Like, where are all of the grads employed by Hack Reactor to pad the numbers accounted for? What percentage of your students already have a CS degree when they walk in the door? Why is the size of the average class increasing at the same time the price is going up? Most importantly, why do some big name companies effectively blacklist your graduates now, and what are you doing about it?
Your "towering accomplishment of staggering magnitude" looks like marketing hype and a lack of transparency.
On grads employed by HR: they are not counted as successful job seekers. Again, you can read about this in the methodology.
On big name companies blacklisting our grads: I have literally never heard of this. Google was our # 2 employer in 2015.
[1] http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardSt...
Also, I believe there is only a single company that has 'blacklisted' HR grads, and it was because they had a bad interpersonal experience with a few people from a single cohort.
Even the author said they got a job after a couple months! Which is exactly what the school promised. How does the poster feel like they wasted their time/money??
Also, the author has no grounds to say HR isn't the best, cause they haven't been to others. I can't say it's the best either. I can say I had an excellent experience, and so did all of my class, and many others. And I do have 3 friends off the top of my head who have gone to other bootcamps, and they all cited those as having major problems (no help finding jobs, bad teachers). Anyway, this post sounds whiny. HR does excellent work.
If you use the same test for months the fact is the answers will leak. People that take it again will do well the second time, regardless of whether they are qualified. This is a failure on your part, not on the applicants part. You need to own up to this and not blame applicants for gaming the admissions process.
It is understandable that we didn't know who you were and couldn't trust you. I have never seen you in my life. I saw Marcus one time in the first week. Talking about how you are going to change things for the future is fine, but it doesn't help those who went through the "troubled period".
It just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth when things go south that you rush to blame people "gaming the admissions process" and not we screwed up, we are fixing it for the future, and here is how we are helping those affected.
Would love to hear a more thorough explanation of this.
I actually liked the problems but it seems like there weren't enough different kinds of questions to filter out people with the answers beforehand.
Horseshit alert if I've ever heard one.
You got into google because google actively recruits military vets, not because of the bootcamp experience, which might have helped get you over the hump, but unlikely caused it.
It took you 3 years between shift lead and google.
~your lovely neighborhood ex-people search engine founder.
P.S. thank you for your navy service (in all seriousness)
As far as the 3 years since Walgreens goes... - 1 year spent in college for CS before dropping out - 1 year spent self-teaching and working for a startup where I learned what "jQuery" and "AJAX" and "PHP" did =p - 3 months Hack Reactor - 6 months contract with Intel - currently at Google
Sounds legit.
I, too, got a six-figure "raise" from middle school to today.
If not this would have got to that number after maybe 2 years so definitely helped.
It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!)
Here's a bit of inside baseball:
This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less supportive of the school. We care and we've made big moves to fix it. 1) Candidates were gaming the admissions process -> we rewrote it. 2) Students only had access to 2014 data and didn't know how it was calculated -> we published our 2015 data (and some stuff on 2016) and we published the world's first guide to "how to publish employment statistics that aren't bullshit", and we ramped up messaging to students "expect that your job search might be harder".[A] 3) Students stopped knowing who we were and stopped feeling like they could trust us -> we bought back two leaders to focus full-time on the campus (vs working at the umbrella organization). Lots of smaller changes as well.
Even during this difficult period, students are generally having a great experience and getting an ROI that we are proud of. Our most recent NPS measurements have all been above 80, which is bonkers. (This means that nearly everyone is a 9 or a 10 on a 1-10 scale of "how likely are you to recommend HR to a friend?")
There are a lot of details in this post that I don't disagree with. Eg "Ironically the number of lectures drops dramatically after the first week." This is true and we tell students about it during w1. It's the correct design decision. Etc. For other students, those same details have added up to a different gestalt. We care and we try to fix things when things aren't adding up. The diagnosis is not linear (you can't just fix the problems that alums cite) but we listen and try to sort out the right decisions.
I empathize with a lot of things going on and I want recent alums to know we care. I also think it's bonkers that our 98% placement rate in 2015 (94% in 3 months, ~85%ish in 3 months for one recent cohort) is being cited like it's weak sauce. That's a towering accomplishment of staggering magnitude in my books, and we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise and we employ lots of staff to make that happen.
<3, Shawn
[A] http://www.hackreactor.com/student-outcomes, http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardSt...