Le Wagon

Before Le Wagon I had a stable job that I liked, but I didn't love. I needed a change, something that pushed me forward to a better and happier future. And that's when I found Le Wagon.

I'm not going to lie or sugar coat it. Those 9 weeks were the most intense weeks of my life so far. I had opposite feelings throughout (sometimes at the same time): I loved it and I hated it, I felt really smart and really dumb, I wanted to hug the teachers and punch them. On the first day, Shannon said 'you just gotta keep going and trust the process' and that's what I did. And it was painful. And I survived. Not only I survived, I had 2 prototypes done and was as proud of them as a mother is proud of her children. They were my babies, they were the result of 9 weeks of hard work, and I couldn't be happier.

I learned a lot and I made new friends, there was time to be serious and time to have fun (Cocktail Thursday!), and I ended up with a whole new set of skills. Now I have a new door open and a new future for me to explore.

Le Wagon is a great way to transition into tech as an entrepreneur. I am a former finance professional who has run my own business since 2009. I am excited by the changes in technology and want to transition my business towards using more technology.

As a business owner I considered it essential that I had the ability to control and understand the code my business utilises, which meant I needed to learn to code.

Le Wagon’s programme exceeded all my expectations. In the nine weeks we learnt full stack web-development and the final fortnight involved writing our own project.

Le Wagon combines an enthusiastic staff and a world class teaching platform to deliver knowledge. Best of all we retain access to our lectures and notes on the platform after the programme and I am already reaching out to the vast alumni network to help me with problems. It is very difficult to change career or direction, but Le Wagon’s programme is one of the best ways to do it.

After graduating with a liberal arts degree in 2015, I began working in an operations role at a financial services firm. I quickly realized my curiosity was not satiated by the work and moved into an application development team as a business analyst. This role brought me close enough to product development to know that this is an area I'd like to continue my career in, but I was missing the technical knowledge needed to properly engage.

I joined Le Wagon to gain a deeper technical skill set before beginning an MBA at MIT this fall. Taking this knowledge with me to business school will allow me to achieve 3 of my goals: 1) Meaningfully engage in the start-up community at b-school and have the skills to bring my ideas to life; 2) credibly pursue technical Product Management roles in the tech space for summer internships and full-time employment post-graduation; 3) relying on my foundational understanding of programming, take further courses at MIT and learn other languages such as python and R (I'm also interested in data analytics).

Having completed the 9 weeks, I can’t speak highly enough of the instructors, the environment they create or the quality of the coursework. 

Coding was the first time I’d felt such highs as I did when I’d finally coded my way through a tough problem, or such lows as getting stuck on something that seemed like it should be easy. What made my Le Wagon experience so valuable, was that when I hit the lows, I could always turn to the buddy I was paired with for that day or call over one of the many teachers and tutors available, to help talk me through it. If I had been studying alone, those moments would have brought my progress to a halt. 

Getting a dev job at the end of the course was not a selection criterion for me and I was therefore surprised to realize in the last few weeks, just how prepared I was to take that next step into a junior dev role, or to work on one of the freelance projects a fellow Le Wagon Alumni had taken on and was looking for help with. I have no doubt that I would have been able to get a job and found it rather regretful that I wouldn’t be able to continue learning in that manner for another year or two. 

It’s not possible to learn everything about anything in 9 weeks, but the Le Wagon approach did set me up to continue to learn and successfully figure things out on my own. I’m taking full advantage of continued access to all the resources I had as a student as I continue working on my group project and a personal project I’ve started. 

I would recommend the bootcamp at Le Wagon to anyone looking to catapult themselves into the world of web development. It's just an awesome experience.

Before starting the bootcamp, I was a product manager working closely with developers, eventually realising that development would be a better fit for me. I firstly tried to teach myself through the online route which was OK but didn't really suit the way I worked. A campus based course is obviously a lot more expensive but your learning happens so much quicker - being able to ask teachers questions face to face as well as coding in teams is so crucial, especially when you're first starting out.

