Hack Reactor

I recently graduated from Remote Beta and have begun the interview process.

Before the program, I was hacking together horrible bits of Javascript to get by at my previous job. I didn't have much programming experience, nor did I have a CS degree.

Yesterday, I had an interview with a tech company with very smart engineers. They asked difficult technical questions, two engineers at a time, for hours.

I killed it. I was absolutely amazed at how much I had learned in 3 months. Do not underestimate Hack Reactor - you will have to work very hard, but the amount of support given by HR staff and the feeling of community in the program is tremendous, and I'm convinced there's no better way to become a software developer.

I was originally hesitant to attend the bootcamp, especially with the price tag. I had enough saved up to attend the bootcamp but I was worried about affording to live in San Francisco. Luckily, I took the leap (and I'm 100% sure I made the right choice!).

I paid off the tuition with my savings and I crowdfunded a loan using WeFinance.co for my living expenses. Best (and toughest) 3 months of my life.

The people there were great, I learned a lot, and they have an AMAZING network. When people refer to it as the "Harvard of coding bootcamps" it's not an understatement. People who attend basically have their choice of jobs.

If you're on the fence, make the jump.

Hack Reactor is the power suit to your learning, allowing you to accomplish so much more than you could as a mere human. But don't be mistaken - you are very much the driver at all times. One of the most important deciding factors for being accepted into HR is the ability to learn independently and work through new challenges.

Don't expect things to be done for you. There are plenty of resources for technical help and team conflicts. HR provides all the controls and levers for you to use, but it is up to you to use them. At the end of the day, HR is not like a traditional school in that it is not obligated to force feed you knowledge. Based on my experience, HR has done a tremendous job of accepting students that can take responsibility for their education. For the most part, these are people that have been doing a fair bit of learning on their own for some time, so it's not a real surprise.

I had a great time knowing and working with all the super-smart students in my cohort. If you ever join HR, you will probably hear legends of this amazing cohort (probably not, but maybe). The best part is that the staff is constantly looking for ways to iterate on the program and improve it to make it better. Not only is HR a program to prepare software engineers for work, it is very much an ongoing engineering project in itself. Expect the unexpected, and be prepared to adapt - as you would when working in tech as a developer.

I haven't had experience with any other programs, so I can't compare HR to them. All I can say is that HR works. Plenty of peeps getting jobs, with or without prior professional programming experience.

Yes, this is going to be another glowing review, and there are so very many others that you can read to confirm, so I'm going to go ahead and speak nothing on the course content and job search support, which are nothing short of excellent. Instead I'm going to tell you about a different reason that you will be successful after going through the remote experience, the people. 

I'm not speaking solely of the staff, who are 100% invested in your personal growth and success both within the program and beyond, but also of the students who, though they must change from cohort to cohort, will always be the type of people you will love to collaborate with and learn from. Having peers that challenge and motivate you is one of the less touted features of the Hack Reactor experience, but one I believe to be very worthy of mention. 

As a final note, keep in mind that this review comes as the Remote program is still growing, therefore you can only expect your experience to be better than those who have come before you. The curriculum is constantly updated, and the alumni support is evolving as well. I'm certain that if you choose Remote Beta, you will not regret it.  

When deciding how best to advance my software engineering career, I faced many choices. Ultimately, I decided on the Advanced Software Engineering Immersive at Hack Reactor. After passing my second technical interview (yeah, it's to that level) and finishing my pre course work, I embarked on the best three months of solid, intensive learning. 

I set the bar high before I started. Hack Reactor just laughed as we passed the bar in the first few weeks. If you are passionate about coding as a lifestyle and want to make lifelong friends with your cohort-mates, class leads, tech mentors, and Hack Reactor staff, apply!

When I first applied to Hack Reactor, I was a little sceptical of all the claims made by HR in terms of job placement and experience. It was also a rather large financial commitment and so I was doubly concerned. But going in for the interview and seeing the school radically shifted all those perceptions. The place was a abuzz with activity and seemingly endless students working on cool stuff.

Going through the actual program was no different. It was easily one of the most challenging and productive 3 months of my life. It pushed me in new ways I honestly didn't know that I was capable of and without question think it was one of the best life decisions i've made. 

It's a pretty special place and I'm incredibly glad that I got to take a part in it!

