews on here and am wondering if the culture at each campus varies drastically? I was at the NYC campus and it was a great experience. The teachers were all excellent and got along with each other, there didn't seem to be any ego from them, and they would all stay late and go out of their way to help. They were organized in their lessons, and extremely supportive.

The students all had very diverse backgrounds, and everyone got along great for the most part. The EE sessions helped us all be open with each other, and there was ongoing support available if we felt we needed it. Everyone brought different strengths to the team and we were all able to learn off of each other. The mentors who were available were also solid and incredibly helpful.

The career support and interview prep needs some work but is getting there. We definitely have enough tools to figure it out on our own, but given the cost of the program, I hope they can make this stronger.

Some of the reviews make the program sound cultish, but I'm not one to drink the Kool-aid, and didn't ever feel out of place. Nobody actually used the "whole-self" etc lingo, there was just an unspoken understanding that it's up to us to be our best selves, and we'll only get as much out of the program as we put in.

Also, the ongoing support after graduating is great, they actually seemed glad that we continue to use the space as alumni, and the career support team works hard to stay in touch with us and encourages us to ask them for help or advice.

I have nothing but positive things to say about Dev Bootcamp. Dev Bootcamp is designed for a beginner to come in, and by the end have the tools to be able to learn anything they want when it comes to software engineering. 

This is exactly what my experience was. Out of all the bootcamps in NYC, not only do I feel as though Dev Bootcamp prepared me to go out and become a Developer, but it also taught me how to work as part of a team, grew me as a person, and taught me some yoga!

For something as intense as a bootcamp, I wouldn't want to be in another bootcamp, becaue I can't imagine a school that could be more supportive of you in the process.  I grew deeply close to my other "cohort-mates", and would highly recommend it!

I recieved a job offer after two months with a tech consulting firm that has hired 5 students from Dev Bootcamp due to thier satisfaction with thier first hire.

When I was first looking into coding bootcamps, there were a lot of common themes about how intense each one's program was, and how much you would learn in a short period of time. At first I was having a hard time really distinguishing one from the pack that I really wanted to do over the others. Once I started learning about Dev Bootcamp, however, I was quickly hooked. I liked that they emphasized that one of the biggest things we took away would be how to learn a language, but even more I liked the focus on building us up as people. The Engineering Empathy curriculum, if you come in willing to participate, can change how you see yourself, the industry, and the world around you. 

They weren't wrong about teaching us how to learn a language. In our final projects, two of our groups worked with things that we hadn't even touched while at DBC, and we made fully-functional mobile apps that we're all proud to show to prospective employers. 

I was expecting the Engineering Empathy curriculum to be very much in line with a lot of things I have been learning about people in general, and I was expecting a lot that would help me (and the rest of my cohort) learn to bond well and quickly with others, and maximize our interpersonal relationships. What I didn't expect was how much I would learn about myself, and how much better I would understand myself and be able to recognize and cope with difficulties that relate to who I have become as a person up to this point in my life.

The intellectual and emotional support DBC provides makes the intense period of study an incredibly rewarding experience, and having spoken with my friends in the industry, I feel that they have prepared me well to join it. The job assistance program follows these same lines, and instead of just introducing you to employers (which they do as well), they teach you what you need to know to find jobs on your own, and help you build the confidence to undertake your own job search, with the support of their career counselors and the network that DBC has in place. 

 I am a January 2015 graduate of the Chicago campus. I personally loved my Dev Bootcamp experience and cannot say enough good things about it. My good experience could be attributed to a few factors: the small size of my cohort (we started with 15 and ended with 10), the excellent students in my cohort (they were not only smart, but hardworking, caring, and optimistic), and the quality of my specific teachers, who were a mix of both senior-level programmers coming from the industry and teaching-focused, junior-level programmers. (Both types of teachers had their own complimentary strengths and weaknesses). These factors can change from cohort to cohort, so I believe that DBC's continued success lies in how well it can manage student/teacher ratio, and the quality of people it admits as students. 

Ultimately, you should care about how well DBC prepares you for life as a professional web developer. I found DBC's curriculum and teaching methods to be very representative of the work life that I entered after graduating. Some of the complaints I read about DBC—like having to work with people you may not like, having a teacher ask you to Google for an answer instead of walking you through it, having your work day interspersed with lectures and other seemingly frivolous events—are very much like real life, work-world situations. Just substitute lectures for staff meetings, fellow students with coworkers, teachers with your senior manager, and your daily coding challenges with a nasty bug fix on a client's website. There are many times when a work situation reminds me of something I encountered at DBC. 

I also found DBC's Engineering Empathy sessions helpful in my work life, in that they made me more aware of my own learning styles and gave me simple mechanisms to cope with the dangers of insecurity, Imposter Syndrome (a very real thing!), and burnout. The descriptions of these sessions may sound a bit goofy at first, but I would say they're effective. 

