Flatiron School

The best thing about FIS is the quality of teaching. This comes from both the instructors who are very helpful as well as your peers. They do a great job of selecting the students and forming well-balanced classes. I learned a ton from them. 

Other great things are:

-Teaching you programming concepts that are transferrable to any language. We learned Ruby but you can take the methodologies they teach you and apply it to any programming language.

-The placements team is awesome. They do a great job prepping you for interviews and connecting you with lots of job opportunities. 

I would highly recommend this program to anyone who is serious about becoming a web developer.

Hello! I wanted to take some time to review my experience with The Flatiron School. I completed the 8-week Part-time Front End Web Developement program here back in May of 2014. It was a pretty good experience being my first dive into web development.

It was a combination of video projects and in person once a week classes. The videos were somewhat long but they were broken down into seprate projects so it was pretty easy to follow. At times the videos weren't posted as far in advance as I would have liked. But being the first time they did something like this it was understandable.

The classes were spent either catching up on the videos or working on an in-person project. It was great to get some in person coding experience to work through problems with a partner. 

We covered Git/Github HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, responsive design. I wish that we spent more time on the javascript/jQuery part and suggest that they extend the course a couple weeks to include more projects for that. 

Pros: low cost ($750), good venue, knowledgeable instructor

Cons: No job placement assistance for part time students, felt like I needed a next step

Flatiron's iOS program is an intensive 12-week bootcamp program, with 20 students. We were a varied bunch! Students were from England, Catalonia, Canada and the US with experience in: computer science, programming, finance, engineering, teaching, law, politics and entrepreneurship. The majority were in their early-to-mid 20s, with a few folks in their late 20s and early 30s. 

Pre-work: Before you begin, there is 80 hours of pre-work walking you through the fundamentals of Git, Objective-C and iOS. Depending on if you have a programming background, this could be insanely challenging or fairly easy.

"Be nice": When you enter Flatiron, you learn Flatiron's first rule - be nice. This sets the tone for the entire community and course. The founders, instructors and fellow classmates are genuinely good, nice people!

The work: Be expected to work at least 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, if not more. I regularly worked 12+ hours per day. Each day you have a morning lecture, a lab, lunch, afternoon lecture, and more labs. There is more work than anyone can possible manage. It is overwhelming for the first few weeks, but you learn to manage your time and expectations over time.

Here are the best things about the Flatiron experience:

1. Immersion - you live and breath code 24/7. It's an amazing way to learn. As someone who tried evening classes, I found this type of bootcamp experience the only way to learn and learn fast.

2. Instruction - Joe, our iOS instructor, is knowledgeable, helpful and an overall great teacher.  

3. People -- your fellow classmates are a smart bunch. And you will learn a ton from them! learned more from my peers than from classroom instruction, purely because I spent most of my day doing labs with peers! As an added bonus, your classmates become your friends and, who knows, maybe even colleagues or co-founders in the future.

TL:DR: The Flatirion school is intense, but its the best way to learn. Instructors are great. The community is a supportive and engaging one. It's a fantastic environment to grow and learn, as a developer and as a person. I'd highly recommend it.

 

They talk a big game about caring about your success, community, etc. but at the end of the day, they are just another for-profit school out to make a buck. 

They engaged in what I believe was predatory false advertising to get students in the Seattle area to enroll. I enrolled in Dec 2021 while the world was in turmoil and all physical campuses were closed due to covid. The message being given to students was the campus will reopen per CDC guidelines. This narrative was peddled until May 2021 when most all things had reopened and students noticed Seattle had been deleted from the school's website. Only then after several ignored messages about the subject were slack questions (not mine personally, another student was answered) on the matter and it was finally revealed that the building had been sold as it didn't align with business interests. The sale of a building takes a long time, (to be on the market, accept offers, go through escrow, etc) and I believe at the time of my enrollment they had no intention of re-opening the campus, and covid was the convenient excuse/nail in the coffin. 

Many more months later someone with flatiron admitted this was something they had been exploring for some time and failed to inform any of their students. When I inquired about this I was told a campus is not necessary for my success(?) and they would be offering no refund in any amount despite the fact they are more than twice the cost of many other fully online boot camps.

The good/caring teachers either get promoted or leave for other positions so the positive reviews are essentially meaningless as those instructors probably aren't there anymore. I was dumped into a new cohort mid-program and when I reached out to student services about it not being a good fit (my new cohort lead was really disconnected and inactive) they offered me to withdraw and re-enroll (and pay tuition again!).

