[Pixelicious]

(Disclosure: I'm a college dropout who went through Hack Reactor and can, for the first time, afford a comfortable lifestyle)

Hack Reactor focuses entirely on JavaScript and Web Development, after baking in the basics (algorithms, logical thinking, recursion vs iteration, introductory functional programming and TDD). And it is incredibly successful.

I think you're underestimating the difference between college and immersive learning. College is about many things, your major and focus being one of them. Immersive learning is about one thing. In Hack Reactor's case, it's becoming a competent Web Developer.

Elon Musk's response in this thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk...) rings true. Almost no college is teaching Web Development, and so the students get little class based exposure to it, and stumble through many pitfalls. An immersive experience gives you the trunk and several branches, and then frees you up to go deep into whatever you care about.

And smart, voracious people who are eager to learn and better themselves quickly outclass everyone else.

Oh, and I could code competently before I went to Hack Reactor (I was a contractor). I went to gain deep web experience, work in crossfunctional teams, and have a safe place to fortify the foundational soft skills which are absolutely essential for productive software developers.

Oh, and the ROI is insane.

[ska]

I don't think I'm underestimating it at all. Immersive learning works best when you are almost ready to learn the material already; in this case you can achieve a lot in a few days if you are motivated, but there are limits. You can't compress years or months into days, and you can only get so far before you have to slow down and synthesize.

I wouldn't hire someone just because they'd graduated from a decent CS program either, it's just a reasonable proxy for some of the skills (but not others) they will need to become a developer over time.

[Pixelicious]

Great points. I often forget how many of my breakthroughs come from careful reflective synthesis, and I forget that, in general, it's a slow process.

It turns out, immersive learning is absolutely capable of compressing synthesis time as well as knowledge transfer. One of the best parts of Hack Reactor is the time after the 'solution lecture', during which everyone gets the chance to reflect on their code and solutions and discuss macro and micro optimizations that were possible.

For general reflection, Socratic seminars are a great way of condensing the synthesis time. Those who have had small epiphanies share them, and hopefully it avalanches.

But you're correct. The deepest learning is very personal and requires effort, solitude, and time. Immersive learning gives you the trunk and knowledge of a few select branches, but if you want to see the leaves you must find them yourself, or at most with one other person. In Hack Reactor's case, only half of the course is absorbing information. The second half is left to projects, during which synthesis must occur and individuals specialize and gain deep knowledge.

500+ hours of steady research and application is nothing to scoff at, especially since it happens while connected to a huge wealth of intellectual resources (I worked directly with Neo4j peoples for a project).

[Bahamut]

Not all are equal though if I had to guess - to add another data point, my current company hired someone who went through Hack Reactor. He was on my team before me, but he was let go before I joined for drastically underproducing and for a very low quality of code. I had to deal with some of the repercussions of his code - what supposedly took him one month to write a poor piece of code utilizing d3 for a donut chart, I was able to refactor to a drastically more performant version in 1 1/2 days.

Maybe not all who go through a bootcamp like Hack Reactor are bad - the story certainly reinforces to avoid assumptions about a candidate and assess each person carefully.