Holberton School

My wife and I moved from Indiana to California so I could be part of the first 'batch' at Holberton School. I had a strong interest in moving from a help desk role to software engineering. However, I needed to go from tinkering around with code skills I had learned on my own to being able to produce production-ready code. Holberton offered the chance to connect with and learn from mentors working for companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Salesforce. I took the leap, and I can honestly say that I have not regretted taking that risk. Holberton provides challenging projects whether you are just getting started or have learned a thing or two on your own. The goal is to learn how to learn with other students in a fast-paced, growing industry. Because of the experience I gained at the school, I work for a major tech company in Silicon Valley. It's crazy to think how much has changed in just under two years.

TL;DR Holberton is an incredibly rewarding but also challenging experience that will whip you into a full-stack software engineer in a short amount of time.

I was in the very first batch of Holberton students, and right from the beginning, it was obvious that the school was something special. From the physical space, to the payment model, to their commitment to diversity and inclusion, everything about it is designed to fulfill its mission of creating high-quality software engineers to fill the serious need in the industry.
To do that, they've done away with the fluff that fills 4-year university programs, teachers, and lectures and created a jam-packed project-based curriculum that forces you to really engage with the ideas and topics you'll actually need on the job. And the curriculum stays relevant - the staff is always taking feedback from students and mentors to see what's working, what's not, what new industry tools and standards are, so that students are really getting the most from their time.
The network of mentors is another distinguishing feature. Guidance from people actually working in the tech industry is invaluable, and Holberton students get it in spades. Some mentors are active through online chat, some give presentations or workshops on their topics of expertise, and others come to the school just to help out. In any case, students get to ask questions and start building those connections right off the bat.

The school environment is also really great. The staff is super supportive, and their passion for the school and students is obvious in everything they do. And the other students, from your batch or the ones above, are possibly your greatest resource. Peer learning is one of the most important aspects of Holberton, and just being surrounded by what's become the Holberton family makes the entire experience that much more enjoyable and rewarding.

Overall, Holberton is a really excellent choice if you're self-motivated, hard-working, and looking to jump into the tech industry, but need a little extra guidance and support. I was able to find a full-time job after only 8 months in the program, so clearly they're doing something right :)

I looked for a very long time to find a program with the  curriculum, community, and culture that would result in long term success. Although I've only just started my experience, I have had both excellent results and resource access.

The staff, mentors, and community push you to always do better while extending the support and tools needed. They have somehow found a powerful balance between empowering students to be self-reliant within a collaborative, cooperative context. 

I can't believe how much I've learned already; more than that, how I have started to perceive problems throughout my life and day differently on account of the immersive nature of the program and it's culture. 

The student body is wonderfully diverse, creative, and bright with a lot of expertise to share - tech related or otherwise - and the mentor pool and support is impressive/authentic. I've never had so many people professionally extend help, encouragement, and time.

It is not a program suited for someone that wants to coast along or "get by"; however, if you want to learn to think critically, professionally, and creatively as a software engineer, I couldn't imagine a better environment in which to do that. 

One of the best parts?! If you have questions or curiosity, just reach out to them. They will be honest and straightforward as you find the right fit in your journey into tech. I, for one, was surprised at how candid they all were during my application and interview process; it was refreshing given a lot of manufactured answers I had received from other programs. 

Nutshell: if you are serious about wanting to learn how to learn, and if you want to live, breath, and dream tech....consider Holberton. 

 

Holberton School offers an intense experience that is ideal for people who are truly motivated and excited by technology. The curriculum will give you a deep understanding of computer languages and computer systems as a whole, relative to a "traditional" bootcamp. For example, your foundation of learning will be through writing programs in C. Only once understanding is established there will you start higher-level languages like Python or JavaScript. This approach was something that attracted me to the school initially—I wanted to learn as much of the foundations as possible rather than gain an understanding of one particular language or framework. In my experience, Holberton delivered on that promise and I was really happy with what they offered. The important thing to note here is that you will have to be internally motivated to take advantage of all that Holberton is offering because the curriculum requires each person to give their energy and manage their own time and learning—there are no classes here! That being said, it much more closely resembles a real-world working situation where you, as an individual, need to find ways to manage your work projects and energy. 

