App Academy

App Academy was an excellent and life changing experience for me. Sure there are some things that weren't perfect, but in the grand scheme of things, they are doing some really amazing stuff.

But prepare to work your ass off for up to 6 months, possibly more, during the program and probably even more during the job search. It is not a golden ticket into a job, but a helpful foot in the door of the industry, and the fastest possible way to go from zero to being able to write and understand code.

As far as outcome, I got a job as a Full Stack Software Engineer at $105K, and it took me about 1.5 months out of the program to land the job.

App Academy was an amazing life experience that I encourage anyone to attend that is looking to transition into the software industry. 

After grinding in finance for 2 years, I was concerned that I would never gain the skills needed to join the fast growing tech industry. Enter App Academy. I attended the SF cohort in March 2016, and in roughly 3 months, they took me from a programming newbie into a software engineer able to push production level code. One month later, I landed a back end engineering position earning roughly $120K.

The secret to the program's success is that the incentives are aligned. UNLIKE ANY OTHER BOOT CAMP, App Academy does not charge you tuition until you are hired. Consequently, the curriculum is extremely hands on and tailored to you gaining the knowledge to be employable. You largely avoid the trivial academic exercises found in a traditional CS program and instead focus on building skills that make you an excellent programmer for companies. 

PROS

• No tuition fees until you start working (only a refundable security deposit is due upfront, and it is credited towards tuition payments)
• Excellent lecturers and personalized support from TAs every day to help you when you are stuck on projects and offer advice to write better code
• Career-driven curriculum to help learn the most important skills companies hire for
• Beyond thoroughly learning web development, you understand the general concepts needed to teach yourself new languages and technologies efficiently

CONS

• Intense programming camp that requires constant effort during and after class hours
• Exceptional self-motivation and time management is needed to survive. You have to be willing to keep up with all assignments and tests, even while job hunting 

BOTTOM LINE
If you are an extremely motivated individual that needs a fresh start in technology, App Academy is your best option. It is a roller coaster of an experience but the intensity pays dividends for you when you are interviewing and on the job.

I was a graduate student in a humanities field, scraping by on ~15k a year to qualify for a professor position that I never really wanted and wouldn't have been prepared for. (Let alone could have gotten in the state the jobs market is in with academia).

I heard about AppAcademy back in the beginning, paid my $3k deposit and moved to New York, and worked my ass off for 12 weeks drinking copious amounts of coffee and learning to code. From the first day of coding to the last day of negotiating my final job offer, a/A was behind me all the way (although I did have to tap into a couple other networks to get hired at a place I liked).

Now I make ~120k a year doing something I'm good at. AppAcademy was and is completely brilliant for making its tuition dependent on first year's wages -- the incentives to create the right curriculum and provide the right support and totally aligned, and it really shows.

AppAcademy was great. They maintained a very focused culture. You get the sense they want you to succeed. If you come ready to work and learn, you will not be dissappointed.

My only complaints are that they failed to mention 2 things prior to signing up. The first being that there's a down payment. The second was that the last 2 weeks were purely job preparation.

There are definitely bootcamps out there that are predatory, and simply accept a high number of students, take their money up front, and then dump them out into the real world without much hope of getting a good job. 

App Academy is not one of those, primarily because you only pay them after you get a job. Nearly everyone in my cohort had a high quality and high paying software engineering job within a few months of graduating. 

It's a massive time committment, but I can't think of any way to do as drastic a career change in as short a time. 

Pros: 
- Well-managed culture, which fostered cooperation rather than competition 
- Extremely supportive network, easy to get help, especially from alumni 
- Curriculum is constantly updated to account for new industry trends 
- Deferred, scaling tuition structure is extremely appealing (pay based on what you earn) 
- Assessment structure ensures that students don't fall behind; from my experience, while the best students across top bootcamps are comparable, App Academy's 'worst' students are far better than the 'worst' students from other boot camps

Cons: 
- Availability of resources drastically dropped in the last third of the program ("job search curriculum"); internal tools for this portion of the curriculum were surprisingly poorly designed given the nature of the boot camp 
- Severe limitation of TA availability at times during practical coding sessions (being improved with reorganization and increased hiring) 
- Drastically differing lecture quality (some were on par with my best college professors, others were absolutely useless -- fortunately in the minority) 
- Algorithms curriculum is disorganized and not as helpful as it could be 
- Assessments are too easy to perfect score, meaning the margin of error for passing is very low. Thus, students who fail seem to do so most often from dev env problems or anxiety vs. not understanding the material. Assessments should be made harder, with an easier passing score, to account for ceiling effects and to present a more accurate mean / median.

