Holberton School

Curriculum: Bash, C, Python, DevOps, and webdev. I give curriculum rating a 3 because it was helpful to learn about low level before moving on to high level programming. Also getting to work on soft skills is a good thing. But the webdev part seemed rushed and we only worked on one big project in bits and pieces at a time. I don't remember any CSS, JS, or other things like SQLalchemy since it was rushed. On the big project: I don't really understand all the parts or the "big picture" because they don't explain anything. The instructions are like this: task 1: do this. task 2: do that, without explaining why we're doing these things. So this was lazy on their part. It would've helped to do smaller webdev projects so that I could actually remember something.

On assignments - I have mixed feelings on this because some things we only had a day or two of experience, like using awk, puppet, bash programming. After not doing it again, I don't remember any of it, so it was like those days didn't make me any better at programming.

Peer learning days - very disorganized. It's the same thing as friends getting together to do an online course, but we're only talking about things we've already done. It would make more sense if we got together everyday for organized group activities like other bootcamps rather than talk about the homework we've already done. Other bootcamps seem to be far more organized.

Instructors: my rating is a 1. There are no teachers, so our only in person help is other students. I would give a better rating if they at least had good explanations or a wiki to go along with the tasks, but the instruction is literally: "here's a task! read this link I found from the front page of a google search to learn more!" This is extremely lazy and is an insult to me as a student as it seems they're not investing in making helpful resources, and more invested in raising money and making tools. App Academy's online course is far more professional and resourceful, and it's now FREE.

Cost: 17% of salary for 3.5 years if you make over $40k. This turns out to be expensive even if you don't get a software dev job. There are circumstances that allow them to extend the payment period, such as if you don't make over $40k, are unemployed, or go to another school after finishing Holberton. Can be extended for another 2 years.

Overall: I'm glad to meet good people, but I feel like the education is very lazy. I don't feel prepared to get a software job and I think most students aren't prepared after a year. The majority of students haven't gotten a software job after 1 year in, check linkedin if you don't believe me. A lot of students end up in DevOps, which is not really software development and more about writing scripts and learning different tools.

The worst admission process, I have tried. I thought it's a rumor that, schools and boot camps admit new students and drop them to keep their acceptance rate low. It helps their prestige. I have made several websites and have CS degree, in the admission process, they asked to make a simple website, which I did but they rejected my application. when I called and asked for feedback, they said they will look into my application and give me a feedback in few days. It has been 2 weeks and they didn't respond. I called them again and they said there is nothing they can do. But I was just asking for feedback!!!!!!

I looked for a very long time to find a program with the  curriculum, community, and culture that would result in long term success. Although I've only just started my experience, I have had both excellent results and resource access.

The staff, mentors, and community push you to always do better while extending the support and tools needed. They have somehow found a powerful balance between empowering students to be self-reliant within a collaborative, cooperative context. 

I can't believe how much I've learned already; more than that, how I have started to perceive problems throughout my life and day differently on account of the immersive nature of the program and it's culture. 

The student body is wonderfully diverse, creative, and bright with a lot of expertise to share - tech related or otherwise - and the mentor pool and support is impressive/authentic. I've never had so many people professionally extend help, encouragement, and time.

It is not a program suited for someone that wants to coast along or "get by"; however, if you want to learn to think critically, professionally, and creatively as a software engineer, I couldn't imagine a better environment in which to do that. 

One of the best parts?! If you have questions or curiosity, just reach out to them. They will be honest and straightforward as you find the right fit in your journey into tech. I, for one, was surprised at how candid they all were during my application and interview process; it was refreshing given a lot of manufactured answers I had received from other programs. 

Nutshell: if you are serious about wanting to learn how to learn, and if you want to live, breath, and dream tech....consider Holberton. 

