Is General Assembly Silencing Some Students Who Had a Bad Experience?

Colby, a previous student of General Assembly, reached out to me concerning an incident that happened at GA, which really concerns me. Even worse, it sounds like several potential negative reviews of that experience were legally silenced if the students wanted a full refund after the incident. Let's talk about it.

Colby Jax (guest):
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colby-jax
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ColbyJaxCodes

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Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:13

But yeah, let's jump into it. First of all, I just want to say, Colby, we had you on before. I really appreciate you coming back and just sharing your story. But yeah, I just love to hear about your experience with GA.

Colby Jax: 0:25

Yeah, man, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. Always a pleasure. Your content is a big part of why I decided to get into becoming a developer in the first place. So, yeah, man, as always, I appreciate you having me on and yeah, thanks for doing what you do. This is good stuff you're bringing to the public. So let me just open it by saying that Appreciate it. Yeah, so I was like you said.

Colby Jax: 0:48

I was on here previously. We were talking about the subject of. That video was basically talking about how I could make the most of my coding bootcamp experience. I'm wearing the same sweater as I was last time I got my sound the developer certified sweater on. But yeah, I'll just jump into it by kind of going through the experience that I had.

Colby Jax: 1:07

I landed on GA primarily because of their PR. They have a relatively solid front end. Their marketing department has done a really good job. I want to make it clear I'm not here to directly disparage GA or the idea of attending a coding bootcamp in general. I'm basically here to talk as objectively as I can about my experience and hopefully speak up for people who ultimately can't as a result of what I'll dive into now. So excuse me for being slightly choppy, but I'm just going to pull my notes up here.

Colby Jax: 1:41

So the experience and that general assembly started out fine. I didn't really have any complaints going into the first couple of weeks Starting. A couple of days into week one there were some minor red flags that started popping like showing up that I think we're only really recognized in hindsight. So the biggest one all of it started manifesting from the TA that we had at GA. From day two or three he had his camera off for the majority of the class sessions, which is like, say what you will, it's fine, I'm not worried about it. Ga does have an expectation that as students you are expected to have your camera on and be participating at basically at all times. And but I get it like people have bad days, bad hair days, forgot to do their makeup, they're stressed, they just stopped crying, whatever. So there's reasons you can have your camera off that are perfectly reasonable for for an hour or even a day, but in my estimation, but two days turned into three weeks of not seeing our TA's face. He was logged in the whole time but we just never saw him and with that came a complete lack of participation in terms of helping people as well.

Colby Jax: 3:09

So, yeah, that's when it started bugging me and some other people as well. I brought it up kind of informally to our lead instructor right before unit one ended, which was a month, four or five weeks in something like that. But it really started bugging people when unit two came around because there were people that were falling behind and they needed help and they weren't getting it and they weren't being properly evaluated to tell if they even needed that help in the first place. So I decided to bring it up to my student success manager, which, if anyone listening doesn't know, is part of the structure that GA and a lot of boot camps have. They'll have a rep that's supposed to represent the liaison between representing GA and representing you to make sure that you're getting an optimal learning experience.

Colby Jax: 4:05

And we didn't really get answers from that and so by, basically by by luck, I can tell you about it, but basically by luck, I was able to escalate it to the manager of students. She happened to pop in to our unit one project overviews for like a minute or two to make sure it was going OK, and I looked her up on LinkedIn. It was private but I I'm not a stalker, I swear, but I opened her resume. I found her portfolio on there and there was an email link. The email link was like, not working, but I inspected the element and found her email in the in the not the call the elements panel of all things, and that was. That was a whole story in and of itself that I mostly just told, but we had an initial meeting with our student success rep and her to talk about the issue and we scaled a follow up and she ended up like two weeks later not even showing up to that meeting. So that was very bothersome.

Colby Jax: 5:08

Shortly after that, our TA was excused from our cohort and he was replaced.

Colby Jax: 5:12

By then, though, you know, the damage was kind of already done in terms of not evaluating people's progress in a diligent way and making sure that they are keeping up.

