BloomTech

The education is bad, most will never find employment in any meaningful way. If you do, you will be woefully unprepared. This was my experience. I had such a bad experience in tech that I left the industry. Yet, I’m still being hounded and harassed by... Read More these thugs to pay them when my job is NOT a result of this “education” and is NOT related to Web Development (my chosen track in 2019 when I went to this horrible “school”).

While attending BloomTech, I personally studied up to 60 hours a week to ensure my success post bootcamp. I now have started my first job and at 21 make more than a lot of people I know. There is a few things I would say you need when entering the school.... Read More - You need a high motivation to learn. You will be learning for years. - you need some free time whether it be 2 hours a day or an accumulative 10 hours a week. The program is self paced so you Can work 10 or 70 hours per week. I chose the high end. Basically, BloomTech provides a successful roadmap, it comes down to you and if you are willing to put in the work. One thing about the industry that is rough, is landing interviews. Being in BloomTech you gain connections which can help greatly landing interviews which is crucial. So if you attend, network! Also, they provide career coaches, learner assistants are available 7 days a week, and the instructors are all senior engineers in the industry.

TLDR: • BloomTech’s training and referrals got me 2 software engineering offers, even in an insanely difficult job market. • BloomTech is led by rockstar instructors, career coaches, and partnership managers. • What sets it apart is the depth of the Backend... Read More curriculum, apprenticeship at the end of the program, and partnerships w/ tech companies big and small. Personal background when I applied to BloomTech: I was a grad student at one of the nation’s top 10 universities in public policy. I had several years of non-technical experience and wanted a bootcamp to pick up technical skills to use in my field. I ended up doing a complete career pivot thanks to BloomTech. Choosing BloomTech: I ran the Backend curriculum through several friends at Google, AWS, and Meta. They all said that if this is what you will learn, you’ll be highly competitive for entry-level roles. They said Lambda (now BloomTech) also has a solid reputation in the industry. I considered several other bootcamps, but most of them were full-stack and didn’t really “get in the trenches” in a specific area in engineering, which is what I wanted. The Backend did. Learning experience: I completed the 9-month, full-time backend course in Sep 2022 (the schedule is now flexible and you can complete it in less time). The instructors (except for 1 who I don’t think works there anymore) were rockstars. I had taken intro CS courses at my university and BloomTech’s structure and pace were both more challenging and rewarding. Because of the Amazon-BloomTech partnership, the learning materials were Amazon projects like Kindle, Amazon Music, etc., which were very interesting. In the full-time structure, I had sufficient time to delve deeper into self-study, as well as to prepare for Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA) for job interviews. Offers & Post-course Experience: I received a verbal offer for a backend role within 6 weeks of graduation through a BloomTech referral. I was expecting to receive a 6-figure salary for the role, but the company placed a hiring freeze 12 weeks later and the offer was rescinded (this was early 2023, the beginning of the tech winter/ layoffs). After the offer was rescinded, BloomTech followed up with the company to get me a proper explanation because the recruiter had totally ghosted me. Here’s what BloomTech did after that I think absolutely sets it apart from other places: I was looped back into the career searching track and kept getting referrals and career support for 6 MONTHS until I landed another offer. In the meantime, I enrolled in BloomTech’s in-house apprenticeship (called BloomTech Labs), where I worked with a team to build a project for a real client, so my resume kept improving as I was job hunting, and I didn’t have to worry about getting rusty. In later interviews, Labs gave me a huge edge. I eventually got a great offer, also through a BloomTech referral, in mid-2023 as a Software Engineer. If, after the first offer was rescinded, BloomTech did not offer to help, that would’ve been understandable to me. I had paid my tuition upfront, and there was no potential loss to them if I didn’t eventually get an offer. So BloomTech’s response to this event was my definitive proof that they were invested in my success. I still think it incredible what a few dedicated, resourceful people there were able to achieve for me. Their career support exceeded that of my university, which has a +$1bn endowment. Each bootcamp has its pros and cons, and I hate to compare. But when I share this experience with friends at other top-ranked bootcamps, they’re often shocked because their programs “feed them to the wolves” (direct quote) after the course is over. When tech is hot and everyone is hiring, this is fine. But in a market like today’s, this would be a huge reason to pick BloomTech. It is shock-proof. And in a normal tech market, the Backend Program is a feeder into Amazon, Bloomberg, JPMorgan, and other top-tier engineering places. So if you’re considering BloomTech now or in the future, my honest advice is don’t hesitate.

