Predatory indeed. I know of many people who were previously working service industry jobs, saved up the $10k for a GA course with the promise that they’ll be making $150k/yr in ~12 weeks.

I’ve personally interviewed around 25 GA grads, and the result was pretty much the same with all of them - “great, you now know what you don’t know, and have about a year of self-directed learning followed by a year of on the job experience before being employable in a role above an internship.

It’s actually pretty heartbreaking when you talk them and get a sense for how much they were oversold.

Disclaimer - taught GA part-time courses (data science)

My heart goes out to those people, and I'm guessing Web Development Immersive students?

I always described GA's programs as a multiplier in that your outcome is going to be weighted by your experience going in. And for the most part I felt GA managed that expectation fairly well for most of its immersive programs - except Web Development.

In WDI I would see students who had no background in CS, design, etc. hoping to go from no experience to a full-stack developer position in 12 weeks. With a broad curriculum that iirc was starting with html/css fundamentals and working through Rails/Node/... maybe Angular? I felt it was giving them a base to start learning on their own, but not enough to immediately start working except for the very-top students (who likely had some sort of helpful background coming in).

I do believe GA is at its core a good organization that wants to see its students succeed (can't say enough good things about the career coaching / placement staff aka "outcomes"). But I can see how with a lot of competition in that space, the sell may have gotten stronger than what the product supports - and that's 100% on GA to address.

I just wanted to chime in and say that I am a graduate of Web Development Immersive program (London campus). In 2014 I was crazy enough to put all my trust in GA (I didn't know much about them, except that they taught Ruby on Rails, and it sounded cool, and I wanted to learn), and go there from a different country to get the training. Turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me, ever! True, I did not have particularly high career expectations, nothing like making $150k/yr or anything that lofty, but I did hope that it would give me enough of a foundation to help me change my career and become a software developer. Which it totally did.

I saw this equally across the UX, WebDev, and product management immersive graduates.

I don’t doubt that GA started with good intentions, but it seems clear that they got caught in the typical startup trap where they get ‘forced’ to prioritize investors over users as their target audience.

Now I'm genuinely curious to know who you are :) You can contact me via my profile.

I used to interview would-be students for Lambda School (we now have a team that does that), and we had many GA grads that couldn't even pass our code challenge we required to start.

It wasn't outrageously hard stuff they were tripping up on, if you don't grasp closure or recursion or something that might be OK, but most couldn't code fizzbuzz. After having paid $10-15k in tuition and being trained for three months, I would at a minimum expect a student to be able to write a for loop.

Although, at a traditional 4 year university you can easily spend 6-10 times that amount of money and many students coming out of CS programs still aren't able to code fizzbuzz.

Turns out a four year university being awful and a code bootcamp being awful are not mutually exclusive.

I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that. My university had a decent CS program, but not top 10 or anything. You wouldn't be able to get past the required intro to CS class without knowing how to code fizzbuzz, much less move on to the later courses. Unless the students you're talking about cheated on every assignment and test, in every class.

You would be shocked. Truly.

Some bootcamps are certainly predatory, but I think there are often expectation mismatches from the student. I do think that bootcamps tend to attract the "wrong" types of people—those who view bootcamp enrollment as a financial transaction (pay $10k, get 10x ROI), or vastly underestimate the amount they also need to pay in sweat and hard work. I'd argue that the most successful bootcamp grads are those that likely would have succeeded outside of a bootcamp. Alone, or through other programs, e.g. MOOCs, that have infinitely better ROI (literally, division by zero/free).

I interviewed and rejected so many GA candidates that I unfortunately don't bother interviewing them anymore.

Moreover, I blame them for completely weakening what "Data Scientist" is supposed to mean. It was never really clear in the first place, but always assumed to be "a programmer who knows about statistics or a statistician who knows about programming". GA distributes their certifications to people who are neither.

Corollary, you're better off coming to me with no diploma/certification than with a GA one.

I took GA recently, and was never over-sold. I knew exactly what I was getting into-- yet I do have previous programming experience.