Colby Jax: 5:22

So we kind of got to this point where myself and a couple of the students were doing OK, but it kind of got to this point of like opportunity cost might be the right term where it's like OK, if I stay, it's going to be like one or two people carrying the weight of a lot of the other students that have fallen behind because they haven't been properly attended to in the project phase of things, and for me that was a big reason. Why I joined a coding bootcamp in the first place was to produce high quality projects with people that were beginners, mind you, but also had a relatively decent understanding of what we were learning and could actually contribute. But for reasons that I just went over, that that wasn't the case. So that was the overall experience. I can get into like dropping and what happened after that, the part that particularly annoys you now, if you'd like, Um, that annoys me.

Don Hansen: 6:20

Yeah, the contract side of things. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I see what you're saying. So how far did you make it before you did drop?

Colby Jax: 6:30

We were nearing the end of unit two. So GA splits up their coding bootcamps into four different units. First one is front end, second is back end and then they have two full stack modules. So we were we had just started back end projects. So I believe that would put us at week number eight. I want to say something like that Gotcha.

Don Hansen: 6:58

And so what is the role of the instructors for making sure everyone's on track, because I feel like that's not really a TA's job in a lot of coding bootcamps. So were they absent with that?

Colby Jax: 7:16

Yeah, so I mean the typical standard is to. It varies from bootcamp to bootcamp, obviously, but I'm the bare minimum standard is homework. So at you know, at a coding bootcamp, at least with GA, you're assigned homework projects or tasks to complete that demonstrate that you have an understanding of the material, and those just weren't followed up on. So I mean we'd gotten halfway through the back end unit and I haven't received feedback for the homework that I had done related to HTML or CSS. So there was no follow up with homework evaluations to determine whether or not a student was keeping up or wasn't, which allowed students that were not keeping up to kind of get get by and not meet the standard, like the learning standards, without, yeah, basically not hold them accountable and like in a more benevolent way to help them potentially, you know, catch up via office hours and stuff like that.

Don Hansen: 8:25

Does GA have periodic assessments tests?

Colby Jax: 8:29

to make it through to the next section, the assessments are primarily homework based, and then they grade the projects as well. So that's how GA does the. As far as my understanding goes, at least, that's how they did it with our cohort. It was mainly the demonstrated understanding was communicated through, or was supposed to be communicated through, completion of the homework assignments.

Don Hansen: 8:56

And so the actual assessments, not just a homework assignments like specifically, but the actual official assessments of the coding boot camp, were not graded or checked or given feedback.

Colby Jax: 9:09

I didn't receive. We didn't receive any formal assessments other than homework and like project evaluations.

Don Hansen: 9:18

Okay, you did get project evaluations though.

Colby Jax: 9:26

Sure, I mean we had a presentation day for our projects, but I would not say no, we never received any rubric like grading our projects or giving any formalized feedback. It was all very informal and was done for a minute or two after the project presentation.

Don Hansen: 9:46

What kind of feedback did you receive?

Colby Jax: 9:49

Very superficial, not very critical in any way. It was very minimal, Don.

Don Hansen: 10:00

Can you give me an example?

Colby Jax: 10:03

Literally. That was interesting. Here's what I thought about your styling on this button or something like that and moving on. I mean extremely To call it. Feedback is quite generous.

Don Hansen: 10:20

So they didn't really get into any technical feedback.

Colby Jax: 10:27

I'm being too generous with the feedback thing. There really was no feedback loop in terms of how we were completing homework or evaluations from a technical standpoint.

Don Hansen: 10:39

And who was responsible for that feedback? Instructors or TAs?

Colby Jax: 10:45

That's a good question, because the lack of it kind of left me with a lack of understanding. By my understanding, I would say that the TA would pick up on things like the homework assignments, probably, and then escalate any questions that they had to the lead instructor and then probably the projects would be primarily evaluated by the lead. But that is almost entirely speculation.

Don Hansen: 11:13

Okay, cool. Thanks for giving me some extra context. I'm just trying to Sure.

Colby Jax: 11:17

I wish I could give you more, but given my experience, unfortunately I don't have the best answers for these things.

