FourthBrain

IntroI just completed FourthBrain's MLE bootcamp with the 9th cohort to go through the program. There aren't really any reviews online, so I wanted to leave one.
TL;DR It's not worth $6k, and I wouldn't recommend the course to anyone. However, it's not a total scam, and I did get some value out of it.

Longer version The course is a 16-week bootcamp, which is done part time. The website says that the program will do things like "future-proof your ML career with expert skills" and "become an end-to-end ML engineer", which I guess it sort of accomplishes. The website also claims that the average FB graduate increases their salary by $27k after completing the program. They don't cite or contextualize this number from what I can tell, and I don't believe they're members of CIRR, so I would be cautious with accepting this claim.

You definitely can learn things in the program. However, you can also not learn things, and they'll take your money and graduate you just the same. That's the crux of my issues with the program.

Pros I have worked in analytics for a long time, and done a lot of data-science adjacent work. This means that I had a good working knowledge of Python going into the program, and had done Kaggle competitions, etc. However, I had never actually built something. This program did result in me building an actual project. That's very cool, and I now feel much more confident exploring the software engineering space and building more projects.

There's also a decent (although not great) community. You get access to their jobs channel on Slack, which posts 1-10 jobs a month. Last post as of this writing is November 18th, but there's an end of the year slowdown of course. There are some other fun slack channels, like algorithm study. I don't think that part is worth the cost at all, but it is a nice feature.

There is a person dedicated to job hunting, and he has already scheduled a call for our cohort to help us prep for the job hunt, which is nice. I don't know what the quality will be yet, but it's nice that they make an effort.

Cons Unfortunately, this is a much bigger section.

The biggest con IMO is the lack of standards. When I applied last year, I had to take an algorithms test in Python, and answer several linear algebra questions. They have since changed the admission criteria to be simply submitting a sample of your work in Pandas. My cohort had people from both admission systems, and there was a very obvious difference in skill level. There were people who actually worked in software engineering, and doing great work in the class, and people with a business background who struggled with basic command line work.

I raised this concern to the Head of Product, and he said something like "this is a business, and we can't be too strict or we won't get enough customers". I'm paraphrasing, but that's pretty close as far as I recall. If we had just been doing solo work, this wouldn't have been a big deal, but there's a lot of collaboration in this program, so low performers really drag down the group. There's pair programming once per week, and a group capstone project, so it's quite a bit of extra work when you get those people in your group. Also, the bootcamps with the best reputations have the strictest admission standards, so I know it can be done.

The lack of standards goes much deeper than that. In prior cohorts, there was a project-based midterm which was required to graduate. With our cohort, they decided to make this optional. The other standards are that you're supposed to attend 70% of lectures, and complete 70% of assignments. They just didn't enforce that.

My capstone group had 3 people, including me. One of our members didn't write a single line of code for our capstone group, and hadn't even done half of his homework assignments, and he graduated just like me. I raised this concern to the Head of Product too, and told him I didn't want the other member to present with our group on demo day because he hadn't contributed anything, and he basically told me I didn't have a choice.

The real crux of my issue is that I don't feel like FourthBrain correctly advertises themselves. When I discussed the fact that a member of my group hadn't contributed, and that I knew that same person hadn't done the homework which was described as mandatory in the syllabus, the Head of Product said something like "it's more about what the student wants to get out of it". If that's the case, then fine. Many people might be okay with that, but explain to students before they sign up that they'll be in class and graduating with people who don't know anything. Let students decide if they want that on their resume, and think it's worth $6k. Some might. I wouldn't have. I told the Head of Product that they should be upfront about the lack of standards and he just gaslighted me and said "that's not true..." But it 100% is true, and they ended up graduating the one guy I know for sure (there might be others) didn't complete the stated requirements of the course.

The other main con is the instructors.

We had 4 instructors. 2 were amazing, and 2 were awful. All of the instructors work full time in industry, and teach part time. They pitch this as a benefit, because you get actual industry knowledge, and it sort of is, but it's more complex than that.

Because the instructors are all part time, a lot of stuff just doesn't get done. Our last 3 homework assignments were never graded, for instance. When the course first started they sent out weekly pre-reading, and weekly reviews, which was great. This just stopped the last 4 weeks.

The instructors are also often very distracted, and will either not answer questions at all, or give answers that indicate they never read the question fully. There were a few students who picked up the slack and answered a lot of questions, which was nice, and speaks to the good community.

The final issue I have is the curriculum. There were tons of errors in assignments. I asked many times for the instructors to try running code before giving it to us, and it never happened. Deprecated libraries, typos, poor logic, etc were in many notebooks. They tried to act like it was for our own good, and would say things like "this is what a programming job is like", which is partially true, but you could see in the repo that they would go fix errors when we brought them up, which indicates to me that they weren't intentional.

Wrap Up

So, overall, I don't think it was worth $6k, and I think they're more interested in getting people in the door than in making those people successful. I do think it's worth $3k maybe, and I did get value out of if. I just wanted to post my honest thoughts, so that people can make a more informed decision than I did.Whatever you choose, good luck on your journey.