Flatiron School

I graduated from Flatiron School's software engineering immersive program in December 2020.  Due to pandemic the program transitioned from on-campus to remote learning. We had to be on Zoom every day 9 to 6.  Our day would start with a group discussion summarizing yesterdays lessons, we would then move on to pair-programming, then there would be a lecture and then we would finish the day with working on labs.
I came to the bootcamp with zero programing knowledge and in four months graduated as a full-stack developer totally confident in what I've learnt. Honestly I was a bit skeptical before I've started this program, I couldn't understand how one can learn so much in such a short time. But the program is super intense and the curriculum requires you to learn and practice new concepts every single day. Every new skill you are taught comes with it's own labs which require you to use the skill until it becomes second nature. I like that Flatiron teaches you not only specific languages and frameworks, but they teach you how to learn, which is a great skill to have in life in general and certainly an important skill for a software developer.
A word about  instructors; the instructors we had were top-notch, super knowledgeable and helpful, and could explain complex, unfamiliar technical concepts in a way which anyone could understand. Our instructors were super supportive and they motivated us to keep going. The school's support does not end at graduation. Everyone is assigned a career coach who supports you for next 6 months and helps you during your job search.

I want to preface this by saying I have no experience with other campuses, but I can speak confidently about my experience at Flatiron in Denver, CO.

With some trepidation, I enrolled in September 2020. It is the best decision I could've made -- do you enjoy learning and aren't afraid to ask questions? Do you like to engage in theory and practice? Do you want to be taught how to learn effectively so you can apply to new languages you want to learn in the future? Do you want to join an incredibly diverse community full of supportive and caring individuals? This place is for you.

Flatiron School is the best coding Bootcamp ever!
If you do your part, you won't regret it!

In the fall of 2019, I enrolled in their full-stack Software Engineering program. I attended their Brooklyn campus in Dumbo. They taught us how to build cutting-edge, full-fledged applications using Ruby, Ruby-on-Rails, JavaScript, React, and Redux. By the time I was ready to graduate, I was able to build a fully functional, full-stack application!

Overall Experience
It was a very challenging experience, but very rewarding at the same time! Every 2 weeks you have to learn a new programming language, pass a code challenge, and build an application solo or as a team. There's a lot to learn in a very short time, however, they give you plenty of exercises and projects to gain a practical understanding of what you learn. At times, you have to do assignments alone, or in pairs. The school also has a lot of fun group activities that foster teamwork and camaraderie.

It was an overall great experience that pushed me to grow not only intellectually, but also as a person! I highly recommend going to Flatiron School!

Curriculum
The curriculum is very rigorous! Here's a breakdown of the process you go through in the immersive SE program:
- 1st week, you learn Ruby
- You're given a ton of assignments to do
- 2nd week, you take a code challenge to test your understanding
- - If you pass, you get to do a group project that you can present to your whole class. Very fun experience!
- - If you fail, you have to do a solo project that ends up being scrutinized and you're grilled by 2-3 instructors in a room. Very stressful experience!
- 3rd week, is for the presentation of the solo or group project.
- - If you fail the solo project, you can't continue the program in-person, you have to continue the program online at your own pace.
- - You technically can't fail the solo project, because you already passed the code challenge. Bear in mind that those projects will end up in your portfolio after graduation, so it's in your best interest to have great projects, whether you did the solo or group project.
- The cycle repeats itself for Ruby-on-Rails, then JavaScript, then React, and finally Redux. Every 3 weeks you learn something new, culminating in a project where you apply those skills.
- The last 3 weeks are for your capstone project that incorporates everything you learned from the beginning to the end of your time there. You have to learn at least 2 new technologies (tools, frameworks, plug-in, etc) on your own and add them to your project. It's a fun, stressful, and rewarding experience!
- The very last week consists of you presenting your project to the entire floor of Software Engineering students. Many alumni come through to see your projects. Sometimes hiring managers also attend.
- The last day is graduation day, the saddest day you'll experience on campus :(

Important: For the immersive SE program, code challenges are not graded! You're evaluated based on your understanding of the subjects, not your grade. They assess your understanding from the mistakes, bugs, or incompleteness of your code or answers to the questions.

