Launch Academy

A fantastic program - Dan Pickett is one of the most well-regarded leaders in the Boston ruby community, and he has put together a really great team of instructors. Awesome people, curriculum second to none. More than that, the 6-month post-grad support is real. The experience engineers at LA are really genuine people as well as stellar engineers - ping them with a question a month after the program is over and you'll get a response. If your heart is 100% in it, you'll get quite a bit more from LA than you could from comparable programs.

Prior to attending Launch Academy, I was somewhat skeptical about the bootcamp education model. Bootcamps require a large upfront tuition payment and I wasn't sure if potential employers would take these non-traditional training programs seriously.

I found Launch Academy particularly appealing because they offered full-stack training which includes database, back-end and front-end development. After thoughtful consideration I decided to attend. I knew I wanted to be a web developer and attending a bootcamp seemed like the most efficient way to successfully transition into the industry.

The program was 10 weeks long. Our cohort, the first cohort at Launch Academy, ramped up in the first week and kept a rapid pace of learning throughout the remainder of the course. The curriculum offered a good balance of depth and breadth. Throughout the course Launch Academy invites local developers, CTOs, CEOs and active members of the tech community to speak to the class. This was a great addition to the course; I gleaned a ton of valuable information from them.

There was one point about halfway through the course where I felt we could have used an additional instructor to help with projects. However, Launch Academy listened to our feedback and hired an additional instructor. This was a minor issue considering we were the first cohort through the course.

Overall, I had an great experience. I learned more than I expected, worked with an incredible group of people and had a blast developing cool things for ten weeks. Upon completion of the course, we had initial interviews with approx. 30 companies. I had several follow up interviews and I accepted an incredible position as a Rails Developer within two weeks of graduation.

I had some background in coding before attending LA and had been doing some self study, but LA really took my abilities to the next level. I was really skeptical I could gain enough practical knowledge in 10 weeks to get a job, but I just graduated last week and already have on-site interviews with four companies lined up.

Launch Academy also offers something you can't get through self study, an amazing atmosphere and a whole group of people eager to learn and aid each other along the way. I got to work with and learn from so many awesome people, I gained more than I ever would have on my own. The people alone were worth the cost of admission.

Also, a big bonus of Launch Academy is their devotion to following best practices. The experience I have gained with Test Driven Development at Launch Academy alone has been enough to impress employers.

If you are looking for a challenging and rewarding experience that will change your life, you can't go wrong with Launch Academy.

 

Launch Academy was a great stepping stone for me. I had just graduated college, and during my last semester i began transitioning to web development. Started doing Codecademy and other tutorials online.

I knew I lacked any prior, both educational and work, experience in computer science, so I figured the next best thing was to do a bootcamp. After doing my research and investigating, I decided Launch Academy was the best fit for me.

I think Launch Academy excels at the instructors. Dan Picket, Johnny Borsiquost, and the Experienced Engineers, are really smart, can explain things very well, and are there to help whenever you may need it.

To be very honest and blunt, this is a bootcamp. If you have the drive and work ethic, you will thrive. If not, maybe take a different approach. 10-weeks goes by really fast, and the amount of knowledge you absorb is unlike anything else.

My advice if your are thinking of doing this or are going to do it, is this. If you are learning something, and dont understand it (after you have tried to figure it out), ask ASAP! 10 weeks really goes by fast. Embrace the confusion, and always look for clarity. Understand your learning style, and make sure Launch Academy is catering to that style. Last time i checked, my batch (the 2nd), had about an 80% job placement within 1.5 months.

Live and breath this stuff for the 10 weeks. Most importantly, seek to understand what, why, how things are happening. Everything builds upon the old stuff, so make sure every step of the way you are understanding what is going on.

Good luck.

 

I joined Launch Academy in February 2014 after realizing that coding was something I wanted to do. While I had very little experience with coding and most programming languages I was familiar with Ruby by attending free workshops in Boston

I decided on Launch for a couple of reasons; it's located in Boston, they are active in the Ruby community, and I had met Launch Academy alum who had only good things to say about the boot camp model.

One of the greatest things about Launch Academy are the Experience Engineers who teach and mentor. It's an amazing support system that I don't think I would've gotten at other bootcamps in the city.

By the end of the 10-week program, I had built a couple of apps using Rails and Sinatra and was exposed to many of the methodologies and technologies full-stack developers use. The most important thing was not just what I learned but HOW I learned. I know feel like I have the tools to learn any new technology at an accelerated rate.

