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Hack Reactor by Galvanize is an educator for rapid career transformation, offering software engineering bootcamps designed so that anyone with motivation can succeed, regardless of education, experience, or background. Hack Reactor by Galvanize bootcamps are challenging and designed to fit a student’s schedule and skill level. Bootcamps include a 19-Week Software Engineering Immersive with JavaScript and Python, designed for beginners, as well as a 12-Week Software Engineering Immersive.
Applicants to the 12-week Software Engineering Immersive need to pass a Technical Admissions Assessment (TAA), which tests for intermediate coding competency. There is a free, self-paced bootcamp prep course that can be accessed to learn the fundamentals of JavaScript. Those applying for the 19-week program do not need to pass the TAA or take any prep courses. Applicants to all programs need to pass an aptitude test, a brief typing test, and an admissions interview.
In addition to its software engineering programs, Hack Reactor provides a large network of professional peers, 1:1 coaching, mock interviews, job training, and more. All students graduate as autonomous, full-stack software engineers, fully capable of tackling unique problems and building complex applications on the job. Hack Reactor alumni join a diverse, engaged network of fellow students, instructors, staff, and alumni, including 14,000+ graduates at 2,500 companies.
★
These are opinions from more than 1 student from more than 1 cohort (both onsite and Remote). Instead of writing several negative reviews and skewing the average number of stars, we have decided to combine and collect all of our opinions into 1 review. Individually speaking, we do not all agree on all contents in this review. In fact, one of us wanted to give this review 5 stars for "Overall Experience." We encourage you to come back to this review to che...
★
These are opinions from more than 1 student from more than 1 cohort (both onsite and Remote). Instead of writing several negative reviews and skewing the average number of stars, we have decided to combine and collect all of our opinions into 1 review. Individually speaking, we do not all agree on all contents in this review. In fact, one of us wanted to give this review 5 stars for "Overall Experience." We encourage you to come back to this review to check for updates. Writing this may even hurt us because we may damage our future job prospects. Some of our classmates are still unemployed even after 6 months of job searching.
Do not believe most positive reviews about Hack Reactor that you read on the Internet (Yelp, Quora, Course Report, Switch Up, etc.) from mid-2016 Hack Reactor graduates. Several positive reviews written by 2016 Hack Reactor graduates are fake. What we mean by this is that the positive reviews are not fake because staff members created fake accounts to boost their ratings, but rather, what makes these reviews fake is that in order to get a free Hack Reactor hoodier at the end, you must write a review (positive, negative, or neutral) with your name attached to it (attached to the Google survey [so the job coach can know who to send it to and not have students cheat Hack Reactor with duplicate reviews for duplicate free hoodies] not directly on the review itself) and show it to your job coach. As you can imagine, even though the job coach does not directly "bribe" you with a free Hack Reactor hoodie (by directly claiming that the review must be positive), most people would not want to write a negative review with their name attached to it (on the Google survey not on the review itself) due to fear of retaliation from the Hack Reactor Outcomes Team (not receiving optimal job support such as whiteboarding help, interviewing help, fixing resume, etc.).
We like how Hack Reactor claimed:
"Please write a review (positive, negative or a mixture of both) on the site listed below" implying that they would be okay with honest negative reviews detracting future applicants to their software engineering bootcamp when in fact, Hack Reactor is a first-and-formost a for-profit school. In Economics 101, a business stays in business to make money. A business that fails to optimize profit is not a business. Do not let the fact that Hack Reactor is giving out several full-rides (by creating a video that teaches someone a new skill) fool you into thinking that their top priority is not to optimize profit. This is all public relations strategies to market their software engineering bootcamp.
As far as we know, Hack Reactor did not ask for reviews in exchange for free Hack Reactor hoodies until recently in mid-2016 or so, so ignore any Hack Reactor alumni who graduated 2012-2015 and or early 2016 who claim that our allegations are false.
