Hack Reactor

Before I begin my review, I want to mention that I signed up for Hack Reactor not to seek engineering jobs, but to build my own startup projects. You can say that every review on here is a subjective assessment of HR. But since I don’t need anything from Hack Reactor after graduation (you know, things like job search support, recommendations, etc.), I feel my review is as impartial as it can get. Judge for yourself, of course.

Hack Reactor is the Navy SEALs of coding schools. Navy SEALs is wonderful. But Navy SEALs is not for everybody. Neither is Hack Reactor. If you are driven, self-reliant, have a good head on your shoulders, and are prepared to go the extra 100 miles and more, Hack Reactor is your school. If you want work-life balance and are more comfortable having teachers spoon-feed you, or if you think by paying an expensive tuition you’ve somehow “paid the dues” and can just expect magical success thereafter, then look elsewhere. (Actually, if you are the last kind, no need to look. No school will fit your bill.)

I joined the HR Remote’s 19th cohort in September 2016, after picking up Javascript in June and finishing Fulcrum (HR’s pre-school program) in August. Before June 17th 2016, I had no experience in programming except some half-assed Matlab.   

The admission interview for me was a drama-free event, because Fulcrum gave me a pretty efficient roadmap as to what to prepare for the interview. I also had the incentive to prepare hard, because their policy was if I didn’t get accepted by one of their schools, I wouldn’t get my Fulcrum tuition refunded.

The remote classes are all conducted online of course. I said “classes”. But actually you don’t spend too much time listening to a teacher talk. Most of our time is spent doing things, i.e. coding. This is something you don't get by just hacking together a study plan with online tutorials. Coding is an activity you learn by actually practicing it, not by watching someone else do it. And the HR's framework gives you the maximum hands-on opportunity to practice actual coding with challening, realistic projects.

For the first half of the curriculum, the schedule is broken down to mostly two-day sprints. On the first day of a sprint, you get the instructions about what you are expected to code/build. After exploring the problem on your own for a short period, you get together with a classmate (your sprint partner) and start writing code. You communicate with each other through video conferencing and share your code through an app that allows you to write to the same file online realtime. On the second day, after you’ve tried as much as you can at your tasks, HR releases suggested solution codes for the sprint. You study those. The day after that, the same process repeats, with a different coding partner and sprint subject.

HR provides some materials (e.g. videos) about the specific frameworks/concepts you should know in order to work on a sprint. But you are expected to go find whatever materials you need on your own to get the job done (e.g. googling, stack overflow, online tutorials, blogs, tips from your classmates, proceeds from selling your soul. Ok, the last one probably won’t help you much). You get some support from the help desk, which is manned by recent grads. But most time you won’t be given straightforward answers even if your helper knows the answer. You’re expected to problem-solve as much as possible on your own.

Now depending on your personality, this could be an unpleasant and chaotic experience (apparently the case according to some negative reviewers). Or it can be an exciting and efficient way to learn. You’re constantly being thrown in at the deep end and feeling like you’re drowning much of the time. At least that was the case for me, especially during Weeks 3-4. But I LOVED this style of learning. I loved the challenge, the autonomy, the discovery, and the fact that I’m in control of my own learning, all within a well-defined framework, so that I don’t proceed blindly while still having plenty of freedom. And the pressure to finish the sprints on time keep me on my toes all the time so that I really have to pick up new information at the maximum speed. Is it stressful? Yes. Is it uncomfortable? Yes. Is it amazing? YES!!

Again, I think how well you would take this learning approach depends on who you are. For example, there’re some negative reviews on here that said HR videos were not good, HR materials are not original, HR didn’t teach you enough, HR course hours are less then they claimed, etc. Here’s my reaction to those critiques. 1. Frankly I skipped half of those course videos. Because watching videos is slow and I prefer just googling some tutorials up fast so that I could get to the sprint. Those videos may be mediocre. But so what? You’re not supposed to get all you need from the HR materials. And to me, HR strikes a good balance between giving you directions and teaching you to be independent. You’re expected to find whatever materials that suit you to crack the sprint. 2. Same thing goes with the “they don’t teach you enough” claim. Guess what? HR taught me very little, except they taught me how to learn programming (my googling skill was improving at warp speed). And because of that, I learned what I needed on my own quickly. 3. As for course hours, I don’t see why that’s relevant because in HR I was spending 13 hours a day coding anyway, official course hour or not. Nobody tells you how much you should work in HR. It’s all about what you produce.

