[rajangdavis]

I went through General Assembly's Web Development Immersive 2 years ago.

I have made good use of what I have learned in that program; however, I would be reluctant to recommend that everyone should take it.

It really depends on how much of your own time you are willing to invest in learning the material. I had 1 year of some web development experience at that point, so I was familiar with some of the material and didn't mind putting in work to get better. It was great for me in that it rounded out some of my skills and got me interested in bash which was something I never expected.

They worked really hard to get feedback from students to ensure that our experience was what we wanted and that they were also challenging us without being overwhelming. They also had a very passionate and personable staff that would answer any questions assuming that you had tried to solve your problem before asking.

They encouraged students to fail first so that they would eventually not fear failure; this was one of the most important lessons that I have taken with me. I don't think you can really learn this from an online course or tutorial.

I saw people go into the program without any developer experience come out of it building complex web apps that were using newer technologies (at that time) like Web Sockets and NodeJS. I also saw people go into the program and not really get much from it, but I don't know how much work they really put in.

A couple of the students from my cohort are working at big name companies like Uber and Starbucks, so my takeaway is that there isn't a guaranteed route to success with these types of programs. They give you enough tools to start a fire but they leave the rest up to you.

[kafkaesq]

Most of that sounds positive, actually. So I'd be curious as to what the basis for your net negative take was.

[rajangdavis]

I'll bite. The negative aspects, to me, were ultimately minor in my experience but consequential for a lot of the students.

This might have changed, but if you had the money, they will take you in. There is an interview process that they use to screen applicants, but my impression is that if you can pay, you get in.

This creates issues where there are students that are heavily invested in a successful outcome but might not have the ability to grasp the material. I tried helping some of my colleagues but some of them just could not grasp the material and it was hard for me understand what obstructed their ability to do so.

It might have been a confidence thing ("I don't get this and I never will"), but again, failure was encouraged in the program.

Additionally, there were issues that occurred due to a lack of diversity in race and gender. I do not want to get into it because it's really complicated and I lack the ability and the time to give this a fair evaluation. The gist of it is: General Assembly facilitated open dialogue but not all of the participants wanted to participate. I will leave it at that.

Halfway through the program, we had a teacher give pretty uninspiring lessons. The subject matter wasn't super dry or uninteresting (it was on SQL and relational databases); my feeling was that the teacher had some personal issues that were affecting his work.

This sucked more for the people that had zero background in development because he was poorly teaching crucial material and none of the students were feeling it. A lot of the students complained about this and he started turning around after that.

I also get the feeling that there was some "drama" in the inner workings of General Assembly. The director of our cohort quit towards the end of our immersive (week 10 out of a 12 week program); she was basically the one that ran the show and made sure that our needs for learning were met.

From my understanding, she was fired because of student complaints. She was very personable and very protective of the students so I feel like there must have been some pressure from above.

[kafkaesq]

Yup - education is hard; sounds like GA is still figuring this out. Thanks for the data points.

[gaius]

Wait, web dev in ASM? That sounds cool but not very hireable...

[rajangdavis]

I'm not sure what you are asking here. Can you elaborate?

The bootcamp was called General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly/).