Holberton School

I will make this really simple. I attended the first-year curriculum with Holberton School which is 9 months long. Our 1st programming language is C for 1st semester then Python for 2nd semester. Surprisingly these two primary languages will be required... Read More for my job. Even though the curriculum prepares students for Full-stack software engineering, I am living proof that you can be hired as a System Software Engineer which requires much more hardware-level programming. I am grateful for the first semester which focused on Lower Level engineering, Data Structures, and Algorithms. One thing I did not mention to anyone until is that I had two days to prep for the interview onsite. I truly believe this curriculum is very good but to anyone interested, please have a base knowledge of operating systems and computers. With that said, I am super grateful to this program for changing my life. I specifically waited to write this review after getting the job offer and start working next Monday. Total almost 4 months of job searching.

It is a life changing experience.

I have been very critical about an academic scheme where the lack of opportunities for people with knowledge and no diplomas is everywhere. If you don't have a degree from a recongized University degree then the situation... Read More gets worst.
That is where Holberton School breaks the mold.
They no only prepare you with technical skills (its like a boot camp, but in steroids and that means all the time studying and programming) but they also try to help you with soft skill needed in a competitive market . Your will learn to program in several languages, work in groups, deal with difficult software situations, and most of all, you will learn to learn.

I your like computer tech and dont know where to go, i will recommend you to give it a chance and enroll.
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Pros:
- nice space, plenty of whiteboards, computers, books, and rooms to reserve
- standup is a good way to practice public speaking and learn about different things
- meet new people

Cons:
- informal learning environment: campus is loud, students tend to... Read More get off topic. It's more like a hangout spot than a school. I've seen people visibly frustrated by this.
- every resource is a link from a google search result... no custom resources at all. Yeah yeah... this is what you do on the job. However, most of us are beginners and we're paying for a school, not for someone to google things for us!
- no teachers, TAs are previous students (felt like a blind leading blind situation - I say this because many people start out with bad coding practices, and there's no one to teach us better ways to code things. Looking at recent students' githubs, I still see ugly code.) they've been using their investors' money to invest in real estate, NOT for resources that benefit students.
- slower pace than community college courses, and less pressure (Holberton has no assessments to test your knowledge). I see reviews saying this school is tough, but maybe because people haven't compared this to other schools, so their expectations for rigor are low. It's mainly time consuming because there aren't any custom resources or decent help.
- "Peer learning days" lack structure, mostly a waste of time. It's just a group of students hanging out going over assignments rather than working on new challenges. This is redundant because we already spend a lot of time together doing the assignments.
- mock interviews had lots of stupid questions that real interviewers would never ask (like who founded Uber? when did they IPO?). they also gave us algo problems when we didn't even have basic data structures knowledge. example: they gave us a Merge k sorted lists problem. This is hard to figure out without knowledge of heaps.
- learning basic C for 3 months was nearly pointless, not applicable to jobs we'd qualify for
- web development track - spent a long time making a basic app that looks terrible
- spent very little time on topics we'd never use again
- bad reputation example: Scality will never hire from Holberton School again because no student showed up to a hackathon they signed up for
- their "job fair" didn't have any employers, just students and people curious about the school
- ISA terms make this by far the highest cost coding school, and it's nowhere near worth it given the time spent and the (lack of) resources. 17% for 3.5 years, no job support after finishing the 9 months. Other schools still organize mandatory days after their program to prep for job interviews

Other: sketchy marketing. Their website claims 100% of "grads" get jobs. However, their definition of grad isn't clear. The main program is 9 months, and there's an optional specialization track, so I think a "grad" is someone who finished 9 months + specialization. Maybe 5 people accomplished this? The real outcomes of people who finished the 9 months: not sure, but it looks like under 40% work with tech. Some people ended up with unrelated jobs.

Overall, I thought this was a bad program. If your goal is to learn about CS and open yourself to numerous CS career possibilities, start with community college. If your goal is to become a software engineer, take free online courses first and practice coding with codewars, project euler, etc. If you want to do a bootcamp, consider: cost, resources, program structure, rigor, and the help (do they have good teachers and TAs?) After 9 months, I don't think people are prepared for a career. Several alumni have already been laid off. I suspect many more are underperforming (I talked with one company that hired multiple Holberton grads. they said they'd rather not hire from the school again because the recent hires were underperforming). Some have been given a chance at an internship, but never got a return offer and are now unemployed. Companies mostly give chances to people who can market themselves as someone who is motivated and has potential. I'm an idiot for taking a chance on this school, but I was desperate to make a change.