The job assistance and job preparation that I saw here was phenominal. Having come from a conventional four-year university that had its own department for job placement, I thought Holberton was way more effective. If you are hoping that attending this school will lead to a job, the work and effort that you invest here will definitely pay off.

I've been lucky to be a part of the first experimental batch of Holberton school. I had some previous programming experience, but not enough to pursue a career in coding, and certainly not enough to fall in love with programming.

 

As someone who has been passionate about coding and how computers actually work, I've found that the problem with learning on your own is not that there is no information out there -- the problem is that there is too much information. There are so many resources that it becomes difficult to assess what you need to know. Holberton School has surprised me in cutting through the noise.

 

From the start, the founders of this program have gotten the fundamentals right: enforcing good learning practices and coding habits. I think it's these fundamentals that make this program unlike anything else out there.

 

While I personally can speak more to the low-level programming track, my personal experience has allowed me to form a few theories as to why this program is so successful. In my opinion, here are the few key features that I think differentiate the Holberton program:

 

First, it has a structured learning approach: it tests you and ensures that you are actually learning, as opposed to coding things you don’t thoroughly understand. As soon as your code is being reviewed, the faculty goes to very great lengths to push your code to the limits and find a way to break it. Evidence of your code not being perfect could be evidence of you not learning. Double pointers? INT_MIN / INT_MAX edge cases? If there is a hole in your understanding, it is the goal of the faculty to find it -- and they will create checks and test cases that will fail when running checks against your code. I think this is a big reason why I personally never felt bored and why I never felt unchallenged through this program, even when I pushed to learn more.

 

Second, I was never challenged so much that I felt that I couldn't overcome each challenge. Even someone without experience can learn from what happens in memory as your code gets compiled by the GCC compiler on a Linux kernel. The teaching assumes no background in CS whatsoever, and yet, supports you with challenges at the more advanced levels of depth that you can get (there are optional “more advanced” tasks, that have the full support of the faculty). How the school has managed to strike this delicate balance  -- I don't know. But I think it has something to do with their strong culture of learning, which I think is their third strong point.

 

The school has a very strong culture of learning, and the way I see it, I think it is due to its spirit of effective communication and cooperation with your peers, coupled with very strong learning fundamentals. These fundamentals include: "don't write any code you don't understand”; “don’t write any code your peers won’t understand”; “write code in a way that your future self will understand”; “understand what you are doing first, and then code later”; “comment your code”; “keep your functions short”; “your code should follow a certain style” (they've even automated a surprisingly robust style code checker -- codenamed "Betty", named after Betty Holberton -- that enforces good program structure and checks to make sure your C code doesn't become a whole mess!)

 

Fourth, depending on how you look at it, this one can be seen as a con, or as a pro, of the program: the program is young. This means that there can sometimes be minor errors / typos, and other inconsistencies in the tasks and projects. If you decide to look at whether the program and its curriculum is in its "final" form, you will not find that here. At least as of this writing, the curriculum is the aggregate of all the project assignments, and the solutions that its students post on GitHub. While the curriculum is not formally defined, in my opinion, the faculty more than makes up for this; the tasks, the projects, and the learning materials iterate and get more advanced based on feedback from the students. This means that there is a very rapid feedback loop; it is common for projects to get clarified or updated in real time as you work on them (the faculty always notifies you of these changes on Slack though). In fact, you could argue that the culture at Holberton is that there is no "final" form -- learning evolves. I guess it is up to each individual to decide if this is a con or a pro. In my personal practical learning experience, this has been very much a pro.

 

And fifth, for the last thing, and perhaps also one of the most important, this program teaches you how to learn. How to ask for help. What kinds of questions are “Google-able”. How to look something up without knowing the answer. It gives you that intuition somehow. There is so much to write that I think that it will not be possible for me to cover everything in this review, but I can definitely tell you that this program successfully and effectively tailors education to each student’s background and learning style. In short, this culture of learning has made me fall in love with programming.

 

To sum it all up in a nutshell, this program aims to give you the learning experience you need to start a career in Computer Science. It my experience so far, it has exceeded my expectations.

Two years may seem like an eternity, but the first few months have raced by in a flurry of challenging learning experiences that were not just about software and the curriculum set by the founders, but were also personal. I am not the person I was when I started at Holberton School.

