Devmountain

My experience was specifically in the cybersecurity program and I would highly recommend avoiding Devmountain for this course of study. The first 8 weeks is focused on Foundations which is a very basic overview of full stack development. The instructors were awesome and I came away feeling like, with more practice, I could easily program in HTML and JavaScript. Then I started my 8 week spec course specializing in cybersecurity and that is where the wheels came off. There is next to no support at this stage, it is pretty much self-guided study using Jason Dion trainings through Udemy which you can purchase on your own for a few hundred dollars versus ~$10,000 for the Devmountain course. After fighting through the program, not a single job I applied to cared about me having any programming experience because the vast majority of cybersecurity does not involve coding at all. Those positions that do require coding are things like being a member of the DevSecOps team but those positions are rarely trained in cybersecurity specifically and are rather people with huge amounts of experience coding and knowing how to make the code solid and secure. So the best part of Devmountain (the 8-week Foundations course) doesn't even apply to this area of study.

At the end of the day, I spent almost $10,000 on Devmountain, received 8 weeks of instructor-led training that did not apply to my desired field of study, then spent 8 weeks studying CompTIA Security+ and Network+ on my own and I could have just paid for for a lot of training materials for these for less than $1,000. I could do two semesters of a master's degree program for less than the cost of a 16-week Devmountain course that doesn't even help in cybersecurity. No matter how you look at it, Devmountain is not worth it for cybersecurity and the worst part of all of it is that no administrators at Devmountain care to listen to my experience so they can improve things for future classes. Avoid wasting your $10,000 like I did if you want to go into cybersecurity.

I had a great experience with the Dev Mountain Web Development camp. The curriculum covers a lot of material and move pretty fast, but wasn't un manageable at any point. There was also plenty of opportunity to put in some extra work to be able to get a better grasp on the curriculum as well as learn some additional content. The second portion of the course is more loosely structured which helps to develop the skills for learning new technologies on your own which is critical to succeed in the industry. The career advice and job assistance is also top notch with weekly lectures and great advice on making yourself stand out against your peers.

I came into devmountain with an understanding of web development from self learning. The first half of the curriculum was insightful but a mash up of skills spanning multiple careers as well as information I had already learned on my own. It was nice to gain an understanding of the job requirements of the fields around mine but it didn't necessarily make me a better developer. 

The second half of the full time course was frustrating to say the least. They just give you a subscription to udemy and recommend videos to watch. It was nice having people around when you need help but it was not much different then self learning. I feel like the biggest benefit was that I spent so much money I was encouraged to be disciplined. 

The outcomes team coaches you on how to get a job but doesn't help you with placement and the information they give you only gets you so far, the most important part is continuing to learn new skills and creating projects for your portfolio. Don't think for a second you will finish that course and be placed in a few months like the outcomes team says. It took me almost a year to find a job and having devmountain on my resume was not a large part of that. My success was because I had the resources and the support system to focus on continuing to learn, to appeal to the employers. 

Many of my classmates still have not found opportunities (other than working for devmountain) and had to go back to their previous careers to pay off the loans they took out to pay for this over priced curriculum. I was also informed by the outcomes team that the reason I was not finding a job was because I was not harassing employers after applying. I can tell you no one likes that. I didn't get my job because I emailed them or stalked them on LinkedIn, I got the job because I went out of my way to keep growing which shows dedication, and because I made myself more appealing to potential employers. After adding typescript projects to my portfolio was when the interviews really started rolling in.

In the end, this course might be beneficial to some, but I hate to see people thinking that going to devmountain is all they need to find a job.

After pounding my head against the proverbial wall in college trying to get a computer science degree I finally switched went to a web dev boot camp. The college I was attending had a good CS degree but that degree had almost nothing for web development. I went to DevMountain and loved it. The instructors were good and so was the curriculum. One of the things I liked most from the curriculum was that they tried to do more than just teach the language that they use but also to teach students how to learn a new language and tools.

