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Ask HN: Why are there so few reviews for coding bootcamps?

• zindlerb 11y ago
  Try yelp. Hack Reactor has 150+ Yelp reviews http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco
  • eastbayjake 11y ago
    There are also 87 Hack Reactor reviews on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Hack-Reactor https://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Hack-Reactor
  • FireBeyond 11y ago
    As good as the course sounds, and though it's small fish in the grand scheme, this turns me off: "Also, you get this hoodie for writing a review so...)" - http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco?hrid=mVJTsZiT6kT7DkTeI_vT9A http://www.yelp.com/biz/hack-reactor-san-francisco?hrid=mVJT...
    • accountatwork 11y ago
      That's shady. Normally, there's a bias such that people who are disgruntled are more likely to post a review than people who had a good experience. If you take that bias into account, a 4 star rating is pretty good, 5 stars is excellent, and so on. But if you flip that bias on its head, 5 stars becomes a mediocre rating. That's ok if you've disclosed what you've done, but out of 165 reviews only one mentions that people are incentivzed to write reviews with free swag.
      • davegonzalez 11y ago
        Disclosure; I graduated from Hack Reactor in October 2013. The lack of negative reviews may seem strange, but I genuinely believe that everyone who has written about HR does so in a sincere manner (whether it be positive or negative). I can understand how it seems shady, but with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.
        • accountatwork 11y ago
          > with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other. That's intuitive but factually incorrect. There's a large body of empirical research that shows that giving away trivial tokens has a significant impact. This is true for everything from charitable donations to sign-ups for services to survey responses. Not to mention ratings for college courses, which are, in the aggregate, more expensive than Hack Reactor.
          • accountatwork 11y ago
            I'm past the edit window here, but it's also not to the point. The point is that, by incentivizing reviews, you skew the sample of reviewers. Even if we didn't have decades of research showing that giving people toys changes their behavior, it would still change the sample of reviewers and make the rating both meaningless and misleading.
    • AlexWest 11y ago
      That's a valid point, but they are trying to incentivize behavior to fix the issue OP asks about, so it's probably a good thing overall (it's not a hoodie for 5-star reviews only).
    • wnmurphy 11y ago
      You get the same hoodie for writing a negative review.
• cenazoic 11y ago
  As a relatively recent bootcamp grad who hasn't written a review, here are my excuses/hypotheses for others who haven't: a) simple laziness. A good review takes time and thought to write, and the time isn't necessarily in the writing the review, but in processing the experience after graduation. By the time you have a more balanced (ie, graduated, employed/unemployed) perspective, you've probably moved on to other things. b) in my case, it's mostly due to general ambivalence about the experience. There were things I liked, things I thought weren't done well, and the overall effect is to cancel each other out. Ambivalence doesn't encourage taking the time (see above) to write down thoughts the way more extreme positive or negative views do. c) also specific to me: I genuinely liked the instructors and most of my cohort, and writing anything negative seems impolite - not wanting to hurt someone's feelings or seem ungrateful. Irrational, but there ya go.
  • colmvp 11y ago
    > c) also specific to me: I genuinely liked the instructors and most of my cohort, and writing anything negative seems impolite - not wanting to hurt someone's feelings or seem ungrateful. Irrational, but there ya go. I was reading Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance. In each of his shows for a tour, he polled the audience with two questions. How should you let a person who is interested in you know you aren't interested in them: Pretend to be busy, say nothing, or be honest? Overwhelmingly, most people practice the "pretend to be busy" and "say nothing" methods. Only a small sliver of the audience would say they were honest. He then asked the audience to pretend the situation is reversed. Someone else is dealing with you. How do you prefer they handle the situation? Overwhelmingly, the audience responded (with applauds) that they'd prefer the honest approach.
    • recursive 11y ago
      One reason we (collectively) might avoid honesty in that scenario is that we're afraid of a meltdown/confrontation/any kind of incident. When we're on the receiving end, we all know that "ourselves" are reasonable, so we'd never get into a fight over it. When we're delivering bad news to others, we can't be so sure.
