Dev Bootcamp

Andrew and Hunter were very accommodating with guests and students.

I went to DBC and recently got a job. Here’s my overall experience from A-​Z.
Pros:
— Location: Financial District
— Aimed for beginners
— Not all about coding. Interpersonal skills and empathetic approaches are also taught.
— Very receptive to feedbacks.
— You learn more than just programming, you learn how to become a problem solver!
Cons:
— Do not cover the basics of Computer Science. This is not good! I met people who did not know some basic Algebra. I’m sorry but if you don’t know basic algebra and DBC doesn’t know/​teach that then good luck with getting a job post graduation.
Check this link out for some CS fundamentals:
.
You are required to know some CS fundamentals for work. At my current job, I just learned why we need to use Redis, why we may need MongoDB, why one framework as opposed to another, etc.
— Too crowded. Okay, if you’re paying more than students at Stanford University do, I don’t see why we should have larger classrooms. This really bugged me, because at times the skilled-​instructor (s) were literally too busy to effectively help. Some tried but were too busy to spend quality one-​on-​one time with a struggling student who paid over 12k for a 9 week course.
— Not all instructors actually know their stuff. Again, when you pay 12k+ this gets very frustrating.
— Some (not all) students that end up working at DBC as a Tutor/​Instructor do not know their concepts well. Again, DBC does not screen their instructors well. They should be more understanding of the 12−15k each student has spent trying to learn than hiring someone with inadequate knowledge/​skill to walk around skipping questions/​not being helpful.
— Just about anyone gets accepted. The interview process and the applications are all a joke. Wether you have a CS degree or just walked out of prison you can get accepted. You can literally talk about water during your interview process and it doesn’t matter. I feel like DBC has become all about money. Mo students mo money. This is a problem and you’ll feel it too. How? Well, DBC is all about pair-​programming. Often you may pair with someone with a CS degree or who’s had a lot of coding practice, and if you had 0 coding practice then you can watch your pair complete the whole challenge. You will learn nothing. The opposite is also true. If you’re the skilled one, your pair will feel awkward and stupid and you’ll feel annoyed that he/​she isn’t contributing much/​anything. DBC should do a better job at who they accept as students. There are coding-​bootcamps tailored for intermediates programmers only, some for beginners, some for advance. But DBC is for mo money (which also explains their unusually large classes).
— They promise you can leave anytime with some refund, but that’s not that simple. I knew one guy who decided to leave, DBC instructor (shall remain nameless) had him come back to the office in front of everyone (in a circle) and explain his situation. It was SOOO AWKWARD and frankly very embarrassing on DBC’s part. If you promise that your students may leave for personal reasons then you mustn’t interrogate him/​her or bring them in front of a crowd to do some explaining.
— No matter how smart (you think) you are, 9-​weeks of programming is not sufficient to be a web developer. DBC must (I think at some point they will) extend their program to teach many of the web-​dev fundamentals that students don’t learn.
AT THE END. I did get a job. A very good one, thank God. But it didn’t come as easy as DBC promises. I can share my experience with how I ended up with the job but that is irrelevant to this post.
BEFORE you spend 12−15k and dedicate the next 9 – 20 weeks to DBC or any programming bootcamp, feel free to msg me and I will, God willing, give you advice on how to get the best out of these schools and what’s important about web-​dev.
EDIT: DBC is great at soliciting feedback (s) and applying them if reasonable. Future students, go online or better yet talk to professional web developers to know what you need to learn about web-​development fundamentals. Then, request DBC’s curriculum and see if there is any void. Also, before choosing a coding bootcamp, ask yourself: do you prefer front-​end dev, back-​end dev, or full-​stack dev.
EDIT 2: I wrote a blog about coding bootcamp and a bit about my experience. This post also includes answers to FAQ I’ve been receiving from many Unilocalers. Check it out here:
Hopefully this will answer most of your questions.

