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Byte Academy is an industry-focused coding school with remote and onsite courses in New York City and Bangalore, India. Its offerings include Full Stack Python development, FinTech (financial technology), Data Science, Blockchain and Quant-Algos. Full-time onsite programs consist of 14 weeks; part-time programs are 24 weeks, 2 evenings per week and remote courses have flexible scheduling options. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.
Byte Academy is one of the few dedicated FinTech bootcamps, which includes a blockchain curriculum. The curriculum in Byte Academy's full stack Python program includes JavaScript and front-end languages so that students are equipped to build full web applications.
Curricula for all of Byte Academy's courses are project-heavy with a strong emphasis on teamwork, career services and job placement, including a Tuition-Refund Program.
Just read through the anonymous reviews here- it's loud and clear.
Skip past the 5 star reviews, they're by instructors and TAs who were once students here, but never held a job where production level code was necessary. They failed to get a job beause this place fails at preparing you for any technical role, so they come back to teach...
Every single event and meetup is a dud and a marketing ploy. Their ciriculum for fintech and medtech is a scam and is not followed at...
Just read through the anonymous reviews here- it's loud and clear.
Skip past the 5 star reviews, they're by instructors and TAs who were once students here, but never held a job where production level code was necessary. They failed to get a job beause this place fails at preparing you for any technical role, so they come back to teach...
Every single event and meetup is a dud and a marketing ploy. Their ciriculum for fintech and medtech is a scam and is not followed at all. Their new data science ciriculum is literally stolen from another bootcamp and sold to you at a higher price. Director sits in his office never making contact with the students he ripped off.
I chose Byte academy because it was the only bootcamp in NYC teaching Python. I quickly realized none of their instructors are competent in teaching it; all their teachers are hired straight from either their own bootcamp or Ruby bootcamps and they have zero real life work experience in what they teach. Typical day at Byte consists of a 15 to 30 min lecture in the morning and after that you are on your own. That was okay though, since especially in the Django part our instructor was so bad...
I chose Byte academy because it was the only bootcamp in NYC teaching Python. I quickly realized none of their instructors are competent in teaching it; all their teachers are hired straight from either their own bootcamp or Ruby bootcamps and they have zero real life work experience in what they teach. Typical day at Byte consists of a 15 to 30 min lecture in the morning and after that you are on your own. That was okay though, since especially in the Django part our instructor was so bad that he confused us more than helped.
Personally I don't care about financial industry, but if I did and chose Byte because of their fintech orientation, I would have been very disappointed. They have a consultant that teaches basic consepts of finance in the second four week period, but that's really all you get (unless you think you're a fintech programmer after writing a simple terminal program where you create accounts and transactions).
Their career counseling is non-existent. They claim they have a lot of hiring partners, but after my graduation the only "assistance" I got from them was a two hour meeting with a woman they call their recruiter and, two weeks after my graduation, an email from that same woman with a list of links to pages like LinkedIn, Dice and Monster. Do not count on them helping you with getting a job.
I did give feedback to their CEO multiple times throughout the program and he seemed to be interested in it. However, absolutely nothing changed during my time there.
If you decide to donate your $10,000 to Byte, make sure you're ok with paying just for a working space and an access to their repo. You will have to work really really hard to learn enough to be able to get a job after this program. Also, do not start this program without learning basic programming skills first. If you do, you won't make it and you will have to repeat or drop out.
Richard of Byte Academy
Campus Director
Feb 29, 2016
Unlike most of the students, I actually graduated from here. They let people in without any coding experience whatsoever so that they can charge these unprepared students thousands of dollars even if they have to drop out on their first week. That's how this place makes a lot of money. The other way is to hire "instructors" straight from Ruby bootcamps and use previous students as TA's. No one here has real world experience as a professional Python/Django engineer. This is a big red flag t...