Instructors
I found the instructors to be very knowledgeable of the subjects. They also were funny, witty, and approachable. You can talk to them about personal issues you may be going through and find them to be very understanding. All the instructors and coaches I had were AWESOME! They must have a very good selection process for hiring them. Most instructors are actually former students that become coaches, then instructors themselves. From my understanding, they're contracted for a year or two after which they have to leave to pave the way for the next set of student alumni.

Job Assistance
After graduation, you're assigned a career coach, with whom you meet every week for the next six months or until you get a job. If you signed up for an Income Share Agreement (ISA), then you don't have to pay the tuition until you find a job, after which a percentage of your salary goes towards paying them back. The contract you sign guarantees that you'll find a job within 6 months, if you don't, then you don't have to pay them. As part of your money-back guarantee (MBG) agreement, you have to meet with your coach once a week, establish at least 8 professional connections or contacts, write a blog, and have at least 5 GitHub contributions (aka 815). Failure to do so results in voiding your MBG contract, meaning that you have to pay the tuition amount even if you don't find a job. In other words, failing to meet any of the weekly 815 obligations means that you will have to pay them even if you don't get a job in 6 months! This is very important to understand and stay on top of!

They're affiliated with companies that hire bootcamp graduates. They have a unit called Employee Partnerships (EP) that send you jobs that they believe match your qualifications. 95 percent of all interviews, code assessments I had were through EP. They're a valuable asset in your job search!

I personally had a very good coach! She gave me great advice and guidance on how to maximize my results for getting a job. I did my 815 as best as possible, attended virtual (due to covid) conferences, lectures, meetings, book clubs, study groups, etc. I made some great connections along the way. I finally found a job via EP, three and a half months after declaring my job search date. I found all of their claims to be true and I'm excited to start a new career as a software engineer! If you choose Flatiron School to start a career in software engineering, you won't be disappointed so long as you do your part in fulfilling all of the obligations that are asked of you! 

Best wishes!
- JP

 I attended Flatiron School's full-stack software engineering immersive program from May-August in 2020 at the Denver campus remotely. The Denver instructional staff is top-notch and extremely knowledgable. They have created an extremely positive educational environment and welcoming campus culture. They don't make you pay $ to repeat learning Modules and they don't grade your projects which allows you the freedom to develop whatever interests you in each learning Mod. They cater to everyone's learning needs and let you choose the lessons each day depending on what you have questions on and what you are interested in learning more about. The Learn.co labs and coursework is also very well done and Flatiron School helps you create an extremely active GitHub profile and set you up well for professional opportunities. Multiple individuals from my cohort as well cohorts in front of mine and behind mine were able to get software engineering jobs just 1-2 months post program. I would definitely recommend Flatiron School Denver to anyone looking for a positive bootcamp experience and great career services. 

Flatiron School helped me develop my engineering skills due to their daily deadlines, constant pair-programming, and their lessons on working autonomously. I was a newbie to coding when I started the program so I was suffering from major imposter syndrome, but despite that, every single person in their staff made me feel so comfortable and provided me with guidance and positivity throughout the whole program. Being in this program also taught me how to learn and be more independent in terms of making my own decisions, not being afraid to try different solutions out, etc. After I graduated, my career coach helped me so much along the way and gave 100% in everything she did for me. I was awful at reaching out to random people/networking in general, but with her advice and applying different techniques, it became really easy and way less nerve-wracking! I am beyond grateful to everyone that contributed to my growth at this school, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to dive into a coding boot camp!

