Software Engineering Certificate (Full-Time)

First thing I want to say is that enrolling in the Software Engineering Immersive program at Flatiron was the best decision I had made in some time. 

I found the course to be challenging and I expected as much; but I am not saying that the course being challenging is an aspect to deter anyone from taking it. Parallel to the difficulty of the course, there was my enjoyment of understanding a topic, which is mostly due to the amazing help I received from my instructor and coaches.

Instructors, coaches, and staff

I value a lot the initial efforts made by the school during the first week in order to break the ice betwen the members of the class, both for students, instructors, and coaches. I feel that it did have an impact on starting the social interaction more smoothly, and creating a friendlier environment.

The school hosts a great place of learning for people of all degrees of familiarity with coding. I was able to feel that I could make mistakes in front of anyone and ask about it and get positive feedback.

Curriculum

While I learned more code than I could have imagined, not everything can be covered, that would be impossible. Considering that each module is three weeks long, I would argue that what students can do at the end of each mod is impressive; it does highlight how well curated and presented the topics are. Needless to say that there has to be some will on the students part.

Job Assisstance 

Both my career coach, and the career prep track were extremely helpful. The career track has important information on how address interviewers, good interview practices, good habits to keep after graduation among other things.

My coach was great in guiding me with a mock interview and preparing possible responses to some common questions. Also feedback on body language, speech speed, diction  and articulation of ideas. Additionally, she advised me on useful mindsets to have when interviewing and overall job searching.

Overall Experience

I am glad that I pushed myself to to go through the course. I am grateful to everyone who I met and contributed to that journey. Even though I had to repeat a mod; I still found the same support to continue. Hopefully, what I just said made some sense, and helps someone to make a clear decision.

Flatiron School totally changed my life in a lot of ways, I not only gained the tangible coding skills to be a developer, but Flatiron achieved their goal of getting me to a confidence and skill-level in my coding where I can go off any learn any language, framework and software system via research and practice. To me that is the biggest technical gift that I walked away with.

In addition, I would not have been able to complete the course if it were not for the incredible coaches, lead instructors and fellow cohortees that all made up the Flatiron community day-to-day. 

Flatiron's curriculum not only gets you to a level of coding and understanding where you can build a beautiful, full-stack, ReactJS-RoR site, but they teach you the fundamental parts of programming that allow you to be adaptable outside of JavaScript and Ruby. 

The program is definitely intense in terms of the volume of work that you are expected to complete, but within the first module, most students got comfortable with understanding how they learned the material best and could adjust their schedules accordingly. 

As a new coder, it is very easy to explore the internet and find people who are extremely passionate about certain ways to go about learning how to code, what's most important. Examples like "Python HAS to be your first language in 2020", which are completely BS, but not obviously so if you are a new developer.

Flatiron surrounds you with professional software engineers throughout the program who not only reassure you that statements like the one above are non-sense. But they also help you understand being a good person and teammate is when it comes to coding. No company nor any development team wants to work with people who are selfish about their coding knowledge, aren't team players, or are just jerks in general. But you can certainly find a lot of those people spouting their "wisdom" online. 

There's something to be said for a former senior software engineer looking at your cohort dead in the eye and saying "You are developers." Imposter syndrome is an enormous reason why people quit teaching themselves how to learn coding, and Flatiron does an excellent job to help people navigate all of the technical AND emotional questions that arise through a developers coding bootcamp journey. 

I am forever grateful for the people who I met at Flatiron!

I've started this school without knowing any programming language knowledge. However, ended up being able to create a web application on my own after graduation. It was an intense course but it is worth to attend and learn to code at this school.

Attending Flatiron School was a great decision for me in starting my career as a Web Developer. The campus and staff were all very supportive and open. Additionally, the other students were all dedicated, helpful, and genuinely passionate about code. The learning materials were very accessible through Flatiron's Learn platform, and there was no shortage of additional practice/labs. I genuinely felt that any questions or concerns I had were heard and addressed in a timely manner, and the overall support to push oneself in a new field was crucial to my progress.

I did a lot of research on bootcamps before landing at Flatiron, quite honestly overall it seemed the best choice at the time. Would I make the same choice? absolutely! I won't lie it was very difficult but calm seas don't make good sailors! I feel as though I'm stronger not only as a person but as a developer. The fast pace learning was intense at first, it felt like a pie eating contest where the prize was more pie. After you hit a groove and trust the process it shaped me to become a fast learning developer. You really learn how to learn. 1 month after graduating I was able to pickup python and mongoDB like it was nothing because of this ability to have learning down to a science. All the friendships in my cohort and with my instructors are strong and have not faded. The support post graduation is just as strong as when I was attending. They leave you with the tools to continue on and spark the drive to want to dive deeper. I love flatiron 3000.

