Hack Reactor

It's extremely hard for me to fully express what sort of a difference this program has made in my life and, indeed, in the lives of people around me. 

I had my reservations early on and not every single day at Hack Reactor went smoothly. There were moments of struggle, anxiety and deep, deep self doubt. There were times when it felt outright painful, especially when combined with the fatigue and separation from loved ones.

That said, there were even more moments of pure exhilaration. You know that warm, elated feeling you get when your brain is actively engaged in the process of learning something new and exciting and wonderful? Hack Reactor was essentially 800 hours of that feeling.

I come from some programming experience. I wrote some code in high school, dabbled as a hobbyist through college and graduate school and then actually worked for a couple of years maintaining a large code base for a eComm company. In spite what amounts to several years of experience over time, it's completely dwarfed by what I learned at Hack Reactor.

Finally, in terms of tangibles - Hack Reactor isn't blowing sunshine up your stack when they tout their numbers. Those are the real deal. I've been on the job market for less than three weeks after graduation (I was in HR19), and from week 1 onward I had the problem of having more interviews than I could sanely handle. Think about that - I don't know about the rest of you, but in all the industries I've worked in, I've never once had more interviews than I could reasonably manage. After 2 and a half weeks, I have 2 amazing offers from companies I would give my front teeth to work for and likely more on the way. It still doesn't fully feel real to me.

If you get into Hack Reactor, go to Hack Reactor. Yeah, it's expensive. Yeah, it's tough to find lodging in San Francisco. I don't care, find a way.

5/5 stars, would attend again.

About me: I'm a mid-life career changer. I have a BA in Geography from Berkeley and an MBA from UT Austin. I started taking undergraduate programming classes a few years ago, thinking I'd get another Master's degree (in CS) and eventually a job as a software engineer. After a few semesters I got lucky and got an entry level job as a junior programmer. It was good experience, but the pay was WELL below average for a junior engineer and the tech stack was aging rapidly (a mix of C#/.NET, MS SQL, JS, jQuery). Even worse, I wasn't working with experienced engineers (always work with the smartest people you can find, you'll learn faster and become a better programmer) and the company was more interested in pushing new features out the door than producing high quality software.

So, after a year I started thinking about how to put my career on a different trajectory. I wanted to work with sharp engineers using the latest technology and best practices to write awesome code. I stumbled upon developer bootcamps, did some research, and decided to take a chance. I applied to Dev Bootcamp, App Academy, and Hack Reactor, all in San Francisco. The job market is starving for engineers in the Bay Area and it's by far the largest concentration (10X any other place) of engineering jobs in the country, so it seemed like the best place to be looking for a job after graduation. 

App Academy seemed like the lowest risk, because you don't pay until you land a programming job, but they turned me down. Hack Reactor was interesting because of their focus on full-stack Javascript. Most of the other schools I looked at were teaching Ruby, although there were a few that taught in Python. Javascript is on a growth trajectory right now. It's embedded as THE front end language of the Internet, and a few years ago Node.js came on the scene (server-side JS) and since then there's been an explosion of new tools and libraries enabling full-stack JS development. Anyway, I made it through the tech interview (you have to study a LOT before you even get accepted to Hack Reactor), and when they accepted me I decided to take the plunge.

I quit my job in Austin, moved to San Francisco and spent 3 months, 70-80 hours per week doing nothing but studying software engineering, Javascript, and JS-related subjects like Node.js, AngularJS, Backbone, and MongoDB. Hack Reactor's primary focus is to teach you how to be a SOFTWARE ENGINEER, Javascript is just the language they chose to teach in. You also learn core engineering concepts like data structures, algorithms and algorithmic complexity/performance, and a lot more. It was an intense learning experience. You cannot master all of the material they expose you to. You'll spend your whole career trying to do that.

In my opinion, these are the things that make Hack Reactor an excellent bootcamp.

1) People: The instructors are all experienced, highly skilled engineers. They could be making a lot more money as engineers. They are dedicated to making HR the best bootcamp in existence, and producing top-notch engineers. They worked longer hours than the students did. The students are also great. HR accepts less than 10% of applicants and they are really good at choosing students you want to be around. You're going to spend all your waking hours with these students for 3 months, so you really want them to be people you like to work with.