Don Hansen: 11:23

No, that's okay, Because I'm taking into account, because I've gotten a feel for the process of a lot of different coding boot camps from kind of just the business side of things or the curriculum side of things and the student side, and sometimes I think I mean it's incredibly important that there is communication and those expectations are laid out for students, because if they aren't your perception, you don't really know how to perceive your experience. You don't really know the right questions to ask, you don't know if you're getting your full money's worth out of the experience or you just have a really shitty cohort or you just have a really shitty instructor. It's really hard when those expectations aren't laid out. For example, like hey, you're going to get homework assignments, we're going to make sure that you're actually learning what you need to learn, we're going to make sure you don't fall behind, and here's how we're going to do that. Here's the assessments. This is the kind of feedback that you're going to get, and I think it's a coding boot camps responsibility to ask those questions.

Don Hansen: 12:20

But all too often this is actually kind of a common thing when staff are stretched in, where I highly encourage students to ask those questions upfront, with admissions, which I understand Not everyone's going to hear my advice and they don't know what they don't know coming in, but that is my advice. Anyone listening to it. Ask as many questions like this, especially when it comes to assessments and making sure that you're going to be qualified to go to the next section and keep up with things and what happens if you fall behind. These are all really good questions to ask, but it sounds like because we had a casual conversation about this before and you shared that it ended up being a pretty bad experience for a lot of people. Several people dropped out. So let's jump into that, mark. Talk about or share your experience with your you kind of moving to actually quit the program and things you've heard from other students with your cohort. What were they experiencing? When did they quit? How many quit?

Colby Jax: 13:21

So I was very fortunate to land a junior position as a WordPress developer before all of this went down. So my story is different than essentially everybody else's in this situation. But basically what happened just to continue from the story that I mentioned our TA ended up getting replaced and the next year that we got was fine I suppose what you would expect from a TA to begin with but the instructional quality because of the lack of assessments, promises that were made to review certain things that we were learning not being fulfilled, et cetera just left me in kind of a position where I was like you know, I'm learning a lot from this job that I have currently. I'm relatively disciplined outside of work to study on my own. So I'm going to make the decision to withdraw from this cohort because I don't, because there's so many students that are behind, I don't perceive this opportunity as being really any more valuable, maybe less valuable than sticking around for group projects. And yeah, so I decided to withdraw At that point. I was just expecting a. You know, ga has a condition where if you withdraw up to 40% like at any point, up to 40% of the length of the cohort, you get the difference that you've paid back. So at that point I was planning to pay in cash. I'd paid like 8K so far, which was roughly half of the admissions. I got like four of that back and that was that.

Colby Jax: 15:07

But about a week and a half later we had a very small cohort. We started off with 12 people. By the time I withdrew there were eight or nine, and a week after I withdrew all but two of the remaining students dropped the cohort. So it was one to one, teacher to student ratio, and I think that GA made the appropriate decision at that point to shut down the cohort because it was you know, it's financially insolvent cohort. At that point there's no reason to keep it going when you could just shift students to the other cohort.

Colby Jax: 15:43

But because that blew up in the way that it did, this was like a three or three, three and a half four week process. But they went through basically a process where they decided hey, we can make an exception to our contract which says that you only get, you know, up to 40% difference, et cetera, like I just explained, and we're going to be issuing full refunds to the entire cohort. The only condition that they were going to do that upon was if any student that wanted that full refund they were requiring to sign a document which is essentially an NDA. It's a non-disclosure, non-dysparagement. The story ends with all of the students ended up signing that NDA, except for me. Out of 12 students, I'm the only student that attended that cohort that is even legally allowed to talk about this experience, which I'm sure we'll hear your opinion on that, but I think it's quite shady. Personally, that includes leaving any reviews for the cohort online, et cetera.

Don Hansen: 17:13

Up to 40%. You basically got to about 50%. You passed the 40%. You were no longer eligible for a full refund, but with your current contract you were still eligible for a partial refund. Correct, that's right, that partial refund? Was that a static amount or was that based on the amount of time that you spent in the program? The latter, yeah.

