Launch Academy

I joined Launch Academy in February 2014 after realizing that coding was something I wanted to do. While I had very little experience with coding and most programming languages I was familiar with Ruby by attending free workshops in Boston

I decided on Launch for a couple of reasons; it's located in Boston, they are active in the Ruby community, and I had met Launch Academy alum who had only good things to say about the boot camp model.

One of the greatest things about Launch Academy are the Experience Engineers who teach and mentor. It's an amazing support system that I don't think I would've gotten at other bootcamps in the city.

By the end of the 10-week program, I had built a couple of apps using Rails and Sinatra and was exposed to many of the methodologies and technologies full-stack developers use. The most important thing was not just what I learned but HOW I learned. I know feel like I have the tools to learn any new technology at an accelerated rate.

I had interviews for 5 different positions and accepted a job offer within a month of graduation.

A look back: 6 Months After Graduation

Everyday there is a reference back to something I learned at Launch Academy. The day to day workflow of working in a Ruby web stack is very similar to what I learned at LA. Our engineering team practices test driven development, another core competency of Launch. Even the environment of Mission Control(the physical space of Launch) mimics the open floor collaborative environment that I currently work in. In addition to the parallels between Launch Academy and career after Launch, I was fortunate enough to have been able to make enough mistakes in a learning environment of LA (dropping production databases, losing git branches, overwriting entire repos) where the cost was low that I didn't lose my company any money.

At Backupify I started as an Associate Software Engineer, where I worked on several projects (upgrading API's/rails, refactoring code, making systems improvements, rewriting tests, customer bugs/requests) which were very manageable task for a young developer. After 2 months, started getting mentoring opportunities to bring brand new engineers up to speed on our technology. I was able to leverage my experience with mentoring my peers at Launch to help bring these new teams members up to speed quickly. After 6 months with this team, I was promoted to Software Engineer and Team Lead managing 3 engineers. 

All of this was possible because I had worked hard to meet the day to day challenges of Launch Academy and learn as much as I possibly could. I am truly thankful for the great patience, knowledge, and experience of the mentors and of the staff of Launch Academy. I look forward to a continued professional relationship with all of my co-Launchers past, present and future.

My time at Launch Academy was a wild ride! Dont go there thinking that you'll coast through and get a great paying job afterwards... You have to put in the time and the effort to be worth your money, but if you do its 100% worth every penny! The instructors are all extreamly helpful and the challenges were all very relevant to the lectures. I would love to see more Javascript in the curriculum, but other than that I dont have any complaints. Job assistance was also great! I got around 4 interviews right after career day and recieved an offer 2-3 weeks later!

In terms of getting bang for your buck I found that that my time at Launch Academy was more valuable than any semester I had in college, but at half the price. It's not an easy road, but if you're willing to put in the effort and embrace the life of a software developer than this is undoubtedly one of the best places to make the transition. More importantly the relationships and alumni network that Launch creates are immensely valuable, and the co-operative aspects of the program helped me not only become a better programmer, but a better person as well.

I don't come from a technical background, but I wanted to make a career change and looked into different bootcamps. Initially, I was (very wrongly) wary about bootcamps and about my ability to land a job after 18 weeks. Through Launch, you will learn so much more than you can believe you can in that time. I had only dabbled with code for 3 weeks prior to the beginning of the program, but the material was very well explained, for even a novice programmer. As the program progressed, the material was definitely more challenging but we have a lot of great educators and there was a ton of collaboration between all the students. The educators are always helpful, and you will definitely create friendships you didn't think was possible with your cohort-mates. That being said, it is a difficult program and if you're not prepared, it can be much more difficult. Make sure to treat Launch like a full-time job. 

One of the biggest selling points for me was that Launch has a great network with companies throughout Boston and through Launch, I was able to find a job shortly after. I feel very lucky to have made the change into web development and feel very lucky that I chose Launch!

I attended Launch Academy two years ago, so some of what you’re about to read may not be current. Proceed at your own caution.

I have mixed feelings about my experience there. On the one hand I did end up getting several job interviews, out of the deal so I consider them to have fulfilled their part of our bargain. On the other, I’m not completely convinced that anything in particular about the course helped me get to that point.

