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by jenno 4320 days ago
I took General Assembly's web dev immersive course last March. Truth be told, I had a terrible instructor -- he could code, but he couldn't teach very well. One caveat is that I already knew HTML and CSS before entering.

I appreciated that they try their damnedest to hook people up with jobs if they want one. The instructor you wind up with might just be the most important puzzle piece. People in previous classes with better instructors are now in jobs making 70-110k in NYC. I landed a job at an education startup and they offered me 62k.

A friend of mine who entered the bootcamp a few months ago, based on my experiences, landed a job paying 50k. We both admitted that there wasn't much actual coding going on, though -- my job was working with Puppet configs and building out new instances of cookie-cutter websites. His was mainly messing around on the front-end and putting together email templates.

I'd do it over again if I could. It did teach me a whole lot, and got me started on a junior path, but there is no question that most of us need a bit more experience and work before really being able to call ourselves junior devs. As the previous commenter said, a lot of the knowledge they impart is skin-deep -- until you run with it and make projects with it. The students that stayed up till 3am coding, then made it into class at 8:30am are the ones that you'd define as "successful" with 6-figure salaries now.

There are many threads on Quora that answer this question more in-depth, if you want more info.