edit 1: suggestions for other better bootcamps are also acceptable. App Academy has been suggested, if anyone knows anything about their admissions or on-campus program, lmk (I am ineligible for their online options, being a resident of NY state)
so in light of the shape rotator debates, what’s the scuttlebut on Bloomtech (formerly Lambdaschool) these days?
I’m already familiar with articles like “Austen Allred is Consistently Deceptive” and I’m pretty used to educational institutions just lying about their outcomes, but those outcomes still seem way better than like, me going back to regular college, and frankly he is still way above any college administrator I’ve ever encountered in terms of integrity.
reviews by former students are, like everything, split illegibly between successes that may have done fine anyway and failures that may have failed anyway and not much to tell me which I’m more like.
reasons I’m considering this:
- I took one of their free sample courses a while back when they were still offered, and felt like I got a lot out of it (flubbed the interview to get in at the time)
- community college courses are about what’s available to me locally, they are not cheap, in money but especially in time, I have found them painfully sluggish, every thing that was one day in that lambda sample course is an entire week in these CC classes. It makes it hard to focus, and looking at a timeline of multiple years to marketable skills is pretty demoralizing! (and I am terrible at balancing work/school. I have built enough runway for ~1 year if I dedicate myself to just this, but if the timeline is longer, I’ll have to combine it with work, and my chance of failure skyrockets)
- I have found trying to teach myself with online resources incredibly frustrating, and while I have made progress, I frequently stall out when I finish one online class thing and have to decide what’s next, in a “if I knew what I should be looking up I wouldn’t need to look it up” way. decision paralysis etc. my progress has been very stop-and-start, and while I may still get there eventually I see it taking a long time. a very explicit path forward, time commitment, and clear peer group may be by themselves worth the price of admission given the specific things I’m struggling with.
- even the bottom bar of what BT considers “success” (a goddamn regular day job with a 401k n shit paying $50,000) would improve my life immeasurably. I don’t really care much about how my outcomes compare to other software people, (which is the main concern I see from people in software who got there by traditional schooling). i care about how they might compare to my situation now, which is absolute shit. econony bad here.