Pros:
- Convenient - Accessible easily from the Bart Station in SF
- Affordable - Getting trained to become a full stack software engineer and no down payment needed - Amazing!
- Great facilities accessible 24 Hours a day with state-of-the-art equipment... Read More - They even have a nap room to rest your mind
- Peers - Learning from my peers is and will be probably the best experience ever, everyone has something to offer
- Projects - The projects are extremely relatable such as building an Airbnb clone from scratch
- Learning speed - The speed of learning gets you to push yourself to the limit, no excuses if you want to get a valuable education
- cont. Learning speed - Show me a degree that gets you to become a proficient full stack engineer in that period, you get your money's worth
- Fun for cheap - I have noticed that despite sf being expensive, you can have extreme fun quite cheaply since most events and hangouts are free of affordable e.g $5 silent discos
- When you get a job after Holberton and work in some cities, you might get a reprieve in the fees you pay, not sure which ones exactly

Cons:
- SF is expensive, you better have a plan on how to study and survive in SF the first semester
- Learning from peers need a bit getting used but upgrades your soft skills
- The spring semester can be quite cold for those not used to it, better be dressed
- Accomodation can be quite costly, its better to share in SF
- If you are planning to work and study full-time, that will be a stretch, chances are your grades will suffer
- You loose touch with most of your friends because of the busy schedule, its a tradeoff.

I attended Holberton's 9-month Full-Stack Software Engineering program. I learned a lot about development and how to learn independently, which I'm deeply grateful for. I also made some lifelong friends during my time there. A lot of the staff were amazing... Read More people that I look up to, which makes it more difficult for me to leave this brutally honest review, but out of the interest of prospective students knowing the truth I believe this review is necessary. My biggest issue with this school is that there's a toxic ethical problem at the root of Holberton that remains suppressed from the public due to the immense financial interests invested in this company.

The truth is important, and people deserve to know what they're getting into before becoming financially entangled with this institution. Here were my issues with Holberton:

1) Job Placement Rates. They claim that 100% of their graduates get jobs as Software Engineers. This is misleading data. It's semantically true, but the only way to get your certificate of completion when you complete the 9-month track is by getting a written referral from your manager ONCE YOU'RE EMPLOYED AS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER. So technically you CAN'T graduate until you have a job. I got a job in Marketing and they ejected me from the program, so no certificate, but I still owe them 17% of my salary for 3 years. I know a lot of students were job hunting for 6 months to a year before finding work. Some just gave up and went back to service work to pay the bills. These students are erased from the history books and left out of the shining statistics you see in their marketing material. I know students who went through Holberton, spent months job hunting with no luck, and then went to a different bootcamp, only to realize the other bootcamp invested far more time into each student and had much higher job placement rates in less time than Holberton. These other bootcamps(which I won't name to protect the anonymity of my sources) were 3-4 month programs that focused on interviewing, algorithms, and projects. They also placed you at REAL companies to get REAL experience. And that's what most companies want. REAL industry experience. The real numbers matter more than what the public sees, as the truth always comes out eventually.

2) Income Sharing Agreement. If you make over 40-50k you have to pay 17% of your wages for 3 years. 50k is still far below the poverty line for the Bay Area. I think this can be improved upon. Here's a quick solution: Only make the student pay if they get a job as a SOFTWARE ENGINEER(or a related technical role). Is it fair to make a student pay 17% of their wages if they're busting their behind doing restaurant work? Maybe you can raise the bar from 40-50k up to 80-90k(which is still below the poverty line for the Bay Area but at least it's a livable salary). If you truly care about social good then you would welcome this feedback and take action to improve the ISA.

2) NOT Full-Stack. This may have changed since I went through the course, but they pitched it as a Full-Stack program, which is definitely was not. We did like 5 days of Javascript and front-end, which was the area I was most interested in. The staff made fun of Javascript as if it's some cliche, not-hip language. Instead, they had us studying C for 3 months. Seemed like an ineffective use of 9-months, as Javascript is the biggest and highest in-demand language in the world. Though to be fair, they do offer a supplementary 3-month web development course if you're willing to do 3 more months of study. The first 9 months is more focused on low-level, back-end, and devops.

