Devmountain

I am really surprised that DevMountain has such a high score. After reading several reviews online I decided to attend DevMountain thinking I made a great choice. However, I was really disapointed by the program. Let's first talk about instructors. They claim on their website that they have several website but I only saw on full-time instructor and several guest speakers. Then they claim that they have lectures all day by the instructors which is not true. Instructor only gives lecture for one hour the rest of the day you spend your time on your own. Mentors are available to help but you need to wait for them since the class is over crowded. Some of the mentors are not even qualified to be there. Instead of helping they will confuse you. 

Also, they claim that thier students find job whitin three months which is not true. If you go on linkedin and look for their students majority of them are jobless. 

My advise, do  not make the same mistake which I did, go find some other bootcamps make sure to reseach and actually attend the school for  a day. 

I am so happy that I took the  class at DevMountian. The teachers, top professionals from the industry, were awesome, and cared so much for our success. After graduating, I got hired right away to work on some awemome tech, and it has completely changed my life. I have so much more time to spend with my family, I am having so much fun and really love what I do, and I literally tripled my income. I completely recommend this program, and this team to you. Turn your life around!

Devmountain is a great program for those who already understand code and have experience coding. I went into the cohort thinking I could start from a beginners level and gain enough experience to get a job. This was not the case at all. All the people who came into the class in the same situation as me either quit weeks in or finished the class and weren't enough close to having the skill set to get a job. If you are going to do the class, make sure you already know how to code well, and just want to refine your skills.

I graduated from the summer iOS immersive cohort about 1 month ago. I started with absolutely no coding experience or knowledge and was able to land a job interview the Monday after we graduated and was extended a job offer 2 days later. I now work full time at an awesome company contributing on an app that I actually use. DevMountain is definately hard, it took 60+ hours of my time a week and there were days I wanted to quit. You definately get what you put into it, if you show up everyday and do all the projects you are going to learn. If you take days off or dont participate in the lessons you will fall behind. Overall I had a great experience, DevMountain has great people and is a great learning environment, that being said it is always evolving, the curriculum is always changing and the program is always getting better. Something that has, in my opinion, really increased the value of the program is the job assistance. Jeff Chapman did a great job of putting on a job fair/ demo day for my class and I got my job as a direct result of the connections I made on that day. So for me it was definately worth the time and investment.

THE RESULTS:

• First week after DevMountain, I got 10 interviews and got 6 job offers

• I ended up taking a job at Jane.com where I literally tripled my salary

• I've build and deployed 3 full blown projects from end to back -- one of them (Mailpants.com a Mailchimp clone) has sent over 300,000 emails since I built it 3 months ago.

• I've been a major contributor at my startup (did all front end work at Toastio.com, Untorch.com)

• I wake up and do what I love each day

• I continue to be contacted by recruiters each week (Domo and Amazon among others)

DEVMOUNTAIN:

Is DevMountain for everyone? Definetively not. If you are one of those people that expects the world to feed you with a golden spoon, you will hate DevMountain, and you probably hate your life too.

But, if you are willing to work hard, and if you find interest in computers (programming, html/css, etc.), I honestly, cannot think of a better place to launch your career.

MY STORY:

I started doing some html/css for my startup, and found that I really really liked it. So I want to a few Universities to see if I could get some formal education on computer science. All respectable Universities rejected me (partially because I already had an undergrad education -- B.S. in Business). And the few where it was available where bad Universities or Institutions where they also required me to take an additional 2 years of irrelevant courses before I could dive into CS.  Not to mention that all formal education would require 2 - 4 years of my life and a considerable amount of money and sacrifices.

DevMountain, on the other hand, was (comparing it to a formal education) waaaay more affordable and only a three month program.  Don't get me wrong, I had a conversation with my wife in which we decided to approach my DevMountain education as my "master's degree."  While some students were leaving at 5pm every day, I was leaving at 2 am. While most people arrived at 9 am, I was already coding by 8 am. While some students did the work once, I did it 2 or 3 times. While some people took the weekend off, I was there all Saturday. I freaking loved what I was doing I was having dreams about code, and (sometimes) would wake up with some solutions to a problem I was facing.

Why do I mention that? You really get out of it what you put in. But there is no way I could have done it without DevMountain.  I tried it for a few months before, and it sucked. The environment was just perfect for me: The instructors were great and super accessible (I still stay in touch with several of them). The mentors were extremely helpful and knowledgeable.  They listened to my concerns and made some adjustments to make sure I was happy with my learning. The facility was legit.

