Hack Reactor

Going in, I had set the parameters of my expectations somewhat strictly. I simply wanted to learn what it takes to become an employable software engineer- some who removes, rather than contributes to, technical debt.

Hack Reactor was so much more than just that.

Of course, the curriculum gave me enough experience that I could figure my way around any web development projects. The junior phase strengthened my confidence with various specific technologies through challenging sprints. The senior phase allowed me to consolidate my understanding of web frameworks + database technologies into viable products, as well as flesh out communication skills by coordinating development with peers, who at this point were working with me as partners.

But it takes much more than only technical expertise to excel in the tech industry. Hack Reactor provided networking opportunities and informative talks from experienced software engineers that grants new grads with the assurance of mentorship and community, making even life-changing transformations far less scary.

Something I deeply appreciated about the organization of the cohorts was the stimulating diversity of my peers. People truly came from all walks of life. This aspect of the program sets it apart from traditional university programs in that you are no longer immersed in your same age stratum. I was the youngest in my cohort, so I went through the program with the mindset that I'll have the most to learn from the life experiences of others. This made Hack Reactor more than just an education. It was a life experience.

I went through Hack Reactor in 2014 and had a great time back then. My original experience with the program is less relevant than the more recent reviews you see, so I want to talk about job and negotiation help that I received 6 years after graduating during my third job search in 2020.

I received offers from Amazon, Box, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Square and was having a hard time making the final call between joining Facebook and Netflix. I'd been discussing my decision in the alumni Slack group, and Marlene, the alumni director, reached out to me to see if she could help. It's definitely nice to have a total pro on your side when you're talking with recruiters. Marlene gave me some invaluable advice over the final week of my negotiations and helped me seal the deal with Netflix. Before all of this, I gained huge benefits by practicing for interviews with members of the alumni community. I can't think of a better group to be in to get such a good pulse on working in the tech industry.

All this to say, Hack Reactor isn't just a one-time thing you go through for a few months and forget about. There's a huge and growing community of people who want to help you throughout your career, and every year, I'm more glad I joined this community.

I have done a lot of educational programs, but this was by far the best educational experience of my life. The program is so hands on and concrete--there's no extra stuff that you can just coast through. Instead, you learn actionable skills and apply them immediately on projects. Staff is brilliant and very good at what they do, curriculum is well-tailored for anyone trying to get into the coding field, and facility was clean and well-maintained. You graduate with a body of work that you can use to start applying immediately. It's all full-stack JavaScript, which is good for applying to start-ups and more "high tech" (Google, Paypal, etc) but they teach you fundamentals well enough that I actually ended up with two Java developer job offers in the middle of the pandemic! Best part of the program is the people though--just incredible and smart people who you get really close to. Can't wait to see what they end up doing!

I'm halfway through the remote part time program and I am 100% happy with my decision to go to Hack Reactor. The staff are fantastic, the curriculum is challenging, you learn rapidly, and fellow students are great. The culture and community aspects are even better than I could have hoped for. The staff are equal parts demanding and encouraging. The organization is constantly tweaking the curriculum and teaching methods to improve student outcomes. Above all they genuinely care about each and every student and are so supportive. 

That said... it's HARD. Even if you are a working dev who wants to level up your skills I promise it will be challenging. I came into HR as a beginner so for me, meeting the basic minimum requirements is plenty hard. But each project has advanced content and if that isn't enough there's another section called 'nightmare mode.'  The staff will make sure you are being challenged - but for most of us the basic curriculum and speed at which you need to finish things is plenty.

I love the part-time program. Some of my cohort mates have kids. Some are working full time. Some are managing both. The part-time program is the exact same curriculum as the full time program but instead of doing it over 13 weeks you do it over 36 weeks. There are 20 hours per week of time required. So you can keep your job and do Hack Reactor at the same time. Personally I'm not working while going through Hack Reactor. I'm an older student (almost 50) and having more time for my brain to absorb content is helpful. 

HR helps prep you for coding interviews by requiring you to practice toy problems. For full time folks you'll do one every day. For part-time you usually do two per week. By the time you finish HR you will have done 60 of them. So they build in interview prep into the entire program. 