There is no community there except what you make for yourself. My first cohort lead was excellent at community building but he soon got promoted. The "community managers" will try and get students to do all the work of organizing, hosting, and maintaining meetings. Otherwise, the "community" is pretty nonexistent, especially being in a city that they essentially abandoned and abandoned all the students there.

The flex program you will essentially self study so you may as well save your money and go to a more affordable BootCamp or Youtube U. No way without the campus is the tuition worth it and if I could do it all over I would not go to this school. They promise the moon but the moment you sign on the dotted line they stop caring.

I received numerous emails about requiring a deposit but have yet to receive a call back as I requested. I wasn’t even made aware that everyone was out of the office for winter break. There weren’t any automatic replies when I sent emails but I surely was reminded that the due date for my deposit was approaching. Piss poor communication. When I did pay my deposit I still didn’t have access to TCs because once again, I was not notified of holiday hours. I had access to the chat feature for one day only and I’ve yet to see the chat feature again. They leave you on your own to code during prep. How is this novice friendly? Also, having to pay $17,000 to be told to bounce off your peers if your need help is unfair to students.

The module curriculum was pretty good for what you could fit into a few months, although the free Odin Project is better if you are self motivated and can teach yourself. There is no way it is worth $17,000, and I assume the job placement numbers are massaged or falsified. They let in almost anyone, and I would estimate anywhere from 33%-75% of my class will never get a software engineering job. Most people had zero knowledge going in. Many did not seem to take it that seriously or work that hard, and many could barely grasp basic concepts or build a non-broken site by the end of the program.

The Denver on site campus was a joke. It was set up as remote, where you basically just work on modules by yourself all day, and there are lectures on zoom from people in New York. I never watched a lecture because it is a questionable at best way to learn how to code. If I wanted to, obviously it could have been from anywhere. The on site instructor had no industry experience and seemed to have the knowledge level of a recent bootcamp grad at best (very, very minimal and surface level). There was basically no value added whatsoever by being on site, as the occasional group activities were terrible. For example, in a coding walkthrough, the instructor robotically typed out a solution someone else had written, and did not do anything to encourage discussion, talk about best practices, or anything. He did not seem to fully understand all of the solutions.

Feedback I've gotten on LinkedIn and my resume from a career services person was reasonable, but was minimal and not substantive. I did not get the sense these people have industry specific knowledge, but rather they seem to be generic HR / resume writer people.

I joined Flatiron as a part of their Flex program for Software development. 

Pros : Course content for the time I was on seemed organized

Cons : I joined the flex program because i was in a full time job with kids. I joined the program based on flexibility and during the time i was on had a job change due to which i could not commit to the corsework. I asked for extension multiple times, but they mentioned since it was a flex program, i had flexibility. However, they emailed me that they had to process my dismissal since i could not keep up with their timelines. Which meant i was out of pocket for thousands of dollars. So folks looking to join their flex program, do understand that it can only flex so much and at the end of the dismissal you have spent thousands of dollars already

Applied for the Deloitte Career Advancement Program. I received an email stating that I need to take an admissions assessment. Requested a copy of the assessment and I was told it was not part of the admissions process. Confused already. Then I was told not to apply online to the Deloitte website. So why is the opportunity listed on several job boards? Sketchy. Then I received an email redirecting me to apply for another program at Flatiron from the same admissions person. If the admissions person wanted me to apply for another program other than Deloitte then why didn't she send the test results? The Flatiron website literally talks about the admissions personnel discussing the test results with the prospective student. It is possible the HR recruiter had something to say about my dislike for the CSU program I went to because she is a CSU graduate. Academic writing is not APA peer-reviewed literacy. The scientific method is required which is not taught at CSU global. The graduates don't know much about quality and are concerned with quantity which is why I left for a more thoughtful education. It is bothersome to get an inconsistent application experience. I do not recommend Flatiron for many reasons. 1. This program should not be difficult to get into because the core content is not challenging. 2. The program mentions Kali Linux which I am familiar with since the inception of Backtrack. This penetration testing environment is not used for higher end corporate environments and is strictly for developmental usage. 3. The program is ridiculously expensive and I wouldn't pay for another bootcamp after my previous experience. These bootcamps are never going to prepare anyone enough for a high paying career. I think businesses will make people feel insecure before not having formal education so they can pay them less. Be careful with bootcamps and higher education. Research the courses and ask for syllabus outlines of course content.