P.S. I'm not saying getting a formal education is a bad thing. It just wasn't for me.

THE STACK:

DevMountain's focus on the MEAN stack is right on. MEAN is a great first stack -- strongly recommend it.  I also recommend trying different things as you keep maturing as a programmer. You should never stop learning.

WOULD YOU DO IT AGAIN?

Knowing the outcome of Devmountain, if you had to go back in time, would you take DevMountain again? That's an obvious yes.

CONCLUSION:

Is DevMountain a 5 star school? Based on my story and results, you tell me.

DevMountain was definitely one of the best decisions I have ever made. I had no prior experience in any type of development before starting the program. All I had was a passion to start a new career in mobile development and the drive to make the most out of my experience at DevMountain. DevMountain gives you all the tools you need to succeed as a junior developer, and continue to grow and learn, long after the course is over. It is up to the developer to put in the hard work and take advantage of all the resources available to them. The few people I know who disliked their experience at DevMountain were the ones who put in little effort and expected the most out of it. DevMountain one of the best bootcamps out there right now. They do more for their students than most bootcamps, with housing and financing throught the school. That was the deciding point for me, and I don't regret it one bit!!

I was trying to make a career change. So I tried DevMountain. At the end of the course, I knew javascript, Angular, and node,  I got a web development job, and I love my work!!!! 

Instructers are very knowlegeable. Mentors helped me stay motivated when I am getting stuck. :) Overall, very friendly environment to learn. 

Going to DevMountain really changed my life drastically. 

I had no computer science background. So there was a lot to learn. But I was provided precourse material which helped me to have basic knowledge I needed to have to catch up with other students who are more tech savvy. If you are excited and proactive about learning, DevMountain will be perfect for you!!!!!

I was a student at Devmountain in 2014, I had high hope for employment and honestly Devmountain made us think that. Going into Devmountain I knew nothing, I did the precourse work which helped but didn't really get me going, it basically just got me familar with tags and what not. During my time at Devmountain the teachers didn't really teach. Most the time they would live code in front of us and we were expected to catch onto what they were teaching and I felt if we didn't catch on they blamed it on us not trying hard enough on our personal time to learn. 

When I applied for Devmountain their website said 95% hire rate, I know for a fact only about 5% of my class actually got a job, many of us felt cheated decieved. I even had a teacher during one of my classes tell us " I don't think Devmountain would want me to say this but majority of you are not going to get a job". For just spending close to 5,000 bucks not to mention quiting a job and relocating to Utah, that wasn't something I was wanting to hear. Also they would have us do stuff to help us gets jobs, one example was writing up a resume and they would look over it. I sent it to the teacher and he never looked over it, and honestly most of the teachers were that way. I had one teacher that would avoid me, because I asked to many questions. Devmountain is a 75% teach yourself school, a lot of the time the things I learned were from watching youtube or figuring it out my self. Half way through the program I was wondering why I need Devmountain when I felt like I was teaching my self. I felt I should have just took 3 months off of work and taught myself vs spending the money. Most of what Devmountain had us do was watch youtube video or google it. I had one teacher that would sit in the back of the class and any time you asked a question he would say google it, and when you did and still couldn't find the answer he would repeat his google it phrase. 

Do I think Devmountain is worth it? No, I do not. If your thinking about going to get an awesome paying job and sweet career then think again. In the words of my Devmountain teacher "Majority of you will not get a job from this". So take it from a Devmountain teacher and don't come if you expect a job unless you all ready know how to code then it will probally help you get a job, if your starting off fresh with no skills then stay away if you think its the path to $40,000 + a year. If your just going to learn some new skills and nothing else then you will probably enjoy it(maybe not for the thousands of dollars you will put into it). 75% of Devmountains coding is self taught the other 25% you do get help so its up to you if the investment is worth the 25%.

Teacher help--- D- (the owner and maybe one other were the only teachers worth your time, everyone else wanted to show how smart they were and ended up not making sense.

School ----- c+( there were some good things about it, mainly the professional photos they took of us!)

Price----- f+(You spend more time teaching yourself then they do helping you)

I did like my time at Devmountain, but all these problems were real and I wanted to let people know whats it really is like before they decide to go to Devmountain or not, I hope it helps.