My favorite thing about the school those is their student outcomes team. They have several people dedicated to helping students get jobs and they are great to work with. The amount of effort that this team has put into helping me get a job after an extremely unique and challenging situation since graduation has been super helpful

Stay away!!! DevMountain is now a company that offers very little at great cost. They are always cutting corners and costs to save on an already highly profitable business at the expense of student learning. I would not recommend it to anyone at this point. I attended DevMountain When it was in Provo and mentored when they moved to Lehi. DevMountain was fantastic when I attended. And back then I would have and did recommend it to everyone but it went down hill really quickly after the shift in management after the new owners really took over. Over 6 months ALL the web instructors left and they hired recent grads with NO job experience to replace them in order to cut costs. They decreased the number of mentors per student and significantly lowered the bar for mentors. Recent grads that would have normally been hired as mentors are now being hired as instructors and so they are hiring virtually anyone who wants to be a mentor regardless of skill. They removed most of the extra resources for students. Significantly lowered the physical classroom quality so while in lecture you can hear all 3 other lectors going on simultaneously separated only by small decorative half walls. The current devmountain management has and will cut any cost they can because they know they can ride off the good reviews and legacy of the old owners and management for a while. Stay away!!! I have worked with students who are graduating now and they are getting a much much lower quality of education/skill set.

I made a huge change in my career after being in retail for over 15 years. I was really happy that I made this decision to go into web development. Originally in college, I was studying it and change majors. I wish I kept going with my original plan but it happens. 

I had a couple friends that attended this bootcamp but at different campuses and the one in Lehi is fairly new. As much as I enjoyed the whole experience at the school, there were a couple things I wish they could have fixed but it was limited to what they could do there anyway. Sometimes it can be tough to listen to lectures while other classes surrounding your class is louder than your instructor. Great thing our instructors were patient and allowed us to ask questions or go over that part of the topic again. The bootcamp does give you all the necessary material you need to learn plus access to resources like mentors, after-hours help and even other students who are in different cohorts that can assist. That's one of the major things about being in tech, people can be willing to help you when you're stuck.

The curriculum there is concentrated in JavaScript which is great for modern programming language. Once you get an idea of what you're doing, keep grinding and learning. I dedicated countless hours a week to keep learning. I did fell behind a couple times but you can still catch up. Make sure you ask questions!! You paid this money to go there, if you don't know what they're teaching you, just ask questions or go over it again. 

The housing was the major selling point for me coming up there. It all depends who rooms with you that makes your living experience enjoyable. For me, I like my place clean and I clean up after myself. If others don't do their due-diligence, it's not going to be good for you. 

Once you completed your curriculum there, meet with the student-success advisors. They want you to succeed after graduating. They follow-up with me to make sure I have found something, if not; they'll ask what I'm doing and how I should do it. 

I took the Web Development - Full Stack cours. My goal was to gain an education, enough to get a job. DevMountain delivered.

 

DevMountain was rigorous enough, community driven, and strategically organized for optimal skill development. They educated me on the content I needed to display during my interviews, that eventually got me my job.

I was hired as a Mobile Developer, but my knowledge of the full stack showed them I was more than a guy that knew Swift and I was granted a higher position from the get go. Many question I was asked, were answered from content I had learned the last week or two.

An offer was over the table before I completed the bootcamp, what a pleasant suprise.

I would not entirely recommend the DevMountain full stack immersive program because after completion of the course, there is no help for you. You are left on your own to try and find a job and your few skills do not let you apply for a majority of the web development positions out there. The hiring events that they hold after you complete the program only target the students who are mentors and you will be lucky to have anything after you hand out a resume.They also do not publish that there is roughly only a 60% hire rate for graduates after 6 months. They do not tell you that you will be competing with thousands of other bootcamp and 4 year CS grads for a very small number of junior level positions. DevMountain also does a poor job at job preparation and you do not get enough practice for the real world of day long tech interviews or phone screens. Personally, if I had the option of doing it all over, I would have hired an experienced professional to tutor me privately for several months versus having only a few weeks of group instruction/ lectures that you get at DevMountain. The housing is nice.. as well as the friends you make, but the lack of experience and simple skillset will not get you a satisfactory job in the current market. You better be a wizard at coding or you will regret not spending your $11900 on something more useful. Remember, higher education is a BUSINESS and all sales are final. Shop wisely. 

