Eh, I had a much better experience. But I don't chalk up my success to HR's curriculum nearly as much as I do the people (though getting exposure to Node.js has been a huge aspect of my life).
If you're going to any bootcamp/immersive and you're going for the curriculum all you're going to get out of it is the curriculum - which you could easily obtain from freecodecamp.com for... well... free. If you're going to go, you should be going for the people - your sprint partners, thesis groups, beer buddies, outcomes teams, tech leads, alumni network... that's what lasts after Hack Reactor and it yields dividends well beyond the (admittedly striking) sticker price.
Part of my concern with bootcamps is the sentiment expressed above that you need it to get exposure to some arbitrary technology. In my experience, the best indicator to success in an industry or technology is a desire to learn that technology. Not someone giving exposure. I a happy it is working out for you, but as Node falls out of fashion, it will be on you to learn the next wave.
I hate when people make the assumption that learning JavaScript is somehow a limiting factor. It hasn't stopped me from picking up Java, Ruby, Python, or PHP. I still have some trouble with Go structs and I still have some learning to do on Rust lifetimes... but seriously.
What "next wave" of server application development does Node.js leave me so woefully unprepared to deal with? Are people really having issues marshalling JSON/XML or sending templates down the wire?
Was not my intention to imply javascript was a limiting factor. Nor that web frameworks for python, java, ruby, etc. are all that different. My comment was simply challenging the thought that a bootcamp is necessary for being exposed to technology. There are plenty of free resources online from which to learn. If a bootcamp helps jumpstart that, great. But picking up the next framework (while similar) will require diving in on your own.
If you're going to any bootcamp/immersive and you're going for the curriculum all you're going to get out of it is the curriculum - which you could easily obtain from freecodecamp.com for... well... free. If you're going to go, you should be going for the people - your sprint partners, thesis groups, beer buddies, outcomes teams, tech leads, alumni network... that's what lasts after Hack Reactor and it yields dividends well beyond the (admittedly striking) sticker price.