The bottomline is that your personality and values will determine your expectation for yourself and for HR, and that will determine your outcome. That's why if you decide to apply, make sure you're well prepared with at least the JS fundamentals and preferably went through, say, Free Code Camp, and built a toy app BEFORE you join HR. (Free Code Camp is a good pre-course for HR. I went through most of it before HR, thought I learned a lot, and then realized HR was on a whole different level.) You may cheat your way through the HR admission. But if you're not prepared enough, you'll struggle a lot because the curriculum moves fast. So do yourself a favor and come prepared. Otherwise you end up wasting your time in HR and wondering why you're not getting your money's worth! If that happens you have no one else to blame but yourself!

Not everyone is sufficiently prepared in my cohort or takes the HR learning approach well. By the halfway point there were several people dropped out from my cohort, voluntarily and involuntarily. Every time our class counselor announced a dropout, I would hear the Hunger Games theme music playing in my head (the one they played when a tribute went down). It’s not that far-off an analogy, except in the Hack Reactor Games, you don’t kill each other. You help each other instead.

This brings me to the next thing I want to tell you about— your classmates. My classmates are amazing people. And I suspect when I look back at this experience a few years from now, my classmates would be my biggest reward from HR. Although they are from all walks of life before joining HR, they share some commonalities— smart, determined, multi-talented, hard-working,  extremely kind and helpful. And hilarious, too. I don’t remember another three months in my life when I had laughed so much every day, despite being under constant pressure to perform. And that is what HR surprised me the most. With the classes being remote, I hadn’t expected to build much relationship with fellow students. But after three months, the kind of community and bonding that had emerged from my cohort was nothing short of amazing. If this site has an option to rate “communities and peers”, I would have given it 10 stars!

If you ask any MBA graduates from Ivy League schools, many of them will tell you that the most useful thing they got out of their MBA is not academic knowledge, but a network of successful peers. I don’t think the tech industry is all that different. Having worked with my classmates, I have no doubt that many of them will be rising stars in their future jobs and become successful engineers. I’m proud to be their classmate. If I had paid the HR tuition just to gain this peer network of talented engineers and nothing else, I would have considered my money well spent! 

There were a couple reviews on this site that mentioned “you learned more from your classmates than from HR”. For those reviewers, that was a negative thing. But by now, I’m sure you can already guess my position on this. That’s right, I learned a lot from my classmates. And I can’t be happier about that. 

And finally, the result. I can’t tell you much about job search, because as mentioned, I did HR to build my own projects. And also, my cohort just graduated yesterday (Dec 10th 2016), and job search has just begun for most of my classmates. What I can tell you is that one person in my thesis group got hired already, for a job that pays >$100k, two weeks before graduation (He’s a smart guy, but had little coding experience before HR, and is definitely not top of class. He has great personality and people skills, though. And that’s quite important in job search). I’m not saying his case is the norm. It’s NOT. I just want to tell you what is possible.

As for me, after my thesis project, I decided to start building my app in Python, which does numerical stuff much better than Javascript. HR only used Javascript and there wasn’t a single line of Python/Django in HR materials. So You can say HR didn’t teach me enough. But when I started my project, I quickly discovered that picking up a new language is now no harder than picking up groceries. And if you had told me that three months ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. So you can say HR taught me a lot. It all depends on how you look at it and what’s important to you. And you can already guess what my preference is.

Again, whether HR is for you depends on the type of person you are. The same experience can be perceived in different ways. How do you find out which type you are? That’s easy. You’ve read my review. I gave you my most honest opinion from my perspective. You’ve also read some of the negative reviews from former students. I trust they gave their honest opinion based on their perspective as well. All you have to do is to look within and see which perspective you can most naturally identify with. That’s your type right there. Good luck! 

I attended Hack Reactor because I was unhappy with my current career path and wanted to break into the software engineering industry. I feel confident in saying that HR has thoroughly prepared me for this transition in a way that no other experience could. It is easy to be put off by the seemingly outlandish success statistics and the high cost and the short time. I know these were all red flags for me at the outset. What I have found, though, is that HR is a well-polished program run by passionate educators with a deep understanding of the software industry. It's not a free ride to a great job, but if you put in the work, you end up with a solid set of skills and a newfound appreciation for the power of good education. I never thought that I would learn so much in so little time, and I definitely didn't think that I would feel so ready to learn new topics. Beyond the core curriculum, the greatest thing you gain from HR is the ability to learn new software topics on your own. It's not for everyone, but if you think it may be for you I strongly encourage you to give it a try.

As a former mechanical engineer, it's in my opinion that one of the most important skill sets every engineer needs is autonomy. Hack Reactor does a great job of building your autonomy. As you move along through the curriculum, they systematically remove more and more scaffolding until you're building full stack applications on your own and solving real engineering challenges.