Don Hansen: 17:46

It's really difficult. Here's what I think about different programs, because I've heard different people demanding refunds in different situations. It's really hard to assess whether the cohort deserved the full refund amount without talking to the instructors and TAs and just staffing the feedback that they got. I'd actually like to talk to the other students and graduates but they can't talk because they signed that contract. I'm kind of torn because they made an exception and that might not be fair. The experience might have been shitty enough where they really didn't even get any value out of their first eight weeks. I really got to dig into that situation to figure out. I would have to get more information to decide what I think about that. Overall, it just sounds like the experience is shitty, whether students deserve the full refund or not and not just partial. I don't know. That's my honest opinion about that.

Don Hansen: 18:56

What is absolutely disgusting is silencing someone from ever leaving a review, because this is huge with marketing. You're spending over $10,000 for this program $10,000 to $20,000. All you can do is literally look at reviews online. If you don't know someone that went into the program. That's all you have. You are spending that much money, which is not a small amount for most people to get a holistic picture of what the program is like. You're going through all of these different reviews and I've talked about this in many different ways. A lot of negative reviews are axed from ever becoming public and this is one way that it can happen. You are essentially paying an agreeing to that amount based on all of these reviews, mostly positive, for every single coding bootcamp, which is bullshit. You are agreeing to that amount, given that expectation, when a lot of obviously going to be negative reviews and your cohort are being snuffed out. You're not getting the whole picture. You're not getting these reviews, regardless of whether they deserve the full refund or not. When you legally silence people, how are you supposed to make an educated decision whether this program is actually going to be right for you, it's actually going to bring you to actually getting a full-time software engineering position?

Don Hansen: 20:30

Because a lot of times you're looking at these reviews you're like, okay, what's relatable? You're trying to attach to different stories and different backgrounds. Oh, this person came from this background or this person had anxiety, this person had this, this person had that. It's like, okay, I want to get that. A lot of people try to relate to certain reviews and try to be like okay, this is most likely going to be me and this person had a decent experience. They really liked the instructors, but the instructors didn't really encourage a lot of group activities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Don Hansen: 20:59

But now you get all of these negative reviews that say why they might not benefit from this program, why this program might not be a good fit, why they might not be able to trust the instructors, the staff, to be able to handle these types of situations efficiently, because it sounds like this situation went on for a long time. All these stories are snuffed out. Why should anyone trust a coding bootcamp when you don't have the whole picture? That's what pisses me off, is just like. I actually think it's a great idea to offer that full review or at least say hey, do you want to jump into another cohort? We'll make sure that you catch up. Blah, blah, blah and you're doing everything possible to make up for that bad experience. But I mean, if people don't feel like they're getting it and you offer that full refund, it's like even from a PR move, it just seems shitty to silence people like that. I just I honestly don't get it. It's just such a bad idea.

Colby Jax: 21:54

Yeah, I mean, I agree wholeheartedly, man. And you only hear about these silencing situations when the rare person slips through the cracks and like I don't have money coming out of my ass. I have two kids, we have a third on the way. I got fucking bills to pay, man. So just to skip out on the extra four grand that, in my opinion, for GA dissolving the cohort was more or less due back to me, especially since it was due back to everybody else is no small price to pay. So again, I'm grateful to be on here. I have two kind of two notes about what you just said.

Colby Jax: 22:37

If I may Just off your right, the students, the majority of the students, did not represent themselves in a way that was appropriate when things started going south. If I could give anybody advice that is planning on attending a coding boot camp in this video, it would be to speak up for yourself if you're falling behind, if you don't like the instructor, if you think you need a different cohort. It's like if you're not speaking up because you're afraid that somebody's going to see you as rude. It's like throw your manners out the window in that regard, because this is your education. You're paying in six months what people typically pay for a year of university instruction, which is, I think, is quite overpriced as well. That's for a different podcast. But if you're going to make the decision to spend this much money, you have to have the guts I guess that's the appropriate term for it to speak up if something feels bad and trust your gut feeling and make sure that it's heard.