I had interviews for 5 different positions and accepted a job offer within a month of graduation.

A look back: 6 Months After Graduation

Everyday there is a reference back to something I learned at Launch Academy. The day to day workflow of working in a Ruby web stack is very similar to what I learned at LA. Our engineering team practices test driven development, another core competency of Launch. Even the environment of Mission Control(the physical space of Launch) mimics the open floor collaborative environment that I currently work in. In addition to the parallels between Launch Academy and career after Launch, I was fortunate enough to have been able to make enough mistakes in a learning environment of LA (dropping production databases, losing git branches, overwriting entire repos) where the cost was low that I didn't lose my company any money.

At Backupify I started as an Associate Software Engineer, where I worked on several projects (upgrading API's/rails, refactoring code, making systems improvements, rewriting tests, customer bugs/requests) which were very manageable task for a young developer. After 2 months, started getting mentoring opportunities to bring brand new engineers up to speed on our technology. I was able to leverage my experience with mentoring my peers at Launch to help bring these new teams members up to speed quickly. After 6 months with this team, I was promoted to Software Engineer and Team Lead managing 3 engineers. 

All of this was possible because I had worked hard to meet the day to day challenges of Launch Academy and learn as much as I possibly could. I am truly thankful for the great patience, knowledge, and experience of the mentors and of the staff of Launch Academy. I look forward to a continued professional relationship with all of my co-Launchers past, present and future.

My time at Launch Academy was a wild ride! Dont go there thinking that you'll coast through and get a great paying job afterwards... You have to put in the time and the effort to be worth your money, but if you do its 100% worth every penny! The instructors are all extreamly helpful and the challenges were all very relevant to the lectures. I would love to see more Javascript in the curriculum, but other than that I dont have any complaints. Job assistance was also great! I got around 4 interviews right after career day and recieved an offer 2-3 weeks later!

In terms of getting bang for your buck I found that that my time at Launch Academy was more valuable than any semester I had in college, but at half the price. It's not an easy road, but if you're willing to put in the effort and embrace the life of a software developer than this is undoubtedly one of the best places to make the transition. More importantly the relationships and alumni network that Launch creates are immensely valuable, and the co-operative aspects of the program helped me not only become a better programmer, but a better person as well.

My experience at Launch was well worth the time commitment and investment. My husband who is a software developer was impressed by how much I learned in a short period of time. Instructors and staff are friendly, engaging, and always willing to help students. In addition, I think being able to learn in person is important for collaboration and engagement. 

Be aware that for all bootcamp grads, job searching can be a long process. Launch provides post grad resources and support to help with this. They also publish their employment statistics. I was fortunate to find a job within a month of graduation. 

Launch Academy is absolutely fantastic! I would absolutely recommend this program to anyone, but you just have to be ready for it. When they say it will take you 60-80 hours a week they mean it. It's a kiln where they melt you down and reforge your mind into something better. Not only do I know how to code now, but I also know how to think better. I know how to ask better questions. I know how to communicate better. I am overall a better person for attending this program. It was absolutely 110% the most difficult thing I've ever done, but it transformed my life for the better. The ONLY reason I can't give it 5 stars for overall experience is because of the stress and sleepless nights, but with that I still encourage everyone to try and attend. Apply and get an interview and just go for it!

I don't come from a technical background, but I wanted to make a career change and looked into different bootcamps. Initially, I was (very wrongly) wary about bootcamps and about my ability to land a job after 18 weeks. Through Launch, you will learn so much more than you can believe you can in that time. I had only dabbled with code for 3 weeks prior to the beginning of the program, but the material was very well explained, for even a novice programmer. As the program progressed, the material was definitely more challenging but we have a lot of great educators and there was a ton of collaboration between all the students. The educators are always helpful, and you will definitely create friendships you didn't think was possible with your cohort-mates. That being said, it is a difficult program and if you're not prepared, it can be much more difficult. Make sure to treat Launch like a full-time job. 

One of the biggest selling points for me was that Launch has a great network with companies throughout Boston and through Launch, I was able to find a job shortly after. I feel very lucky to have made the change into web development and feel very lucky that I chose Launch!

I attended Launch Academy two years ago, so some of what you’re about to read may not be current. Proceed at your own caution.

I have mixed feelings about my experience there. On the one hand I did end up getting several job interviews, out of the deal so I consider them to have fulfilled their part of our bargain. On the other, I’m not completely convinced that anything in particular about the course helped me get to that point.

