Turing School of Software & Design

Comparing DBC: If you are new to programming, as I was, then the "0" program of DBC might not be enough. I like that at Turing, I got 6 weeks of just Ruby. Curriculum that came from Katrina Owen and Jumpstart Labs was a better fit for me than that of the DBC "0" program. I'm not saying anything negative about DBC. DBC and I parted on friendly terms and I still have friends from my DBC posse.

(that's all I got on comparing DBC, the rest has nothing to do with DBC) 

Shoulda-Coulda: I was asked to repeat the first Module of Ruby at Turing. I said no because I hadn't budgeted for an extra 7 weeks. I wish that I had planned on repeating one of the four Modules. If you are like me, struggling with confidence and balancing a family then please plan on repeating a section. It's actually one of the components that helps set Turing apart from other programs. My one shoulda-coulda is that I didn't repeat the first and most challenging module.

Not-a-fan: I wasn't always a fan of instruction - being a math teacher in a formal life, the "I do", "We do", "You do" was not considered best-practice in my district and we discouraged other teachers from this kind of teaching. The reason for this is because the data did not support that math students benefited from this style. I would bet the same holds for students of programming. I would have liked to have seen data-driven teaching and not the "fly-by-the-seat-of-you-pants type" that is most common.

Challenge: Balancing learning as much as your brain can hold and being an awesome team member to support the projects you will build was amazingly difficult. Turing is not easy and not for the faint of heart.

Tip for the struggling: I was a struggling student, my classmates knew it too and so in projects, expectations of what I could do were low. Only you can pull yourself out of a rut like that, so keep at it and find students that are willing to help you. I was lucky to have great friends that helped and tutored me. You really have to be an advocate for yourself at all times.

Instructors: You will be blessed with amazing programmers who choose to make a half of what they could in the real world so that you can be awesome. Enjoy and take advantage of this.

Guests: We met some of the biggest names in programming and some of those big names were our mentors. What they had to say was invaluable. Ask them questions.

Mentors: Mentors and Instructors keep Turing on the crest of programming best practices. I impressed my boss because of my knowledge of how to build an app with others using GitHub workflow.

Jobs: Do everything that the teachers advice and you will get a job. I did. I'm currently working remote for a small family oriented consulting firm. It's the right company for me. I owe my fellow students, teachers, and Jeff the biggest thanks because without their help I would not be where I am.

I know it is cliche to say something is a life changing expereince but Turing was an incredibly intense 7 months which helped make me the person and developer I am today.

Students - Turing has amazing people.  There are 18-22 students there who are all comitted to becoming awesome junior developers.  They are all there for the same reason and there is increible camraderie and a sense of competive helpfulness.  People are looking to do the best job they can but not step all over each other to do that.  Almost everyone there cares about being helpful where they can.  I feel like I have made life long friends as well because of the program. 

Instructors - Jeff Casmir the Director of the school has been teaching people for over a decade, and has been teaching people programming for a large part of those ten years.  It is a I do, we do, you do, type of ciriculum with about 1/2 lecture and 1/2 project work time for in class hours. (There are a lot of out of class horus with the weekly amonout of hours averaging about 60, +- 10 depending on a varitey of factors) The entire team is dedicated to doing the best they can to teach you what you need to know.  These instructors are here because they want to be and not for the paycheck.  They certainly could make A LOT MORE money working somewhere else.  Many of them are former teachers as well.  Super beneficial because they are good at conveying their thoughts and actually teaching to your skill level.

Job - Yea but what about a job you say?  After all I assume most of you are not interested in the program to make $$$ when you get out.  As of Feb 15 14 out of 17 from our cohort have been hired.  Very small downside is if you go here you have to be at least a little bit willing to branch out of the greater Denver area to find a job.  This will be the reality in the latter part of 2015.  Sorry not everyone can stay in Denver.  Good news there are still plentiful jobs in Denver and Turing even holds a Job Fair.  It's like speed dating for finding jobs.  Also Boulder has a very big tech sector and if you want to move to any other city(New York, DC, San Fran, Berlin, Sydney, Austin, Columbus, etc...) There are alumni connections or Jeff knows someone there because he is a boss.  

Post Turing - Right now I've had 4 final interviews and waiting to hear back from two final interviews I had last week.  I've gotten all these inteviews because Jeff knows someone at these companies.  People at my interviews have said the following things...