Hack Reactor was my second computer science training experience. My first was getting my CS degree from CSU Hayward (now called CSU Eastbay). The breadth of material covered and the fostering of community and class bonding was excellent, however, I must admit the intensity was a bit high for me. Not having my Saturdays to myself for three months wore me out, but I survived. Be aware before joining that the pace is really quick and there is not as much review and follow-up on material that has been covered; if you fall behind, you'll need to catch up in the little remaining time you have with the mentors they offer or other resources you might find. This can be rather difficult. I was most impressed by how much job hunt / interviewing / resumé prep they offer, and the alumni resources are world-class. I learned a lot about working with teams of other developers, something that my college CS courses never taught me. Over-all, I recommend it, but only if you are hard working, work well with others, are very smart, and can endure this kind of environment.

Be aware that the cirriculum is JavaScript centric; while this positions you well for many of the jobs out there, and certainly teaches you enough CS, you may need to learn many other technologies such as Python or Ruby if what you're aiming for is the center of the web application development job distribution histogram.

TL;DR - this was the single greatest experience of my life. I have zero regrets and would do it all over again.

The overall goal of Hack Reactor is not to "get you a $105k+ job". The fact is, you are in charge of your destiny. Your education at Hack Reactor revolves around becoming an autonomous learner. Your goal is to learn software engineering, not memorize Javascript frameworks and libraries. 

For the first six weeks, you're going to deep dive into lectures and pair programming sprints. It's a total immersion in software engineering: you tackle data structures, algorithm challenges, MVC frameworks, servers, databases, deployment, and much more. If this seems overwhelming, don't be worry - we're in this together.

Your support comes in the form of the instruction staff, technical mentors, class shepherds and leads, and most importantly your fellow peers. For the last thirteen weeks (twelve + solo week), I have spent over 800 hours with the same ~64 peers. I have never felt more supported and engaged before.

The second half of your time is defined by three group projects and the most intense, informative, and useful job search preparation I have ever encountered. There's a very different dynamic between the first and second half portions of the course and a common complaint is the perception of a lack of support during it, but I feel like that's simply unreasonable -- especially when you have all of your peers to lean on. Your group projects are intended to simulate real world work environments and help you learn  workflow, deployment, testing, continuous integration, and overall working with a team.

The job search support at Hack Reactor is second to none. We spent several days working on our resumes, iterating over them and improving them over and over again. By the time I was finished, my resume looked so much better than when I started, and I like to think that I used to have a good grasp at writing resumes. There's a sprint where we do the same for cover letters. The support continues with mock interview sessions, endless whiteboarding, and lectures on jobs search and interview strategy. I feel like the job search support at Hack Reactor is worth the price of admission alone. 

I have officially spent twenty weeks on Hack Reactor's curriculum so far - eight on the pre-course, twelve on-site. I also started the first of my twelve-week residency with the program this week. I loved my experience so much and wanted to give back to this community. I'm excited for my peers who are well into their job search and can't wait to see where they end up within these next twelve weeks.

If you've read this far and are still thinking about attending Hack Reactor, just go for it. You're going to have the best time of your life while working towards a career change.

It's extremely hard for me to fully express what sort of a difference this program has made in my life and, indeed, in the lives of people around me. 

I had my reservations early on and not every single day at Hack Reactor went smoothly. There were moments of struggle, anxiety and deep, deep self doubt. There were times when it felt outright painful, especially when combined with the fatigue and separation from loved ones.

That said, there were even more moments of pure exhilaration. You know that warm, elated feeling you get when your brain is actively engaged in the process of learning something new and exciting and wonderful? Hack Reactor was essentially 800 hours of that feeling.

I come from some programming experience. I wrote some code in high school, dabbled as a hobbyist through college and graduate school and then actually worked for a couple of years maintaining a large code base for a eComm company. In spite what amounts to several years of experience over time, it's completely dwarfed by what I learned at Hack Reactor.

Finally, in terms of tangibles - Hack Reactor isn't blowing sunshine up your stack when they tout their numbers. Those are the real deal. I've been on the job market for less than three weeks after graduation (I was in HR19), and from week 1 onward I had the problem of having more interviews than I could sanely handle. Think about that - I don't know about the rest of you, but in all the industries I've worked in, I've never once had more interviews than I could reasonably manage. After 2 and a half weeks, I have 2 amazing offers from companies I would give my front teeth to work for and likely more on the way. It still doesn't fully feel real to me.

If you get into Hack Reactor, go to Hack Reactor. Yeah, it's expensive. Yeah, it's tough to find lodging in San Francisco. I don't care, find a way.

5/5 stars, would attend again.

