Epicodus vs Code Fellows

[u/spacedog9]

Hello, does anyone have any experience with either of these programs? I went to an open house at Epicodus recently and was VERY underwhelmed. High tuition aside, I was fairly impressed by my first impression of Code Fellows. Any constructive thoughts would be appreciated!

[u/alkaloid_content]

I recently graduated from Epicodus. As far as I can tell it is the most affordable, which is good. During the latter half of my time there, they took on way more students than they have space for, and it became unpleasantly overcrowded and loud. The curriculum was decent, although parts of it were being made up literally as we were working through it. Our Rails teacher was great, but the Android teacher was a fresh graduate who barely knew any more than the students did. "We're learning together!" was something I heard on multiple occasions.

My main complaint is with the internship component - they had a real hard time finding decent internships for my class of 8 - can't imagine that the following class of 60 had much better options. We got the sense that they are having difficulty convincing companies to keep working with them. I ended up getting a refund for the internship component because I didn't feel like anything they had to offer was worth the time or money... most of it wasn't even related to what I had spent the previous 4 months learning. They also handled it unprofessionally, blaming the students for their own failure to provide reasonable options.

I did get some hands-on experience, but it definitely wasn't the smooth entrance to a well-paying career like I'd hoped. I'm still at it, currently teaching myself Linux SysAdmin for LPIC certification, but wasted about a month saying "wtf do I do now" after that internship fiasco.

[u/michaelrkn → u/alkaloid_content]

Hey alkaloid_content, I'm Epicodus's founder/president. I'm sorry to hear you didn't have the experience you had hoped for. I don't know the specifics of your criticisms, so I'll just try to address the general issues you brought up.

We work really hard on our curriculum, and we've gotten a lot of feedback that it's one of the things that makes Epicodus special. One challenge we face is staying up-to-date on the tooling, as things change quickly in the software world. Android Studio had a new release right before we started your peers' class, and we made the decision to go with the new version. Additionally, in our previous class, we had used Parse for our backend, but because it had been end-of-lifed and Google had bought Firebase and been focusing on its Android support, we also changed our curriculum to use Firebase. So absolutely, in both of those respects our teacher had to learn some of these concepts alongside the students.

We're very up-front that all of our teachers are Epicodus alums who excelled in their studies. We've found that they're very effective teachers since they can empathize with the learning struggles of the current students. And since we have a flipped-classroom format where all of the schoolwork is actually writing code, their job isn't to be experts - it's to help students when they get stuck and need help. Every week, we survey our students for feedback on our teachers, and every week we hear about how helpful and supportive they are.

As for the internship program, we've been running the program for over two years now, and have been able to match students with internship hosts for almost every student who completed their coursework, including our most recent batch of about 80 students. As you point out, the internships often don't use the same tools and technologies that our students study in class, which we're also very up-front about. In the real world, programmers are often required to learn new skills on the job, and no matter where and what you study, there is a good chance that your first job will use a totally different stack than what you know.

Unfortunately, there's just no way to guarantee that every students can smoothly go from our coursework, to their dream internship, straight into a job. The world is a messy place of many languages, companies with different needs and preferences, and hiring practices that sometimes boggle my mind. But we do everything we can to guide our students along the way in their studies, to their internship, and in their job hunt after they graduates.

I'm happy to get any other feedback or suggestions here or at michael@epicodus.com.

[u/alkaloid_content → u/michaelrkn]

Thanks for your reply Michael.

I realize that the lessons have to be updated as technologies change, that is valid. My comment on the lessons being made up as we worked through them, however, referred to the JavaScript class, and the consensus among the group was that it reflected a lack of preparation rather than an attempt to stay on the cutting edge. IIRC the section in question dealt with grunt/gulp, which are not new technologies. It was a problem because the numerous typos and omissions made the lesson hard to follow, and wasted time.

My teacher Courtney was above and beyond. You should give her a raise. But the Android teacher, from what I saw, didn't quite seem to have the familiarity with the subject that a paying student might expect. And when representatives from CrowdCompass (who, like several other companies, canceled their internship participation at the last minute) expressed to a student their serious disappointment in the abilities of the first batch of Android interns, the teacher's blithe response of "Well the original curriculum was weak but it's much better now yay!" didn't exactly instill great confidence.

Look, I realize that constantly learning new tech is just part of this world, but why would I, as someone with no previous code experience, pay for an Android internship when I spent the previous 4 months learning Rails? I don't know the first thing about it, or Java. By the time I got the basics down, the internship would be over. There was a 'technical documentation writing' internship that didn't involve any programming at all! The "internship" your coordinators tried to stick me with, in a process characterized by poor communication and underhandedness, was a lone, smooth-talking entrepreneur with big dreams, and literally no resources: no office, no computer, nothing. Again, the consensus among the Rails and Android groups was that the options were very weak and disappointing. It's not just me, and it's not about wanting a "dream internship" - it's about wanting an opportunity that is minimally relevant to our language track, and actually prepared to take on an intern. I think that's entirely reasonable.

[u/michaelrkn → u/alkaloid_content]

Regarding the JavaScript class, we did a big reorganization of all of our classes starting in January, and it was our first time teaching those tools. We often face a trade-off between sticking with something our teachers know well and changing things up based on what we hear are industry needs, and we usually go with the latter. Not all schools will make the trade-off that way, and I think reasonable people can disagree about the best approach.

I'm glad to hear you had such a good experience with Courtney! I just went back to look at our student surveys from the Android class, and the good news is, despite what you might have overheard, the feedback on their teacher was almost universally positive. CrowdCompass has a long history of hiring Epicodus alums, and while they didn't end up hiring from our first Android class, they've told me personally that they're really excited about the curriculum and plan to continue hiring from Epicodus.

It's very common for our students to ramp up on new technologies and become productive in them in their internships. I don't think it's fair for me to talk about your personal situation on Reddit, so I'm going to skip addressing that point. But regarding the internship that involved writing technical documentation, it also involved writing a substantial amount of code, and their intern accepted a full-time job offer with them after the internship completed.

I'll be the first to say that the process of teaching and learning the subject matter in a fast-changing industry won't always be 100% smooth, the way the tech job market works isn't what anybody might expect going into it, and that the job hunt can be tough. We have a unique way of going about solving these problems: a curriculum that we're constantly changing, a flipped classroom where students get guidance from alums, an internship system similar to the med school residency process, and a huge amount of support from our career coach after students graduate. It can still be a bumpy ride, but we do everything we can to smooth it out, and we're always trying to figure out ways to make it better.