Unlike most of the students, I actually graduated from here. They let people in without any coding experience whatsoever so that they can charge these unprepared students thousands of dollars even if they have to drop out on their first week. That's how this place makes a lot of money. The other way is to hire "instructors" straight from Ruby bootcamps and use previous students as TA's. No one here has real world experience as a professional Python/Django engineer. This is a big red flag that I should have acknowledged. Never attend any bootcamp that does not hire experienced people from the industry.
If you manage to make it through the program, do not expect to get a job after. They keep telling you about all of their "partners" that are interested in hiring, but once you're on that stage, the only career help from their side is some 2 hour talk with their recruiter about how to write your resume. She'll tell you she'll send you open positions, but don't expect that to happen in real life. And if it actually does, it's just some BS job listings from the internet.
Also, they make all their TA's write five star reviews on top of all the five star reviews their marketing department wrote. Just keep that in mind when evaluating reviews.
You're better off paying a little more and going to one of the bigger players on the market. Or just learn on your own.
This may be good given some time to grow. In the meantime, this is a waste of money and time. The good reviews are from staff, or have been requested by their marketing person. They send out emails with incentives asking people to leave 5 star reviews on different sites.
You will get a brief "lesson" each day that does not actually teach you anything. The projects are the same you would find if you did your own online search or used books. The resources are much the same. T...
This may be good given some time to grow. In the meantime, this is a waste of money and time. The good reviews are from staff, or have been requested by their marketing person. They send out emails with incentives asking people to leave 5 star reviews on different sites.
You will get a brief "lesson" each day that does not actually teach you anything. The projects are the same you would find if you did your own online search or used books. The resources are much the same. They pull together different external sources and tell you to work on the projects and ask questions. Then you are left on your own. It would be more honest for them to say it's a place to go and program on your own if you feel the need to work out of a Manhattan office full-time. Other than that, there is no value here. You would learn more on your own, or with a bootcamp that actually teaches.
The instructors are immature. The environment is small and loud. People repeat sessions over and over until they finally "pass", or they leave the school. They will ask for feedback, but instantly dismiss anything that is negative and turn it around on the students. Good place to go if you are too excited about programming and feel the need to have someone put you down and strip the joy out of it. The office is shared with the company's consultants and main staff. If you insist on spending a lot of money for no instruction and a junior high hostile culture, at least go visit first and ask yourself if you can spend everyday in their limited shared facilities.
If you talk about getting work right out of the program you will be laughed at and told that is too ambitious. The only grads I heard of that found work afterwards are the hostile TAs they hired to "teach".
There are so many well-established options out there with truthful published job placement numbers, and strong networks for referrals. Please don't sign up here and get pushed out of the industry. Places like this scare off people from tech that could actually be the next big thing. Find a friendlier and more knowledgeable tribe that will help you launch your career. I found a much better program and the difference is astounding. Look over the good reviews and ask yourself if they are spinning the negatives that have been brought up. They are. Why would a review mention being left on your own as a positive? Because it has been complained about and they are trying to squash the negative reviews and overwhelm this page with 5 stars to get the numbers up. Their defense stance will be their undoing. If they ever listen and make real changes then maybe the school will survive.
And by the way, if you are looking for a program that just lets you show up and code with no instruction, there are some on this site with good (real) reviews. They beat this place in terms of having experts to talk to and having strong alumni networks. If this place tries to sell you on any one feature ask yourself if it's real, and if it's enough of a pro to outweigh all the cons. Visit/question more than one place before you sign up. They ask you to hand over your credit card in person, even after they've already run it remotely. This place wants your $$$$
After all that if you still go and have to leave, you may want to leave a truthful review so no one else gets scammed. That may be enough for them to finally fix the place. Financial tech is a great idea and it's a shame this is the only option in NYC. They need to wake up.
Okay, first off don't believe anything they tell you! I fell for their scams and lies. They lied about everything! They have no connections and cannot get you a job. The stats they have on their pamphlets are complete lies. I was told 98% of their graduates have landed a job with 78k+ salaries. THAT WAS A LIE KAI ! While I attended, ever so often they printed new pamphlets that showed their stats decreasing: salaries decreasing, fewer students landing a job, new courses they've supposedly...
