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I participated in App Academy. The program had strengths and weaknesses, but to their credit, they culled the class at the halfway point, and gave folks who had no chance of getting hired within a reasonable timeframe a full refund of their deposit.

There was some bait-and-switch with regard to their "free unless/until you get a job" pitch. I think the competition for students in the space is increasing pressure, and oversight is probably a necessary thing.

In my opinion, students who went on to A-list companies probably could have gotten a job without the bootcamp. But the offer is still compelling if you get a couple months of intense introduction to an in-demand framework, and don't pay anything out-of-pocket (App Academy collects when you get hired).

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Culling sounds kind of like they either needed a longer course or a deeper applications pipeline. It's definitely not a thing at Hack Reactor.

As an aside, I met most of the first class of App Academy. I was really impressed with Ned's teaching as well as the progress Hugo and a couple of the others were making. It was seeing that that lead me to go to an immersive school and it was one of the best investments I've ever made.

There was a paramedic school around that was closely tied in with one of the national ambulance companies, who offered / guaranteed jobs (matching, help with recruiting, etc) to graduates, the catch being that if you were "undesirable", but a graduate nonetheless, you'd be offered a job with the company in the middle of the rural Dakotas or West Virginia or somewhere "undesirable" (apologies to those areas - more that young people trying to do the paramedic thing are usually looking for the "excitement" of big-city medicine).

If you didn't take the job, well, they'd fulfilled things, and got you a(n undesirable) job.

What happened to the students that were culled? I can't even imagine what you'd do after getting dropped from a class you paid for (even with refund). That must be tremendously demoralizing.

I also participated in App Academy, and there was no culling. The students went on to successfully find well-paying jobs in the tech industry.

I find the second sentence to be as ambiguous as possible.

> 95% of our graduates have offers or are working in tech jobs now at an average salary of $91,000.

http://www.appacademy.io/

that could even be true, but some for-profit schools are notorious for manipulating statistics like that in a variety of ways. Hiring people themselves, paying other outfits to hire them temporarily, offers of terrible jobs nobody would take, and flat-out lying.

That's not to say it's happening here, of course. I'm sure some of these programs are great. But it's something people should consider when looking at any program like this, especially unregulated ones.

> that could even be true, but some for-profit schools are notorious for manipulating statistics like that in a variety of ways.

The people from my cohort are not just statistics to me. I know them personally, and all I can say is that they are very satisfied with how things have turned out.

Also note that with App Academy, the tuition is a percentage of your first year's salary. So the company is incentivized to ensure that students get a job (and the highest paying one they can), because otherwise they don't get paid.

No offense intended; I'm glad you and your friends had a good experience. My concern is about the market in general.

I like App Academy's percentage-based approach. That's definitely putting their money where their mouth is. I think the only thing undemonstrated for me is how much difference their program makes. It'd be interesting to take their pre App-Academy resumes and put them in the hands of a good recruiter.

> I think the only thing undemonstrated for me is how much difference their program makes.

It can be difficult for people who have not experienced it to understand the sort of progress you can make in such a short period of time. I obviously can't speak as to the other hiring bootcamps, but the guided pair programming approach taken by App Academy is very effective for rapid hands-on learning. I had taken a CS class or two prior to App Academy, and the difference is night and day.

Also, there is more to the program than just technical learning. There is a 3 week hiring bootcamp, where everyone works together on the job search process, under the guidance of an App Academy hiring instructor. For people new to the tech industry, this is very effective at bringing them up to speed on how hiring works in tech.

At this point, there are many companies that employ App Academy alumni (including thoughtbot, Facebook, Vimeo, Hipmunk, Twilio, and Zendesk), and many have realized the quality of its graduates, and so whenever a new cohort is getting close to graduation, managers from those companies come to a "demo day," where students can show their capstone projects and get interviews.

I've been pair programming for more than a decade, so I definitely know how much it can help newbies. My point is more that one way they can skew the stats in their favor is by hiring people who would have been hired by those companies with or without the program. E.g., people whose issue is self esteem, or people who aren't good at self-evaluation, or people who lack the sort of personal connections that let other hard-to-evaluate candidates get their first break.

I'm not saying that's what they're doing, of course I'm just saying that in this market a strong hiring rate alone doesn't prove anything about the program.

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