About me: I'm a mid-life career changer. I have a BA in Geography from Berkeley and an MBA from UT Austin. I started taking undergraduate programming classes a few years ago, thinking I'd get another Master's degree (in CS) and eventually a job as a software engineer. After a few semesters I got lucky and got an entry level job as a junior programmer. It was good experience, but the pay was WELL below average for a junior engineer and the tech stack was aging rapidly (a mix of C#/.NET, MS SQL, JS, jQuery). Even worse, I wasn't working with experienced engineers (always work with the smartest people you can find, you'll learn faster and become a better programmer) and the company was more interested in pushing new features out the door than producing high quality software.

So, after a year I started thinking about how to put my career on a different trajectory. I wanted to work with sharp engineers using the latest technology and best practices to write awesome code. I stumbled upon developer bootcamps, did some research, and decided to take a chance. I applied to Dev Bootcamp, App Academy, and Hack Reactor, all in San Francisco. The job market is starving for engineers in the Bay Area and it's by far the largest concentration (10X any other place) of engineering jobs in the country, so it seemed like the best place to be looking for a job after graduation. 

App Academy seemed like the lowest risk, because you don't pay until you land a programming job, but they turned me down. Hack Reactor was interesting because of their focus on full-stack Javascript. Most of the other schools I looked at were teaching Ruby, although there were a few that taught in Python. Javascript is on a growth trajectory right now. It's embedded as THE front end language of the Internet, and a few years ago Node.js came on the scene (server-side JS) and since then there's been an explosion of new tools and libraries enabling full-stack JS development. Anyway, I made it through the tech interview (you have to study a LOT before you even get accepted to Hack Reactor), and when they accepted me I decided to take the plunge.

I quit my job in Austin, moved to San Francisco and spent 3 months, 70-80 hours per week doing nothing but studying software engineering, Javascript, and JS-related subjects like Node.js, AngularJS, Backbone, and MongoDB. Hack Reactor's primary focus is to teach you how to be a SOFTWARE ENGINEER, Javascript is just the language they chose to teach in. You also learn core engineering concepts like data structures, algorithms and algorithmic complexity/performance, and a lot more. It was an intense learning experience. You cannot master all of the material they expose you to. You'll spend your whole career trying to do that.

In my opinion, these are the things that make Hack Reactor an excellent bootcamp.

1) People: The instructors are all experienced, highly skilled engineers. They could be making a lot more money as engineers. They are dedicated to making HR the best bootcamp in existence, and producing top-notch engineers. They worked longer hours than the students did. The students are also great. HR accepts less than 10% of applicants and they are really good at choosing students you want to be around. You're going to spend all your waking hours with these students for 3 months, so you really want them to be people you like to work with.

2) Philosophy: HR strives for continuous improvement. They take feedback from students every week and change the program every "semester" to make it better. I spoke to HR graduates from the previous year who were a little jealous because the program had grown significantly and included additional topics that weren't covered when they were students. I'm sure I'll feel the same way about the program next year when I see what HR has become in a few more cycles.

3) Job Placement: The entire second half of the program is designed to make you employable. You switch from learning concepts and building small individual projects to working on teams, building bigger projects, learning how to succeed in tech interviews, etc. By the time you get to Hiring Day, where you get to meet hiring managers from roughly 30 companies, you have a substantial GitHub portfolio, a good story to tell, and an excellent chance of landing a job. They also have an alumni program/network, and when it's time to look for your NEXT job, they help with that too. It's too early too tell, but it feels like it's going to be a long-term relationship as my career develops.

There's a lot more I could say about how awesome HR is, but this covers the highlights. I had a great experience, made some good friends, and landed a great job at a startup in SF about a month after I graduated.

Before you get into one of these bootcamps, you're on the outside looking in, reading all of the marketing material on their websites, and asking yourself "Is it really worth it? Will I get a good job after I graduate? Which school should I apply to?". HR's website states their job placement rate is 99%. That sounds too good to be true, but it's not. ALL of the students who graduated from my class found jobs within 3 months. Most of them had never worked as a software engineer before. I could not be happier with my experience at Hack Reactor and I recommend it highly.

Hack Reactor was, in a word, awesome.  I was incredibly impressed by their ability to deliver all that they promised.  Below are some of what I believe are their greatest strengths.

• Class Quality - Hack Reactor's admissions are very selective.  Everyone entering the class has a good understanding of the basics of programming.  It's not a 0-60 program.  As someone with several years of prior programming experience (though none of it professional), this made it a great fit.  No time was spent on basic concepts like loops and conditionals.
• Instructors - The lead instructors are incredibly rigorous in their teaching, and spend a lot of time refining their style.  The dedication shown was beyond that of any teacher of professor I'd had before.
• Freedom - Much of the course is spent on independent projects, and even the structured assignments are highly customizable, with lots of extra credit.  This allows students to delve deep into their favored interests, and there will always be at least one knowledgable staff member who can help.
• Job Assistance - We get a lot of practice with our interviews, and great inside tips on applications, resumes, and negotiations.  I would have been lost without all of this personal attention.