In terms of the course, the curriculum is very structured and the dashboard is a fantastic resource tool that all students and alumni have access too. Super important when you start coding post-course. It's a massive learning curve and you have to be super on it but the teachers are great and create a great environment to learn as much as possible which is what it's all about. There were also a real mix of interesting people on the course and being part of the massive Le Wagon community is absolutely awesome and something I hope to stay involved in for the rest of my working life. Hope this helps anyone thinking of starting the bootcamp - do it!

I launched 2 startups in 2017. I had to stop the first one as the devs I was working with stopped coding because they were too suddenly unable to continue and I wasn’t able to code it myself at the time. I wanted to develop an app and improve the website for the second startup which is still running, so I decided to enroll to Le Wagon and learn coding. 
Now I am in a much better position to do so and work with developers. My experience at LeWagon was great in terms of learning and networking - great team. I definitely recommend any entrepreneur in tech with no coding skills to do the bootcamp.

Joining Le Wagon was one of the major turning points in my life. A year before Le Wagon, I was a fresh undergraduate with an engineering major that I assumed would be “hot” and lucrative (read: popular). Fast- forward a year and I found myself winding up in Shanghai with no real employment experiences in the past year, forced to reconsider my future. What prompted me to take a leap of faith and join Le Wagon was the urge to do something different. A year of countless job applications and rejections persuaded me to make that switch into coding, and I haven’t regretted it since.

Everyone who has gone through the program (or has a friend who’s gone through it) knows how utterly bizarre those 9 weeks felt. It’s a gruesome mixture of pain, frustration, and pleasure, but oddly enough, it doesn’t cease to become one of the most memorable and unforgettable experiences of our lives. For 9 weeks straight, every day is filled with difficult challenges and the satisfying opportunity to work with a soon-to-be friend or colleague. What I soon realized is that these 9 weeks were the shortest 9 weeks I’ve ever felt.

When it came to coding, my personal adventure was as frustrating as it was satisfying, constantly trying to learn a new craft and apply it at the same time. I had some prior experience, albeit elementary, with coding, but within the first week of the camp I felt like I was in uncharted territory. This didn’t scare me as much as it did ignite a kind of passion within that made me want to learn more and take on each daily challenge. As each week went on, this passion grew and was evenly matched by more complex challenges, eventually resulting in a final project for Aarusha Homes, a company in India that aims to provide sustainable and affordable housing for low-income migrant workers. Our team built a backend hotel management system to help modernize Aarusha Homes' hotel management procedures, from pen and paper practices into computerized guest tracking.

My story with Le Wagon doesn’t just end there. In fact, I have Le Wagon to thank for my current job. If not for its vast alumni network and also the skills it’s armed me with, I would not be in working in the role I am today.

I have just completed the Le Wagon bootcamp in London and had an amazing time!

The team in London is fantastic; all of the teachers are super enthusiastic and encouraging, very knowledgeable and willing to help. However, they won’t spoon feed you answers, instead, they will ask you questions and help you break down the issue into small parts so that you can reach the solution by yourself. The team manage to create a great balance of hard work (I was knackered by the end of every week) whilst maintaining a fun and relaxed atmosphere (I always looked forward to going back in on Monday).

The course is tough and can be slightly overwhelming at the beginning as you learn a lot of new information very quickly. The teachers keep repeating that “it will eventually click” and thankfully, it appears that it does! A lot of thought has clearly gone into the structure of the nine weeks and you keep building on the ideas that you have been exposed to earlier in the course. During the course (and forever after) you have access to all of the lectures (videos), lecture slides / notes, challenges and flashcards which is a fantastic resource. Ed also does a great job of organising loads of talks in the evenings with a variety of speakers and also provides sessions on writing CVs, looking for jobs, updating LinkedIn etc., all which were very useful.  

Another great thing about Le Wagon is that it is not all about the coding! You are able to develop your presentation skills, understand further what it takes to build a successful company and gain experience of working as a team within a development environment. As well as this, you meet an incredible mix of people from different backgrounds (and from all over the world!) all who are extremely motivated to learn a new skill.