The curriculum is frequently frustrating but I have to admit it's absolutely necessary. Having studied the best way to teach coding, HR has learned that it's through doing not lectures. There are some lectures which will give you a base to jump off of but every new project you're jumping in the deep end. So frequently students feel frustrated. But it's also in that frustration that you learn. There are plenty of tools to help you get unstuck and they teach you to use them. You can schedule office hours with staff or call the help desk when you're stuck. Help desk is great. It's staffed by recent graduates who just went through what you are going through. They are trained to not take away too much of your pain (since that's where learning happens) but rather to help point you to documentation or ask you questions about your code. 'What is line 12 doing? Why do you think that? Have you checked to make sure it's really doing what you think it's doing?' etc. You also do pair programming in most of the junior phase (first half of the program). This brings its own frustrations but also joys as you work with a partner to complete a project. You learn how to work with people who think differently than you do. 

I was skeptical at first about the remote program. In fact I went to the in person program in Seattle in Februray 2020 to start. After three days I decided I needed to bone up on my JS skills more. So I rolled back to the next cohort. Then COVID hit and my housing situation changed and I was no longer in commutable distance for the in person program (and they ended up having to go online b/c of Covid anyhow). Well I have met some amazing friends in the remote program and I think it's just as good as the in-person program. I probably would not have believed that if I hadn't experienced it for myself. There are some big pros too - like you don't have to commute so the time you save packing food, traveling, etc can be used for sleeping. This is especially important if you do the full time program. And you really do get to know people, not just from your cohort but from the 5 other remote part time cohorts as well - watching people from more senior cohorts graduate and get six figure jobs is inspiring.  

HR's #1 goal is to turn out autonomous engineers and I believe they do a great job. Is it the best bootcamp out there? I think without going to more than one bootcamp it's hard to say. But is it a top, even elite, bootcamp? Absolutely.

If you're already working in tech, and are concerned about the opportunity cost of taking time off to deepen your technical expertise, I suggest that you take the leap. Prior to Hack Reactor I worked in a traditional software sales role (in the marketing automation space). I chose to go to hack reactor primarily out of curiosity, and looking back 5 years, I am happy to say that the ROI was definitely there for me. 

Coming out of Hack Reactor, I did a short stint as a programmer at a small startup and then went on to work at GitHub as a Solutions / Sales Engineer. I've now been at GitHub for the last 4 years, and Hack Reactor was an amazing launching point for me to develop the skills and curiosity that I use in my job every day. 

The community I gained from Hack Reactor has also been huge for me — I still talk to several of my fellow students almost daily. It's been a great resource for continued learning and idea-sharing. I'd like to also give a special shoutout to Marlene Fong, who is a cornerstone of the Hack Reactor community. Marlene helped me with my two job hunts coming out of Hack Reactor and has been there as a great alumni resource for negotiating promotions / other offers. 

To truly provide my experience, let me start with some context: I attended another boot camp and felt like I was pumped out of a factory. I was able to obtain a job but I was creating personal technical debt. I was barely getting by with the skills I gained but with no foundational knowledge. It was creating a huge stressor in my life that I had decided to attend another boot camp. An advanced boot camp. I truly mean it.

There is an unofficial motto that I heard about Hack Reactor. "We don't take you from 0 - 60, we take you from 20 - 120."  Truer words hasn't been spoken about a coding boot camp. From the moment you reach out to the program to the day you graduate, you are familiarize with the process of applying and working within the software engineer industry. As a veteran, I was able to use the newly introduced Vet Tech, which saved me from using my own funds and my GI Bill. To be recognized by the VA as a prestigious school definitely reassured me, as well.

Prior to the being admitted to the school, there is a prep course, a technical interview and pre-course work. The school shows that they are looking for a high-level of commitment and allows like-minded students to be together for 13 weeks.

The students' dedication is definitely tested with its' 6 days a week and 11 hour days. The course is split into two phases: junior and senior. In the junior phase, it lays down exceptional, foundational knowledge regarding data structures and algorithms that you will utilize for the rest of your career. Senior phases does not just focuses on entry-level skills but it covers senior-level skills from infrastructure to operations and system design. The curriculum adapts to the current market needs understanding that technology changes frequently while maintaining the core foundational classes..

