Flatiron School

Tomorrow I start my new job in software development. If you had told me how far I'd come in a year I would have said you were a liar.

The fact is: the promises made are possible to acheive. Flatiron/Learn will give you a road map, but you have to walk the path.

That said, the assistance in learning and in job hunting that I recieved from The Flatiron School was invaluable. My career coach was a god send who helped me keep my head up when I thought for sure I'd failed.

It's hard work. It gets frustrating. You will doubt yourself and others along the way. But it's real and it's up to you. There is no such thing as magic. Thank you Flatiron!

My goal was to transition from a career without any programming knowledge to being a full stack developer building great things.  With the Flatiron School's help -- mission accomplished.  Below are a few things I really loved about the Online Campus (previously called the "Learn" program, when I first joined).

Learn At Your Own Pace:  Rather than a 12-week intense immersive, I was able to learn full stack technologies over 8-months at my own pace.

Learn Where You Want:  Rather than having to be in a city, I could travel and do the learning online.  This was key as I was transitioning between cities during my learning period.  You can do this at home, at school, in a coffee shop, wherever you want.

Competitive Pricing:  They price it in monthly installments, but cap the fee so that it will (generally) not cost more than your average 12-week boot camp.  If you meet the cap, then you stop paying but keep access to everything.

Great Support: Access to instructors and a super helpful student community.  You have an "Ask A Question" portal, Slack channels with everyone will to pitch-in, and easy access to the instructors.

Great Tools: The key is that you use the REAL development tools on your computer, nothing contrived.  You learn how to really work as a legitimate developer.

For anyone wondering whether it is easy, by no means was it a walk in the park.  You had to learn a lot of information, build real applications that end up in your portfolio to show employers.  Also, a job is not served to you on a silver platter.  You still have to put in the leg work (meetups, networking, emails, coffee-chats, etc.) -- but that is par for the course, you would do that regardless.

It worked for me.  I think this is a great option for many other people who want flexibility with their career transition, and who want to work with a great Flatiron team!

Learn Verified was such a good fit for me! At the time I knew I wanted to change my career by learning how to program, I first started teaching myself using various online resources and books. With so much to learn, it often felt overwhelming and frankly discouraging. I started to hunt for programs to take a more structured approach to my learning. I interviewed with and considered several in-person bootcamps, in addition to going back to school for a CS degree, but I wasn't willing/ready (financially) to quit my job and/or borrow money to complete such programs. I was pleasantly surprised that during this hunt, I stumbled across a remote program by Flatiron School called Learn.co. Thankfully I was well within its curriculum too, by time my full-time job laid me off! 

I was part of the first cohort which made me nervous for several reasons. Yes, there were some growing pains at times, but our feedback was always encouaged to help improve the program and its curriculum. Additionally, as a student who was recently laid off, the "pay as you go" plan made me quite nervous as well; it was hard to tell how soon I'd finish and I didn't want to rush it either. However, I received so much support from my cohort (some who I've met in person and now consider to be friends), and from the staff like Avi, Jonas, Annette, the career team and more, during the program AND afterwards too! These are great people who genuinely want you to succeed! I am SO grateful for it all! 

 I could literally sit here and write a novel about my experience, but I'll cut to the chase. Yes I would recommend this program to a friend, BUT my friend would need to know that online learning requires A LOT of discipline. I 100% believe that you get what you put into it, or anything really. And Yes, I am now working as a Software Engineer within 6 months of graduating as promised, BUT I'm also very active within my local tech community and was able to take advantage of the network I've built over the year. 

Sometimes I still check back in my account and see that even more curriculum has been added since graduating, including Java! It's great to see that the program is still improving, and that I still have access to the additional content. 

I recently graduated from Flatiron School's online program Learn.co and will be starting my new career as a web developer tomorrow.

I spent a lot of time researching different learning options after completing treehouse, and codecademy when I came across Learn. I immediately started the free trial and fell in love. I loved that I could go at my own pace and learn at any hour of the day. I was working full time as an accountant and didn't want to quit and relocate to attend a traditional bootcamp. Learn worked perfectly for me but it may not be for you if you are not self motivated, or need to be in person with the instructors. Flatiron is continuing to innovate new ways to help students stay connected with not only the instructors but the amazing flatiron community. If you ever were stuck on something you could get help from an instructor through the ask a question feature most hours of the day. However, I didn't have to rely solely on instructors for help because my fellow classmates were awesome.  I could really say so many great things about the Learn program but it really comes down to the amazing people of the Flatiron School and the other students who love learning to code just as much as you do. Learn is becoming more and more amazing every day as the team is constantly adding new features like study groups, blogging, and integrated chat features. 

