Hack Reactor

If you enjoy coding and are willing to work really hard, Hack Reactor will be maybe the most intense, rewarding 3 months of your life. People come into it from all kinds of backgrounds and the curriculum is such that if you can think analytically and put in enough effort, you'll make it through just fine and come out with an insane amount of knowledge and skill. 

HR really stresses autonomy. If you're expecting to be spoon-fed information, this is definitely not the program for you. They give you the right amount of content to figure it out, but you do have to work hard and make use of google to master the material. This can feel frustrating at times but it's excellent preparation for being on the job. HR puts an insane amount of thought, intention, and time into their curriculum and if it feels like you you don't have enough information to figure something out, it's probably intentional. They have really good material for understanding the Javascript fundamentals, the autonomy mostly comes in with learning new frameworks.

Also, the people. I've met and worked with some of the most intelligent, thoughtful, fascinating people that I've ever met and I expect to stay friends with them for a long time. As a girl in STEM (I studied math in college and have worked in all technical jobs) there's always a bit of apprehension going into a mostly male working environment, but Marcus stressed on day 1 that any sort of bad attitude toward minorities would not be tolerated, and HR ended up being one of the most fair, supportive environments I've ever worked in. (I say 'worked' because the second half of the course basically feels like you're at a job).

As others have mentioned, there's a technical assessment half-way through that you have to pass to move on to the second half of the course. I think people worry about this more than is necessary. If you work hard to master the material during the first 6 weeks, you'll probably be fine.

Its been about 2 months since I graduated from Hack Reactor Austin. I am currently working as a full stack engineer at a great company. I pretty much got all that I wanted. 

It hasn't been easy tho, just getting into the program requires dedication and hard work. The program itself is super intense and there were tears and stressfull moments, but in the end it really prepares you to hit the ground running on your new job. It is incredibly helpful wether its learning fundamentals, learning how to learn or preparing you for the job market and it is worth every penny. I had my doubts when I was first reading the reviews about 6 months ago because it sounded too good to be true. I know my review sounds super positive but if you work super hard and you have passion Hack Reactor is the way to go.

I went through the prep program in Austin, TX, then the immersive bootcamp, then worked as a fellow and I have nothing but amazing things to report from the experience. You learn more than you thought to be possible in only 13 weeks time, and the curriculum and overall experience is perfectly aligned with what you need to succeed as an up-and-coming software engineer. The curriculum is constantly iterating based on the job market and feedback from students and graduates which makes the whole expreience a lot like it really is in the work force and ensures what you're learning is very relevant. I believe really makes Hack Reactor really stand out from other bootcamps. Now at my first job I am regularly amazed by how much the bootcamp has prepared me not only to ace the interviews to get the job but also to know what to expect out of the industry and how to handle it.

While it was very challenging work I felt supported the whole time and I learned more than I would have studying by myself for years. It's not only technical knowledge you gain, but working on real applications in a team environment (a big part of the experience you need to land your first job which would be impossible to achieve through self study). Staff at Hack Reactor truly wants what is best for each and every student that passes through the school, and the interview process helps to make sure each class is full of driven, smart, nice people that you will want to work with for 13 weeks straight. 

If you put the work in you will absolutely learn the skills you need to ace a job interview and excel in the industry, and I can't imagine a better bootcamp with regards to the culture and the curriculum (and for me the location of Austin which is amazing). 

I was sick and tired of my high stress, thankless, engineering career and had a calling to learn to code. I applied and got accepted to the Austin bootcamp. I took a leap of faith by quitting my high paying job and moving to another state, but it was the best decision of my life.

The entire experience was challenging and exciting. I learned more in three months than I thought I ever could. This bootcamp was the real deal! One month after graduation I landed my first software engineering job which paid more money, had a way better company culture and was a lot lower stress than my old job. I actually look forward every day to going to work and interacting with my kickass coworkers. The value of actually loving your job cannot be overstated!

The key to understanding Hack Reactor's philosophy, and by extension the positive and negative reviews seen here is their guiding principle of teaching you to hunt instead of spoon feeding the program to you.