The instructors are the same instructors that teach every cohort with its' rigorous curriculum, which establishes a strong baseline amongst graduates. It allows collaboration/mentorship across multiple cohort graduates, creating a vibrant and progressive alumni community. For veterans, At one point of the course, there were administrative problems with the VA and I was concerned about my enrollment... One of my instructors took on the additional responsibility as the company VA liaison to ensure I continued my education. Wouldn't you want to be in a community like this? (Thank you if you're reading this!) Even today, I can reach out to my instructors and they have never turned down an opportunity to assist me.

The alumni community is active, all the time. There are topics about forming study groups to re-solidify their base knowledge to prepare for an interview, collaborate on a new technology such as AI or ML, or even just network for happy hour. I may not have met a lot of them but I know they are hard working, smart individuals just from the fact that they've passed the assessment to be admitted into the course, in the first place.

I put N/A for job assistance because I was able to secure a job during my senior phase with the new added knowledge from Hack Reactor. Today, we are right at the 6 month mark from graduation and we are at 95% employment rate as software engineers. In my previous boot camp, it has been a year out and only half were employed and out of those half, majority were not employed as software engineers. 

I don't regret taking another 3 months to attend Hack Reactor. It was well worth the investment. Make the right choice, if you are reading this as prospective student!

I graduated from Hack Reactor in late January 2020. For context for this review, I came into the program with 8 years of work experience in a STEM field. But basically no code experience outside one intro class in college a decade prior. My classmates had a large spectrum of past experience, from those with months or years of exposure to people without college degrees who had never coded before.

Curriculum: The curriculum is broken down into two halves - "junior" and "senior". In the "junior" half, we pair-programmed in 2-day sprints. Looking back, I think the topics of the sprints were spot-on for learning the important topics in the job market. The structure of the sprints also emphasized the right mindset - figuring things out yourself (being autonomous without spoonfed instructions/answers) and working collaboratively with a partner. On the "senior" side, we worked on 3 meaty projects that served as most people's resume centerpieces upon graduation.

Instructors: The instruction in the program included Zoom conferences by very experienced senior staff that we did not interact with outside of those lectures, as well as occasional workshops by the cohort's Technical Mentor(s) who were the assigned staff for our cohort. I found most of the Zoom lectures to be high quality though I found the electronic format less effective than in-person could have been. The cohort staff were supportive and really cared about students' success, but the philosophy of the bootcamp was to learn things on your own, so while I learned some from the cohort staff, it didn't become a centerpiece of my experience. I actually felt like a lot of learning was through interacting with my peers. So I would give 5 stars to our wonderful, hardworking staff but 4 stars for the program structure which I felt lacked direct interface with senior technical experts that could provide code review feedback (our cohort staff were recent graduates of the program and very sharp but lacked the battle scars to convey best practices from years of coding in industry).

Job Assistance: They will not get you a job. That will be on you. But they will provide lots of support in the form of a job coach, support group, and active Slack community that posts resources and word-of-mouth job postings. The job hunt was grueling and in my opinion, in some ways harder than the program itself, because there were so many factors that were more about luck and timing than skill, and especially exacerbated due to the exceptional circumstances of trying to find a job amidst the COVID-19 global pandemic (hiring freezes, a flooded candidate pool due to recent layoffs, fully remote processes negating hard-earned whiteboarding practice/skills).

Overall Experience: Overall, Hack Reactor was a great way to learn all I needed to pivot into Software Engineering. I personally would not have been able to get to where I am now without it. And one of the best parts for me was meeting a group of new lifelong friends.

I recently attended the Hack Reactor Extended Immersive program in the Fall of 2019. (HRR41) Prior to this, I have been and still am a professional musician and teacher. Originally I was set to attend the onsite program in Los Angeles, but the commute was rough and I had already met some awesome people in the initial extended portion who were doing remote, so I took the plunge. I decided quite late and the cohort was already full, but the remote team was willing to accept me. I met the counselor, Annah, and right away I knew I had made a good decision. She was so welcoming along with the whole team and I felt like I was in good hands. When we met Robin, the lead tech mentor, we all were immediately blown away. This guy is smart. He doesn't just know code. He knows right away the weaknesses in YOUR code. He knows how to push you to learn the hard parts that you may be struggling with. In this way, the program felt very tailored to ME. In addition, Annah was right there to push me on my soft skills. I tend to be a perfectionist, and she made me realize that coding can be a challenge, but it is about the long haul. She taught me to pace myself and to keep calm and centered. Hack Reactor is not an easy program. But if you find you have a passion for coding, or just find it fun, you can succeed. In addition, the career services are amazing at Hack Reactor. I consider myself to be a self-motivated learner, but I would never have had the confidence to enter the field if not for this amazing part of the program. Shout out to Lena, she is so amazing. She helped with my resume, confidence, and gives you the tools to succeed in your job search. She really imparted a "make them say no" approach which I believe helped me land my first job. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a coding challenge for a position at Amazon Game Studios. Immediately it felt like a Hack Reactor sprint, and even though I didn't really know how to start, the feeling was familiar. I worked hard, got through the interview process, and ultimately got the position. It has been such a rewarding career and I love what I get to do for a living. If you have a passion for coding and are considering a boot camp, Hack Reactor is amazing. It literally changed my life. Big thank you to Robin, Annah, Lena, and Hack Reactor for helping me reach my goals.