The staff is great, and they all have invaluable industry experience. The lecturers have a commanding knowledge of the curriculum and they practically beg you to ask questions because they want everyone to understand the material. The mentors, coaches, and counselors are all very eager to help out. In only three months, they build a relationship with you where you feel like you're part of a family.

Some of the previous low-ratings on Course Report are a little confusing. The tone of some of these reviews reflect feelings of neglect and animosity. I'm not sure why this is because the Hack Reactor staff are very upfront with the program's intentions, and their business model is directly tied to the success of their students. Because of the transparency of their SSOM standards, there really isn't any way around this.

I had a great experience at Hack Reactor. I received the guidance that I wasn't getting from self-study, I learned to push myself further than I thought was possible, and I made some life-long friends along the way. That being said, you'll get what you put into it. There is an endless amount of information out there. They teach you to explore new concepts, and they challenge you to go beyond the core curriculum.

That was my experience at Hack Reactor, and I hope my review helps others get a clearer picture of what Hack Reactor life can be like.

Like everyone else I was VERY skeptical of the bootcamp model. I ended doing my research and contacting about 20 grads directly on LinkedIn. All of them loved it. I decided what the heck, college sucks, and I want to learn faster. I ended up moving out to San Francisco and devoted every ounce of my time to development. Literally between 14 -16 hours per day were spent in the Hack Reactor building. 

Anyway you want to know how much I learned and how the experience was. It was great! The curriculum was VERY strong. I can say that it provided me with the knowledge to build and deploy a Full Stack Web Application. However, the real value is not really the curriculum or the instructors. Both of which I endorse for their merits. The real value is in the people. I ended up learning more from other peers in my community than I did from the course material by at least 3x. Many people venture away from the taught frameworks and language. Many people learned Python, Go, and some of the languages for mobile development. I learned Swift and React Native. It all worked out very well. 

In terms of getting a job. People will take you seriously if you present and sell yourself well. If you act and can code like an engineer in the field with four years experience, if you graduate you definitely have the programming down, then companies will treat you as such. There are a lot of mind games in getting a job, you just have to overcome them.

I endorse Hack Reactor and would advise anyone trying to get into programming or filling in gaps of knowledge to try it!

Ill make this short and sweet. I completed 6.5 weeks at the MakerPrep course in LA.

This school is a complete scam. They have many 5 star ratings but that is only because they have reviewed themselves many many many times. They are all fake reviews to give the appearance of quality. The instructors are previous graduates who cant make it in the real world. They are lazy and are just there punching a clock. Everyone was led to believe that they would have support for when they needed it through resources online and 1 on 1.

I was there EARLY every day to have just minutes of time with the instructor, (i was early about 3-4 hours early EVERY DAY! ) They asked us to Slack them with any questions and they would get back to us. That never happened! My entire experiance was spent trying to get the instructors attention. There were way too many students all fighting over the instructors time. He never had a clear lesson plan, and was always late to class. It was almost as if they had no idea that we were paying good money for this. They changed the material all the time and everyone there was completely lost. Ive never heard so many complaints before.  I would try to set up appointments and use their spreedsheet to book office hours they they never showed up to.How convienat for sappovive "expert programmers" to not be able to figure out how to fix a simple shared excel spredsheet. Absolutley rediculous. 

They admitted that the class didnt go as they had hoped and that I would be able to attend the class over again so that I could get my moneys worth. THAT NEVER HAPPENED! IM SO PISSED! Do they even know what it take to scrape together the money it takes to take this course when you are UNEMPLOYED!!!

Hello, Shawn here.

I will phrase my review in two parts:

1.

I work in financial securities, and I rigourously research all of these bootcamp schools in the same manner that my employer pays me to research stocks.

My analysis is that Hack Reactor is an over priced work of fiction that has a great SEO campaign and Google Adwords account that places them at the top whenever you type in "top coding bootcamps" into Google.

They charge you almost 20k for materials that are available 100% free online.

They have so called "Instructors" that are really just former students who were not smart enough to get a job...and the Founders are people with absolutely no verifiable professional working experience - NONE.

If this was a stock I would short it.

2.

Has anyone else noticed the large amount of 5 star reviews?
Is it just my imagination or is the Hack Reactor marketing team trying to flood this blog with fake reviews?

There are 65 total reviews so far, and every negative review has immediately been swamped by "5 star reviews"...but they dont give their names.

No details are provided in these 5 star reviews...no instructor names, no course reviews, not even any reports on trying to find a job.

