New York Code + Design Academy

Avoid this place at all costs. The course I took here was terrible. Unprofessional, badly taught, unclear, and often beset with many technical problems such as projectors not working, etc. Homework was practically non-existent, even though it was supposed to be weekly. I didn't come out of it feeling like I'd learned anywhere near enough to justify the high cost. The class numbers really dwindled toward the end. I'd estimate more than 50% of students dropped out within the first few weeks. 

I also had numerous problems with their billing department, who somehow could not get it together to take money from me. This part of NYCDA is really chaotic and disorganized. I ended up getting multiple "Your Payment is Past Due"-type emails from them spread over nearly a year after I signed up for the course. Very, very stressful. 

You're in NYC, there are far better coding schools than this. Go to them instead.

NYCDA has some exceptional staff members and instructors, but dysfunction at the highest decision-making levels cripples it as an institution.

There is little support for instructors and their teaching assistants, and the curriculum is not particularly designed past the first several weeks, which do serve as a solid introduction to HTML/CSS/JS/Ruby. Sadly, the instructors and TAs are fighting a battle against what appears to be some sort of organizational entropy. A portion of their lecture curriculum is written by graduates fresh out of the bootcamp themselves, rather than the instructors or the academic department, to the point where many instructors use their own material rather than the lectures they've been provided.

Exceptionally low admissions standards are coupled with a lack of the standard set of "pass or leave" style assessments common at most other boot camps. The result is that students who hold the entire class back are allowed to persist throughout the course, resulting in a course that slavishly caters to the most needy student while hindering the advancement of those typically most-likely to succeed. Beyond this, the school tolerates outright code plagiarism by its students, even on their final projects. In short, their for-profit nature has them tolerate behaviour that would be grounds for immediate expulsion at most academic institutions. 

All in all, it means very little to have "completed" NYCDA - the certificate at graduation isn't quite a rubber stamp you get just for walking in the door, but its not far from it.

That said, I developed great relationships with my instructors and some of my fellow classmates, and did learn a solid amount of programming skills. But I can't in good conciousness recommend NYCDA to anyone else serious about making a career transition. 3 months after graduation, only a small percentage of students in my group (<20%) had full or part-time jobs in tech, excluding a handful employed by the school itself. The career services department ofters minimal support and their placement network is next to nonexistent. 

I would strongly recommend waiting and trying to get acceptance into a more rigorous institution if you're serious about transitioning into tech.

This place is a shit show. They are the epitome of unprofessional and do not exert any amount of effort for their students. As a student you will be constantly faced with teachers that don't care, zero transparency and blatant lack of response post graduation. They privately acknowledge that thier curriculum is outdated yet continue to enroll new students with no updates to the curriculum. I left this school feeling completely unprepared and have required a ton of additional work on my own post graduation. They have an entire department dedicated to Career Services which informs students of the importance to brush their teeth and shower before interviews. These recommendations were even written down on the board for visual representation........in other words if your in NYC please do not get fooled by the cheap prices spend the extra money and go elsewhere.

I was very hesitant when coming to this campus. Having had a terrible experience with another bootcamp that was in its inception, NYCDA, has the full-fledge support system that makes sure that you leave knowing how to create well-done web applications and also knowing how to learn.  

The intensive typically consists of daily lectures from 10-6pm, and to say that they throw info at you is an understatment. But luckly the support system is activated long before class even starts.  A month prior, the admissions councelor gave a thorough asessement of my skills (nothing to difficult). They basically want to know if you could follow directions and do basic arithmetic.  After that, you get a confirmation within three days. Once you pay  your deposit, you recieve a link to their video archives (which is massive), they also give you materials to study the basics of HTML/CSS.  You also have connection to their student network via slack, where you can ask all the preliminary questions and get all the nervous gitters out.  Very friendly and very informative. Topping that off..you also get access to your own mentor (my mentor was an instrcutor for the weekend kids class they established). All in all the support system is there.  Also, its important to keep in mind that the intensive covers the main topics of the language. They don't cover everything within the three month span, but you can always reach out to any one including the CEO, for any questions and tips on any missing pieces. 

