Hackbright Academy

It was an intense 12-week journey, learning both front-end and back-end technologies. As the only deaf student in the class, I faced challenges like the language barrier. I am extremely grateful for the patience, encouragement, and support from my instructors, supportive cohort mates, and everyone who took the time to communicate with me and help me make decisions throughout the project. Seeing the website I built and the code I wrote after just 12 weeks, I can hardly believe the progress I've made and the realization of my initial goals.

I spent months researching coding schools, considering technology stacks, program length, graduation rates, average salary of grads, etc. There were a couple of schools on my short list, but I decided to go with HackBright mainly because it promotes women in engineering and I was looking for the support the school offered. I applied and paid for the software engineering prep program, and was all set to start. The last step was to sign the Student Agreement. It was all pretty routine stuff until about the middle of the document. They require you to sign off on the school/parent company using your student biographical information, any photos/videos of you (think zoom), voice, etc. in perpetuity, without compensation, and in any way they want. Further, after graduation if/when you find a job, you must agree to provide the school with a signed copy of your employment offer letter, and again give the school permission to publish that information any way they choose, in perpetuity, and without compensation. I really wanted to attend the school, and I asked the admissions advisor if I could strike those items from the agreement and still attend, and they said no. In the end I decided against attending the school because of the student agreement.  While I have no experience with the Instructors or Curriculum, I am giving them three stars because I cannot submit this this review without rating them.

My review will be somewhat unique for a couple of reasons:
1. I took the part-time course on a full-time basis (i.e. I didn't have a concurrent job similar to most of my cohort-mates in the part-time program).
2. I enrolled in a coding interview preparation bootcamp immediately after Hackbright where I learned data structures and algorithms.

If you can afford to take the part-time program on a full-time basis, I highly recommend it.  There is a lot of material/ topics to cover and if you're coming from a completely non-technical background (such as myself), the ability to rewatch parts of the lectures that you may not have fully understood or the ability to practice coding on the side using CodeAcademy helped solidify my understanding of the topics in a more sustainable way.  

Pros:
- I left the bootcamp having learned both Python and Javascript feeling comfortable coding in both (note that I took the option to learn/use React in my capstone project).  Many other bootcamps only teach Javascript.
- I thought the instructors were quite good.  They explain the topics well and they go above and beyond to answer all of our questions both in the live sessions as well as meeting with us outside of school hours to resolve any issues we may be having.
- I enjoyed the labs and I thought they were practical and solidified my understanding of the material.
- It was quite helpful to me to be able to get recordings of the lectures both ahead of time (from previous cohorts) and after the fact so that I could study ahead of the class or review material that I may not have fully understood the first time.
- Hackbright has a positive reputation amongst employers.  There was a couple of times in interviews/info chats when an engineer commented on the quality of engineers coming from Hackbright.
- I rather enjoyed being in an all women's bootcamp; my cohort-mates were motivated and delightful and it was a positive and supportive learning environment.
- Hackbright provides us with mentors (software engineers who are in industry) and my mentor was critical in my getting the job offers that I did.  He practiced whiteboarding with me on a weekly basis for months.  While not every mentor does this, a cohort-mate told me that she asked for a new mentor and Hackbright provided her with one.
- Hackbright organized a career fair at which several employers attended.  All of the employers were eager to interview us and I got an offer from the one employer that I chose to interview with.

Cons: 
- Sometimes administrative or scheduling related things can be disorganized.
- There isn't enough time put towards data structures and algorithms or whiteboarding.  As mentioned earlier, I did a separate interview coding bootcamp where I learned data structures (and my mentor helped me significantly with whiteboarding) and I highly recommend considering something similar.  While Hackbright will teach you how to code, it's up to you to learn DS&A and practice whiteboarding such that you can successfully pass technical interviews.
- Hackbright's set up isn't very conducive to using React easily in our final projects.  The Python and Flask backend (and Hackbright's set up) made it such that we couldn't easily import React libraries so I had to find workarounds to implement the 4 APIs in my project (but I was able to do this successfully and the instructors/advisors did provide resources to help me).

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While everyone has different experiences, I ultimately ended up getting multiple job offers within 3 months of graduation, but one reason for this is that I put so much emphasis on learning data structures and algorithms and on practicing whiteboarding that for every job for which I got a face-to-face interview, I was able to successfully get an offer (and this includes a company that came to Hackbright's career fair). 

In summary, when preparation meets opportunity, amazing things can happen.

