Our experience is that students and potential employers are asking for a longer program, so ours runs for 12 weeks instead of 9.
We think class size is a big determinant of educational outcomes, so we think students might be interested to know that we'll have 15 students in our cohort (vs 60 in DBC's if I recall correctly).
Our hours are longer -- 10-9, six days a week. We're asking you to take time off of your normal life, and we think it's important to provide a very immersive environment for you to make the most of that period.
We're going to put a lot more effort into helping you with your job search process. Our hiring day is after week 10, and weeks 11 and 12 consist of preparation aligned with the jobs that you'd like to get, practice interviews, etc.
Jesse, here. For those just tuning in, Shawn & I know each other and I help run Dev Bootcamp. Tony Phillips, one of Shawn's co-founders, was a teacher-in-training at Dev Bootcamp for 5 months and before that a student in our first, 8-week cohort.
A few corrections:
1. Our current cohort has 54 students. Starting January 28th, we'll have 48 students in the space at a given time. Although it's been challenging, we've so far been able to increase group cohesion as we increase class size.
Below a certain size it's very easy for students to feel isolated if they can't find at least one other student to identify with.
2. Although our core hours are 9AM-6PM Monday-Friday, most students are here 12+ hours per day, 6-7 days per week. 75% of the class was here last weekend, for example. We keep a tight container on core hours and give students flexibility on off hours.
The average student is working for about ~750 hours over the course of Dev Bootcamp.
Also, about 50% of each cohort comes from out-of-state, and about 20% have families and children. Trust me, they're "tak[ing] time off [their] normal life."
3. We've worked with around ~100 companies over the course of our hiring days and none of them are asking for a longer training period. If an employer is skeptical, there's little difference between 9, 10, or 12 weeks.
Twitter hired one of our summer students as an intern, for example, and their initial skepticism was more along the lines of, "How could 10 weeks compare to a 4-year University CS education?" That's a rough paraphrase from a conversation I had with a head of their head of college recruiting in April.
On the flip side, virtually all employers return for future hiring days and about half send employees to become mentors for students in the following DBC class. I'll grant you that we might be talking to different employers.
The homepage says Tony, one of the four staff, used to work there.