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My experience wasn't great… the bootcamp was still useful and was enough for what I wanted. The problem is when students think they are going to become programmers in 10 weeks. Here are some highlights:

1. The level of the teaching assistants was bad. Some of them couldn't solve very basic problems, or worse, they would tell you your syntax was wrong just because it did not match their own syntax! Second, almost anyone was offered to be a TA for the next batch, including myself because I have "soft skills", prioritizing these over technical skills. A red flag was the first couple of days, when I realized my TA had not landed a job yet, even though he graduated from Le Wagon a few batches before. It didn't feel very encouraging. Other TAs were much better that him, but overall I found it not okay that teachers were previous alumni, some very recent graduates. That made me uncomfortable and felt like LW was some sort of "pyramid scam" as TA was the only job they could land.

2. Halfway through the bootcamp, my batch manager organized 1:1 meetings with us to ask us: "what do you think of our bootcamp?" He asked 2 or 3 questions (quality of learning and overall atmosphere) and asked us to provide a grade from 1 to 10. I found it extremely odd that this survey had to be in person, face-to-face and with no notice! I told him the level of the TAs was not okay, and I also mentioned some classmates shouldn't be there because they didn't have logic or maths skills. He agreed and said some students didn't have the right attitude! but he never attributed it to a bad admissions process.

After I answered his questions he said "we will repeat this survey at the end of the bootcamp. what do we have to improve for your grade to be 5/5 next time? "You know how important NPS surveys are for us". This is when I realized why their NPS grade on the website is so high. You could tell everything there was about marketing. A senior Le Wagon staff member told me he was worried about the low job success rates, as if he had also been sold Le Wagon's fake metrics.

3. I'm one of the few students of my batch (early 2023) that has found a job. My previous experience in another field played a massive role in me finding a new job. Another person found a front-end developer job, but she was a great coder before starting the bootcamp. Those who had no coding background for sure did not find a job. Some people haven't even landed a single interview since then. Simply put, there's not enough jobs for the amount of bootcamp graduates going out in the job market every semester. Le Wagon graduates are way too junior, no companies want to hire rookies that they have to train, when you could hire solid programmers.

4. The syllabus was not okay. The first couple of weeks it felt like the content in the internal interface was not properly written, it was misleading, and the theory didn't even match the level of the exercises. They teach you how to sum, then you have to solve integral equations on your own. Terribly frustrating. It was also not very didactical that if you didn't write the syntax in the exact way they were expecting, your code wouldn't pass the test. So even when your logic was fine, you could sat there alone for hours trying to figure our what the hell was missing, when nothing was missing. As the program progressed it got better, you could tell the lessons were written by other people with better teaching approaches.

I knew SQL well from my previous job experiences. When we learned this lesson, that's when I realized how rushed the bootcamp was. I remember solving the exercises really quickly cause they were really easy to me, but people didn't even get what a data table was. I remember teaching one other student everything I could cause she didn't even get the basics of databases. I felt dumb until that day, then I realized that if I couldn't follow the bootcamp's pace it wasn't because of me. They say you learn Javascript: we did 3 days of Javascript. It was impossible to grasp anything at that pace. I remember skipping a lesson just out of the frustration of being in class and not being able to follow. (I've always been a good student)

5. It really felt that Le Wagon was a business, not a school. The fact that the TAs were recruited from previous batches, the weird atmosphere on Campus... it didn't feel like a solid school. Even the campus itself was weird. It was extremely cold, not too well equipped with just a few Ikea tables and not even screens... It didn't feel like a great campus compared to what you would expect for their reputation or tuition fee.

One guy got kicked-out of my bootcamp for not showing up a few times. It was all very shady and weird, it might have been fair, I don't know. But it all felt really unnecessary because Le Wagon had already shown they are not a serious institution. Instead of expelling him, maybe they shouldn't have accepted him in the first place?

6. I would feel scammed, but I have to say I learned quite a lot of things. I'm now applying to my job so I did accomplish what I wanted. The problem is with students who believe that they will go "from cook to programmer" in 10 weeks... I really pity them.

Thanks to the people behind this website. This is very much needed.