…and it has not prepared you for a real job.
Dramatic, right? Glad I have your attention!
Overall, the curriculum is dogmatic, pedantic, and old. It rarely uses modern techniques, and rampantly enforces the use of tools and techniques that the industry has abandoned, disavowed, or which no one has ever even heard of. I definitely know more than I did at the start, and I can build many more things! But my fellow students and I are nowhere near prepared for real jobs in the real world. And for the majority of us who get them anyway, we’ll spend much of our first experiences unlearning bad habits, and instead first starting our education on how real apps are written and work.
For perspective, I’m in a different and frankly better position than most of the other students, which is part of why I feel comfortable writing this. Upon graduation, I won’t be looking for a new job, I’ll simply have added some new knowledge to my skillset that I’ll hope to use in my current job. That’s a privileged position and not the one most folks are in.
Most of my fellow students have invested huge chunks of their savings into an education that promises them a job…and it will probably get them one! Our industry is starved for talent, and companies will make do with whatever they can get… but they definitely won’t get it. They’re smart, and they’ll make it work, but they’ll spend evenings and weekends at their first few jobs catching up with their counterparts, and learning things their bootcamp should have taught them, or which it taught them the wrong answers for. And that’s just pretty unnecessarily shitty.
For context, I have hired and recommended Flatiron students before. Frankly there were many bootcamps we interviewed folks from, who were even worse. The landscape, while enthusiastic and doing some great things for the industry, is young, naive and full of first-time educators with little understanding of the fundamentals and theory of the very things they’re teaching. Following my experience, heck, Flatiron students might still be better off than some other schools… but they’re definitely not suitable junior engineers upon graduation.
Would I hire a Flatiron student again? Unclear. At the very least, they’d get no more credibility than an engineer who self-taught on Egghead or some other program. I’m also having a ton of ah-ha moments about the early years of those Flatiron grads I’ve worked with. I totally get their giant, fundamental blindspots now! They were not personal failings. They were Flatiron failings. And I’m so much more impressed with some of the ones I’ve personally hired, for struggling through those first few post-school years and turning into solid engineers just the same, before I eventually met them, hired them, and learned how fabulous they were. And I’m also just SO aware of how much worse it’s gotten since then, from seeing the delta between those new Flatiron engineers and today’s new Flatiron engineers.
Most of our instructors have little or no real world experience. They’re students, who became Flatiron coaches (aka customer/student support), and then instructors. It’s unclear if they took this path because they’re the students who failed to get jobs in the real world, or for other reasons, but it’s clear many of them have no passion for teaching, and no formal education in, well, educating. More importantly, the only thing they really know, is the curriculum itself. Hence all the dogma, and failure to think outside the box.
The instructors are essentially photocopies of photocopies of photocopies. At some point, the starting point, they were surely real live developers, who had years of experience and the knowledge that comes with it. Much of the early parts of the online curriculum is watching videos of Avi teaching concepts—and he was great! (Full disclosure, Avi’s an old friend, and I know early Flatiron was so much better than this because he was at the helm). But they’re the greatest part of the course—and many of them are four to six years old. Yes, you read that right. In a landscape that changes seemingly daily, Flatiron students are getting much of their education from videos that are multiple years old.
Back to the instructors. We’re several generations away from the original sources now, and for those of us old enough to remember how photocopies work, each new one is a little bit worse than the last one, and it compounds and compounds. Eventually you’re just trying to glean something from a grainy piece of paper someone insists is full of wisdom.
My classmates have been fabulous, that’s the redeeming factor, but also the kicker. Flatiron has managed to recruit a student body full of wonderful, diverse and eager students, some of whom are using their best chance and last dollars on these programs. And along the way, as the curriculum got more and more inadequate, and the school grew less and less supportive (their responses to Coronavirus and BLM have been both thoughtless and barely-there), they spent more and more of their personal time finding outside resources. We constantly share resources behind the scenes, and rely on each other to make sense of the bugs, inconsistencies and general ineptitude of the materials. And that’s great for us! But we’re also sure as heck not getting our money’s worth, and we’re not getting the support nor quality of education we were promised.
I’m talking about the ones who didn’t drop out, of course. The attrition rates are tremendous. My cohort started with between 40 and 60 students. There’s a clear and concerted, or at least accidentally ignorant, effort to not let folks know who and how many folks are in their cohort, presumably so no one notices how many of us disappear. Right now there are fewer than 20 folks in my cohort, and many of them aren’t the students I started with. They’re students who have fallen out of cohorts that started earlier than us and jumped into our class to try and graduate. So of those 40-60, maybe 10 of us are the original class. Maybe.
Flatiron’s outcome reports talk about those who graduated, but doesn’t tell you about all those who didn’t. The data I’d really like to see is:
- What percentage of students drop out at any point before graduation?
- What percentage of students take longer than expected to graduate?
- What are the diversity numbers on the students who drop-out?
- What’s the average number of years of experience in real programming jobs of the Flatiron faculty?
- What percentage of students fail each segment review (think midterms) and have to drop back a cohort?
