BitBootCamp

Waste of time, money, no job placement, not hiring partners, all lies.  They don't help you at all with jobs it's like yeah we have hiring partners, you don't need projects for github etc...lies.  They don't answer emails...Save your money go to a real data science school.    You would think that they would believe in their own program to the point where they would at least give you an internship with their consulting company to at least gain some experience nope...they just sell you crap....SAVE YOUR $$$ you will not get a job through these people.

I wrote a previous review which I spent some time on that got deleted....so to keep this one short incase it gets deleted again, this program is not worth your money. 

Yes things are tought in this class but not worth the cost of the program. I felt scammed almost by the end of it, as if it were just a moneymaking scheme for the main company. I would not recommend these classes unless they were almost free. Things can be learned online at a better pace/depth and efficency than anything you will pick up here. At the end of the program there is no job assistance dont get tricked into thinking there is. 

I regret taking the part-time hadoop and big data analytics course at BitBootCamp and would advise against it in it's current state. In fact, my theory is that the whole BitBootCamp business is mostly a way for the founder to help fund his sister big data consulting startup, Hudson Data.

Also, apparently they occasionally try to use the classes as a recruitting tool, as the teacher said that a few former students currently worked with Hudson Data. Be wary, though. A couple of students in the class were asked to work on projects for them with the possibility to get hired if they did a good job. They said later that they were jerked along with future promises but that they were never payed or hired because at the end of the day, the projects they worked on weren't revenue generating and so they couldn't justify hiring them to work on it. I suppose the lesson is if they do ask you, make sure you work on Big Data technologies that are a core part of their business. Otherwise, they seem to be trying to get free work out of you for various ideas they have but don't want to dedicate time to themselves. The students said they would have been better off just applying to jobs in their free time.

ANYWAY, about the class itself. The teacher was a previous student at the Bootcamp who had very little teaching experience and didn't seem to prepare very much beforehand. Don't be fooled by the professional looking presentation of the course on their website. The actual content was very surface level and very little learning took place in class. He basically introduced subjects at a very general level but didn't go into many details (and when he did, he would occasionally fumble it) nor did he have good examples/exercises to help the students learn. Their were some exercise sheets handed out for unix and sql, but they were never discussed later so it was just up to the students to do on their own (these resources are online for free btw). Also, he would often ramble on about his work experiences or give us platitudes about how if you learned some technology, you will have no problem finding a job, all of which was essentially time wasting so he could fill the three hours. Even then, he often would stop 30-60 minutes early.  

Despite their class description, there was very little cohesiveness to the class nor direct skill building. Regarding big data, the teacher skimmed over the hadoop documentation and basically rotely instructed us to set up a one-node cluster with the free trial on AWS (again, there are free resources to do this online, which they probably themselves used), and gave us some vaque ideas of things to try. No detailed learning module or cool projects that you develop through the class that you can put on your resume. 

Lastly, the professional development regarding resume reviews, interview practice, or job network is non-existent. One of the students said they talked to a guy who used to work at Hudson Data, and he said that the founder had connections to American Express, but they have sinced dried up.

I actually did not want to write negative review as I am not a jerk and although I was not happy with the delivery of the course, I just figured to see it as a bad experience as I only attended one class and I knew that there were others who paid a lot more because they attended other classes at the same time.

But, I just did not want others to have similar experience and waste thousands of dollars of hard-earned money for something wasteful.

Curriculum: the learning roadmap was top notch, and this was actually the reason I joined the class, but the delivery was not even close. If you think that you would actually build your own cluster of 5 to 10 nodes, fuhgetabutit. Learned about AWS, not a chance. When we asked about this, one of the instructors (who also happened to be the founder) responded that it would take a lot of times to do that and that it would just not be possible with the allotted time (I attended the part time class), but ... if you know that it is not possible why they were listed on the curriculum (and they still are). Also,everything in the class were just instructional introductory material, except for the unix commands and sql syntax, there were practices, but here is the caveat: they just gave you practice questions but there was no answer or even discussion. Heck, how do I know if I was doing it correctly or not? again, cliche answer: they wanted us to practice on our own.

Instructors: all of the instructors were either graduates from the previous classes or employees of their sister company hudson data. This fact was not the issue, the issue was that they did not have prior teaching experience and some of the instructors told us that they were actually contacted by the founder to teach the class at the last minute so they asked us to excuse them a bit if somehow they missed one or two. Don't get me wrong, most of the instructors were nice people, they tried to do the best they could given the circumstances, I just think they are not up to the task.

Job Assistance: nope, not even resume preparation as mentioned on the curriculum.

Overall experience: just one of those classes which you feel that you just wasted a lot of money for nothing. Classes often ended before the scheduled time around 8.15-8.30pm (schedule: 6-9pm), again, here is the excuse: well, why prolong something that can be done quicker?

I noticed some of good reviews the school received in the past were from the early classes where they could still get job assistance because the founder happened to know some folks in American Express in the nearby location, but those folks had master degree in related field, some even have phd degree (just so you know)