Warning don't expect to just pay the tuition, cruise through the curriculum in a few weeks, and walk away with a six-figure job offer. Learning to code is hard, and takes a lot of time and effort. Learn does a great job of providing excellent cirriculum and support to help you learn but in the end it comes down to you putting in the work each and every day until you are prepared for a career in development. That being said if you put in the time and are passionate about learning you will learn how to code and you will get a job. Sacrafices will be required but if learning to code is really what you want to do Learn is the way I would reccomemend learning. 

If you don't know if coding is for you, I would reccomend trying the free trial at Learn.co and by the end you will know. Best of luck to all of you.

Thankfully I read the Terms and Conditions. Anyone can cancel within 14 days of their first payment for a full refund.

I did Learn.co Online for the free 2 weeks, enjoyed it, got some help when I got stuck, then paid $1000/month ($750 with the discount) for the "real course".

I requested a full refund after 12 days. I have done Team Treehouse Ruby on Rails, Codeacademy Ruby on Rails & HTML & CSS, 25% of FreeCodeCamp.com, a Java course on Udemy by a Cal Poly SLO Instructor, read half of Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial, and read half of Head Start Javascript. I didn't finish most, more dabbled to see if programming was truly what I wanted to do with my career. That is why I chose to pay $1000 to Learn.co to get me to the next level.

I am an experienced online learner. I am an experienced yet still beginner programmer. 

Learn.co explained to me that they "do not spoon feed their programmers", yet if I was a beginner, with zero experience, you need to spoon feed me until I can figure out the rest! They expect you to know what answer theyre looking for, without giving enough content to ever get there!

The course expects you to know things that are never taught. Even as someone who has taken classes, I got stuck regularly because the directions were not clear, the answer was hard to achieve given the content provided, and worst of all....

When you get stuck, there is a chat to the right, yet expect to wait 10-30 mins or sometimes a full day for any response! And that response will be garbage 75% of the time. Often I get one response, Hey, how can I help? Then I explain, then I wait 20 minutes for a response! What else are these chat support doing? Checking their email between each response they send?? SO frustrating. 

I would ask a question, and only one time out of the umpteen times I asked questions did I get a professional, helpful, well explained answer. The people answering q's are grad of Flatiron School, the same crappy curriculum, and so they too, are crappy teachers. Which only allowed Learn.co students like myself, to learn crappy programming. 

What a waste of time which is a waste of money. This is why I chose to go forward with the much better acclaimed Udacity Nanodegree Full Stack Web Development which also has a job/money back guarantee, and is $300/month. Why spend $1000 and get terrible content, support, and skills, when you can spend $300/month, and get great contant, support, and skills. and a job!

Learn.co is a waste of time. They probably want you to waste time, because hey, the more time it takes you to finish the course, the more you wait for Learn.co support when you are stuck, the longer it will take you to finish the course and the more months of payment you will incur.

Do yourself a favor. Quit now. Stop wasting time waiting for support and money that is better spent elsewhere. 

Are you seeking a career change? Have you been lured by promises of better compensation and opportunity? Don't be fooled by individuals from the placement-team who will tout falsified job placement percentages as evidence of better professional outcomes. The entire team at Flatiron School, from executive and management to placements and instructors, have absolutely no idea what's going on, and as long as they're getting your money by selling you on the hope of a new career, they don't care. 

My experience with this bootcamp can be summed up as follows:
Attending Flatiron School was the single most disastrous professional and financial decision I've ever made.


For months prior to making the decision to attend a bootcamp, I spent time doing my due diligence and actually spoke with grads and the placements team before applying, and I was assured that job prospects were "good" and that "industry relationships" were abundant. This was the sole reason I was willing to pay an exorbitant fee for a skill I could have learned from books and videos online, however by all appearances myself and my entire class have been misled.

After an interval greater than most individual's job search, Flatiron's placement numbers have been inflated by hiring individuals from my class as instructors but other individuals in my class have received very little in the way of placement assistance.


