The Iron Yard

I’m writing this because I came here myself to read what was said about the Iron Yard before I decided to take the course, and I found what people said to be helpful, both the critical and the superlative. If, after reading this you have any questions, hit me up on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/isaiahfasoldt. I’d be happy to talk about my experience over the phone or in person. That’s how I made my decision, I contacted a bunch (5) of people who did the Iron Yard in Indianapolis and asked how it was.

So first things first. I’m only reviewing The Iron Yard Indianapolis Back-end 12-week course. I can’t speak really at all to the organization as a whole, the instructor quality around the country, or even, for that matter, the instructor quality in the front-end course in Indianapolis (I know that he’s a good guy, but I didn’t take class with him). From what I understand, it’s a good market around the country for programmers, and especially so in Indianapolis. But maybe it’s not in your area. So my review is limited in scope.

But here’s what I do know. Today is Saturday. I presented my final project to a representatives from probably 25+ companies this past Thursday. By Friday night, I had two interviews lined up with exciting companies that I would absolutely love to work for. I’m in conversation with another awesome company that may turn into an interview. Still another business, that has hired multiple grads in the past, has told me that they are going to contact me soon. I haven’t “applied” for a position yet. I may in the future, but if I do, the network of connections that the Indianapolis branch has may prove invaluable. No, I haven’t been handed a job. But I have been put in a position to take advantage of tremendous opportunities.

And I’m not alone. Out of the 10 students (4 back-end, 6 front-end), 1 back-end student got a job week 11, another front-end student got a job offer yesterday (Friday, for those who are counting). And again, I don’t think any of this was from “applying”. Most of us have barely started the job search process.

So the course. Let’s see. It’s tough and time consuming. You probably need to be decently bright to do it (not like brilliant or anything, just generally intelligent). If you feel like college is too tough for you (not like writing essays, or something, but like the academic level as a whole), than you probably shouldn’t start from scratch with the Iron Yard. It’s not that coding is too tough for you, but maybe the speed at which the course moves would be.

Also, if you can’t commit to putting in some HARD work, than the Iron Yard is not for you. I spent probably 75 hours a week. 8 hours in class and 4 hours at home M-F. And then 15 hours on the weekend. I have a 2 year old daughter; I was a bit of an absent parent for the three months. My angel of a wife picked up a lot of the parenting slack for me. I’m an avid video gamer, a netflix watcher. I played maybe 5 hours of video games total and watched exactly 0 hours of Netflix during the course. I still went to church. I still found time to take a Saturday and make my wife a birthday dinner. We celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary by going out to eat at a nice restaurant, not by taking a camping trip like I had planned. So it takes sacrifices. As other people have noted, you get out what you put in.

That commitment applies to the pre-work that they hand you as well. Probably my biggest criticism of my time is that it didn’t feel like the pre-work was emphasized enough. I did all of it, and some extras, but some students came in without having finished it. It makes a huge difference. There’s no time to catch up during the course, so if you start off behind, it’s difficult, really difficult.

The instructor, Chris, is gifted as both a programmer and a teacher. I don’t say this lightly. I did TeachForAmerica in the South Bronx for 5 years. I know what a good teacher looks like, as well as a crappy teacher. Chris is a great teacher. Ryder, who I know well (hey man!), mentions below that the teaching was overly didactic and lecture based. That’s fair criticism. The schedule is lecture from 9 am to noon, lunch, lab from 1pm-5pm. 3 hours of lecture is a lot, but it worked well for me, and is probably necessary to get through the amount of content that we did. To be fair, at least with us, Chris did do a lot of code review, and answered the 1 BILLION questions that we (mostly I) asked in class. He always took time to answer our questions in as much detail as we wanted. I will say that you have to get over your fear of looking stupid by asking a question. Different people get lost at different places and there’s no time to teach everything from 5 different angles. Chris will teach it from the angle that he knows from experience works best, and if you let it be known that you don’t get it (which will be often, it’s just part of the experience), he will explain it from a different perspective. Also, the “lecture” is really him coding in front of you narrating along the way. In education-speak, we’d call this modeling, and Chris is a master of it.