Okay, first off don't believe anything they tell you! I fell for their scams and lies. They lied about everything! They have no connections and cannot get you a job. The stats they have on their pamphlets are complete lies. I was told 98% of their graduates have landed a job with 78k+ salaries. THAT WAS A LIE KAI ! While I attended, ever so often they printed new pamphlets that showed their stats decreasing: salaries decreasing, fewer students landing a job, new courses they've supposedly added. Even when they showed stats decreasing it was still a lie, the actual numbers are far lower than that. I can honestly say less than 10% of all students in 2016 landed a job. Only students who were able to land a job had a computer science background or other technical backgrounds.
Every few months they add some random course they claim they teach just to get more students to attend.
Most employers now do not hire students that have only a bootcamp on their resume. Trust me over 15 of us have spent over 6+ months looking for work now. Some of us are in worse situation than before, but Byte Academy does not give a ****
Rak (The head) just wants your money, I wonder what he does all day in his room on the laptop, not talking to potential partners that can hire the graduate studets, that's for sure. He doesn't even talk to the students, he knows he's cheating them.
Byte hired about 3-4 students to work for them, just so they can "try" to back their really low actual stats.
One student got a 75% refund because they claimed they would teach her MedTech, which obviously was bs because they have no such thing. She left after phase 1.
Another student was a TA for over a year at Byte, they had to kick him out to let new graduate students become TAs while looking for work. He had been looking for a job for over a year, mind you, he was a decent programmer.
BE AWARE ! most of the positive reviews you are reading here are from students asked to write reviews before they graduate, which they based only off of the education they received. And if you are a noob to computer science, the education would seem great only because it would be tough for anyone new.
Also, theres only small cohorts because no one else wants to join this bootcamp, no matter how much of our money they are spending on internet ads.
I beg you, even to the students in phase 1, leave and get your money back, if needed attended a more competitive and honest bootcamp (app academy, GA, ect.)
The FinTech part is just few hours on the second month where they will explain a bit of financial terminology and that's is all! There is nothing of FinTech at all.
The Python/Django program was created by an recent graduate from a Ruby/Rails bootcamp, not anyone with real knowledge or experience in Python nor Django. The is so many things missing or wrong in that curriculum that you are better doing some Python online classes for free on Edx or Udacity.
The job assista...
The FinTech part is just few hours on the second month where they will explain a bit of financial terminology and that's is all! There is nothing of FinTech at all.
The Python/Django program was created by an recent graduate from a Ruby/Rails bootcamp, not anyone with real knowledge or experience in Python nor Django. The is so many things missing or wrong in that curriculum that you are better doing some Python online classes for free on Edx or Udacity.
The job assistance is basically a meeting where they will show you a list of few sites with job listings(that you would get yourself in 1min looking for jobs online) and a resume assistance that will take 2 weeks to review your resume.
I would never recommend this bootcamp to anyone.
Lets start with the curriculum that was made by recent Ruby graduate students that got hired to develop a Python/Django curriculum. It is not just outdated but a lot of times show techniques that is plain wrong. NO ONE USES/KNOW DJANGO IN THERE. The place is a lie! None of the instructors has professional experience with Django so don't expect to learn market standard techniques.
The office is dirty, messy and loud and the place where the "classes" should happen is all the time h...
Lets start with the curriculum that was made by recent Ruby graduate students that got hired to develop a Python/Django curriculum. It is not just outdated but a lot of times show techniques that is plain wrong. NO ONE USES/KNOW DJANGO IN THERE. The place is a lie! None of the instructors has professional experience with Django so don't expect to learn market standard techniques.
The office is dirty, messy and loud and the place where the "classes" should happen is all the time having events. The job assistance is ridiculous. They create "new courses" as the market department please. If they see people are talking about fintech, they just name it fintech, if there is "medtech" in the news they call themselfs "medtech" bootcamp, and data-sci, so on... but the curriculum barely changes. It is just a tricky to catch students looking for a specialization on some trend market. The true, you wont get specialization at all. And you would learn more Python taking MIT courses available at EDX online.