What upset me were, as you said, those who wanted to believe the promise of instant-employability without ANY prior coding experience. But GA did not over-sell this. They make it very clear in the entrance interview that there are no promises and the employment process is on our shoulders.

I feel, perhaps, the industry oversells itself: claims of "everyone should learn to code", claims of developers "making millions on IPOs", and reading how big tech companies are making the headlines every day. My neighbor's are all driving nice, fancy cars. Why? Amazon developers. Who doesn't want to be a developer-turned-overnight-success with propaganda like that?

I can attest to this in the case of the Data Science course. My wife, a non-CS PhD, was interested in changing her career track. We were referred to General Assembly (the SF location) by one of my coworkers and the curriculum looked comprehensive enough, so she signed up.

About a month into the course, to our despair, we discovered that there was almost zero conceptual training imparted (I am a data scientist by profession and can speak to this). The instructors seemed to be working there as a stopgap measure while looking for other jobs, and the students were there for standard credential-seeking. The course material meanwhile was focused on answering "How" but not "Why", which is far more important when approaching data science problems.

To fix the situation, we quickly pieced together a curriculum based on Tibshirani & Hastie's machine learning video lectures[0] and picked a few Kaggle challenges for practice. My wife went through this material over a month, and came out with enough of a mental framework to be able to tackle book-length material such as ISLR[1].

Finally, there was almost zero career support provided apart from generic advice around how networking is important and how one should try to get outside their comfort zone.

Though all's well that ends well (my wife is working as a data scientist now at a seed-stage Valley startup), in retrospect we often talk about how we shouldn't have wasted money on this course. She didn't learn anything that she couldn't have picked up on her own, not even practical skills re: data analysis with Python/R, and her student cohort was quite disinterested in making connections.

Ce la vie.

[0] http://www.dataschool.io/15-hours-of-expert-machine-learning... [1] Introduction to Statistical Learning, http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Just to tack onto this, from what I understand, quality at each of the GA locations varied wildly. Part of that is it's on the instructors to come up with all the details of the curriculum so instruction varies from class to class depending on whether or not the instructor had taught it before, or if HQ decided to change the material in the course. My understanding as a former evening class instructor was the SF location was a shit show, whereas the Boston location where I taught had better outcomes.

I've long looked at their courses with interest, and recently took a free class intro so I could scope out if the place was worth the money and.... I wasn't impressed, especially not for the high prices.

The instructor was a "senior engineer" while his resume was only 2-3 years long, and he was an average at best instructor. The furniture was Ikea or Ikea-level. And perhaps most unforgivable to me, the (cheap) desks/benches did not have power outlets, even though laptops are a fundamental requirement. My last point may seem petty to some, but to me it indicated a distinct lack of consideration for what students actually need to succeed.

If I'm paying north of $100 per class hour, I expected considerably better.

I used to teach the web development immersive.

The quality of the courses depends on the quality of the instructors -- and because GA tends to hire instructors as contractors without benefits, it's difficult for them to retain good instructors.

I also think the rigor and quality of the curriculum varies widely between campuses. NYC and DC do have fairly solid curriculums and high expectations for students. I get the impression that this is not the same for all campuses. (As an example: a campus on the west coast spends one hour total on SQL, while campuses on the east coast spend 9-10 hours of lecture time along with two homework assignments.)

I was a contractor that taught evening classes. Definitely agree that quality is all on the instructors, and quality of outcomes varied between instructors and campuses. When I was still teaching, I was pretty sure WDI instructors were full time employees. Is that not still the case? The biggest issue I heard from the WDI guys I knew was burnout. They were doing 40 hours in class, then class prep/student aid outside. For the same salary as a dev, they basically had 60-80 hour weeks in session.

In NYC, at least, there are three or four full time slots, and the rest are contractors. 8 or 10 total. Burnout is definitely a big deal. Instructors who naturally tend towards burning themselves out stick around longer...

I've helped a few students with their homework, despite never taking a course there. They were utterly lost.