 

I am currently a student at Holberton School. Holberton is a full-stack software engineering school. The aim of the school is to emulate the workplace as much as possible to ready us for careers in software engineering. The space is set up like a startup - one main open space that makes collaboration easy and accessible. Everything is project based - allowing us to get a feel for what its like to work with deadlines. We are given limited guidance which forces us to use our resources, work with each other, and ultimately learn how to learn. This industry changes so quickly, it is no longer sufficient to learn a single langue or framework. We need to be agile and if we learn the fundamentals, new technologies that come along will be easy to pick up. 

 

The founders are honestly one of my favorite parts of this school. They are hard working and dedicated to this place. Each one of them has come from reputable companies like Apple, Linkedin, and Docker. They come with real world knowledge and have been able to transfer that knowledge to the projects that they have personally curated. They are passionate about what they do, and it makes this school a great place to come every day. Seeing how hard they worked to get where they are today, makes us want to work all that much harder. 

 

The school is located in the heart of the finical district in downtown San Francisco. I can’t think of a better place to learn this industry, and than amongst some of the most reputable tech companies of our generation.

By far the worst place to go.  No lectures, they don’t teach you shit and you end up in a income shared agreement without learning jack shit.  You are better off using Udemy, LinkedIn learning,Lynda, YouTube and just books on coding.  Again emphasis on THEY DONT TEACH YOU SHIT. they want you to research everything and do it on your own. You can do that from the comfort of your home.  This is the biggest scam out there. Avoid this so called “school”.. I left in the middle of it all and I wish I left sooner instead of waisting my time at this shit hole.  

The Holberton School Curriculum is unique.  It s great alternative for Bootcamps ( quite short, and focused on only one technology) and CS College (often too much theoretical, not industry oriented). They offer a 2 year program (9 months on site in SF, then 6 months internship and finally 9 months remote) to trained the next generation of software engineers.

The education is project based, there are no formal teachers.  But the students and the team are much closer because there is only 30 students per batch and the projects are peer-reviewed. Moreover they offer something unique: a very strong community of industry experts. Many projects and Meet-ups are given by mentors, giving technical but also professional advices to the students. 

This program is not free but the students only have to pay the tuition after the 2 years (after having a job). The mission of the school is clear: allow anyone to become a professional software developer whatever his or her background. It is not a light statement: the three founders of the Holberton School are very driven and have created a great program to help everyone achieve their goal.

Lots of fun; each day is usually dedicated to tackling a project. Achieving the project tasks feels a lot like solving puzzle challenges, and you have peers tackling the same puzzles along side you, so if you get stuck you can start conferring with them. More like "doing" than "studying."

During my time at Holberton I felt ownership over every day, since I had so much freedom about how to approach each project. If you're a self-directed individual, this school might be for you.

Since you spend so much time with your peers, you end up with a strong sense of community that you take with you once you graduate. Your peers serve as your support network.

A few caveats: it helps if you have some familiarity with basic programming conventions when you enter the program (if, else if, else conditions; for and while loops) since those can be hard to grasp at first and the curriculum moves quickly. More vital is basic problem solving skills - if you don't have those, you have to get them down in the first few months, otherwise you'll be stuck with a lot of projects you don't know how to tackle. If you have an instinct to decompose a problem into smaller task, you can identify knowledge gaps to resolve, and you can break down information from the Internet, you should be good.

If you're able to keep up with the curriculum, you'll get trained up to be a successful software engineer, you'll get a deeper understanding of the industry than any bootcamp/college grad, and you'll have a lot of (career) opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise via the mentor network. So go for it if you think the project-based methodology suits you.

"Bad business practices, illegal contracts, fake statistics, deceiving marketing”

They give out ISAs without approval from the government.
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/02/26/san-francisco-based-holberton-coding-school-facing-fraud-accusations-from-former-students/They committed fraud to get authorized as a school. Look it up on the BPPE’s website.They expel anyone who can’t keep up with their sink or swim methodology, or anyone who challenges their way of operating.The curriculum is all curated and half of it’s written by students.They drastically overpriced the program.The course changes every month, so good luck getting what you signed up for. Doesn’t prepare you for the job market. Most students have to teach themselves all the skills required to land a job. No actual mentorship or career coaching.If you get a job paying over $40k you still owe them. I know at least a dozen students who owe them back and don’t have coding jobs.Stay far away from this school. It’s not as perfect as it seems in their marketing.

