Flatiron School

My take on the Flatiron School

I was a student at The Flatiron School for their immersive iOS program and I do not recommend this school.  I had to make sure I graduated before I left this review because if they found out that I wrote a negative review while I was a student, there would have been retribution against me and they would have made my life miserable.

The job placement numbers are complete BS

They make misleading statements about job placements.  Perhaps I am naive, but I believed the numbers I got from the Flatiron reps and what I found on Course Report were accurate.  The Flatiron School reports that 95 % of their grads are hired in technical roles with 120 days and report an average salary of $74, 447.  This couldn’t be further from the truth!   They suggested I even try to find some entry level position even if it was at minimum wage.  I couldn’t believe this.  I really felt that I was lied to. I still am in touch with several of my cohort mates and many of them are still looking for work, 6 months after graduating. As another reviewer noted – “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”.

The iOS program

Their main program is Web development and Ruby on Rails and you can tell that their web cohort receives a lot more attention than the iOS guys. Their iOS curriculum is also not well thought out and rushes through the topics without going into any depth which I realized when I started interviewing. And their teachers lack professional experience. Code reviews is another thing that this school lacks. Keep these also in mind if you’re considering their iOS bootcamp. So in my opinion all this was definitely not worth the 15k that I spent.

I really enjoyed the free Intro to Ruby course they use as a preview for the full $1500/mo course. Actually, that price changed three times in the 3 months I was a "Learner" (it was initially $1000/mo, then split into $500 or $1000, then raised to $1500). 

The Slack community is enjoyable with fun and hard working people chatting throughout the day. And the Flatiron founder Avi was quite active.

Unlike the free course, there are no video lectures for each lesson in the full version, it's all text. After a few hundred of those, I got the feeling like this was basically a very expensive version of Code School/Codecademy/etc. When I had questions, the TA chat response time was around 30 minutes, which was way longer than it was in the free course (5 minutes tops, usually instant). Also, there are only 6 times were your code will be reviewed by someone. That's a terrible value and you will not feel confident that you are writing solid code even if you're passing the tests.

The worst part is that the slower you go, the more it'll cost. Also, just as others have posted here, the general advice they have is for you to take the first job you're offered regardless of the pay. Even paid internships. If you dig deeper into their Jobs Report, you'll find that the awesome numbers they report for salary and placement are for folks who received full time jobs, but many students don't, thus they aren't included as to not bring down the numbers. If you're like me, who has a family to support, a temporary, lowly paid internship is not what I envisioned when investing in the program.

I really wanted to love this program. My heart was set on completing it after interacting with the Slack community. I ignored my common sense when I learned that there would only be 6 code reviews. I ignored my common sense when I saw that the full version contained no video lectures and I was just reading GitHub Readme's that seemed similar to free content I'd found elsewhere online. I was blinded by my hope for a high salary and a better life.

That blindness cost me big bucks. I hope you will take this review to heart and let your common sense prevail.