[markfer]

Honestly you'd be pretty surprised. I can't speak for other coding bootcamps, but App Academy only admits 2-3% of all applicants. Going through the admissions process requires learning basic coding fundamentals, but nothing prohibitive. You'd be surprised what taking incredibly intelligent applicants, and teaching them a great curriculum (biased here) could achieve.

[learc83]

>You'd be surprised what taking incredibly intelligent applicants, and teaching them a great curriculum (biased here) could achieve.

You don't take someone with no knowledge and teach them enough to pass a Google (or Facebook, or Apple etc...) interview in 12 weeks.

I looked through the curriculum and there is no way, that covering graph theory in a day or 2 is going to teach you what you need to know to pass a Google interview.

From what I can tell after reading up about them it looks like this is what happens:

They make people go through 4 rounds of coding challenges equivalent to something you'd see interviewing as a new grad at a second tier company (not Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, hot valley startup etc...).

Then they take the top 3%. They're aiming for people who are really fantastically good at interviews who already understand the material really well. It doesn't matter that the questions aren't super difficult when they are judging on relative performance.

After that they spend 2 weeks teaching you the basics, 8 weeks teaching you how to use some frameworks, and then 2 weeks teaching you to pass code interviews.

That's not enough time to cover most of what comes up during a Google interview. Professional programmers with years of experience spend months practicing. There are single books on coding interviews that would take longer than 12 weeks to complete.

I'm assuming what comes next is that the graduate spends several additional months prepping for interviews.

So that by the time the person interviews at Google and gets the job they actually have at least a year coding and they're really good at interviewing. This same person could have probably gotten the job without the 12 week course and paying 22% of their first year's salary.

[markfer]

Without spending too much time answering this - you're half right.

Google is our top hiring partner by a long margin. The application requires a coding test, a technical interview (answering 3 questions with 15 minutes each), and a nontechnical interview. On average this takes 3-5 weeks. We have tens of thousands of applications on a yearly basis, of which we accept 2-3%.

The curriculum spends 9 weeks going through CSS, HTML, JS, and Ruby on Rails, of which an average week consists of 80-100 hours of coursework (no exaggeration here). Then 3 weeks for a final project of their choice, and prepping for job applications.

The vast majority of our graduates will then have a job within 6 months of graduation. Yes, they interview at a lot of places and do better each time. Yes, it is incredibly difficult. Yes, they do get a job at Google when 6 months earlier they didn't know what a function was. Hope this helped.

[learc83]

>Yes, they do get a job at Google when 6 months earlier they didn't know what a function was.

Doesn't your screening process basically require you to already know basic ruby? You don't have any idea how long it took an applicant to get to the point, so how can you have any idea if there are really people going from not knowing what a function is to job at Google in 6 months?

>which an average week consists of 80-100 hours of coursework (no exaggeration here).

I can't think of anything similar to this except maybe Resident Doctors, and they are performing a job, not learning for 100 hours a week. I'd really like to see some efficacy studies because I find it very hard to believe that learning for 12 hours a day for 9 weeks is effective.

After the whole thing is done, those that make it through are probably worth hiring because they made it through, not necessary because of what they learned during the process.

If anything It sounds like what you've really done is to create a multi month interview process that you've convinced people to pay for.