If you are looking to break into Silicon Valley, Hack Reactor is a great way to do it. 
You master JavaScript, learn how to best work as a team and deep dive into data structures/algorithms to pass tough interview processes. On top of that, Hack Reactor takes many hard-working, dedicated students, so the connections you make along can be even more valuable than the coursework.
Once you graduate, the school just doesn’t forget about you. Hack Reactor has an excellent Alumni Director in Marlene Fong, who stays with each student the entire way in finding employment. Just wish I didn’t take this long to say thank you to her, because she and the school overall made unbelievable difference to the direction of my career. 
Keep up the great work.

Simply put, Hack Reactor's Software Engineering Immersive program in Seattle in my opinion was and still is the best bootcamp out there.  After speaking with numerous grads and students from other bootcamps in the area I feel absolutely comfortable in saying that it's curriculum provides a far more in-depth study of both fundamental CS concepts as well as work on software engineering projects in the senior phase actually mimic real on-the-job engineering work.  This program requires you to actually to work in an agile-like environment implementing full-stack core concepts on a daily basis instead of just being told about them, which may not seem like a difference between other schools but I have yet to see another program that works this way.

I will put in some words of warning however, that this program is not a suitable option for everyone who is deciding to attend a bootcamp to switch careers or brush up and hone their previously existing skills.  The coursework is rigorous and seemingly never-ending.  On one hand you cover so much material this way that it puts you in a fantastic position for your job search, but on the other, no matter your skill level, it does require 100% percent of your attention and focus for the entire time that you spend in the program.  You will have late nights.  You will code through your lunches.  You will work an absolute bare minimum of 60 hour weeks (I have never seen a student across several cohorts who spent that little time each and every week.). You will be required to pick up and retain core concepts at lightning speed.  You will be overwhelmed.  You will struggle.  But, you will ultimately pick up so much more information this way.

What truly separates this particular bootcamp from the rest besides the material covered and the manner of the course's educational model is the staff, specifically for when I was in the program - the tech mentor/campus lead.  Because of the low acceptance rate and the program's relative infancy physically located in Seattle, class sizes are low which allows for much more interaction with the on-campus instructor.  Each location exercises a considerable amount of autonomy in coursework across all of Hack Reactor's campuses and I believe that the Seattle campus truly provides a better overall experience because of it's instructor's ability to directly interface with students far more often than on other campuses.

The only minor quibble that I have with the program is that while the career services instructor is very accessible, and a fantastic resource, they inherited a broken system from the previous program that Hack Reactor took over relatively recently that they are in the process of constantly adding to. The networking in both the physical location as well as through a nation-wide alumni is great though.  Many of the people that I met through the Seattle campus have gone on to work with the likes of some of the big players in the industry (Amazon, IBM, Atlassian, etc..) while others have gone on to smaller companies (with some eye-popping salaries.)

If you are serious about putting in any amount of work required to switch careers, are confident in your ability to completely dedicate several months of life to learning the skills required to actually navigate a very competitive job market, and have a detail-oriented, disciplined, but creative analytical mind, then this program is for you.  If you do not match up to each and every one of those criteria, or if you are looking for a program that allows you to have a balance with your personal life then I would suggest to look at other options.

For context, I graduated in 2015 and I realize the school, curriculum, and even the industry have changed since then.