• marktd 11y ago
  Many of the bootcamps are relatively young with not that many attendees per year. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: ~50 per cohort, 6 cohorts per year is 300 students per year, times 3 or so years is around a thousand total enrollees. 100 reviews is 10% of people reviewing - that seems pretty high to me. FWIW: I did a bootcamp, loved it, never wrote a review. Just laziness/generally don't write reviews for things. I would guess many people don't write reviews for the same reason.
  • pickitupsnake 11y ago
    Agree. ++ Second cohort at Flatiron School - it has grown up so much since then that there is a time relevance issue.
• MrDrone 11y ago
  Having done an online boot camp I can say at least part of it is not wanting to spread negative feedback that might devalue your investment. I imagine many people go into these programs to gain skills to get a job. If afterwards you talk about how the program failed to prepare you for that you're shooting yourself in the foot. As to why there aren't more positive reviews - maybe it's related?
  • pc86 11y ago
    > As to why there aren't more positive reviews - maybe it's related? I would look at the absolute lack of glowing 6/5 star reviews about how amazing these boot camps are as proof of exactly the opposite. There are presumably thousands of grads from the largest programs. If you can only get 50 or 100 people to write a review about how your $10,000 course helped them land a job, it should be a huge red flag about the actual value.
    • true_religion 11y ago
      I don't know about that. It's education. I've never written a review for my university experience, although I'm sure somewhere there's a venue for me to do so.
  • Joof 11y ago
    We got a lot of this in college. Thankfully it's big enough and I'm ambivalent enough that I can say my college education was largely worthless and the good parts often far less good than they could have been. At a 'good' school.
• ldn1854 11y ago
  I did a GA bootcamp, during which time we were all encouraged to blog about our experience on a weekly basis (and we did). I'm not sure where I'd necessarily write/post a proper review.
  • officialchicken 11y ago
    My GA review: I did GA coworking space before their pivot to full time bootcamp. Startups and an established community that had been there for years were all given one month notice at the end of the year and were kicked out... seats for learning are more profitable than desks for doing. Now all of the grads need jobs, which used to be across the hall. In summary, they're short sighted.
• elevenfist 11y ago
  One reason that also explains why there aren't many reviews of universities, relative to the number of people who attend: When your career depends in part upon the esteem of your degrees or certifications, speaking negatively about the source (uni, a camp) is disincentivized.
  • linkregister 11y ago
    Reviews of individual university classes are prolific. Last time I used one of these websites [1] (years ago), there weren't any compunctions about posting negative reviews. I know this isn't exactly responding to your comment, but I thought it fit. [1] ratemyprofessor.com
    • tonyarkles 11y ago
      As a total sidebar, my favourite ratemyprocessor.com review (of myself) reads as follows: "is always willing to help if you need help just make sure that you at least try for a bit before you go for help from Tony otherwise he will not help you." And yet the student rated me 5/5 for helpfulness and clarity. Makes me very happy inside to know that at least someone sees that that's a plus.
• skyyler 11y ago
  Kind of relevant: Are bootcamps worth it? I'm looking to get into programming, but I have a full time support job right now that I need to be able to live and eat. I can save my money and do a bootcamp, or I could learn how to program in my downtime. I'm not sure which route to go through. My friend did a local bootcamp and now he's doing ASP.NET work and loves it! I'm just scared of doing that specific one because I don't really have interest in anything microsoft.
  • afarrell 11y ago
    > learn to program in my downtime The hard part here is curation of resources and environment setup.
    • Terr_ 11y ago
      Right. Take carpentry as an analogy: If you decide to learn how to build anything big, you need to set up an area where you can safely make a little bit of a mess and you may also need to acquire arrange some tools. If you're not ready for that, then practice with some "birdhouse"-like projects.
    • jrumbut 11y ago
      It's funny to hear that because I just typed "learn to code" into Google and the first page (ads included!) are all fine and mostly free resources, many requiring only a web browser to start. Just 10 or 15 years ago the process was completely opaque, a lot of books in your local store had omissions or bugs that made them impossible to follow, it was a seriously frustrating process unless you stumbled into the right community, were a genius, or had lots of guidance.
