| My team (a small healthcare startup) spent a lot of time looking at this for our first hire so I feel like I could provide some insights. First off, I think it varies quite widely on the school. We talked to people from General Assembly and the quality varied A LOT. There were some people who I would have said were capable of being a junior developer and some who I would say are hardly employable. None of them were exceptional programmers though. Everyone we talked to had never built anything prior to GA and were very clearly not what I would think of if I had to imagine an (ideal) programmer. We did end up hiring a programmer from a program called App Academy and this program seemed way more legitimate. Their staff had people contributing to the linux kernel and git, which gave us a lot more confidence. Similarly, with some of the smaller programs that we interviewed with we saw an increase in quality. The largest correlation we saw though, was that programs that were compensated based on your compensation produced much better people. GA is just making money whether you suck or not. AppAcademy gets paid if you get paid. If you make 10% more, so do they. I think that's extremely evident in the students they send out into the world. The combination of his salary and equity isn't too far below $100,000, but he's also quite exceptional. He had gone to Princeton, did great in school, had a perfect score on the SAT's, knew about Public Health, etc. TL;DR: The average starting salary of $100,000 sounds like BS.
Hire from smaller programs that get a commission - not tuition.
Just like normal universities, students can vary in quality regardless of their "pedigree." |