Devmountain

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.

I am having a hard time with the teaching methods of UVU regarding computer development and programming. I heard about this bootcamp from a friend that immediately tripled their income only a month after finishing the 3 month course. I signed up and received pre-work to start the course. I haven't started the course yet but have worked on the pre-work. I have learned more in Just 5 hours worth of pre-course work than I learned if half a semester at UVU. I love the teaching method of DevMountain and think it is the most effective way out their to learn. I am incredibly excited to start my course.

Up to this point (half way through), I'm thrilled with my decision to learn iOS at DevMountain.  They aren't kidding when they use the term 'immersive'. -- 9 hours of class a day, generally paired with another 2-3 hours outside of class completing challenges, coding, reading, working on personal projects, etc.  It's intense.  Despite my fear of getting burned out and/or left in the dust, at this point I find I'm actually headed the opposite direction.  I want to keep going, keep learning, keep running into problems so I can keep finding answers.  While I had no background in coding at all, I was interested in it.  Now, once I get going, I have to make a conscious effort to take a break, get some exercise, eat some dinner, whatever.  It has consumed me, which is probably the best review I can offer.  DevMountain teaches the basics, and more importantly cultivates an ability (and for myself a desire) to find answers independently.  I enjoy the instructors, mentors and environment, and I can't imagine any other bootcamp offering this much bang for the buck.

*Regarding the job category, I'll be marking it a 3, simply based on the fact that I don't actually have a strong opinion on the matter since I still have half the course to finish before I start looking for work.