actually this is false. I am currently in a cohort and I had two classmates over 50. Sadly one of them failed out because his typing speed set him behind on the assessments. (young people have failed out for this same reason). The other classmate over 50 is still on track to graduate successfully. So…check your facts

why selling your house if you can rent it out? it sounds too dramatic

I sent an email (there are no phone numbers listed on their web site) about visiting the San Francisco campus for a tour, since I would be attending from out of state. I wanted to see where I would be studying, get a feel for the place, meet with an admissions person, and maybe even chat with an instructor. After all, it would be huge investment in time, energy and money to do all the prep work, go through the application process, quit my job, sell my house, and move to another state. After about a week they wrote back saying they don’t give tours until you’ve been accepted into the program, but they’d be happy to answer any questions I have….via email.

this guy works for go live labs…..just search his name on linkedin. Stop posting fake reviews

Clearly Gourav is not a student because he is pitching his own program. Lol

I took the course back in July 2013 and as far as I’m aware, my classmates and I all received our deposits back at the end of the course as agreed upon. If you don’t mind me asking, have you personally taken the course? I had an great experience at AA – I learned more in just the first month than I had on my own in a year, and I had no prior programming experience other than dabbling with online tutorials. I can confidently say that attending AA has changed my life. And I can’t speak for the present, but during my class, the two lead instructors were not former students.

In response to your claim that they hire on the majority of the graduates to boost placement – I can attest that this is untrue. In my cohort, the top performing student was offered a teaching assistant position, while everyone else (including myself) participated in the standard job search. I graduated in the bottom half of my class, but I did land a job I was happy with after a 2-month search. Granted, it was not an easy process, and there were many rejections along the way, but what do you expect?

Not trying to be confrontational here, but from your post it sounds like you have not done your research. I am happy to share more details about my experience; if anyone is interested just send me a message.

The upside is that I learned a ton doing the assignments. Also, I still believe in the concept and know someone who is happily employed and feels professionally well served by her time at App Academy. I hope they can come up with clearer and more honest admissions process that still stacks their deck with qualified people who are good tuition risks. Knowing that they boot people from the program for failing tests makes the moving goal post during the admission process even more of a concern.

App Academy summarily rejects the non-young with some boilerplate email about how you don’t know enough Ruby/Rails to attend (uh, yeah, that’s I’m going to a bootcamp–to learn more). Meanwhile, younger applicants knowing far less are accepted.

Don’t bother with these jerks.

Do you mean you had no development experience at all, or no web development experience? I find it very hard to believe that anyone could get in with no development experience. Were you a CS grad student with no web dev experience?

I think a company named “People Vendor LLC” has the same address as Go-Live Labs (121 West Washington Ave., Suite 219, Sunnyvale, CA, 94086).

http://www.linkedin.com/in/gouravkochhar (the URL ends with “gouravkochhar”) has this in the overview section of someone named Gourav Kochhar:
Sales, Research & Marketing at Go-Live Labs
SEM/SMM – Executive at People Vendor LLC

Is that person “Gourav Kochhar” you? Are you in sales and marketing at Go-Live Labs?

Gourav Kochhar, after your training, Go-Live Labs will send you to different companies to write software for those companies, right?

Suppose the economy is slow, and there’s not enough work to go around. Will your get paid only for the times that you are writing software for other companies? Or will you get paid a regular paycheck, whether or not you are currently writing software for a company?

The catch? You have to work with them in a consulting role for one year. Or you pay
$8000 in 4 installments if you leave and join a full time position. Compare that to others now!
They offered me a great salary + H1B Sponsorship (at No Cost unlike some of these
Indian staffing companies who ask candidates to pay for legal fees).
I recently interviewed with them and got in. Check out their website. Not only do
they give one on one attention to all of us in class (small class of 6) but
also have a career department that actively circulates our resumes and gets us
interviews. The previous batch got some awesome job offers since they knew all
the latest JavaScript Frameworks like Angular JS, Backbone JS & Core OO
JS.

There is an interview but it’s mostly to assess how seriously you are pursuing a
career in UI/UX and if you know basic programming. They demand minimum 40 hours
in their classroom and Lab per week. They do 3 classes of 4 hours each per
week.

They are still growing so you may not have heard of it. I am learning so much! They are in Sunnyvale downtown on Murphy Street with a nice Training and Lab space. Check them out here http://GoLiveLabs.io .

Was this in New York or San Francisco?

What were the math challenges like?