Let me explain.

The employees at launch - at least the ones you will mainly interact with - are called ‘experience engineers’. The (large) majority of these people are Launch graduates, and recent graduates at that. It’s very possible that your ‘mentor’ will be a person who has quite literally been programming three months longer than you have. Out of the ones who have been there longer, precious few have any industry experience to speak of. As many here have mentioned, it’s not at all uncommon to be directed to Google upon presenting a problem. This is only after entering your question in on online queue and waiting (sometimes quite a while) to get one of the engineers to help you out. As absurd as it seems, they have set up a system where you can’t just ask a quick question of an experience engineer without being told to put it in the queue (even if the queue is empty).

Of course once you are able to get the attention of an ‘EE’, you are almost always underwhelmed by the help they are able to give. There were a couple who were very smart, capable problem solvers (people I would work with in the future without hesitation), but if they weren’t on duty then there was basically no point in even entering the queue. I hate to say it, but that old saw “those who can’t do, teach” seems depressingly apt here. The EEs are also responsible for development of the academy website, which is of dubious quality and speaks for itself.

At the end of the course all students who are able to accumulate the number of points deemed necessary to graduate, give 2 minute presentations of capstone projects to hiring partners on two nights. My cohort was fortunate in that we had a fair number of companies show up. We were unfortunate in that a number of them were not hiring junior developers (or at all). There are miniature ‘networking’ sessions throughout the evening, and on several occasions I worked my hardest at presenting a good front to a prospective employer only to be told afterward that they aren’t there looking to hire anyone. I’d like to point out the distinction here between not wanting to hire ‘me’ (which I was also told at various points in the evening) and not wanting to hire ‘anyone’. Again, I guess I can’t really complain since I’ve heard that Launch has been having a hard time getting any hiring partners to show up to more recent cohorts.

After the career nights, you may get some interview requests trickling in as companies that couldn’t attend go over the student projects and profiles. They don’t tell you this, but they rank students and give the rankings to the hiring partners. So when you’re told that companies flip through all the launcher profiles and choose the ones they like, I don’t think they’re being totally honest.

I hate that I have to do this, but I really feel like the political climate at Launch Academy in Boston needs to be known. It is extremely and unapologetically hard left, and if that’s your bag you will be like a fish in water and likely won’t notice anything amiss. Time will be made during coding lessons for political speeches. Political opinions will be inserted as fact into mentoring sessions. Not a big deal if you agree with the politics, but I can imagine it would get old to those who don’t. I graduated before the most recent election, and I can only guess it’s gotten much worse since then.

Unfortunately some of the identity politics of the more extreme end of the modern left have really taken hold of the culture there. There was an incident in my cohort where two young men were punished after being accused of harassment by a young woman. I wasn’t there for the incident, so I can’t comment on it, but I had had previous conversations with the woman in question where I came away with the impression that she was looking for a confrontation. Of course, if she really was harassed, her attitude doesn’t matter and they deserve (more than) what they got. However, the day after the incident, she proudly wore an “I bathe in male tears” shirt (that was clearly in violation of community guidelines, for what it’s worth), and I highly doubt it was a fresh purchase. I should say that the conversation I had with her included a third person who was the director of engineering of the school and a political fellow traveler (and extremely unpopular for separate reasons - mostly personality based). He was the one driving the ultimate investigation and punishment, and there wasn’t any reason to think he was in any way objective about it.

I may be emphasizing the above incident too much. One of the men was basically ‘suspended’ for a couple weeks, and the other ended up attending and graduating from the following cohort. I hope if they were perpetrators of violent assault that Launch Academy would have ended their association with them. The fact that they didn’t makes me think (hope?) there wasn’t much to the incident in the first place.

What I really want to make clear here is that if you are not a political progressive, be prepared to be the only one. If you can handle that, then don’t worry...but you should keep your views to yourself. And make sure to say “y’all” in place of “you guys”.

I’m getting tired of writing this review, so I’m going to finish up by saying Launch Academy is expensive. You can learn everything they teach on your own though numerous cheaper (and free) resources, so the real question is whether or not it’s going to lead to a job. All in all, I do think it’s one way of getting your foot in the door to start a new career. My advice would be to try to get some assurance that there will be companies actually attending the career days at the end of the cohort. They probably won’t give you any, but I don’t know what else to tell you. Without hiring partners interested in taking on junior developers (and there are less and less as the market is saturated with them), I can’t recommend you attend Launch Academy.

