Rithm School

In short, my return was certainly worth the cost of admission - especially with the deferred tuition model. In four months, I went from not knowing a lick of JavaScript, to getting my Pull Requests accepted on production codebases with React Native advanced... Read More patterns. Technical expertise isn't the only thing I got from Rithm. They also taught me invaluable interprersonal skills as well as strategies for navigating the jobseeking process. I even got a job within the first few weeks of graduating by using one of my Rithm connections.

In more depth, the small class sizes made the instructors incredibly available - all of whom are skilled software engineers. With their varied expertise, I could get all of my questions addressed - no matter how deep I went down the rabbit hole. If I wanted to know why 'with' blocks function the way they do in Python, I could ask the guy who contributed to the Python source code. If I wanted to know about NP-Complete and how that relates to Big O, I could ask the one with a Mathematics pHD. Even if I wanted to know why "{ } + [ ]" returned 0 but "[ ] + { }" returned "[object Object]" in JavaScript, I could get my questions answered.

Their curriculum is always being updated on multiple levels. By asking for data from recent graduates about their job hunting experience, they can focus on relevant technologies while relegating less important topics to footnotes or Further Study. Additionally, every lecture has an option for feedback, and they definitely pay attention; the Callback Pattern exercise was substantially rewritten after they processed our feedback.

Their support continues even after graduation. They keep office hours every week specifically for alumni and assist in fine tuning the job search for best results. They're really looking out for their students' best interests.

Lastly, they understand the importance of work-life balance. The assessments are just challenging enough to solidify the lessons learned throughout the week. Even though the core requirements are designed to be completed in a reasonable amount of time, reach goals are included as well for the ambitious student. They also throw parties for significant curriculum achievements - such as completing your first sprint! There's often a group of people staying around after class to play a few board games. Although the schedule is quite rigorous and challenging, the culture really makes it manageable.

All in all, an incredible experience

Bonus: The company dog is great, and they let me bring my own well-behaved therapy dog to class!

My name is Hinesh and I attended Rithm as part of the 8th cohort. I was looking at some other bootcamps but a friend had attended Rithm and recommended it and from the first day, I could see why. The classes sizes are small and access to instructors is... Read More always there.

The instructors at Rithm truly care about teaching and it shows. They are also extremely talented developers themselves. The curriculum is extremely well thought out and does a good job in balancing breadth and depth. They also really take feedback well and make changes to the curriculum for the better based on it.

The internship experience is also incredible for 4 weeks and differentiates Rithm. You get to work with a large, real codebase and complete tasks which gives you an insight into life in software development after the bootcamp.

If you put in the time and work hard you will succeed at Rithm because the environment, from the class size to the instructors to the job support after the program, will ensure that you do. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made and would make it again in a heartbeat.

I’m from Boston and I decided to move across the country to attend Rithm School, rather than staying on the East Coast and going to a bootcamp there (or doing a remote program). I’m so glad I made this decision--Rithm School exceeded my already super... Read More high expectations.

Tldr: I’m a former high school English teacher with no experience in computer science. I chose Rithm because of the small class sizes, company projects, job search support, and amazing instructors / curriculum. I couldn’t be happier with my decision. I loved the program, I felt really well-prepared for the job search, and I found a job within 2 months of graduation.

Here are some of the factors that set Rithm apart:

Small Class Sizes

My cohort had 14 students and 3 instructors. A lot of the bigger, well-known bootcamps have 40 or 50 students and 1-2 instructors. These larger programs will claim that you get more “real-life experience” in their classes because you’re forced to learn on your own. Rithm gives you all the benefits of “real-life experience” (you work on a project with a real codebase from a partner company, you gain experience reading technical documentation, debugging, researching on Stack Overflow), but you ALSO get thorough code reviews, lots of feedback, and ongoing mentorship from experienced developers. During Rithm, I often had to problem solve and research on my own, but after I finished implementing a feature, I received a detailed code review from an instructor. This is important because, when working totally independently you might create code that works, but it might be brittle and not up to professional standards. Ongoing feedback helped me understand how to write code that was well documented and more easily scalable and maintainable.

The small class size also means that, if you find a specific concept challenging, the instructors are always available to provide one-on-one support and extra review.

Company Projects

Toward the end of Rithm School, you will be matched with a company for a short internship. This is something that makes Rithm unique (most bootcamps have a final project, but it is usually a group project, rather than a project for a real production website or application). The company project is an incredible learning opportunity because you get to work with an existing codebase and interact with developers outside of your instructors and peers at Rithm. It also gives you real experience that you can add to your resume, which is incredibly valuable during the job search.

