Flatiron School vs General Assembly

Bootcamp is challenging and very well-structured. Languages and frameworks highly relevant. A lot of hands-on practice with labs, and projects allowed a ton of creative freedom as to topic and structure, etc. My instructor was extremely good and I felt... Read More I had total support. Job search was challenging just because of market conditions, but that is independent of the bootcamp experience. Flatiron teaches you how to think and solve problems and really equips you with the relevant tools to be a successful software engineer.

So where do I start. I am a former science major who was looking for a career change after realizing that lab work was no longer the road I wanted to travel and decided to leave my comfy position that I had for over 4 years to pursue something that I... Read More always had a strong interest in. It only took about a week for that dream to quickly die and realize that I made a dumb mistake and wish I would have though about my decision more carefully. Needless to say, I feel that I closed a chapter in my life and still want to use my degree to pursue something closely related to my original major. I was extremely excited to start the Flatiron School Full time Online program in September 2023. The best people at the company are those in admissions because they do a really good job at selling you something that turns out to be completely the opposite. When I enrolled for the class, it was underneath the guise that we would be doing a full time lecture with coding projects along the way. However, that turned out to not be the case at all and the only "lecture" that we received was a 1 hour code along in the afternoon. The only other time you have with your instructors is to answer questions from the self-guided online material if you didn't understand anything. I have no idea how you can market this class as a full time course when you're literally only teaching for one hour of the day. The reason why people are paying almost $18k (yes, it's that much) is so they can be lead by a teacher and so that knowledge gets passed down. If I wanted to grind material on slides, I would've just used freecodecamp or literally any alternative that doesn't cost nearly as much and actually gives you advice on how to write the code. The fact that something that is free can give you more advice that a program that cost almost one year of school is pretty sad. Speaking about instructors, the instructor himself was laughable at best. He literally did not have any teaching background prior to Flatiron School, and it was very apparent because even though he knew the material himself, he did not do a great job explaining and going into great detail about the subject matter. As a matter of fact, he was a previous student through the school, which makes me wonder if they literally just hire instructors from their student pool and not consider anyone who has a full CS background. I feel that most people that join this course are those who have no idea how to do code to begin with, and in order to keep you students engaged you really need to go the extra mile to help those that are struggling. Even after completing the pre-course material, I was still completely lost in the lectures because he would just plow through. I learned more from other students with more hands on experience than I did from the instructor, which really says something about the people that they choose to teach this course. The only thing positive I can say about the course is that there were legitimately a lot of good people who made a discord group for our cohort and had chatrooms to help those in need. They were very knowledgeable about the topic and honestly, I wish the best for them. They made the experience a lot better and hope they land a good position in the future, because they deserved it. The fact that other cohorts were more instructive than the "instructor" was my red flag, and I knew that it was time to get my money back and go look for a new position. So, to sum it up - Full-Time online is not really "full time" - Lackluster material which you can find online for free - Bad instructors (one of them literally did not even start the week I was there) - Admissions will lure you in for a class you thought was completely different in reality - Expensive! - Other cohorts will probably be better teachers than your own instructor Seriously, do your research. Sure there may be a lot of good reviews but there are also plenty of bad ones as well. I wouldn't be shocked if most of the reviews that are overly positive are those still relying on thee school to find a good placement or alumni that got hired by the school. Do yourselves a favor and avoid the same mistake I made.