Another major issue is their claim to “only pay us if you find a job as a developer after the program.” This cleaver marketing verbiage is simply an outright lie. They require all student to pay about $3k to $4k up front which they will not return unless you complete the course to their satisfaction, get a job in the area, and pay them nearly 20% of your salary for a year or so. If all these criteria are met then after two years they will refund your deposit with no interest. (To date no students have been refunded their deposit)

It seems that this academy may be nothing more than a way for former hedge fund analyst Kush Patel dupe eager students into giving funds interest free to scam artist Kush Patel. The FTC and IRS should investigate this new twist on the ponzi scheme.

Don’t Fall for this scheme and their inflated placement rate they simply hire on the majority of graduates for a few months to boost the reported placement percentage.

Hey Monk-e-man! Glad to hear you got in and had the job offers, where did you end up working? Also, do they provide housing? Where do you stay for 9 weeks if you live several states away? Need to know before I apply.

Oops, I made a typo: I got twelve interviews and four offers within 2 weeks.

After I graduated from App Academy, I got twelve interviews and landed four offers within 12 weeks: 80k, 100k, 100k, and 105k. So from my single data point, I consider the App Academy a resounding success.

Thanks for the site and review :). Just wondering, what was the last interview like? What kind of problems did they ask? Was it anything like the prep-work?

great idea! will try to work on it tomorrow. It is really easy to do through mindmeister.com

Digging around on LinkedIn, I’m pretty sure App Academy, Hackbright, and Catalyst Class were all founded by former Dev Bootcamp students. Both the CEO and COO of Catalyst were students in Dev Bootcamp’s first cohort, I think.

These people were all students in Dev Bootcamp’s first cohort:

Kush Patel (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kush-patel/4b/99/349)
Tony Phillips (http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonybphillips)
Douglas Calhoun (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/douglas-calhoun/44/998/500)
David Phillips (http://www.linkedin.com/in/davjphillips)

Dave Hoover, one of Dev Bootcamp’s co-founders, used to be affiliated with Starter League, too.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/redsquirrel

I found all the above by rifling through LinkedIn and googling the people’s names. Couldn’t find anything else.

2. Personal story:
10/24/12 I applied for 7/1/13 session (and 2 more after that)
10/26/12 submitted second part of application form
10/30/12 got invitation to a coding challenge. it contained 9 chapter study material
11/5/12 completed a math challenge (2 problems) and tried to take a coding challenge (6 problems. completed only 1)
11/6/12 received an email:
“Thanks very much for applying to App Academy. After reviewing your
application, we think you might be a good fit.
One thing we did notice from your coding test is that you may not
have a lot of prior experience programming; many of the students we
have accepted in the past did not. However, we would like you to
complete some additional programming prepwork for us to review
before we offer to accept you into the program.
The prepwork we’d like you to complete is the same that we give all
accepted students; you may access it here. The
prepwork constitutes a basic introduction to programming designed to
be accessible to everyone. It contains some selected readings to
bring you up to speed on Ruby, plus some exercises for you to
complete. All told, we expect the prepwork to take about 15hrs.
The prepwork details contain information about submitting your
exercises. When you complete the prepwork successfully, our final
step is to conduct a brief, last-check interview. After this, we
will be able to make a final decision on your application within
24hrs.
There is no deadline for the prepwork; you may complete it and take
the second coding exercise whenever you like.
We believe that the time you invest in learning Ruby will be time
well spent: the prep work constitutes a self-contained introductory
course in programming, giving you skills that you will be able to
apply to other parts of your life.”

Prep work had 13 problems, each problem had 2-8 sub problems. Since i didn’t have a lot of programming experience it took me way more than 15 hours to complete this prepwork.

12/17/12 I submitted my prepwork
12/18/12 Received email that my prepwork was accepted.
12/21/12 Had my 19min interview that contained coding challenge: 2 simple problems/ Completed it.
12/23/12 Received my rejection letter.
“Thanks very much for applying to App Academy. I am sorry to write
that we are unable to accept your application. I wish I were writing
to report a different decision, but the applicant pool for these
cycles was very strong, and there were many talented applicants who
we didn’t have space to admit.
Applicants sometimes ask if there was a reason why we didn’t accept
their application. In truth, there is often no specific reason. The
reality is that we are space-constrained and have to turn away many
qualified people.
Please don’t take our decision personally, particularly because we
know we make mistakes. We also know that many applicants we were
unable to admit have what it takes to learn software development; it
is a certainty that many will find successful careers in software
development.
Please accept our best wishes.”

12/26/12 Created this site 😉