Inside Hack Reactor, The Coding Bootcamp That Wants To Be The CS Degree Of The Future

Monday, September 2nd, 2013, TechCrunch

Colleen Taylor

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial Times’ Mergermarket newswire, and the semiconductor industry newsletter Electronic News. Disclosure: Colleen holds a small amount of shares in AOL, which were awarded as part of her employment contract with TechCrunch. She personally... → Learn More


At the same time that unemployment and low wages continue to plague the larger U.S. economy, Silicon Valley and the rest of the tech industry is having a hiring crisis — many tech companies just can’t seem to find enough people with the coding skills needed to fill the relatively well-paying jobs of building the software and web products of the future. And even though there is no shortage of higher education programs out there right now, there seems to be some sort of training gap when it comes to software programming.

Hack Reactor is one San Francisco-based startup that’s aiming to help build the bridge between people who want to learn how to code and the many companies who are so keen to hire programmers. It’s an intense, 12-week-long program that is essentially a programming bootcamp filled with intensive classes and project-based instruction for six days a week from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The Hack Reactor program does not come cheap — standard tuition for the three-month-long program is $17,780, though scholarships are available — but it seems that it can really be worth it: Hack Reactor claims that 100 percent of its graduates are now employed as software engineers, with an average salary in the six figures. The program’s tagline spells out a grand vision of being “the CS degree of the 21st century.”

It’s part of a growing trend of coding bootcamps that could all be potentially disruptive to the standard university system (which many say is long overdue for a shakeup anyway.) So we swung by Hack Reactor HQ with our TechCrunch TV cameras to take a look for ourselves. Check out the video embedded above to hear us talk to Hack Reactor co-founder Shawn Drost and a couple Hack Reactor students about the experience.