I just finished the Web Dev Immersive course in Provo, and DevMountain met or exceeded every expectation I had. This is a school that is invested in your success more than any other program I've ever been a part of. One of the things I like most is that they are genuinely trying to constantly improve. If one of the lessons was a bit over people's heads, the lead instructor would come in and spend the afternoon answering questions and clearing things up. If you want to get into coding, this program is as good as it gets!

Before reading this review, I want to say that all of the facts I've provided below came from searching around on LinkedIn profiles, talking to other members of my cohort and the people that work/teach at DevMountain. I'm not saying they aren't all true, just that this is all to the best of my knowledge and research. For example, there may be a few more people that have found jobs I don't know about but haven't updated their LinkedIn profiles or otherwise made that information available yet.

I graduated in the DM4 Web Development Immersive cohort in August 2015. Of the around 30 members of my cohort, a month later I can only find 5 of us that have found jobs and 3 of those jobs were at DevMountain itself as mentors/assistants. Furthermore, 1 of the 2 non-DevMountain hired students was someone who had been designing and creating websites/apps long before even attending DevMountain. For those 3 jobs offered to students to work at DevMountain, they were all selected mainly because they played integral roles in their group projects. These were all for internal tools the lead instructor wanted made for use in future cohorts. They hired them to stick around to support those tools. I heard this from multiple people who work/teach at DevMountain. Worth noting, this was not disclosed beforehand as a factor for selection to be hired by DevMountain as mentors and many of us that hoped to continue on working and learning there had no knowledge our selection of project had effectively discounted us from the running.

The course material was actually not that bad albeit only slightly better than what can be found online since most instructors taught mainly by live coding in front of the class and didn't always elaborate on the concepts themselves. It seemed like some just hoped you picked it up by watching them code instead of explaining the what, when, where, why, etc. that really helps cement the material in your head. Therefore, some topics were very hard to grasp come project time. What was really odd to me throughout the cohort was that they never shared or wanted to share (I asked many times) the calendar of who was teaching what on which day. I guess this is mainly because people might not show up if a certain instructor was teaching that day since some were, to be brutally honest, mostly useless in helping you fully grasp the concepts. Basically, a lot of self-teaching is required here, so please do not to sign up thinking everything will be handed to you. There were definitely some great instructors there though, specifically Merrick Christensen and Daniel Kesler.

The job assistance at DevMountain is basically non-existent and to be completely fair was never advertised to exist in the first place. I think a lot of us got excited when they hired on Jeff Chapman to help work on this and kind of saw it as the start of a job assistance department. This however must have been optimistic thinking because I still honestly haven't even been contacted since graduating over a month ago as I continue on aimlessly in my (so far) fruitless job search.

In the end, the question that really matters is: In my time at DevMountain, did I learn to code great Web Applications? The answer is both yes and no. I came in starting from basically zero knowledge and ended my time there being able to create full stack applications with great functionality from scratch. However, I feel like around half of this was due to personal study and perseverance and not from the school's curriculum itself. Also, the whole UI/UX portion of making your websites/apps look great along with working great is very much not emphasized, but I've heard this about almost all of the JavaScript-centric bootcamps, including the biggest ones.

To summarize all this up:

- What did DevMountain excel at? Teaching us the core and some of the advanced concepts of JavaScript and many of the popular frameworks and utilities such as AngularJS, NodeJS, MongoDB and Mongoose along with basic HTML/CSS/jQuery/ReactJS.

- What would I improve? Spend less time on breaks and working on solo projects and more time on learning concepts to make us more hirable. Almost 4 weeks of the class (including the one week of break aka Interim Week) are spent working on personal projects which to me is not a valuable use of time when there are so many more concepts that we could learn or spend time elaborating on. The idea of having a week long break in the middle of the class to me is wrong to me as well. We only have 3 months to learn as much as we can before trying to start our career, we need all the time we can get. Also, definitely make job assistance part of the budget. As I said before, almost all of us are having issues getting hired, from my cohort at least.

I wrote this review because I currently would not recommend this course for someone looking to start a career in Web Development. From what I've seen, there are other schools out there that may cost more, but seem to have higher amounts of satisfied and (most importantly) employed graduates with transparent data available to back up their claims. Overall, for me, DevMountain’s Immersive Web Development course turned out to be more of a 0-50 learning experience instead of the 0-60 that I felt like I was promised.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me at dm4student@gmail.com.