Coding Dojo

My cohort at Coding Dojo Silicon Valley began towards the end to September 2015 and concluded on the first week of January 2016. I accepted a full-time offer as a Web Developer at a digital agency on February 20th, 2016. I was very hesitant about joining a bootcamp, I knew I wanted to enroll in one eventually, but prolonged the process for a very long time because I wanted to feel perfectly prepared for this expensive decision. After completing the bootcamp, I can say with complete confidence and honesty that enrolling in Coding Dojo was one of the best decisions I have ever made in my entire life. I was hesitant, and when I talked to people about wanting to embark on this journey their eyes would often times pop out of their skulls when I told them how much the 14 week program would cost. However, I am so glad that I took the leap and am forever grateful for the challenging and fulfilling environment that Coding Dojo offered.

  I cannot compare my experience to other bootcamps, and I can't compare my experience to other Coding Dojo locations, but I can give you insights into my personal experience at Coding Dojo Silicon Valley. One thing that routinely stood out to me was that the instructors truly care about you, and your success. If you are willing to put in the work, your instructors, TA's and fellow students are there to catch you when you fall. I was often impressed with the patience and enthusiasm of my instructors. No question is stupid and no question was out of the scope of conversation. Want to discuss a framework that isn't in the curriculum? No problem, find an instructor and ask away.   I came into the bootcamp with a good amount of experience with HTML, CSS and a tiny bit of Javascript. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to be perfectly prepared before entering the bootcamp. I wanted to be at least have a surface level familiarity with most of the technologies that I would be using throughout the bootcamp. I think there is a fine line to walk here. I fully believe that you will get more out of any bootcamp if you have some experience with web development or programming. In my cohort, people with experience excelled, and those with zero experience had a tougher time. However, I would not prolong the application process for too long. Give yourself 2-3 months to nail down the basics and then dive into the bootcamp. You will learn more in that environment than you ever thought possible.   Put simply, Coding Dojo Silicon Valley provided a really fun and positive working environment. They allowed me to come in and work on stuff before my cohort even started. And, I continued to go there every day after my cohort ended, so I could work on projects and my job search. To this day, almost a year later, I still stop by to say hello and am greeted by the friendly instructors.

I recenty completed the online Coding Dojo bootcamp. I have some experience coding at home just from what I've learned myself (books, videos etc) so I thought I would learn faster through the Coding Dojo bootcamp, I was wrong!

Coding Dojo works from a platform all students follow. An HTML section, a CSS section and so on. These are topped up with lectures and office hours through the week. The thing with Coding Dojo is if you are still working on an assignment after the lecture the instructor simply moves onto the the next assignment, leaving you with work pilling up. 

We were told from the outset we would be pair programing at certain times through the course, I thought this would be great for 'real world' experience, this never happened, not even once.

The way the assignments are explained can be a bit vague, for example a Node.js assignment might say something like "Create something like the following wireframe....", if you complete the assignment something like it the instructors will tell you you've done it wrong as it's not exactly like the wireframe. This was annoying to say the least. 

Also trying to get help from an instructor can be like getting blood from a stone! The usual response is something along the lines of, '...keep trying and get back to me later', getting back to them later didn't yield any more help as it was usually another 'you're annoying me' type response. 

There were also obvious errors in some of the video tutorials. In one section (the SQL section I believe) videos just ended half way through an explanation so you didn't fully understand what or why we were doing a certain thing. Video quality also varied from section to section. At times it was great, at other times it was almost a joke it was so bad!

There were other things that made the course overall dissapointing, but one of them, maybe the least important to some was the quality of the text in assignments and reading pages. There were so many grammatical and spelling errors it was irritating, maybe I'm being too picky at this but I just couldn't get over how bad some sections were. 

I would not recomend Coding Dojo to anyone, there are far better bootcamps out there, just keep looking.