In classical education, subjects and materials are feed to you in a perscribed order where you later regurgitate them on a test or prompt. The course is meant to completely encompass ALL material for the course. However, real life and developer jobs aren't like that at all. Every day you come to work you don't know how to do your job. You are paid to figure it out, build things no one has before, and find solutions. 

Hack Reactor takes a different approach toward creating engineers. One, where everything you do is in real world, developing skills that you will use every day in your job. There are no safety nets like classical education, there are also no tests or grades like in classical education. The course is NOT all encompassing, like in any dev job (I've had several) you have to look for outside resources. Maybe you can't understand the material from a tutorial, so instead you look for another that helps you grasp the material better.

Failure doesn't mean you have to retake the course to keep your GPA high, it means you need to go back and get better at what you had a hard time in. At Hack Reactor, failure is to be celebrated, because you've found your absolute limits and with your classmates and a little guidance YOU can overcome them. It doesn't matter what your GPA is or how much you've memorized when programming, what matters is that you have the skills to either build it or figure out how to.

Course Ratings:

The double edged sword of continous course refinement. You get the LATEST tech to learn that is relevant to the industry. But there were some hickups with videos and lectures. Still 4.5/5 

Helpdesk was hit or miss, I ended up going my own way and feel that my debugging skills are better because of it. I also learned to take everything with a grain of salt. 4/5, day to day instructors went above and beyond every time.

The Job assistance has been fantastic. I graduated HR and am in the job search, and feel I have the skills to negotiate effectively. I won't always have the support net of HR, but their team has given me skills so that in the future I won't need it. 5/5

I had a great experience that really transformed me and propelled me on the path I wanted to go. I would highly recommend Hack Reactor. 5/5

Responses:

Can you learn everything they teach for free(ish)? Absolutely, the developer community is amazing like that. Free tutorials, guides, documentation and tools are provided everywhere. But let me counter with why would you skip the course to learn on your own? Think of learning to fish. You could buy a pole or even just get some string and a stick and teach yourself to fish. It would take a long time but it's free right? On the other hand you could shell out for a fishing book, learn where the fish will be, what bait to use, techniques etc. You learn to fish at an excellerated rate because you are getting all the lesson you would learn in a fraction of the time. That's what tech courses are selling you, not knowledge, but time.

They provide little/no help for job search, and the school doesn't give you enough to get a job after. Completely false, I have interviewed and seen hired people with a fraction of the experience and tech ability that HR gives you. But I understand, I'm in the same boat as you guys, looking for a job and it's tough. Hack Reactor is not a be all, end all development bootcamp. Nowhere will teach you everything you need to know, not even your job. Instead you learn the tools necessary to build yourself up.

You only get what you put in, HR does little to teach you, it's mostly the other students that help you learn. As with everything in life, you only get what you put in and your mileage may vary. I learned a lot from my peers, I also learned a lot from the instructors who are there at every step to take extra time to help you understand the concepts being taught. You will not be spoon fed material and you are encouraged to strike out and learn on your own. There's a review about how Hack Reactor is misleading with less than 800 hrs of coding. I don't know about you but I experienced easily over 1000 hours of programming. If you put in the bare minimum you get the bare minimum.

You will not be spoon fed information, tests, everything an employer could ever want, and a job. You are given a spear, shown how to use it and told to go hunt.

I read through the reviews on here a few days ago, and while I definitely agree with some of the criticisms, and have made some of the same criticisms myself, I arrived at the end of Hack Reactor onsite with an incredible appreciation for the work that everyone put in, students and staff included, and a sense that it is going to turn out well.  I am just starting the job search, so we'll see, but I am glad I did the program, but it was rough -- and I say this as someone very experienced in working my ass off for crazy hours.  

