My experience with Revature

Hello, I felt compelled to make a post about my experience with Revature. There are many posts like it but this one is mine. I will give you the God's honest truth, as unbiased as I can make it. I act

Hello, I felt compelled to make a post about my experience with Revature. There are many posts like it but this one is mine. I will give you the God's honest truth, as unbiased as I can make it. I actually wrote this like 2 months ago and was waiting until I had 100 karma on my other throwaway to post here.. then it got banned. Which is weird, because I am so well behaved.. Anyway, I guess I'll just post it on this beloved account. ​ Before Revature: In late summer of 2021 I was working a construction job with a Computer Science degree and very few prospects. A couple months of that in the summer heat made the idea of working for Revature go from a worst case scenario to a very tempting idea. Frankly I didn't care how much they were going to fuck me, I did not get a god damn Bachelor's degree to put up fascia in 100 degree weather. So I did it, I bit the bullet and accepted that I was going to be an underpaid developer for a WITCH company... and not just any WITCH company, but the infamous Revature. Let me start off by saying that Revature responded to me FREAKY fast. I applied, and within like 30 minutes somebody called me. If this was for any other job I would've been ecstatic. Instead, I was deeply concerned. If you are reading this Revature, come off a bit less like a desperate ex. Ultimately, I accepted their terms. I did reach out to them first, after all. I was ready to do anything to not work construction. ​ Training with Revature: When I started my journey at Revature they were quick to point out that only 10% of the candidates that apply for their positions even make it to training. If that is actually the case, their candidate choices must include bobbleheads and dog turds. My training "batch" (as they called it) started with 35 people in it. Frankly, I could've weeded out 10 of them in less than half an hour. We had a 60+ year old dude that would be hard pressed to start command prompt successfully. There were a few others that were not much better. Compare that to me and at least a handful of others that had Comp Sci degrees and the level of variance was staggering. As you can probably imagine, the first week was programming 101 and it was incredibly boring. If you are reading this Revature, do better at grouping your batches. Make people wait longer to start training and group people with similar educational backgrounds. By the second week we were learning about full stack development, which was somewhat interesting. From there we moved into Javascript, Angular, some Dev Ops stuff, and more that I have certainly forgot. Training was pretty hard to follow at first because every time our instructor would give us a simple instruction like "start Intellij" somebody would always fuck it up. Always. And then we all had to wait for them, just for somebody else to fuck up something else 5 minutes later. Since all of our training was remote and our instructor didn't really care if we had our webcams on, I'm pretty sure I fell asleep on multiple occasions. There were 4 projects to be completed throughout training. 1. A pretty simple app that used standard input to navigate through text menus. It used jdbc to connect to a database and did some fun stuff like that. 2. An app with a frontend in javascript and a java backend that also did some database stuff. 3. A team project (3-4 people) where you made a social networking app using Angular and a java backend. This took a lot of time but I learned a lot about Angular. Too bad my job doesn't use Angular at all. 4. Kind of like project 3 but with the entire training batch on one team. We utilized microservices and had small teams on each microservice. The projects were great for learning. Who would've thought, coding stuff makes you learn how to code stuff. You could learn do any of these projects on your own, but they were still beneficial. Every week after the first 2 or so, we would be given an assessment in the form of QC (quality control). These assessments were done by a Revature QC person in front of the entire batch, which served two crucial purposes: Interview practice and weeding. In a nutshell you answered some questions from training such as "name the 4 pillars of OOP" until the QC guy was satisfied. You were "graded" for these QC interviews but not actually told how well you did. They mentioned that doing poorly in enough QCs would result in you being kicked out of training. I thought they were bluffing to make people try harder. They were not bluffing. Between people getting axed and people just realized they were not cut out to be a software engineer, our batch ended up going down to 18 or so people out of the initial 35. Around the end of training our instructor wanted us to fill out a review for Revature on Glassdoor, just giving an honest review of our experience. It was strictly optional. They are clearly aware of their poor reputation and want to change it. Leaving a review right out of training seemed premature so I told myself I would do a review only after I was no longer working for them, which is where this post came from. One thing worth noting is that your performance in training DOES seem to matter. Some of the "top students" and I were given interviews with a very well known fortune 500 company, whereas the people who barely made it through were given to another contractor company to be someone else's bitch. So after stumbling through the interview I was told that they were interesting in hiring me. After that I went into a sort of limbo, where I was just waiting everyday to get my start date. I still had to check in every morning, but after that I was pretty much getting paid minimum wage to do absolutely nothing. This lasted an entire month. It was awesome. ​ After training: Eventually they remembered I existed and I had to go work for this company for 45k a year. The pay sucked but it was remote and my cost of living was very low, so I was pretty happy. Fast forward \~10 months of doing that and I got a phone call from my Revature guy asking if I would like to work full time for the company I was contracted out to. I said yes, and now I am doing the same work but making a little over 100k. I did have to relocate and go into office, but I was always ok with that. It's worth noting that I am still "on the hook" for my contract in the sense that I am supposed to stay with my current company for at least 14 months (to equal the full 24 month contract). I have no idea if they enforce that but I have no intention of finding out because I really like my job. I probably got lucky with this whole thing but my experience with Revature was surprisingly pleasant overall. A solid 7/10. ​ If you have any questions I will do my best to answer. I don't think training is remote anymore so a lot of information I have in that regard is probably dated.