Keziyah

I went to a bootcamp and it changed my life for the better. I have a job I enjoy that pays well. I can see the day when I'm finally out of debt. One day I can buy my mom a house. I can travel and work at the same time. I want other people to have these opportunities.

But in order to get people into tech jobs, they need to be educated properly. Unfortunately, many bootcamps are doing a terrible job. Instead of helping students, they are actively harming them, and in some cases, ruining lives. So, someone needs to talk about this.

Just like with my Lambda School thread, what I'm saying here is based on what others have told me. Students/alumni have sent me information about what goes on at Holberton School. They will all be kept anonymous.

This thread will probably be long and I'll possibly be adding more over the next few days. Anyway, let's begin.

Holberton School is one of the ISA (income share agreement) bootcamps. How does an ISA work? It's "free" now, and then you pay a percentage of your income for a certain period of time after you get a job.

.@hollowships analysis of ISAs is really interesting. I highly recommend reading this blog and giving Christof a follow to learn more about why ISAs are very problematic.https://twitter.com/hollowships/status/1157032401824112640 …

I used to think that bootcamps did ISAs and tuition repayment programs out of the goodness of their hearts. If I don't get a job, they lose money, right? No. These bootcamps are VC backed, & they sell the ISAs to 3rd parties. There's no incentive to prioritize student success.

I guess that's why Holberton School has no teachers. That's right. No teachers, at all. Students teach themselves and help each other out. To be fair, some of the students I talked to either didn't mind this, or liked it.

I have no problem with self & peer learning. I do have a problem when students are paying up to $85,000 USD to teach themselves. That's the cap for the Holberton School ISA. 17% of your income per month, for 3.5 years, up to $85k. You start paying if you make at least 40k.

Also:https://twitter.com/hollowships/status/1169066952142327808 …

Let's switch gears for a sec and talk about Holberton School reviews. First, if you ever see Course Report, SwitchUp, or similar bootcamp reviews, ignore them. They look too good to be true. That's because they are.

Remember that the tech bootcamps pay other companies to promote their products. That's why you might see bootcamp promotions on review sites like Course Report and SwitchUp. That's how Career Karma exists. They get paid to refer students to a select few schools.

Several folks have told me that Holberton School gives students gift cards to write "honest" reviews on these review sites. A student sent me a screenshot of a Slack message, in which Holberton staff told students that they'd get a $50 Amazon gift card after writing reviews.

Students were asked to write reviews on Course Report, SwitchUp, Yelp, Facebook, and Google. To be fair, the Slack message did say that students should talk about both the good and bad about Holberton School. But they were getting paid, so...

Let's talk about admissions. A 2.58% acceptance rate is what they claim on their website. But according to one former student, let's call them Anon 1, "if you're breathing, they'll accept you...it's a numbers game to them."

Anon 1 is a success story by the way. They went through part of the program and now have a high paying tech job. Yet they reached out to me because they saw their fellow students struggling, and felt the need to warn others about what was really going on at Holberton.

Anon 1: "I don't want people to fall for this trap anymore." But it seems like Holberton School wants to make the trap as easy as possible to fall into. Admissions isn't selective at all. Anon 2 spoke to an intern, who "was told to accept anything that came to her."

Anon 2: "During my application process, my entry was instantly accepted when I submitted. There was not nearly enough time to look at anything I did..." They later found out there was no real system in place to review applications.

Let's get into Holberton's curriculum. As I said, students will pay up to $85k to teach themselves & each other. Anon 3 is another success story, from an earlier batch of HS. They work as an engineer in a tech hub. Anon 3: "We truly feel that the education was not worth 85k."

Anon 3: "Many of the students [from my early batch years ago] were used as their "success numbers", yet our curriculum was woefully underdeveloped" In fact, there was no Year 2 curriculum yet. I believe there *still* isn't a Year 2 curriculum.

My understanding is that though Holberton School is a 2 year program, the actual learning takes place over 9 months. Anon 2: "They do not make any effort to put anyone into the year 2 program unless they have totally given up on job hunting. The year 2 curriculum is a sham"

Ok, so there is a Year 2 curriculum, but it's bullshit. Anon 1 only did the 1st 9 months, and says those 9 months are "very general, stuff you can grab out of a book yourself. Don’t need some aging tech bro to do that for you."

For $85k per student, you'd think that Holberton School would hire an amazing education team to write the curriculum, right? Anon 1 says that a "co-founder shamelessly laughed about grabbing practice problems right from the book and charging people for it"

For the Year 2 specializations, you can supposedly learn things like machine learning, AR/VR, and low level programming. The curriculum for all of these specializations are being developed by junior engineers/former Holberton students.

Curriculum development is very hard. This is not work that you give to students with little experience. I swear these bootcamps have no respect for education at all.

Anon 1: "They’re really just betting that people won’t go back for the specialization and that’s why they have placeholder specialization that isn’t completely fleshed out." Though the Year 2 specialization is optional, the tuition isn't. Eighty five thousand American dollars.

Oh yeah, and the current head of curriculum at Holberton School? Also a former student. No apparent previous experience in education or curriculum design.

So it's no wonder that Anon 3 described the curriculum as "obviously thrown together." So we have newbie coders teaching themselves with a poor curriculum. Also, the program is advertised as full stack, but they only get one week of JavaScript. One week.

Let's talk about how students learn at Holberton School. Or how they don't. Anon 4, on peer learning at HS: "It’s no different from giving a bunch of kids car keys and manuals to go learn by doing...No one looks through our work, no one teaches us best practices."