Hackbright Academy

The most valuable resources you need making a major career switch is a strong network and support system. The community at Hackbright is unbelievable. I started school with a competitive mindset and just wanted to make a quick career switch and get sh-t... Read More done. At Hackbright, I learned how to build community and what it means to empower others, especially women. I felt more accepted than I ever had by a group of peers (besides my best friends from childhood).

My incredible cohortmates inspired me daily, and the alumni network was very supportive in my job search. Hackbright also has an excellent mentorship program (2 mentors : 1 student ratio), and a network of industry partners that regularly host job fairs and whiteboarding sessions to help you shine in the job market.

Coming from a nursing background with zero coding experience, Hackbright's 2 month prep program absolutely prepared me for the fellowship. Going into software engineering is a scary thing, since you don't even know where to start learning. This program... Read More gave me a structured way of easing into the fundamentals, which I am so grateful for.

(+) Instructors: Everyone was helpful and knew how to explain concepts to those just starting out with coding. Additionally, the staff always went above and beyond in case we needed extra help.
(+) Pair programming: Having 2 months of pair programming experience excelled me into an easy transition for the fellowship.
(+) Content: The way they structured their curriculum made so much sense. It was such a good pace, knowing that many students attend this program on top of their current jobs.
(+) Project: You leave the prep program having a tangible project under your belt, which additionally reinforced all the concepts you've just learned over the past 2 months.

(-) Since it's a program intended to introduce coding vs. strictly preparing for the fellowship, the "coding challenges" lecture could have been more expansive. However, actually taking the fellowship's coding challenge -- I was 100% prepared after all!

Coming from a nursing background, I had zero coding experience prior to attending Hackbright's prep course (and onto the fellowship). After talking to tech recruiters regarding what bootcamp to attend, they all unanimously pointed towards Hackbright.

There are 4 dinstinct qualities about Hackbright that make it stand out from the rest: the transparency, continuous passion for improvement, support system, and alumnae network.

Transparency - They held info sessions for prospective students, were timely with email exchanges, and are part of a 3rd party outcomes report. Just looking at the website, you know exactly what you're getting into, up to the day-to-day schedule of the program.

Continuous passion for improvement: During the prep and fellowship program, every lecture was paired with a feedback survey, as well as the TA writing notes in the back for potential powerpoint typos, areas of clarifications, etc. They also restructure the curriculum from time to time to keep up with the latest versions of programming languages / if a certain technology is starting to be prevalent in the job market.

Support system: When you're attending a lecture and look back, seeing all the other instructors/TAs literally attending the lecture WITH you, you know you are in the right place. What an amazing staff. I never once felt insecure about asking a question, and never once had no one available to ask the question to.

Alumnae network: Hackbright continously hosts events where alum and students connect with one another, as well as the career services team being more than happy to introduce you to previous graduates. It's by far the strongest community I've seen. We are all proud Hackbrighters, easily spotted in the city with our red jackets.

My only room of improvement would be the tech stack they teach. It's a carefully curated one, intended for pedagogical reasons. However, in terms of the job market and what's prevalent out there, it does not exactly align. But, this bootcamp above all else taught me HOW to learn new frameworks/languages in a short amount of time, which is absolutely the most important skill you can have going into the tech industry.

I attended the 12 week evening class, not the all day bootcamp.

Some instructors are awesome, some are wanting. It really depends on which instructor you get. The instructors I had couldn't wait to leave the classroom at night and it showed.
They need... Read More an instructional designer. To save on money, the administrator is also the instructional designer.
Disorganized - They desperately need to get their act together. Many slides were wrong and they were still fixing them in class.
There were problem sets for about half the classes. There were never problem sheets the second half of the class.
The answers were sometimes given out.
Was not worth $3k

I was accepted to the bootcamp but decided to bypass Hackbright.

As for every bootcamp, the result depends on the person's prior experience with coding and their learning abilities. Bootcamps go fast, and you can fall behind quickly without a solid foundation beforehand or are a slow learner. What you get out of a... Read More bootcamp depends on the work you put into understanding the concepts, and also how much work you put into networking to get a job.

Pros:

The community - My cohort ended up being pretty close. We have all kept in touch since the program ended. The alum community and networking is valuable. Instructors all genuinely seemed like they wanted to help the students succeed and learn.