Four months ago I was a novice, working alone in my house and struggling to transform online tutorials into real World projects. Today I am surrounded by people on a similar journey, belonging to a class of peers whose collaboration & camaraderie makes learning an enjoyable process.

It is not without its challenges. You have to work hard and study hard and allow yourself to go through the process of growing into your skills. 'Growing pains' are not called pains for nothing. However, because there is so much support from mentors who are industry professionals, we are finding success in our different fields of interest.

Holberton School sometimes also feels like a startup because we're all invested in the success of the school. We're involved in marketing, dev-ops, new innovative projects for the school that are outside the curriculum, and building the community at large.

The idea of becoming a full-stack software engineer can be daunting, and with technology racing at break neck speed, we all worry that our skills will be obsolete in a few years. This is the reason why Holberton School is the investment you want to make. Learning how to learn - a skill that will take you far into an uncertain future.

The Holberton School Curriculum is unique.  It s great alternative for Bootcamps ( quite short, and focused on only one technology) and CS College (often too much theoretical, not industry oriented). They offer a 2 year program (9 months on site in SF, then 6 months internship and finally 9 months remote) to trained the next generation of software engineers.

The education is project based, there are no formal teachers.  But the students and the team are much closer because there is only 30 students per batch and the projects are peer-reviewed. Moreover they offer something unique: a very strong community of industry experts. Many projects and Meet-ups are given by mentors, giving technical but also professional advices to the students. 

This program is not free but the students only have to pay the tuition after the 2 years (after having a job). The mission of the school is clear: allow anyone to become a professional software developer whatever his or her background. It is not a light statement: the three founders of the Holberton School are very driven and have created a great program to help everyone achieve their goal.

I am currently a student at Holberton School. Holberton is a full-stack software engineering school. The aim of the school is to emulate the workplace as much as possible to ready us for careers in software engineering. The space is set up like a startup - one main open space that makes collaboration easy and accessible. Everything is project based - allowing us to get a feel for what its like to work with deadlines. We are given limited guidance which forces us to use our resources, work with each other, and ultimately learn how to learn. This industry changes so quickly, it is no longer sufficient to learn a single langue or framework. We need to be agile and if we learn the fundamentals, new technologies that come along will be easy to pick up. 

 

The founders are honestly one of my favorite parts of this school. They are hard working and dedicated to this place. Each one of them has come from reputable companies like Apple, Linkedin, and Docker. They come with real world knowledge and have been able to transfer that knowledge to the projects that they have personally curated. They are passionate about what they do, and it makes this school a great place to come every day. Seeing how hard they worked to get where they are today, makes us want to work all that much harder. 

 

The school is located in the heart of the finical district in downtown San Francisco. I can’t think of a better place to learn this industry, and than amongst some of the most reputable tech companies of our generation.

Holberton School is GREAT at first appearances. The first three months are a trap - they're good (the only good thing about the school) and they trap you into officially locking in your contract. 
Then, you realize you've made a mistake, but it is too late to get out by then. 

Once you've past that three month mark, the staff kind of forget you exist as they focus on the new incoming cohorts. Once you've past the year mark, the staff treat you like dirt. Job support? Forget about that! You're on your own if you've made it this far. 

The best part of it all? Holberton School goes OUT OF THEIR WAY to make sure that student complaints get muffled. Recently, they've kicked many alumni's out of the Slack channel as a way to silence our growing discontent. We've asked questions about the outdated curriculum, the student-driven second year curriculum, and the ISA discrepancies. All of our concerns were muffled by the school staff. 

Please avoid going to this bootcamp. You'll save yourself a ton of headache! 

I began with the good stuff :
- The curriculum for fundamentals is acceptable, comparable to other bootcamps. Acceptable because in some subjects it is already lagging behind. 
- The checker is what you really interact with, there are the proposed projects.
- The peers.

The bad:
- It's not a cutting-edge education as they promise, the content can be found elsewhere.
- It does not have its own material to teach, its framework is limited to google searches for answers or solutions, i.e. the material is google searches.
- There is no such thing as mentors at holberton. The technical assistants are students with a little more experience than the other students.
- The engineers who are there to help are very few (one or less for compus) and have not developed the projects and their help is limited to googling (they do not have adequate knowledge of the projects ). 
- The manager of the franchise in Colombia (Coderise International) is lousy, with no interest in the students and pushing the payment as soon as possible even with manipulations like withdrawing the students before the end of the program to start making collections.
- The staff does not know how the school works and only gives answers from the manual.
- The advanced programs are not complete (or outdated) at the time of this review.

