Learn to code and get a good job - that's a message we've all been hearing a lot. Code Fellows, a Seattle-based startup that provides intensive courses in web and mobile technologies offers a money-back guarantee to its alumni and so far has made only two refunds.

Code Fellows has gathered statistics on the students that have enrolled in its eight-week Developer Accelerator courses at a cost of $10K. It claims 165 graduates and a completion rate of 88%, suggesting that around 25 students either dropped-out or didn't do well enough to achieve a certificate. 

The Code Fellows guarantee isn't just that graduates will get a job but that they will command a starting salary of at least $60K within 9 months. So far the mean works out at $75.6K with 16% of students attracting salaries of $100K or more.

Getting a job quickly is in some ways a better indicator of the company's success. 82% had found full-time work within 3 months with 9% getting a job offer before the end of the course and another 35% within a month. To date there are only 2 refunds (i.e. 1%) but the nine month guarantee period isn't yet up for some students so there may be more.

Code Fellows also has information on the educational background of its intake, revealing that 11% already had Masters degrees, 65% Bachelor degrees and 6% Associate degree, leaving 18% with no post-secondary study.

Referring to this distribution of pre-course experience Code Fellows comments

Interestingly, over half of our alumni do not come from a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) background. We've heard stories from teachers, dancers, musicians, etc... who chose to start learning how to code on their own and decided to switch careers into software development.

In case you think that it is impossible to learn enough programming in eight weeks to gain a $60K+ software development job, that's just half the story. The graduates in question are those that have completed Code Fellows second-level accelerator course and include some people who were already experienced programmers and were "switching stack".

As shown in this flow chart, there are two distinct phases to the full process:

If you are a novice programmer (and you expected to have done some coding already, for example taking some online course) there are two possibilities - an intensive 4-week boot camp, costing $5K with up to 25 participants  per class; or evening classes of 2 hours twice a week. Foundations 1 is introductory Computer Science and web development in general and costs $500 while Foundations 2 is specific to one of the technologies offered at the next level and costs $1500 - which also covers the Personalized Growth plan which is common to both Step 1 routes.

The eight-week intensive Dev Accelerator courses, which are limited  to 20 students per class, are offered in the following technology stacks:

• JavaScript - covers the core Javascript language as well as jQuery, Backbone.js, Node.js, Ember.js, and Angular.js
• iOS - covers Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder, Cocoa, UIKit
• Python - how to use Django, AppEngine, and a wide variety of software applications for which Python is commonly used
• UX Design & Development - for those who want to become experts in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Ruby on Rails - how to build apps and work in a team development environment

The next Ruby on Rails accelerator in the schedule is "Women Only" which suggests that there is a demand from among Code Fellows intake of novice programmers to justify such a restriction.

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