How I Decided on Which Melbourne Tech Bootcamp To Attend
In early 2019 I decided I was ready to switch careers into software engineering and thought the best way was to attend a bootcamp. When I researched, there were online options but I really wanted something in-person, the options that came up were:
- Academy Xi
- Coder Academy (CA)
- General Assembly (GA)
- Le Wagon
Academy Xi didn’t have a software engineering course so they were automatically out.
Le Wagon was still fairly new in Melbourne. I didn’t have confidence that the 8 week course would be enough time. I talked to people who were graduating who didn’t seem to do it to get a job but more to gain technical skills. I was wanting to get a job so Le Wagon didn’t seem like the best fit for me. But since I’ve got to know the instructors and students coming out, they seem to be doing something right. The projects are impressive and the students don’t seem traumatized.
So that left GA and CA. I ended up going to GA. It’s probably easier to list the reasons I decided to not go with CA:
- The length of time. CA is 6 months and GA is 3 months. On one hand, 6 months would be great as far as learning but I didn’t want it to take that long if it didn’t have to… and it seemed like I didn’t have to.
- Unnecessary certificate. One of the reasons CA is 6 months is because they are required to stretch out their curriculum to be able to give an education certificate regulated by the government. I have a Masters Degree, so I didn’t need another paper.
- The money. At the time CA was $26k and GA was $15k. The tuition was more, but not only that, my partner and I would be paying for childcare for those months that I wasn’t working which was ~$3k/mo. So in the end CA would be $44k and GA would be $24k. And that doesn’t account for the job searching months after, which typically takes 3–6 month.
- Reputation. I reached out to alumni on LinkedIn from both GA and CA. CA was still fairly new at the time but the feedback I was getting from students from CA was not great… high teacher turnover, teachers with little experience, and untrustworthy administration.
There weren’t very many online reviews from past students, so I had to do a lot of personal outreach on LinkedIn. For the most part people were really responsive and actually some of them are still my friends to this day!
Fast forward to 2021 and I’m still really glad I chose GA over CA. I keep hearing bad experiences from people going through the CA program.
However, I would recommend GA with a big caveat. GA seems to fit better under the category of a technical portfolio school. Not a place to actually learn your technical skills but a place to focus and knock out some really solid projects to show potential employers.
If someone is still set on going to GA, I would recommend doing a ~year of self-learning on platforms like Codecademy (~$200/year) and focus on a programming language like JavaScript. I made the mistake of thinking a couple of HTML/CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript courses could set me up and I was wrong. It made for a really frustrating bootcamp experience where I felt extremely stressed. Feeling that level of overwhelm is not going to help any student retain knowledge.
In the end a lot of GA alumni get jobs, so if that is someones ultimate goal then perhaps tolerating the intense environment is worth it? I also ended up getting two job offers but wow, it was rough. I would do it again, but only if I had perhaps 40–60 hours more of self-learning under my belt.
There’s an opportunity in the market for a bootcamp/school to do it slower, better, in smaller increments, with more 1:1 support and feedback.
And if I were to revisit this now, with having online be the only option anyway? I think I would look into programs like Flatiron where they offer your money back if you don’t land a job 6 months after the program. Pretty amazing!
Here’s a link to what my day-to-day was like in GA. All the best to you in your search for a program that’s a right fit!