I was part of the second cohort, cs2, back when BloomTech was called Lambda School. Our cohort started with about 30-35 students and was almost immediately pure chaos. Our instructors were constantly moving around to different cohorts, new instructors... Read More were being hired to replace them, and we were learning pretty outdated patterns. By the time our cohort graduated, there were about 5 or 6 students. Everybody else in our cohort had dropped the program and I should’ve too. We didn’t even have a real final project because they hadn’t figured out what they wanted to do with those yet. We had one ”session” with their “career coach” as a group. It took about 30 minutes and she presented 3 PowerPoints to us with some tips on making our resumes look good. There was no other job placement assistance ever offered, nor have I ever been given any job placement assistance when I’ve reached out for help. At the end of the day, you will just be another number to them. Their CEO is happy to preach online about “de-risking” education, but this is the biggest risk I’ve ever taken with my education and it’s been horrible. All they want is your money. Even if you don’t end up in a software job, they will come for you. Their promise to only charge you if you’re making $50,000 or more in a software job is a complete lie. As soon as your income in a single month (not year) is over their threshold, regardless of what job you have, you will be sent an invoice. I know there are students that have found some success from this program. Almost every single one of them that I met while doing the program had a LOT of previous experience or connections. If you’re somebody who already has decent experience with programming, you’ll probably find success with BloomTech. But you’ll find the same success if you just sat down for 6 months and worked on some projects on your own. If you’re someone like me that went in with the bare minimum level of experience, run away. Don’t look back, it’s not worth it.

The mastery-based curriculum was a true "drinking from a firehose" scenario, but being challenged forced myself and others to learn so much more than the typical academic setting. The BloomTech team do an excellent job of giving you an experience that... Read More will ACTUALLY prepare you for working in a highly competitive tech industry. One of the aspects of BloomTech that really stood out to employers/interviewers during my job searching were the LABS projects; BloomTech coordinates with companies so that students get the opportunity to deliver a real product to real stakeholders and showcase that experience on their portfolio. The staff is incredibly supportive not only in seeing you through the material, but also in helping you land a job right out of the door. They go so far above and beyond to help you get plugged in; feedback on your resume, portfolio, linkedin etc - sourcing emails for outreach to your desired companies, daily technical interview practice to keep your skills sharp, job sourcing (literally finding job openings that are a fit for you and sending them to you along with who to reach out to) providing custom tailored message templates for cold outreach, thank you messages, follow up emails - scheduled mock interviews and feedback for EVERY TIME you land an interview. So much of the guidance around the art of job searching and presenting myself professionally I would never have figured out on my own. I am grateful someone recommended BloomTech to me as I am now getting paid to do exactly what I love, and it wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

I 100% recommend this to anyone that wants to get into tech. It’s not an easy process by any means but if you really put the work in and don’t quit, it’ll work. Going to BloomTech has been one of my best decisions. It’s opened up a whole new world of... Read More opportunities.

I am presently enrolled in the Backend Development boot camp, and will very likely drop it. My progress through this program has admittedly been marred by a series of unrelated personal matters. However, neither divorce nor a heart attack slowed me down... Read More so much as the actual program itself. The refundable units are great. I'll start by saying that the quality doesn't diminish until you can't drop with a full refund. If you want to learn the basics of Java, then that part of the boot camp is high quality and well-developed. But then course quality completely falls off a cliff. The learning process is presented as a non-traditional inverted approach where the learner self-studies material instead of having a lecture, and then engages with a guided session instead of working alone. There are a few problems with this approach as Bloomtech implements it. First, the self-study material is overly wordy and at the same time, insufficient. Learners will waste time reading pages about material that could be covered in sentences while needed material is completely absent. For example, toolchain setup is not fully covered and this will convert guided sessions into a passive waste of time necessary to get full credit for attendance. The progress through material is at times challenging early on but always fun. And then it's neither. By the fourth unit after the full refund point, an entire week is spent covering disjoint topics where the only real instruction consists of memorizing four annotations. An introduction to databases is ham-fisted and clumsy, with a half-covered CLI adding mystique to fundamental material that should instead be fully understood. Due to the aforementioned personal matters, I attended a certain week three times and still cannot tell you how to set up half of the tools that were used that week. I didn't learn anything that week that I couldn't have figured out with a quick glance at an API reference. Bloomtech encourages students to have their cameras on during guided sessions, and then seems to hire a model to also be on camera. Consequently, you'll always feel ugly and uncomfortable when reviewing videos of guided sessions. Learners are encouraged to contact instructors with any questions, suggestions, or requests for assistance, and then entire policy and procedure changes make you feel unwelcome after you do. When I finally told staff that I was on the verge of dropping the course due to the poorly supported tech stack, the next day the entire means of contacting the instructor was changed to a public forum. Now if students don't understand something, they'll embarrass themselves among peers and future students by putting that lack of understanding on display. When I reached out to the academic advisor about this problem, I was told that it's assumed I was not putting enough time into the program. Well, yeah! How could I when the necessary tools aren't well enough supported to even use them?! That's the whole point I contacted him about! Furthermore, it's not an advertised part of the course design that you study for an hour before class, attend a guided session, sit around waiting for office hours, passively stand by waiting your turn during office hours, and then work on unit projects. That's an entire day for material that could be covered in two or three hours at most. It's simply neither dense enough in subject matter nor challenging enough to warrant the kind of time commitment Bloomtech demands, and that time is instead used up compensating for a lack of design and forethought. Bloomtech was Lambda, and it rebranded due to reviews so bad that many programming boot camp aggregators won't even list them. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, will likely end up in debt to them, and I have gained absolutely nothing in return beyond a reintroduction to elementary Java. I endured a heart attack at the start of my time in the program, and nobody even noticed. There was no change in my attendance or anything. I later had my family fall apart, and even then came back after a short break. My whole existence came apart at the seams and I was still ready to perform. But I couldn't overcome the poor design of the course material itself.

