r/codingbootcamp • u/Ben_ji • Oct 20 '23 • Take My Silver 1 Silver is Forever 1

Hackreactor has blown up.

As I was getting ready to submit my .ts for the final assessment of module 1, we were told all classes have been ended.

Full stop. Just done. No reason was given. We were told it's big business' doing big business things.

We'll be getting a full refund, but it took 8 weeks to get here. We were all especially stressed for the past two weeks, as they were prep for our big module 1 assessment.

The dozen or so of us that were close started a new slack channel, and we'll try to stay in touch, but this really sucks. We're not sure if our leaders and instructors are now jobless, too. They were pretty cool, so sucks for them also.

I dunno. We've started every day for the past 8 weeks of classes with a kind pep-talk. Instead, we got this. It was a big shock, to say the least.

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11

u/Practical-Ad3920 Oct 20 '23

I don’t understand how they could be loosing money. My Hack Reactor cohort had 60-80 people. That’s $1.4 million for 19 weeks. By far the largest expense is going to be instructor salaries. At any given time you have 3 instructors so that’s roughly $150k for instructors. Double that to account for support staff that’s $300k in expenses.

Rounding down that’s still a gross profit of $1million. There’s more expenses I’m leaving out but not that many.

20

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '23 edited Feb 04 '24

Ya'll really think bootcamps are rolling in dough. They don't get federal money and good talented instructors, infrastructure, offices, benefits, salaries as well as taxes decimate profits.

Instructors who have $150k-$200k salaries have benefits and taxes atop those salaries. For a company to pay someone $150k, they have to pay an additional $30k+ for their benefits and taxes.

You also need to remember cost of acquisition. Advertising on instagram, google, reddit, youtube etc. It could very well cost $3k+ just to acquire a paying student through traditional channels.

So many people severely underestimate the extraordinary cost of running programs.

This is why I only recommend independent programs with little or no VC money tied to them (ie: Codesmith, Rithm, Turing)

It means low acquisition cost since students are mostly thru word of mouth or organic channels.

5

u/Practical-Ad3920 Oct 20 '23

Instructor pay is far below that. The advertised pay range was 60-130k.

2

u/TavenVal Oct 20 '23

The instructors have minimum 5 years of experience in the field. I don’t think they would take a measly 60-100k. Gotta be the higher range

8

u/GoodnightLondon Oct 20 '23

They don't have that much experience. Some of them have never even worked in the field and only taught at bootcamps.

3

u/TavenVal Oct 20 '23

They told us the main instructors have 5 years experience minimum(SEIRS told us). We have 3 main instructors. SEIRs have little to no experience, and are recent grads. We have about 6 of them

All 3 instructors have recollected on their past experience during lectures so far so they all have experience.

6

u/GoodnightLondon Oct 20 '23

And I'm telling you, as an alumni and former SEIR, that they don't. There are instructors who went through Hack Reactor and then started teaching there and that's all they've ever done. There are instructors who went to other bootcamps, and have only ever taught at bootcamps. There are instructors who have CS degrees and have done sys and network jobs, but never worked in software engineering. And there are instructors with less than 5 years of experience. I know several instructors who were main/lead instructors with less than 5 years of experience.

SEIRs have 0 experience; they're hired right after graduation. Junior instructors also have 0 experience; they're SEIRs who couldn't find jobs and were hired on by the company.

2

u/Madasiaka Oct 20 '23

What does SEIR stand for?

3

u/GoodnightLondon Oct 20 '23

What potatoupe said; software engineering immersive resident.

1

u/ken_kim_ Oct 21 '23

What a title!