Flatiron School

Hello! I wanted to take some time to review my experience with The Flatiron School. I completed the 8-week Part-time Front End Web Developement program here back in May of 2014. It was a pretty good experience being my first dive into web development.

It was a combination of video projects and in person once a week classes. The videos were somewhat long but they were broken down into seprate projects so it was pretty easy to follow. At times the videos weren't posted as far in advance as I would have liked. But being the first time they did something like this it was understandable.

The classes were spent either catching up on the videos or working on an in-person project. It was great to get some in person coding experience to work through problems with a partner. 

We covered Git/Github HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, responsive design. I wish that we spent more time on the javascript/jQuery part and suggest that they extend the course a couple weeks to include more projects for that. 

Pros: low cost ($750), good venue, knowledgeable instructor

Cons: No job placement assistance for part time students, felt like I needed a next step

Flatiron's iOS program is an intensive 12-week bootcamp program, with 20 students. We were a varied bunch! Students were from England, Catalonia, Canada and the US with experience in: computer science, programming, finance, engineering, teaching, law, politics and entrepreneurship. The majority were in their early-to-mid 20s, with a few folks in their late 20s and early 30s. 

Pre-work: Before you begin, there is 80 hours of pre-work walking you through the fundamentals of Git, Objective-C and iOS. Depending on if you have a programming background, this could be insanely challenging or fairly easy.

"Be nice": When you enter Flatiron, you learn Flatiron's first rule - be nice. This sets the tone for the entire community and course. The founders, instructors and fellow classmates are genuinely good, nice people!

The work: Be expected to work at least 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, if not more. I regularly worked 12+ hours per day. Each day you have a morning lecture, a lab, lunch, afternoon lecture, and more labs. There is more work than anyone can possible manage. It is overwhelming for the first few weeks, but you learn to manage your time and expectations over time.

Here are the best things about the Flatiron experience:

1. Immersion - you live and breath code 24/7. It's an amazing way to learn. As someone who tried evening classes, I found this type of bootcamp experience the only way to learn and learn fast.

2. Instruction - Joe, our iOS instructor, is knowledgeable, helpful and an overall great teacher.  

3. People -- your fellow classmates are a smart bunch. And you will learn a ton from them! learned more from my peers than from classroom instruction, purely because I spent most of my day doing labs with peers! As an added bonus, your classmates become your friends and, who knows, maybe even colleagues or co-founders in the future.

TL:DR: The Flatirion school is intense, but its the best way to learn. Instructors are great. The community is a supportive and engaging one. It's a fantastic environment to grow and learn, as a developer and as a person. I'd highly recommend it.

 

Bootcamp is challenging and very well-structured. Languages and frameworks highly relevant. A lot of hands-on practice with labs, and projects allowed a ton of creative freedom as to topic and structure, etc. My instructor was extremely good and I felt I had total support. Job search was challenging just because of market conditions, but that is independent of the bootcamp experience. Flatiron teaches you how to think and solve problems and really equips you with the relevant tools to be a successful software engineer.

I recently graduated from the in-person NYC program, and can say that my educational experience was pretty much everything I hoped for. I was glad that I chose an in-person program, as working with others to solve problems, and learning how to communicate effectively about technical subjects were big takeaways. The current tech stack of JavaScript/React for frontend and Python/Flask for backend seems aligned with what the market is hiring for. I wasn't sure about learning a second language for backend (Python), but the experience really helped cement the transferable basics of coding and gave me the confidence that I can pick up new languages as necessary.

The NYC campus is larger than I expected, with plenty of workspace, monitors, and free coffee :) The program is divided into five 3-week units, the first two on JavaScript and React, and the second two on Python and working with databases and web services / APIs. Each three-week section wraps up with a project (generally in small groups, though this varies by instructor), and the final three weeks is a self-directed solo capstone project, with the instructor to guide you. The day involves about an hour and a half of lecture, followed by time to work on labs and projects by yourself / with your peers. This surprised me at first--I thought it would be a lot more of the instructor staring over my shoulder--but ultimately being self-directed, learning how to read documentation and how to ask for help are really the key skills of software development. There was pretty much always an instructor available to help us solve problems when we were stuck, and again, you can always work with your peers to get assistance. But you have to ask for help!

Overall, the program is not easy! While the instructors break down concepts and the curriculum is very thorough for even a beginner, it is A LOT to learn in 15 weeks. That's the nature of an intensive bootcamp. For the record, I was working on-campus 7-8 hours a day and then generally putting in 1-2 hours of study in the evening, and it still felt like drinking from a firehose at time. I liken it to learning basketball: anyone can pick up the basics, but can you achieve a high enough level to play competitively? That is dependent on your motivation and to some degree your natural aptitude. If anything, by the time I graduated I realized I had so much more to learn, but I felt comfortable about HOW to go about learning all those other skills to make me competitive.