Week 1 : HTML/CSS

Week2 : JavaScript/ Jquerty

Week3 : Ruby

Week 4 : Sinatra

Week5 : Ruby on Rails..

Week 6 : More Rails/ SaSS

Week 7 and On: Rails projects, incuding group work, and peronal project.

Just to emphasize: you get in what you put in. But during the massive span of time you realize that your ability to retain info increases exponentially. You have to put in the time after-school and you will get it. Also there are people from all walks of life, from those with no exp, to some who are already established but just want to learn Rails, but all of the info eventually clicks.  The T.A. attend class and help you when you're completely stumpted.  There's also a job support system via their job councelor.  He does weekly presentations  and 1 on 1's to develop a plan that's feasible to what you're trying to do after the course is over. They don't promise a job, but they do help you to get there. 

And if you attend their monthly open house before you start the intensive you get 10% off tutition. Not bad at all...

They also started an intensive in Amsterdam, in which they'll have student housing so that's a plus as well!

All in all I'm very satisfied I chose this school. They know what they're doing. 

*Full Disclosure: After I graduated the Web Development Intensive course, I worked as a TA for several months before I landed my developer job.

First things first, everything everyone has said so far is valid, being on both sides of the course as a student and TA, I was fortunate enough to really get a full experience from both sides. There are people who come to NYCDA open, focused, confident, and love the environment and do very well and then there are people who come scared, anxious, not willing to follow instructions, are antagonistic, and wash out. There are also people who go from one end of the spectrum to the other. If you're seriously considering or thinking about attending, there are two important things you should consider, the coursework and career services. 

Let's talk career services. No offense to anyone who works career services at coding boot camps but from my experience, you can either get someone who is sincerely supportive, with your interests at heart or you get someone who will help you get the job. With that being said, you really get both from Krystal and the outcomes team at NYCDA. Krystal helped me get my shit together after I graduated NYCDA, helped me negotiate when I had job offers, and to this day I still get that A-1 career advice from her. I remember this one time when I was applying to companies and I asked her if she had a contact at a company I was seriously interested in. She actually ended up reviewing my resume with the CTO to figure out how to make me more marketable. Who else would do that for you? 

Now let's talk about the coursework. I was fortunate enough to have a great instructor ( Orlando ) and to work with great instructors ( Liza and Will ). BUT, I can totally understand the sentiment that former students had about their instructors/the curriculum. Recently, NYCDA has been fighting these issues and management seems to have been taking the school in the right direction. There is now a full-time team in place just to focus on developing the curriculum. In addition, the instructional staff has gotten more diverse in their backgrounds and they are excited to teach/mentor students. 

Here's the final takeaway from all this, I was an average student for the WDI course, became a better TA for the WD100, PTWDI, and WDI, and now I'm working my first job as a Front End Developer with a digital agency in New York City ( so it kind of worked out for me ). With that being said, I have nothing to gain from writing a positive or lengthy review, I just wanted to share an honest opinion. I had a great experience, I have no regrets, and at the end of the day I was surrounded by good, smart people and if you're willing to work hard what more can you ask for? 

The experience was ok, but it left me constantly expecting a lot more. Generally it seemed like the course was kind of thrown together, with many concepts poorly explained, many sample apps irreparably broken, and the same project used multiple times in slight different flavors. 

The curriculum seemed pretty weak compared to other bootcamps, and the career services department is a pretty big joke.   The instructors I dealt with were all pretty talented, but it felt like they were constantly fighting the curriculum to get things accomplished.  The school appears to be about graduating everyone, rather than teaching, so it often feels like the teaching is dumbed down to the slowest in the room.  There's no assessment structure to remove people who'll never succeed, and that feeling of being held back is ever present because of it. 

The staff was pretty helpful, but it always felt like there was no management, and despite their saying 'we're here for you' the owners always felt like they were barely there.  They're young, and it shows through, with the ever present idea that they have no idea how to manage anything.  

The school run job fair was a huge letdown, with what seemed like absolutely zero hiring partners of any sort.  