Colby Jax: 23:48

Yeah, it was drawn out far too long From the point that myself and another student realized, hey, this is not good, we should do something about this. To me, dropping was like five weeks. It was way too long, yeah, and then sweeping people under the rug so they can't speak. It's sad, man, because the only indicator that you're going to get if people can't leave reviews that a bootcamp is doing poorly is the potential eventual bankruptcy of that organization because they can't hold things together, or something similar to that, or lawsuits. And by the time that's happened, far too many people have paid the price in terms of lost time, lost wages, lost tuition. The list goes on.

Colby Jax: 24:44

But yeah, the damage that that practice leaves in its wake is incalculable, especially when you're dealing with people who. I just need to take a second to speak up for the people that dropped man. These are moms that are staying at home and watching their kids full time in addition to going to school. These are people that quit their jobs because they had faith that GA would give them something reasonable, that they would be able to get into tech. These people had shit on the line, they had stakes when they joined this and the fact that they can't even talk about how poor of an experience this was and I get it. Bad experiences are going to happen with bootcamps. I'm not mad at GA because one of their cohorts fell apart, but to put them in a situation where they can't even talk about it is just like you got to answer for that eventually.

Don Hansen: 25:41

That's the part that's disgusting. See, I hear different stories of predatory contracts or contracts that are just there On Tuesday probably. I mean they just scare people. You don't have a lot of money, you're non-attorney. You see this legalese that, especially with a lot of refund policies, you'll get this legalese. It's basically just a non-dispairagement clause where you're allowed that refund as long as you don't say anything bad about the program.

Don Hansen: 26:12

I truly don't understand that practice. It feels like it comes from a place of fear and a lack of confidence in your own program. So if they had a couple of students that didn't try, they didn't put effort forth, and now these students are complaining oh yeah, ta instructor didn't help me, blah, blah, and there's another story to it that's different. And then these individuals are like okay, you know what we want to refund or we're going to just shit on your program. I'm going to tell everyone how bad this program is. That's a situation where I would quite frankly just say GA, give them the middle finger. There are bad attitudes and bad actors like that. But to basically have this broad policy when you're issuing refunds like that shows just fear and a lack of confidence in the quality of your program or the quality of your instructors, and that, to me, is a red flag. I feel like it says a lot more and I'm very curious who decided to just implement this policy, who decided this was a good idea. And I mean, ga isn't the only program. I'm not going to list off any coding boot camps because, like, the goal isn't just a shit. On specific coding boot camps, I don't want to get any names wrong either, but it just I don't know.

Don Hansen: 27:37

I think that's one of the most disgusting things about the coding boot camp industry is people don't feel like they have an educated, they're not informed, they don't have all of the reviews, they don't have all of the stories, they just see statistics that don't really dive into the details of like all this job placement. Like a lot of data is just presented in a way that excludes certain variables that are actually relevant. You would think are obviously included in the data and they're not. But like it's not just reviews, it's the way placement rates are even presented. It's the way admissions sells a program, it's like it just I think a lot of people just feel like it's a big sales funnel all the time and stuff like this when you hear these like hidden contracts, silencing people from even being able to share their story, and I actually think if they let people share their story, it'd be a little bit better than they think it would be.

Don Hansen: 28:31

When you offer a full, freaking refund, that's huge right and you actually got a little bit of education. I would argue like eight weeks in, you are getting an outline of what needs to come, like you might not even need to go to a coding bootcamp Now. Okay, I have an outline Now I could supplement. Like that you might have set them up for success, right, and maybe you don't offer the full refund, maybe you like charge them a thousand or something like that. It's like you can work in something. But I just I feel like when you just when you silence people, it's like this is why people don't trust a coding bootcamp in a industry. I do feel sad for your cohort. I truly do, because it sounds like a lot of them. You know they quit their jobs and you know once you quit your job too, it's it's hard to get that job back. You know, yeah, dude, especially now, even if you get that full refund.