2) Philosophy: HR strives for continuous improvement. They take feedback from students every week and change the program every "semester" to make it better. I spoke to HR graduates from the previous year who were a little jealous because the program had grown significantly and included additional topics that weren't covered when they were students. I'm sure I'll feel the same way about the program next year when I see what HR has become in a few more cycles.

3) Job Placement: The entire second half of the program is designed to make you employable. You switch from learning concepts and building small individual projects to working on teams, building bigger projects, learning how to succeed in tech interviews, etc. By the time you get to Hiring Day, where you get to meet hiring managers from roughly 30 companies, you have a substantial GitHub portfolio, a good story to tell, and an excellent chance of landing a job. They also have an alumni program/network, and when it's time to look for your NEXT job, they help with that too. It's too early too tell, but it feels like it's going to be a long-term relationship as my career develops.

There's a lot more I could say about how awesome HR is, but this covers the highlights. I had a great experience, made some good friends, and landed a great job at a startup in SF about a month after I graduated.

Before you get into one of these bootcamps, you're on the outside looking in, reading all of the marketing material on their websites, and asking yourself "Is it really worth it? Will I get a good job after I graduate? Which school should I apply to?". HR's website states their job placement rate is 99%. That sounds too good to be true, but it's not. ALL of the students who graduated from my class found jobs within 3 months. Most of them had never worked as a software engineer before. I could not be happier with my experience at Hack Reactor and I recommend it highly.

Hack Reactor was, in a word, awesome.  I was incredibly impressed by their ability to deliver all that they promised.  Below are some of what I believe are their greatest strengths.

• Class Quality - Hack Reactor's admissions are very selective.  Everyone entering the class has a good understanding of the basics of programming.  It's not a 0-60 program.  As someone with several years of prior programming experience (though none of it professional), this made it a great fit.  No time was spent on basic concepts like loops and conditionals.
• Instructors - The lead instructors are incredibly rigorous in their teaching, and spend a lot of time refining their style.  The dedication shown was beyond that of any teacher of professor I'd had before.
• Freedom - Much of the course is spent on independent projects, and even the structured assignments are highly customizable, with lots of extra credit.  This allows students to delve deep into their favored interests, and there will always be at least one knowledgable staff member who can help.
• Job Assistance - We get a lot of practice with our interviews, and great inside tips on applications, resumes, and negotiations.  I would have been lost without all of this personal attention.

Hack Reactor was a wonderful, transformative experience, and I wouldn't be where I am today without it.

Hack reactor was am briliant fit for me... I'd done lots of programming on my own time... I took a few classes in college, but there were a lot of basics that I was missing: Algorithms, Data Structures, Big O Notation, closures, functional scope.

Hack Reactor really cemented these patterns in my mind, and I'm much more confident with my programming skills. I'm a grad student at MIT now, and I've had some of the best teachers around -- but no experience quite compares with Hack Reactor.

There are a few moments when you know your life forever changed. Hack Reactor creates one of those, sharply increasing your career trajectory and forging valuable friendships.

I applied to H/R because I knew I love to program, but wasn't satisfied with 'working my way up to software engineer over 3-5 years.' It's been the best decision I've made.

You will learn CS fundamentals, lots of frameworks, product engineering, and much more during an incredibly short time period where you'll work extremely hard.

The people who seemed to get the most from our cohort were the ones who stayed late, got drinks after, and generally bonded around the pain and euphoria of bending machines to our will.

I can't recommend Hack Reactor enough. If they accept you, go; you'll thank yourself a few short months later.

Almost 2 years ago now I in San Francisco for the life changing experience of Hack Reactor.  I had seen a post on hacker news about a new programming school.  3 months of intense learning in Javascript.  I was an IT Director and did some programming  but I knew I wanted to become a developer full time. I interviewed with the founders and I got accepted into the first class!

I was little nervous because they had never done it before. Come to find out I had nothing to worry about,  Marcus, Tony, Shawn and the other instructors were well prepared and organized. When things didn't go exactly as planned they were quick to respond and fix any problems.

The whole course design was project based we would  have a lecture, then a day of coding, code review then a refactor.  Pair programming was a great benefit to me.  Working in pairs made for increased energy as we all pushed each other forward. The material we learned was useful and we used it to build actual apps.  We created our own personal project after and that we separated into groups and created our capstone project which we showed off to employers.