2) Mentorship. They sell you on this idea of abundant "Mentorship". When you're in the program and you have a question you're told to ask a peer, or slack some mentor at some company that may get back at some point. Some students got great mentorship from industry professionals, but many didn't. Of course you have to take initiative and reach out to them, and the school won't do everything for you, as they do indeed say up-front. But having experts accessible, to offer you coaching and develop a relationship with you is something that an institution for higher-learning needs, which Holberton promises, but does not deliver on. I think the independently learning model is amazing, to a degree, but there should still be at least some professional teachers who instruct on things like process, philosophy, industry, and communication.

3) Truthfulness. When I was a student they bribed us with $50 Amazon gift cards to leave reviews. Because we were students at the time everyone left gleaming reviews, not knowing if the program actually worked, and with the added pressure of not wanting to discredit the school while we still had to attend. Plus, leaving any negative reviews lowers the value of Holberton's education so students are incentivized to be unrealistically positive about their experience. You also risk losing the advantages of being in their network(and getting a certificate) if you openly speak honestly about Holberton.

4) Favoritism. If you're a good marketing face(woman, person of color, LGBTQ), you don't question the school or give any negative feedback, AND you're an intermediate-expert at programming then the school will bolster you up and increase your chances of getting a job. If you question anything, struggle in your studies, or you're a white guy then you're last in line for all the perks. Being a person of color, I strongly believe in equality and inclusion in tech, but the blatant favoritism at Holberton seems more geared toward taking advantage of a current trend.

5) Social Impact. Holberton paints itself as a heroic institution fighting for inclusion and diversity in tech, but they're clearly more interested in the marketing value of being seen as good, than actually looking at themselves and asking how they might still be contributing to the problems of social inequality. I've seen them treat students as disposable objects, instead of valued customers. I'll give some examples:

- There was a student in a cohort before me who very noticeably had mental health issues, as well as a drug problem. He was not completing any work at all, but got strung along in the program for months, pushed back a batch, and then finally kicked out after 6 months. He now owes the school $85k. The could have put more thought into assessing this student's fit for the program, and perhaps considered waiving his debt given his circumstances.
- There was another student who was kicked out from the program for apparently plagiarizing a line in a blog article. He was a person of color, very likely from a working class part of society, who showed difficulties keeping up with the intensity of the program. No support, no coaching, no investigation into how to help uplift this student. Rather, they booted him from the program and slapped him with $85k in debt.
- Another student had chronic health issues that made it hard for her to keep up with the program. She stayed back a cohort and at one point reused some of her old code for a project. In turn, she got kicked out of the program for "plagiarizing" her own code from Github. From what I understand, she had received a "Women in Tech" related scholarship from her friend who was a CEO at a tech company. That scholarship was apparently taken and distributed among other female students. She now owes them $85k.
- One student didn't complete his End-Of-Year project and presented what he tried to do, which was incomplete. Julian Barbier, one of the founders, dragged him through the coals while he was on stage, saying something along the lines of: "This is pathetic. You did nothing! Why would you even present this?! What did you even do this whole time?" It was a cringeworthy, brute-force attempt to teach a life-lesson, and it was painful for everyone to watch one of our peers get humiliated on stage like that. I think a more professional and effective way to approach this would have been to pull the student aside in private and say "What stopped you from finishing your project? Is everything okay? How can we help?"
- There were several other cases of students being threatened with expulsion for offering constructive feedback, cracking inappropriate jokes, or just falling behind in the program. There's clearly no written process or code of conduct in place specifying what gets you kicked out. It's more of a judgement call based on how the leadership feels about you and how much you'll benefit the image of the school.

I acknowledge that several of these stories are secondhand information which may not be wholly accurate. Despite the details, there's a recurring pattern here. They're quick to kick students out who are struggling in the program, likely because they don't have as much support and/or don't fit the narrative of the premiere student. They're okay with putting these students in severe debt without investing any effort into understanding the challenges that these people face and seeing how they can help them overcome these hurdles. If you're marketing yourself as an "ethical" school built on a mission of diversity and inclusion, then prove it with your actions, not just buzzwords and flashy marketing campaigns. Hire coaches, therapists, teachers, and experts who have an inherent understanding of people and a desire to help on a deeper, more personal level.

