Pros
If you're someone who's looking to career shift or kickstart your career in IT, then Pointwest would certainly help you through the way of bootcamp.
Cons
Keep in mind that you will be bonded for 3 years, and a breach of that bond will cost you 200k. Staying for 3 years in a company isn't necessarily a long time, but don't forget that you'll go through the following: you will rarely use the skills you will learn from bootcamp, because they may assign you (this is not up to you to choose which one you want to participate in, UNLESS management/leads like you) to projects that use a different/old system, so you’ll have to learn through hands-on experience fast. You will also get stuck in a project for long periods of time, and I know they promise you that you can be exposed to other projects/get transferred from time to time, but no, the only exposure you’ll get will be stretch assignments, and even if you do well on that, you’ll still be paid the same low salary (so technically, you’re doing free labor for the company, when it’s not part of your actual responsibilities. Please be mindful of this, because most projects are hectic and will cause you to feel burned out). Also, when you do get transferred to another project, there is VERY little to no onboarding – you will literally hit the ground running, and then you get reprimanded if you make mistakes. They’ll tell you that there are promotion opportunities, but that rarely happens and is also dependent on how much your lead/s like you, and whether there's budget, apparently. The most ‘promotion’ bootcampers get would be when they graduate from bootcamp, and then they stay in the same salary range for 2+ years. The salary adjustment they promised? Rarely happens, and when it does, the amount is small that you won’t even be able to feel it. I know they also promised learning opportunities through the way of certifications, but they will only select who can participate in them. Also, I've heard from my teammates that there’s little to no budget for it anyway, so if you want to acquire certificates, use your own money (this is what they did). Also, keep in mind that if you do get chosen to participate in a certification class, depending on the cost, it can get you bonded too. There’s rampant favoritism, which I’ve noticed with how HR handles resignation notices. You will know whether management likes you if they book time with you to try and prevent you from leaving (and no, this is different from the offboarding process). Developers often let each other know that we'll be resigning, and as a result, HR receives the notices almost consecutively. However, I’ve noticed that there are common factors to those they convince to stay, such as the school they came from (especially if they’re from Ateneo, UST, DLSU, or UP), their fluency in English (typical Filipino mindset: if they’re good in English = they must be a good employee – but really, that’s what BAs are there for to cover), and their project assignment/s (which is not their fault because they don’t have the power to choose where they are assigned to anyway), but they will be easier to let go if they’re not in a billable project. Lastly, it irks me when HR/Payroll repeatedly says that salary is confidential. In my current company now, this is not our practice. Why? Because this means that employees don’t know how their pay relates to the others, and they may start to think that they’re being underpaid than the others (I can guarantee that here, you will be underpaid compared to your peers who graduated from ‘the big 4 schools’, even if you equally started in your career path during bootcamp). Keeping salaries confidential leaves employees prone to being sabotaged, because they will not know if their colleagues are paid higher for literally the same responsibilities (hate to break it to you, but you will also realize that you have colleagues who earn more than you but do and have WAY LESS responsibilities than you). Ultimately, just use Pointwest for experience, then realize your worth. Loyalty doesn’t pay the bills.