I attended Launch Academy to switch from a non-technical field with the goal of getting a job as a developer.  Ultimately I was able to do this, but during the course I felt underprepared.  I had only taken a basic course in HTML and CSS prior to attending, and found myself struggling to keep up with the fast pace of learning.  It really takes about 6 months at least to feel comfortable with the basic concepts needed for an entry level role.  I failed one exam because of a simple typo, and after that I made sure to review my exam answers with a fine toothed comb.  Looking back, I wish that I had taken one of the many free/cheap online courses in javascropt/ruby/python, as that would have made it easier to keep pace with the class. 

I am glad that I attended Launch, as it did prepare me well for my current role as a jr full stack developer, which I got about 2 months after completing Launch.  I made some great friends at Launch and I still go back to the course material from time to time as a reference at work. 

The Good

The curriculum at Launch Academy is really spot on. To start, you will spend 8 weeks in your own time, online, learning the basics. They will cover things like the command line, loops, arrays, hashes, syntax, JavaScript, es6, Git and a little bit of testing. They say they do this so you are ready to go once you make it to the campus portion and it certainly works.

As for the on-campus curriculum, it’s pretty solid – I only wish we had learned more but in order for that to have truly of happened the entire program would have to be maybe 2 weeks longer – which is something they should seriously consider. You have 6 weeks of learning, each week a new topic. In my cohort it was, IIRC – React, Advanced OOP, Databases, Rails, HTTP and General Front End. The front-end week was kind of useless since they just skimmed over a crap load of material about design and typography and the like. Those topics are so dense, to give them such a superficial treatment was pointless. The time that week would have been better served expanding on existing material. 

This is followed by 2 weeks of group projects, which was an amazing eye-opening experience and then 2 more weeks of solo projects, which is very stressful but you will overcome. Again, the curriculum is on point and I learned WAY more than I thought I would. It moves fast and feels overwhelming for the majority of the program but that will soon feel natural and you will sink into a rhythm and get into the zone by the end of the first week.

The Bad

The entire staff is committed to evangelizing the gospel of social justice. Now, I’m all for equality and I’d like to think I’m very open minded and tolerant but I didn’t pay $15,500 to be lectured about how, because I am a man, I need to censor myself around women. I also did not pay $15,500 to be lectured about how awful Donald Trump is. I am not a political person, I do not care. Leave politics and social justice out of the classroom and teach me how to code. The staff we’re routinely injecting politics into the cohort for no reason. It came off as cringe worthy at times and always forced. Like I said, this is a coding bootcamp, not capitol hill.

On two separate occasions, they sat us all down and gave a lecture on ‘Mansplaining’, I actually didn’t even know what this was when they brought it up, I had never heard of it before. They said that someone made a rude and insensitive comment, but they would neither repeat what was said nor would they be speaking with the individual in question. They actually ended up saying that, if what we can’t tell you was said, is said again then you will be expelled. What? None of us even know what they were referring to, not even remotely. This caused a lot of self-censorship and bewilderment. They ended it by telling all the men in attendance to be cautious of how they talk, because, and I quote “Men have a tendency to talk down to women and assume they know more by virtue of being a man”. Nice. Where I come from, assuming bias based on external and immutable features of a human is what is commonly referred to as bigotry. Not to these people, it’s called social justice.

Secondly, while having a spirited debate on the Launch Academy Slack channel about the issue of women in the STEM field, D.T. – the Vice President of Engineering @ Launch Academy, decided to interject and remind everyone that everything they say is being monitored. Here are some excerpts of what he said, verbatim:

“Do you really want to say things that are open for mis-interpretation that could present a "public" perception that makes you sound callous to the gender/diversity hot button tech issue of the day?”

“It's a fact that there are more white men in this community than any other group, and as such i particularly appeal to those of us who fall into that category to try hard to keep our tone and conversation in line with the Launch Academy cultural norms and guidelines that all of us benefit from.”

