Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate
(I&#x27;m a cofounder at Hack Reactor.)<p>It&#x27;s always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program.  I hate reading posts like this and I&#x27;d love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time.  (Email is in profile!)<p>Here&#x27;s a bit of inside baseball:<p>This post is representative of a troubled period at our school.  We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less supportive of the school.  We care and we&#x27;ve made big moves to fix it.  1) Candidates were gaming the admissions process -&gt; we rewrote it.  2) Students only had access to 2014 data and didn&#x27;t know how it was calculated -&gt; we published our 2015 data (and some stuff on 2016) and we published the world&#x27;s first guide to &quot;how to publish employment statistics that aren&#x27;t bullshit&quot;, and we ramped up messaging to students &quot;expect that your job search might be harder&quot;.[A]  3) Students stopped knowing who we were and stopped feeling like they could trust us -&gt; we bought back two leaders to focus full-time on the campus (vs working at the umbrella organization).  Lots of smaller changes as well.<p>Even during this difficult period, students are generally having a great experience and getting an ROI that we are proud of.  Our most recent NPS measurements have all been above 80, which is bonkers.  (This means that nearly everyone is a 9 or a 10 on a 1-10 scale of &quot;how likely are you to recommend HR to a friend?&quot;)<p>There are a lot of details in this post that I don&#x27;t disagree with.  Eg &quot;Ironically the number of lectures drops dramatically after the first week.&quot;  This is true and we tell students about it during w1.  It&#x27;s the correct design decision.  Etc.  For other students, those same details have added up to a different gestalt.  We care and we try to fix things when things aren&#x27;t adding up.  The diagnosis is not linear (you can&#x27;t just fix the problems that alums cite) but we listen and try to sort out the right decisions.<p>I empathize with a lot of things going on and I want recent alums to know we care.  I also think it&#x27;s bonkers that our 98% placement rate in 2015 (94% in 3 months, ~85%ish in 3 months for one recent cohort) is being cited like it&#x27;s weak sauce.  That&#x27;s a towering accomplishment of staggering magnitude in my books, and we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise and we employ lots of staff to make that happen.<p>&lt;3,
Shawn<p>[A]
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