I must give my review anonymously to avoid sanctions from the franchise operator in Colombia

There are so many better, more honest alternatives out there.

- After taxes that 17% is more like 25%.
- They were operating without approval from the government. They allegedly committed fraud to get approval, by saying they weren't issuing ISAs.
- No one is even sure whether or not our ISAs are even legally binding.
- First 9 months has no-front end. That's not full-stack.
- Year 2 Curriculums are all written by students, and not very educational based on what I hear from people who've attended.
- I know a guy who went back to work as an electrician after getting expelled, and had to pay them back.
- Another student has been job searching for a year while driving Uber. Still has to pay them back because he's making over $40k.
- Witnessed Julien Barbier(one of the founders) publicly shame two students on stage for not finishing their end of year projects.
- Seems like half of the students with ISAs never get coding jobs, but they never graduate. So Holberton claims a 99% placement rate for "graduates". Who knows what the real outcomes are.
- I know 25+ students personally who have to pay back ISAs with no coding job.
- If you successfully land a coding job, you have no idea how badly you got ripped off because you have nothing else to compare to.

Here's the CBS news story about Holberton being a scam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHgCGCVZGdE

And the Bureau for Postsecondary Private Education's official Notice and Emergency Decision to stop Holberton from admitting new students.
https://www.bppe.ca.gov/enforcement/actions/holberton_emergency_20200124.pdf

And that just scratches the surface of how bad this school is. The worst part about it is, half the students who attended cheerlead it so loudly to protect their own brand that Holberton continues to trap people into a predatory ISA.

 

 

17% of wages for 3 years is steep for something you can get for $7-15k at an online or 3 month bootcamp.

Coaching and mentorship are scarce, and with unqualified people. A lot of their coaches and mentors are recent graduates in need of the job title.

The founder threatens to expel people for "insubordination"... ie questioning anything about Holberton.

They promise a "Full-stack" education, and give you back-end and low level. Little to no Javascript(3-4 days).

I have a friend who went to Make School and it sounds like what Holberton says it is. Make School gives you 2 years and a Bachelor's in CS, with actual mentorship, for around the same price.

Holberton hasn't been approved to operate as an institution for higher learning and there's an ongoing investigation by the Bureau of Postsecondary Education. It you've been lied to by this school you should submit a complaint.

https://www.bppe.ca.gov/enforcement/actions/holberton_emergency_20200124.pdf

Hi, I am currently a student who is about 7 months into the first year here.

I would highly recommend Holberton to anyone who wants a deeper dive into computer science. If you want to learn how to code, there are many options but where I think Holberton really shines is in the depth of the curriculum. Because you spend the first three months in C, you will be working very closely with the kernel and learning lower-level tasks such as memory management/assembly. You will be working in Linux machines from the very first day and be very proficient in Bash and Git. The final project for the first trimester involves using data structures such as linked lists to build a Unix shell from scratch.

In the second trimester, you learn Python and the Object-Oriented Programming. There is a heavier emphasis on algorithms and interview prep. We deep-dived into Big O/sorting algorithms and binary trees. I personally enjoyed this semester as we got to learn SQL and built an Airbnb clone from scratch.

Now I'm in the third trimester which is heavily focused on Dev Ops. The topics we are focusing on are server management with NGINX and Apache. We spend most of our time in SSH and learning about networking. We are also using Docker containers to debug and deploy applications.

Year two offers 4 specializations at the moment: Web Dev, Machine Learning, AR/VR and Blockchain.

If you are considering schools, I would recommend this program if you are looking for an education more akin to a Computer Science degree. If you are interested in the DevOps field, this is also a great option as it is one of the only schools that teaches this topic. If you are an independent person who is comfortable with asking questions and socializing, this is a good fit because you will be working with peers all day long. There is no instructor to keep you on your toes; that is up to you.

I would NOT recommend this program if you want to just learn web development or if you are on a time restraint. Because of the length of the program and the way it is structured, that topic is covered in Year 2 as the priority is on full-stack development in Foundations (Year 1).