Colby Jax: 29:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, I, I mean I, I come from a sales background, so I don't blame the you know any. Whenever you're selling a big ticket item like this kind of education, you, you have to have some kind of a funnel. So I don't blame them inherently for for setting things up the way that they do. But, yeah, you, you wouldn't think it would be that hard to set up like a WSU policy, a we screwed up policy, where it's like, you know, if it's the fault, if it's deemed to be the fault of of the bootcamp, there are processes in place to take care of that and do damage mitigation, while still being honest. But I mean, yeah, man, I mean I've talked to a few people since this all went down, that have worked and do work in the coding bootcamp space, and I mean, generally speaking, the thing that I hear the most is that we should be expecting, hopefully, in an ideal world, to see more regulation come into the coding bootcamp world, because this is no small.

Colby Jax: 30:27

This is no small industry. I mean, ga was acquired in 2018 for $412 million. It's not exactly chump change that we're working with here. So when you have an enterprise is this big that's doing things like this. Like I'm not a lawyer, I have a reasonable moral compass, though, and I can tell you just from how this feels that this isn't the right way to do business. So yeah, we'll see. I would. I would say probably that would be a good thing to have more regulation in an industry like this, similar to how it is in actual education, but I suppose we'll see if that happens and if that ends up being a good thing. But it certainly would be a step in a direction.

Don Hansen: 31:12

Yeah, I mean you'll get regulation in some states I think California is a big one that protects students but yeah, to get something that's going to be spread across multiple states, you're just, you're in the wrong country for that. That's not how our country operates and that you know. That is. There are pros and cons to this setup. But you might even consider honestly, like if you really do especially when you signed an ISA, especially when you sign a contract that puts you a little bit at a financial risk, or that you're going to be owing a lot of money I feel like maybe you lean on, like look into the state that the coding bootcamp is in and try to lean on a little bit heavier regulation. You might be paying a lot more for that as well, unfortunately, because you get a lot of the bigger programs in states like this.

Don Hansen: 32:03

But yeah, the coding bootcamp is weird. I don't think we're going to get regulation anytime soon and I think, until alternative education starts getting taken a little bit more seriously, that regulation is not going to come because you don't really get any government aid. It'd be nice to see like government financial aid for alternative education rather than dumping and like getting $100,000 in debt with you know, a CS degree necessarily. Sure, you truly can't afford that, but it's a weird situation. I think a lot of coding bootcamps are just going to start dropping, to be honest, if this market keeps up. But we'll see.

Colby Jax: 32:37

Yeah, yeah, we certainly will. Yeah, yeah man, yeah yeah, it's, it's, it's wild man, it's quite the situation. This is not what I was expecting when I when I signed up, that's for sure.

Don Hansen: 32:50

But I well, and I really appreciate you sharing this story, because you're the only one in your cohort who apparently can.

Colby Jax: 32:57

Yeah, man, I'm one of 12. So I mean, at least count me for, like you can know, if you look at at what is it course report, is that the website? If you, if you look at a review website and you're looking at GA, I would say, at a minimum, count for 12 negative reviews that you don't see on there and you you do the implications to figure out if this might have happened before. I think we know the answer, but yeah, I think this is a interesting approach that is probably more common than most people anticipate.

Don Hansen: 33:32

I think so too. Did you leave a negative review?

Colby Jax: 33:35

I have not. I've been posting regularly to my YouTube about it. I just haven't gotten around to to leaving a review myself. So I need to get my $4000 worth and get that thing out there.

Don Hansen: 33:45

So I agree, yeah, yeah, it costs a lot of money, so this sounds like a really shitty experience. I'd be really curious. So if any GA students you know you're watching this, or any other students from different coding boot camps like. The problem is, there are people that will reach out to me and try to be anonymous and they don't really want to speak up. Even if they didn't sign a contract that would put them at legal risk. People just don't want to put their face out there. So please like this. This happens all the time and I'm just kind of yelling into the wind when you're trying to get me to share your anonymous stories. A lot of people just think I have it out for the coding boot. The number of times I've been accused of that is just like. Please come out of the podcast, like, please like, because yours I guarantee your story isn't a solo story. There are so many other out there, other stories out there.