Here is our evidence that Hack Reactor engages in such behavior:
http://imgur.com/a/qfcfO
As these people did not graduate from Hack Reactor in mid-2016 specifically, they were not asked to write a review with their names attached in exchange for a free Hack Reactor hoodie. Hack Reactor graduates from 2012-2015 and early 2016 are completely out of touch with reality of the new mid-2016 Hack Reactor quality. They had several $100k+ salary job offers within 3 months of graduating, so they are living in their own echo chamber while mid-2016 graduates and onwards are struggling with dismal job prospects. As such, to the eyes of prospective Hack Reactor applicants, their reviews and opinions are no longer applicable. However, some mid-2016 Hack Reactor graduates are definitely not getting $100k+ job offers within 3 months of graduation.
This is incredibly unreasonable as most prospective Hack Reactor applicants depend on honest reviews to help them make an informed life-changing decision that could negatively affect their mental health, finances, relationships, etc. These students do not realize that Hack Reactor is an unsafe bet until they become unemployed for 6 months.
In fact, some of us were discussing amonst each other to plan to initially give Hack Reactor positive reviews with all 5 stars, wait a month for the free Hack Reactor hoodie to ship to our houses, go back and decrease all of the 5 stars positive reviews back down to 1 star negative reviews. Course Report allows the reviewer to infinitely edit the written review and change the number of stars as well.
Notice how all of the positive reviews on Course Report have 0-1 points of "This review is helpful" whereas most of the negative reviews on Course Report have 20+ points of "This review is helpful." This analysis should tell the Hack Reactor applicant that more people agree with the negative reviews than the positive reviews. Quality over quantitiy. The high number of positive 5-star reviews (which are mostly fake anyways because Hack Reactor alumni are easily bribed with a free Hack Reactor sweater) do not mean much if few people upvote them (agree with them).
The only reason we attended Hack Reactor Remote / Hack Reactor Onsite was due to the postive reviews we have read on Quora, Course Report, Switch, Yelp, etc. (which we later found out some recent ones to be fake because the students were being bribed with free Hack Reactor hoodies).
Coming into Hack Reactor, we had high expectations as Hack Reactor claimed to be "the CS degree for the 21st century" as well as "The Harvard of the Software Engineering Bootcamps." They advertised that their student outcomes were better than other software engineering bootcamps, BS CS programs from UCs, BS CS programs from CSUs, etc.
The Remote Prep and Fulcrum are also useless with minimal help from HIRs with just slides.
Once you pass the technical interview, you must complete the precourse homework by yourself with no help from HIRs.
The HIRs, technical mentors, class sheperd, etc. do not have any previous industrial software engineering experience. The HIRs get paid $22 per hour, so most of us did not even apply. The technical mentors get paid $80k-$100k (as advertised on Angel List). The HIRs from Thinkful have previous industrial software engineering experience and get paid $35 per hour based on what my friends tell me. During sprints, you are forbidden from asking technical mentors for help. You are only allowed to ask HIRs for help.
We asked help from the HIRs, and most HIRs just told us the following:
"You must Google the answer yourself. I will watch you via screenshare to see your Googling methodology. If there are any errors in your Googling methodology, we will correct you and point you in the correct path in terms of knowing what correct terms to Google."
"Did you try Googling it before submitting the Help Desk Ticket"?
"My goal is not to give you direct answers, but rather, my goal is to point you in the correct direction and help you get unstuck. Once you get unstuck, you Google the rest."
"Here is some documentation, blogs, videos, etc. for you to read. These resources will solve your questions. If you still need help, use Google. If you still need help, submit another help desk ticket."
"These concepts were covered in the videos. Rewatch videos X, Y, Z on the MakerPass interface. You should also Google some blogs to help you. You can use money to buy Udemy videos as well."
Outdated Curriculum
MongoDB 3.2.11 was released on November 18, 2016.
Current Hack Reactor students definitely did not learn MongoDB 3.2.11.
https://docs.mongodb.com/v3.2/release-notes/3.2/
Express 5.0 is in the alpha stage, yet one recent Hack Reactor graduate whom we met at a software company recruiting meet and greet event in downtown SF claim that he or she was still solving the half of the Express sprints in Express 3.0 and the second half of the Express sprints in Express 4.0. This shows that Hack Reactor was too lazy to update their curriculum to be consistent.