Mostly everyone who has submitted a negative review either does not understand the value prop from Lambda or did not commit fully to the expectations of the program. Yes it is a short amount of time to learn a lot of material, yes it is not the case that... Read More someone holds your hand 24/7 through the program, yes it is pricey when you're talking about a 6 month program (fulltime web 6 months). As someone who comes from a non-technical background and now works for a company making 6 figures (graduated 3 months ago), I can attest Lambda was a key driver in reaching a new point in my life and not because of the material but because of the mindset it encourages you to take. The instructors aren't wizards who will grant you knowledge just because you show up. The material isn't revolutionary or one of a kind by any means but it gives you a structure, or framework, to start learning and motivate you to seek more. If you told me a year ago that I would have to invest 30k in something to potentially earn 6 figures instead of a 60k salary in something I hated, I would have signed up years ago.

I write this 2 years after I "graduated" from Lambda School and have paid off my ISA. It has been an absolute persistent, nagging drain on my finances. I got a job shortly after joining Lambda School based on skills I learned on my own and through various... Read More other free and inexpensive courses. I found Lambda School's content to be very similar to the courses I took previously and found myself waiting for more advanced work but it only came in small doses at the end with the computer science section and only then it was so quick and I didn't get much out of it. I went into it thinking I'd really level up but but I can say 2 years later that I did not get anything out of the school that couldn't be learned for free elsewhere. I was hired for my relevancy and skills alone--as I was still enrolled when I got hired. I've paid $30,000 at this point and wish I had spent that money towards a computer science degree as I feel now no one will take me seriously saying I went to a "coding bootcamp". It feels utterly worthless to me. I wouldn't be so bitter if the financial commitment was the length of the program but 2 YEARS is just insane. Price your product for what it's worth! Also, it didn't help that some of the instructors were stumbling their way through the lectures having had only a few years experience themselves. I went into it thinking we've have true experts but was sorely disappointed. Really, the school is not that great and kinda scammy.

Looking back at my Lambda School experience, if given the option of redoing it...I wouldn't. The fact of the matter is between all of the free material available on YouTube, Free Code Camp and pay sites like Udemy, Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning, etc.,... Read More IMO it simply doesn't make sense to shell out up to $30K for Lambda. You can get exactly the same level of education I would argue for less than $500. Let's dispel some of the myths. A lot of the resource material Lambda points students to is free on-line content. For instance, you'll be pointed to W3Schools, MDN Webdocs, Python.org, etc. There's nothing magical about their content. Many of the instructors teach for supplemental income. They too, are struggling developers trying to make a buck, but I can't fault them for that. Just don't think that you're getting world class, pillars of industry. In fact, many of them came from boot camps and have two or three years of scattered coding experience. Instructors are given a list of objectives to teach. It's up to them on how they want to teach it. In short, no uniformity. Students are pushed through the program with the end goal of passing "the GCA" (run a search for General Coding Assessment). This is a standardized test Lambda uses to pitch students to prospective employers. The mile high view of a day at Lambda. Before class you read a bunch of content (and perhaps watch a few videos) of the material the instructor will cover. Afterward have a two hour live video session with an instructor and that is followed by an assignment. After that you're left to your own devices. Get stuck? Post a question on the help channel and hope someone gets back to you. It's up to the students to make relationships with other students to get help and work on problems together. In the past students were put into teams, so you would from the get go have people to study with and reach out to. These teams would have Team Leads who you could reach out to and ask questions pretty much any time of the day. Not now. The ISA. Your Income Share Agreement will be managed by Leif.org. Expect to receive numerous emails asking for income updates. "Hello Frank, we haven't heard from you in 30 days. Please update us with your current income information". Honestly, this turns into a nagging Hell. A few other things worth noting. Before signing the ISA, have an attorney look it over. Yes, drop $300 to have the contract reviewed so you know exactly what you're getting in to. Lambda broadly defines software industry. So, let's say you got a job as a receptionist at Intuit after your Lambda experience. Intuit makes software, so technically you're working in the software industry or "space" as they define it, in spite of the fact you're not coding anything. You will likely have to pay (provided you're making $50K or more). And one last thing, because I think it's important to have access to as much information as possible, there is a class action law suit against Lambda School. You should be aware of this. The National Student Defense Legal Network is representing three students and, from doing my own research, they have received a lot of interest from other students who have filed complaints. Go to their website, read the documentation and consider this information before committing to Lambda. Just be sure you're seeing the big picture and make an informed decision.