 MY EXPERIENCE AT FLATIRON (JULY 2020)

Full Time Software Engineering
I would not recommend Flatiron to anyone, period.
My Student/Admissions Rep had terrible communication skills (which is not acceptable) and would take days and days to answer 1 email after asking again after 2 or 3 days and then CC'ing the general info@flatiron email to try to get an answer. This went on the entire 3 months of correspondence leading up to the class and even after, when I tried to switch to Self-Paced (more on that later). I voiced this concern to the Senior Manager of Admissions and Enrollment, Marquise Martin, after my Student rep emailed me (for the first time to tell me) at 2 PM that my Enrollment Agreement had to be signed THAT NIGHT. I was literally in the middle of driving a 26' Uhaul truck full of my possessions with my car on a tow dolly on the back driving halfway across the country when I saw the email later that afternoon. Marquise at first seemed interested in my concerns only to quickly brush them aside and just say sorry that I have concerns. (The great customer service continues) I feel for you if you get Tiwanna Hamilton as an Admissions/Student Rep, she seems unorganized and lacks responsiveness and the communication skills needed to be a Rep.
They have what's called a First Mile, which is just your first 2 weeks of school, and it has requirements to complete before time is up or you fail and have to be placed in the next Cohort (if it's your 1st time failing). Unfortunately, due to my wife contracting the Coronavirus, that left me beginning my First Mile while taking care of her and our 3 kids. This caused me to get behind, so behind that I spent days on Iterations and had to ask a Teacher's Assistant (TA) for help on every lab. By the time I got it, I was out of time to complete the rest of the curriculum.

The curriculum is a joke. I am not exaggerating when I say it is a few paragraphs, sometimes with a video, as the lesson. The videos are poor quality, it just shows a screen capture and the narration sounds like it was recorded on a laptop mic from 2008. To say it's poor quality is an understatement. The curriculum, more often than not, does not teach you how to do what they then ask you to do in their labs, which, as you can imagine, makes things very difficult. (Why did you guys wait until after iterations for ANY code-alongs??) You will either be Googling Ruby syntax to try to piece together the code yourself from Quora, or you'll be copying/pasting former student's code from repl.it, or asking a Teacher's Assistant to help walk you through it. Though others were offered help via screen share, this was not offered to me until 3 days before the First Mile ended. (I didn't even know it was an option) Most of the TAs are not great at teaching, they were not skilled at breaking things down in a simple-to-understand manner. This made (most of) them almost useless.

My instructor, Annabel Wilmerding, was a former (2018) Flatiron student (her only coding education and experience, apparently), now teaching her first Cohort with absolutely (apparently) zero experience coding outside of Flatiron. This led to many confusing Lab demos where she would go 'chasing rabbits' that weren't helpful, having students correct her and ultimately made the videos of little help. Call me crazy, but I kind of want someone who has actually coded for companies outside of the Flatiron school bubble, teaching others how to code for the first time. She was a nice person. However, according to Flatiron instructors are supposed to assist students via Slack. The entire 2 weeks, she helped 0 students via Slack. She ONLY posted once a day in Slack, a morning update with how many assignments should be completed by the end of day and what they are called. That was the extent of the "Instruction" at Flatiron. I voiced this concern to Tana Glenn at Flatiron (not sure what she does because her email signature doesn't say and neither did she), which disregarded my experience for a canned response about methods for getting help with curriculum. Again, see lack of customer service skills and poor communication.

Upon not completing the First Mile, my instructor Annabel contacted me about whether I wanted to continue with the program and be put into another Cohort or withdraw and receive a full refund. I was confused as to why your instructor, especially a now former instructor, would be responsible for this part. It seems like Tana or even the Admissions rep should be responsible for handling all of this. Regardless, I emailed Tana and asked her when the next Cohort would be, only to be told that she didn't know, but that it could be as early as mid-late August or early September, an entire month to 2 months later. Not being satisfied with this huge of a delay, I asked if I could switch to Self-Paced. That way I could pickup where I left off, I still got TA support, didn't have a useless Instructor, saved $6k versus Full Time and might could even still finish on time as the original Full Time program as I wanted. She said it was against policy to allow me to switch. I asked if I could withdraw and reapply for the Self-Paced one instead and she said yes, but it could take weeks to be accepted again (no kidding with Tiwanna as a Rep), trying to force me into staying Full Time at the $15k. So I withdrew and reapplied 3 days later. I was told by Hannah M. I would be contacted by "finance" to discuss the refund and everything.