Preparation and Support in the Job Search

Throughout the program, you will have regular one-on-one check-ins with an advisor who will help you plan for your job search. Your success in finding a job ultimately depends on your own effort and persistence, but Rithm does a great job preparing you. In my experience, almost all of the topics that came up in interviews were concepts that had been covered extensively in Rithm’s curriculum. Rithm also offers weekly office hours for alumni who are in the midst of the job search, so you have ongoing support during the process.

Amazing Instructors and curriculum

The instructors at Rithm have worked in the industry for years. They are incredibly knowledgeable and extremely supportive. They are also constantly updating and refining their curriculum so that it focuses on the most current in-demand skills. The curriculum is also very thoughtfully designed so that projects and concepts build on each other in a clear sequence. And there are always “further study” options so that if you want to keep exploring a topic and deepen your understanding, you have resources and suggested exercises to do so.

If you’re not convinced yet, feel free to check out one of Rithm’s free events. That’s a great way to get a feel for the program. You can also reach out to Rithm alum on LinkedIn if you want more info.

Choosing Rithm School was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

That's saying a lot coming from a student that's as hard to please as I am. I have very high standards when it comes to my personal educational, and instructors at Rithm are extremely... Read More knowledgable and love teaching. If you are the kind of student that needs to be challenged above and beyond what most students need, the instructors at Rithm will more than happily provide extra learning resources to help feed your endless technical curiosities and ensure that you grow as much as possible throughout the program regardless of your skill level.

My experience at Rithm was great. We got daily code reviews and were taught not just how to write code, but how to thoughtfully build robust applications. Week after week I was amazed at how much I was learning. The curriculum is very well thought out - and structured in a manner that encourages maximum absorption and retention.

A huge plus for me was that Rithm school spends a considerable amount of time on backend technologies (as well as frontend). If you're interested in backend, then this is a great school. You won't just learn some massive framework and be great at only that framework - you'll learn the fundamental concepts that help you to understand how things are really working under the hood - and apply that knowledge to any tech stack you might encounter.

Rithm gave me the confidence to be able to pick up any new technology and find a thrill in quickly learning and adapting to challenging environments. During our company projects section, our team had to learn an entirely new language and framework within a week, and make significant contributions to a very large codebase. This confidence extended to my job search where I applied far and wide. A month after graduating I received a fantastic job offer working as a backend engineer at a gaming studio.

If you value attentiveness in your instructors and an environment that will push you towards a path of significant technical growth - then Rithm School is a great choice. I would highly recommend trying out the private prep program before you decide to attend. You'll get to visit the school and get a lesson from each of the instructors to get a sense of their teaching styles.

I wholeheartedly recommend Rithm to anyone who is seriously considering attending a bootcamp!

My overall experience with Rithm School was excellent.

I was doing freelance digital effects and having a hard time finding consistent work. I looked into web development for a new career because I wanted to find a position where I could spend more time... Read More with my family and still have a stable occupation.

Rithm School stood out as the best choice for an engineering boot camp due to their small class sizes(12-14 students per cohort) and I also liked the idea of the company projects.

Our cohort was over the holidays, so it was actually a 19-week course including the break. A month after I graduated, I received my first job offer.

During the company projects portion of our course, I worked with a lot of new technology and that experience gave me enough to secure a job.

Now, I'm doing the work that I love to do, I have a 100% remote position so I can take my kids to school and pick them up after, and I'm making a lot more than I ever did in my previous career. It couldn't have worked out any better.

The instructors were also great. They were very supportive of our progress each step of the way. I had Joel, Elie, and Alissa as my instructors. Each instructor was amazing at teaching and very entertaining as well. I was never bored in any of the lectures and had so much fun during the cohort. You could really tell they cared about us and loved what they did for a living.

I would highly recommend this boot camp to everyone.

tldr: Rithm wins for best instruction, curriculum, community, and job seeking support.

Curriculum: All of Rithm's curriculum can be found online. They are continually re-evaluating and making sure they are teaching the most relevant and in demand topics... Read More while also teaching solid CS and engineering skills. The content is modern, relevant, and still full of the necessary foundational computer science and problem solving skills you need to be a successful software engineer.

Internship/Company project: Towards the end of your program, you'll get assigned to a company project where you'll pair with fellow students and a Rithm instructor to make meaningful contributions to a real production code base. This is ran like an internship and nothing is more satisfying than seeing something you built go live!!! And when it comes time to job hunt, you'll have relevant experience to help guide those interview conversations.