I'm not sure what these older reviews experienced, but I'm hesitant to think it was the same school. Maybe the sale to a private institution made the management care less about the students, and more about expanding?

I've had friends ask about it, and I don't expect I'd reccommend any of them to study at NYCDA, there are a number of other programs, that all seem to be stronger, more stable and more focused on students and job placement, rather than expanding and high graduation rates.

The intensive program is great, if you want to learn Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, and you currently know nothing. It definitely teaches you how to make stuff, and further fundamentals of web development. 

However. If you enroll with the sole purpose of getting a job, please go elsewhere. They are not great at that, I know dozens of WDI students before and after my class (December 2015) who are still struggling in search of a job. They do not focus on that: there are no hiring partners, their demo day (in my day) was hacked together and full of people who just had ideas for businesses, instead of actual employers. There are a ton of other bootcamps who will teach you relevant technologies for being hired now as a junior (Angular, React, Node, etc), and who have better career assistance. This is not out of spite, as I made great friends there. But it is out of empathy. Spend your money and time on a place that has proven successful in placing graduates in full-time positions. Sadly, that is not NYCDA.

December 2014: My contract at a large pharmaceutical company as a data analyst was coming to an end. I was scrambling to find a job with my experience at a Fortune 500 company backed by a business degree from the University of Pittsburgh. Come March 2015, I’ve sent out metaphorical stacks of job applications with little prospects. I stopped what I was doing and began pursuing skillset that had more demand, computer programming.

After extensive research on coding boot camps, I found information about New York Code & Design Academy. I went to one of their open houses in Center City Philadelphia and was quite impressed with the way the Chief Academic Officer, Zachary Feldman, described his program and the skillsets the class would produce. This reinforced my confidence in my decision to change careers and a few weeks later I was having an interview with the Director of Admissions, Nathan Conn. Nathan answered my questions and quelled the rest of my remaining uncertainties.

August 2015: first day of classes. I was feeling good with my shiny new Mac Book Pro and revving and ready to learn. First two weeks were learning how to develop the front-end of the internet. The front-end is the pretty stuff that you see and the elements you interact with with your mouse, finger, and keyboard. The HTML. The CSS The JavaScript. I loved this stuff because I’m a visual learner.

The next few weeks were harder. The program teaches you the back-end. The database side holds all of your Facebook Posts, your Twitter Tweets, your Instagram Grams. I had difficulty learning this stuff because it was a different way of thinking. But I understand the importance of being able to construct database tables and Creating, Reading, Updating, and Deleting data. Our instructor, Jon Wexler, is an amazing teacher and was able to break down concepts so that even a simple business major like me could understand and digest.

Throughout the course, the program’s Development Manager, Constance Ip, was constantly connecting with outside companies. We would have a speaker once a week and sometimes more because of her hard work. Speakers would give us insight into their role at their company and how our skillset could be applied into the job market once we graduated.

November 2015: My favorite part of the course was the Meet & Greet. This was an NYCDA event that is held for graduates to present their projects to a large group of prospective employers and tech recruiters. I met some really cool people at this event and a few of them worked really hard to help me find a job.

March 2016: I am employed at a large health insurance company with a highly marketable skillset.

June 2016: I finish a personal side-project making a website and physical menu for a small dessert shop in Chinatown. I show off the website to my classmates from August like a kid who just learned how to do a wheelie.

Job assistance post course needed work. I received very little assistance in the job hunt from the program post course work.

Summary: I believe I made the best decision in my life enrolling into this program. I often compare how value of 4 years of business school and vocabulary words I never use is nowhere close to the value I received in 12 weeks at NYCDA. My personal development has never been at a faster pace. I believe that the implicit problem solving abilities that I picked up programming has accelerated my ability to learn. I feel so much more empowered and able to express myself with this skillset.

Let’s face it, the U.S. economy sucks right now for young people.  We don’t live in the same era as our baby boomer parents did, where graduating with a B.A. in some worthless degree would still present you a plethora of job opportunities.  This isn’t the case anymore.  After making questionable career choices in the past, I decided that my career was in dire need of a reboot as badly as Batman’s film career did in 2005.  Pursuing a STEM career is one of the few (and best) choices a millennial could make in the current economic climate.