I recently got into Flatiron's Engineering Immersive course. I had researched other courses and found Flatiron to be the best fit. Beware the prep work before the interview is about 100 hours. Once you pass your technical interview, which is where you show the code that you used to solve one of their labs in the interview prep work. You explain how you got that answer, and then pair code with your interviewer. They got back to me promptly that I got in. Once you get in there is another 100 hours of prep work. They said that there would be 75 hours and another 75, it took me about 50 hours more. So give yourself ample time to work through it, plus they have you figure a lot of it out to prepare you for what it is like to be a developer. They do have tutors available 10 hours a day to help you through problems so make sure that you use them! My course starts on December 9 and I am very excited. I will update this review once I complete the course.

I really enjoyed my experience at the Flatiron School, I recently graduated and am missing the campus already. This was one of the most diverse and inclusive environments I have had the pleasure to be a part of. My classmates, teachers, coaches, and staff are super friendly and made this a great space to learn software development. They really care! I would recommend this to anyone who is able to really dedicate a few months to the immersive program. Good luck!

Avoid! I couldn't complete the course and left after the first week, they charged me 1k?! Even after knowing I couldn't keep up with course, had a newborn baby and mortgage and bills! Heartless company! 

I'm 34, working in finance. I wasn't happy in my career and looked for a career change. I tried the sample course on a few sites and enjoyed the flatiron course and the way the website looked as well as the job guarantee.  after speaking to the admin team at flatiron I joined up. 1k deposit and 9k loan for a career change seemed great. But...I struggled at the end of the pre course work. Speaking to admin about this they pushed me to join the full immersion course before I was ready/confident. They informed me that I made enough progress to get through it. 

I was going to take a career break, knowing I can return to my current job and if it didn't work out with flatirons job guarantee, that I have a job already so risk wasn't too bad. Upon joining I was told I was people were being made redundant. I had to take calls during the course and attend meetings. The stress caused me to fall behind. I struggled to keep up with the course material. 

I was told I was keeping my job but had to return sooner than expected and to a further location and different job. I had to drop out.

I begged the team to help but had no help. I have a new born baby, mortgage and bills. Redundancy would give 2minths pay so had no choice but to keep the job. I couldn't risk my families future. I had to make a choice to leave the course after the redundancy. 

Flatiron showed no compassion whatsoever, pointing me to generic terms and conditions and disregarded my personal circumstances.  They kept 1k even though I had not used 1k worth or resources or tutors time. Utter shameless company!  Begged them to return our savings as 1k is a lot of money as I am the only one working. They said, tough and that they won't return it

About Me

Graduate of the Full Stack Web Development on-campus immersive course, 2019
Found a Full Stack role (React and C#) with an above-average salary 4 months after declaring a job search
Bachelor's degree in a non-traditional background (not tech-related)

The Flatiron Experience in a Nutshell

Expect Flatiron to prepare you to be a shoo-in for an internship, to land a lower-paying full-time gig after some additional self-directed study, or to obtain a higher-paying role after some months of dedicated study.

The Good

Knowledgable instructors who cared about my success
Inclusive, fun and supportive culture in a fast-paced, immersive learning environment
Gained practical industry skills for a solid foundation

The Not-So-Good

Flatiron is not (at this time) set up to bring graduates' technical skills up to par with industry expectations for higher-paying full-time entry-level roles
Career support did not provide even the most basic job-search optimization tactics

What You Can Expect

I loved my Flatiron on-campus experience. But after graduation, I realized I wasn't prepared to reach my personal career goals and expectations without months of additional study. 

Technical Expectations

In my job search, I've found what I learned with Ruby, Rails, SQL, Object-Oriented & Functional Programming, JavaScript and React/Redux are no doubt essentials for grads looking for Junior Engineering positions; But that isn't all you need anymore. 

Instructors expect interviewers in 2019 to ask us questions like the FizzBuzz problem. That may have been the case 3 or 4 years ago, but with so many bootcamp grads getting churned out the bar has been raised much higher. In interviews, I was asked to create algorithms implementing data structures including linked lists, binary search trees, heaps, stacks & queues and sometimes even graphs. To land a job at a top company like Hulu, Amazon, Facebook, etc. you need a solid understanding of system API design (I believe this will soon be the norm for less prestigious companies as well). Regardless of what may be advertised online, Flatiron does not teach data structures or system design.