HR doesn't do a great job of deciding who to let in, and there is a huge disparity in ability and previous experience among the students.  HR kicked three of our cohort out, and I'm not sure how many from the other floor.  This was after at least four left voluntarily earlier on in the course because they were worried about failing the mid-term exam and getting kicked out and losing all their tuition.  (HR has to keep their job placement stats up, so they don't graduate anyone who doesn't seem like they are going to get good jobs.)  Apparently the current junior cohort is in danger of losing a lot more students.  If you are a really fast learner, you can come in and get through the course without knowing more at the outset than they require for admission.  However, it is going to be really painful and scary the entire time.  Most of your fellow students will have worked with servers and databases before.  Many will have worked with React or Backbone.  If you have not done any of these things, be prepared to be overwhelmed.  It is worth your while, if you want to get the most out of the course and have the best job prospects afterwards, to learn more than the bare minimum required to be admitted.  Being good at algorithms and toy problems is important, but it's not what the bulk of the material is, and you'll be well served to learn a little more of the nitty gritty before diving in.  Wait one more cohort than you think you need to and go through some full stack tutorials.  Skip the CSS and JQuery.  You'll barely use this at all at HR.  Know the other stuff, the stuff they tell you you don't need to know in advance.  At HR you will teach yourself a lot.  This is only going to work for you if you already have enough knowledge to know where to start with that.  

I really came to appreciate everyone in my cohort.  There's a real sense of community, especially in the second half of the program, after people pass the exam and know they aren't getting kicked out.  It's a total sausage fest, and there's definitely an annoying amount of competition among the boys at times, but there's also an enormous amount of humor and camaraderie.  It's a program that is definitely worth your while, as long as you approach it in a smart way.  Learn more than you think you need to know, more than they tell you you need to know, and you'll get a ton out of this course.  

I recently finished Hack Reactor Remote and am leaving a review about the remote experience specifically.  I originally planned on attending onsite HR, but job/ personal circumstances didn't let me move to attend the course.  So I enrolled in remote with a little trepidation- my goal in attending HR was to grow really fast as a software engineer and to be constantly pushed to be better.  I wasn't sure if a remote course could motivate me in the same way as seeing my classmates in person.

I was wrong.

REMOTE IS AWESOME! There is a distinct culture in the remote program and it feels intensely social.  Even though your classmates are all over the country (we had one guy in Europe too) you still feel closely connected with them and you're together 12 hours a day in lecture, pair programming, and hangouts.  You know how being in a constant groupchat/ snap session with your friends feels like you're always with them even though you're in different cities?  HR Remote is like that, except you're getting things done, and your classmates are always pushing you to be better (in a super nice positive way).

Before starting HRR, there were 3 areas that I was concerned about that I'd like to address in my review- CULTURE, LEARNING, OUTCOMES.

CULTURE

Hack Reactor purposefully has a very positive atmosphere.  Everybody supports each other and I never felt weird asking a classmate to jump on video chat with me to help me work through a problem or technology that I knew they were a superstar in.

Even though you're distributed, through chat and meetings you quickly get a good idea of everyone's personality and interests. That makes it easy to find people who share your specific programming interests to pursue topics together.  Hack Reactor students are really committed to being good web developers and will pursue various topics they're interested in outside of class (i.e. functional programming, 3D canvas animations, systems programming languages) and the culture of exploration is infectious.

The course is challenging at times and both the staff and other students are awesome at cheering you up and getting motivated again.

We graduated with a lot of good in-jokes (which is a good sign of a close knit team).

LEARNING

Whoa.

I was a self-taught programmer for 9 months before starting HR and one of the primary reasons I wanted to do a bootcamp was that I felt that I wasn't moving fast enough by myself. I'd work on Udacity courses, or projects from online tutorials and then I would hit a place where I WOULD BE STUCK.

Prior to HR, I would try to solve my problem, inevitably get frustrated, and generally take a long time to move past my obstacles. After HR, problems no longer last that long.  I have the confidence that I can learn new paradigms, look up Stack Overflow, and learn new frameworks without getting stuck.

There are previous negative reviews of Course Report where a student complained the Hackers in Residence (the TAs of Hack Reactor) would just tell them to Google a solution to their problem.  Well...yeeaaah- how else do you expect to find an answer?  

Don't go to Hack Reactor if you would want an answer handed to you everytime you get stuck at a bug. These aren't the droids you're looking for.  The staff will be very good about jumping on a call with you, talking over the problem space with you, and offer helpful suggestions about where to look for a solution.  They won't just tell you the answer.