Hack Reactor was a wonderful, transformative experience, and I wouldn't be where I am today without it.

Hack reactor was am briliant fit for me... I'd done lots of programming on my own time... I took a few classes in college, but there were a lot of basics that I was missing: Algorithms, Data Structures, Big O Notation, closures, functional scope.

Hack Reactor really cemented these patterns in my mind, and I'm much more confident with my programming skills. I'm a grad student at MIT now, and I've had some of the best teachers around -- but no experience quite compares with Hack Reactor.

There are a few moments when you know your life forever changed. Hack Reactor creates one of those, sharply increasing your career trajectory and forging valuable friendships.

I applied to H/R because I knew I love to program, but wasn't satisfied with 'working my way up to software engineer over 3-5 years.' It's been the best decision I've made.

You will learn CS fundamentals, lots of frameworks, product engineering, and much more during an incredibly short time period where you'll work extremely hard.

The people who seemed to get the most from our cohort were the ones who stayed late, got drinks after, and generally bonded around the pain and euphoria of bending machines to our will.

I can't recommend Hack Reactor enough. If they accept you, go; you'll thank yourself a few short months later.

Almost 2 years ago now I in San Francisco for the life changing experience of Hack Reactor.  I had seen a post on hacker news about a new programming school.  3 months of intense learning in Javascript.  I was an IT Director and did some programming  but I knew I wanted to become a developer full time. I interviewed with the founders and I got accepted into the first class!

I was little nervous because they had never done it before. Come to find out I had nothing to worry about,  Marcus, Tony, Shawn and the other instructors were well prepared and organized. When things didn't go exactly as planned they were quick to respond and fix any problems.

The whole course design was project based we would  have a lecture, then a day of coding, code review then a refactor.  Pair programming was a great benefit to me.  Working in pairs made for increased energy as we all pushed each other forward. The material we learned was useful and we used it to build actual apps.  We created our own personal project after and that we separated into groups and created our capstone project which we showed off to employers.

I am amazed at how much we learned in such a short time.  The students were motivated, the teachers all cared about our success and taught us the skills necessary to succeed in the software development world.  I quickly got several job offers after graduation and 2 years later I am working at an amazing company with a great a team of engineers.  This is a place I wouldn't have been without Hack Reactor.,

Thank you Shawn, Marcus, Tony and all the other instructors!  Thank you for creating a place that changed my life, increased my skill set and made me immediately employable after graduation.

Hack Reactor was the single most beneficial thing I have ever done for myself. I have a Bachelor's Degree from a four year college, and I would have taken the 12 weeks spent at Hack Reactor over my four years in college in a hearbeat, even if I still had to pay the $100k+ to Hack Reactor that I paid in college tuition. 

I could wax eloquent about Hack Reactor for pages, but to keep the review short, everything everyone else has said is true. I was a huge skeptic of the metrics that Hack Rector says they keep for hiring stats, and I was already employed full-time with a family I had to take care of. Since I was offered a job two weeks before even graduating for twice what I was making before leaving to attend Hack Reactor, and pretty much all of the people who went through the program with me are getting great offers, I can say the metrics are true. 

Hack Reactor changed my life, and I am left with the feeling that I owe them more. I was worried about the tuition beforehand, since it is the most expensive program, but after going through it and seeing the changes it allowed me to make in my life, I feel like I underpaid by quite a bit.

Opportunities like this come around once in a lifetime, if you are considering it, just go for it, I can't imagine your life not being improved many times over by the knowledge and experience that you will get going through this program.

Hack Reactor was one of the most fun and intense 3 months of my life. I was there very early (class #6, which was Aug '13). I truly enjoyed it. If you want a more complete breakdown, I did a weekly blog while I was attending (http://sympatheticvibration.com/category/hack-reactor-journal/). But the short of it is, if you're gonna go to a coding school, you pretty much should aim to go to Hack Reactor, and only consider other options if you don't get in. The teachers are amazing. The students are all very smart and interesting, which really helps give energy to the room and motivate everyone. They do "sprint reflectiosn" every 2 days with students, so they can keep refining and improving the curriciulum. The stuff they're teaching you is on the cutting edge of modern web technology, and they teach it extremely well, which is why the job placement rate is 99%. Also, the salary numbers are completely accurate. I could go on, but just read the blog I wrote, because it details things much more.