At the end of the day, there is no lack of resources to learn how to code these days. It's about how resourceful you can be. Yes, you can learn to code on your own, but personally speaking, I think you will learn much faster if you are surrounded by intelligent, motivated people every day. What I am happy to pay for is the community, mentors, and people with industry experience who can guide you on your journey. Holberton has given me that so far.

 

I came to Holberton because I wanted an alternative to the slow and mundane learning style that I had in college. I'm currently on my 6th month in Holberton School and I've enjoyed it a lot. The program has reduced many learning barriers that I had in college. I no longer worry about losing a seat, I study at my own pace, I learn with a motivated community / peer to peer. The peer to peer learning style has helped me have a deeper understanding of the material that I was learning, everyone has shared solutions and errors. 

I've noticed a lot of comparisons of Holberton and Lambda, I personally choose Holberton School because of its two year course, with the second year being a specialization of your choice.  Soft skills are very important when it comes to working with big tech, communication skills are everything. Everyone has the chance to share their knowledge by whiteboarding, almost like we're teaching! The curriculum is challenging but very rewarding. I remeber the struggles I shared with my peers, and it's a joy looking back and seeing how far we've come in just 6 months. 

 

TLDR; This program isn't worth it, stay away. Also their ISA is choking and has a rediculous cap on maximum payment. 17%, 3.5 years and 85k max.

App Academy, Rithm, Lambda are a few that i know which are MUCH better ISAs. around 15%, 2-3 years and 40k max. Better curriculum, better cost, muuuuch faster timeline...just better. Hell, 42 school is FREE.

I know a lot of people share my frustrations and its stupid to see none of it brought to light because they won't make any changes if everyone is just all "Keep it up, everything is just amazing at holberton!" they will never change if they aren't exposed.

There was one other review about lazy education and he was 100% right, it's the most helpful review on course report if you click the filter "most helpful" because it's true. 

Do your research, message holberton students on linkedin, find their githubs and see what kind of stuff they did. Is it worth it to you? Probably not as you'll see. 

If you really want to do this, stay for the 3 months of  C and bash ( if you really wanna learn C, Command line/Bash ) and then drop out and self learn, everything else after that is just a private company's attempt at being freeCodeCamp minus all the hundreds of hours of totally FREE videos/tutorials and lessons, all put together by actual industry experienced professionals. It's not 2014 anymore, theres many other programs with much more competitive ISA agreements and faster. 2 years is a joke their 2nd year program is a joke. 

I've done the whole program ( which is the first 9 months lets be real ) and currently this program is just not worth it and not competitive cost wise. So lets get this out of the way:

Don't believe any marketing they advertised about "only 3% get accepted" this is pure bs. 

They might have taken that down already, because they accept as many people as they can get, it is a pure numbers game. I remember submitting a serious youtube video, a long ass medium post, moved on to buliding a decent website that did everything and was accepted almost immediately, seconds later, way too fast to check anything.

Bottom line is that they just need to get as many people as possible to sign their ISA agreement and hope that a large percentage of them stay for the lock in period where they owe the full 17% I think it's over 3 months. Just completely arbitrary rules and hours about how long you stay versus what you owe:

 it is 3.5 years of payment on 17% off the top of your salary. The max here is 85K which is absolutely rediculous. They recently divided up year 1 and 2 as 40k and 45K Even if you opt out of year 2 they consider your year 1 as 60% of the full program and apparently 60 == 100 where you are expected to pay the full percentage and at the full maximum amount. This is just pure greed, bullshit.  I wouldn't be upset about this if the program was worth it but it is not. 

Doing this program will most likely get you a devOps job. I did not even know what devOps was until it was too late. It isn't software development, it's not frontend/backend. It's playing around with infrastructure tools and services and building automation scripts. "Full Stack Developer" is also just a marketing lie. they never even mention devOps.

The whole point here in doing this program is to get a job. You are given 3 months of C. This is helpful to nothing but C/Embedded jobs which are slim to none and definitely favors CS grad/actual computer science qualified candidates. Bash is also thrown in, a skill only nice to have with devOps. Sooo 3 months go to a low/unmarketable job skills.

After that you focus on python. a language that favors... data science? which usually is a field of PhDs masters people or statistic majors. machine learning? Again you don't have the background for the machine learning field and that isn't taught at school anyways. Annnnd devOps, the field they failed to mention anything to you about. The only job you will basically be preparing for in this school. SO about 3 months of a very specific job skill. 