Thanks for proving everything I mentioned in this article, Hack Reactor marketing team :)

Before I joined Hack Reactor’s (formally MakerSquare) Software Engineering immersive program, I have been a front-end web developer with 8 years of working experience.  While I have learned valuable skills in that time-frame, my skill level to be an effective, multi-tooled full-stack Engineer was preventing me from moving forward as a Senior or Tech Lead.  While I have personally worked on online web developer tutorials, I was still missing two important factors: Being aware of what tech stacks the industry is doing and learning not just the tech, but the approach on how to effectively learn and understand them.

This is where Hack Reactor helps you the most in becoming a super-competent Software Engineer.

They teach you the core fundamentals - data structures, How JavaScript functions work “under the hood” (this is important! If you understand the logic of its library, you will have a better ability to write code), recursion, algorithmic thinking.  Then you move on to using the latest libraries and frameworks - React, Angular, Backbone.js for the front-end, and server side using Node.js, RESTful APIs, MySQL, MongoDB.  If you understand these concepts, libraries, and frameworks, it will give you the ability to transition to other technologies. This characteristic is vital in becoming a well-versed Software Engineer!

And don’t forget the friendship and connections with your fellow cohorts!

The full-time staff - this includes the instructors, code support team (recent graduates of the program), Technical Mentors, and even opportunities to talk with previous alum is one of its reasons why Hack Reactor is the best at what they do.  They are all extremely knowledgable and helpful, and have no second thoughts to stop and help you figure out issues you have in your code.   I applied (and accepted) to join two other coding schools.  But with their mission statement and A++ staff and and awesome tech start up-like environment, I am more than happy I chose Hack Reactor.   If you are looking to change your career, or you need to sharpen your current skills as a Software Engineer, take the time to speak with someone at Hack Reactor and join the team!

So whenever I write a review, I try to keep things factual and transparent...mainly because I'm just a regular non-IT guy trying to get into fulltime web development.  I've mastered HTML and CSS but its time to get serious about Immersive.

I first contacted Hack Reactor through the number on their website.  This turned out to be a gigantic waste of time...as calls kept getting routed to someone called "MakerSquare"...and the Chinese guy who answered had no clue about any kind of Bootcamp.
So then I contacted them through their facebook website, facebook has this live messenger type thing, kind of like live customer support.
The lady who was typing in the chatbox let me know that most of the instructors are HIR...Hackers In Residence...which is just a fancy way of saying "Former Graduates".

I was like, seriously?  You want me to pay 20k tuition to be trained by someone who used to work at Walmart or used to make sandwiches at Panera Bread?

Complete and total scam...all their placement numbers on their website are un-verified and probably unrealistic.

You can get the same education for 50% less anywhere else.

Stay away from these guys.

-Harry

Hack Reactor is a life-changing program that I would recommend to anyone that is motivated willing to work hard to achieve their goals of becoming a software engineer. Throughout the first half there were times that I struggled, however as we entered the project phases in the second half, I felt prepared to learn and tackle problems without the guidance of a structured curriculum. Our cohort had a new curriculum that was changed for week 12, with more of a focus on the types of things that previous graduates had struggled with in the job searching phase. This was still a bit rough around the edges since it was new, however it was very valuable to find out the spots that needed to be improved on as I begin my own job search. Finally the best takeaway from Hack Reactor is the amazing people I met and worked with, this is what made the program special, being surrounded by motivated and like-minded people all helping each other work towards our future goals.

I had always wanted to make the move into web development since I discovered the internet and I had taken online classes at a local community college but was never able to actually make the move until I took this class.

I found out about HR while reading my feeds at work after just having received my severance date.  I used what was going to be my severance check to pay for the program and was the only female in a cohort of 15.  

It is a lot of hard work and I think you get what you put into it.  There were issues as we were the second remote cohort, but the HR team bent over backwards to help and support us.

With respect to finding a job afterwards, I believe it was harder being remote, but through the support and persistence of certain people at HR, I was able to find a job in my home town about 8-9 weeks after graduating.  Yes I had to do the job hunt.  Yes I had to send out the resumes.  Yes I had to do the work.  But HR was checking in almost daily with me with words of encouragement and mock interviews.

After all was said and done, I now work as a Software Engineer and my husband loves to tell people "Yea I thought this was another of her 'get rich quick schemes', but it worked!".  I love my job!

You'll never find a better way to invest in your career. This place attracts amazing, friendly people and the staff work painstakingly hard to foster an incredible environment for learners to thrive. It's fast paced and requires long hours and discipline but what is really important is that the entire program is structured to turn you into a learning machine, which is what a software developer will need to have a long and successful career. If you're thinking about making a career change at all, this is the place to do it!