The New York Code + Design Academy is one of the less expensive options for a coding bootcamp in the NYC area.  While it doesn’t have the same prestige (yet) as The Flatiron School or Fullstack Academy, it provides a good education at a cheaper cost than other coding bootcamps in NYC.  You will learn enough programming languages and frameworks to call yourself a full-stack web developer at the end of the Web Development Intensive course, but expect to be more of a Jack of All Trades/Master of None type.  The school will offer you the basic skill-set, but it is up to you to keep refining your skills.  Look at what skills are in demand, and focus improving on those.

Do note that because you will be learning 2 years worth of computer science material in 3 MONTHS, this class is going to be INTENSE.  I was literally working on a homework assignment or project every day of the week, even showing up to school on weekends to get assistance from the TAs.  But at the end of the course, I felt like a champion.

The staff was pretty friendly and was always willing to lend a helping hand.  Krystal Kaplan, the Career Services coordinator, really cares about the students’ success.  We still keep in touch months after my graduation.  Some of the students in my class complained about the teaching methods of our classroom instructor.  However, one thing I noticed about this was that the students in question who complained the most were also having the toughest time in class to stay ahead, whereas the best students in class didn't say a word.  Crabs in a bucket mentality.

As far as job hunting goes, getting your foot in the door as a developer with 3 months of coding bootcamp won't be enough.  Sure, there's always those one or two kids who somehow get jobs right after graduation, but this won't be the case for most.  I even know graduates who moved back in with the parents after failing to find a job within months of graduating.  I have some advice to counter this.  One, you can find some sort of non-developer tech position, such as a project manager or QA analyst, and transition into a developer role that way.  I like this method because you will have income rolling in while learning tech skills on the side.  Another way is to pursue a freelance career.  You may not make enough money right away to live in a major U.S. city like NYC or SF, but you have the option of living anywhere in the world (with good Wi-Fi, of course).  The key is to live in a lower cost-of-living area while making a U.S. salary.  This is what I'm doing now.  You can do this short-term while still looking for work in the U.S.

At the end of the day, investing in a coding bootcamp was one of the best decisions I ever made.  Before NYCDA, job hunting was the most painful, miserable experience of my life.  Employers couldn’t care less of my existence.  Now the tables are turning.  Shortly after graduating, I’ve had a few interviews and even rejected a job offer from a start-up for not offering me market-rate salary.  Finding a good job is still difficult, but not as bad as what it used to be.  For now, I am living the digital nomad life of travelling the world, working remotely on freelance projects, and upgrading my skills.

Despite being a huge Unix geek and learning how to program a bit here and there, I ultimately decided not to pursue a career in software development. Around 5 years ago I realized it was time for a change and I started to learn Ruby / Ruby on Rails in my spare time. I eventually transitioned into working as a Junior Jr.™ Rails developer, getting freelance gigs when I could.

I knew that I needed some more formal education in order to progress in my career, but the typical “coding bootcamp” was not for me. I was already very comfortable with more or less all of the topics that most fully immersive programs would cover in the first six weeks. After spending months weighing my options I discovered the New York Code and Design Academy on Reddit. I took a look at their website and sure enough they had an Intermediate Rails course.

I ended up not taking the Rails course, because after sitting in on the iOS Development with Swift course one evening I decided that for me, programming a pocket-sized computer to do my bidding was infinitely more exciting than web development. I dedicated a tremendous amount of time to studying outside of class and learned a ton. By the end of the class I built a working app that used Core Data, MapKit and UIImagePicker.

Shortly after I finished the class, Jeremy Snepar (CEO and co-founder) contacted me with a potential job opportunity. To make a very long story fairly short, myself and another student who was in my class ended up developing the app together. Developing the application was true baptism by fire, we worked 60+ hours a week for four months and we had a great time. I’m happy to say that the app is available on the App Store for download. I could not have done that without my time spent at NYCDA.