Google released Angular 2.1.0 on October 12, 2016. https://angular.io/news.html We are still learning Angular 1.0.
Node 7.2.0 was released on November 22, 2016. https://nodejs.org/en/download/releases/ A recent Hack Reactor graduate said that he or she was still learning Node 6.
Facebook just released React 15.4.0 on November 16, 2016.
https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/04/07/react-v15.html
The version of React.js that one recent Hack Reactor graduate was learning was definitely not 15.4.0.
What are we even paying $17,780 for then?
After realizing how insulting the HIRs were, by around Week 4, 95%+ of us stopped submitting tickets for help desk to ask HIRs for help, and we just simply started to search the Internet when we got stuck.
Many of Hack Reactor's contents look similar to online free sources. This could also be due to other sources reusing Hack Reactor's contents (which is clearly not Hack Reactor's fault at all). It can also be previous Hack Reactor students uploading Hack Reactor sprints onto their public respositories on GitHub and other sources copying off of them (which is clearly not Hack Reactor's fault at all). Our HIRs told us to consult Udemy, Youtube, etc. before doing each sprint. So we did. When we were doing the sprints, we were saying to ourselves, "Wait, did we not do something similar to this before?" The HIRs did not tell us why there were no solution videos for Recastly nor Siskel. While we do not accuse Hack Reactor of plagiarism or copyright infringement under DMCA laws, it begs the question of:
"Why pay $17,780 to study at Hack Reactor when so many resources are available online for free"?
Someone can just clone the Hack Reactor experience by gathering a group of 4 Hack Reactor accepted students, use Udemy, Internet, Free Code Camp, etc., and just build projects as a group. The real value in Hack Reactor are the portfolios and the alumni connections which can be replicated via Meetup groups.
We give Hack Reactor the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was possible that another Youtube video was recycling material from Hack Reactor instead or that neither were reusing contents from each other and they both independently created the similar content. It is incredibly difficult to create super 100% original content from scratch. Mr. Harsh Patel claimed that all sprints are designed independently, so we believe him. We are glad that Hack Reactor is committed to honesty and that Mr. Harsh Patel responded. We wish Hack Reactor and Mr. Harsh Patel the best in optimizing Hack Reactor for future students. However, Mr. Harsh Patel still failed to explain to us why Recastly and Siskel do not have prepared solution videos. These solutions lectures had to be given live in person.
How much you learn depends on how smart your sprint partners / project partners. Despite claiming a 3% acceptance rate, Hack Reactor still accepts low-quality students. It is incredibly easy to cheat on the technical admissions interview, precourse homework, weekly assessments, sprints, summary assessment, etc. In fact, it may even be possible to cheat your way through the entire Hack Reactor curriculum (onsite or Remote) if someone is clever enough (although we do not believe there has been a case where someone has cheated their way through the entire Hack Reactor curriculum). The reason why people cheat in Hack Reactor is because they quit their job and spent $17,780 and do not want to put their spent money to waste.
On Week 6 Saturday, you must pass a Summary Assessment. If you fail miserably, you are permanently kicked out of Hack Reactor where you have no option to defer to a subsequent Hack Reactor cohort cycle. You are still given a prorated refund of around $8k though. The Summary Assessment covers the MEARN stack.