Instruction: If you want to teach yourself, just go watch youtube videos and read tutorials on medium or quora. If you want to actually have instructors that will patiently help you with ANYTHING that you're struggling with, go to Rithm. Code alongs, lectures with slides you can actually keep/reference back to, lab projects and sprints that involve pair programming and solo projects, stretch goals for advanced students and further study for students who need more scaffolding before mastering a topic.

Community: So much of community depends on your fellow cohort members. Each cohort will have its own personality, but the staff will go the extra mile to make sure everyone is included, safe, and comfortable. Sorry judgy mcjudgersons, you won't find a home here.

Job seeking support: At the end of the day, what every potential boot camper wants to know is "will I find a job." Rithm publishes their numbers transparently. The onus is you to do the job seeking, but they are there for you to provide the skills on how to job seek and where to look. The Rithm alumni networking is growing and we refer where we can. The instructors helped me with things like advice for negotiating once I got my job offer, editing my cover letter and resume, practice whiteboarding and take home projects.

Rithm has all kinds of free coding meet ups. There is no better way to check out a school than to see how they teach these free workshops. Most of us alumni are also very findable on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out to chat! Or better yet, just apply to Rithm and join our awesome community!

Going to Rithm School was one of the best things I've ever done for myself.

As an individual who was unable to finish college due to some unavoidable circumstances, I was always so concerned I would never be able to pursue a career in technology. I was... Read More wrong.

I spent a handful of years working in jobs that I didn't really like. It always felt like something was missing. This led me to tinker with the idea of going to a coding bootcamp, and eventually decided to take the plunge and move forward. I completed the Hack Reactor prep program remotely, and absolutely loved what I was learning. I worked hard throughout the course, and at the end I passed the technical interview and was accepted to their immersive program. I wanted to pursue other options in order to make the most informed decision. One of the guys I met through the Hack Reactor course told me about Rithm School, and I also applied to Galvanize. I was accepted to all three (HR, Rithm, Galvanize), and I had to make a decision.

Through word of mouth, I heard amazing things about Rithm School. At the time they were a much newer program, and had only worked with 5 cohorts. Their approach was much different than most of the other programs I looked into, and I liked what I saw.

The main reason I chose Rithm was because of their emphasis on small class room sizes. I have never been able to learn very well in large classrooms. I found the idea of working in a small intimate group much more appealing than being just another person in a massive room.

If anybody tells you that going through Rithm's immersive program is easy, they are lying. I worked harder than I ever have in my life. There is so much material to learn, and it moves quickly. From day one I felt extremely welcomed by all of the instructors, and they served as an excellent source for me to get personal questions answered, which made a huge difference. There were many times I felt like I had hit a wall. I wanted to give up! But those feelings always passed, and before I knew it I started to feel like an engineer.

Rithm does an excellent job at providing the necessary information and tools to be successful in the course. It was obvious that they had a clear picture of what works and what doesn't. The curriculum is well laid out, and each topic tends to build on the previous one.

My favorite part of the program was the company projects phase. I was able to work with an awesome start-up, and build deployable features for their application before I had even finished a bootcamp! It was an awesome experience, and it really solidified everything I had learned in the first half of the program.

The last phase of the program (outcomes) was also crucial for my success. There is so much I didn't know about the interviewing and hiring process for technical roles. Over the course of just a few weeks I learned how to master technical interviews, take home challenges, phone screens, and even post offer negotiation. I would've been screwed in my job search process without a lot of this information.
As the program neared an end, I had mixed feelings of both excitement and fear. I was very concerned that I would have a super hard time finding a job without a Bachelor's degree on my resume. I applied to hundreds of jobs, over the course of just a few weeks. There were plenty of rejections, and it was hard work. Amazingly enough, after a long interview process, I ended up getting offered an awesome position through a referral I had gotten from one of the instructors at Rithm. All of the hard work was suddenly SO worth it.

Looking at my life today, I am beyond grateful for the opportunities I was given based on my decision to attend Rithm School. I have built a strong group of peers (friends) through Rithm School, that I believe will remain a part of my network for many years to come. I have a career that I LOVE, and I couldn't imagine myself doing anything else. What more can I ask for? I am so glad I chose to go to Rithm.

I was a university lecturer and legal-economic researcher before I decided on a career change. I attended Rithm’s 6th cohort and was very pleased with the education, the corporate project, and the job search support. I can only wholeheartedly recommend... Read More this bootcamp to anyone interested in switching to a career in software development.

