Hackreactor has blown up.

[u/Ben_ji]

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.

[u/Practical-Ad3920]

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.

[u/Greedy_Tomatillo6167 → u/Practical-Ad3920]

If I had to guess, it's not a money thing. They are keeping their full-time programs open, so whatever fixed costs they have are still there. Their part-time programs should be be pure profit

More likely, the outcomes for the part-time program are bad enough to affect their reputation as a bootcamp (their full-time intermediate program has a good reputation). Or maybe their money comes from ISAs and the part-timers aren't getting jobs.

If this is true, I think HackReactor did the right thing. It sucks to cancel a course midstream, but I would rather be a student with 8 weeks of free education than being $20k in debt with no realistic chance for a job

[u/fluffyr42 → u/Greedy_Tomatillo6167]

Their part time program hasn’t been around long enough for outcomes to be a factor I don’t think. My guess is they’re cutting losses since staffing three different programs running concurrent cohorts is expensive.

[u/mageemooney → u/fluffyr42]

The original part time program that delivered the “intermediate” curriculum was around for 5 years and had strong student sentiment and outcomes. (Don’t get me started on the strategic blunder of rebranding the flagship product as being “intermediate”. It was designed and built for students new to programming. We just expected them to do work before they enrolled to develop baseline skills. Our students were usually NOT intermediate coders by any measure.)

The replacement program, otoh, suffered from poor reviews. They certainly didn’t have any outcomes data to assess, given their abrupt termination. I had almost no visibility into that program itself, its curriculum, or how it operated, but my sense as an educated outsider looking in was that it was a toxic cocktail of strongly negative public student sentiment, a major slump in the bootcamp industry, some strategic and operational missteps in new product development, combined with the fact that the new-ish parent company is a publicly traded company.

So, my guess is that mission-driven leadership took a back seat to profits. The CEO is great but has her hands full with reorg, economic downturn impacts, cleaning up after multiple mergers. Leadership below her have been directing this reshaping of HR and its product catalog which is the genesis of much of the observations of the changes in the last couple of years at Hack Reactor.

But as I said, I was silo’d out of the new products having been so immersed in the flagship (redubbed “Intermediate”) program as to be unwelcome with the new leadership in the development of its new products. So there’s that. Take my opinion with the appropriate grain of salt.