"Wow you have a lot more practical knowledge than people from other coding bootcamps we have interviewed"

"It seems like you know your Database and Rails relationships very well"

"I like how you took time to communicate what you were thinking and your plan for solving this problem"

To be honest I'm a completely middle of the pack developer is my class, but I was suprised at my own ability to answer some of the questions thrown at me.  I know a lot because of what Turing has taught me!  

-Robert Gu

I would highly recommend Turing to someone who is serious about changing their life. It's not easy. In fact, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It's not that the curriculum and material are so challenging, it's more the pace of the learning and the fact that it's basically non-stop for 7 months. I started to feel the burnout about halfway through, but then I had to just keep moving forward to keep up. I had to make a ton of sacrifices like saying goodbye to exercising and my social life, and keeping up with anything non-Turing related was out of the question.

Fortunately for me, it was well worth the effort. Not only did I form amazing friendships with my cohort, but I landed a job within a few weeks after graduating. My new job is strict about work/life balance, has amazing benefits, more PTO and paid holidays than I knew was possible, and a starting salary that is above the market rate for a junior developer. It's the kind of job I knew existed but didn't have access to before Turing. And if that wasn't enough, my coworkers rave about the fundamentals that Turing teaches its developers. The school has an excellent reputation out in the tech world.

As for my time at Turing, the support I received from the staff and my fellow students was stellar. They offer free counseling, focus heavily on the community and student body, and do a pretty excellent job at making students feel at home. Students have 24/7 access to the building and facilities and there is a laptop included in the tuition so that everyone is geared for success. Like the title says, it really is a wonderful program.

I had a pretty bad experience with Turing, and now I'm in a ton of debt (40K) and my current . job has nothing to do with software or programming or tech in general. I'll try and be brief. You'll see plenty of positive reviews here, but what you don't see is what happened to people like me, and I'm not the only one. You SHOULD NOT go to Turing if you're looking to make a career change just for the money because you heard software development is lucrative and it takes a quarter of the time to become a developer as opposed to getting a computer science degree. Unless you already have experience in web development or software programming in general, I would not go to Turing, unless you a study for ONE YEAR ahead of time if you have no experience, trust me. They call it a boot camp for a reason. You will be getting information through 10 firehoses at once working 80 hour weeks. You will not have time for a full-time job or even a part-time job, FYI.

Below I will list advantages and disadvantages of going to Turing and the brutal job hunt aftwards. Turing was the hardest thing I've ever done, and in the end it did not work out for me. They cram way too much information into each module. If the program was longer and more time to absorb everything, it would be worth it. Be prepared to learn 3 - 4 years worth of learning into 6 months with pretty much no downtime. 

Another thing which I really don't like and wish they would change is, their admissions process is very misleading, and it's obviously to et a lot of regular people in to make money off of them. When I attended, their only requirement was to solve LSAT logic problems. There were no actual coding challenges, or things related to being proficient or have an aptitude for ACTUAL coding. It does not prepare you for what you will face when you are in the program, whatsoever. That is my biggest gripe.  

Most, not all, of the instructors are not very good. I failed back end mod 1 halfway through at the mid-mod exam, just 3 weeks in. I happened to know a guy who did the front end program who offered to mentor me so figured I would try it again. $2,500 dollars spent on half a module gone, what did I have to lose? Short answer: A LOT.  Barely passed Mod 1 front end, didn't pass mod 2 after giving it my all. Decided enough was enough and didn't want to keep wasting money on a loan I took out. Now I was $12,500 in debt plus an additional sum for cost of living. 

Not to mention, the MacBook's you get that are "brand new" are refurbished. Mine crapped out halfway through Mod 1 and I had to get it repaired out of pocket at a local repair shop which was beyond stressful not having a working computer during the program. Then, later in the year my screen crapped out and has a lot of distorition and distorted colors and is very hard to use, very annoying. Then I get an email from Apple saying my line of MacBooks had a recall! WTF?  Thanks Jeff. AT LEAST give us a working computer if we pay your very lucrative salary?!?! But I digress.

Turing does not guarantee you a job. They have job assistance. It's completely up to you. I would get as much real-world experience as you can, don't rely just on your Turing projects except for your capstone project. I have been looking for work for OVER A YEAR. Countless interviews, no luck. If you don't have at least 2 or 3 years of REAL WORLD experience with software and programming, other than your school projects, best of luck, you're gonna need it. Just know you are trying to get a job in a very competetive industry and with no real experience other than a bootcamp, you have a real uphill battle to face against computer science majors and plenty of developers job hopping all the time, who I think really control the job market. Unless you want to take a job in a terrible part of the country.

