Confessions of a Flatiron Alum

The Journey Begins

My journey to Flatiron School started with a job fair. It was the fall of 2016. At the time, I was working at an insurance call center, mainly helping retirees select and enroll in Medicare plans. If you’ve never worked in a call center, let me assure you: it’s no fun. Sitting at a cubicle with a headset on and answering the same questions and repeating the same scripts day after day gets pretty mind numbing. After more than two years of the monotony and fairly low pay, I decided it was time to explore the job market again. I had come across an online ad for a job fair and decided to take a day off work to attend it. So I donned a suit and tie, printed a bunch of copies of my resume, and prayed for the best as I headed there in search for more fulfilling employment.

Long story short, all I did was waste paper and printer ink by printing all those resumes. I was disappointed in the small number of businesses represented at the fair, and none of the potential jobs struck me as anything I’d be interested in and/or qualified for. However, I noticed several IT schools had set up tables and, on a whim, decided to check them out and chat with the folks manning them. Doing so switched on a light bulb in my mind — maybe it was time to get trained in a whole new field. As I left the job fair with no new employment prospects, I kept ruminating on the idea of going back to school.

That evening, I shared this idea with my wife to see what she thought of it. Thankfully, she ended up supporting me, and I decided to start looking into IT and other computer-related careers, including web development. My research finally led me to enroll in a local community college to pursue an associate’s degree in web development.

Fast forward a little over two years: I still had not finished an associate’s degree. I had taken several courses that introduced me to HTML, CSS, Python, and JavaScript, but various setbacks had kept me from completing nearly enough work to graduate. Thus, my chances of landing work in web development were, as far as I could tell, slim to none.

Whither Now?

On the one hand, my wife was tired of bearing the entire burden of providing for us financially. On the other hand, I didn’t want to just call it quits and probably have to go back to working some boring, low-paying job. Should I enroll in more community college classes? And even if I did finally earn that associate’s degree, how useful would it prove to be? And would the school’s career center be of much use in finding a job in that field?

With these concerns in mind, I kept researching other options. That’s when I learned about online web development “bootcamps,” an alternative to pursuing an additional college degree. What are these bootcamps? According to Career Foundry:

A web development bootcamp is a condensed, immersive education program that aims to take motivated beginners to job-ready graduates in anything from a few months to a year. By focusing on high-impact learning and practical, real-world projects, web development bootcamps fuse fundamental web development theory with the industry skills that would be valuable to current employers. The result? A comprehensive, well-rounded learning experience that will take you from total coding newbie to qualified web developer.

I also started using Career Karma to connect online with others and explore various bootcamps to see if any would be a good fit for my needs (and budget!). After looking into Thinkful, Flatiron, and other programs, I finally opted to apply to Flatiron. My decision came down to three factors. First, they had about the lowest price of any of the programs I looked into. Next, they had an online self-paced course, which I felt would provided with me with the flexibility I needed, as opposed to some other programs that had a fixed class schedule and a very strict attendance policy. Finally, they offered a money-back guarantee if I was unable to get a web development job within six months of completing the program.

Hello, Flatiron!

I began Flatiron’s online software engineering course in April 2019. The curriculum focused on the following areas:

• Ruby
• HTML & CSS
• Sinatra
• Rails
• JavaScript
• React & Redux

It also touched on some other topics, such as SQL. I went through a series of modules, each of which contained a set of lessons about the topics covered in the module. Some lessons consisted just of an article to read, while others had an assignment — called a “lab” — to complete. Submitting a completed lab caused it to be uploaded to my GitHub account. Throughout the course, I had to create five portfolio projects that incorporated what I had learned up to that point. These included a CLI data gem (Ruby based) project, a Sinatra project, a Rails project, a JavaScript project, and a React/Redux project.

Initially, I had 18 months to complete the course. However, as the Covid crisis hit in 2020, Flatiron granted those of us in the self-paced program a 90-day extension, which I desperately needed, as some personal problems had impeded my progress in completing the assignments. At last, in mid-October of 2020, after a lot of ups and downs — not to mention a lot of handwringing and moments when I felt like beating my head against a wall in exasperation — I completed the course. Not surprisingly, my wife was just as elated as I was!

A career coach at Flatiron has met with me several times since finishing the program to help me prepare for the job search. My sessions with him have focused on tips for polishing up my resume and my LinkedIn profile, networking, other issues related to landing employment in my new field. I declared my official job search starting date to be January 11, and I will now have to keep a record of my weekly job search activities, which in addition to contacting prospective employers will include writing a weekly blog post and making at least 5 Github commits.

My Feelings on Flatiron?

Very mixed. Of course, I can only comment on their online self-paced program, as I didn’t attend classes at any of their locations or their virtual classes. I enjoyed the flexibility that the self-paced program allowed, and I did learn a good deal by working on the portfolio projects. One downside was that I felt the lessons would rush through too much new information with little or no review of what had come before so that I could sufficiently digest the material and master the skills expected of us. By way of comparison, I remember using a particular math curriculum in high school that was especially effective because each lesson consisted mostly of review of previous concepts, allowing students to keep practicing them over and over and thereby solidify their understanding of them. Granted, the instruction in coding bootcamps is always going to be somewhat compressed due to time constraints, but if I could redesign the curriculum, I would make sure there was continuous review. After all, acquiring a new skill requires constant practice.

Another peeve was that I felt the material didn’t always clearly explain things or demonstrate how to use what we had learned, nor did the coding problems in the labs always match up with the examples we were provided in the lessons. Also, the lessons, in my opinion, didn’t adequately prepare me to do the portfolio projects. I once joked with my wife that it was like the lessons showed us how to make a paper airplane — and then we were expected to take what we had learned from doing that to build a real airplane! But seriously, having worked for a time as a college instructor, I understand the need for providing students with very clear teaching and project guidelines, and frankly, I felt Flatiron’s curriculum often required me to make too many quantum leaps of logic to figure things out.

My frustrations with the curriculum may in part result from just having written materials to learn from rather than having a live instructor to work with me. Perhaps Flatiron students who attended classes either in person or virtually had different experiences. And perhaps the lesson format simply didn’t mesh well with my learning style. Regardless, I found that I easily learned as much if not more by watching coding tutorials on YouTube. In fact, I often found it necessary to turn to YouTube to supplement Flatiron’s materials.

I enrolled Flatiron in the hopes of giving myself a solid credential that would help me land a job in web development. Well, Course Report gives Flatiron a rating of 4.5 stars (out of a possible 5), and Flatiron is at the top of Career Karma’s list of best coding bootcamps. So hopefully, it will prove to have been worth the time, money and effort.