Why?  The most valuable part of HR for me wasn't learning JavaScript and Node and JS frameworks- it was the meta-learning.  You learn how to solve software problems on your own by researching and liberally applying trial and error. You learn how to debug and understand error messages and test your assumptions.  You learn how to learn how to traverse up the call stack.  If that fails, you learn how to ask good questions to a senior engineer so that they'll be the most helpful to you.

The magic of Hack Reactor isn't in the course material.  It's high quality and always iterating to stay close to the current state of web tech.  However, in my opinion it's only like 10-15% better than stuff you could find online for free.

The value of Hack Reactor is all the training in how to solve problems, and not giving you any slack when you'd rather be handed an answer.  It's the classmates who will help solve problems with you.  It's the thrill of discovery when you finally get your code to work and you've learned new in the process.

Regardless of whether you do a bootcamp, I would argue the most essential skill for a developer is to be able to view a bug as a learning opportunity to learn new paradigms or to correct a fundamental misunderstanding.

Oh- and you'll become a JavaScript, React, Angular, Node ninja too in Hack Reactor.

OUTCOMES

This is one of the most important metrics when evaluating a bootcamp, and one of the fuzziest. When I applied for HR, the hiring metrics seemed unbelievable to me and I think they may create unrealistic expectations for applicants.

The short answer is yes, you will almost for sure get a software engineering job somewhere within 3-6 months of graduating a program.  It may not be the ideal job, but it will be a place that you can develop your skills.

I think a lot of the negative feedback comes from students' expectations not being met.  Going from not programming at all to working at Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Facebook after three months of Hack Reactor is not a realistic goal. Yes, it's possible for certain students with prior experience and certain students who work their @sses off- but it's not the expected outcome.

The expected outcome is you get a decent job at a dev shop somewhere, and if you really care about working at a unicorn, you can interview there after a year. I would argue that the Hack Reactor marketing doesn't make the expected outcome clear and it leads to some disappointment.

That said, even though I just graduated, I feel very prepared for the job search.  For the handful of applications I sent out last week, I've gotten past a few phone screens and got past a coding challenge (to build a Node server in a few hours) sent by a company.

CONCLUSION

Hack Reactor is not magic.  If you're not completely committed to being a developer, it's not 10x better than just learning  on your own.  Its value is that it puts you in an intense environment with other committed classmates where you can quickly develop the meta-skills that will make you a good engineer.  What you do with those skills and how you leverage them into getting a job is mostly on your own (with staff support).

I chose Hack Reactor because I wanted a challenging program where I could accelerate my learning.  There is no credential or diploma that you get at the end, but I do feel much more confident approaching the job search and learning new things.  I continue to view myself fundamentally as a self-taught developer, but Hack Reactor was an accelerator for my personal progress (kind of like young startups going through YC- not guaranteed success, but you learn a lot and get good networks).

If that is your goal and you can afford it- Hack Reactor is super worth it.

I just graduated from the Hack Reactor onsite program last Friday, December 9th.

Don't expect to be spoon fed instructions while you're here. If you want to passively absorb lectures all day long and be told the answer to everything, Hack Reactor probably isn't the right boot camp for you. At Hack Reactor, the vast majority of the day is spent making stuff with cool people, and that's where the learning happens.

The people are one of the best parts of Hack Reactor. We had a friendly, collaborative group of students working round the clock to make each other better. I'll keep in touch with lots of them long past our graduation. The environment and energy here are unparalleled. It makes you want to get shit done.

At Hack Reactor, I learned at a rate that far exceeding what I did during undergrad at UCSD or while getting my master's degree. But don't expect it to be easy. Don't expect it to always be comfortable.

Expect it to be hard. Expect it to be stressful when you're trying to meet a tight deadline. Expect it to be frustrating when things don't work. Expect it to be immensely gratifying when they finally do. Expect to meet 40+ bright, motivated, like-minded people. Expect to spend 11+ hours a day programming, 6+ days a week. Expect to learn a ton.