Hack Reactor radically shifted the entire trajectory of my life in the most positive way. I was able to go from being a "failed" artist to beginning my career as a Software Engineer. I look back on the time spent there as one of the pivotal moments in my life. 

I had expected the program to be challenging, but honestly, nothing prepared me for how much of a whirlwind of work it would be. It was easily the most challenging educational endeavor i'd ever taken on. While it easily pushed me to my limits, being surrounded by equally motivated, driven, and enjoyable cohort-mates helped me tackle the challenges presented by the curriculum. 

More importantly, the ongoing career support through the Alumni program, facilitated by the one and only Marlene, has been an absolute game changer that continues to pay dividends all these years later. Marlene isn't just one of the most caring and compassionate people I know, she has more experience helping people prepare and secure jobs than anyone I have ever met. Every question, concern, and anxiety that surrounds the job search are deftly answered by her and often with suggestions of entirely different approaches I never would have imagined on my own. 

Hack Reactor gave me an opportunity and a career I would have never imagined for myself and I will forever be indebted to the program for what it provided me.

Hack Reactor was unlike any education I've experienced: it teaches you autonomous learning and you still get support after graduating!

Hack Reactor provided the foundational work and community necessary to learn at a faster rate than before. When picking up a breadth of technical concepts in a short period of time, this is key! 

The meta-skill of learning that will quickly outpace the utility of whatever library/technology you learn when you attend.

Post-graduation support! I've always gotten help from Marlene whenever transitioning roles. More than that, she knows and anticipates your needs on the job search. Whether it's connecting you for algorithm practice, finding the right warm intro to make, or giving you the right negotiation move, she is out to guide you for career success.

Consider how many offer letters she has helped secure and negotiate: she's becoming AlphaGo for job market/support.

Hack Reactor is such a unique and structured immersive course. I came from Hospitality which was not STEM major. From the beginning, they help us out how to start with programming but as we go further, they guide us but let us know how to find the resources by ourselves and search the materials to solve real-world problems. Daily data structure & algorithm toy problems were extremely helpful as well. Last but not least, my favorite part was the active help from the HR. It was my first job searching but I knew that I could always ask people at HR to discuss how to make my resume more competitive and how to keep working on projects and interview preps during my job searching. Even after the first job searching, I still keep in touch with the people I met from HR and getting advise which is amazing. I highly recommend Hack Reactor for people who has passionates in tech but have not get a chance to start it yet.

I wanted a bootcamp that offered a rigorous program that would teach me the skills and knowledge needed to become a software engineer.  Hack Reactor definitely delivered that. Since the program is only three months, there were many things I didn't learn during the bootcamp and had to learn on the job. However, Hack Reactor taught me how to learn and problem solve on my own, which, I believe, is the main benefit of attending. In addition to teaching the technical skills and knowledge, they provide great career services that prepare and support students for and during their job searches. Marlene supported me a lot during the negotiation process for both my first and second job. She coached and advised me on what to say and how to counter, which was super helpful since I had never negotiated an offer before. Lastly, Hack Reactor has a large alumni network and community, which is very beneficial for career opportunities or advice.

Hack Reactor was an exhausting but wonderful three months. I really enjoyed the semi-structured aspect of the sprints (first half) and being able to dig deeper into the things that were interesting to me. The pairing was useful as well - I frequently learned tips from my classmates and was able to reinforce my own understanding by having to talk about code. The second half was much less structured, and while I enjoyed it a little less, it was a great opportunity to practice developing in the same repo with other engineers and tackle more complex problems. I found the interview prep that occured throughout the program to be well aligned to interviews that I experienced in the job search.

While Hack Reactor didn't teach me everything I needed to know to do my eventual job, it provided great foundational knowledge that I was able to use to learn other things, and in a shorter timeframe than I would have been able to do all by myself. The things I use most today (5 years later!) are the deep dive into JS internals and the debugging process.

Instructors were super smart and were great at breaking down concepts. I'd happily take more courses from Marcus or Fred in the future. The career search staff was energetic and invested in our success, and while most of the staff from my cohort are no longer with the company, Marlene (who does alumni job support) is awesome - no-nonsense, caring, and focused.

Overall, if I could go back and time and do it again, I would. :)

I graduated from HRSF in September 2018, right as they were acquired by Galvanize. 3.5 stars. It was an overall rewarding experience and I don't regret it, but my general opinion is that the experience left a lot to be desired. I'll spare you the details of what you hear over and over (hard work, cameraderie, life changer) and provide you with my unabashed opinion on what was once considered SF's premier immersive program.