Career Support Expectations

My career coach gave some solid advice on cultural interviewing. However, through my own study, I found there are a lot of really cool ways to optimize your job search that Flatiron career counselors should be sharing with their grads. I really could have used a job-finding expert on my side. Flatiron has a partnerships team that sends mass referrals out to graduates, but most of these were for low-paying contract work. 

I met with my counselor almost weekly at the beginning, but most of my one-on-ones felt a lot more like emotional support meetings than focused tactical strategy sessions aimed at getting my resume in the hands of decision-makers and nailing the interview. The great news is you can check out the resources listed below to fill in those gaps.

Is Flatiron For You?

All things considered, if you're a dedicated self-starter willing to put in the hours after graduation Flatiron could be an excellent option for you. I know grads from other noteworthy bootcamps experiencing similar struggles, and some that didn't have a positive on-campus experience. Flatiron can help get you where you want to be, but you have to set yourself apart from the thousands of other bootcamp grads looking for the same job opportunities.

Resources

Technical

Leetcode (consider the premium option. check out the problems broken out by data structure)

Data Structures & Algorithms Masterclass (JavaScript)
Grokking the System Design Interview

Job Search Optimization

Cold Emailing
Mail Merge
Clearbit Connect
Hunter.io

Flatiron's bootcamp prep work really helps you understand the basics of coding. It's also useful to see if you truly enjoy coding and solving problems or not. The interview for the bootcamp will obviously be daunting as it would be your first ever coding related interview. I would advise to stay calm, understand what you have written and explain why you chose to write it that way. Once in the bootcamp, you're greeting with the amazing and lovely instructors and staff. The first week or two will be difficult as you as have to adjust to the bootcamp as well as learning LOTS of new concepts.

Some of my classmates did not come from a STEM background and they have all successfully found jobs after graduating - though it does make it easier if you're from a technical/STEM background.

Make the most of your time at the bootcamp as you have lots of support from peers and instructors and coaches. Ask meaningful and thoughtful questions. That being said, do not overwork yourself. Sometimes taking a break is what will help you solve your coding problems.

I believe that Flatiron School has a great curriculum and really pushes their students to learn how to learn in the world of programming.

I'm happy to say that I was able to find a job after graduating - my next goal is to dive deeper in the computer science aspect of coding and hopefully one day be able to mentor the upcoming junior developers.

I attended Flatiron x WeWork's Access Labs in Brooklyn from October 2018 to February 2019. My experience there was overwhelmingly positive. From staff to other students, everyone behaved professionally when communicating with each other and everyone was always very supportive through the experience.

You will definitely learn everything they promise as long as you put in the effort to learn. A lot of learning comes from their Learn.co website that you can try out through their free bootcamp prep course, it's very helpful in my opinion. After doing the readings and labs there are lectures where the instructor will go over the material you read about and piece everything together for you and students are able to ask questions (or if you're me and a bit shy, ask your questions after lecture directly with the instructor, nothing wrong with that).

The immersive course was definitely the way to go for me, because I wanted the experience of learning and programming with other people. The people who were in my cohort became some of my best friends because we struggled together, cried together (I cried, a lot), laughed together, ate lunch together, and even got jobs together. It actually gets lonely after you graduate from the program because you go from seeing your cohort-mates everyday to once every few weeks or not at all. 

When I was being interviewed for this program I asked my interviewer how he was able to get through an intense 15 weeks of learning to code and he told me, "Make friends with your cohort and you'll always want to go back". What he said stuck with me and really did keep me going in every day.

As for job assistance, they provide career coaches for everyone who graduates. Mine was an awesome, super supportive mom-like lady who helped to keep me on track in my search and prep me for my interviews. Career services also provide you with a career fair, which is actually how I got my job. At the career fair you can expect to interview with 2-3 companies who are looking to hire. It was mostly cultural interviews, but I also had one technical interview at the fair with the company who hired me, so it's good to be prepared. I graduated in February and received my offer end of May (though I start end of June), but there are others who find a job quickly after graduating and others who are still doing their best on the job hunt.

If you're looking for a supportive, welcoming, professional environment to learn how to code and also make less than 30k/year then Flatiron's Access Labs is the place for you. 

