Now that tech hiring has slowed, it may be true that its moment has passed. But that doesn’t excuse many of the misleading points in this review. “Hack Reactor

Now that tech hiring has slowed, it may be true that its moment has passed. But that doesn’t excuse many of the misleading points in this review. “Hack Reactor was created in late 2012 by DevBootcamp grads.” This makes them sound like recent bootcamp grads. Shawn Drost studied CS at USC and was a technical team lead at OKCupid. Marcus Philips was an engineer at Twitter. It describes (unfairly) the skeleton of the average day as if that’s all there is. There are frequently other lectures and guest speakers, and daily presentations and other discussions. There are also resources, assignments, and support before you even start the program, and support after. “The students assigned to help during the sprints have graduated just before you started… Unfortunately they are not experts.” Their role is not to “give” anybody answers, but to get you unstuck. If you’re truly hopelessly stuck on something, then there are experts who step in. “The third month you’ll work on your thesis project with a team chosen for you.” You have a lot of input over who you work with, and they accommodate switches when possible. “The second half is cruise control.” That’s like saying a thesis semester is cruise control. You meet daily with an expert who functions as a PM. It was very comparable to real world programming. The criticisms of the condensed nature of the program miss the point. They’re designed to make you autonomous and accustomed to agile practices, and not be someone who becomes easily lost with unfamiliar problems. “Another observation, most people who get in, are already qualified people, with top university degrees.” This was certainly not true of the cohorts I saw or the people I interviewed when I did admissions for them. Roughly half had CS backgrounds, and the rest were changing careers. A few candidates I interviewed attended previous bootcamps, and I saw no improvement over regular candidates. Most did not get in. With one exception, the alumni I know of (graduating 3-9 months ago) ended up in good jobs in line with their outcomes statistics. I don’t know if Hack Reactor is still worth it in today’s market, but painting the program as some kind of scam or bait-and-switch is not the sentiment of anyone I know, and this article makes a lot of dishonest points to get there.