My Hack Reactor journey took place over an entire year. I started the part time structured study program in Jan, got admitted into the April cohort, attended for a week and was (rightfully) deemed underprepared, attended the HREXT program for 6 weeks and got readmitted in June, graduated in Sept, and held fellowship that finished up in Dec. I was fortunate enough to have an entire year (plus months of job searching) where I could dedicate my time and energy in going from someone who enjoyed programming but had little knowledge outside of online free courses to a graduate. So my first caveat is that your journey may be longer than just 3 months; be aware of your learning pace and take your time, because it's better to do that than get by with the "C's get degrees" mindset.

That said, one great thing about this program is that they won't let you through the gates unless they deem you to be ready (in the beginning, anyway. Will get into more details later). They were able to catch the fact that I was going to fall through the cracks within the first 3 days(!) and suggested that I enroll in the HREXT program to get back on track for the next cohort. I am SO thankful for that, because I knew that I have a high learning curve and still felt shaky with the fundamentals when they admitted me--I was pretty sure that I could catch up by putting in extra effort and extra hours, and they gave me a chance to prove it.

The biggest flaw I've found with the program is the unrealistic amounts of autonomy that are expected from you in the program, especially in the second half. When you're a junior engineer at a company, you are usually not expected to "know everything" and will generally receive some sort of mentorship beyond "just Google it". Yes, it's true that HR wants to emphasize becoming self-sufficient as an engineer and I totally support that, but some things just can't be Googled without priming. Things like bugs, error messages, function signatures, etc should definitely be independently researched, but certain things (design patterns, best practices) are much harder to research. One example: business logic should generally not be stored on the client; this idea didn't come naturally to me, and as a new engineer, I wouldn't even have known the term "business logic." Since we had such a high emphasis on client-side work, it seemed logical to me to have the client handle it, and my group mates and I didn't even realize that it could be handled by the server! It wasn't until I had friends who work in the field who code reviewed me and pointed out this antipattern. The TL;DR is, by the second half, no one looks at your code besides your equally inexperienced teammates, and no one will inform you if your code is full of antipatterns, inefficiencies, and other bad practices that aren't intuitively searchable.

Lastly, I want to say that your cohort-mates make all the difference. As I mentioned, I got the rare experience of being in two cohorts (granted, only a week with the first one), but the difference was night and day. My first cohort was <25 people, mature, and most people were considerate. The cohort I graduated with was a wreck. I really wanted to avoid the summer cohorts because I knew it would be flooded with college students on summer break, and I was right to make that judgment. It was ~40 people, rowdy/loud, and ridiculously difficult to learn. People were terribly behaved and I felt bad for our cohort lead, who had to spend time disciplining our cohort as if it were middle school detention. Maybe half the students were serious about working and learning, the other half were being outwardly inconsiderate, playing DoTA, chatting on the phone, vaping indoors, leetcoding, and doing phone interviews. I don't care that these people were doing other things, but I DO care that I spent 18K and was being bothered left and right by people who don't realize that they're in a common space and lack the courtesy to not be disruptive to others who actually take their work seriously. Imagine if you were in a college lecture next to someone blabbering on the phone and you'll get the picture. If you think I'm some ol' curmudgeon...I was 23 at the time.

Lastly, job searching. I knew I would take longer than average to find a job because of my low confidence and learning curve, but I promise if you put in the effort it can be done! The job search behavioral tip lectures were helpful, but I didn't really get much out of connecting with my career coach after graduation. The micromanaging, constant checkin thing just didn't work out for me and I am glad my coach respected my decision to go at it at my own pace. I think they focused too much on the "behavioral" side (seriously, there's a calendar for how you should spend your job search days) and not enough on the technical aspects of getting a job (aka what really counts).

I would like to give a shoutout to the HREXT team though--that program was AMAZING. You'll learn and get actual support and encouragementand actual advice on coding cleanly and idiomatically rather than some hand-wavy non-answer.

Background about me: taken HS programming course, BS+MS in Biotechnology, some college work. Shy, introverted, low confidence, not particularly well inclined toward math/engineering and slower learner, but love learning about technology and algorithms nonetheless.

