Bit Bootcamp

I joined BitBootCamp as a way to boost my professional career. I didn't have any previous experience in the field of Data Science or Big Data. After attending both courses in data science and big data during the evenings I was able to land in a great... Read More position in a major financial institution few days later. Completely professional staff that help in every aspect of new career.

I regret taking the part-time hadoop and big data analytics course at BitBootCamp and would advise against it in it's current state. In fact, my theory is that the whole BitBootCamp business is mostly a way for the founder to help fund his sister big... Read More data consulting startup, Hudson Data.

Also, apparently they occasionally try to use the classes as a recruitting tool, as the teacher said that a few former students currently worked with Hudson Data. Be wary, though. A couple of students in the class were asked to work on projects for them with the possibility to get hired if they did a good job. They said later that they were jerked along with future promises but that they were never payed or hired because at the end of the day, the projects they worked on weren't revenue generating and so they couldn't justify hiring them to work on it. I suppose the lesson is if they do ask you, make sure you work on Big Data technologies that are a core part of their business. Otherwise, they seem to be trying to get free work out of you for various ideas they have but don't want to dedicate time to themselves. The students said they would have been better off just applying to jobs in their free time.

ANYWAY, about the class itself. The teacher was a previous student at the Bootcamp who had very little teaching experience and didn't seem to prepare very much beforehand. Don't be fooled by the professional looking presentation of the course on their website. The actual content was very surface level and very little learning took place in class. He basically introduced subjects at a very general level but didn't go into many details (and when he did, he would occasionally fumble it) nor did he have good examples/exercises to help the students learn. Their were some exercise sheets handed out for unix and sql, but they were never discussed later so it was just up to the students to do on their own (these resources are online for free btw). Also, he would often ramble on about his work experiences or give us platitudes about how if you learned some technology, you will have no problem finding a job, all of which was essentially time wasting so he could fill the three hours. Even then, he often would stop 30-60 minutes early.

Despite their class description, there was very little cohesiveness to the class nor direct skill building. Regarding big data, the teacher skimmed over the hadoop documentation and basically rotely instructed us to set up a one-node cluster with the free trial on AWS (again, there are free resources to do this online, which they probably themselves used), and gave us some vaque ideas of things to try. No detailed learning module or cool projects that you develop through the class that you can put on your resume.

Lastly, the professional development regarding resume reviews, interview practice, or job network is non-existent. One of the students said they talked to a guy who used to work at Hudson Data, and he said that the founder had connections to American Express, but they have sinced dried up.