Flatiron School

I wanna start this off by saying that I was originally very hesitant to enroll into Flatiron (not because of Flatiron itself but because of the reputations of a lot of other predatory bootcamps). It's also important to note that I enrolled in the data science program so I cannot speak towards it's other programs. Ultimately, I chose Flatiron because it has one of the best reputations of all the bootcamps out there and I am happy to say that all the positive things are 100% true

It is important to note that it is a challenging 15 weeks (I did full-time) and you get what you put into it. It's a lot of hard work but incredibly rewarding with fantastic instructors who go out of their way to help you succeed. They also put together a lot of great events (meditation, career help, etc) that you can optionally attend but that are also fantastic. When I graduated, I got a career coach (she was AMAZING) who helped me weekly until I landed a FANTASTIC data analyst job with great ppl, salary, and benefits (and in the middle of a pandemic to).

It genuinely changed my life and career trajectory in the BEST way and as long as you're willing to work hard, this is one of the best decisions you can make for yourself

I want to start off by saying that Flatiron School is a fantastic coding boot camp. This school ensures that they deliver a quality experience and I am forever grateful that I have had the opportunity to attend Flatiron. 
I would totally recommend Flatiron School to anyone who is looking for a career change in tech. This has been a life changing experience for me and for anyone who has been working these dead-end jobs on the market, take it from me, a career change in tech will change your life and attending Flatiron School can make that a reality. You will not regret your decision, and I am sure you would receive an excellent ROI.
Flatirom School has great instructors and an excellent curriculum. They provide you with various workshops and services that make the cost justifiable. 
My only advice to those considering a coding boot camp is to make sure you don't just go into it without knowing how to code. This will make a world of difference for your experience and success. You want to have at least basic knowledge of the fundamentals in front-end and back-end technologies before attending a coding boot camp. The curriculum moves fast so it would be in your best interest to know how to code before hand. Trust me. 

Upon graduating I had intended to write an extremely in depth review. However, its been 3 years since Ive graduated and I dont remember all of the nitty gritty details.
I can say, however, that I was one of the first in my cohort to get a job offer. I do not have a college degree, I was not the "brightest" one in my cohort, and my starting salary was on the lower end ($55k), but soft skills start to play a much more important role when it comes job-search time.
Ive since moved on to another job in the suburbs making $80k using TypeScript, C#, and .NET... Im learning C++ and hardware programming in my own time which is fun.
My life is in every way better after attending flatiron.

My advice: 

All of the "behind the scenes stuff you learn in the beginning" which seems like you dont really need to know. You will be doing yourself a massive favor by taking that material very seriously when it comes to real-world dev (Sinatra, SQL, etc...).

Keep your projects small. Focus your project only what its intended for. If its a command line project, try to cram everything into the project that you've learned the past 3 or 4 weeks while keep the functionality/features small. Dont fool yourself. None of your projects are going to be used ever again after your first job. Dont try to think of an amazing idea for your projects. Simply use them to re-inforce what you've learned. (Except your last project, really go all-out with that one).

Lastly- I really loved flatiron. but I would now considering another school that does NOT focus on Ruby/Rails for three reasons:
1) Focusing that extra attention on Javascript is going to take you way further
2) Node backend is simply becoming more popular than Ruby. Ruby did not take off as initially expected
3) There's less abstraction with a Node API. Ruby has a ton of abstraction (which you DO learn about, i.e. Sinatra), but using the bare bones code and never using those abstractions will help you a lot more.

I write this sincerely as someone who put themselves in unnecessary debt with the hopes of turning my career around. Please, if you are someone who is looking to get into Cybersecurity, please explore your options when it comes to continuing education. Flatiron school is a scam. I am embarrassed to have partaken in the Cybersecurity cohort. Everyone, from the instructors to the career service personnel are well aware that this program does not provide for you what it says it does. I am now $17,000 in the hole because I believed in this program.

The biggest red flag was one of the instructors writing an article in regard to Bootcamps not preparing students for the workplace. Imagine your college professor writing an article saying "This is all horse**** and I know it!", then showing up to work everyday (I say everyday sparingly). There is no ROI here. I graduated in January and career services has "matched" me with companies that are looking for EXPERIENCED candidates. The promise of "Come in with no experience and leave ready for the workplace" is absolute trash and the administration knows it. We had one professor quit in the middle of the cohort. One professor not show for the first two weeks. One professor refuse to listen to our concerns and then would go on "vacation" every other week leaving us with a substitute instructor. So many red flags, but I tried to stay positive as I have immense pressure from everyone around me to succeed. This school and their practices has effectively destroyed my mental health and no amount of "Virtual Happy Hours" will fix that. I genuinely feel bad for anyone employed here. I could imagine they don't sleep too well at night. If they do, the sociopathy epidemic is worse than I imagined. 

As you can tell I am fuming writing this review so I am trying to be as objective as possible. Stay away. This school puts all of their attention on Software Development and introduced Cybersecurity simply as another stream of revenue. 

My parting words for Flatiron are simple: You know what you're doing. You know what it does to people. You're well aware of your price point. Reconstruct your business model. Save lives. 