Holberton School is an amazing place to learn full stack software engineering - from the fundamentals and low level software engineering to higher level programming. All assignments are project based and there are no traditional teachers. The students are expected to do their own research to learn the material to complete the projects. Instead of formal teachers, students are encouraged to first ask other students for help and teach each other.

  The school also helps prepare students for the soft skills they need as a programmer. There are days were the students practice interviewing through mock interviews with each other. There are also mentors who are available to do mock interviews with students once they are ready to start interviewing at companies for jobs and internships. Some of the projects are also done in groups, so students learn how to work together to complete the assignment.   I am currently close to half way through the initial 9-months of the two year program. Some of my favorite things about the program are: - The staff is wonderful and genuinely care about the students. - Great network of mentors who work in the industry - Very diverse population of students - many people are changing careers, others are fresh out of college or high school - all learning programming - No payments up front - just once you get a job - Great space with plenty of whiteboards and variety of working arrangements (sitting and standing desks, study rooms, bean bags)   For me, the only "con" I can think of is that it is very difficult to have a job while attending the school which means living on a budget. I don't really mind this as much, though, because I am having so much fun learning about software engineering and programming.

I've been lucky to be a part of the first experimental batch of Holberton school. I had some previous programming experience, but not enough to pursue a career in coding, and certainly not enough to fall in love with programming.

 

As someone who has been passionate about coding and how computers actually work, I've found that the problem with learning on your own is not that there is no information out there -- the problem is that there is too much information. There are so many resources that it becomes difficult to assess what you need to know. Holberton School has surprised me in cutting through the noise.

 

From the start, the founders of this program have gotten the fundamentals right: enforcing good learning practices and coding habits. I think it's these fundamentals that make this program unlike anything else out there.

 

While I personally can speak more to the low-level programming track, my personal experience has allowed me to form a few theories as to why this program is so successful. In my opinion, here are the few key features that I think differentiate the Holberton program:

 

First, it has a structured learning approach: it tests you and ensures that you are actually learning, as opposed to coding things you don’t thoroughly understand. As soon as your code is being reviewed, the faculty goes to very great lengths to push your code to the limits and find a way to break it. Evidence of your code not being perfect could be evidence of you not learning. Double pointers? INT_MIN / INT_MAX edge cases? If there is a hole in your understanding, it is the goal of the faculty to find it -- and they will create checks and test cases that will fail when running checks against your code. I think this is a big reason why I personally never felt bored and why I never felt unchallenged through this program, even when I pushed to learn more.

 

Second, I was never challenged so much that I felt that I couldn't overcome each challenge. Even someone without experience can learn from what happens in memory as your code gets compiled by the GCC compiler on a Linux kernel. The teaching assumes no background in CS whatsoever, and yet, supports you with challenges at the more advanced levels of depth that you can get (there are optional “more advanced” tasks, that have the full support of the faculty). How the school has managed to strike this delicate balance  -- I don't know. But I think it has something to do with their strong culture of learning, which I think is their third strong point.

 

The school has a very strong culture of learning, and the way I see it, I think it is due to its spirit of effective communication and cooperation with your peers, coupled with very strong learning fundamentals. These fundamentals include: "don't write any code you don't understand”; “don’t write any code your peers won’t understand”; “write code in a way that your future self will understand”; “understand what you are doing first, and then code later”; “comment your code”; “keep your functions short”; “your code should follow a certain style” (they've even automated a surprisingly robust style code checker -- codenamed "Betty", named after Betty Holberton -- that enforces good program structure and checks to make sure your C code doesn't become a whole mess!)

