­nique School For Coders: Tuition-Free – ­ntil You’re Hired

Stephanie Shupe had been a civil engineer for two years before she decided her heart was not really in it and what she really wanted to be was a programmer. She quit her job last May, moved from Austin to San Francisco, and began an intensive nine-week, 45-hours-a-week coding course at a programming bootcamp called App Academy. Three months later, she had a job as an iOS developer at Lookout Mobile Security.

Luckily for App Academy graduates like Shupe, while the job market is still reeling from the effects of a bleak economy, software developers — especially those in the mobile space — are in high demand. Luckier still, App Academy stands behind the ability of its students to find jobs — if you cannot find one within a year, tuition is free. Grads pay 15% of their first year’s gross salary when and if they find a job as a programmer. So far, every grad but one has needed to pay up, having found positions within an average 4-5 weeks.

That is a good deal for both the students and the Academy. Today, the average starting salary for programmers is about $83,000, which means the school earns over $12,000 every time a grad is hired. The school makes a very aggressive placement effort, introducing grads to partner companies and holding a Hiring Day on the last day of class to attract prospective employers.

"We’re not interested in just getting students that first job," stresses co-founder Kush Patel. "We’re trying to set them up for a career in software development, hoping to find them an environment where they can get mentorship and continue to learn, because nine weeks of classes is just enough to get you into that first junior developer position."

Patel believes the school’s unique tuition policy attracts some 500 applicants each semester and has them vying for just 20 seats.

Shupe agrees: "Living in San Francisco or New York [the two cities where the Academy conducts classes] is very expensive, and it’s difficult to have to spend a lot of money upfront. It’s not like you can easily get a student loan these days."

A quarter of the students even live rent-free at the Academy, which encourages them to "eat, drink, and dream code in a very intense environment," says Shupe, who recalls putting in about 80 hours a week, taking classes from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, and then going home to study and do more work, sometimes until 3 a.m.

"The people best suited for the course are those who want to be software developers, not people who just want to learn to code because it might be helpful in some other career," she explains. "It is way too much work; if you are not passionate about it, you are going to burn out."

She adds that some of her friends who are four-year CS graduates could not believe her progress when, after the first week at App Academy, she had built "a functioning program for San Francisco’s BART transit system." She went on to create another 14 apps during her 9-week course.

Currently the curriculum — taught by two instructors and three teaching assistants — focuses on Web development using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, which Patel describes as the two languages that give his students the most opportunities once they graduate.

Despite the heavy competition to join the Academy’s limited student body, no college degree or specific educational background is required. Indeed, Patel recalls one grad who had only completed high school, took the course, and is now a programmer at one of the top Rails consultancies.

Candidates whose applications are approved are handed an introductory programming book to read and are then given an online, timed coding test. Based on the results, applicants are selected to do a live Skype interview.

"We are looking for people who have done enough programming to know that they enjoy it, have problem-solving abilities, can learn quickly, and can communicate their ideas effectively," says Patel. "We often find that those who do better on the coding test are people who have no CS background at all. We believe that training to be a CS grad and training to be a programmer are really two very different goals."

App Academy opened its doors at the end of July, and plans to grow slowly, expanding the current class size to perhaps 30 or 40. At that point, other city locations may be added and the curriculum may be expanded into other course material. Most importantly, says Patel, the goal is to see 90-95% of the students who graduate become software engineers. That, he says, is how he will measure the school’s success.

Meanwhile, other schools for developers — including Manhattan-based The Flatiron School and San Francisco’s Dev Bootcamp — have similar programs, but neither has a "no tuition until employment" policy.

At The Flatiron School, which opened in August, students do 100 hours of "pre-work" before coming to campus and taking the 12-week course, which involves a minimum of 45 hours a week but, more likely, 70-plus hours per week. On completion of the course, students are qualified to be employed as junior Web developers. Of the 19 students who attended the school’s first semester, everyone seeking a job found one, says president Adam Enbar.

Standard tuition is $10,000 per semester, but Flatiron also charges companies a placement fee to hire its grads. Students who use the placement service successfully receive a $4,000 tuition refund; if they find employment through other means, there is no refund.

Like App Academy, Flatiron is interested in growth, but only if it "can recruit enough really great teachers," says Enbar. "Right now we have a 10% acceptance rate, so we can literally admit 10 times as many students — and make a lot more money," he says. "But our focus is keeping this a high-quality program to teach people great skills so they can get great jobs. That is not something you can grow really easily."

Paul Hyman is a science and technology writer based in Great Neck, NY.