I started the Hack Reactor prep program (then called Structured Study Program) in November of 2018, entered the full-time immersive in February of 2019, graduated that May, stayed on in an associate instructor role until August, and started my position as a full stack engineer in September. I hadn't touched or read about code before November of 2018 (unless a few lines of HTML in middle school counts). If your plan is to put everything else on pause and give the program and job search 100% of you, it works.

I think the critical pieces to the success of the program are: its emphasis on both hard and soft skills, its focus on community-building around shared goals, and the pivot into career readiness and support as students approach graduation. 

Students spend as much time and energy leveling up their ability to communicate and collaborate with others, verbalize their technical work with accessible language, and iterate on their workflow and project planning as they do on leveling up their technical abilities. This is huge for both nailing technical interviews and performing on the job as a software engineer (which are two different beasts). It's not enough to be great at coding or communicating; both are necessary. Students are guided by technical instructors and counselors, each of who are passionate, dedicated people who genuinely care about their students' success. They do a great job of fostering a community, which certainly helps with motivation/morale, but also improves technical growth through collaborative approaches to the material. It also translates to professional networking. You're likely to meet amazing people going through such a rigorous program that places such high value on people skills. I certainly did.

The curriculum is iterative; both students and instructors are in tight feedback loops, and schedules and assignments are flexible to match the needs of students and industry trends. Side note: I think it's important to view the curriculum as a tool rather than a transformative environment-- you won't move through it and level up into a software engineer. You'll use it, along with Google and your peers, to figure out how to solve a million tiny problems and a few big ones. It (the curriculum) has some shortcomings, but I think the overall system works, and I think it serves its purpose. 

The career support is huge. The career counselors meet with you regularly after graduation to coach you through the job hunt, working on/vetting doc's like resumes, covers, emails, etc., and practicing interview talking points, compensation deflection and negotiation, and general mental model/strategy work. I found this critical to my success in the job hunt. Special shout out to Lena Johnson in the Remote campus.

Overall, the program provides what it says it will: the environment, tools, resources, and people for you to figure out how to software engineer.  

I graduated from Hack Reactor in May 2015 from the San Francisco location. At the time, I had just graduated from undergrad with a non-technical major and a CS minor.

 

Hack Reactor was one of the best decisions I've ever made. In my college CS classes, other students just wanted to get an A whether they understood the material or not. At HR, there are no grades and the students genuinely want to learn and help each other. It's such a collaborative learning experience that it changed my entire perspective on what education could be like. To give a quick example, I took a semester of Data Structures in college, then spent one week learning data structures at HR and thought "is this what they were talking about all semester in college?" HR has figured out how to teach what you need to know.

 

After graduation, I became a Hacker in Residence (basically a teaching assistant) and taught a few pre-camp classes (for students who have never coded before and want to eventually apply to the program) because I appreciated so much what the community did for me and I wanted to give back.

 

Even years after graduation, I still get help from HR when applying to new jobs and negotiating salaries. Shout-out to Marlene Fong, an awesome career coach/alumni director who is incredibly supportive and super helpful for alumni figuring out their careers. This is the kind of support that even a university (which is many times more expensive!) will not give you.

 

Is it possible for you to save your money and learn all of this for free? Of course. Are you going to know what to study, in which order, and have an entire network of other motivated learners by your side? No, and that's exactly what HR gives you. Will you learn the same amount as you would in a typical 4-year degree? Of course not, but you will be able to apply it better. CS degrees teach you theory, HR teaches you application, which is much more important for a job.

 

Overall, I highly recommend this program. It's a life-changing experience.

 

I was a chef with only a hobby level of experience with computers and coding, decided to take the course after hearing about it from a friend. Easily one of the better decisions I've made in my life. I'm now employed as a Software Engineer in New Hampshire making astronomically more money than I ever have in my life and loving my job. Would recommend this course to anyone (which I do just about every time someone brings up hating their job or not making enough money).

pros:
  -no fire and forget curriculum where you just get assignments and sit on a computer alone
  -emulates a real work environment well
  -great staff
  -rapid pace
  -blends autonomy with accountability and social engagement
  -support is available but not as a crutch
cons:
  -I actually found this to be a pro but the pace is breakneck and this program is not for the faint of heart, this lends to the program's gravitas.