And now, the big caveat: the market in 2024 for junior software developers is...rough. The days of completing a bootcamp and immediately being offered a high-paying job are gone, and its uncertain when or if they will return. The career assistance Flatiron provides is solid: how to make your resume show you in the best light, how to use LinkedIn to stay visible, how to network. The career coaches really invest time in you. But Flatiron does not have a secret pipeline of jobs that are not available to the thousands of other bootcamp grads and out-of-work mid-level engineers. At the end of the day, you will be directed into this tough market. Is the cost of tuition worth it, when there are very good learning resources available for free online? For me, the in-person instruction and accountability of an in-person program and a peer group motivated me to choose Flatiron. But a bootcamp certificate is just the start of your career transition or upgrade. There are currently very few internship opportunities for non-CS majors or people who already have a four-year degree. A very possible outcome of completing this program will be accepting a tech-adjacent role (sales, customer support) or working on your own projects, unpaid, for many months after graduation until you build up the portfolio and connections to land your first role. Best of luck out there!

So where do I start.

I am a former science major who was looking for a career change after realizing that lab work was no longer the road I wanted to travel and decided to leave my comfy position that I had for over 4 years to pursue something that I always had a strong interest in. It only took about a week for that dream to quickly die and realize that I made a dumb mistake and wish I would have though about my decision more carefully. Needless to say, I feel that I closed a chapter in my life and still want to use my degree to pursue something closely related to my original major.

I was extremely excited to start the Flatiron School Full time Online program in September 2023. The best people at the company are those in admissions because they do a really good job at selling you something that turns out to be completely the opposite. When I enrolled for the class, it was underneath the guise that we would be doing a full time lecture with coding projects along the way. However, that turned out to not be the case at all and the only "lecture" that we received was a 1 hour code along in the afternoon. The only other time you have with your instructors is to answer questions from the self-guided online material if you didn't understand anything. I have no idea how you can market this class as a full time course when you're literally only teaching for one hour of the day. The reason why people are paying almost $18k (yes, it's that much) is so they can be lead by a teacher and so that knowledge gets passed down. If I wanted to grind material on slides, I would've just used freecodecamp or literally any alternative that doesn't cost nearly as much and actually gives you advice on how to write the code. The fact that something that is free can give you more advice that a program that cost almost one year of school is pretty sad. 

Speaking about instructors, the instructor himself was laughable at best. He literally did not have any teaching background prior to Flatiron School, and it was very apparent because even though he knew the material himself, he did not do a great job explaining and going into great detail about the subject matter. As a matter of fact, he was a previous student through the school, which makes me  wonder if they literally just hire instructors from their student pool and not consider anyone who has a full CS background. I feel that most people that join this course are those who have no idea how to do code to begin with, and in order to keep you students engaged you really need to go the extra mile to help those that are struggling. Even after completing the pre-course material, I was still completely lost in the lectures because he would just plow through. I learned more from other students with more hands on experience than I did from the instructor, which really says something about the people that they choose to teach this course.

The only thing positive I can say about the course is that there were legitimately a lot of good people who made a discord group for our cohort and had chatrooms to help those in need. They were very knowledgeable about the topic and honestly, I wish the best for them. They made the experience a lot better and hope they land a good position in the future, because they deserved it. The fact that other cohorts were more instructive than the "instructor" was my red flag, and I knew that it was time to get my money back and go look for a new position.

So, to sum it up
- Full-Time online is not really "full time"
- Lackluster material which you can find online for free
- Bad instructors (one of them literally did not even start the week I was there)
- Admissions will lure you in for a class you thought was completely different in reality
- Expensive! 
- Other cohorts will probably be better teachers than your own instructor

Seriously, do your research. Sure there may be a lot of good reviews but there are also plenty of bad ones as well. I wouldn't be shocked if most of the reviews that are overly positive are those still relying on thee school to find a good placement or alumni that got hired by the school. Do yourselves a favor and avoid the same mistake I made.

Instructors are phenomenal.  They are approachable and are very helpful with projects.  There are also people available to help with programming exercises after hours.  The languages that they teach are mostly consistent with what the industry requests but a little behind although I am glad they are teaching Python.  They may want to consider teaching Java, although it is a very high level and intensive language.  The career services and career coaching are fantastic and I got a job offer in just under 5 months considering that the tech market is unprecedentedly slow.