Other Notes: 
- More effort can be done to address burnout. Due to the fast pace and challenging nature of the work, many students stop to take a breather once the pressure is off... and never start again. Not listed as a 'con' because this honestly should be the students' responsibility over App Academy, but it is an area where App Academy can make a large impact. App Academy can organize group projects, accountability groups for job seekers, etc. 
- Algorithms curriculum received a major upgrade around when I left; from what I can see, there is much more of a formalized structure now

Pros.... you don't have to pay until you get a job is good for some people. The office is nice and centrally located. The ratio of TAs to students is good. Some of the projects are very interesting and unique to A/A (you get to create your own object relational mapper for example). They do cover data structures and algorithms which are important for interviews.

Cons... Their "money-back" guarantee contract is actually ridiculous. You only don't have to pay tuition if you search for an entire year after the program is over and don't find a job (you aren't allowed to hold even part-time work in your previous position for that entire year).

They test their students every week and kick out the students who don't perform well, so this inflates their statistics on percentage of students who find a job vs other bootcamps who don't kick out students. Plus it makes everyone way stressed out. Even so, their time to placement is way too long (after 3 months, ~50% of grads are employed), compare that to Hack Reactor's stats of 80%!). 

They have terrible post-graduation job support that mostly involves pushing students to bulk-spam companies. Basically, forget about picking where you want to work, just get an offer anywhere that will give you one because let's face it, we're in a coding bootcamp bubble. There are now way more bootcamp graduates than there are openings for junior-level software engineers in SF and most employers don't think A/A graduates are any better/different from Dev Bootcamp/General Assembly/Coding Dojo, etc grads. All students are required to submit 200+ applications to companies.

TAs are 99% recently graduated students who did well in the course but have no work experience as software engineers or experience finding jobs in this field.

The whiteboarding pair practice is unusual and useful for most people, though as a math major I'd been accidentally practicing it for years. The curriculum in Rails is nothing special but solid; the JS curriculum was as well, though they've switched to React since then. The algorithms sessions cover most of what you need to know and some cool stuff you don't but should.

The job search 'help' wasn't. They had one clueless person; now there are several failed grads who couldn't cut it as instructors playing high school guidance counselor.

My advice: Sure, apply; they're fairly selective and you're in good shape if they accept you. But then turn them down, because they're not actually worth it.

I would definitely recommend App Academy to anyone looking to switch career paths into full stack development. The structured curriculum and pair programming definitely helped me get through the 85-90 hour weeks. It definitely takes self-drive to get through the program but I can assure you will come out with a great knowledge of Ruby on Rails, React, Redux and computer science fundamentals. The instructors are always there to help, and so are your cohort-mates!

If you are interested in software development and willing to devote yourself full time to the program, App Academy will give you the skills to succeed in a developer role. Be prepared to spend upwards of 90 hours per week learning the material, and be ready to do this for 12 weeks straight - as soon as you start to come to grips with one topic, lectures begin on the next. The pace is rigorous to say the least.

That said, the payoff is immeasurable and the experience unquestionably positive. I've never learned so much so short a span of time, all while surrounded by diverse peers of incredible ability. I can't recomend the program enough for those willing to devote the time necessary.

Pros:
- people
- learn a lot of stuff( Ruby on Rails, React/Redux, Javascript)
- great TA's

Cons:
- no time for anything else
- super fast-paced

Attending App Academy has been one of the most rewarding experiences I've had. There were many times where I felt completely lost, but the TA staff at App Academy was always super accommodating and willing to patiently teach any of us that needed the help. If you are willing to drop everything and commit 9 weeks to see if coding is for you, there isn't a program out there I'd recommend more so than App Academy.

I enjoyed the program overall. It was stressful though dealing with the tests and the daily checkin times. After completing the code intensive part of the curriculum I felt like I had a good understand of the materials, but I would need more time to cement the knowledge within me.  The teachers were very helpful and a good support system to have when things got stressful. It was a worth while program.