ens

Wow, that's an incredibly rude and narrow-minded comment.

Not dumb, it's called integrated care! Kaiser Permanente and the Mayo Clinic do just that.

I graduated from General Assembly's bootcamp in the fall of 2013 (1.5 years out of college). Found an internship 3 weeks after I hired via the developer Meet & Greet GA hosted, and was hired full time at a startup a month into the internship. I'm still with the same company almost 3.5 years later in an engineering team lead role. Like some other commenters said, at GA I learned how to learn. I graduated the program still knowing very little about programming to be honest and I was lucky I got hired at an early stage company that asked a lot of me and forced me to learn quickly. I never would have gotten the job I got without GA because at the time I learned better with the accountability and structure of a classroom setting. In terms of skills, I haven't touched Ruby since GA and I knew basic JS, but GA was critical in teaching me how to be comfortable working through problems I have no idea how to solve.

Of my cohort of 15, I think over half are developers, a few are in other product roles at startups, and 1 or 2 went back to their previous jobs.

It's a baconspiracy!

x0x0 and Htsthbjig are right, this is an industry puff piece. In a previous job I researched brominated flame retardants and it is well documented that they cause developmental disruptions, cancer, and reproductive toxicity. One of the main dangers is that they are not chemically bonded to the plastic and foam that they are added to, like in your couch cushions. This means they get into dust, which is particularly a hazard for babies crawling on the floor.

The laws are also outdated and not very practical- in California, which has some of the most rigorous regulations on environmental health, the test for a flame retardant cushion is to hold a candle to a piece of foam for 12 seconds.

The Chicago Tribune did a series on the tobacco industry's role in getting brominated flame retardants into furniture, which I recommend reading for some context on the current US regulations: http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html

Edited to add links to some studies: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866688/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3569691/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3349420/

I did General Assembly's Web Development Immersive program, which emphasized back end a little more. I had no coding experience going in and got my first dev job 3 weeks after I graduated.

I wouldn't have been able to teach myself nearly as much using online resources. I learn much better being accountable to a group for my work, and there were so many times I got stuck and needed to just ask another person for help. I also learned how to work on a dev team, not just in my app-building silo. So, GA was worth it for me.

That being said, it depends on your background and your goals. Learning front end to change careers is different than learning it to be able to better communicate with front end devs at your work.

I personally wouldn't get $10k worth of knowledge from online resources, but your motivation may vary.