I’ve been accepted to five bootcamps and vetted all of them before choosing Rithm. The reasons were the quality of Rithm’s curriculum, the commitment of its teachers, the company projects, and the included outcomes weeks and job search support. Rithm’s curriculum was very well organized, especially in comparison to the curricula of other bootcamps, where some of the elements even seemed ad hoc, as if grafted on as an afterthought. Obviously much thought was given to the design of Rithm’s curriculum, as it was building and expanding my knowledge gradually without major leaps or missing steps. Rithm has a permanent teaching staff with low turnover and an excellent teacher to student ratio; so I knew up-front who were going to be my teachers and what kind of teaching I was going to get. Other bootcamps have more temporary teaching staffs with high teacher turnover, so often they weren’t able to tell me who the teachers were going to be, not even how many of them we were going to have. During the bootcamp and even afterwards during job search I found the teachers of Rithm very professional, very committed to their craft, and also very committed to our success.

Rithm’s practice of contracting students out after 10 weeks of lectures to do real life company projects was also very sympathetic to me, and I haven’t seen this implemented anywhere else at Bay Area bootcamps. I thought of this as a final check whether I would actually be able to do the job and the final stage of actually becoming a real software developer. My company project also turned out to be a great conversation starter during my phone screens and interviews, and I suspect that my resume often got picked out of the pile because I had a company project on it. About the job search support I was a bit skeptical initially, because every bootcamp claims to provide some form of job search support. What was a bit different about Rithm was that the bootcamp had three weeks set aside specifically for “outcomes”, which was essentially education how to get a software developer job, from improving the resume to salary negotiations. This training also proved to be very useful and I even discussed my activities with the teachers and got advices after the bootcamp was over, right up to the point when I got an offer.

So I can’t thank Rithm enough: I really enjoyed the bootcamp and learned a lot in a very short time. And most importantly, at the end I landed an awesome job just five weeks into the job search. Thank you Rithm School!

Going to Rithm School was the best decision I’ve ever made.
I got my dream job (software engineer) in a company I deeply care about in San Francisco and I made lots of new friends while doing it. You *can* have your cake and eat it too!

Prior to Rithm... Read More I got accepted into Hack Reactor and was thinking of joining their course. After lots of research, touring multiple bootcamp offices and talking with previous grads I decided on Rithm.
In hindsight, I’m super glad I chose Rithm because:
• working on the company project prepared me for real world engineering work (gathering reqs, creating prototype, communicating with stakeholders, collaborating with team members, code reviews, pull requests, etc)

• Instructors were experienced developers *and* fantastic teachers. We got to ask any questions we wanted because they keep class sizes small; this meant we could get clarification on advanced topics to better understand them.

• Example of above: I’ve asked other bootcamp grads about things like CSRF tokens, preventing XSS and other web security issues. Often they had not heard of CSRF or didn’t understand implications of XSS beyond the basics. I’m super happy that Rithm instructors invested time in this area.

• Curriculum is relevant and highly in-demand: Python and Javascript/Node with React – demand for React devs is off the charts in the Bay Area. Rithm also provided lots of practice with computer science topics like data structures and algorithms. This was crucial for job interviews.

• Most importantly: support and feedback are exceptional. Elie, Matt, Joel and Michael all go the extra mile and come early / stay late to make sure you’ll be successful. They are amazing. They truly care and that makes all the difference.

Bonus: Rithm office at Sansome St is fantastic - lots of space to collaborate, code and whiteboard!

TL;DR: RIthm provided an excellent javascript & python full stack curriculum (including React) complemented with data structures and algorithms practice and lectures. Support continued through the job interview process. Within 90 days of graduation I... Read More landed a fullstack role in San Francisco.

One of the immediate benefits of Rithm was the small class size and high teacher to student ratio. This allowed everyone to have access to an instructor throughout the course. This doesn't mean they held my hand through the course! They were excellent at extending a concept or assignment for those stretch goals. 

Every morning you are given a warm-up assignment covering data structures, algorithms, and/or design concepts. This was crucial come time for white boarding and toy problem interview questions. 

The entire curriculum I would argue leads up to the company projects. Rithm has teamed up with companies for students to work as contractors on new features for their product or service. This prepares a student for the interview process as they have experience working within a company's production code base rather than a final project built from scratch.

My cohort graduated before Rithm added a job interview prep curriculum. However, they were there for me to prep for all facets of interviewing in the Bay Area market. From behavioral to white boarding and presentation skills, an instructor was there to help me sell myself to these companies.