I started FlatIrons Full-time Online course but decided to withdraw after the first week due to lack of technical assistance being offered to our cohort. We had about 32 students and only 1 instructor. As well, they only offer one hour of lecture a day. However, during the lecture you don't actually go over any concepts or material, instead you just watch your instructor do a quick code along over one topic for the day. As well, the entire curriculum for our first phase was extremely unorganized with zero direction on what we should be learning each day. When our entire cohort complained to the instructor and to our student advisors the school sent an email to our entire cohort essentially telling us "to get over it" and that we should get a second instructor available to us our second week. If I knew I would be essentially teaching myself and doing it all on my own I would not have signed up for the program or agreed to pay their tuition which is higher than a lot of the other bootcamps I looked into. When I requested to change to a later cohort in order to give myself some more prep time to get the fundamentals down since we were going to have to teach ourselves, the school informed me I would have to completely withdraw from my current cohort and pay for the current tuition I owed then restart the application process all over including the 2 weeks of prep-work I had already completed and then pay full tuition for the next cohort. We had about 10 students drop from our cohort due to the school's lack of care for their student's needs or frustrations. FlatIron is definitely more centered on money and not what's best for the students that are paying a lot of money to learn. I will say they did start out strong in the career prep and had us already doing career workshops the first week of class. I know several other people who have completed bootcamps (GA, Code Platoon, Full Stack) and when I went to them to discuss my experience with FlatIron, they all told me their bootcamps actually provided lecture over material and had several TA's available for help. This is what made my final decision to lose money with FlatIron and go to a different bootcamp. 

Flatiron School is one of the few boot camps that offers an in-person program, and I delayed my entrance to the school so that I'd be able to attend on their Denver campus. I was pretty excited for this program, but when I and my fellow students showed up, we were surprised to find out that the lectures were going to be administered via Zoom. This was a pretty big disappointment to all of us, since we had expected in-person lectures. I have heard that they are now lecturing in person, which makes me feel gipped, to say the least.

Beyond the Zoom lectures, the curriculum was really thorough. But in the 6 months since the class, I've learned things that should have been taught in the first few weeks, but weren't. Such as the difference between development and production environments, which is crucial to the process of deploying a website.

My cohort was also one of the last to learn Ruby on Rails as the backend technology - they've now switched to Python and Flask, which I was able to snag the learning materials for upon graduation. Ruby is a bit of a niche technology at this point, so it's a bit annoying to have spent 6 weeks learning it instead of something more in-demand.

I loved my cohort and the technical coaches were pretty good. But, honestly this school isn't that equipped to make people job ready in the 2023 job market. Their jobs report on their website is called the "2022 Jobs Report", but it was merely released in 2022 and only includes numbers from the entire year of 2021. This is a huge red flag, and extremely misleading at 7+ months into 2023. So, I recommend requesting the most current jobs numbers from them if you're applying - they will be significantly worse than those of 2021. I have talked to fellow grads applying to 400+ jobs with single-digit interviews.

I don't regret doing the program because I am not sure I would have learned this amount of these skills on my own by now, and I don't recommend avoiding Flatiron entirely. But, just know what you're getting yourself into before committing almost $20k to paying for something that might be worth closer to $10k. Also, the student loan options start huge payments about 4 months after graduation, so be prepared for that as well. You should be able to request a 3-month interest-only grace period.

I graduated from Flatiron School Feb of 2022. For 2 years I took my time delving into Full Stack development within Flatiron’s Online Part Time Software Engineering program. It still wasn’t enough. Peer programming should have been mandatory. Data structures and algorithms should have been mandator. I wasn’t communicated the importance of these subjects throughout my schooling and it’s frustrating. No wonder the Ed coaches told me not to worry about it until after graduating. More people would have flunked out if said topics were mandatory. Now I am currently left tutor-less and further in student loan debt. I am possibly apt enough to work at Revature starting with a low salary gig and tutoring assistance. Needless to say, I am skeptical about a low salary Indian company with a 30,000 employment contract break. This isn’t what I signed up for. Anyone thinking of joining Flatiron School or any other coding bootcamp, it’s not enough to even be remotely considered for 60,000 + jobs nowadays. You’re better off perusing an associates degree at a community college.

I was given misinformation over the phone about the flex program which led me to apply for the full-time live session. Afterward, I was corrected and told the course takes a maximum of 40 weeks. I was then emailed by a separate department that stated you have 60 weeks to complete flex. It's clear that the departments don't fully understand their own program and will give whatever information they "think" is correct, which led me to a decision that was not good for me. They are hard to get a hold of, and student support is almost non-existent. The curriculum often repeats itself and is not very hands-on. Often you read about a concept and then complete a lab later on, which is helpful but usually looks for a "specific answer", meaning your answer can be correct but still fail if it's not exactly what it's looking for. Unfortunately, my time at FlatIron was not good, so I cannot recommend it.

