Devmountain

I made a huge change in my career after being in retail for over 15 years. I was really happy that I made this decision to go into web development. Originally in college, I was studying it and change majors. I wish I kept going with my original plan but it happens. 

I had a couple friends that attended this bootcamp but at different campuses and the one in Lehi is fairly new. As much as I enjoyed the whole experience at the school, there were a couple things I wish they could have fixed but it was limited to what they could do there anyway. Sometimes it can be tough to listen to lectures while other classes surrounding your class is louder than your instructor. Great thing our instructors were patient and allowed us to ask questions or go over that part of the topic again. The bootcamp does give you all the necessary material you need to learn plus access to resources like mentors, after-hours help and even other students who are in different cohorts that can assist. That's one of the major things about being in tech, people can be willing to help you when you're stuck.

The curriculum there is concentrated in JavaScript which is great for modern programming language. Once you get an idea of what you're doing, keep grinding and learning. I dedicated countless hours a week to keep learning. I did fell behind a couple times but you can still catch up. Make sure you ask questions!! You paid this money to go there, if you don't know what they're teaching you, just ask questions or go over it again. 

The housing was the major selling point for me coming up there. It all depends who rooms with you that makes your living experience enjoyable. For me, I like my place clean and I clean up after myself. If others don't do their due-diligence, it's not going to be good for you. 

Once you completed your curriculum there, meet with the student-success advisors. They want you to succeed after graduating. They follow-up with me to make sure I have found something, if not; they'll ask what I'm doing and how I should do it. 

I took the Web Development - Full Stack cours. My goal was to gain an education, enough to get a job. DevMountain delivered.

DevMountain was rigorous enough, community driven, and strategically organized for optimal skill development. They educated me on the content I needed to display during my interviews, that eventually got me my job.

I was hired as a Mobile Developer, but my knowledge of the full stack showed them I was more than a guy that knew Swift and I was granted a higher position from the get go. Many question I was asked, were answered from content I had learned the last week or two.

An offer was over the table before I completed the bootcamp, what a pleasant suprise.

I would not entirely recommend the DevMountain full stack immersive program because after completion of the course, there is no help for you. You are left on your own to try and find a job and your few skills do not let you apply for a majority of the web development positions out there. The hiring events that they hold after you complete the program only target the students who are mentors and you will be lucky to have anything after you hand out a resume.They also do not publish that there is roughly only a 60% hire rate for graduates after 6 months. They do not tell you that you will be competing with thousands of other bootcamp and 4 year CS grads for a very small number of junior level positions. DevMountain also does a poor job at job preparation and you do not get enough practice for the real world of day long tech interviews or phone screens. Personally, if I had the option of doing it all over, I would have hired an experienced professional to tutor me privately for several months versus having only a few weeks of group instruction/ lectures that you get at DevMountain. The housing is nice.. as well as the friends you make, but the lack of experience and simple skillset will not get you a satisfactory job in the current market. You better be a wizard at coding or you will regret not spending your $11900 on something more useful. Remember, higher education is a BUSINESS and all sales are final. Shop wisely. 

I probably spend 80 + hours per week at dev mountain, or working on projects, or other assignments for the Web Development Immersive Course. I am just graduating, but I have to say, I wouldn't do it any other way. Put in the time, because you will need every minute of it to try to absorb the immense amount of content that will be covered in your 13 week stay. 

Great, challenging course, just don't come in with any plans for a social life outside of this while you are here. There really just isn't time for that.

Honestly, I went a few years ago and still regret this choice. DevMountain was a fun experience but not worth the money it costs to have that experience. At the time they made it seem like you would get a job from doing this program. They pushed a 95% job placement for their students. As a 24-year-old, I thought that sounded great and they made it sound great. They really pushed the job aspect and made you believe you would get a job. However, I quickly learned this wasn't the case. I even had one instructor tell us a majority of us wouldn't even get a job but DevMountain wouldn't want me to tell you that. As a Father supporting a family this wasn't what I was wanting to hear. Everything DevMountain said to our group was geared towards us getting a job, they led us to believe we would. Now I take full responsibility for the fact that I never got a job I can't blame my frustrations of not landing a job on a school but I can blame them for the misleading they did. They could have told us from the start that it's going to be hard to land a job but if they did that most of us wouldn't have gone. They also said they would help us get interviews and bring companies to DevMountain to help us get into situations to get interviewed for jobs. This was never the case. They had a website for alumni where they would post job announcements and only one or two jobs ever got posted. I checked daily and nothing ever happened with that site. If they were more upfront with us at the beginning it wouldn't have been bad, but they led us to believe that if we learned these skills people would hire us. I only got a few interviews when I finished and every time I interviewed they would say sorry you don't have enough experience.  I understand that life happens and you can't blame others for the bad stuff in life that happens but a school like DevMountain shouldn't have misled like they did. I believe now they corrected some of their mistakes but for the people who were with them at the start kind of got shafted. I had a great time at DevMountain, I learned a lot and enjoyed the people. I turned a lot of opportunities down because DevMountain promised a lot that they didn't live up to, and yes they even said 95% of students were hired. I just wish they were upfront for the students when they started there program. I understand there's a lot of bugs to work out in a new business but a lot of people were affected by their poor decisions.

DevMountain was a challenging but fulfilling experience. It costs a lot of money, but the tradeoff is worth it as long as you are willing to work hard to get to where you need to be by graduation. The mentors and instructors were super helpful and knew their stuff. The curriculum contained a lot of outdated and extremely long videos that were marginally helpful, but the in-class gudied projects really helped solidify things. I haven't had the chance to go to a DevMountain hiring event yet so that is why the Job Assistance rating is a 3, although I'm sure the hiring event will be awesome. 

