We should be upfront about the obvious thing: we run one of these schools, so we have an interest in how you answer this. The way we have tried to make the article useful anyway is to answer all seven questions ourselves, in public, with links to the pages where you can check each answer. If our answers are worse than somebody else’s, you will be able to see that, which is roughly the deal we think a buyer is owed.
The reason to have a script at all is that these conversations are structurally uneven. The school has had this conversation a thousand times and you are having it once or twice. Everybody is friendly, nothing feels adversarial, and you leave with a warm impression and almost no checkable facts. A list of specific questions is the cheapest way to level that up, because it moves the conversation from impressions to answers you can compare side by side.
One framing note before the list. The point is not to catch anyone out, and most schools are not scams. The point is that good schools give specific, checkable answers and weak ones give general, warm ones, and that difference shows up within about ten minutes if you know what to ask.
Why we do not publish placement rates
Question five is the one that costs us something, so it deserves more than a box. We do not publish placement rates, time-to-hire figures, or salary outcomes for our own students. Competitors do, and we are aware that in a side-by-side comparison an absent number can read worse than a flattering one.
The reason is that the standard of evidence needed to make an outcome claim honestly is high, and our enrolment records do not meet it. To publish a placement rate responsibly you need reliable employment status for the whole cohort over a defined window, including the people who stopped replying, and a stated rule for who was excluded and why. Most published bootcamp numbers quietly solve the hard part by defining the denominator down to the people who finished, engaged with career support and were actively seeking, at which point the number is real and means considerably less than it appears to.
So we publish what we can defend instead: research on who enrols, what they believe and what they buy, with every denominator on the page and an explicit statement that it contains no outcome claims. You can read it at The Confidence Gap. What we do offer instead of a statistic is a large volume of unmediated first-hand accounts: 180+ written reviews on platforms we do not control and 80+ recorded video interviews with graduates, plus 68 shipped student projects you can open and use. That is weaker than an audited number and considerably stronger than an unaudited one.
The general principle, applied to whoever you are evaluating: a school that tells you what it cannot prove is giving you information about its whole character, not just that one claim.
Compare the real cost, not the sticker
Almost everyone compares tuition against zero, which is the wrong comparison and leads to bad decisions in both directions. The real comparison is between paths that all cost something, just in different currencies. Time is the one people systematically undervalue, partly because it is spent slowly.
The row people misread is the first one. Self-teaching is genuinely viable and plenty of working developers did it, so we are not going to pretend otherwise. What the cheap column hides is the completion risk. Our own application research found 42% of applicants blocked by money and 42% blocked by self-doubt, in a near-exact dead heat (n=325), with time a distant third at 7%. Those two barriers do not go away when the price does. Free removes the first one and leaves the second entirely intact, which is why free resources have the completion rates they have.
What a programme actually sells, stated without flourish, is pace, structure and a feedback loop. Whether that is worth five figures to you depends on your runway, your discipline and how much a year of delay costs in your particular life. It is a real question with different right answers, and our comparison pages set out five versions of it including the ones where we come off worse.
The question underneath all seven
Read back through the seven and you will notice they share a structure. Every one of them asks can you show me, rather than will you tell me. Published curriculum instead of a described one. Named people instead of described expertise. Stated hours instead of reassurance. Sample feedback instead of a promise of feedback. Denominators instead of percentages. Written terms instead of a spoken guarantee. A trial instead of a pitch.
That single test will carry you through a conversation with any school, including ones that did not exist when this was written, and including us. If a claim cannot be checked before you pay, treat it as decoration rather than information.
The last thing worth saying is about what you are actually choosing between, because it is easy to get lost in comparison and forget the underlying decision. Whichever school you pick, or if you pick none of them, the thing of value is coding fundamentals with AI in the workflow. That base pays off in every direction you might go afterwards: employment, freelance work, your own product, or applying it inside the job you already have. The seven questions are for choosing a route. They are not a reason to postpone the journey while you perfect the choice, which is the most common failure mode of all and costs more than picking imperfectly.
If you want to test us against our own list, the free trial answers question seven for free, and the published curriculum answers question one without you having to speak to anybody.