I withdrew July 22nd, it's been weeks now and I still have not heard anything from "finance." I had to email Hannah and ask about whether I would receive my $500 seat deposit back, whether they tell Climb Credit or I do, whether they refund Climb Credit or me for me to pay them back. (Again, see poor communication skills) I wrote her on Aug 5th asking for an update regarding finance or Climb and still haven't received a response after weeks now.
Then I receive and correspond to Tiwanna again as she (much to my utter disappointment) is assigned again as my Admissions Rep for my July 25th application, it went like this:
"Jul 29 @ 12p, me to Flatiron: Hi, I applied last week (Jul 24) and haven't heard anything back.

Jul 30 @ 9a, Tiwanna: Did you previously withdraw from the program?
<<Do they not communicate with each other??>>
Jul 30 @ 9a, me: Yes.
Jul 31 @ 2p, me: Hoping to hear back about my application before the weekend.
Aug 3 @ 10a, Tiwanna: It is our understanding that you recently withdrew from the program.
<<Um, duh, we just stated that, it's like she's implying something here but won't communicate what it is she's implying.>>
Aug 3 @ 10a, me: Yes, I withdrew from the full time program after not completing the curriculum within the First Mile allotted time. I am re-applying for the self-paced program since I was not permitted to switch to self-paced.
Aug 5 @ 10a, me to Tiwanna and info@flatiron since she wouldn't respond: Can I please hear back about this? It's been almost 2 weeks since I applied.
Aug 7 (FRIDAY) @ 5:00p (she waited until close), Tiwanna: Appreciate the follow up.
At this time we have decided not to proceed with your enrollment in the self-paced program."

Imagine my surprise. I guess they are doing well enough that they don't want $9,600 (they don't even refund it because it's self paced so they are literally just butthurt because I didn't submit to their greedy Policy for preventing students from switching Paces based off of what the student needs). Flatiron is not interested in your success, they are not interested in your best interest, they don't care if you or your spouse have had the Coronavirus and needed to switch paces because of it. They just want your $15k+ and nothing less.
Flatiron has switched to entirely online due to the COVID panic generated by the government and media. However, they have not provided an equivalent product to the Immersive experience and yet want to charge the exact same price. They have claimed to do just such a thing, which makes them dishonest and unethical.

Having used Treehouse for a couple of years, Flatiron's curriculum is pathetic compared to Treehouse, leaps and bounds in terms of video production and instruction quality. They are equal in educational support. Treehouse is $25/month.
TL;DR: Tiwanna sucks, as does the rest of the staff have poor communication and slow responsiveness and there is zero accountability for the staff, the instructor graduated Flatiron and started teaching others, they won't let you swap Full Time to Self Paced, curriculum is basically $15k to Google search to pass the Labs that they don't teach you how to do.

How Flatiron can sleep at night charging $15,000 for this pile of junk that they call a school is beyond me. Terrible staff, horrible curriculum, overpriced Google searching for what they call an "education," and the worst part is they just literally don't care about the students. 

Enrolling in the Flatiron School boot camp was probably the best decision I've made, both financially and personally. The boot camp does cost a fair amount of money, but now I'm making way more than I would've before and earlier than if I had gone the self-paced route. I originally wanted to pursue teaching (high school English), but the education field requires a lot of work to get into for very low pay and not a ton of support. Pretty shortly after graduating, I landed a role as a Cohort Lead at Flatiron. So now I'm able to teach and code while also being on track to pay off my ISA easily. I also know plenty of others who have graduated before and after me who have landed roles at major companies like Amazon and Shopify despite even COVID-19. Overall, the best aspect of Flatiron is the community. My cohort lead and career coach both went above and beyond to help me develop my skills and land a job. Beyond that, everyone I worked with - from admissions to education to career services to alumni, and even now, the hiring and HR teams - have been absolutely wonderful. The people working at Flatiron truly want everyone who enters the boot camp to leave with a job they love and that supports them, and they work above and beyond their job responsibilities to try to get you there. Some people take longer than others, but from what I've seen personally from other cohort mates is that if you are determined/able to put the work in and love to code, you will finish the program with the skills to build beautiful and functional full-stack applications from scratch.