Teaches full stack - Useful to know python and javascript

Mentorship - During week 3, you are paired with 3 volunteer mentors from different companies all over the bay area. The mentor experience can vary, but most have been positive connections made and helpful

App project - You make your own app during the last four weeks of the course. It is your own individual project and you can do whatever you want. (Some other bootcamps have partner or group projects)

Cons:
Definitely still too expensive, mostly paying the cost to be in a women's only bootcamp. They seem to have a small budget for amenities and snacks, when we are paying so much.
Partnerships with other companies are lacking. There are no guaranteed internships that some other bootcamps provide.
Too much emphasis on demo night, and no good connections were made from it.
Instructors varied in expertise level. Some were better at teaching than others.
People consistently have mentioned the chairs are uncomfortable, but no change has been made.
Feels much more for-profit, since the acquisition by Capella. New cohorts start every six weeks, leading to rapid expansion and a saturated market of bootcamp grads.

After doing online tutorials to mixed results, I decided to put the money and time toward learning software development. This was the perfect stepping stone between online classes and doing a full-time bootcamp (which I later went on to do). I went to... Read More an info session and a follow-up email contained a $500 discount off the part-time night program so I ended up paying $2.5k for the 12-week course.

Pros:
- Relatively affordable. Class was 2x week for 12 weeks, I do feel I got my money's worth.
- I work downtown so commute was easy
- 24/7 access to the space while you are enrolled, so you can stay late or do extra work on weekends
- Covered a wide range of topics, and things that aren't necessarily in online coding tutorials and how they work together (git version control, GitHub, sublime/text editors, etc.).
- Aimed at total beginners; very welcoming environment and no such thing as a dumb question.
- Taught by developers with professional experience, so they teach you how to use tools that they actually use on the job.
- First time I've ever been asked in a professional setting what my preferred pronoun is!
- Final project is very open and you can be fairly ambitious with what you want to do with Python. I thought my classmates and I did amazing work from where we all started.
- Required nightly feedback forms that do get read and acted upon by instructors

Cons:
- Aimed at total beginners (yes, this is a pro and a con); I did find myself a bit frustrated with the pace of class for the first half of the term.
- Classes are hit or miss. My class had a good vibe but we did have at least one person switch from the other, less good vibe-y class to ours.
- We had 3 instructors and I hit it off with one of them, the second seemed burnt out from work and teaching so he wasn't around much outside of class, and the third seemed to play favorites (I found it ironic that he completely mansplained my own project to me at a women-focused code school).

Other?
- After I completed this class, I think they either started using it as a feeder for the full-time program or developed another class for that purpose. Either way, no one pressured me at the time to join the fellowship but the staff always made themselves available to chat about that program if I wanted to continue with Hackbright.
- Be aware they cater much more to the full-time fellowship. We weren't allowed in certain spaces if the fellowship was still there working.
- I overheard a comment that this class basically gets you through the first 2 weeks of the fellowship program.

I have been working in the same field over 16 years and I was in a well paid career but reached a point where it wasn't challenging me intellectually. I found that I was spending most of my professional life putting out fires and fighting political battles.... Read More I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment or satisfaction with my current career.

I always had a curiosity with software and coding but wasn't sure if I had what it took to learn software engineering at this stage of my career. Since I had an engineering degree, I knew that I had the aptitude so I started teaching myself how to code through various online classes but felt that I needed in person instruction. I wasn't ready to leave my well-paid gig to get into a full time program which was how I discovered Hackbright. They were in a short-list of organizations that offered a part-time course that fit my schedule. I found it to be challenging yet doable especially given the learning environment. All the instructors were very supportive to the point that one of the teaching assistants ran a regular Sunday code brunch where she reviewed each of our projects and answered any of our questions. She even taught us other concepts that were not covered in class. Coming out of this part-time course gave me the foundation and confidence to apply for the full-time fellowship. Not only did I discover that I enjoyed coding, I also felt a sense of accomplishment building a simple Python application from scratch. I am currently in the Fellowship and enjoying all the challenges that it is providing. The education and career staff have been top-notch! The classes are tough and challenging but this is what I signed up for as the industry is very competitive! Thanks to Hackbright, I have new skills which will I feel will enable me to get into a more technical role and immediately add value to an organization.

The material was very spotty. Lots of typos in the slides. The instructors are either very good or terrible. Some made it obvious that the didn't want to be there (burnout?) and some obviously wanted to be there and help the students learn. Few had pedagogical... Read More training of any kind. For $3000, I did not get my money's worth. I could have gotten the same from an online community college for a tiny fraction of that cost. Some of us are enrolling in community college courses because we didn't get what was going on in the hackbright course.

No quizzes, no exams, very few problem/practice sets to test knowledge. Very disorganized.

A monumental waste of time/money.

They're trying to expand and now have the facilities, but they are having problems attracting students.

