Some pros and cons in my opinion
Pros
- You will be challenged...a lot. The final projects that are spat out that are created in 7 days from 9th week Dev students is pretty impressive. My favorite is http://www.tetroggleable.com/, which combines tetris, boggle and scrabble into one game.
- You learn how to break down problems into numerous solvable solutions. This was huge for me. On day 5 you have to write a program to solve soduku puzzles. Without that the ability to break it down, I would have stared at my screen, yelled "fuck this" and watched a bunch of old Simpsons episodes instead.
- The careers team is great and extremely helpful. It's nice to have people who are extremely dedicated to making sure you end up employed.
CONS - Engineers Empathy is pretty silly. It's this concept they have that if they sit everyone in a semi-circle and pretend like they were in the Breakfast Club that we'll all be better programmers. It's like a one-off Jr. level psych class taught by people with no training on the subject. - It's hard to manage your challenges because there is way too much work for you to complete. Our group ended up with a bunch of students who skipped all the CSS drills and as a consequence, couldn't style anything with a damn. - It is absolutely overwhelming and extremely difficult.
It's not for everyone. If you are getting somewhere learning it on your own, challenging yourself like crazy, going to meetups...great, you don't need it. For those of us who refuse to challenge ourselves, hate other people until we're forced to be around them...it's pretty necessary.
As to the poster above: I get it. I was pissed at times and there were things that shouldn't be issues that were. They do need to realize that they are a business, as they sometimes act, from an organizational standpoint, that any failure is all your fault and not theirs. But...overwhelmingly, students are coming out of it with enough programming skills to land Jr. dev jobs. That being said, few of them got it right after the program ended. They worked their ass off for a couple of more months.