My experience with Flatiron is overall positive. I really enjoyed the course curriculum and the structure of course (6week online individual work, 6week online group work, 5 weeks in-person group work, 4 weeks client work, 3 weeks portfolio.)

Instructors
From my observation, Flatiron tends to hire two types of instructors - 1) notorious professors from well-known universities and 2) motivated, smart Bootcamp grads who have been in the workforce for 1-3 years.
I would say I got really lucky and had the chance to work with some great lead instructors and supporting instructors (mostly the ladder-type mentioned above.) who are very dedicated to helping students succeed and would put in extra effort and time to help you build great portfolio pieces.
Not to say the professors are bad but there is a huge difference between teaching at a University and teaching at a Bootcamp. Instructors are a huge part of this learning experience, so I would say I got pretty lucky because the cohort before me and after me both had really bad experience.
PS: also a side note: most of the instructors I worked with had already left Flatiron, so I can't speak to the new instructors.

Job Assistance
You get assigned a career coach, who you would meet with every week to give you advice and new directions. There is also the Employment Partnership team, who is supposedly setting up interviews for you. (an add on to your own career search)
Career coaches are great resources for reviewing resumes, portfolios, or simply a source of motivation.

Environment + Resources
Flatiron is owned by WeWork, so we had really great resources there. Even before our in-person phase started, my team and I worked at WeWork to collaborate. (This was before COVID as well)
We also received course material to the UI track after we have completed the course. There are a lot of resources available at Flatiron, I think it is a great plus.

Client Work
I don't know of a lot of boot camps that sets you up for client work (internship basically.) This is something that really helped with my job search - being able to say I have had the opp to work with real clients, projects, engineers? etc.
Although I have to say, my client was super flaky and we did the whole project without much communication with them. It still works experience, right?

Overall
I think Flatiron makes some excellent hires and some terrible ones in all teams and fields (not much in-betweens...) and there is no good protocols in place to ensure experience. The curriculum is great. One thing for sure is that Flatiron really is trying to find you a job, with the resources they provide and the ISA options, etc. There are some really smart people working here to help you.

I joined Flatiron School SE track with much enthusiasm. I found the instructors to be knowledgeable and willing to help you if you had questions. I completed the program on a fast track (faster than my cohort) and have my portfolio finished with top notch projects. 

The curriculum (2019-2020) seemed a bit too basic, repetitive tasks and exercises. I did raise the issue of lessons even repeating themselves and even grammatical errors/bugs in them. It also did not cover crucial software engineering concepts such as data structures and algorithms. Also the stack with a heavy focus on Ruby is a bit outdated and only cover modern frameworks in the last section. 

My major issue was with career and student services. Student services is pretty much absent. I sent an email in the middle of my program and waited over a month to only get a templated response. Career services people are willing to help you and get to the next level but the process relies on a pretty outdated structure with spreadsheets and you're required to do a lot of cold outreaching. 

As a graduate of the software engineering program, and with a background in education I felt Flatiron School is a bit overrated these days. In the past it could've been in the forefront of technology and innovation. Considering the outdated/too basic curriculum, non-responsive student services and lack of meaningful support from career services I think it needs a major overhaul to keep up with current job and tech trends.

Overall, I had a fantastic experience with Flatiron School. The program enabled me to get a data science job that ticked all my boxes. I was able to make a dramatic career transition (during a pandemic, no less!) from academia/non-profits to tech thanks to this program.

Background: When I was applying to bootcamps, I already had a PhD (in a humanities discipline) and lots of data science and programming tutorials under my belt. I chose Flatiron School because the curriculum looked good, the program was only 5 months when done full-time, and they offered an income share agreement as a payment option. 