Bottom line: DONT WASTE YOUR TIME NOR MONEY. Go to Python and Django meetups around the city and do some Python courses online at EDX/Udacity that you learn more and will save money.
I graduated here about a year ago and am still in touch with a number of the TAs. Of all the bootcamps out there, do not go here, it is the worst one and getting even worse. You are better off studying from a book and asking your good friend google for help. No one here knows best practices for production code, they were all noob students at this bootcamp at one point if that counts for anything. It's the blind leadi...
I graduated here about a year ago and am still in touch with a number of the TAs. Of all the bootcamps out there, do not go here, it is the worst one and getting even worse. You are better off studying from a book and asking your good friend google for help. No one here knows best practices for production code, they were all noob students at this bootcamp at one point if that counts for anything. It's the blind leading the blind. The actual learning comes from building projects, but guess what? You can do that at home, without spending thousands of dollars! Current job support includes sending your resume to recruiters and that's about it from what I hear. They tout themselves as first in fintech, but they don't have fintech lectures at all. Their medtech track looks great on paper, but doesn't exist in reality. Staff has absolutely zero clue what goes on and could not care less about what students are thinking. Even if a student went to tell them something was wrong, they might as well be talking to a brick wall for all the change that happens after. I have witnessed this first hand with other students who have complained, and apparently students are still loudly complaining about the same things as when I was there. Oh and get this- they've got plans to run bootcamps in Singapore and India. They can barely communicate within the 4 walls of their grimy office space, you think they can manage across the globe? Sh*t started to hit the fan real hard when they sent their lead instructor to Singapore. Wait till it flies when they send their least qualified instructor to India. 50% of their instructors were consumed to work on their student platform. So instead of teaching the current, paying, students, they are preparing an app for future students to use. They won't have any future students at the rate they're going. Oh wait... they don't... Apparently they haven't had a new cohort in 4 months, which is pathetic because their most recent cohort only has 2 students in it to being with. They're supposed to have a new cohort every 2 months if I remember correctly. Don't go here - it is quickly crumbling and about to implode.
Byte academy does a great job at pretending they are a full service academy and having amazing job placement after. The truth is, they hardly have any graduates and have had more people drop out than graduate with jobs. All of the reviews on this site are written by the people who work there or by current teachers. The teachers care more about their side projects than they do their students. They force multiple people to repeat so most cohorts are made up of 3-4 students. When I first star...
Byte academy does a great job at pretending they are a full service academy and having amazing job placement after. The truth is, they hardly have any graduates and have had more people drop out than graduate with jobs. All of the reviews on this site are written by the people who work there or by current teachers. The teachers care more about their side projects than they do their students. They force multiple people to repeat so most cohorts are made up of 3-4 students. When I first started, I was the only one I my group. They do a great job of just handing you work and never reviewing it unless you ask. The curriculum is decent but the amount of work per day is just insane. My favorite quote from the instructor is "I'm sorry I haven't been helping you today but it's kind of your fault". People have to repeat the first 4 weeks twice?? That's not their fault but the instructors. The instructors act like they're above you but behave like children. The whole school needs a serious redo and structure change. Do not waste your money here but go to a proven school like General Assembly or flatiron.
A childhood friend of mine told me that he was planning on attending Byte, in July (2016), and I decided to check the place out. I'll never forget how much Tom, an instructor at the time, and Kai, the head of admissions, didn't try to sell me on enrollment. It's kind of hard to explain, but it was like they were indifferent as to whether or not I ended up going, and that's -- perhaps counterintuitively-- what sold me.
I can't remember exactly when this was (it's mid-January, now)...
A childhood friend of mine told me that he was planning on attending Byte, in July (2016), and I decided to check the place out. I'll never forget how much Tom, an instructor at the time, and Kai, the head of admissions, didn't try to sell me on enrollment. It's kind of hard to explain, but it was like they were indifferent as to whether or not I ended up going, and that's -- perhaps counterintuitively-- what sold me.