Pros & Cons

Pros:
1. Free coffee
2. Better Teaching of Standards of Practice/Third Party Libraries
3. "Cool" people (that is, until you start asking for help)
4. Happy hours/feelings sessions
5. If you're really lucky (or a sycophant) you might get a job as an instructor after graduating

Cons:

1. We're provided with "interviews" during our second to last week for positions that don't actually exist at the companies that come in.

2. There is no proportionate representation of candidates in the placements process. Some of my classmates had received 4-5 interviews while others received none within months of "graduating."

3. We're told to accept whatever positions are available regardless of compensation, benefits, or opportunity for advancement.  

4. Curriculum is disorganized: Many lessons depended on understanding principles or concepts that would only be taught later.

5. Instructors available for help are composed of the last cohort's lucky chosen placement rate inflaters and don't have any actual professional experience.

Remember, for every good review you see on here, there is a bias because students are threatened with retribution for criticism or bad reviews. For every bad review you see on here, there are probably a dozen other students who feel similarly but are unable to say so because they're desperate for any help after spending 3 months and 15k on a program.

Personally, I've been struggling for more than a reasonable interval to find consistent, well-paying work. The time and finacial investment required and subsequent failure to find work ended a long term relationship. Maintaining a flexible schedule for interviews that never seem to happen means I can't find consistent, steady-paying work in other fields.  



My advice to those of you who are considering a switch to a programming vocation: buy some books (Big Nerd Ranch et al.), watch videos (UDEMY, TeamTreeHouse, etc), and develop your own projects instead of making the mistake I made by trusting the paid representatives of a bootcamp. 









 

For perspective, began in November 2015 and am now nearly finished with the curriculum.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the Flatiron School's Learn Verified Program.  The platform of learn.co itself is great.  From day one, everything you are doing with your time is real, actual work.  You always work in a real dev environment, and push all your code to Github.  I view this as a mandatory feature for any program that claims to prepare you for a job though.

I could rave about how the course material was a good mix of clear, concise, and fun, or how the specific technologies covered are relevant for today's market.  However, what I believe to be one of the strongest features to Flatiron is the overarching sequence and manner in which they guide you through learning programming skills.  This is hard to explain if you don't have much coding experience.  The Flatiron curriculum is very thoughtfully crafted in a way which has you cementing together fundamental blocks of your knowledge that you only realize after you have already built them.  More succinctly, it's wax on, wax off.  More concretely I mean that they have you manually build out various technologies in detail by hand, before introducing you to an existing technology or framework (dynamic ORM before ActiveRecord, Sinatra before Rails, etc).  Going about it in this manner really ensures that their students will have a firm understanding of what these technologies do and why they do it.  I am much more interested in gaining a thorough understanding of how to use a framework well than simply being able to crank out apps and material without that underlying basis.  More complete understanding is better for you in the long run.

I have found that help has been quickly within reach anytime it was truly needed.  The staff has been extremely responsive, and genuinely make every possible effort to give their students anything that will help them succeed.  The live assessments are very valuable as well.  Every time I have learned an extreme amount of information very quickly.  You are given perspective not only on the work that you have done, but for overall project design decisions, code patterns, and often pushed to expand your work in ways that you'd never have thought to.

Now nearing the end of the coursework, I am feeling very confident in my ability to build increasingly powerful and complex applications.  It's important to remember that a bootcamp is just a beginning.  If you are genuinely changing careers into software development as I am, the learning does not stop after any bootcamp.  There is a limit to the amount of material that you will learn in any bootcamp, but I don't think there's anything I feel was lacking from Flatiron.  I am highly confident in my ability to find work upon graduation, and will hopefully update with results in the near future.

This is an honest and sincere review with the only intention to inform others about a very real experience.  

I had zero code review.  ZERO.  I asked for it many times, never got it.

My classmates were either completely drunk or 100% independent didn't-want-to-work-with-anyone types, except for one.  I am still friends with the one classmate that wasn't like this.

This place was extremely noisy the entire time, and the teachers regularly would get a TA to take their place when they were too hungover to come in and teach.  This happened *many* times. 

All of the staff and most of the classmates seemed to care much more about the world sport tournament that was blasted every day on the giant projector screen in the main room (where all of the students had to be all day, every day) than they did about helping their students being able to complete their assignments.  I was definitely not the only person that felt this way. 