The thesis project phase is useless because everyone builds their projects differently using their own technology stacks, so there is no way for the HIRs to help you get unstuck as each HIR is specialized in a different technology stack and each HIR does not know your game plan for your thesis project as they were not there when you are theorycrafting your thesis project at the beginning. If you are stuck on a part of the thesis project, you basically have no recourse whatsoever. Most groups do not even finish their thesis project by Saturday of Week 13 and they must spend several months after their Hack Reactor cohort has ended to wrap up their projects before interviewing. This means that some people's (the 2% in 2015 that are unable to obtain at least 1 software engineering job within 6 months of graduation from Hack Reactor) timelines are as follows:
-1 month to study JS on your own for the technical admissions interview
-1 month to re-interview if you get soft rejected
-1 month for precourse homework
-2 months to defer to the next cohort if you fail the technical check-in during the precourse phase
-3 months for the actual software engineering immersive
-1 month to finish / fix / polish your projects (MVP, Greenfield, Legacy, Thesis) on your own even after Hack Reactor is finished because your team members could be incompetent, code everything wrong, let you do most of the work, etc. (If you do not have a BS CS degree [which most Hack Reactor students do not], remember that you must have an interview-viable project before an employer will even give you a phone screen.) without any help from Hack Reactor
-2 months to review data structures and algorithms via Cracking the Coding Interview, Interview Cake, Coderbyte, Code Wars, Leet Code, Top Coder, etc. due to how poorly data structures and algorithms are taught at Hack Reactor without any help from Hack Reactor
-1 month to review JavaScript technology stacks (MEAN + Backbone.js + React.js) via Free Code Camp, Udemy, etc. without any help from Hack Reactor
-6 months to find a job (applying, getting rejected, phone screens, take home coding challenges, Skype interviews, onsite interviews, negotiation, etc.).
We are aware that 98% of 2015 Hack Reactor graduates receive an offer within 6 months of graduation from Hack Reactor (as a 3rd party independent accounting firm verified), but if you are in the 2% from 2015 that were unable to get a software engineering job within 6 months, your entire career change to software engineering via Hack Reactor might take upwards of 17 months. Being unemployed for 17 or more months will negatively affect your relationships, finances, etc. because the interest on the loans will accumulate while you are unemployed. Some long-term unemployed Hack Reactor graduates who have completely given up on their software engineering career change have gone back to their previous jobs.
The job coaches are more like cheerleaders. They do not help you connect with jobs.
When people read the phrase "job placement," people usually interpret it as "the organization connecting the students with interviews directly where the students skip the application submission process and jump straight to the interview."
As Hack Reactor does not connect its students with interviews directly where the students skip the application submission process and jump straight to the interview, their outcomes team's goal is incredibly misleading.
Hack Reactor has cancelled their hiring day where they brought in hiring partners to observe the students' projects and hire on the spot. Nowadays, Hack Reactor alumni just apply randomly and hope to get jobs. Codesmith in LA and App Academy in SF still have their hiring days.
App Academy and Viking School are safer bets as you only pay them X% of your 1st year's salary over a span of Y months if they help you get a job.
Thinkful, Career Foundry, Udacity Nanodegree+ refunds your tuition if you fail to find a job after 6 months.
Hack Reactor keeps the entire $17,780 tuition even if you are unemployed for more than 6 months.
Hack Reactor shuts down curriculum access after 3 months. Thinkful lets you keep infinite access to the Thinkful curriculum for a lifetime even if Thinkful refunds the student the entire $14,000 due to failing to find at least 1 market-rate software engineering job in his or her location. Some Thinkful students even feel bad that Thinkful is being this generous. A Thinkful alumnus claimed that this is Thinkful's method of giving a gift as gratitude for at least trying out Thinkful. To make this review honest and fair, since we claimed that Hack Reactor uses free scholarships via creating "Teach a new skill" videos to market their school, this may also be used to market Thinkful.
The Hack Reactor curriculum is incredibly outdated. Hack Reactor claims to be better than other software engineering bootcamps because other software engineering bootcamps takes you from 0 - 100 whereas Hack Reactor takes you from 20 - 120. However, the current job market for junior / mid software engineers is oversaturated. Most of the software engineering job market is geared towards senior and above (lead, staff, director, VP, CTO, etc.). However, being at 120 is not enough to get a senior software engineering role. To be a senior software engineer, you need to be at least at 150-180. Some Hack Reactor alumni have submitted 500+ applications, but they are still unemployed (assuming their claims are true). To make this review fair, this could also mean that they are bad interviewers which is clearly not Hack Reactor's fault.