I alluded earlier to Flatiron having a lackluster response to Coronavirus and BLM. A little more about that:
When Coronavirus hit, Flatiron’s response was…. nothing. They may have said a few empty “this is so hard” sort of things, but in practice, they did nothing. I, and several others, lodged complaints, and reached out to administration. Personally I had a call with the GM, and frankly, she had nothing compelling to say. As her best argument, she said that she couldn’t do anything to help students who might need more time due to Coronavirus “because of the regulatory agencies, they won’t allow it.” When I asked which agencies she was referring to, she had no answer.
I talked about Flatiron’s responsibilities to their student body. I specifically talked about how they were focusing on tackling the industry diversity pipeline problem, and were doing a great job at it. But about how that meant that the students they were failing were disproportionately BIPOC and women, who incidentally, were also disproportionately affected by Coronavirus. About how there was a moral responsibility to step up. Again, I was met with crickets.
I want to stress that no fewer than four times in that call, the GM said something like “but what can I do to help you”? To which I responded, it wasn’t about me. I was doing just fine. It was about the students who had too much on the line to stand up for themselves. The students who weren’t even there to complain because they were in the hospital with ill family members. The students who had been laid off, and were too busy hunting for emergency income sources. But she kept asking, in the union-busting “but if I make you happy, this all goes away” way.
Eventually, we started a petition, and after a bunch of tweets from the public, successful alumni, and DHH (the creator of Ruby on Rails, which the program teaches), the school agreed to waive certain financial restrictions (essentially letting folks drop out or back with fewer penalties, shifting the terms of the money-back guarantee for finding employment, and extending the completion date before which they’d start charging self-paced students more). They didn’t do anything more when those accommodations quietly expired and the pandemic continued to ravage, but that’s beside the point. I took the win! But… why was it so hard?
Now, with the increased persistence of police violence and the disproportionate burden on Black and BIPOC students and communities, Flatiron has once again, done nothing. Twice now, they’ve “taken the day off out of respect” (blackout Tuesday and Juneteenth), but where that meant giving a day off to their seemingly mostly-white staff, and taking a day of support away from their diverse student body. (A day off did not mean that student deadlines were pushed or extended, just that our instructors and customer service folk were around to help us one fewer day. So in fact “honoring” the BLM movement made things harder for their diverse student body. Go figure). It’s no wonder, considering what their leadership and board looks like:
Am I bitter? A tad. I may not have personal stakes on the line here, but I can’t stress enough how wonderful some of the people I’ve met along the way were. Students from all walks of life, all parts of the world, all types of professional backgrounds. It’s been painful watching them contort their brains to learn concepts taught in the worst possible way, to watch them be rebuffed by incompetent instructors guzzling the kool-aid and trying to hide their own ineptitude… and to watch many of them give up or nearly give up. We’ve become professionals at giving each other pep talks! They ought put that on the list of graduation skills.
Along the way, some staff members were great. A few tried to advocate for us, but not shockingly, there was less and less talk of that as time went on. In March, at an All Hands/Q&A meeting, Flatiron’s CEO threatened to fire staff members who spoke up, and chewed one staff member out “for what felt like 20+ minutes” because they brought up helping students with Coronavirus concerns anyway. He implied they would fire a bunch of folks if they needed to make accommodations for students, and would immediately go bankrupt. Cool story, WeWork money.
This mind you, after various rounds of layoffs that we heard about from the media, not the school. If we asked, we were just told “don’t worry about it, it won’t affect you.” Comforting, I know.
Some students have had good experiences. Some instructors seem pretty decent, some are really nice people, and frankly, most students, being new to programming, don’t know better than to think the education they’re receiving is solid. They think that when they struggle, it’s because they aren’t smart enough. Or because a lucrative career like programming just requires this sort of struggle. In reality it’s just a poorly delivered student experience, with what seems like little leadership and barely any accountability.
You shouldn’t have to luck out to have a great experience when you’re paying $15,000 in tuition. You shouldn’t have to rely on free online resources to make sense of the gobbledygook. You shouldn’t have to beg for every ounce of empathy you can get from a cold administration that seems entirely ivory-tower disconnected from their student body.
I know Flatiron didn’t start out like this. I know this wasn’t Avi’s dream, and that the quality of the education in those first few years was solid. I don’t know if this is just the natural order of things as companies grow (dear god I hope not) or if it’s related to the selling of the souls to WeWork. But either way, it’s a shitshow that has all the building blocks to not be one, and leadership doesn’t even know enough to be embarrassed about it, because they don’t know or seem to care. I don’t know if other bootcamps are better, but dear world I hope some of them are.
So long, and thanks for all the classmates. As for the rest of it, what a giant, expensive, disappointment.
PS: As a totally random aside, student friends, Flatiron has their privacy set up so they can read all your Slack DMs. Every Admin—and it seems like they make most faculty Owners or Admins—can, without reason or notice, read any DMs they wish. It’s potentially illegal or at least unethical, but on the bright side, I doubt there’s enough competency there for them to have every actually bothered, beyond one or two intentional bad actors. Point being, if you’re trash talking, big brother probably already knows about it. HIDE!