This specifically pertains to the Data Science BootCamp. I cannot speak about the other fields, though I imagine cybersecurity would be in a similar boat, and software dev and UI dev would be better as it is more acceptable to enter into those fields without a degree.

I entered into the Data Science Online bootcamp ($17500) with 3 previous years of programming experience and the following expectations that were not met:

1. Flatiron curriculum was taught by experts in the field and would equip me with the skills needed to be an asset in a professional role.
2. Flatiron makes finding a job easier than if you did it on your own
     2A - they have hiring connections / a network of companies that respect their degree
     2B - they have an expert career coaching program to make finding a job easier
3. Employers respect the BootCamp certificate to be somewhat similar to receiving a Master's degree.

Here is the Reality:
1. at least for the online course, the entire curriculum is free and open source on Git Hub as the learn.co curriculum. Most of the lessons had not been updated since early 2021, which is not only an issue because tech is rapidly changing, but also many of the functions used were deprecated or in the process of being deprecated, links were broken or had moved, and overall 1/5 lessons on average would not run all the way through. Lectures happened to rarely live so it was very unlikely you would be able to catch on on a flex schedule, but from watching the recorded sessions, you weren't missing much. The lectures were just going through the learn.co assignments. You are connected with a personal coach which may meet with once a week, but it is very hit or miss who you will be assigned to, and some are much better than others. I was assigned Joe Commex, who was fired by the company for an undisclosed reason halfway through and I was transferred to Morgan Jones. Joe was ok, but not super knowledgeable of Data Science, more of Python-Dev. Morgan Jones (Yeah I am naming and shaming) was utterly terrible. He knew nothing of the subject matter, and would often get tripped up on even the simplest of DS questions. He showed us one of his projects that had glaring errors in the NN, and when I questioned them, he got defensive and was rude to me. Also, you need to schedule a time to review each project you complete, and there are often no times available for at least a week ahead of time and you are not allowed to work ahead until a project is graded. so you often find yourself in a week of limbo where your time is wasted.

2A Flatiron has NO connections other than the FDM group. The FDM Group is a seemingly good company that pays for you to obtain training in a particular IT field and then guarantees you a position with an employer. They require a college degree usually, but let you wave that req if you are a Flatiron alum. They do not look for previous coding experience tho, so if you already have e degree, just apply to them and skip Flatiron. They have several other companies like this, such as TheDataSchool and Revature, and they have even said that graduating from Flatiron does not make you more attractive and that they expect you not to have prior experience. They have literally 0 connections with any real companies.

2B Although they do indeed provide you with a career coaching program, and my mentor is very nice and helpful, it does not provide any information you could not find online or better yet ChatGPT. Thus, My complaint is that it simply does not justify the $17,500 I spent on the program, given that it is the only helpful thing, and it is not that helpful.

3. This is the biggest one, for data science at least, NO ONE CARES that you went to a BootCamp. Data Science is a complex field and most hiring managers expect either a master's or PhD to be qualified. Even if you received a real BS in Computer science, you would not be considered very competitive for true DS roles. Instead, you would need to settle for much lower paying and less interesting Data analyst roles, or maybe get lucky finding a startup that doesn't have a lot of options and can't pay you well or offer any benefits.

TLDR
The Key takeaway is that Flatiron is for all intents and purposes not worth your time and money and that you would be better off either applying to a company like FDM or the Data School, or learning these things yourself on youtube or with the help of an LLM like ChatGPT, making a portfolio of simple projects on GitHub, and applying broadly along the way

I went to Flatirons with the intent of breaking into tech immediately after leaving the teaching field. I didn't quite achieve that timeline, but within 1 year of leaving teaching I completed the bootcamp (full time, online for 15 wks) and a 6 month job search. I have just received an offer and am excited to be in the content area that aligns with my previous career. The bootcamp was very difficult and rigorous as I knew almost nothing going into it outside of the prep work. I definitely recommend doing it full time, and making sure you make connections and friends within your cohort. If you are a hard worker, and enjoy working through difficult problems/working with others this will be great for you! I feel like I particularly excelled because I know how to target areas of learning for improvement, was always making connections, and was constantly learning throughout the bootcamp and after. They teach you really well how to find those resources. 

The slack/discord channels were a great way to make friends and work with others to learn the content together. I heard other cohorts did not like their teachers/lead but I personally loved mine. My cohort started at 15 people and ended with 8 I believe, so it was nice to be in a small cohort. The code challenges were very stressful and challenging, but if you are willing to attend extra meetings and work on your own it is easy to be successful and pass. Career services during the program were not very professional or organized but after the program when you are actually in the job search they were great. I felt well prepared as I job searched and knew that the circumstances of the economy where mostly my problem at the start of my search.