Pros - If you don't know anything and don't mind not learning much for your 1k+/week program, Hackbright is the place for you.
Cons- It will be very difficult for you to find a job. Outcomes will tell you your resume looks great, keep grinding and to "be prepared for a paycut" - Staff are almost all recent HB grads, not teachers or experienced SWEs. This means they are still learning and are often unable to answer questions outside of a very basic range. Our lead instructor failed out of another bootcamp, did the HB program and was unable to find a job so they hired her to be a lead instructor. That is the quality of instruction you can expect.- Hackbright will not protect your financial information. A student's full name, address, and bank information were "unintentionally" emailed to another student. I'm not sure that they notified that student, which they are required by CA law to do.- Instructors frequently did not understand their own demos. More than once admitted that they hadn't reviewed the slides prior to lecture.- Curriculum is poorly thought out, incomplete, and lacks appropriate confirmatory work.
- Slides, homework, and assessments are riddled with meaning-altering errors. When students complained, we were told "you should have seen how bad it used to be"- Help is unavailable during queue hours. Hackbright says wait times of up to 30 minutes are acceptable. Many, many students including myself waited hours or days for help that never came on multiple occasions. HB acknowledges that this was unacceptable but didn't do anything to solve it.- Staff frequently complained of being overworked, being busy with other cohorts, or being too tired to participate in scheduled queue times or to give full effort during lectures. - You will be held back by the slowest learners in your cohort during project season. No help for projects was available until after every student completed their data models, which took almost a full week.
- Zero support for project demos for Windows users - Watch out if you are trans of nonbinary, you will consistently be misgendered and brushed off- Assessments are not graded in a timely fashion. We waited FIVE WEEKS for one assessment to be graded and 2+ weeks for all but one other. If you are doing something wrong, you won't know until the program ends and good luck teaching yourself at that point. Hackbright admits this has been a problem "for some time" but has done nothing to fix it.- Use old tech. Who still uses vagrant? - Instructors encouraged anyone who was ahead to use React for their projects, then refused to support the students using React, using the excuse that it is not part of the curriculum - then why did you tell us to use it??? I can teach myself a new framework with no help or resources on my own time.- Hackbright took a full month to do an "investigation" of our experience and determined that it was in line with what they promise and intend to deliver. 

I've just finished Hackbright and am disappointed. They have not transitioned well from in person to online and I think the quality has gone done considerably since they were bought by Capella education in 2016 (Capella was then bought by SEI in 2018 which may also be a factor). Personally, I regret coming to HB and wish I had chosen a different bootcamp (or just self-studied) but also acknowledge they are definitely not the worst out there. Several of us did express dissatisfaction with the program and after a "review" our experience was considered in alignment to their standards so anyone looking at bootcamps can expect to have a similar experience to mine at Hackbright. Here are my main issues so you can make an informed decision.
The negatives

• Not a challenging program - the mentality seemed to be relax, don't worry, don't push yourself too much which is the opposite of what I was looking for. If you have no background at all in tech and want a very supportive environment this can be good but if you want to finish a bootcamp and be somewhat competitive in the job market, this is not the program for you. Almost everything I learned in the program was through self-study. The classes were very slow and honestly, I learned more from the pre-work than the classes. Also, most staff had limited programming knowledge which meant they were unable to answers more in-depth questions. I'm lucky to have friends in tech so I had a network of people who could help me/answer my questions the staff wasn't able to but that obviously isn't the case for everyone.
• Hackbright staff is spread too thin and which resulted in:
  • Fewer than anticipated advising sessions for some (I had 4 over the course of 12 weeks)
  • Multiple weeks to get feedback on our assessments (there are a total of 7 assessments. One took 4 weeks to get feedback on)
  • Long turn-around period to get questions answered. There is a system of asking questions to a channel and then staff helping people in the order the question was received. Best case scenario it took a few hours to get questions answers but worst case it took some people days. This was problematic when we were working on projects. Also, because of the aforementioned staff's lack of knowledge - asking questions in the channel was frequently a waste of time. 
  • No code reviews. At all. The entire 12 weeks of the program.
• Friday check in was called "feeling circle" - I came here to learn to code and being expected to share our feelings with a group of strangers was extremely uncomfortable and weird. 

The positives

• I got GREAT mentors out of the program. However, these mentors are 100% volunteer - just people who volunteer to be mentors and I just got lucky to happen to be matched with two really great people.
• The network and support system the students built to help each other is great. We did learn a lot helping each other out and teaching each other the concepts out of necessity. For example, React wasn't fully taught as part of the curriculum so a group of us worked together to teach ourselves. 

Some notes: I think the experience is largely dependent on the instructor assigned to your cohort. That being said, the cohort before ours had several dissatisfied students and at least one of the other ongoing cohorts is having similar frustrations so even with different instructors, something is going wrong. Also, keep in mind that bootcamps are for-profit education which can be problematic. I knew this coming in and expected that the "change the ratio" slogan was at least part marketing but still, even with (I felt) realistic expectations, I was very disappointed. I regret wasting my money. 

What I enjoyed about Hackbright Academy was the support system they have. Everyone is very supportive and helpful. Learning to become a software engineer is frightening, but Hackbright helps you to believe you can do it. 

What I found challenging about the part-time class was studying after work.  I would study on my bed, but would end up falling asleep. I got myself a desk and monitor, this helped me put in more study hours and kept me from falling asleep.

I liked the pace of 6 months. In the beginning of the program it felt strange seeing myself as a software engineer. As time passed by and continued to learn/code, I began to see myself as a software engineer. 

I enjoyed the lectures, labs, fieldstrips, career talks, projects, whiteboarding and skills assessments. I had a great experience and enjoyed my time at Hackbright Academy.