Let me explain.

The employees at launch - at least the ones you will mainly interact with - are called ‘experience engineers’. The (large) majority of these people are Launch graduates, and recent graduates at that. It’s very possible that your ‘mentor’ will be a person who has quite literally been programming three months longer than you have. Out of the ones who have been there longer, precious few have any industry experience to speak of. As many here have mentioned, it’s not at all uncommon to be directed to Google upon presenting a problem. This is only after entering your question in on online queue and waiting (sometimes quite a while) to get one of the engineers to help you out. As absurd as it seems, they have set up a system where you can’t just ask a quick question of an experience engineer without being told to put it in the queue (even if the queue is empty).

Of course once you are able to get the attention of an ‘EE’, you are almost always underwhelmed by the help they are able to give. There were a couple who were very smart, capable problem solvers (people I would work with in the future without hesitation), but if they weren’t on duty then there was basically no point in even entering the queue. I hate to say it, but that old saw “those who can’t do, teach” seems depressingly apt here. The EEs are also responsible for development of the academy website, which is of dubious quality and speaks for itself.

At the end of the course all students who are able to accumulate the number of points deemed necessary to graduate, give 2 minute presentations of capstone projects to hiring partners on two nights. My cohort was fortunate in that we had a fair number of companies show up. We were unfortunate in that a number of them were not hiring junior developers (or at all). There are miniature ‘networking’ sessions throughout the evening, and on several occasions I worked my hardest at presenting a good front to a prospective employer only to be told afterward that they aren’t there looking to hire anyone. I’d like to point out the distinction here between not wanting to hire ‘me’ (which I was also told at various points in the evening) and not wanting to hire ‘anyone’. Again, I guess I can’t really complain since I’ve heard that Launch has been having a hard time getting any hiring partners to show up to more recent cohorts.

After the career nights, you may get some interview requests trickling in as companies that couldn’t attend go over the student projects and profiles. They don’t tell you this, but they rank students and give the rankings to the hiring partners. So when you’re told that companies flip through all the launcher profiles and choose the ones they like, I don’t think they’re being totally honest.

I hate that I have to do this, but I really feel like the political climate at Launch Academy in Boston needs to be known. It is extremely and unapologetically hard left, and if that’s your bag you will be like a fish in water and likely won’t notice anything amiss. Time will be made during coding lessons for political speeches. Political opinions will be inserted as fact into mentoring sessions. Not a big deal if you agree with the politics, but I can imagine it would get old to those who don’t. I graduated before the most recent election, and I can only guess it’s gotten much worse since then.

Unfortunately some of the identity politics of the more extreme end of the modern left have really taken hold of the culture there. There was an incident in my cohort where two young men were punished after being accused of harassment by a young woman. I wasn’t there for the incident, so I can’t comment on it, but I had had previous conversations with the woman in question where I came away with the impression that she was looking for a confrontation. Of course, if she really was harassed, her attitude doesn’t matter and they deserve (more than) what they got. However, the day after the incident, she proudly wore an “I bathe in male tears” shirt (that was clearly in violation of community guidelines, for what it’s worth), and I highly doubt it was a fresh purchase. I should say that the conversation I had with her included a third person who was the director of engineering of the school and a political fellow traveler (and extremely unpopular for separate reasons - mostly personality based). He was the one driving the ultimate investigation and punishment, and there wasn’t any reason to think he was in any way objective about it.

I may be emphasizing the above incident too much. One of the men was basically ‘suspended’ for a couple weeks, and the other ended up attending and graduating from the following cohort. I hope if they were perpetrators of violent assault that Launch Academy would have ended their association with them. The fact that they didn’t makes me think (hope?) there wasn’t much to the incident in the first place.

What I really want to make clear here is that if you are not a political progressive, be prepared to be the only one. If you can handle that, then don’t worry...but you should keep your views to yourself. And make sure to say “y’all” in place of “you guys”.

I’m getting tired of writing this review, so I’m going to finish up by saying Launch Academy is expensive. You can learn everything they teach on your own though numerous cheaper (and free) resources, so the real question is whether or not it’s going to lead to a job. All in all, I do think it’s one way of getting your foot in the door to start a new career. My advice would be to try to get some assurance that there will be companies actually attending the career days at the end of the cohort. They probably won’t give you any, but I don’t know what else to tell you. Without hiring partners interested in taking on junior developers (and there are less and less as the market is saturated with them), I can’t recommend you attend Launch Academy.