So that’s my story, but I’ve yet to tell you what makes NYCDA so great. There are a lot of reasons, but one word in particular that comes to mind is community. From the first moment that I walked in the door I was genuinely treated like a friend. The staff goes out of their way to make sure that you’re having the best experience possible and is always their to help you with anything. You can stop in any time regardless of whether or not you have a class that day and get help or use the facilities to work (including Saturday’s and Sunday’s, they will actually give you a key if you want to use the space on Sunday when the staff is not there).

Zach Feldman (Chief Academic Officer and co-founder) is some how always available to give you a hand with your work, give advice or just to talk in general. Victor Wang (Business Development Manager) is one of the most helpful people I have ever encountered in my life, he was like my personal liason during my time at NYCDA and he is a good friend.

The instructor I had for my iOS development class was very professional, knowledgeable and dedicated. She is a true master of her craft but on top of that she is an excellent teacher which is a rare combination.

While NYCDA offers the “typical” Ruby on Rails immersive-style program, they also offer classes that focus on new and exciting technology including Angular.js, React.js and Go. I’m considering taking the upcoming React.js course.

Today I am proud to say that I am an iOS developer. NYCDA made that possible and I am eternally grateful.

Hi everyone! I am a front end developer from Russia. Last summer I decided to combine business with pleasure, broaden my knowledge in UI/UX Design while improving my English. I read a lot of reviews about various bootcamps and chose the User Experience/User Interface Intensive at The New York Code + Design Academy. The New York City campus is located in the center of the Financial District, what I regarded as an advantage because it took me only about half an hour to reach the place by metro. Since the very first day, I was pleasantly surprised by the family atmosphere at the school, the friendly attitude of the staff, the comfort and coziness of the area and well-equipped classrooms. Our course instructor, Jimmy Chandler, is a great specialist in Interface design and a wonderful teacher whose lectures were cleverly structured and supplemented by activity tasks. It was really cool to chat with him about some new tech issues at the lunch breaks. Each week, NYCDA invited specialists in design to share their experience, ideas and new technologies with us. Meetings were held in a format of business lunch. Throughout the course, the school also organized extracurricular lectures in New York City museums.

To supplement our work in the course, the Outcomes Producer, Krystal Kaplan, provided the most informative lectures on self-presentation, going through the interview process and creating the perfect CV. She met one-on-one with each student to give them tailored recommendations. With Krystal’s help I managed to make important improvements into my personal website.

This bootcamp helped me discover this new field and made me a full stack developer. Now I know the all methods of researching in design and how I can use them. I learned how to conduct interviews and how to test prototypes. I completely mastered the Sketch and several  other apps for creating interactive prototypes. By the end of course I added three completed projects to my portfolio. Coming back to Russia I found a job at a global company. Apart from the professional benefits, I made many new friends. I want to sincerely thank all the people who were with me at that time - it was one the greatest experiences in my life!

I will go chronologically. First, the onboarding was terrible! Not even an introduction email with some basic instructions, there were not even instructions on where the course is being held and most of us arrived to a wrong location where they did a presentation but was not the actual place of the course, when we finally arrived the teacher literally said open your text editor and start executing programs we didn't even know they exist. The teacher was ok and was really pushing us to do stuff (which is good) but was lacking of experience like a lot and then we switched to another teacher, one that was the other way around, he's been prograamimng since a young age, has LOTS of experience, knowledge and get things do amazingly good but as a teacher, bad like really bad. The entire time was just looking at him doing stuff, always late and could never follow the structure that he made (bc he didn't like NYCDA structure), we ended up graduating with just a final project in our github and many topics were left aside and from the academy itself... careless, the person in charge of Amsterdam operations left in the middle of the course, classrooms were absolutely disgusting, sometimes even locked down and we had to use other disgusting rooms, at the very end of the course we finally hear from somebody in NY who offered support, she was actually very helpful but it was impossible to compensate with the lack of experience after the course, now I find myself trying to apply for jobs with a very poor portfolio and serious lack of skills.