Of course, indiscriminately lecturing all men is not something that is explicitly prohibited in the Launch Academy Code of Conduct paper we all signed – because, you know…diversity.

One more example – A fellow classmate of mine was accused of sexual harassment by a female classmate, and without actually investigating the accusation, Launch Academy took it at face value and actually threatened to expel him. They told him that he was sexually harassing another student but refused to give evidence of it ever happening, the date, time or place in question it occurred or the name of the accuser. They wouldn’t even state exactly what it was that he did, just a nebulous “You committed sexual harassment”. They never followed up with this female accuser to press her for details, they simply assumed that she was telling the truth.

This and many other countless examples really irritated me. They treat people like they are fragile, broken creatures’, incapable of accepting the fact that someone has a differing view from themselves. To remedy this, they preemptively tell people to not talk about certain topics and inject BS politics into a program that is designed to teach me and everyone else how-to CODE. One of the staff members actually gave a presentation on how to “cope” with the fact that Hillary Clinton did not win the election. This is absolute garbage. Nobody cares. I want to build websites, not listen to your nonsense. I am here to jumpstart a new career. I risked A LOT to make this move in my life and to have Launch Academy staff show such little regard for the sacrifices I made to be there is very disconcerting.

The disruption and distraction caused by their nonsensical moral high-ground showmanship really put a damper on the latter part of the cohort – a sentiment expressed by well over half of the cohort to myself, personally. It made it difficult to focus on the already difficult course material because everyone was chatting in hushed tones about what we all thought these veiled threats of expulsion were in response to. We never really found out…

Conclusion

Here is the full gist of what I took from my experience. If you want to learn how to code, Launch Academy will in fact teach you to code – even if you are a complete novice. However, you should expect incessant lecturing about how horrible men are and how virtuous a litany of ‘protected’ classes are. Expect lots of political evangelism and expect to be told to conform to their way of thinking or shut up and leave. If given the opportunity to do it all over, I am fairly certain I would go the route of a Bootcamp, but I am not so sure, if I knew what I know now, I would choose Launch Academy.

After teaching programming skills to elementary students and taking one programming course myself I took the leap into Web Development full time. Launch was the best decision I ever made.

With the 8 weeks pre-learning and the 10 week on campus immersion, I feel that is the best curriculum to set one up for success. Launch has prepared me not only for a demanding job at a startup but for being in a totally new job field. Career Services at Launch is nothing but spectacular in preparing you to prep, network and interview.

LA was one of the best learning experiences I’ve ever been a part of having the chance to collaborate with passionate and driven people. Coming straight out of college with no professional job experience, I wanted to make the transition into programming as soon as possible. Like other bootcamps, LA isn’t for you if you are not willing to put in the work.

Searching for job can always be daunting, but you won’t be alone. Though the job search was stressful and difficult for me, LA’s career support helped me overcome my fear of not finding a job. Even after graduation, they continuously pushed me towards the perfect position and encouraged me to keep strengthening my portfolio and networking within Boston’s emerging tech community. LA is always rooting for your success! 

Know that LA’s onsite curriculum will be fast-paced and challenging, and the job search afterwards will be tougher for some more than others; however, LA’s career services will be by your side. Use the resources available to you at Launch, whether it’s their career services, the experience engineers, or even your fellow Launchers. Just keep asking questions and address any concerns you may have and don’t be afraid to ask for help, and continue to code!

Overall, if you’re willing to put in the effort and sacrifice, LA is the place you want to go to make that big step towards your career change.

I am a former Launcher who decided to attend the bootcamp with minimal experience in coding. Overall I would say I had a great experience at Launch Academy. My goal was to expedite the process of learning to code and transition into a new career, and Launch helped me do both of those things. The curriculum covers a lot of information and the group and individual projects gives students the chance to test out their new skills. 

This is not a bootcamp for people who aren't self-motivated or expect Launch to just hand them a job after graduating (although I think the same thing is true of any bootcamp). You get out of it what you put into it. But if you're willing to work hard for the few short months you're in the program the instructors and career services will do everything they can to support you. 

I definitely think I made the right choice by attending Launch Academy and would certainly recommend it to anyone I know thinking of attending a bootcamp.