Lab time is when you get the daily homework (or weekend if it’s Thursday). It's always almost exactly what Chris did or you in the lecture, but with enough differences that you can't just copy his code. (He almost always puts his code from lecture online as well for reference) You sit and bang your head against the wall until it makes sense. If you get stuck, you try to figure it out for yourself for about 10-15 minutes (Hint: google your problem, someone somewhere has run into the exact same issue. Also, it’s probably on the stackoverflow). If you can’t get it after a few minutes, you call over your instructor, and he’ll take as long as he needs to get you to a point where you can continue on your own. Then you run into another wall and repeat the process. Sound frustrating? It is. But it’s also the best way to learn. Learning to deal with frustration and failure is one of the most important skills that a programmer can have. As Chris says a million times: “Nothing works on the first try”. And it’s true, even when he’s doing the coding in front of us in class. Even his mistakes are part of that modeling process. The only criticism I have of lab time is that there were a few days when he had other job duties (like interviewing future students) that made him less available, and left us stuck in places longer than we would have liked. It didn’t happen a lot, but it did happen occasionally. That said, he was generally available on slack (chat messaging) until nearly midnight, and usually responded immediately. All in all, he was very accessible.

Here’s another thing, there’s nothing special about the concepts that are learned at the Iron Yard, no special formula for the homework. People mention that it’s all readily available online. It probably is. I mean, heck, everything I learned in both my bachelor’s degree in Philosophy/Ancient Languages and Master’s degree in Education is online too! You could absolutely learn everything that the Iron Yard course offers online. Lots of programmers are self-taught. If you can learn enough to convince someone to give you a job, you probably don’t need the Iron Yard. You’ll learn on the job and get paid at the same time. The more power to you! I could have done that myself. But it would have taken me years and years instead of 3 months. Here’s the truth, you’re not paying for the material, you’re paying for the accelerated learning that having an experienced teacher allows. And you’re paying for the reputation of the school with employers and the network it has.

About that network. Emily, the campus director in Indianapolis does an outstanding job of cultivating relationships with the tech community. The advisory board for the Indianapolis campus reads like a who’s who of tech companies in the area. The vast majority of the tech people I met with at local meetups had heard of the Iron Yard, had a positive impression of it. Lots knew Emily and/or Chris personally. Emily does everything she can to throw potential employers into your path, from scheduling them as guest speakers, to offering the campus space to tech meetups, to hosting mixers and networking events for students and employers. You still need to have your own hustle, of course, but it’s that much easier. Emily's also wonderfully and brutally honest. If you're not cutting it, she'll let you know. Her previous job was as a tech recruiter, so she knows exactly what it takes to get hired as a software engineer. She runs trainings on resumes, portfolios, etc, that get you looking good to employers.

This has become a super long review. But I’m including all the things that would have made my decision that much easier. Best of luck to you in the decision making process.

I was part of the February 2016 Rails cohort on the Indianapolis campus. While there are many fine schools in the Iron Yard network, I am speaking to my own experience and do not assert any generalizability of said experience to other campuses.

The Iron Yard Indianapolis (TIYI from here on out) is a fantastic and well-connected coding immersion program designed to take people with little or no coding experience and get them junior developer jobs. Like the overwhelming majority of bootcamps, employment is not guaranteed. For many reasons -- including the professional performance of alumni and the breadth and depth of the TIYI network -- employment as a developer is, however, very likely.

Also -- and I cannot stress this enough -- what you get out of it mostly depends on what you put into it.

TIYI is staffed by experienced and driven personnel who are good at their jobs, enjoy their work, and are genuinely concerned about their students and graduates.

I will now state my biggest complaint, and the primary reason why I dinged TIYI for a star -- the curriculum. While I completed several pair and group projects throughout the Rails engineering course, other than that there was very little collaboration during both lab and lecture. Although we have a gifted instructor and tremendous development resource in Chris Vannoy, I found lecture to be oppressively didactic.

I would have preferred to pair on most of the work I did throughout the course -- like they do at Hack Reactor -- and I did not find the policy on pairing during lab to be clearly articulated. I asked about it multiple times and still didn't feel I understood where the boundary was -- consequently I did most of my work alone. While I still benefited from problem-solving in this way, I think this is far from the ideal way to prepare new developers to constructively and effectively communicate their ideas, or to work together in a common code base.