Reading a one star review below and seeing most other reviews are from last year, I felt compelled to share my experience.
First of all, DBC is for BEGINNERS. It is designed for people who have never really opened their terminal windows and learn the difference between bits and bytes. It is not optimized for people with solid prior programming experience, there are other programs such as Hack Reactor better for people with more experiences and you can easily tell the different entry bars when you undergo a school’s application process. However, with that said, as an intelligent decision maker, you should study some Ruby fundamentals and web development basics before you decide to throw away 10k+ and quitting your current job to attend a school without knowing if it is the right career for you.
DBC’s curriculum is structured into 3 phases with 3 weeks in each phase. First 6 weeks of DBC (first 2 phases) teach you much more than ruby syntax and what is mentioned in prework. Syntax is the first thing you learn just like you have to learn the alphabet before you can write. But that was taught in the first week and you may see some new stuff here and there the following two weeks. The rest of Phase 1 and Phase 2 you will learn about a variety of topics such as recursion, SQL Database, Sinatra, AJAX, OAuth, API etc. The final 3 weeks (Phase 3) introduce Rails and only the last week is spend on group projects. The first 2 weeks of Phase 3 you spend learning Ruby on Rails, Rails API and deeper dive into JavaScript. Final week is crunch time and the final projects can be as complicated as you dare to challenge yourself with. It is designed for you to have something in your portfolio to showcase when it comes to job hunting. I actually have landed quite few interviews because of what I did for my final project. DBC provides a safe and encouraging environment for learning, which is what beginners needed most. And most importantly, DBC teaches you to think like a programmer — how to learn, how to debug, how to pair programming, how to work in a team and how to be HUMBLE and KIND.
Now, comes to the job placement part. I will not lie as the career week itself is very weak and provides a very harsh contrast for students who just finished intensive coding programs. I have heard people getting interviews with DevConnect which is an in-​house career site but personally I did not get a single response. I definitely do feel the advertised hiring rate seems high in the time range they provided. However, most people who have aggressively applied for jobs with no prior experiences nor connections, myself included, have landed offer within 4 months (I received an offer right around the 2 months mark). This obviously can vary person to person and I believe the time gap will continue to increase as more and more bootcamp graduates flooding to the market every week. This is probably also one of the reasons DevBootcamp have taken down the specific statistic from their website. But I truly believe that if you love programming and you have persistence, you can have a complete turnover of your life under 6 months. I did with my life with DevBootcamp and would join the rest of the reviewers here to say it is one of the best decisions I have ever made.

I was enrolled shortly at DevBootCamp and had to withdraw early for personal reasons. My experience stems from my short time enrolled and from two close friends who I recommended DBC to and who are currently on-​site.
My feeling towards DBC started warm, but has quickly dropped the more I interact with them. One of DBC’s strong points is that they provide you with a supportive community, which is absolutely necessary when beginning something new. I recommended DBC to many of my friends for that sole reason; however, I can no longer say that.
One of my close friends wanted to defer or withdraw for personal reasons. At the bare minimum, he would be able to withdraw with only a 2k penalty (
) since he wanted to leave before Phase 1 began. When they would not respond to his defer/​withdrawal email, he went on-​site to personally ask them this. They then said that he could not defer and that they would penalize him 5K if he withdrew (which is inconsistent with their refund policy).
If you have any doubts about whether you want to do programming, I highly discourage you from considering DBC as it will be difficult to get your money back once they have it.

I had an interview today with a dev bootcamp alumni. This person did not grasp some of the most basic tenants of programming like assignment and recursion. I’m not sure what they’re teaching here, but it doesn’t seem to be very well rounded. Would not recommend.
It apparently took 4 people 8 weeks to build this quality piece of software
I guess it works kind of, and doesn’t always crash my browser. That’s something to be proud of…
Hiring tech talent is hard enough without «schools» like these convincing students that they’re ready for the workplace after only a few weeks of training. They’re doing a disservice to employers, and are deceiving people looking to learn how to program.
Take a look at some of the code in the above project to get a sense of the quality that you can look forward to having at your company after hiring one of these bozos!

