I went to Hack Reactor in 2014 and have kept in touch with many members of my cohort. Just about everyone has been and continues to be employed as a developer. A few have started companies. Three members of our 30 person cohort joined Google, including me.
I was a philosophy major who took some CS courses in college, programmed as a hobby and was working as a product manager. The bootcamp was a great way to build an understanding of the production software development process. It also allowed me to build a strong skillset within one tech stack (MEAN).
The bootcamp was absolutely not an end to my cs/engineering education. When I started at Google the learning curve was steep and I have been constantly taking at least one coursera/udacity/edx course for years as well as company internal classes. Hack Reactor wasn't an end all solution but it gave me a great lay of the land and was instrumental to landing a job of the quality that I did.
After HR I stayed on for three months as part of their Hacker in Residence program. During that time I prepared and delivered lectures on various algorithms and data structures, which was great preparation for whiteboard interviews.
I also planned for the Google interview to be relatively late in my job hunt. I already had offers in hand and a lot of on-site practice going into it. I doubt I would have passed had it been my first on-site engineering interview.
Beyond that nothing special. A lot of CTCI stuff and daily practice.
I was a philosophy major who took some CS courses in college, programmed as a hobby and was working as a product manager. The bootcamp was a great way to build an understanding of the production software development process. It also allowed me to build a strong skillset within one tech stack (MEAN).
The bootcamp was absolutely not an end to my cs/engineering education. When I started at Google the learning curve was steep and I have been constantly taking at least one coursera/udacity/edx course for years as well as company internal classes. Hack Reactor wasn't an end all solution but it gave me a great lay of the land and was instrumental to landing a job of the quality that I did.