If you're worried about the validity of users' posts here, I'd recommend that you search for Hack Reactor alumni on linked in and reach out with some targeted questions. Most of us are friendly ;)

Hack Reactor is a demanding 13 weeks of hard work, but if you put in the time it pays off beyond all expectations. I went from a guy obsessively pouring over google/quora/course report reviews and working on code wars prompts, to attaining proficient skills across the full stack in just 3 months (it is a real thing). In Hack Reactor, the name of the is exposure and they do an incredible job of introducing you to the universe of software engineering in a remarkably short period of time. By the end of the course, you'll find that you have learned how to learn and all you really need to pick up any new language or framework is a couple of days and some docs. If you're on the fence about joining, get off of it and do it already. You'll make great friends, great products, and come out on the other side ready for a career change into the lucrative field of software development. 

I can't speak on behalf of HR Remote that has received a lot of recent hate, but my experience at HR Onsite from Sept - Dec of 2016 was fantastic. 

HR's Most Valuable Assets to me

Instructors and Staff: 5 Stars easily.. to name a few

• Josh: Really really smart and compassionate. Makes sure no one falls behind, provides additional lectures or 1on1s, and genuinely cares about every students' success. 
• Benji, Zak: Helped me out tremendously especially right before the cumulative assessment. Gave 1on1s, advice, additional lectures, and kept me on the tracks to success.

Location: 5 Stars: Easy commute. 

Environment: 5 Stars: HR does a great job picking out people that can get along with each other to spend 13 stressful weeks with. 

Self Autonomy: 5 Stars: I don't have that mentality anymore where I look at the problem and tell myself "I don't know how the ***k to do this" 

Things to improve: 

Job search prep: I wish we were able to have more than just a couple of mock coding interview sessions with an instructor. If there was an additional week of practicing alogorithms, schemas, data structures, and anything else that would show up on an interview, HR would be about perfect. 

Toilet Paper: I hate 1 ply. 

Notes/Tips: 

Live Lectures > Recorded: Our class was fortunate enough to receive a lot of in-person lectures (scheduled and unscheduled) and even one from the co-founder of npm, Laurie Voss. Make sure to keep it this way. 

Take advantage of the resources provided and you'll be in good hands. 

One misconception I can maybe address

"Hacker in Residence are recent graduates who couldn't get jobs"

From what I saw, many of the top students in my cohort were the ones that became Hackers in Residence. Extremely knowledgable and were usually the ones to go to to ask a quick question. 

If anyone wants an honest answer, shoot me an email. 
masashiswingle@hotmail.com

Walking into hack reactor I was skeptical that it could live up to the hype. It seemed way too good to be true. I can assure you it is even better than anything that you could ever expect. 

Over the 3 months I was able to transform my skills from basic coding challenges into being fully capable of building any web application that I want. They build your skillset to be able to pick up any framework or language - and the stuff our cohort built was quite incredible. We had a mixture of vr apps, mobile apps, and web apps. 

I thought it would be gruelling with such long hours. But I never felt like I was working. It felt like I was with some of my closest friends solving puzzles all day. I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world.

So if you're in doubt. Take the plunge, you won't regret it.

I came to Hack Reactor to learn how to build full stack apps and not simple front end websites. And at every level Hack Reactor has given me the knowledge and training I need to build amazing things.

At Hack Reactor, I built:

- Mobile applications (https://github.com/smartiecereals/glazedgallopers)

- A photo-sharing virtual reality app (https://github.com/lowtalkers/escape-reality)

- A trip planning collaboration tool (https://github.com/smartiecereals/glampr)

All of these were made using technologies that are being used at startups and big companies right now. Before Hack Reactor, the most I could make was a to-do list website using simple jQuery and after Hack Reactor I was able build virtual reality apps with multiple backend technologies. The difference is evident.

But, they don't just teach you programming, they also teach you how to learn, how to communicate, how to collaborate in a team and how to apply for jobs.

I highly recommend Hack Reactor to anyone who is interested in software, looking for a career upgrade or anyone who wants to start a technology company.

Thank you for listening!