To use "social equality" as a prop for selling a product without actually understanding what it means really bothers me. People have sacrificed their lives fighting for the right to be accepted as equals and given an opportunity in America. This is not to say that if you come from privilege and power you can't do good in the world. I just believe that if you're in a position of power then you should honestly review your own impact and intentions and make sure that you're doing your best to ACTUALLY help, rather than wear the hero's suit of armor for photo shoots and retweets.

There's tremendous potential for Holberton school to be a great institution, and I don't believe that things are as simple as good and evil. But if Holberton wants to pioneer the education of the future and truly do good like it says then the leadership(founders AND investors) need to do some serious self-review and ask if they're putting enough effort to be fair, provide maximum value for their students, and actually listen to critical feedback and use it to grow. Truly helping people requires a wholesome understanding of society and what it is that holds us back from growing. People are complex and need a dynamic, adaptive, and evolving education system that welcomes feedback and values truth over appearance, which Holberton so far has failed to do. I appreciate what I learned here, but I wouldn't recommend it to a friend over the alternatives.

I am currently a student at Holberton School, in the year 1 curriculum.
I really love everything about this school and it has proven to be a super good fit for me. Although I have noticed it's not a good fit for everybody.
The curriculum is tough, and there... Read More are a lot of things to learn everyday, especially if you're from a non-tech background (like me). You have to be extremely motivated, and know how to push your limits.
That being said, it's totally worth it. Here are some reasons why:
- The curriculum may be tough but as I said it covers so much that you really develop your knowledge exponentially.
- The Income Share Agreement allows you to only pay once you land a job after graduating, no upfront tuition.
- The school is one of the most inclusive and diverse spaces I have ever been in. The admissions are totally bias-free (since they're checked by an algorithm) and a lot of effort is done to help minorities have access to jobs in tech.
- Student life is great. The peer-learning aspect of it makes you become friends with other students much faster and there are always cool events organized by the school (i.e. disco dance parties, game nights etc...)
- You get a lot of support from everybody. Peers, staff, alumni, mentors.

To sum it up, I would recommend this school to anyone who would like to switch careers and don't have time/money to go back to college, and who's really motivated about learning new stuff!

I'm writing as a student halfway into the program.
Coming from a background of studying Computer Science's in high school and one year of communal college, I was in awe after coming here. I always felt the way I was learning wasn't very efficient. Starring... Read More at a professor hours at a time while he goes line through line of code - I was processing 10% of the information coming in. I took multiple online courses on my own and was already learning more than I did in months in school.
But I wanted to take this one step further - I wanted a place that realized how to free ones full potential, and I think I found it. One thing that's extremely important to realize, it's not going to be easy. There's no 'easy' way of becoming a software engineer. You are going to have to work hours every single day and most weekends. You might feel at certain points that you can't do it, but you will get through those times.
There are no formal teachers or classes at Holberton School. Everything you learn is through projects you do on a daily basis (sometimes more than a day). If you come across a problem you can't seem to figure out on your own, you will always have ~30 other friends around you who are going through the exact same thing. Of course not everything is self taught, and multiple days a week are mandatory to be on campus, in which you will go over the projects from the past few days in groups of peers.
If you're wondering if this is the best place for you, I think you have to know exactly what you want. If you're looking for some similar college experience (parties, less intense studies, etc.), this is not what you will find here. All of the students in this school are extremely motivated and focused, and thus are capable of working together in the best way. We all have one goal in common - to become software engineers.
Feel free to ask me any more questions - DM me on twitter @eitanmayer57

Figured this would be a wonderful platform in which to speak on my current school Holberton. Personally I identify as someone who always loved to learn but was never a fan of rote memorization in classrooms simply for the sake of test taking or sitting... Read More in a lecturn for an hour without the chance for discusson. At Holberton they focus on peer learning and self accountability in your work, which for the last 4 months has made for the best learning environments I have found the privilege of being a part of. The school's curriculum is geared towards teaching us how to think and introducing us to the various tools/languages we would use in order to lay the foundation of being a full stack engineer or for some going into more minute detail of an industry they have already been a part of for years. Students in my group range from all different career backgrounds, ages, identities and experience and everyone is able to get something out of it. I would definitely check out the school's model if you find yourself wanting to start anew and have a true grasp of the functionality of programming for any tech carreer you want.