Decided to go with another bootcamp. Wasn’t really feel it for a couple of reasons:
a) I got the feel the interview prep on
might be similar to the Prep 0: 9-​weeks remote section which is an awful online learn guide and didn’t covered everything that was asked in the interview. Would be better off picking up a Ruby book than going though that.
b) Interview was awkward, the interviewer was very down and lacked enticement. Seems like the interviewer didn’t care much and this was only a blue-​collar minimum wage pay job for him.
c) From the gist of all this, I have no doubt that DBC could be greater but it’s not very enticing. Many other camps have couple hundred thousands of followers on Google+ and a better layout of what they have to offer, respectable reviews about what their past alumni have done, and more respectable people you speak to that offer more persuasion in response to your question.

Honestly, going to DBC was the best professional decision I have ever made. If you want to learn how to code, go to DBC. Simple as that.

Having finished Dev Bootcamp in the Sea Lions cohort of 2014 I can confidently say that I have never learned so much in a 9 week period. Dev Bootcamp promises to turn any willing individual into a Web Developer. Not only have they done that, but they have done it well.
I can confidently recommend the program to anyone interested in becoming a developer.

I dont think Ive ever learned more in the span of 9 weeks. DBC was a great experience that i have recommend to many friends interested in learning how to code
I graduated in the March ’14 cohort.

Because of Dev Bootcamp I am confident that I can conquer any coding challenge that I come across. I just graduated and had an amazing experience. It was one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences I have ever had. This accelerator gave me the skills I need to get a head start on my graphic design career.
They also just got a brand new amazing space that is definitely worth checking out. DBC is the first of its kind, this program is always evolving in the best way possible.

Attending DBC is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The staff, the teachers, and my class are all such amazing people. I entered unsure of whether I could learn to code, and left with the skills I needed to build a prototype of my idea Hipcamp to help people discover the outdoors. That prototype has propelled me to building Hipcamp fulltime. I couldn’t be happier, and it wouldn’t have been possible without DBC. If you’re thinking about it, just do it. It will make you smarter, stronger, and a more aware human being. Coding is such a critical skill, and only getting more important every day. I truly believe DBC is the best place in the whole world to learn how to code.

My roommate went to DevBootcamp. He spent close to 16 hours a day for 3 months, then he got an intership at Twitter following by full time offer.
has a good review of DevBootcamp and most importantly it allows to compare it to other similar bootcamps side-​by-​side:

At Dev Bootcamp, I met some of the most amazing people I have ever known. I made very, very special friends. And I learned back-​end programming (I have had a lot of experience in front-​end development and design).
Dev Bootcamp is like a 9+ week long Hackathon but with strong focus on best practices.
Simply put, Dev Bootcamp changed my life.

DBC was one of the best decisions of my life. Making a carrier change with 35+ is normally quite hard, but thanks to DBC it was easy. A month after graduating I got my job.
As a former teacher with 12 years experience I was amazed to see what they did and how they did it. I loved at DBC the approach to teach the whole person to bring variety into the intense learning plan (about 9am-​10pm 7 days/​week — self-​pased but with a strict timeframe): there was sport (yoga, ymca membership), meta-​skill training (how to tell a person nicely that he/​she is annoys you,…), counseling, …
I would encourage everyone to give it a shot when you are thinking about a carrier as a Developer, but especially women. The school tries hard to get more women into programming and makes it a save and empowering environment.

This program was critical to my getting to where I currently am as a designer and engineer. It truly did open up doors for me professionally I couldn’t have opened on my own, or at least without years of comparable experience.

I am a graduate of Dev Bootcamp’s second cohort, summer of 2012, and it was the best experience I could have asked for. I was 19 at the time of graduation and had a couple job offers right out the gate. I opted to work part time and go to school, since then I have worked for two different companies and founded multiple web apps of my own including this one here:
. Also with the help of my Dev Bootcamp experience, I have been able to secure a scholarship to UC Berkeley.
Dev Bootcamp was the best thing I could have done for my career. The skills learned there have helped me in all aspects of my life. I honestly cannot thank the dev Bootcamp teachers and founders enough for the experience that they facilitated for me. I’m sure that I can speak for everyone in my cohort when I say that it was one the best and most life changing experiences I have had in my life.