Having worked in the Insurance industry for 4 years prior to attending Le Wagon, I was nervous about changing career paths and learning a new skill. In hindsight I am extremely thankful that I look the leap and enrolled on the course. Thank you to all of the Le Wagon team !

After graduating in Design and feeling stagnated in my Career, I discovered Le Wagon and really liked what I saw. At first I was very scared at the idea of a 9 week bootcamp, not only for being very intense, but also for it seeming a little too good to be true. I looked into it for a while, went to a couple of workshops, and finally decided to sign up and to finally take the challenge of learning code, and I can safely say that it was worth it.

After college, I was very happy with how practical the course is. There is a lot to do everyday, but there is always something new, interesting and exciting. When I did fall behind, all the resources were very accessible and helped me catch up. These resources are also great to have after the completion of the bootcamp, and I check them a lot when developing my own projects.

While intense, there was always a great atmosphere that helped us have the energy to keep up. The teachers were very capable and, more importantly, were great people that I still keep in touch with. The backgrounds of each student were very varied but we worked hard together and helped each other do our best. I learned a lot tackling problems together with other students.

I feel like one of the biggest strengths of the bootcamp is teaching us to work in a group. Not only in a generic motivational way, but with Github, a tool that is very important for developers. During the bootcamp we developed 2 applications in a group and we used methods that are standard in the industry, which makes us feel more prepared for professional work.

Having finished the bootcamp, It feels like I gained the tools to pursue all those ideas that I had but never did anything with. Having a background in Design, I discovered how much I like front-end, and am excited about the paths that are opened to me.

When I joined Le Wagon, I was 21 years old and still a business school student (EDHEC). I hadn’t had any knowledge in web development before. However, I deeply wanted to learn how to code and get an understanding of tech in general. Then I did Le Wagon during my summer vacation.

Le Wagon allowed me to learn how to make a website without having to re-enter the studying system for several years. I learnt HTML, CSS, jQuery, Ruby, Ruby and Rails, SQL etc. But the bootcamp is not just about learning several languages, it’s about building tech products. Le Wagon also gave me the method to learn other programming languages by myself and the best practices to build up a web application.

More than coding courses I really really loved that experience and it gave me the opportunity to find a team to launch my startup idea with. Indeed, we spent the last 15 days coding personal projects in groups.

After Le Wagon, I came back to my business school, and felt very acknowledged and prepared to start prototyping my ideas. I even got my first freelance mission a few months after the bootcamp, and I was only 21!

I have been in the customer service and logistics industry for the past 10 years but always had an eagerness to learn to code. But trying to teach myself ended up in frustration with more questions than answers. Then, one day I came across a two-month program with Le Wagon Tokyo (LWT) and I ended up joining their batch 147.

LWT guides are not generic like most online courses, they go in-depth in terminology, theory, and the best part is their support system. From day one you can tell you are not alone in this, you have someone there that can answer those why, how, what, and huh questions. I had many of those ha ha.

Overall you will get your mind blown way on how you can create something out of nothing. The co-founders Sylvain & Paul are the best. They will be checking in on you providing feedback with encouragement, then the bootcamp manager Doug makes sure you are progressing if he sees you are having trouble he will come up and give you the nudge you can do this. LWT also rotates the teachers with real-life developers, so you can expect real-life experiences. 

Le Wagon Tokyo is highly recommended, it will be tough, but they will guide through those trenches and in the end you will feel “I can do this”.

It pains me to admit that this program did not get me where I needed to be. After several months of self-studying on Codecademy, I wanted to switch careers and become a software engineer in the US (my country of residence), so I attended Le Wagon for several reasons: A) it is cheaper than most US bootcamps, B) it teaches Rails and JavaScript, C) I saw amazing reviews, and D) it would allow me to travel to another city and be part of a culturally rich experience where I am surrounded with students from all over the world. 

