Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate
Full disclosure: I am part of the instruction team at Hack Reactor. This amazing team that I work with are completely committed to our students, their experience and their success. I have colleagues who almost don&#x27;t go home, who work weekends, obsess over how to help our students succeed. We lose sleep. We worry. Truth is, I find the tone of this article dismaying knowing what these remarkable people do for our students and knowing how successful most of those students go on to be.<p>Shawn responds with some details about recent changes we had to make to address, among other things, applicants figuring out how to game our admissions. For a few cycles there were notably more students than usual who struggled with the program, not getting out of it what other students do and who subsequently struggled in the job search. That placed a huge demand on instructional resources which has impact throughout the student body.<p>Whether those students got in by deliberate exploitation of vulnerabilities in our process (some did) or earnestly researching what HR wants and studying &quot;to the exam&quot; is immaterial -- they entered unprepared for the program.  Regardless, they received the same world-class curriculum as our phenomenally successful students. I don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s coincidental that the most vindictive account of a student&#x27;s experience at Hack Reactor came hot on the heels of that challenging period in our history.<p>I do want to address a few assertions that were made that suggest a deliberate attempt to mislead readers. The Hackers In Residence are not Instructors at Hack Reactor. They aren&#x27;t represented as such.  HIR&#x27;s are not intended to be experts in technology nor to provide answers to all possible questions the current students provide. Any instruction they provide is either ad-hoc coaching, whiteboarding collaboration, in the form of brown bag talks they offer or by presenting toy problem solutions in the morning.<p>What they are is a group of very gifted and empathetic engineers who are sharing their talents with other students, coaching them through problem solving, providing first line Help Desk support, pitching in on other efforts at the school while they continue their own studies beyond the scope of our curriculum. They are among our brightest students who choose not to go immediately into the job market where they can command impressive salaries but rather stay to learn and study more and to support other students.  They&#x27;re fabulous, talented people.<p>More specifically, HIR&#x27;s are recent grads who understand the experience of the current students and who know from direct recent experience the kinds of support they found most helpful or most hoped for and seek to provide that support to students.  Questions that are beyond the scope of their understanding are escalated to engineers (like me) on the Instruction Team.  They are an additional set of eyes and ears that allow me to even more insight into the experience of my current students than I can gain on my own.<p>As to the lectures and the difference between the first half and the second half of the program. The curriculum is very specifically designed to develop autonomous engineers. It is WHY our grads are successful. They don&#x27;t excel in the workplace IN SPITE OF that structure. We guide them more early in the program where they need more support and very consciously, over time, reduce the hand-holding in favor of their own discovery and collaborating with classmates to learn. Mentors and Lecturers continue to provide support and instruction as needed during the latter half of the program.<p>With respect to languages. Many schools teach more than one language. Not many schools prepare engineers as well as we do. Hack Reactor is not a Javascript school.  We use Javascript as a context to teach software engineering. Our students often tackle new languages on their own in the second half because they are well-prepared and appropriately autonomous.  We&#x27;ve had students and student teams use Swift, Python, Ruby on Rails, Rust, Processing, dabble in IoT, ... And HIRs tackle Scala, Haskell, and more. That&#x27;s not in spite of the program, that&#x27;s because of the program..<p>I understand that a critical reader will have to take my response with a grain of salt but I think it&#x27;s reasonable to ask readers of the Medium article to do their own research and contact alums for direct feedback before drawing conclusions.