I can't remember exactly when this was (it's mid-January, now), but I remember not doing much of the pre-course work. My friend was on top of it, from the start, but I thought that the bootcamp was going to be more or less of a cake-walk because I was developing websites with WordPress / managing my own servers, for a few years before I attended. I ended up paying for it the first month; if there's any advice I have to offer it's: 1) choose Byte and 2) do the pre-work.
I touched on Rak and Cody (my fin. and tech. instructors, respectively) in a review on Byte's website, but I'll mention them, here, too; if I had to choose one phrase to sum both of them up it'd be: "world class." I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I've been through a myriad of educational experiences (attending boarding school in South Korea, conducting research sponsored by General Electric, etc.) and this-- by far and away-- was the best educational experience of my life.
That's not to say that it isn't grueling. The first month can be a dog. I thought that I'd be the big-swinging-dick at Byte when I first signed up because of my experience developing WordPress themes and plugins, but I was leagues behind my peers for the entirety of the first month (en serio: do the pre-work). I think, in retrospect, that I thought that the rest of my cohort would be a bunch of chumps, but, as it turned out, every person in my cohort ended up having a work history that'd make your dick shrivel (investment banker at Credit Suisse, cryptolinguist at the National Security Agency, etc.) and, in my opinion, there's nothing better-- whether you're trying to become a better athlete or a better programmer-- than to be surrounded by your betters.
I wasn't on the struggle bus forever, either. I ended up getting an open-source project off the ground and speaking to a bunch of people about it at DigitalOcean's headquarters. It's still pretty small, but I feel like it's one of happening things at the crossroads of financial technology and we've even had the C.E.O. of Investopedia come by Byte, as part of the project's speaker series, to talk about his experiences in the industry. The project actually shares the name of a WordPress-based project that I demo-ed at DisruptNY's hackathon in 2015, and in a strange way, I feel like something about this anecdote sums up my opinion of Byte; it's something like a bridge: between what was and what could be.
It's a weird thing, to look back, you know? I mean, I read every single review on Course Report, and every other website that I could find, before I took the leap. I was hungry, man. I was fucking rabid. I don't even know what this means, but I wanted "to know."
I took a moment to re-read what I'd written and the album "Is This It" came to mind. I was about to plug my headphones into my laptop and pull it up on Spotify, but I started to think about why the album came to mind in the first place as I reflected on what I meant when I wrote "I wanted 'to know'" I realized that that's exactly what I was asking myself right around the time in my life when my friend told me that he was going to go to Byte. You've really got to look inward before you take the leap. Three months can seem like a long time if you aren't ready for a lot of change, but if you're right head-space: it'll go by in the blink of an eye.
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...don't byte
How much does Byte Academy cost?
Byte Academy costs around $14,950. On the lower end, some Byte Academy courses like Python Foundation cost $100.
What courses does Byte Academy teach?
Byte Academy offers courses like Blockchain (Part-Time), Data Science (Full-Time), FinTech (Part-Time), Full Stack Python Bootcamp (Full-Time) and 2 more.
Where does Byte Academy have campuses?
Byte Academy has in-person campuses in Bangalore and New York City. Byte Academy also has a remote classroom so students can learn online.
Is Byte Academy worth it?
Byte Academy hasn't shared alumni outcomes yet, but one way to determine if a bootcamp is worth it is by reading alumni reviews. 72 Byte Academy alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Byte Academy on Course Report - you should start there!
Is Byte Academy legit?
We let alumni answer that question. 72 Byte Academy alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Byte Academy and rate their overall experience a 3.99 out of 5.
Does Byte Academy offer scholarships or accept the GI Bill?
Right now, it doesn't look like Byte Academy offers scholarships or accepts the GI Bill. We're always adding to the list of schools that do offer Exclusive Course Report Scholarships and a list of the bootcamps that accept the GI Bill.
Can I read Byte Academy reviews?
You can read 72 reviews of Byte Academy on Course Report! Byte Academy alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed Byte Academy and rate their overall experience a 3.99 out of 5.
Is Byte Academy accredited?
Certificates on the blockchain provided.
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