Colby Jax: 34:33

I agree, and I did want to make sure that I took a minute to say like I have a similar experience on. You know, my channel is much smaller than yours at this point, but I have a similar experience where, like my, comments are filled with boot camp pessimists, let's put it, and I wanted to make a note like I am not anti coding boot camp. I think that a good percentage of coding boot camps are set up in a reasonable way and they produce reasonable results for people who put in a lot of work, and I think it's a viable option for a ton of people. I wouldn't generally say don't go to a coding boot camp. I don't think that's the right answer. I don't have the right answer, though. The right answer is there are good boot camps out there and there are bad boot camps out there.

Colby Jax: 35:21

I think that I think that this needs to be talked about more, just in this space in general how to evaluate a coding boot camp properly, who you should be talking to, what questions you should be asking them. There's there's so much more due diligence that needs to go into this, because it is a sales funnel. Ultimately, you go to a coding boot camps website. It's a sales funnel. There's some exceptions to where they very much so force you to consider the implications of joining, but in any case, to avoid rambling, I'll stop at that. But yeah, I appreciate you having me on to have this discussion because these talks need to be happening more often. We need to be asking these questions of what makes a good coding boot camp, what you need to be talking about with admissions and other students and the teachers and people who got fired or quit from that boot camp. There's much more information you need than just the single track of that particular coding boot camps sales funnel.

Don Hansen: 36:26

I agree. I appreciate the advice and the opinion. I have the same opinion that coding boot camps are definitely still a very viable option. I think they should be considered. I'm a big fan of coding boot camps. I give a lot of strong advice on just read the contract, know exactly what you're getting into. Read it thoroughly. If you don't understand it, talk to an attorney and I know an attorney costs, but so does that coding boot camp. You're making a huge investment. I have one final question for you. I'm going to challenge you. If you could go back and talk to admissions again before you signed up to this program, what are three questions you would ask admissions to assess whether this is going to happen or not.

Colby Jax: 37:19

One question that I did ask was if I could talk to alumni of, if they had people on a short list. Essentially, that I could talk to. I talked to two alumni of GA before going. I would talk to more. I would also skirt around the admissions to do that as well. I would just be reaching out on LinkedIn, similar to how I am now or how people are now reaching out to me. That's number one. I cheated because I did ask that, getting a. Let's see.

Colby Jax: 37:56

I would generally ask questions that would give me a better idea of what it would look like if things were not going well. So try to figure out what kind of actions they take. If, say, you're falling behind and then something like that, you would be able to kind of test that. So if you are falling behind and you're not being held to those standards, or if other students are falling behind and they're not being held to that standard, you would know that something might be up. Now, again, that's not going to really tell you if there are red flags until you're in the experience.

Colby Jax: 38:36

I think the third thing that I would ask and look out for is the thoroughness of their qualification process. Like there was pre-work for GA, but the pre-work was essentially like following a Udemy course, more or less. It was very it was not extremely rigorous. If you paid any attention, essentially you could do decently on it. I don't even know if all the students completed their pre-work either beforehand, so that's another thing. But pay attention to how hard it is to get into the boot camp, because I don't know if you have this opinion as well, but a coding boot camp that is rigorous is going to filter out a ton of people before they even get to day one through the pre-assessment, through the pre-work.

Colby Jax: 39:36

So make sure that that exists for the school. Make sure it's rigorous. It should not be easy to get through unless you've spent six, nine months self-studying beforehand, which was the case for me. The pre-work was essentially all review for me, as was the first half of the first module. But yeah, those were for just being asked, point blank like that. That's what I would say. Make sure you're formulating questions that will be good indicators down the line. Do a better job than me at coming up with questions you can ask to figure out if it's a good cohort to go to in the first place. Sorry, my battery just died on my camera.

Don Hansen: 40:21

That's okay, I'll keep talking while you Are. You replacing it.

Colby Jax: 40:25

I am, yeah, I'll be right back. Okay, can you still hear me? I can, I can hear you. Just fine, sorry, don't.