I probably spend 80 + hours per week at dev mountain, or working on projects, or other assignments for the Web Development Immersive Course. I am just graduating, but I have to say, I wouldn't do it any other way. Put in the time, because you will need every minute of it to try to absorb the immense amount of content that will be covered in your 13 week stay. 

Great, challenging course, just don't come in with any plans for a social life outside of this while you are here. There really just isn't time for that.

Honestly, I went a few years ago and still regret this choice. DevMountain was a fun experience but not worth the money it costs to have that experience. At the time they made it seem like you would get a job from doing this program. They pushed a 95% job placement for their students. As a 24-year-old, I thought that sounded great and they made it sound great. They really pushed the job aspect and made you believe you would get a job. However, I quickly learned this wasn't the case. I even had one instructor tell us a majority of us wouldn't even get a job but DevMountain wouldn't want me to tell you that. As a Father supporting a family this wasn't what I was wanting to hear. Everything DevMountain said to our group was geared towards us getting a job, they led us to believe we would. Now I take full responsibility for the fact that I never got a job I can't blame my frustrations of not landing a job on a school but I can blame them for the misleading they did. They could have told us from the start that it's going to be hard to land a job but if they did that most of us wouldn't have gone. They also said they would help us get interviews and bring companies to DevMountain to help us get into situations to get interviewed for jobs. This was never the case. They had a website for alumni where they would post job announcements and only one or two jobs ever got posted. I checked daily and nothing ever happened with that site. If they were more upfront with us at the beginning it wouldn't have been bad, but they led us to believe that if we learned these skills people would hire us. I only got a few interviews when I finished and every time I interviewed they would say sorry you don't have enough experience.  I understand that life happens and you can't blame others for the bad stuff in life that happens but a school like DevMountain shouldn't have misled like they did. I believe now they corrected some of their mistakes but for the people who were with them at the start kind of got shafted. I had a great time at DevMountain, I learned a lot and enjoyed the people. I turned a lot of opportunities down because DevMountain promised a lot that they didn't live up to, and yes they even said 95% of students were hired. I just wish they were upfront for the students when they started there program. I understand there's a lot of bugs to work out in a new business but a lot of people were affected by their poor decisions.

DevMountain was a challenging but fulfilling experience. It costs a lot of money, but the tradeoff is worth it as long as you are willing to work hard to get to where you need to be by graduation. The mentors and instructors were super helpful and knew their stuff. The curriculum contained a lot of outdated and extremely long videos that were marginally helpful, but the in-class gudied projects really helped solidify things. I haven't had the chance to go to a DevMountain hiring event yet so that is why the Job Assistance rating is a 3, although I'm sure the hiring event will be awesome. 

All in all, a great experience and I would definitely do it again. 

 

I will try and keep this short and to the point to help future bootcampers make educated decisions when deciding on which track to take, in heading towards a world of web development.  First off, my overall experience at Dev Mountain was ok and the staff was very friendly and nice.  The facility is nice, clean and is open 24hrs a day, which is great for focusing and coding into the late hours of the night.  The housing option was another great feature which lead me towards choosing Dev Mountain as a coding bootcamp.  All of these features and options were great, and were probably the reason why I gave the bootcamp a medium rating.  