Some employers in 2016 and onwards want to see a completely self-made project with only the job applicant making 100% of the commits on said project on GitHub, but Hack Reactor forces students to build projects in groups of 3-5. Previous Hack Reactor job seekers have told my classmates that employers generally do not give interviews to those who do not have at least 1 full-stack application that is completely built by themselves because the employers do not want to risk wasting time interviewing an applicant who could be incompetent who might have let his or her teammates do all of the work and take all the credit in the end (remember that in the thesis project phase, the HIRs / technical mentors do not check individual progress of each member on each thesis team before letting them graduate). This means that it is entirely possible to graduate from Hack Reactor by barely making any commits at all to your group's thesis project.
Our main reasoning for writing this review is to help others make an informed decision, so that they do not quit their job and take out $42k in loans ($25k from Pave + $17k from Earnest) (remember that you also need living expenses for 9 months [3 months for Hack Reactor and 6 months for job search]). In order to have our negative review be taken seriously by as many people as possible, we have carefully edited this negative review to remove all sentences related emotions and only focus on the cold hard logic.
We would not recommend Hack Reactor (onsite or Remote) to anyone at all even if he or she won the full-ride Hack Reactor scholarship $17,780 where you must make a Youtube video of yourself teaching someone a new skill because this person who attends Hack Reactor with a full-ride would still be wasting his or her time.
We hope the Hack Reactor employees had an excellent Thanksgiving and Christmas Holiday season because they surely ruined ours.
Some alternatives to Hack Reactor would be Udemy, Youtube, blogs, Stack Overflow, Free Code Camp, Free Code Camp meetups where you have access to a live tutor volunteer, Interview Cake, Cracking the Coding Interview, etc. The secret is knowing what to study. The only reason why people attend software engineering bootcamps is that they find self-studying to be difficult due to not having a game plan curriculum. Once you figure out exactly what you must study in order to be a successful software engineer, attending any software engineering bootcamp makes absolutely zero sense.
The founders of Telegraph Academy have both left Telegraph Academy, and Telegraph Academy has now been converted to The Telegraph Track which is a mentorship program for people of color, women, LGBTQ people, etc. in the software industry. One Telegraph Academy cofounder is now a diversity specialist at Hack Reactor, and the other Telegraph Academy cofounde is now the interim director of Hack Reactor Remote. Notice how there is no Hack Reactor site in Berkeley, CA. The reason why the Telegraph Academy was not converted to Hack Reactor Berkeley is because they received some negative reviews on Yelp and Course Report. The Reactor Core Network just decided to let the Telegraph Academy name die out to protect the Hack Reactor brand name.
As of 11-29-16, after only 4 days, this honest negative review received 30 upvotes. It is possible to upvote the same review on Course Report more than once after clearing cookies, but even if we took into account that each person upvoted this honest negative review 3 times each, that is still ~10 unique upvotes. We did upvote some of the previous negative reviews (only once each), but we have only upvoted our own negative review once (after writing the 1st draft) since it is more than 1 person writng this review. We are extremely pleased to know that this review has made an impact on some prospective students' decisions. It is only a matter of time until Hack Reactor is forced to create a directory of students' LinkedIn profiles where they encourage prospective applicants to message random alumni for opinions and or take the "you only pay us X% of your 1st year's salary until you find a job within Y months" approach towards tuition.
We are so glad that Course Report only has an upvote button and no downvote button.
Can you imagine what would happen if Course Report had a downvote button?
If Course Report had a downvote button, lots of Hack Reactor alumni who had a positive experience to comb through past negative reviews and downvote them.
One thing to note is that the next cycle ends around Saturday 12-10-16, and this exact time is when the fake reviews from Hack Reactor graduates (who are easily bribed with a free Hack Reactor hoodie and who have sold their soul to the devil by knowingly deceiving future Hack Reactor applicants by writing fake positive reviews just to get a free Hack Reactor hoodie) start pouring in.
We will probably write our final draft before Saturday 12-10-16, so that this honest negative review can be seen by many prospective applicants before a sea of fake positive reviews (by Hack Reactor alumni who are easily bribed by a free Hack Reactor hoodie) eclipses this honest negative review.
Make sure you share this honest negative review with as many people as you know.
If we can even convince at least one person reading this honest negative review to reject Hack Reactor to self-study software engineering via Udemy or Free Code Camp, our job here is done.