Don Hansen: 40:31

Awesome, you're fine. So I'll respond to that Essentially like first two points. Yeah, the first two points are really good and I love the idea of so I'm a big proponent of if you're going to sign up for a coding boot camp, go with one with a rigorous assessment. And the one thing I'll add on to it, because I know the argument against it it's like that means the coding boot camp isn't accessible, right? It allows, so people that have a little bit of a lower education et cetera aren't able to get in and it gate keeps people out of the coding boot camp. So I already know that's the big argument against it and I say that's bullshit, because just because you make it into the program doesn't mean you're going to get your money's worth out of it. And when you don't already you're not in a good financial situation already to be shoved through a program like this and not be able to get the most out of it. You are just burning money at that point. So I highly recommend if people want to consider a coding boot camp, do the self-taught path for a few months. Talk to admissions. If you have a favorite coding boot camp, talk to admissions. What can I do to prepare to be the best student that I possibly can be. How can I prepare for this assessment? Blah, blah, blah. Spend a little time, become resourceful, get curious about coding right.

Don Hansen: 41:42

A lot of people just want to run through the coding boot camp and expect to get a job right afterwards anyways and that's an extremely rare circumstance to have happened and so I find that a lot of people become really successful when they start enjoying coding. They dive into it, they figure out if they even want to do it, because that's going to help fuel that fire throughout the entire program. You're going to spend a little extra time each night on the program and you're going to get your money's worth. So even if you fail the assessment because it is rigorous which is a good thing, because they're making sure everyone's ready you just do it again. They have another cohort coming up, et cetera, which is why you shouldn't just quit your job right away.

Don Hansen: 42:18

I'm a big proponent as well. You probably shouldn't just quit your job. I think a lot more people should consider part-time programs and doing it on the side, given the market, and understand your financial situation. If that's what you need to do, that's what you need to do. So people that are quitting full-time. Just make sure you're spending a good amount of time just studying on your own, preparing as much as you can, because that rigorous assessment that is the one component of a coding boot camp that I find that guarantees a job placement. It's making sure that student is ready. So I 100% agree with that.

Colby Jax: 42:52

But yeah, yeah, yeah, man, I'll say one more thing, and I won't keep you all day. I know you have a life, just like I do, but I'm not like I don't believe in superiority complexes. When it comes to becoming a developer, I think that basically anybody that really wants to can. Not everybody is ready right now. You might not be ready right now, and there should be a filter to determine whether or not you're ready to do it right now, and if you're not, that's totally okay. This isn't the bar exam, where if you fail a handful of times, you're barred from ever doing it again. So there's that.

Colby Jax: 43:43

And just to quickly make a note on what you said about quitting your job and getting a job in six months, that happens with a very small amount of people, and I would say that betting the farm on that is ultimately an insult to yourself because it downplays the legitimacy of the career change that you're trying to make in the first place. You can get a lot of jobs in six months. Most of them are going to be shitty jobs that you don't want to stay in. So this is my advice. You haven't said it. Maybe your advice too, like treat this as if you were going to medical school or you were going to school to become an attorney, because you can make the same amount as both of those after a decent amount of time. But to downplay it and say, yeah, I'm going to make this work in six months doesn't hold it to the same high standard that it can potentially be.

Don Hansen: 44:41

So yeah, I like that perspective and it's showing respect towards what you're becoming, because, as a software engineer, generally, software engineers, especially in tech companies, are highly respected, high responsibility, and they can literally destroy the entire company, given that you hire a really shitty team of software engineers. So, yeah, no, it's harder to become than people think and that's okay, and you financially prepare for that, you allow yourself more time for information to sink in, because I think a lot of people sell it as this really easy transition and it's not. It just isn't. And then people poorly plan around that and that's what gets them. So, yeah, I think that was good advice. All right, cool. So that's pretty much the conversation I wanted to have.

Don Hansen: 45:33

Colby, seriously, I really appreciate you coming on and if any GA staff are watching this, I'm happy to bring you on. You want to talk about what happened with this cohort? I'm happy to hear your side of things. I definitely have questions, but I do like hopefully I made it clear I like getting both perspectives. I like getting the business side of things and I like getting the student side of things. So if you have something to say about this, just reach out, just email me and I'm happy to talk but Colby stick around for a couple of minutes. But seriously, man, thank you so much for coming back on.

Colby Jax: 46:06

Thank you Don. That's all I'd appreciate it, man. All right, everyone. See you again.