The things I didn't like while attending were some of the lectures and classes were a bit unorganized and the school seemed like they didn't have there stuff together at times.  Also some of the curriculum course assignments were out of date, and didn't work when trying to complete the assignments.  This made things difficult when trying to learn new concepts in coding.  This was not just me, but I know a lot of students complained about this aspect of the schooling as well.  I also felt that the lack of professional coding experience by the staff was underwhelming. Outside of the lead instructor, most of the mentors and instructors were very green to the software development world.  These were some of the things I was hoping that a bootcamp experience would have delivered on since I was paying for a high priced education.  Oh yeah, and towards the end of the experience, they tell you that a bootcamp doesn't really look that good on your resume and that you should try to disguise that somehow.  Weird thing to tell your students, who have just paid a bunch of money to go to school and sacrificed everything to change careers.  This was another thing myself and other students felt a little strange about, but obviously couldn't do anything since it was disclosed during the last week of schooling.  

I think overall out of any bootcamp experience, I think the advertising out there boasts one thing, but the reality of going through it, is another story all together.  If I could do it all over again, I would not have quit my job and lost out on so much time and money that I invested.  In total, I've been jobless for 6 months now and upon looking for work, there really aren't that many junior dev jobs out there like a lot of bootcamps boast about.  If anything, join up with Pluralsight/Udemy, keep your job and learn from building projects that work out of the box.  The bootcamps are teaching the same concepts and aren't enlightening the students with any sort of extra knowledge you can't get from a time tested teaching resource like Pluralsight/Udemy.  If anything, I've learned more from watching expert PS videos and going through online teaching courses, than at the physical bootcamp schooling.  That's just my take on it all, some people need the bootcamp experience, but for me it was not worth my job, time and money invested.  I worked really hard while there, and continue to work really hard in trying to move forward, I just thought things would have turned out differently. 

Dev Mountain wasn’t a horrible experience for me by any means. The instructors were awesome, and certainly did the best they could to teach you to code in a short amount of time. However, the bottom-line is that Dev Mountain is a double-edged sword. Is it a waste of time? Yes and No.

If you can afford to pay $10,000 and take the Immersive course – I would recommend that you do so. They will teach you the front and back end side of development, and will provide some type of job placement. However, if you cannot afford the Immersive course, or cannot simply be in class all day – DO NOT SIGN UP FOR THE AFTER HOURS CLASS! It is a complete waste of money and time. Some people may argue otherwise, as people certainly have found jobs from the After Hours class. However, there are a number of things to be aware of when it comes to this course.

1. Dev Mountain will not acknowledge or support their after-hours students. Once you “graduate” from the after-hours program you will not receive ANY support or job placement from Dev Mountain. If someone contacts Dev Mountain to ask about you, they will not say you know what you’re doing because you simply haven’t had enough hours in development to receive their endorsement. You get as much credit from them as if you never took the course in the first place.

2. You learn nothing about the back-end. All you learn is simple front-end development in HTML, CSS, some jQuery, and AngularJS. With the Immersive you learn both front and back end – an important thing when looking for a developer job.

3. The most important thing that almost all jobs I was looking for to get in as an entry-level developer is a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science. This is almost the main thing all people looking for Junior Developers are looking for. If you truly want to get into coding – go this route and avoid a coding boot camp.

Now, DevMountain will tell you that they offer an advanced after-hours course to teach the back end which is true. But ask them how many people actually sign up for it. They’ve had to cancel it twice as no one has any interest in doing so after they take the regular after-hours course and find out that they’ve just wasted $5,000. They claim that over 90% of their students find jobs, but these figures are for the people who took the Immersive class. If they kept stats of how many after-hours graduates find jobs (which I’m sure they don’t because they simply don’t care about these students after they have their money) I would think that the placement figures would be around 1%-5%. Which means almost 95% of after-hours students just wasted $5,000.

In the end, I would like to see Dev Mountain just get rid of the after-hours course because it’s just a rip off. If you are going to go to Dev Mountain – take the Immersive course, or don’t go at all. I can’t speak for everyone, but I certainly don’t have $5,000 to waste. I could have taken it out and burned it and I would have ended up with the same results. Dev Mountain is supposedly run by ethical LDS people. If this is the case, I would hope that one day they would do the right thing and get rid of the after hours course and just offer the Immersive one. If you can’t afford $10,000, then find a better way to spend your money.