      • trowawee 11y ago
        There're enough options that it can be overwhelming. It's hard to see the place to start, because if you're completely outside the bubble, it's hard to even know what the options are, or why you'd pick one of them. Say you type "learn to code" into Google. You go to Codeacademy, because it's the first option and maybe you've heard of it. You log in, then you go the courses page. You don't want to drop $20 on the personalized plan right away, so you skip that; you don't know what "web development" means, or how it's different from anything else, so you skip the web dev stuff. You go down to the language section - that's a good, basic start, right? - and you see six boxes: HTML & CSS: Learn how to create websites by structuring and styling your pages with HTML and CSS. JavaScript: Learn the fundamentals of JavaScript, the programming language of the Web. jQuery: Learn how to make your websites interactive and create animations by using jQuery. PHP: Learn to program in PHP, a widespread language that powers sites like Facebook. Python: Learn to program in Python, a powerful language used by sites like YouTube and Dropbox. Ruby: Learn to program in Ruby, a flexible language used to create sites like Codecademy. Apparently you can use...all of these things to build websites? And they're all languages? The goals section is better, because those are concrete things that make some of these choices for you, but your rookie who just wants to learn some code and maybe see if they like this is already being asked to make a bunch of choices with relatively little data. And when they start researching, they're going to find a bunch of sites that say PHP sucks, a bunch that say the criticism of PHP is overrated, a bunch that say Ruby is the best beginner language, a bunch that say Ruby is terrible, and a bunch of math nerds (<3 u, python). Plus, they're going to stumble into the CF that is the wide world of JavaScript. None of this makes it impossible, but choice paralysis is a real issue, and I know a fair number of people who want to get started coding, but can't figure out where to get a handhold. That's one of the benefits of bootcamps - they make some of the initial choices for you, so you can get started learning the building blocks. Weirdly, I think that well-written books (huge caveat) might be better, because they do something similar: lock you in a path and then tell you to put your nose to the grindstone and get to work.
• mdeggies 11y ago
  I believe there can be legal repercussions if you write negative reviews about some of these bootcamps.
• cpymchn 11y ago
  I'm a grad... and I would say part of the phenomena -- and this might sound corny but I will explain -- is how bootcamps are a personal journey. By that I mean the entry point for most participants are all different, the expectations for most participants are all different, the experience for most participants are all different (some students work harder than others), and the outcomes are all different. I felt there was more to learn than there was time (I did a 12 week course), so how I felt after graduating was largely a reflection of my own confidence and ability in contrast to the effort I put in and not a direct reflection of the quality of the instruction. The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition [0] is a useful reference here. Any program that claims you will gain mastery over a discipline in a dozen weeks is lying to you. The guys that ran my bootcamp were plain about that. They said they would help me help myself learn... which they did but not to the level I really wanted to get to. And that more than anything is why I am ambivalent about recommending them. -------- 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisi...
• throwaway847027 11y ago
  A number of employers (at least in SV) are so biased against bootcamps that the only sensible course of action is to pretend it never happened as soon as is feasible. If you review a bootcamp, you risk a permanent association with having attended a bootcamp.
• xiaoma 11y ago
  I wrote a fairly detailed review on my blog. http://logicmason.com/2013/hack-reactor-review-life-at-a-hacker-school/ http://logicmason.com/2013/hack-reactor-review-life-at-a-hac... It lead to several sites emailing me and asking me to write a review or to link to their sites. Here is what I wrote to coursereport: >By completely ignoring the issue of student outcomes, your resource does prospective students a disservice. How about listing average salaries, listing graduation rates, linking to yelp profiles and linking to student directories for those schools confident enough in their outcomes to share them? I hadn't looked at any of these sites in a long time, but to the best of my knowledge, very little has changed. They offer a comparison only of the costs of the various options, not the value. The person who emailed me did seem to express some vague interest in adding that kind of information later but two years later it's still not there. At least for me, the main reason I avoided the "bootcamp review" sites is that I didn't feel any would have given me useful guidance as a prospect (whereas Quora, Yelp and HN threads would have if they'd been around when I applied).