You should also understand that you're not going to get handed a job coming out of this -- well some of you might, but you shouldn't count on it. My buddy Seth had a fantastic job lined up at week 6, but most of us weren't so lucky -- the last stat I heard touted was that most students who find a dev job take about a month to do so. Personally I could have had a job at week 11, but I didn't land the job I wanted until a month and a half after graduating. That job, however, was at Salesforce -- a company that pretty much categorically does not hire juniors for anything more than internships -- so you should take that as another feather in TIYI's cap.

Emily Trimble (the TIYI dean) is a formidable career resource to whom I am deeply indebted. Also understand that this is not a 12-week program; it is a 16-week program after you factor in the job search. Pace yourself accordingly.

Our Rails instructor has great natural aptitude for teaching. He also possesses the necessary (and rare) combination of technical and communicative ability needed to teach development effectively.

I did struggle with lecture more than any other part of the curriculum, and it's because for most of our classroom time I was bored. Or mad. Or both.

Lecture was didactic in nature -- there was little time allocated in class to collaboration or code review, and the methodology was far from Socratic. Partly I am sympathetic, as our cohort was full of tough nuts to crack and it would have taken skillful, consistent, and early intervention to establish an open and collaborative dynamic. That's in addition to the constraints being imposed by Iron Yard central, of which I am ignorant.

But it was still hard, and not in an expected way. Maybe in a way that ultimately challenged and served me well -- another reason for only dinging the one star -- but hard.

Really hard.

Know what you want to get out of TIYI before you go in. Have at least a general idea of what kind of place you want to work at and in what capacity. If you have never read What Color is Your Parachute? or really done the work to understand yourself and your goals, please do that first. You don't have to live and breathe code (though many if not most do during the course), or even be a developer for the rest of your life, but make sure you have an endgame here.

Once you're there -- hey, congratulations. If you really took the time to think things through before signing up, you've just made what could easily become the best career decision of your life.  Take a second to pat yourself on the back.

Now remember how you checked things out thoroughly before deciding this was right for you? That means you already have an endgame. Take the time to share that endgame -- to the extent that you're comfortable and maybe a bit more -- with the staff.

Nobody's going to do this for you. If you want to get more than the basic package out of this, you'll need to put in the work yourself. If you have some goals while you're here and can share them, you'll get help. If it's possible to share those things with your cohort as well, by all means do so.

If you are looking at attending, I would say that it is equally as important to know who you will be attending with as to know the staff.

Overall, the Iron Yard Indianapolis is an amazing program. It deserves a place at the top of the list of anyone with patience, persistence, and technical ability who is looking to change careers in this part of the country.

In August of 2015 I found myself growing more and more desparate to find employment as I had been unemployed over a year and running out resources to support myself. I was depressed and felt worthless and didn't really want to go anywhere because I'd see people living and doing things with their lives and would feel alienated because I wasn't doing much with my life but not for lack of trying. 

One day I was browsing through my twitter feed and ran across an article about coding camps in other cities and the success the graduates had after graduating a course that only took 3 months, I was skeptical but also intrigued enough to Google for code camps in Houston. I found the Iron Yard, told my girlfriend about it and she encouraged me to go up to the campus and at least check it out. I met Brian Dorton who welcomed me like I was an old friend and asked me about myself and my background, I was totally open and honest with him about my situation and he told me I should apply.

I did and was later accepted, I felt a great deal of responsibility on my shoulders because I took this opportunity as a "second chance" to do something that made me feel worthy, something I could be proud of. 

I took the Ruby/Rails course and weeks before we started, my teacher Jesse provided us with internet resources that we should have a look at to get familiar with the language and concepts. I spent pretty much all of my time on Codeschool.com which is a resource I still use to this very day and by the first day of Iron Yard I was nervous but also energized and ready to hit the ground running. 

We had a small class, maybe 15 people and I soon learned that my teacher JWo is a cool guy and likes to have fun, but when it's time to get down to business, he's not going to hold your hand or baby you, it's literally a boot camp, with comfortable seats and great coffee. Jesse has a talent for assessing where his students are and determining who genuinely needs help getting up to speed and he would deal with those students accordingly, whether that's staying after class for a bit or making himself available via Slack or Phone. 

The course was intense and 'intense' might even be an understatement, after the first week, I didn't get a single night of sleep where I wasn't dreaming about code, I was fully immersed in it EVERY day of the week so I fully agree with others who say "you get what you put into this course", it's absolutely true. 