 

Fourth, depending on how you look at it, this one can be seen as a con, or as a pro, of the program: the program is young. This means that there can sometimes be minor errors / typos, and other inconsistencies in the tasks and projects. If you decide to look at whether the program and its curriculum is in its "final" form, you will not find that here. At least as of this writing, the curriculum is the aggregate of all the project assignments, and the solutions that its students post on GitHub. While the curriculum is not formally defined, in my opinion, the faculty more than makes up for this; the tasks, the projects, and the learning materials iterate and get more advanced based on feedback from the students. This means that there is a very rapid feedback loop; it is common for projects to get clarified or updated in real time as you work on them (the faculty always notifies you of these changes on Slack though). In fact, you could argue that the culture at Holberton is that there is no "final" form -- learning evolves. I guess it is up to each individual to decide if this is a con or a pro. In my personal practical learning experience, this has been very much a pro.

 

And fifth, for the last thing, and perhaps also one of the most important, this program teaches you how to learn. How to ask for help. What kinds of questions are “Google-able”. How to look something up without knowing the answer. It gives you that intuition somehow. There is so much to write that I think that it will not be possible for me to cover everything in this review, but I can definitely tell you that this program successfully and effectively tailors education to each student’s background and learning style. In short, this culture of learning has made me fall in love with programming.

 

To sum it all up in a nutshell, this program aims to give you the learning experience you need to start a career in Computer Science. It my experience so far, it has exceeded my expectations.

Holberton is setting the standard for training new software engineers with a two-year program that can take anyone, no experience required, and make them an impeccable Full-Stack Software Engineer.

I was coding and working with peers on the first day at Holberton. This was a refreshing change for me after years of dreading going to class in public schools where my daily objective was to sit down and listen to a topic I was scarcely interested in. Holberton has overwhelmingly embraced project-based and peer learning and it creates a natural way to learn that I have never experienced before. At Holberton you’ll learn the most from your peers and mentors while working on projects and that will give you a tangible edge when you go to get an internship or job. Having the opportunity to learn from project-based learning with my peers surpasses sitting in a classroom lecture any day.

There are no upfront costs to study at Holberton. The school charges a percentage of your internship salary and your salary once you find a job. You’ll still need to find and afford your own accommodations in or around San Francisco for the duration you are attending the school on site. This was a challenge that I found exceedingly difficult and at times it affected my ability to be at the school because I was looking for a place to live. Holberton has taken a step in the right direction and is working with companies like Google, Accenture, Scality, and CloudNow to help students defray living expenses.

A great thing a new school can do is set themselves up to be able to adapt to what their students need and Holberton is exceeding at doing that. I was in batch 0 that started in January of 2016. Since my batch started, the school has made many improvements to projects based on feedback from students. Additionally, Holberton has worked to improve interactions with experienced mentors in the community. New students are only going to have more opportunities to exceed with Holberton.

TLDR: If you want to be a Full-Stack Software Engineer, the elite program Holberton has to offer is exactly what you need.

Holberton School offers an intense experience that is ideal for people who are truly motivated and excited by technology. The curriculum will give you a deep understanding of computer languages and computer systems as a whole, relative to a "traditional" bootcamp. For example, your foundation of learning will be through writing programs in C. Only once understanding is established there will you start higher-level languages like Python or JavaScript. This approach was something that attracted me to the school initially—I wanted to learn as much of the foundations as possible rather than gain an understanding of one particular language or framework. In my experience, Holberton delivered on that promise and I was really happy with what they offered. The important thing to note here is that you will have to be internally motivated to take advantage of all that Holberton is offering because the curriculum requires each person to give their energy and manage their own time and learning—there are no classes here! That being said, it much more closely resembles a real-world working situation where you, as an individual, need to find ways to manage your work projects and energy. 

The job assistance and job preparation that I saw here was phenominal. Having come from a conventional four-year university that had its own department for job placement, I thought Holberton was way more effective. If you are hoping that attending this school will lead to a job, the work and effort that you invest here will definitely pay off.