I had been working in Client Service roles for most of my career. After working with a developer team at the last job I was on, I was inspired to start pursuing a developer career. After a company re-org, I was let go, and decided to begin down a path to a new career. I did a significant amount of research, and after everything I read online about Flatiron, and talking to a few recent grads, I pulled the trigger and applied. 
The baseline level of knowledge to know before entering the program was daunting, but it was reassuring to know that my cohort would be past the basics, and would be learning code at a higher level right from the beginning.
I was excited right from the beginning to challenge myself at a high level, and was immediately impressed by both the knowledge of the instructors and coaches and their level of care and compassion in an otherwise intense environment.
I survived the program, made life-long friends, and began my job search in November. I was recently hired into a finance-adjacent firm. I'm a working developer, and couldn't be happier about my decision to attend the Flatiron School. I believe that the skills I learned at the school made me a stronger learner, coder, and communicator, as well as problem solver.

If you would've told me 1 year ago 6 months ago I'd be where I am now, I don't think I would've have believed you. I started Flatiron in October '18, graduated in January '19, and found a job that I LOVE in exactly 2 months. I came from a totally different background with NO prior developer experience and am now thriving in an incredible new career. I know it sounds crazy and too good to be true, I was completely skeptical at first too... but ask any Flatiron grad and they'll agree - this school is unique and really gets you where you need to be. They teach you what you need to know to land your first dev role and support you in a way that will feel like a second family (in fact I still spend time with a lot of my previous instructors and cohort-mates). I encourage anyone who's scared or unsure to at least give it a shot - try the free pre-work material and go to some of the events they have - see for yourself what it's like. It was seriously one of the best decisions of my life and I would recommend Flatiron school to anyone. 

Overall I am really pleased with my decision to go to Flatiron, without it I would not have been able to change my career and get a job in a relatively short timeframe, it would have taken me years if I had taken a purely self-taught, self-directed route. It was a fantastic and supportive environment with brilliant instructors. 

I will add the usual caveats by saying that the course does ask a lot of you - I think I averaged 60+ hours a week in order to keep up with the pace of material. At times it was frustrating, there were tears, coding til 1am. Going in you should be prepared that it's not about going there to sit and be taught, you do need to supply your own motivation, though that's the same with any bootcamp. If you are motivated and are able to dedicate the time to complete the course, you really can change your life. 

Like any bootcamp this is just the beginning, in order to continue as a developer you need to keep learning.  The career support you receive afterwards also really helped to support me through the process of getting a job, which took just under 2 months after graduation.

I would advise any potential applicant to check out the free bootcamp prep course, which prepares you well for the style of labs throughout the course. 

To be balanced, I would say some cons of Flatiron are that you don't have a guaranteed job after and the requirements to be eligible for the money back guarantee are quite stringent. Also the mod 3 and mod 4 labs are not quite as strong as those for mods 1 and 2, I think the curriculum team are working on it though. 

My situation was a little unique in that I was living and working in DC, but knew I was going to move to Miami soon to be with my new husband. I decided to quit my job, do the in-person immersive program, and then move to Miami and search for jobs there, and it was the best decision I could have made for my career! Flatiron helped me move from a $50k/yr job to an $80k/yr junior dev role in Miami. 

I definitely recommend going into it for the right reasons. Try something technical and see how you like it. Before I applied, I tried Flatiron's free online bootcamp prep course, which is how I discovered I really liked learning about code. Something employers look for is passion for code, so it's important to actually like coding before you start.

During the program: the experience was really amazing. I bonded really well with my cohort (50% male/ 50% female) and got a scholarship for women in tech. The instructors were very understanding, knowledgeable, and always wiling to help and mentor students. They all come from tech backgrounds, so they can tell you what it's like in the industry too. 

After the program: The career coaches are very knowledgeable, encouraging, and keep you accountable in your job search. Since I was job searching in a new city, my career coach was a huge resource suggesting lots of job search activities.

Overall, a great experience and the results speak for themselves!

I was enrolled in the immersive software engineering course and I graduated Jan 2019. The admission and technical interviews were straight forward and really smooth. I chose JavaScript for my technical interview. I would recommend to work on the free prep as much as you could when you are just applying for the course. I also found it very beneficial after I got accepted to do all the pre-work especially for my first week.

The insturctors are really good and they are available to ask questions about different tech topics even if it is not in the curriculum. Usually when we struggle with a lab we start by debugging and search for answers online, if this is not helpful then ask one of the technical coaches and then the instructors.