In the end, I did not feel like I was where I needed to be and I actually ended up doing a second bootcamp which was a night and day difference, and landed a job a week after graduating. I do want to give a disclaimer and say that Le Wagon is not a bad bootcamp, and I don't take it lightly that I am basically the only one with a negative review. There are bootcamps out there that are much worse, and this is a decent one. It's just that this bootcamp was not enough to accomplish my goals. I ask everyone looking into bootcamps to think about why exactly you are attending, and, if your goal is to become a software engineer from a non-engineering background, particularly in the US where competition is tough, I would caution you against attending Le Wagon as it might not be enough to get you where you need to be. If you are looking to just learn to code to boost your resume, if you have a start-up idea and just want to build out the platform for that one idea, if you have a STEM background and learn very fast and are super disciplined to continue learning on your own (I thought I was and it still didn't work out!), or if you reside in the city where Le Wagon is located and plan to stay there to be a developer, then attending Le Wagon might work out for you. 

Without further ado, here are the reasons why Le Wagon did not work out for me even though I really wanted it to:

1) From the very beginning, this bootcamp did not strike me as a place that accepts top talent and has good job outcomes. There was no test to get in, there was no technical interview, and it felt like they would accept anyone. During the one interview I had, I was informally accepted into the program and told to just pay the deposit as quickly as possible to secure my spot before it fills up. When asked about job outcomes, their typical response was that they don't want to turn students into numbers, and the bootcamp is not about turning out statistics, so I guess I should've seen that as a red flag. 

2) It seems like the students at the bootcamp had very different goals, where not everyone was looking to become a software engineer. Some students just wanted to boost their resume and others just wanted to learn to build out their startup idea. That shoud've been a red flag because it shows that the program's goal is too open-ended instead of being specific and it's open to a lot of different audiences. 

3) Don't count on getting hired if visa issues may arise. This is something I should've considered more seriously at the time, but if you attend Le Wagon and plan to work in a place where you don't have a work visa, you're going to have a harder time finding an engineering job because not only will you have the task of finding a job, but you will also need a job that is willing to sponsor you. Most places don't want to bother with it and would rather hire a senior dev with a lot of experience than someone straight out of a 9 week bootcamp who they need to sponsor. One of my classmates actually was hired over me because she didn't need to be sponsored and I did (so if you don't foresee visa issues it might work out). 

4) Think about what the job market is like if you need to return to your country or city after Le Wagon. I should've considered more seriously that the competition is much stronger for developers in the US (especially because the salaries are higher) and that it would be difficult to find a job there after 9 weeks of Le Wagon, a bootcamp that is not really equipped to prepare students for that kind of competition. 

5) There was no support for students falling behind. Part of the issue here is that they let almost all students into the bootcamp, so they are bound to accept people who will not succeed. Everyone struggles at times and I definetley struggled at times even at the second bootcamp I attened. But when there is no solid preparation or assessments to get into the bootcamp and to get everyone on the same page and you are struggling, you think that you are the stupid one instead of the bootcamp being flawed. I was somewhat average and I still struggled because the pace is very fast. There were students who I know where completely lost and had fallen behind too far and probably didn't get very much out of the program. There is no support when students are behind. The program will not let you make office hours with an instructor, they will not let you repeat a part of the program, they will just push you ahead and the instructors/other students who aren't behind will just code more of the project for you so that you graduate even if you didn't understand most of the material. 

6) Nine weeks is simply too short to become a fullstack developer and feel confident. If that's not your goal and you just view this as an immersive course to boost your resume, you'll be fine. If this is your goal, unless you have a STEM background and are the top student of the batch, prepare to struggle. And even if you are all of those things, prepare to struggle and feel like an imposter at your first job. I have spoken to alum who managed to get a job after this bootcamp and they struggled a lot- they had to spend several months self-teaching themselves, and then had a really hard time on the job for months. I also noticed that a lot of alums can't find jobs and just become TAs. For a bootcamp that takes you from beginner level to fullstack developer, nine weeks is too short to truly feel confident and like a master of the material. It's not even enough to feel like you can learn anything on your own afterward. The bootcamp I did afterward was 17 weeks and it started at an intermediate level with tests and technical interviews to get in, and only then was it enough to get a job and feel confident in my skills.