Everything is broken up into small bite sized tasks, and then a project is thrown on you that kind of tests what you've learned. It's a good attempt at what freeCodeCamp gives you for free, but it's worse because where freeCodeCamp is constantly improving by a team of people and it's FILLED with projects to work on. Holberton's curriculum staff drinks the koolaid hard and thinks everything is just perfect and any criticism is a hostile attack that needs to be aggressivly defended on every point made.

There are no instructors. staff at the school was always very defensive and held off on offering much support. It was as if you should be grateful you're even in the building and everything you are given is a form a charity, and don't question it.

It's "peer learning". You are basically on your own and have to rely on google or other students that also googled it...so basically use a lot of google? So no, not peer learning. they pad the weeks with "PLDS" peer learning days. Which are days that nothing happens: people that did the work are held back a day, people that struggled and continue to struggle by asking people and failing to google then spend the day asking people again and without googling and still struggle. Most people in this category would eventually just give up and copy code or ask a friend to just give them the answer. So maybe a combined 2 weeks of the 9 months is spent like this. 

So what about projects? You get one fully built over engineered website that they make you spend WAY too much time on. It's one website, with an API a database and very light frontend. it's all built with python and flask which again very few companies use for web development backend. MySQL which is useful. about 2 weeks of useful SQL knowledge. Again this is all WAY stretched out. 

Your portfolio is going to be one shell terminal and one end to end website. 

How about javascript? the most desirable language that every web development job looks for? filled with very popular and desirable frameworks? You get about 1 week of javascript and jQuery, the least cared about framework/library at this point. So basically nothing.

The final project is something that you have to come up with yourself and spend 2 weeks off and you show it off the holberton's "connections" that they gather for a "career night". I did mine, guess how many people showed up? No one. Which leads to my next point

How about mentors? This is another marketing Lie, WAY over exaggeration. This school has no one that works on building connections for the school. Mentors in my experience were few and far in between and usually were not even engineers. A tiny fraction of the mentors were engineers and we were basically discouraged from contacting them about anything career related. They were never helpful, just showed up for 30 minutes of public speaking practice. It's usually up to students to find mentors.

Any connections this school had were dried up by batch 2, it is now batch 8. 

Job Support, the biggest thing a coding bootcamp student would need? Terrible. I would say not applicable but basically it boils down to a founder direct messaging you for something he came across. If you are lucky he will message you, if not he messaged someone else and you are on your own. That means countless hours networking and going to events and practicing hackerrank 

Interview practice? very bad. The majority of the material they would give you were recycled questions with 1 word answers "who founded twitter?" "who created C?" "how much is amazon worth" "what command would I use to change directories?" "what is the shadow file?" "what is contained in the passwd file?" Completely useless questions with no value that you'll never hear. and then 1 or 2 recycled algorithm problems that you had already worked on in a past assignment. Only the last 3-4 interview practices felt good. We did a total of maybe 10 interviews?

So 3 months of unmarketable C and barely marketable bash, 3 months of devOps popular python, 1 week of javascript, 2 weeks of MySQL.

Not nearly enough web development exposure (read:javascript/a portfolio) to match up to any other coding bootcamp. Hackreactor and all the rest will blow you out of the water for web development. Unless you spend more months self learning without the school, something you could have done from the beginning. 

Soft Skills, what soft skills??? You give 3 presentations, write useless blog posts that no one reads, useless diagrams. Nope i'm not talking about something useful like UML diagrams, like "draw a picture of how recursion works". If you don't already have great people/networking skills, none of their advice is going to help you. 

The last portion of this padded/stretched out curriculum is devOps. You learn a very VERY surface level explanation of the internet, protocols, system design, etc... just enough that maybe you can regurgitate a term or too, but if anyone asks a deeper question you are screwed. So this portion is almost just like a glimpse of "oh btw this is devOps, that thing you've been unknowingly working towards" You setup up an nginx server a few times, haproxy, draw a few system design diagrams. You don't ever focus too long any one topic or tool to be able to market yourself as having any kind of proficiency in it. So basically, it is almost useless, and if you still weren't interested in a devOps job, it is actually completely useless. 