Just not too long ago, it all started with the one word, "trust." But the trust that was showed back to me was outrageous. "No asshoe type of attitude allowed", but instructors were constantly late. Absent without at least telling excuses, and ahead of time. Or, if they are around, they wouldn't even be in the room they are in charge of anyways. I have to e-mail or Slack them online when they are inside the same building, doing what? I really wonder too. Then, everytime I get hands on help at last, I love how they would later go perform some conversations about how dependent people would be so unsuccessful on and on. "Nobody gets help in a real job, they all do their own research". I really wonder which job doesn't train employees and make them work without teamwork or help. Oh, I thought those instructors got their trainings before they started doing their job, but seems like they did not, never did and never will. From beginning to end, I couldn't rely on the platform, obvious enough why I ask for help... The horrible and bad quality videos, and none sense little kids instructions was so true, I've long heard about how bad that was. But when I asked the recruiter I was told it already improved, it is error-free and so self sufficient and so on. I trusted that they have a good ceo and reputation, maybe some asshoes were just picking on them. By the time I know the truth, I already wasted so much committment, time and finances. They got all the upper hand, students like us carry all the risks and they ain't got nothing to lose. They misused their power. I trusted they wanted the best for us and greatly understand our risks, nut turns out the total opposite. I told an instructor some changes must be made, if not now then do it in the future, but he likes ending our conversations like a good talk where he appreciated it, the next minute, went talkings behind me and other people back. Very silly, it was just about how we won't buy, and never will accept, and forever refuse their ingenious statement: "go-learn-how-to-learn-so-you-can-learn-and-will-learn" I looked at him and almost wanted to report him. But we are nothing but a money machine to all of them. If free online resources are good enough I wouldn't need a bootcamp, nobody would! 

In conclusion they are killing more than one bird in one shot. Too many students and instructors need free time so some students need to drop out already please. There are too many overly competitive students, and it's too hard to teach them, it's a good excuse to blame the dumb students for making them fall behind because everyone got to be on the same page together. We learned from the prior class that there was nothing more special than apps, it is a very spendy program but no, sorry kiddo there won't be no robots involved. Even the small networking between students got to be tarnished. The more students graduated the more responsibilities they have to take care of. This startup, not open up to different cultures, their style is to turn people against each other. There were lots of asshoes in the room, I can never recommend this bootcamp unless you are just as noxious, or... plans to be. Please always keep your moral codes above everything and do not mix yourself with this deadly and vicious trap.

If you are interested in learning how to code this is not the place for you. Although they claim anyone can learn, it is quickly shown that is not the case. Not only you are constantly referred to Google every time you have a question, but they also teach about 2 lines of code per language which leaves you worst than what you started with. Leaving those that have no experience struggling and frustrated. I personally have attended Coding Dojo and I have to say 98% of what I've learned, I've learned from codeacademy.com, w3schools.com, udacity.com (great instructors here and a fraction of the cost), of course YouTube, and lots of Google. Again NOT worth the $10K to $13K that it cost to ultimately have to learn everything on your own anyways. So I would recommend you use the sites I mentioned above in which you will find great instructors that will guide you 100% more than the instructors that they have at Coding Dojo, which are all previous graduates (sad to say none of them have actual real life experience as programmers). Lastly the platform they use to give a basic explanation about each stack it is by far very mideocre level, meaning my 10 year old nephew could have done it. Not to mention there are many sections that the information was copied and pasted from other tech websites, so again why are they charging so much? Not sure. I wish Coding Dojo would have been more honest during their orientation night saving many of us thousands of dollars, but of course you are just a dollar sign to them. Good Luck and I hope this saves someone from losing money.

 

Attende LA remote and on site. While the Dojo has a solid curriculum that can indeed make one job ready, your performance and mastery of the content is directly correlated with the quality of your teacher. We had a great instructor for the first stack (PHP/LAMp) but the teachers were rotated and were so so for Javasceipt and iOS. In fact a lot of students ended up dropping out due to almost 0 help or benefit from under-qualified instructors. This was quite a disappointment as many of the former students turned instructors cannot help with anything outside the scope of the coding dojo platform. In fact some can't even help with things outside of the day's/weeks work because they still haven't reviewed other content. I don't want to make it sound too negative as I did learn a lot. I just wonder how much more I would've absorbed and mastered had I been able to learn under the same instructor  for all the stacks. Also LAMP stack is becoming very useless in the job market. Even the instructors will admit it's not the stack that will help you get a job. Python would've been far more useful than PHP. 

On a more positive note, they are becoming more flexible with scholarships and tuition and are much more affordable than other bootcamps. And they do not discriminate based on experience. Everyone is welcome. All in all I'd give the dojo a 6/10. With the right instructors it can be the best bootcamps out there.

Coding Dojo is basically a large scale investment for a bootcamp that will get you virtually no where. I often look at classmates from linkedin and most of them are still unemployed.

Their method of training is cheap and wrong. You essentially spend most of your day watching prepared lectures and doing assignments. you can do all of this for around 10 bucks a course on udemys website. More over their career services is essentially useless and hence they constantly change team members all the time. 

 

Your best bet is getting an actual degree or going to a real bootcamp