They make incredible claims about job placement.  Then, 2 weeks before the end of the program, they pretty much tell you to take whatever job you can get, even if it's free or minimum wage.  

Of the 3 leads they gave me, two were 100% non-code related, and the 3rd never got back to me even though they liked me a lot (they realized they needed someone that wasn't a bootcamp grad)

This left me with an extremely bitter taste in my mouth.  Their job leads program clearly did not do their due diligence in finding quality leads.   I did not approve of Flatiron including me in their "success" category when it came to their job placement rates, yet they hold those numbers close and I have no control over it.  

What's worse, is that the final project they gave my group was poorly scoped too.  We were not allowed to pick our team-mates or project topic, so the arrogant member of the team kept deleting our code that he didn't like (who does that?!) and when our attempts to remedy the issue failed, the staff wouldn't do anything to mitigate the issue.  

If you want to attend any bootcamp, my advice is this: 

-Don't believe anything about job placement rates or leads.  

-Ask dozens of questions.  Take everything with a grain of salt.

-Ask to see the real data on the percent of graduates that are placed in FULL-TIME JOBS WITH BENEFITS within 6 months and what ***THEIR*** starting pay was.  

-Be overly-prepared for the beginning of the program.  Most claim you don't need to know any code at all, but really you should.  You'll suffer if you don't.  Start teaching yourself.  Start with Codecademy, then graduate to CodeSchool, Pluralsight, Treehouse, Udacity, and/Or something else that is free/cheap.  Once you've exhausted those resources, then consider a bootcamp if you are still interested.  

-Attend a bootcamp *only* in the city where you will stay and seek employment

-You only should attend a bootcamp if you're way too lazy to teach yourself using free tools online.  Most people are.  However, you should at least try this path first.  

If you venture down this path, expecting a bootcamp to teach you a little bit about a lot of things in a very short amount of time, and do absolutely nothing else for you, then you'll be happy with your experience.  If you expect a bootcamp to give you extensive code review (absolutely necessary to hone your skillset), find you a good job with good pay and help you have something incredible in your portfolio to show to prospective employers, you might be terribly disappointed.  I was.

Again, I wrote this to provide an honest review explaining my personal experience.  I learned a lot, but I didn't get half as much out of the program as I could have if they cared about my concerns listed above.  This was a couple years ago now, maybe they've improved?  They probably have.  I can't imagine I'm the only one that had an experience like this.  

Reader should keep in mind that most graduates don't want to leave negative reviews about the bootcamp they attended because they are still relying on the bootcamp to help them find employment.  It's twisted.  You can't find much credible negative information online regarding bootcamps.  

Find a few graduates of *the* program you're considering taking at the bootcamp you want to attend, email them or find them on LinkedIn, and ask them lots of questions.  This is how you will get an honest review.  

Note: I intentionally altered the month/year that I graduated from the program because I'd rather not have this come back to bite me because my classmate was scolded by a staff member for his review on a different platform.  

This was originally posted in my blog.

I began searching for online coding bootcamps recently, a good alternative to going to a major city to attend a coding bootcamp in person. Not everyone is like me who has family in a major city, in my case NYC. Rent alone can drain a person’s bank account, much more if that person needs to quit his or her job to attend an intensive school 60 hours a week, which is the norm for bootcamps.

Who should attend this program?

Online coding bootcamps with live mentors are great for people who have a strong technology background, but lacks programming skills. For example, I don’t get confused with programming concepts because of my years of Intro to Programming back in CS school, but have problems learning and applying codes in real world. I don’t feel isolated because I’m confident the mentor will be there to help me out, but at the same time I don’t have to revisit topics that I am otherwise familiar with.

Flatiron School has solid reputation

Flatiron School in NYC recently released their online version of their program, which has traditionally been in-person classes. I signed up yesterday, and so far so good. I love the interface, which is very important to have a good learning experience.

Hit the ground running? Not really.

One thing I do recommend is if you’ll be doing this full-time like 40 hours a week, you should definitely buy a second or/and third monitor. The screen on your laptop will not be enough. There are so many windows that you need to keep open to make sure that they lesson is seamless.

I’ll continue providing feedbacks of Flatiron School’s Learn Online Bootcamp throughout the upcoming weeks.