Getting in: First I had a call with a representative to assess my interest and experience in data science. Then I got access to some preparatory materials that included basic Python and a little bit of calculus. Once these were done, I had a technical interview with a Flatiron School instructor, consisting of a few basic programming questions and a conversation about some math/calculus concepts. The preparatory materials were enough to help me be ready for this interview, but the real point of the interview is to assess whether you can learn quickly and take feedback/correction well. After this, I was accepted to the program and chose my start date.

The program: For the duration of the program, I had one instructor, an "educational coach" (to help with motivation, study skills, etc.) and a cohort of fellow bootcampers. We spent four hours per week in live lecture/office hours, and I had two half-hour one-on-ones with my instructor each week, too. My cohort had its own Slack channel where we could ask the instructor or each other questions and do daily standups. Here's a list of topics we covered (not exhaustive):

• General Python programming, with particular focus on NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib
• Git, GitHub, and principles of version control
• Basics of data visualization
• Regression (linear, logistic, multiple linear, polynomial, etc.)
• SQL and general principles of database design
• Basics of object-oriented programming
• APIs, web scraping, and working with JSON files
• A broad survey of statistical topics, including combinatorics, permutations, distributions, central limit theorem, hypothesis testing, and Bayesian stats
• Time series analysis
• Basics of linear algebra
• Survey of machine learning algorithms and techniques, including k nearest neighbors, decision trees, random forests and other ensemble methods, support vector machines, PCA, k means, and recommendation systems
• A little introduction to Spark via PySpark
• Basics of graph theory/network analysis
• Basics of NLP
• Survey of deep learning topics, including RNNs, CNNs, and transfer learning
• A little intro to AWS and how to deploy a machine learning algorithm into production.

Near the end of the program, I also got access to a career prep curriculum, which contained readings and exercises relating to résumés, LinkedIn, networking, building a professional web presence, etc. Flatiron School recently added a post-bootcamp curriculum of extra stuff to study while job-searching, including more work with SQL, and intro to R, and some guidelines for making your projects look better on GitHub. I'm really glad they created these additional resources, since these are things I went out and studied on my own because they were important for my job search. Flatiron is constantly updating the curriculum, and students are welcome to submit suggestions or corrections to be addressed by the curriculum team.

An average day of bootcamp involved a lot of independent reading and work on the labs provided in the curriculum, interrupted by a lecture/group meeting with instructor and classmates to go over the material assigned for that day. This format was great for me because I learn better when I can focus on something on my own for a while and then have a chance to ask my questions and hear other people's questions, too. Each day's meeting covered a certain chunk of the curriculum, but there was a lot of flexibility to work ahead or take more time on something if I wanted. Although you could always spend more time on things, I found it was possible to complete each week's material to my own satisfaction in 40-45 hours on average.
Overall, the curriculum prepared me well for my job search. The projects I built during bootcamp were of a high enough quality that I could present them during job interviews. The capstone project is totally open-ended, so you can design it to show off skills relevant to the types of jobs that appeal to you. For each project, I had to do both a non-technical presentation and a code review with my instructor, and these experiences were extremely helpful once I started looking for a job. This is definitely one of the reasons to do a bootcamp rather than just studying on one's own. If someone I knew were looking for a bootcamp today, I would tell them to ask whether a program includes this kind of project work, since it's the best way to prepare for/show that you're prepared for real data science work.

Career services: My experience with career services at Flatiron definitely made the program worth the cost. As soon as I graduated, I started working with a career coach who helped me with my résumé, mock interviews, web presence, and general job search strategy. My coach was amazing, especially at keeping me motivated when the pandemic brought my job search to a screeching halt. It was really helpful to have someone to talk to each week about my job search, and she was super responsive to any questions I had about how to respond to e-mails, networking tactics, etc. 

Highlights: The best parts of the bootcamp for me were my instructor, my career coach, and the projects I built.

Improvements: I would have liked to see a little more space in the curriculum given to ethics, maybe some case studies about practical applications of data ethics. There was a brief overview of data ethics in theory ("Hey, you should only make ethical use of people's personal information! There is bias in AI!"), but since this is an issue that affects all aspects of data science, it would be good to give it a little more weight.