7) Your instructors will code large portions of your project for you. My team was an average representation of the students at the bootcamp- not really anyone super falling behind or any super geniuses. We had problems with our final project and our instructor coded large portions of it for us. After finishing the program, I did not really feel like I understood all aspects of the project or like I could build something like that independently. That defeats the purpose of being independent and being ready to join the workforce. 

8) They kept switching instructors on us. I did not like how almost every day there was a different TA giving a lecture. It did not feel very cohesive or like I had a person I could approach or someone who knew my progress well. I also did not feel like the TAs were knowledgeable enough to give the lectures or help out with debugging since they were just students themselves. 

9) They try to teach you the maximum amount of material in the minimum amount of time and really cut a lot of important things out. They also just hand out a lot of material so you don't have to struggle to do things on your own or understand how they work. There's a lot of examples of this, but for istance I did not like that I didn't understand how rails routes work because we didn't have to build them ourselves and I didn't understand how user sessions worked because we were given a devise tutorial instead of having to write sessions ourselves. I still don't understand how devise works. 

10) Going off the last point, I felt like too little time was spent on each topic. For example, we spent about two days on SQL, two days on JavaScript, three days on HTML/CSS, and those were not enough time to understand how those things work. But it was done so that the bootcamp can be taught over 9 weeks at the expense of teaching in-depth.

11) JavaScript- I feel like this should be its own bullet point. I really felt like there was basically no time spent on JavaScript and one of the reasons I attended the bootcamp was because it was on the curriculum. It's a really important language and every fullstack developer must know how to use it since it runs in the browser. I graduated being afraid of it and not knowing how to use it at all. 

12) There was essentially no career support. After you finish the program, you are completely on your own. I made an appointment with one of the program leaders to look over my resume and portfolio which she kindly did in her own time, and that was it. There are job boards on slack where anyone can post jobs, but that's all you have. The other program I attended had a career success team dedicated to helping you get a job- we practiced mock interviews (behavioral and technical), we practiced whiteboarding where we solve algorithms and talk about big O notation (I didn't learn any of that at Le Wagon), we had regular check-ins for our resume, linkedIn profiles, practiced our elevator pitch, etc. 

13) Feedback is not taken seriously at Le Wagon. They ask for feedback after the program but they will not change the program based on feedback. They simply can't because the program is too big. It runs in too many cities with batches happening at all times, that changing the program is too defficult. 

14) Sexism was a thing. Not a big thing, but enough to matter and make me and certain others lose confidence as a programmer. When issues were mentioned to those in charge, it was denied and not addressed. 

15) There were no soft skills taught and some group project dynamics were very difficult as a result. In fact, group projects were a popularity contest. We were told that after pitching our ideas, everyone would fairly vote on the top ideas and those projects will be built. Instead, people only voted for those they wanted to work with, different ideas were built, people were left to the wayside quickly scrambling to find a group, and difficult group dynamics resulted for some groups. I felt like if there was more oversight by the instructors to choose and arrange the groups, get some feedback from students, the process would've gone more smoothly. Some groups did not know how to resolve conflicts and were very tense, and I feel the program would've benefitted by giving some talks about how to approach these kinds of issues before they arose. 

16) Finally, pair programming was not taught the way it is supposed to be. In a real pair programming setting, there is a driver and navigator where only one person is allowed to type. The students take turns switching roles, communicate together, learn to talk about code and brainstorm together. Instead, we were given partners but not taught about the true way to pair program. Students merely sat with their partner and each did their own work. I know that some students were falling behind when working with partners but too afraid to ask their partners for help because of the way pair programming was structured. 

I hope this review is helpful and those reading it understand where I am coming from. I think a big part of the problem was the Le Wagon did not align with the goal I had in mind (to become employed as a Fullstack developer), but that's a pretty big deal considering that's what most bootcamps should be able to do. If you have a lesser goal in mind, Le Wagon is a great place to get a general overview, be introduced to coding, and learn about the flow of designing and developing a website. It's also great for being in a culturally diverse environment. However, I would say the program is not enough for most people to become a fullstack engineer afterward (without a lot of struggle and continued learning) which was ultimately my goal.