As to the belief that you could learn all of this stuff on your own through courses and going to meet-up groups...well, yes you could, if you had a certain amount of prior coding background, knowledge of the resources available to you, and free time. Everybody is starting with different skill levels, different kinds of exposure to the tech industry, and different family/life situations, so a fully-immersive, accelerated program like DBC may be more appropriate for some people than for others. I was a person who had zero programming experience (other than some basic HTML or CSS), nor did I have any formal Computer Science training. I could see someone who has more prior knowledge than me feeling like they could get to where I wanted to be professionally through a more patchwork/self-taught route. But coming where I came from, I felt like DBC got me to where I wanted to be, with relatively little time and money spent. What I really paid for at DBC was time—an acceleration from the few years it could take to learn this stuff on my own to the few months it took to go from zero coding knowledge to professional web developer. DBC also gives you access to a world you may not have known how to engage with beforehand. 

Do not expect to be awesome or an expert at all the things you learn at DBC right out of the program. Do expect to come out of the program with the language and confidence to be able to be able to learn whatever you want, and to become an expert at anything in due time. That's not enough for some people, but it was enough for me to be able to get a full-time job as a web developer, and to feel like I could make my way around some random programming Wikipedia article without feeling like it might as well be written in Mandarin.  

In short, I had a very positive Dev Bootcamp experience, and I feel like I got my money's worth.

*Some of these points relate directly to the Chicago campus, but most can be attributed to the program as a whole.

The off-campus pre-work is okay. It definitely gets you up and going, but there NEEDS to be an weekly 'check point' in-person, on-site -all of my cohort members would attest to this. Having an ALL ONLINE pre-work regimen is bogus when you're paying nearly $13 THOUSAND dollars and are not allowed to come on-campus for any [likely] help that is needed; half of the time [we] struggled as a cohort to find much needed guidance/tutors as their availability was limited.

On-campus, everything was very "business-like", they want you in and out, into a phase and out as quickly as possible -and it shows! A handful of teachers were complete assholes, they thought they were 'cool' if they portrayed themselves as dominant alphas, simply because they knew more than the rest -as if it were a popularity contest. When 4:30pm came around, you can sense their wanting to 'give-up' for the day and just leave. Not a single instructor was willing to stay even 5 minutes after 5pm.

As far as resources, they essentially pumped us into thinking we can figure it out as a 'cohort' entitling us to essentially scour the internet and 'figure it out' - wtf? If I'm paying $13k I'm paying for tutors on-site, instructors on-site, and some form of structure -not being told to "Google it"; if that was the case I could've saved myself THOUSANDS of dollars and simply have done it myself.

All-in-all it's an experience albeit [IMO] not worth the asking price for tuition. The program heavily really relies on the fact that students Google things and show no real passion in teaching, (again speaking for most, not all instructors). Once you're through, you're not given much attention to unlike what they portray, their focus is on getting as many students enrolled for p0 and p1, thereafter they could careless.

ps. ANYTHING you're told verbally, get it in writing. A lot that is promised is vague and can/have easily turn their backs on.

There are a lot of things that could be said about an intensive bootcamp. The experience was probabaly overly intense and pushed harder that necessary. And that environment led to lots of coping mechanisms to be employed.

But I don't want to talk to much about that. Rather, I think that the measure of a bootcamp should be about whether or not it turns out people that 1. can become employed in their chosen field and 2. should be pursuing that type of job at least for a little while. I know that not everyone that wants to learn how to code does so to get a job as a programmer, but I believe that those people should not be in an intensive bootcamp for that purpose and the school should not cater to those people. Under that idea, I think that Dev Bootcamp grades at a B. The material can get you a job, but it is still an uphill battle to convince people that a bootcamp education is enough. The part where I think that can be improved the most is better screening of applicants and currently enrolled students. I know more than one person that was somewhat pushed through the program because the school didn't have any other way of dealing with them. I don't think that this should be the case. I think that is both harming the student as well as the bootcamps reputation. And as more of these schools are created and more students are graduated, those reputations will become even more important.

Going to DBC was probably the most important life decision I've ever made. I now have a job I love in an industry that engages me. The bootcamp experience was intense and while I had previous programming knowledge I felt challenged by the material. That being said, ruby is an easy language to learn and the basics of web development are fairly simple to grasp. Where DBC excels is empowering students to teach themselves after instruction has ended. This served me in learning a new environment and eventually landing me a job.

Interesting, now 5 months later I get to write this review, I honestly think after Dev Bootcamp was bought by Kaplan, their methods were more into the money making machine that now bootcamps have become. I bailed after 5 weeks into the program, and it was the best decision I made. Not only were my former cohort mates dissapointed with the experience, none of them have jobs right now. Don't waste your money, this is not worth 13k and quitting your job. If you really want to learn, start at code academy, then move on to onemonth, then udemy courses. Right now I am lucky that I got a job as a developer, not thanks to dev bootcamp though.