There were many times that I'd try to compare my progree to my classmates and would sometimes feel like I wasn't quite measuring up to them only to talk to those same people and discover they felt the same things, I used this as motivation to put in extra time at home studying or not leaving the Iron Yard until at least 75% of that night's homework was complete. 

Every week we'd have to turn in a lab and every week was filled with anxiety and worries of whether or not I'd be able to finish it on time or if it'd be up to the standard that my teacher expected. In hindsight I appreciate the terror I felt because if the pressure wasn't there, I believe I wouldn't have put in the level of effort I did or stay up until midnight every night knowing I'd have to be at the bus stop at 7am the next morning.

In my first meeting with Brian, he told me that the Iron Yard is something that could change my life and it was a statement that really didn't have as much impact as it did on graduation day, I was in a space where I felt like I could add value to my life and the immediate lives around me, I was able to make connections that resulted in me find employment less than two weeks of me graduating and I owe all of it to the Iron Yard. 

If you're interested in this program and you don't have the time to fully devote yourself to it, I'll straight up recommend that you don't apply because you will only get out of this program what you put into it. 

At the Iron Yard DC you'll find a caring staff and well-educated and talented instructors. That being said, it's very difficult to learn how to code in 3 months, so your best chance of success is prep as much as you can before you get there. There's loads of free resources online. Do as many as you can that way when you get there you can take advantage of the skilled staff. In other words, it's hard to know what questions to ask if you haven't done any learning ahead of time. The more prepared you are, the more you can get out of it and when you leave you'll have a good foundation to start your coding journey.

I'm amazed at some of these negative reviews. They tell you up front that it won't be easy. It seems like people expect to just be handed everything after paying tuition. Learning to code takes time and persistence. Not only do you have to work hard during the course, you need to work hard afterwards on your job hunt. Boot camps aren't for everyone, they are for self motivated hard working people that are willing to put in the time required to succeed. It's not just a free job. I spent a few weeks post graduation either coding or job hunting all day and got a job. My instructor and campus director were both amazing and did everything they could for me WHEN I ASKED. It's not just about leaving a three month course with everything you'll ever need. You learn how to learn. You learn how to work through problems and keep at it until you find the right way. I would absolutely recommend this program to anyone (excluding someone who is consistently lazy and expects everyone to do their work for them).

I attended the Iron Yard after realizing the amount of time it would take to teach myself how to code while working 50 - 60 hours a week.  The course was intense and it taught me how to program and what it means to be a developer, along with interview and job search skills.  As far as helping you find jobs the staff will help you as much as they can, but the few positions that are posted to students are usually looking for people with more experience then you will have coming out of the program.  I did have trouble initially finding work after leaving the program, and the high price for a class with no credit hours to show has been an issue in my new role.  My advice to anyone thinking of attending the Iron Yard is to evaluate why you want to take the course, realize what the expected salary is for a graduate (most make around $35K), take classes online where you actually write programs, and realize that you will still need to further educate yourself after graduating.  All in all it was a great experience and I wish my college was more like the Iron Yard.

Let me start by saying I have a job as a developer now - but only because after my bad experience I took it upon myself to try another bootcamp and online course with CodeSchool. The way this course is sold to the applicants is that ANYBODY can do it if they put in the time, dedication, hard work, and willingness to learn. That is true for any field really but I definitely fell for that speech and joined the course. We were also told that you can go from "0 to hero" basically you don't have to have any programming knowledge and they can take you to a junior developer in 3 months. Basically you can make it through this camp if you ALREADY know how to code. They ask you to study tutorials before you get there to know the basics but I found I was basically teaching myself. I don't mind that of course because I ended up doing it after the camp ended but for all the money you have to pay, that's ridiculous to pay to teach yourself! Add the fact that you MUST have a Mac, which is not a requirement at most jobs. (I asked in different interviews.) Please just take your time with enrolling at TIY. Ask many questions, don't get caught in the hype. If you want connections and job opportunities just join the tech meetups in Indy. Saying you went to TIY won't get you far, they already have a bad reputation starting because our community is so small. I asked at a few meetups what complete strangers thought of them (I never said I went there) and the response was not surprising. Word traveled quickly that the course material was all over the place, the administration was stuffy, and for the price you can take a superb course online or at Eleven Fifty if you really want class instruction. I'll leave on a good note though... the idea behind it is great. Small classes, individual attention, classmates are usually really cool (because we love tech), beer, and insider info on the tech scene in Indy was great. But then again you can get that for free at a meetup!

