DevPoint Labs

I never ended up attending Devpoint, but I thought I'd make others aware of what I experienced because I had only read positive reviews on Devpoint. My interview was rescheduled 3 separate times, all last minute. There was no technical interview when I finally did speak with one of the co-owners and I was accepted 2 weeks later, after being told I would hear back in a week. I do not live in Utah, but was ready to relocate to attend the cohort I was accepted into. All I needed was the smallest effort from the owners to send me a single document to obtain a loan from their partners, which they were not even aware of the conditions. One of the co-owners repetedly told me that I couldn't get a loan because I lived out of Utah, but my loan processor told me I certainly could. After finally being told I would be e-mailed the document, I never heard from anyone at Devpoint again. I gave up at that point, too stressful dealing with lack of communication and being left in the dark. Perhaps the program is great, I cannot say anything about that or the instructors, but I do feel this is worth noting for future applicants. I hate to be a downer and I am a very understanding person in most situations, but I was honestly offended by the lack of effort I experienced while working with Devpoint Labs.

I did some extensive competetive analysis prior to applying at DevPointLabs. Their program appeared to offer the very best value in the market. We all hear how looking back in the rear view mirror is always 20/20. Well now I can say with absolute conviction, my analysis proved out in spades. My experience at DevPointLabs was beyond even my somewhat quixotic expectations. I experienced full engagement and support from the entire administration right on through the teaching staff. I sincerely appreciated the "up-front" authenticity and candor, as the administrators enumerated the level of rigor associated with this course. The full-stack rails course is suited for people commited to putting forth a level of focused effort beyond most other endeavors.

I attended DPL between May 18th, 2015 and July 31st, 2015.  
It was a great experience for me.  

I went in with some programming experience from college courses and also teaching myself some stuff.  
The course jumped right into coding and didn't stop for 11 weeks.  My brain felt like mush most days after class from all the learning I was doing.  
I was able to get an internship the last two weeks of class working for a new startup company and then was hired by them as a Jr. Dev on the last day of class.  
I recommend this course to anybody who wants a change in their life and career!  

I was a part of the 2014 spring cohort at Devpoint Labs, and I had a great experience. First of all let me get this out of the way, programming is hard. You are going to have to work your butt off to get it down, but it is such a great feeling when you build cool stuff or figure out a problem that had you stumped. 

The staff at Devpoint Labs is great. They were all very helpful and enthusiastic about helping their students to learn and grow. Throughout the entire course, I felt like they were very concerned for my progress and improvement as a developer. The instructors definitely know their stuff, and they were very willing to take extra time to explain concepts or provide extra help to anyone who needed it.

I would recommend Devpoint Labs to anyone who is serious about development. The experience will either help get you on the developer path, or it will help to fine tune your skills if you are looking to pick up a new language.

 

I would not choose this program unless you have a higher than average understanding of Javascript. You will not get what you need out of this program without it. The entire cohort you are copying and pasting instructors code into your projects. You aren't taught how to code a project from start to finish on your own. You will learn how to alter the preexisting code that your instructor very quickly goes through, but won't understand what each section of the code is doing. You aren't taught how to debug either. All in all I would not recommend this program to someone with no experience in front and back end development. The people were great, but the material will not in any way shape or form set you up for employment. I have no ill feelings towards the people there. My experience there was stressful, but enjoyable. The issue I have is that they didn't teach us how to write code. I literally paid thousands of dollars to copy and paste what my instructor typed during the lectures into my projects. 

Here is a bit of information for any prospective students of DevPoint...

For the Fall 2018 cohort, as of February 2019 (3.5 months after graduation), as far as I know only 4/25 students have jobs -- based on what I've seen on our alumni Slack account and on LinkedIn. 

Yes, these numbers aren't very uplifting. You have to understand that students that did not get a job after applying for months (like me) were hesitant to put any reviews at all here--so the "five stars" is deceiving..DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST!

***I was someone who left a job of 10 years and sacrificed a much better paying gig to come here and work in web development. I never was lax about this program and tried very hard to keep up, understand and ask questions. I'd say I was "middle of the pack"***

TO REVIEW: 

The content: I feel like what DevPoint presented for us to learn was decent in terms of demand, but the way they presented this information was extremely disorganized, ineffective, or both. The reason is that they implement a method of going about this that is one technology one day, one technology another, and don't much time on the basics whatsoever. We learn Ruby to begin and then abandon it only to circle back around to it months after in coding exercises -- how are we supposed to be sharp at that point when we've been studying other languages? They would have been much better off in my opinion making this a JavaScript based course as the demand is much higher in this technology and you could have skipped out on all the time learning Ruby basics (and only basics). 

The instructors: Some of the best instructors that are actual software developers having had experience at a professional level have departed as of this posting. The lead instructors now are relatively inexperienced and I will also add that several of the instructors last cohort had an indifferent attitude when helping students. Not to say all instructors were "bad" in any sense, as a few are very friendly, but overall not what anyone should be paying for. 

The daily routine: Get to class at 9:30, start a topic until 12:30 with breaks in between...So this amounted to around 2-2.5 hours of lecture. Also to note, most of the time this was just a "code along" and we really didn't ever break down what were typing until the app "worked" and then we were left to figure out how it did on our own time.
Then, the lecturer would announce a homework assignment after lunch and from around 1-5 pm we would work on that in the chapel with little to no hands on help from instructors or TA's, who more or less sat in the middle of the chapel on their laptops. This made for an awkward situation as it seemed like we had to bother the TA's rather than them actively coming and looking for people to help. So essentially if you were stuck on something and couldn't get help from students around you, you went to the TA's who would give you a nudge in the right direction but really never actually guide you completely through a problem for the most part. That's 4 hours of the day. Half the day. What we were doing. 

Career assistance: None. This is where DPL really fell off the map. You're given a certificate--fun, but after that you really only have an alumni slack channel to vent on. Why couldn't they have gone with an income sharing agreement so that all of DPL was more focused into getting students into jobs to get their money? We did have a day of "career advice" which was just motivational speak about getting our Linkedin resume up to par, but this was pointless really. 


If I could do it again, I would have chosen a school that focused more on a few core languages (say HTML/CSS, JavaScript, ReactJS, NodeJS) and left out the Ruby/Rails. There is no way you can be a real effective full stack developer in 12 weeks unless you have significant experience coming in -- and you see this with the results from our cohort and others. Only a handful seem to be able to get jobs from prior experience, knowing just the right person, or having had CS education beforehand. 

Until DPL changes all of these things and the results speak to the quality of the school in terms of jobs, internships, anything for students after graduating -- I can not recommend this school.