On the positive side, Turing is the best bootcamp and education you can get for software engineering. Some people are naturally good at the logic and programming in general. i was not and it ended up being a HUGE mistake. My current job is in sales, nothing to do with programming and just starting to pay off this bs debt. I regret ever going down the Turing path, total waste of time. Again, IF YOU ARE JUST LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT OF YOUR CURRENT CAREER PATH, AND AREN'T REALLY INTERESTED IN CODING OR PROGRAMMING, DO NOT GO TO TURING. There "Try Coding" weekend is NOTHING like what you will actually be doing. It's like learning how to say "Hello" and "Goodbye" in a foreign language, not actually learning everything about that foreign language. 

Think twice about going based on the reviews here. Do some research. Try coding for yourself, build a real project. Talk to developers. Talk to alumni, and talk to them about how brutally hard the program is, because it is. I would not lie about that. Hope this was helpful to someone.

I have only been out of Turing for a little more than a year and 6 months and I am making six figures. So financially, I'm doing quite well and it is all because of the school. I think I cleared around 30k the year before making the switch. Now it's not all about money, but the investment is a big one, and I want to make sure that you know it will pay off. It all comes down to who you are as a person if you will succeed or not. If you can work hard, and focus on the task at hand you will be fine. They need software developers, I'll repeat, they need software engineers. You will never be lacking for employment again if you attend Turing and work hard. I only know Turing so I can't speak of other schools, but let it be known that Turing has its issues like all schools do. But their issues are not related to their technical know how. They like to push the envelope for better or worse in terms of making the world a better place. They do this through a progressive agenda. It's great but be prepared for it, and if you are totally averse to that school of thought, then you might want to check out somewhere else. With that being said, you will learn a ton, and Jeff Casimir is the real deal. The guy believes in education and believes in you and is making the world a way better place. My life has been changed so much for the better. If you are telling yourself its too good to be true, its not, you are going to work your butt off, and sweat and grind at a computer for a long time. But if you asked me, I would say its the best decision you'll ever make. Go for Turing, Go for Turing. Tell them you want to learn Go. 

I have mixed feelings about Turing because of what it has become.

On the one hand, it does provide a quality introduction to both the theory underpinning today's technologies and the technologies themselves. On the other hand, the administration preaches a toxic political philosophy that ostracizes people that just happen to be in the majority of the tech industry, but never harmed anyone consciously in doing so. If you're fine with regressive left ideas being thrown in your face everyday, you'll enjoy every day at Turing.

I spent the better part of my 20s, jumping between jobs after a liberal arts degree that gave me few career options. I studied for the LSAT, GMAT and GRE and wasn't convinced that grad schools were worth the money and time.  I started thinking a lot about coding and taking some evening and online courses.  I thought a bootcamp was a good option but didn't think 12 weeks was going to be enough to learn. I eventually saw Jeff Casimir speak at Denver Startup Week's Bootcamps panel and was thoroughly impressed with his mission and Turing's program.  

Turing is a non-profit which means that you don't get a beautiful startup-y building with views of the mountains, you get a basement.  You don't get free food or access to tech parties but you get exceptional instructors who are willing to come in on weekends (with no extra bonuses to their salaries) to help you learn to code- they just care that much.  

The curriculum doesn't just teach you how to use frameworks and memorize rules. It teaches you how to think like a developer and how to code. Test Driven Development is a mantra here. It's not surprising that many of my classmates have ended up with jobs in other languages outside of what we were taught.  The curriculum covers a lot of foundational content and it's not easy.  The program is rigorous, to say the least, so prepare to put in lots of hours. And if your projects are consistently subpar, expect to retake a module or two.  

Turing was the hardest thing I've ever done but I received a job offer within 10 days of graduating.  I feel well prepared for the work that I will be doing, as every aspect of the job is something that I've covered in the curriculum. 

Outside of the curriculum, projects are geared to teach you how to work in teams (which is very challenging with code) and the program covers lots of soft skills (like public speaking and group debates), which makes you a more well-rounded, and open-minded developer coming out of the program.  I interviewed and met several CTOs and recruiters who consistently told me that they were only considering hiring bootcamp grads from Turing.  

If you're looking for a program that is evenings only or can be done as quickly as possible, you need to ask yourself if you really want to learn programming all that badly. Turing is really the only solid option out there.