PART 2:

Sorry I forgot to add that: 1. I found all the homework assignments on YouTube. Why should I pay for material that was taken from Treehouse, Google, and/or YouTube?? 2. People have different learning styles so I don't understand all the positive reviews when they say it's a bootcamp it's supposed to be fast. Being too fast wasn't the big issue really, it was the unorganized, stolen material. The unanswered questions. The guess everything approach. Google it... yes we're going to be problem solvers but I wanted to LEARN it first. Then I can solve the problems! 3. Seriously the tuition baffles me. I agree with the several reviews on the price. They'll try to tell you it's because you MAY graduate and find an entry level position for $40,000 per year or more.... they are not Hack Reactor so they shouldn't be making such foolish claims to suck people in.

So I was reading through reviews of The Iron Yard (I just graduated in December 2015) and was unpleasantly surprized that anyone would not love and respect the entire experience that going there was all about! First thing is first: THIS IS A BOOTCAMP SCHOOL!! If you have a difficult time going at a fast pace, you might need to check out private tutoring or traditional schooling. Second: I HAVE NEVER, EVER, EVER, HAD AN INSTRUCTOR BEND OVER BACKWARDS FOR EVERYONE IN THE CLASS ANYTIME AND EVERYTIME THEY NEEDED IT! This includes sometimes walking away to teach us that we can walk on our own and that we can do it without them standing over our shoulders all the time. Third: The support from the ENTIRE staff from the higher ups at the school to the other instructors is unsupassed and is better than I have recieved even from my own family! They are here to help and to give you any extra attention that you ask for ( I asked for help from the other instructors and they did not hesitate once to try to walk me through a language they didn't know anything about.) I would not trade my experience for anything in the world and if you are on the fence about going ... DO IT!! Or talk to one the amazing people who dedicate so much of their time to helping you to succeed! I feel confident in saying that I am now an iOS Developer and I feel confident about my abilities coming out of the program. DO IT!!

To reiterate what another graduate said in another review, "you get what you put into it." This class is for the self-driven and for the motivated. The instructors are brilliant minds, great teachers, and offer great support, but if you expect someone else to do your work and research for you then you have another thing coming. BUT, with that being said, taking this class was the best decision I have made for myself. I came out of the course with more practical skills and knowledge than my four year IT degree ever gave me. Not only that, but the instructors really teach you how to teach yourself and tell you how to find resources on new technology. This has made learning a new language at my current job actually achievable. If I had the time and money I would go back and take the other classes that the Iron Yard offers too. 

Did I come out of the course as a front-end developer ready to dive into the tech-world? I can definitely make it look that way on paper to try and land me interviews, but the fact of the matter is this: I wanted so badly to convince myself these twelve sleepless weeks were worth it, that my final project was something creative and impressive that encompassed everything I painstakingly learned from the course, and that most importantly, I would get a return on my $12,000 investment; however, the more I think about it all, now that I've been able to sleep, I've realized that I walked away with not much more than a $12,000 "diploma" that may help me get my foot in the door and get some interviews. In no way do I feel like I actually learned what I wanted to convince myself I did.

I will go ahead and get this out of the way. There were two instructors. One was nice and approachable, and the other seemed as if he couldn't have cared less about being there. I remember once, on a Friday after class, the latter had gone to 'happy hour' and when he came back, I asked for help with something. He started to help, then stated he was too inebriated to assist me! I discounted this "instructor" immediately as being of any use to me

So, let's say that one "instructor" actually counted as one. There was still a 1:10 instructor to student ratio. With 22 students, The Iron Yard's budget was $264,000, which should have been more than enough to hire a couple more teachers. So why were there so many issues? I don't know, but here is a list of them:

-       There was a huge disparity between the knowledge gained during lecture and the knowledge needed to complete the assignments. Thinking outside the box is great, but being told to Google possible solutions to an already trial-and-error process wasn't acceptable.