Out of the 9 month curriculum the most useful things you will learn and can confidently say you are at a junior engineer level of understanding are python, bash, and MySQL. Minus all the C and devOps and peer learning days and jeapordy question interviews and blog post writing....Maybe 3 months total. 

They also mentioned a "6 month internship" this is written down as if it is baked into the program. It's not. That's completely up to you, whatever you find.  it's just more bs and makes you think like this is part of the schedule lol. No.

The year 2 was never anything very fleshed out. And if you can go 2 years without work, in SF, ummm lucky you? 

There was more web development practice, more C practice, and now they offer "machine learning and VR" that was developed entirely by other students??...yeah i'll pass. Udemy has courses and most are made by actual experienced industry professionals/educators. Go there for that. 

It's bad enough that you can't just get a loan and pay it off because 85,000 is rediculous. So you will be stuck with a big chunk of your paycheck sliced off the top and after taxes and whatever fees you are basically going to be living tight in SF for the next 3.5 years. 

The only good thing that came was from the friends I made. 

Curriculum: Bash, C, Python, DevOps, and webdev. I give curriculum rating a 3 because it was helpful to learn about low level before moving on to high level programming. Also getting to work on soft skills is a good thing. But the webdev part seemed rushed and we only worked on one big project in bits and pieces at a time. I don't remember any CSS, JS, or other things like SQLalchemy since it was rushed. On the big project: I don't really understand all the parts or the "big picture" because they don't explain anything. The instructions are like this: task 1: do this. task 2: do that, without explaining why we're doing these things. So this was lazy on their part. It would've helped to do smaller webdev projects so that I could actually remember something.

On assignments - I have mixed feelings on this because some things we only had a day or two of experience, like using awk, puppet, bash programming. After not doing it again, I don't remember any of it, so it was like those days didn't make me any better at programming.

Peer learning days - very disorganized. It's the same thing as friends getting together to do an online course, but we're only talking about things we've already done. It would make more sense if we got together everyday for organized group activities like other bootcamps rather than talk about the homework we've already done. Other bootcamps seem to be far more organized.

Instructors: my rating is a 1. There are no teachers, so our only in person help is other students. I would give a better rating if they at least had good explanations or a wiki to go along with the tasks, but the instruction is literally: "here's a task! read this link I found from the front page of a google search to learn more!" This is extremely lazy and is an insult to me as a student as it seems they're not investing in making helpful resources, and more invested in raising money and making tools. App Academy's online course is far more professional and resourceful, and it's now FREE.

Cost: 17% of salary for 3.5 years if you make over $40k. This turns out to be expensive even if you don't get a software dev job. There are circumstances that allow them to extend the payment period, such as if you don't make over $40k, are unemployed, or go to another school after finishing Holberton. Can be extended for another 2 years.

Overall: I'm glad to meet good people, but I feel like the education is very lazy. I don't feel prepared to get a software job and I think most students aren't prepared after a year. The majority of students haven't gotten a software job after 1 year in, check linkedin if you don't believe me. A lot of students end up in DevOps, which is not really software development and more about writing scripts and learning different tools.

Lots of fun; each day is usually dedicated to tackling a project. Achieving the project tasks feels a lot like solving puzzle challenges, and you have peers tackling the same puzzles along side you, so if you get stuck you can start conferring with them. More like "doing" than "studying."

During my time at Holberton I felt ownership over every day, since I had so much freedom about how to approach each project. If you're a self-directed individual, this school might be for you.

Since you spend so much time with your peers, you end up with a strong sense of community that you take with you once you graduate. Your peers serve as your support network.

A few caveats: it helps if you have some familiarity with basic programming conventions when you enter the program (if, else if, else conditions; for and while loops) since those can be hard to grasp at first and the curriculum moves quickly. More vital is basic problem solving skills - if you don't have those, you have to get them down in the first few months, otherwise you'll be stuck with a lot of projects you don't know how to tackle. If you have an instinct to decompose a problem into smaller task, you can identify knowledge gaps to resolve, and you can break down information from the Internet, you should be good.

If you're able to keep up with the curriculum, you'll get trained up to be a successful software engineer, you'll get a deeper understanding of the industry than any bootcamp/college grad, and you'll have a lot of (career) opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise via the mentor network. So go for it if you think the project-based methodology suits you.