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I'm from Lincoln and I hope this works out for the people who drop the $6,000 on this training program. However, I take issue with two things they are promoting, First, this line, "Now they're employed as web developers making $70-100k." The Omaha and Lincoln area have a much lower cost of living than SF obviously, but developer salaries are also much, much lower. An entry level dev is likely to find something closer to $35,000-50,000. I'd say the salary range in the midwest is something like $35,000-100,000 depending on where you work, experience, and so on. Selling devs on the idea that this 12 week course will get you a $70-100k job in the midwest is at least a bit misleading. Second, even a very intense 12 week course is a good start, but I don't know how many employers are going to hire someone with 3 months training. Now, I don't doubt that the training is FAR more applicable than what they are teaching at the local universities, but real world project experience counts for a lot and some lessons you never really learn until you get the experience of building something. Also, I really think that the line "Omaha Code School is special" kind of exudes this weird notion I've seen popping up in the "Silicon Prarie" that doing tech in the midwest somehow makes you special because you're not doing it in Boston or SF. I don't really get why they think that, but that vibe seems to permeate the culture of midwest startup land. Anyway, I hope this does awesome things, but I am worried they are setting the wrong expectations for potential students. |
I graduated from Hack Reactor this April, the only school I know of a with similar number of instruction hours to those quoted here—about 800. Back then, the school had little brand, but I still got hired by Groupon, and not in a junior role. I was a liberal arts major.
Since that time, I've seen demand for students of later cohorts grow and grow. Some have gotten into white hot start-ups like famo.us, Google and Yahoo! offered interviews to practically the entire current graduating class. One of my friends who started right after me is leading Keychain Logistic's front-end development (YC2012). More interestingly is that while we learn Node, Meteor, Backbone and a lot of other JS-related technologies, a large number of formerly non-technical students have gone on to take roles that have little to do with JavaScript. A couple of examples I can think of off the top of my head are senior Java developer at Pandora and chief data scientist at Node Prime. I really can't emphasize strongly enough what 800 hours in 12 weeks can do in the right program.
My biggest concern with what I can see of the Omaha Code School is actually the low price tag. These schools are not commodities with roughly similar pros and cons. There is a huge variance in outcomes and if you're going to put your life on hold for months while spending all your waking time investing in a new career, it would be madness not to invest in the highest quality program you can.