Search results yield coursereport.com and switchup.org.<p>With the "top" ones like GA, Hack Reactor, Career Foundry, you are lucky to get more than 50+ reviews.<p>With some of these being over $10k, am I wrong to think there should be more reviews out there?
As a relatively recent bootcamp grad who hasn't written a review, here are my excuses/hypotheses for others who haven't:<p>a) simple laziness. A good review takes time and thought to write, and the time isn't necessarily in the writing the review, but in processing the experience after graduation. By the time you have a more balanced (ie, graduated, employed/unemployed) perspective, you've probably moved on to other things.<p>b) in my case, it's mostly due to general ambivalence about the experience. There were things I liked, things I thought weren't done well, and the overall effect is to cancel each other out. Ambivalence doesn't encourage taking the time (see above) to write down thoughts the way more extreme positive or negative views do.<p>c) also specific to me: I genuinely liked the instructors and most of my cohort, and writing anything negative seems impolite - not wanting to hurt someone's feelings or seem ungrateful. Irrational, but there ya go.
Having done an online boot camp I can say at least part of it is not wanting to spread negative feedback that might devalue your investment.<p>I imagine many people go into these programs to gain skills to get a job. If afterwards you talk about how the program failed to prepare you for that you're shooting yourself in the foot.<p>As to why there aren't more positive reviews - maybe it's related?
One reason that also explains why there aren't many reviews of universities, relative to the number of people who attend: When your career depends in part upon the esteem of your degrees or certifications, speaking negatively about the source (uni, a camp) is disincentivized.
A number of employers (at least in SV) are so biased against bootcamps that the only sensible course of action is to pretend it never happened as soon as is feasible.<p>If you review a bootcamp, you risk a permanent association with having attended a bootcamp.
I wrote a fairly detailed review on my blog. <a href="http://logicmason.com/2013/hack-reactor-review-life-at-a-hacker-school/" rel="nofollow">http://logicmason.com/2013/hack-reactor-review-life-at-a-hac...</a><p>It lead to several sites emailing me and asking me to write a review or to link to their sites. Here is what I wrote to coursereport:<p>><i>By completely ignoring the issue of student outcomes, your resource does prospective students a disservice. How about listing average salaries, listing graduation rates, linking to yelp profiles and linking to student directories for those schools confident enough in their outcomes to share them?</i><p>I hadn't looked at any of these sites in a long time, but to the best of my knowledge, very little has changed. They offer a comparison only of the costs of the various options, not the value. The person who emailed me did seem to express some vague interest in adding that kind of information later but two years later it's still not there.<p>At least for me, the main reason I avoided the "bootcamp review" sites is that I didn't feel any would have given me useful guidance as a prospect (whereas Quora, Yelp and HN threads would have if they'd been around when I applied).
Many of the bootcamps are relatively young with not that many attendees per year. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: ~50 per cohort, 6 cohorts per year is 300 students per year, times 3 or so years is around a thousand total enrollees. 100 reviews is 10% of people reviewing - that seems pretty high to me.<p>FWIW: I did a bootcamp, loved it, never wrote a review. Just laziness/generally don't write reviews for things. I would guess many people don't write reviews for the same reason.
I'm a grad... and I would say part of the phenomena -- and this might sound corny but I will explain -- is how bootcamps are a personal journey.<p>By that I mean the entry point for most participants are all different, the expectations for most participants are all different, the experience for most participants are all different (some students work harder than others), and the outcomes are all different.<p>I felt there was more to learn than there was time (I did a 12 week course), so how I felt after graduating was largely a reflection of my own confidence and ability in contrast to the effort I put in and not a direct reflection of the quality of the instruction.<p>The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition [0] is a useful reference here. Any program that claims you will gain mastery over a discipline in a dozen weeks is lying to you. The guys that ran my bootcamp were plain about that. They said they would help me help myself learn... which they did but not to the level I really wanted to get to. And that more than anything is why I am ambivalent about recommending them.<p>--------<p>0 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisi...</a>
I loved my bootcamp experience, am still plugged into the alumni network, am not ashamed of it (why would I be?), but I'm probably never going to write a review of it. I'm happy to talk to people about it, but I'm not going to take the time to go write a review. There's no particular pay-off for me, and besides, the program changes constantly; I mentor where I graduated and in the 1.5 years since I finished, tons of things have changed in terms of how they organize things. I'd feel like an idiot if I said, "Oh, this was a part I didn't like," and then somebody who worked there emailed me and said "Hey, that doesn't exist any more." (Which has happened, except in conversational form.)<p>And sure, I'll freely cop to self-interest here. Bootcamp grads get enough shit from people in tech who want to dick-measure. I'm not going to do anything to further the cause of people who already think I'm an incompetent chimp with a keyboard.<p>Also, like the SwitchUp person already said in this thread, there's no reliable source of data for outcomes. I can tell you how long it took to get a job and what I made fresh out of the course, but why would you believe me, especially if you're already primed, like a bunch of people here clearly are, to believe that bootcamps are bullshit and their grads are rubes desperate to cover up the fact they got bilked? Maybe I'm just a plant; maybe I get paid a combined $200k a year by DBC/GA/HR/Flatiron to fire up 100 sockpuppets and argue that bootcamps are a good investment to con people on Reddit/HR/wherever. (That actually sounds like a super fun, super immoral job. Maybe I can trick them into actually paying me to do that. OR MAYBE I AM STILL MESSING WITH YOU. ~spirit fingers~)
Hmm... there is probably space for a service here. Find out who applies to boot camps, interview them, find out who gets accepted to boot camps, interview them, then interview the graduates and any drop outs/people cut after the program is over. Use questions drawn from standard sociological and psychological surveys like the Grit-S Scale <a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20Scale.05312011.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20S...</a><p>Provide ratings and info to the general public that don't just show rates, but trends, who drops out, comparisons of success rates for different groups, etc. Provide more structured but still anonymous feedback, for a price, to bootcamps as a consultant, or get a grant from a large tech firm. Publish papers in conjunction with academia on a delay.<p>I think what bootcamps could do, if they were willing to, is be much more agile in changing how they work based on research then a 4 year school, and actually do research and experiments to find better ways of teaching, and improve the industry as a whole.
Kind of relevant: Are bootcamps worth it? I'm looking to get into programming, but I have a full time support job right now that I need to be able to live and eat. I can save my money and do a bootcamp, or I could learn how to program in my downtime. I'm not sure which route to go through.<p>My friend did a local bootcamp and now he's doing ASP.NET work and loves it! I'm just scared of doing that specific one because I don't really have interest in anything microsoft.
I did a GA bootcamp, during which time we were all encouraged to blog about our experience on a weekly basis (and we did). I'm not sure where I'd necessarily write/post a proper review.
Theory: If you disliked it, reviewing it poorly could reduce the credibility of your education. If you liked it, you don't care enough to review it.