Just graduated in December from the Salamander Cohort as part of Dev Bootcamp Chicago and have to say that I had a fantastic experience! Looks like I’m one of the first to review so I’ll try to give some in-​depth information about the program and how it is run
What you are going to learn:
–Ruby
–Ruby on Rails
–Sinatra
–Decent exposure to JS
–HTML & CSS and the whole web side of things
–Testing (Rspec/​Jasmine)
–APIs
–A bunch of other great stuff like Active Record, security, git, heroku, performance optimization through caching, lots of algorithms during the first week… check out their website for more
What you are not going to learn:
–The computer science stuff that you would get in a CS degree (sorting algorithms, in-​depth practice with complex abstract data types — like trees, heaps, linked lists, ect — practice with big O, computer theory… etc)
–You are not going to get lots of interview practice for real world interviews. They are currently adding more interview help/​prep to the end of the program but as it currently stands the actual prep work for interviewing (whiteboard practice, toy problems, computer science concepts, sort skills, etc.) has to be done independently.
The structure of the days:
–Every morning the gong (yes, there is an actual gong) rings at 8am. Typically after this you will have a morning lecture followed by core coding assignments that are done in pairs (DBC is really big on pair programming). During Phase 1 there is mandatory yoga twice a week in the mornings, but honestly even if yoga isn’t your thing don’t worry too much about it. The class is taught for absolute beginners and was not challenging/​intimidating whatsoever.
–After that you typically program with your partner until lunch (there is optional solo programming on Thursday where you can work alone all day if you like — do it) and then you get an hour and a half lunch break. DBC Chicago also provides a gym for you to go to as part of the cost of the program, and I would typically leave and go lift weights for an hour during this time.
–After lunch is usually a lecture on some topic that is related to what you are/​have been doing so far that day. When afternoon lecture ends you go back and work on the day’s core challenges. If you finish your cores for the day there are more advanced challenges you can work on or you can go help others who are still struggling with their cores.
–The end of day gong rings at 5pm but it was not uncommon to work until 10pm before going home, falling asleep, and dreaming of coding all night long. This will happen to you every night of the program.
–Also, you will be working both days on the weekends as well. Be prepared to not have a life outside of DBC.
The structure of the program:
DBC is divided into three phases. Each one is three weeks long and at the end of the first two phases there is an assessment, which you have to pass to go on to the next phase.
–Phase one — Ruby, Object Oriented Design, Databases.
–Phase two — Web Fundamentals, Front End (CSS/​HTML), Web Apps (using Sinatra as your mvc framework). You will build a ton of crud apps using Sinatra during this time.
–Phase three — Ruby on Rails, practice everything you learned so far, final projects. For final projects you have 8 days to go off and build something you are passionate about with a small team. This is an extremely fun/​stressful time.
The staff/​teachers:
–In Chicago most of the staff are Ex-​Groupon. The teachers were extremely knowledgeable, kind yet demanding with their expectations, and really would do anything they could to ensure that you understood the material well. Although they could officially leave DBC at 5pm, it was not uncommon for teachers to stick around much later helping students with the material.
Overall:
The excellent teachers and supportive learning environment enabled me to really learn a lot. I learned a lot about myself and how I learn, as well as how to build and architect systems and use ruby/​ruby on rails as a means of creating beautiful and meaningful web applications. It was also great to help others get through the program and watch as they progressed in skill.
Programming boot camps are beginning to become very trendy so if you are even thinking of doing DBC make sure to apply now, since the waiting list is several months long already. The wait list at DBC chicago is shorter than DBC San Fran
My only critique with the program is with their philosophy that by the end of the program you are a «world class beginner». Not to be cocky but my advice to you is to remove the word «beginner» or «junior» from your vocabulary/​any of your online profiles, especially when interviewing. After graduating from DBC I feel more than confident that I can take on any software engineering challenge I am presented with and solve it like any other good engineer.
«Remember, programming is not about what you know. It’s about what you can figure out.» –Socrates

I am chairman of a company that just hired a wonderful candidate from the last class at Dev Bootcamp, and interviewed many promising others. Of the previous class, the ones I know of seem to be happily employed at good companies.
I have visited several times, and always been impressed with the atmosphere and motivation of the students. It’s a remarkable place.