  • jhylau 11y ago
    Disclaimer: I run switchup.org The reason we don't have average salaries and grad rates is because the only org publishing that is the school itself. Can we trust that number? Has it been reviewed/audited by a third-party? Only one school does that and we report their number on the site. However, we constantly publish data on industry trends and overall placement rates and job stats to help guide the conversation. https://www.switchup.org/research/coding-bootcamp-survey https://www.switchup.org/research/coding-bootcamp-survey We do have independent school by school database of job outcomes based on our independent surveys, but sample sizes are generally small and we are not at liberty to disclose school specific info.
    • xiaoma 11y ago
      Yes, I've encountered this argument. Are you aware of the legal trouble a school misrepresenting its numbers would be open to? It's extremely useful to include self-reported salaries and hiring stats. That's actually one of the key pieces of information I myself was looking at. List the stat and link to or summarize or link to their explanation of how it was calculated. As for your own independent surveys, they are almost certainly far less accurate than that of the schools themselves. Considering the effects of selection bias on top of those of the small sample size you mentioned before I suspect they're essentially useless for someone making a decision. Similarly, what good are "overall stats" that average the results of random respondents from world class institutions, low-end operations, experiments and all kinds of other projects? It would be kind of like looking at "overall stats" for a bucket of participating businesses who had taken money from YC, Techstars, unknown funds, crowdfunding, banks or their parents. That would yield some data, but the data wouldn't be useful for an entrepreneur actually considering taking on funding. I don't think bootcamp review sites (except possibly Yelp) "help guide the conversation". I think they tend to mask the huge gulf between the several schools that a fantastic investment and the many more that aren't.
• trowawee 11y ago
  I loved my bootcamp experience, am still plugged into the alumni network, am not ashamed of it (why would I be?), but I'm probably never going to write a review of it. I'm happy to talk to people about it, but I'm not going to take the time to go write a review. There's no particular pay-off for me, and besides, the program changes constantly; I mentor where I graduated and in the 1.5 years since I finished, tons of things have changed in terms of how they organize things. I'd feel like an idiot if I said, "Oh, this was a part I didn't like," and then somebody who worked there emailed me and said "Hey, that doesn't exist any more." (Which has happened, except in conversational form.) And sure, I'll freely cop to self-interest here. Bootcamp grads get enough shit from people in tech who want to dick-measure. I'm not going to do anything to further the cause of people who already think I'm an incompetent chimp with a keyboard. Also, like the SwitchUp person already said in this thread, there's no reliable source of data for outcomes. I can tell you how long it took to get a job and what I made fresh out of the course, but why would you believe me, especially if you're already primed, like a bunch of people here clearly are, to believe that bootcamps are bullshit and their grads are rubes desperate to cover up the fact they got bilked? Maybe I'm just a plant; maybe I get paid a combined $200k a year by DBC/GA/HR/Flatiron to fire up 100 sockpuppets and argue that bootcamps are a good investment to con people on Reddit/HR/wherever. (That actually sounds like a super fun, super immoral job. Maybe I can trick them into actually paying me to do that. OR MAYBE I AM STILL MESSING WITH YOU. ~spirit fingers~)
• Joof 11y ago
  Theory: If you disliked it, reviewing it poorly could reduce the credibility of your education. If you liked it, you don't care enough to review it.
• lsiebert 11y ago
  Hmm... there is probably space for a service here. Find out who applies to boot camps, interview them, find out who gets accepted to boot camps, interview them, then interview the graduates and any drop outs/people cut after the program is over. Use questions drawn from standard sociological and psychological surveys like the Grit-S Scale http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20Scale.05312011.pdf http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20S... Provide ratings and info to the general public that don't just show rates, but trends, who drops out, comparisons of success rates for different groups, etc. Provide more structured but still anonymous feedback, for a price, to bootcamps as a consultant, or get a grant from a large tech firm. Publish papers in conjunction with academia on a delay. I think what bootcamps could do, if they were willing to, is be much more agile in changing how they work based on research then a 4 year school, and actually do research and experiments to find better ways of teaching, and improve the industry as a whole.
• deleted 11y ago
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