I am amazed at how much we learned in such a short time.  The students were motivated, the teachers all cared about our success and taught us the skills necessary to succeed in the software development world.  I quickly got several job offers after graduation and 2 years later I am working at an amazing company with a great a team of engineers.  This is a place I wouldn't have been without Hack Reactor.,

Thank you Shawn, Marcus, Tony and all the other instructors!  Thank you for creating a place that changed my life, increased my skill set and made me immediately employable after graduation.

Hack Reactor was the single most beneficial thing I have ever done for myself. I have a Bachelor's Degree from a four year college, and I would have taken the 12 weeks spent at Hack Reactor over my four years in college in a hearbeat, even if I still had to pay the $100k+ to Hack Reactor that I paid in college tuition. 

I could wax eloquent about Hack Reactor for pages, but to keep the review short, everything everyone else has said is true. I was a huge skeptic of the metrics that Hack Rector says they keep for hiring stats, and I was already employed full-time with a family I had to take care of. Since I was offered a job two weeks before even graduating for twice what I was making before leaving to attend Hack Reactor, and pretty much all of the people who went through the program with me are getting great offers, I can say the metrics are true. 

Hack Reactor changed my life, and I am left with the feeling that I owe them more. I was worried about the tuition beforehand, since it is the most expensive program, but after going through it and seeing the changes it allowed me to make in my life, I feel like I underpaid by quite a bit.

Opportunities like this come around once in a lifetime, if you are considering it, just go for it, I can't imagine your life not being improved many times over by the knowledge and experience that you will get going through this program.

Hack Reactor was one of the most fun and intense 3 months of my life. I was there very early (class #6, which was Aug '13). I truly enjoyed it. If you want a more complete breakdown, I did a weekly blog while I was attending (http://sympatheticvibration.com/category/hack-reactor-journal/). But the short of it is, if you're gonna go to a coding school, you pretty much should aim to go to Hack Reactor, and only consider other options if you don't get in. The teachers are amazing. The students are all very smart and interesting, which really helps give energy to the room and motivate everyone. They do "sprint reflectiosn" every 2 days with students, so they can keep refining and improving the curriciulum. The stuff they're teaching you is on the cutting edge of modern web technology, and they teach it extremely well, which is why the job placement rate is 99%. Also, the salary numbers are completely accurate. I could go on, but just read the blog I wrote, because it details things much more.

I attended Hack Reactor in January 2014 and it was one of the best educational decisions I could have made.  HR has a fantastic all around software engineering curriculum with a focus on JavaScript.  

The lecture instructors are generally very helpful and always encourage the students to stop lecture when something is not understood.  The material is a cumulative reflection of all the students that have come before and evaluated its effectiveness, so the lectures are pretty much on point with delivery and the material covered.  You will learn more about JavaScript in a few weeks than you could teach yourself in a few years, easily. 

About the curriculum:

Every morning starts out with a toy problem to work on and a solution lecture.  They are questions and problems you will see in your technical interviews. 

There are a few weeks of 2 day sprints that encompass things a full-stack engineer might use on a day to day basis.  The curriculum does, as mentioned, change frequently but I think the general outline is still that you'll learn a couple front end frameworks, databases, server-side programming, deployment, testing. The sprints are fun and will have you building or solving something new every few days.  These are usually kicked off with a quick lecture to get you familiar with what you're about to be using but not meant to give away too much.  During sprints there is a help system that students can use to get "unstuck".  Help requests are answered by a variety of people including alumni, hackers-in-residence, staff, etc. 

There are two project periods where teams of students can either go offsite and work for a client on something they need done or work on a project of their own.  This is the real meat of the course and where you will learn a ton about engineering.  This experience varies depending on who you work for, who you work with and what your project is but in my opinion, you get what you paid for during this time period.  There is no substitute for actually building something substantial.  

Hack Reactor excels in Job Assistance.  There is a period of time dedicated to it in the program.  You will have professional help on resumes, interviewing techniques, technical interview questions, and social media.  You will participate in a hiring day with some super exciting Bay Area companies (we had apple, facebook, bigcommerce, a smattering of various stage start-ups, etc..) and get a chance to have a lightning talk with them and a social event after to get your foot in the door even further with those you liked most.  Hack Reactor will also continue to help you with getting a job long after your course is done and you will be welcomed into any hiring day events if you are needing to find a new job.

At the end, you'll be in a very marketable and employable position.  Most people have jobs within a month or so of graduation, some longer or shorter than that.  

All in all, if you're even thinking about applying, do it.  Hack Reactor is a solid choice and you will definitely not regret attending.