Pros:
- Great start for those without any experience
- Lots of white boarding practice
- Excellent way to rebrand, especially if your previous field was non-tech
- Networking with Bay Area companies
- Learn to communicate/articulate your thoughts to other... Read More people of varying abilities
- Potential for informal mentorship between students

Cons:
- If you don't have any programming background or aren't great at learning fast, it's unlikely you will be fully prepared for SWE interviews by the end of this program.
- If you do have a large programming background, you will be suffering a lot of review work while being paired with a partner. There is no customization to each individual's ability level for the first half of the program.
- Material is not carefully proofread. Often there would be meaning-altering typos on slides and in lab/challenge instructions, stubs, and solutions.
- Very expensive. I wonder why, as all of their mentors are volunteers and many of the company events (ie: field trips/white boarding nights) are company-sponsored.
- Some of the TAs are Hackbright grads. Sometimes it feels like they are still learning the material themselves, so they might give you information that is wrong/only half-right.
- They definitely talk up career day a TON but many of the big name companies did not actually show. It was also my impression that few people actually reaped opportunities they were excited about from career day.

The last reviewer did a good job in summarizing my unhappiness with Hackbright. I only have the below to add:

I graduated with the June 2016 cohort. Only 5 girls out of our graduating class have been able to find jobs and it's been 2 months since graduation.... Read More One of them went back to Hackbright to be a lab assistant, another already had a job lined up outside of Hackbright, another picked up what she'd been doing previous to Hackbright, and I'm not sure what the remaining girls are doing.

By the project phase of our cohort, many of the girls were expresssing malcontent with the program. In particular, career services. If you are struggling with the material, they turn the onus onto you. Meaning, they said that you weren't doing well because you weren't working hard enough or something like that. But seriously! My advisor and my instructors never had time to answer my questions and I got the same, "We don't support tutoring." They didn't give me any personal attention. If a girl wasn't doing well, they would say that it was failure on her part. Not the instructor. And! There was never any personal attention given even if so to help that girl out.

They have unusual and almost unethical practices at Hackbright. At the end of every cohort/class, they offer jobs to the girls with the caveat that if they accept a job at Hackbright - they're not allowed to participate in career day. The girls should have been allowed to weigh their offers along with any potential offers being made as a result of career day. That's the way the real world works! People compete for the best candidate!

And! During career day, companies are not allowed to ask the girls technical questions about their projects. This seems really shady as it would be the perfect opportunity for the girls to show off what they had learned during the Hackbright 12 week class. It serves to do two things: 1) cover Hackbright ineptness 2) protect Hackbright reputation in case the girls don't do well. I was raised to believe that the student's faults were that of the instructors. Hackbright does all sorts of things to cover itself. It doesn't stand up to the things it purports to do.

What really upset me the most is that career services told us all sorts of things about being able to find a job within 3-6 months of graduation. Then, a month before graduation, she tells us not to expect to find jobs soon, but it would take about a couple months of study to really 'get it down.' Some of these girls cleaned out their savings to attend Hackbright! They're owed more than the inflated marketing!! If Hackbright were really doing a good job, they would encourage companies to ask their students technical questions and not be afraid to stand behind their students.

And! Hackbright was recently acquired by Capella University. This is an online centered learning business that 'takes advantage' of women and minorities. Much alike University of Phoenix that went down for marketing cheaper and more convenient sub-standard MBA programs and catered to women and minorities. When these demographics went for jobs, they were told their MBAs were not competitive. So now the graduates owe money from tuition and they are jobless.

Take your money somewhere more deserving! Hackbright is NOT!!!!

Hackbright Academy is an all female bootcamp which seeks to "Change the ratio," but what the start-up really does is "line their pocket books" via taking advantage of a niche market.

Learning Environment:
For $16,570, I'd expect a learning environment... Read More geared towards the individual students needs. At least this holds true for costly private institutions. Even in public institutions (community college class is roughly ~$300), students are guaranteed the professor's time by office hours, one on one appointments, or at least the tutelage of the teacher's aide. Not at Hackbright. Students are given two one and a half hour lectures daily, assigned daily homework, and weekend assessments in which none of the above are graded. They are mandatory assignments, yet none are scrutinized carefully nor corrected by the student assigned advisor. Upon requesting more individual help, we were told that the school did not support such a structure. The most I ever got was 20 minutes of tutorial per week. When I asked a question, the advisor would conveniently Google the answer and then send me the link. There is 30 minutes of advising per week for the project, but we were told it's mostly for 'strategy.'