I was a self-taught developer for 2 years, learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which I struggled a lot with and I had some off time, around 6 months, because of JS but there was still plenty of things I need to learn about and that is why I took the decision to apply for Flatiron School where I've learned tones of new materials such as Ruby, Ruby on Rails, React and databases.

If you want to learn plenty in a short time then this is the right place and I wish you have a great cohort as mine which helped me a lot during the time I spent there. 

I attended Flatiron School's Access Labs program in Brooklyn, and graduated this past January. Since then I have been hired as Junior Frontend Developer, and I can say that it was the absolutely right decision to attend Flatiron.

I was very unsure how their reputation stacked up in the real world and what the quality of the education was. I looked into App Academy, and Fullstack as well, and was accepted at Fullstack, (I didnt apply to App Academy). Ulitimately I choose Flatiron because the timing of the cohort was better for me, and the finiancing option with the Access Labs program is awesome. I currently work with App Academy graduates and they are all top notch, and know other people who are Fullstack graduates that are excellent programmers too. 

I didnt find the bootcamp expierence to be crazy overwhemling, its hard work for sure, but if you have a mature attitude and work ethic you'll be fine. Flatiron will teach you how to code, how to build applications, provide a working understanding of how code operates and how the frameworks and languages communicate with each other. If you choose not to do the hard work, you'll still probably graduate but you've just cheated yourself. Like anything in life you get out of it what you put in, and Flatiron has a ton of resources for those who engage and want to learn. Flatiron does an excellent job of helping their students develop their soft skills too, and they offer talks and work shops with working developers.

When you graduate you'll still have a lot of knowledge to fill in, data types, and algorithms, CS concepts etc. You need to do the work and learn this stuff. 

Flatiron has a robust career staffing team that actively engage and assist their graduates find jobs, lifetime career coaching support, job fairs, mock tech interviews, and more. This aspect of the school can not be understated, they offer a lot of job hunting support. 

The teaching assistants are excellent, and extremely helpful, the teachers for the most part are senior devs that have switched to teaching. 

Flatiron can improve by implementing more code reviews of student projects, and by having stricter requirements for passing course sections. I saw some students that would have benefitted from more focused support from the teaching staff but instead were passed to advanced sections with out fulling grasping the concepts. IF you as a student feel like you are falling behind you need to take the initiative to get the help you need. 

All in all I very very happy with my decision to attend Flatiron, I now have the best job Ive ever had.

I attended Flatiron School London on the third bootcamp cohort. The support and community values were exactly what I needed when taking on such an intense curriculum. Not only is the teaching and material excellent, the career prep coaching played a key part in my job search. I received a job offer (at what flatiron advertised as the average starting salary) within 2 weeks of finishing the course. The instructors really did go above and beyond anything I had expected. My new job is great but leaving flatiron was pretty emotional.​

I earned my BA in Computer Science, but I had a hard time applying my skills to real world scenarios.  After working in a non-technical setting for about a year, I jumped into learning web development. It was a lot of fun but with no real learning structure to guide me, so I felt like I was always jumping around. I decided to attend Flatiron, and it was a great experience. So much information is thrown at you, but the instructors and fellow students are there to help you.  I think that was the biggest takeaway from Flatiron, the culture they try to foster. Being able to go through a program that is this intense is easier to do when you have people around you trying to push you to be the best you can be.  I graduated in November, and now in January I have accepted an offer with Amazon. The offer was initally set up through Flatiron's Business Development team.  Roughly every three months, the school offers a career fair for qualifying students (you just have to complete some mock interviews and meet with your coach a few times). This was one of the most helpful experiences I went through while at Flatiron. Over the course of 4 days, I met with 5 companies that the BD team matched me with. It's a great opportunity to hone your interview skills and also nail in person interviews so you can proceed to next steps.  Overall, Flatiron was one of the best decisions I made for my career, and I strongly recommend the school to anyone looking to enter into Web Development.

Coming from a background in business/management I joined Flatiron School to gain a technical skill. After completing the course I am now a Full-stack developer at Tried and Supplied, a recently launched start-up. I am the only developer on the team and I think that speaks to the level that Flatiron prepares you for.

At no point throughout my time at Flatiron School did I think 'I can not do this' and I think that is due to the incredible people there. At each stage, from admissions, instruction, to the careers team you have the support you need to get you through it.