All in all, a great experience and I would definitely do it again. 

I will try and keep this short and to the point to help future bootcampers make educated decisions when deciding on which track to take, in heading towards a world of web development.  First off, my overall experience at Dev Mountain was ok and the staff was very friendly and nice.  The facility is nice, clean and is open 24hrs a day, which is great for focusing and coding into the late hours of the night.  The housing option was another great feature which lead me towards choosing Dev Mountain as a coding bootcamp.  All of these features and options were great, and were probably the reason why I gave the bootcamp a medium rating.  

The things I didn't like while attending were some of the lectures and classes were a bit unorganized and the school seemed like they didn't have there stuff together at times.  Also some of the curriculum course assignments were out of date, and didn't work when trying to complete the assignments.  This made things difficult when trying to learn new concepts in coding.  This was not just me, but I know a lot of students complained about this aspect of the schooling as well.  I also felt that the lack of professional coding experience by the staff was underwhelming. Outside of the lead instructor, most of the mentors and instructors were very green to the software development world.  These were some of the things I was hoping that a bootcamp experience would have delivered on since I was paying for a high priced education.  Oh yeah, and towards the end of the experience, they tell you that a bootcamp doesn't really look that good on your resume and that you should try to disguise that somehow.  Weird thing to tell your students, who have just paid a bunch of money to go to school and sacrificed everything to change careers.  This was another thing myself and other students felt a little strange about, but obviously couldn't do anything since it was disclosed during the last week of schooling.  

I think overall out of any bootcamp experience, I think the advertising out there boasts one thing, but the reality of going through it, is another story all together.  If I could do it all over again, I would not have quit my job and lost out on so much time and money that I invested.  In total, I've been jobless for 6 months now and upon looking for work, there really aren't that many junior dev jobs out there like a lot of bootcamps boast about.  If anything, join up with Pluralsight/Udemy, keep your job and learn from building projects that work out of the box.  The bootcamps are teaching the same concepts and aren't enlightening the students with any sort of extra knowledge you can't get from a time tested teaching resource like Pluralsight/Udemy.  If anything, I've learned more from watching expert PS videos and going through online teaching courses, than at the physical bootcamp schooling.  That's just my take on it all, some people need the bootcamp experience, but for me it was not worth my job, time and money invested.  I worked really hard while there, and continue to work really hard in trying to move forward, I just thought things would have turned out differently. 

Dev Mountain wasn’t a horrible experience for me by any means. The instructors were awesome, and certainly did the best they could to teach you to code in a short amount of time. However, the bottom-line is that Dev Mountain is a double-edged sword. Is it a waste of time? Yes and No.

If you can afford to pay $10,000 and take the Immersive course – I would recommend that you do so. They will teach you the front and back end side of development, and will provide some type of job placement. However, if you cannot afford the Immersive course, or cannot simply be in class all day – DO NOT SIGN UP FOR THE AFTER HOURS CLASS! It is a complete waste of money and time. Some people may argue otherwise, as people certainly have found jobs from the After Hours class. However, there are a number of things to be aware of when it comes to this course.

1. Dev Mountain will not acknowledge or support their after-hours students. Once you “graduate” from the after-hours program you will not receive ANY support or job placement from Dev Mountain. If someone contacts Dev Mountain to ask about you, they will not say you know what you’re doing because you simply haven’t had enough hours in development to receive their endorsement. You get as much credit from them as if you never took the course in the first place.

2. You learn nothing about the back-end. All you learn is simple front-end development in HTML, CSS, some jQuery, and AngularJS. With the Immersive you learn both front and back end – an important thing when looking for a developer job.

3. The most important thing that almost all jobs I was looking for to get in as an entry-level developer is a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science. This is almost the main thing all people looking for Junior Developers are looking for. If you truly want to get into coding – go this route and avoid a coding boot camp.

Now, DevMountain will tell you that they offer an advanced after-hours course to teach the back end which is true. But ask them how many people actually sign up for it. They’ve had to cancel it twice as no one has any interest in doing so after they take the regular after-hours course and find out that they’ve just wasted $5,000. They claim that over 90% of their students find jobs, but these figures are for the people who took the Immersive class. If they kept stats of how many after-hours graduates find jobs (which I’m sure they don’t because they simply don’t care about these students after they have their money) I would think that the placement figures would be around 1%-5%. Which means almost 95% of after-hours students just wasted $5,000.

In the end, I would like to see Dev Mountain just get rid of the after-hours course because it’s just a rip off. If you are going to go to Dev Mountain – take the Immersive course, or don’t go at all. I can’t speak for everyone, but I certainly don’t have $5,000 to waste. I could have taken it out and burned it and I would have ended up with the same results. Dev Mountain is supposedly run by ethical LDS people. If this is the case, I would hope that one day they would do the right thing and get rid of the after hours course and just offer the Immersive one. If you can’t afford $10,000, then find a better way to spend your money.

I attended an immersive full stack web development cohort here (12-week program) and put in roughly 80-100 hours / week into it. These camps you definitely get out what you put in. It was hard but I learned and grew an extraordinary amount in that small period of time. The leadership at DevMountain is incredibly caring, positive, and want you to succeed. They will do whatever it takes to make sure you feel like you got your moneys worth. 

That all said... the curriculum could use a little work (as of early 2016). I know that is a focus for them so hopefully it will get better as time goes on. It's definitely not enough to ding more than maybe a single star.