To make this honest review fair, we will still list some positive factors about Hack Reactor:
-The classmates are nice and social.
-You will probably be friends with your project partners for life.
-The program is somewhat selective to a certain extent, so the top classmates are all very smart.
-The atmosphere is positive.
-The top students get jobs at top companies.
-Almost all classmates are willing to help each other.
-You have guaranteed partners for software engineering projects.
-Hack Reactor hired an independent accounting firm to verify their student outcomes (in 2015, 98% of job-seekers found a software engineering job within 6 months of graduation from Hack Reactor).
Our advice:
If you want a completely objective view point of Hack Reactor, we strongly encourage you to go on LinkedIn and message 10+ people from Hack Reactor mid-2016 and ask them for their opinions on Hack Reactor. All of them will say that they were offered a Hack Reactor sweater in exchange for an Internet review with their name attached to it. Most people fear giving opinions with paper trail as these can be traced back to them. Offer to buy them lunch / beer / lunch / a gift card in exchange for taking the time to sit down with them for X minutes asking them for their real honest opinions of Hack Reactor in person where there is no paper trail of their opinions leading back to them.
To the people claiming that this is a fake review from a competitor software engineering bootcamp designed to attract prospective applicants to their own software engineering bootcamp, if we are not Hack Reactor alumni, then how do we know super specific details about the Hack Reactor syllabus (which are not publically available anywhere on the Internet at the time of this review) such as Siskel (Backbone.js sprint) and Recastly (React.js sprint with Youtube API) not having prepared recorded posted solution videos on the Hack Reactor contents interface (at the time of this posting)? Explain that. Feel free to ask any current Hack Reactor student to verify this specific fact (at the time of this posting). Actually, ask any other future Hack Reactor students in subsequent cohorts to verify this fact because given Hack Reactor's previous track record of failing to update their online videos in a timely manner, Hack Reactor will most likely still be using 2014 video lectures in 2017 and still fail to update a single aspect on their outdated MakerPass interface. It is incredibly unfortunate that we even had to provide some sort of circumstantial evidence to convince future Hack Reactor prospective applicants that this is a real review. It looks to us like none of the positive reviewers had any logical rebuttal to our review and just resorts to calling all negative reviews fake because they have nothing else to back up their claims. Several of the rebuttals to this review had to resort to italicizing and or bolding their main arguments. With the exception of subtopic headlines, we never had to resort to bolding or italicizing any text within this review. We let the evidence, rationale, logic, etc. speak for itself.
Assuming Hack Reactor brings back hiring day, we will increase the job support category of this review to 3 stars.
Harsh Patel of Hack Reactor
COO
Dec 09, 2016
How much does Hack Reactor cost?
Hack Reactor costs around $19,480.
What courses does Hack Reactor teach?
Hack Reactor offers courses like 12-Week Software Engineering Online Immersive, 19-Week Software Engineering Immersive with JavaScript & Python.
Where does Hack Reactor have campuses?
Hack Reactor teaches students Online in a remote classroom.
Is Hack Reactor worth it?
Hack Reactor hasn't shared alumni outcomes yet, but one way to determine if a bootcamp is worth it is by reading alumni reviews. 334 Hack Reactor alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Hack Reactor on Course Report - you should start there!
Is Hack Reactor legit?
We let alumni answer that question. 334 Hack Reactor alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Hack Reactor and rate their overall experience a 4.59 out of 5.
Does Hack Reactor offer scholarships or accept the GI Bill?
Right now, it doesn't look like Hack Reactor offers scholarships or accepts the GI Bill. We're always adding to the list of schools that do offer Exclusive Course Report Scholarships and a list of the bootcamps that accept the GI Bill.
Can I read Hack Reactor reviews?
You can read 334 reviews of Hack Reactor on Course Report! Hack Reactor alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Hack Reactor and rate their overall experience a 4.59 out of 5.
Is Hack Reactor accredited?
Read details here: https://www.galvanize.com/regulatory-information
Just tell us who you are and what you’re searching for, we’ll handle the rest.