I attended the part time online Software Engineering Bootcamp with Flatiron last year and had a great experience! Basically, we went through five main modules. Each module involved learning about languages/frameworks through reading written lessons, doing coding labs, having a couple of class meetings a week where our instructor reviewed the content, or showed us bonus content, and at the end, building an app with what we had learned. We also did pair programming every week with other students. The curriculum worked great for me, and I really appreciated the learning style of mostly reading about something and practicing doing it myself! Flatiron's online bootcamp also has feature where you could ask a question about a lesson and someone would come help if you needed it, which was great! 
My only quibble with the way the instruction was structured was because everyone was learning at their own pace, sometimes I would find the class meetings helpful and informative and sometimes I would find them difficult to parse, depending on where I was in the material. Where we should have been at by the time we attended a lecture to get the most out of it was wasn't made clear. This is a small critique though as most lectures were helpful and really, all of the information I needed was in the written lessons anyway.
For the job search, Flatiron has a lot of excellent written advice on how to prepare for and approach this, and in addition to that, I met with a career coach every week, which was great for staying on track! I have rated this one star less mostly because I am Canadian--Flatiron's advice is still great no matter where you live, but their employee partnerships are exclusively in the US and the UK, so I wasn't able to benefit from any of the opportunities for finding work emailed my way, and wasn't able to take advantage of their money-back guarantee. If you're Canadian, I would consider looking into more local bootcamps. That said, even though it took almost a year of job searching to get an offer, I am absolutely thrilled with the company I'll be starting with in a couple of weeks, and I couldn't have done it without the wonderful people at Flatiron! Also, I cannot overstate the benefit for me of being able to do a course part time instead of full-time--this was one of the main reasons I picked Flatiron as a bootcamp over more local offerings, and the pace was excellent. Challenging without being gruelling, and I was able to work part time through the program as well. 

In my experience the curriculum was excellent. The labs and help chat were awesome! You can talk to your instructor about curriculum you aren’t undeterstanding annnd the hard working team in the help chat(I forgot their title). The projects were my favorite part of the curriculum. But, the community is what got me through. I went in with minimal knowledge of html and css. I graduated with 5 projects completed. My projects were impressive to me but there were projects that made my jaw drop. It’s amazing what we can create once we learn. I recommend FlatIron if you are serious about making a career change. When I say serious, you have to understand that the hardest part is getting a job after you graduate. It could take a really long time before you find your first job. BUT, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. I put in the work and I am a better man for it. 

I attended the 15 week intensive full time software engineering bootcamp at Flatiron. I was part of the Seattle cohort, but because of Covid-19 the program was conducted entirely online. I thought that would be a drawback but it ended up being great. With no commuting I had more time to dedicate to coding and I was able to fit in a few more to-do's each day, like going for a run or getting an errand done. This program is an amazing way to learn a new skill very quickly. The structure of the program is excellent, and allows for self motivated learning but also provides a lot of much needed direction. I came from the performing arts so I was afraid I would be a fish out of water, but I had no trouble jumping right into the new material. My instructors were truly top tier educators, and really cared about my success. I cant say enough positive things about my experience at Flatiron. I feel it gave me the boost I needed to change my life and launch into a new career with confidence and momentum.

I submitted an application on 3/1/21 and was contacted the next day by Maryssa Medley to schedule an interview. I wanted to review their free "Hacking 101 course" before scheduling my interview even though it's not required. I scheduled my interview two days later and was not able to get a slot until 3/16. I had already received an offer of admissions to another bootcamp and they needed my acceptance/enrollment by 3/12, so I emailed Maryssa to see if I could get in earlier perhaps with another admissions officer and received an automated response that she was not in until the 10th and had limited access to emails. In her automated email, she refers urgent matters to her colleague, Michael Krashes. I emailed him and cc'd Maryssa, explaining my dilemma again and emphasizing that Flatiron was my first choice of bootcamps. I received no response from either by the next day. So on the 5th, I called the general admissions line and left a voicemail since apparently no one is in due to covid. I also sent an email to the admissions office, as was suggested in their outgoing voicemail recording. By the 10th, which is also when Maryssa was due back in the office, I still had not heard from ANYONE. That evening, Fullstack had a seminar with a panel of their alumni. One of the questions I asked is if any of them had considered any other bootcamps and why they chose to enroll at Fullstack. Two of them had looked at Flatiron's curriculum and decided that their program was not inclusive enough to set them up for a successful career in cybersecurity. One also commented that they did no seem to have the infrastructure to accommodate a virtual learning program. That's a nice way of putting it! They flat out ignored me even knowing that I really wanted to enroll and I reached out to four different people!! Today as I'm writing this on 3/11, I still have not heard from ANYONE, even though I canceled my original interview stating my reasons. If they are this unresponsive during the application process, I can't imagine what the experience would be like during the program itself and when looking for a job, especially for someone like me who is a novice and is putting faith into an institution like this bootcamp to guide me through the work to successfully start a career in a completely different industry from where I'm coming from. My cohort with Fullstack starts tomorrow. I will definitely add a review for that bootcamp once I've completed it. I feel REALLY good about the people there. Every question I've had along the way has been promptly answered and, on some occasions, by multiple people reaching out to me. 

Flatiron School's Online Data Science Immersive was a fast-paced, rigorous and exciting experience throughout which I felt supported by my instructors, cohort, and career coach. I had completed undergraduate and graduate level calc + statistics coursework prior to starting the program, which absolutely helped to make the pace more manageable throughout the math-heavy modules. I would recommend this program to other graduates who are looking to expand their knowledge of coding and data science methods, and who would benefit from having structure and community throughout their learning journey. If you're willing to put the required work in, you'll leave with a project portfolio, a data science blog, and the skills to continuing building upon your work after you leave Flatiron.