Now one might argue that debugging is an important skill to master. This is true. However, for a beginner, it is far too easy to get caught up on a programming idiosyncrasy where one might spends hours debugging as opposed to having an instructor help that student past a simple blockage point and explain what she is doing incorrectly. In Python, it could be a silly indentation error, or forgetting a colon at the end of a loop statement. Plus, it's helpful often to 'talk through' the issue with a more experienced person. For the same amount of tuition ($16,570), Hack Reactor offers 24/7 online help to it's students. CodeAcademy Pro offers the same for 12 hours a day EST for $20/month.

Instruction:
The quality of instructor also followed the Gaussian curve at Hackbright. While there are some very gifted coders, the majority were non-industry teachers. Some of which had just graduated from the last cohort. If they did not know the answer to a question, it was often heard, "That's not within the scope of this lecture." My most poignant memory was a student asking a question and the instructor saying, "That's not within the notes" to which the student pointed out, "It is here in the notes" and pointed out the section. The instructor then answered, "I don't want to answer that right now." Seriously. An "I don't know. I will research it and get back to you" is a perfectly acceptable answer. Or, if the instructors sometimes didn't know the answer, they just kept deflecting until the student got tired of listening to it.

Career Services:
At this point, one might ask...would the $16,570 tuition merit a high return on investment in career services? Sadly, no. What 'Career Services' does is simply surf LinkedIn profiles. The student gets secretive 1:1 meetings with the career services counselor who 'coaches' them on how to hone their skills to target their employment goals. Now, what this really means is that the woman spends time surfing LinkedIn profiles for recruiters...something one can do oneself without paying $16,570. She also advises the student that she has 'connections' and not to tell the other students about them. These 'connections' are easily gotten off surfing LinkedIn profiles.

Additionally, Silicon Valley media has much highlighted the disparity of male to female engineers. So much so that companies are moving to sponsor diversity fairs and events in which to hire minority engineers. Hackbright career services is not attuned at all to the various Silicon Valley company sponsored diversity fairs. This is a shame considering Hackbright's slogan is to "change the ratio." One would think career services would be working extra hard with companies to truly "change the ratio." When prompted during a Q&A session, the counselor had no clue that these programs existed whatsoever.

There does exist a Career Day where the students can show off their projects to prospective employers. However, the catch is that Hackbright does not know who is attending the event until the day before and the companies may not be hiring. If they are hiring, what you will get is a prospective interview...but then you need the skills to pass that interview.

Hackbright boasts that ~90% of it's 'engineers' get hired within 3-6 months. Yet, what is the break down? Is it 3 engineers within 3 months and the rest within 6 months? And, 6 months is a LONG time to find a job. Within that 6 months, the student could have studied a lot with free online resources on her own. Don't be fooled by the marketing of these statistics. Many Hackbright graduates feel unprepared for the traditional computer science interview.

Financial Aid: For a school that is focused on "changing the ratio;" Hackbright only offers loans through partners, one full scholarship for one woman out of 52 women, and for the rest $500 owing to financial need. They do not offer to help look for scholarships through private funds which any solid university or community college would offer if they were truly trying to help a student out.

Lightning Talks:
Students are assigned short 8 minute presentations in which they are to get up in front of their cohort and talk about a pertinent topic. The point of this is to learn to communicate technical ideas clearly and to be able to speak to an audience. While in theory this is a good idea, the talks were never critiqued by the instructors and therefore not useful to the student. What is useful is the information shared with the other ladies in the cohort when it was a good presentation.

Skills Readiness:
While the program does cover many of the items that industry professionals utilize, the items are covered in breadth and not in depth. Students are only given the chance to ask questions during the lecture and once a week during an hour long 'study-hall.' Many of the graduates and current students expressed feeling unready and confused. The students are able to code simple algorithms, but when prompted 'why' and if they can optimize...many students fail in this regard. This is due to instruction failure.

Mentorship:
One thing that Hackbright does well is assigning industry level mentors to each of it's students. These are tried and true professionals whom volunteer their time to help get students on their way to careers. My mentors in particular help with my code, project, resume evaluation, and invited me to tour their companies and network. However, I'd say this is more on the part of those individuals than Hackbright as an institution.

All of this makes it hard for a 12 week bootcamp graduate to compete with the many four year bachelors degree graduates from traditional computer science backgrounds. Silicon Valley suffers from no shortage of engineers from all around the world vying for engineering jobs. While it's not impossible to find a good bootcamp and to develop web savvy skills to become a full stack developer, I would recommend doing it at a school that actually has a solid curriculum and in which the instructors are competent and readily available. Good luck on your search!!