-       The instructor-to-student ratio was a joke. This lead to a “first come/first serve” arrangement to get help after lecture. When asking for help, I was too often told to look for an answer via an external resource. This resulted in an inordinate number of hours spent on guess work.

-       The absence of feedback from completed assignments was detrimental to the learning process. If you don’t understand your mistakes, how can you possibly know how to proceed with future assignments? If I had been shown how the code for the previous assignments could be more professionally and efficiently accomplished, it would have allowed me to use that knowledge moving forward. This caused unnecessary struggle of making the same mistakes.

-       With the degree of dedication and effort put into every day, I shouldn't have felt stranded. I relied heavily on collaboration with other students to complete assignments. While collaboration is good, many people were struggling with the same problems as me. This resulted in a cluster of random ideas and possible solutions.

I wish I could get my time and money back and just start studying on my own. This was a terrible experience, and I hope that if you decide to take the plunge, that your’s is better than mine.

Thanks for reading.

Above all else: you will get out of this course, what you put into it. And I wish I had done this in place of going to college. Fact.

I was part of a cohort that only graduated 4. A smaller class, to be sure.

The instructor was fantastic with being able to work with those of differing levels of knowledge, and he was literally one message away nearly all hours of the day and night (even at 11pm, he was still answering questions and helping direct if we got stuck on something!). He also did an amazing job of making sure we had exposure to all the programs, gems, work-flow styles, etc. that are being used in tech companies today. On numerous site visits with companies, they mentioned hoping to find individuals with the exact skills and knowledge we were(or had) learning in the course. 

Personally, I had NO knowledge prior to the course, other than pre-course work that I did the week before classes began. Now, I'm applying for jobs as a Jr. Developer, and I've met amazing people in the tech community along the way. I did my best to get out there and meet people at tech meet-ups and mixers, I worked hard to get as far on assignments as I could (which, btw, I LOVED the set-up of difficulty for each assignment), and I took notes. 

The campus director was such a great part of helping with resume building, reviewing, and helping to make sure we were connected when those tech events were happening. She's one of the best-connected educational resources I've had (and I'm including my state university in that comparison).

Mind you, I worked part-time through all of this, averaging around 20 hours a week at my job (resulting in a few weeks at or around 70 hour work weeks).  I worked over 640 hours alone towards the coursework during the 12 week class (though mine was 14 weeks because of Holidays). It was tough, but the more time you invest, the more you will learn and get out of it. It was worth every minute. Every. Single. Minute.

I have nothing but gratitude, respect, and appreciation for the Iron Yard of Indy. I walked away with knowledge of coding, a new way of looking at and solving problems, and an appreciation for the tech we use every day. I am now starting my career in development...and I owe it to Iron Yard. 

You can feel free to personally contact me if you want to know more - seriously. I stand behind this program 100%. Absolutely, completely, life-changing.

I think I've re-written this review several different times now considering how I want to say what I want to say about this particular program.

The fact is:  I just graduated.

Do I have interviews lined up?  Absolutely.

All of my interviews are with some very big names here in Charleston.

Will I get a job?  I certainly hope so.

I've read all of reviews for TIY, not only the ones recently posted for the Charleston campus.  All I have to say in response to the more negative ones is:  "I have my opinions on the style of management, what the company could have done better to really bring home the perceived value, and everything under the sun including the shade of blue they used to paint the walls."

However none of these opinions are relevant to the question at hand.  The question being:  "Did you learn how to code?"

Yes.

"Was it easy?"

No.  I've noticed a trend in life.  That trend being:  "Nothing in life that is worth while is easy."

The amount of benefit you will receive from this program is directly proportional to the work that you put into it.

If you have questions; ask, ask, ask, ask, ask.  If you don’t then your instructor will either 1) think you are a Clojure aficionado or 2) you just don’t care?  My point is the instructors are programmers not mind readers!

Now…..to my Java instructor:

Zach Oakes is one of the most intelligent people I have had the privilege to study under.  He has a decade worth of experience, AT LEAST.  He is a well-respected member of the tech community.  His work has been honorably mentioned in a few books, his tech-talks are well received and reviewed, and most importantly he is “out-of-the-box.”

TDLR;

If you’re expecting an easy ride TIY probably isn’t your best bet.

However if can work hard, power through the tough times, and keep focused you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.  I know I was.