Makers Academy

Makers Academy exists to help people change career and become developers, which they do exceptionally well (I secured a job as a software developer within 2 weeks of graduating).

What Makers Academy actually does is much more far-reaching than that. ... Read More

Here's a list of the side-effects I experienced from doing the course.

1. Made incredible friends. When Makers say they are selective, it's not just about whether you have the right brain for coding. It's about selecting a group of people who will feel totally comfortable with each other whilst they all go through an intense transformation. There's a real community of Makers Academy Alumni out there in the tech world for this reason.
2. Became a quality and craftsmanship crusader. How often does quality get sacrificed for the sake of profit nowadays? A lot. I now live to do things well, mostly for my own satisfaction and fulfilment. Best practices (and agile practices) are drilled in from day one, but you are also encouraged to form your own opinions too.
3. Relapsed - my addiction to being intellectually challenged surfaced again. There is no way I would go back into a job where I coasted through my day. I now look for 'difficult'. 'Easy' just isn't fulfilling enough.
4. Cured my phobia of failing or looking stupid.
5. Learnt how to learn rather than how to be taught. Makers tutors will not spoonfeed you information. They want to make independent programmers, who can find the fastest way to keep abreast of anything and everything new (and theres a lot of new stuff in tech) that their life as a developer will inevitably throw at them. If you want to be 'taught', rather than 'learn', don't go to Makers, and perhaps think again about whether you want to become a developer.

Went into Makers with a huge amount of skepticism but I couldn't have been more wrong. Not only did I learn how to code, but I learnt how to learn...as peculiar as that sounds. Walking out of Makers has not only given me a dream job as a developer, but... Read More its also given me this surreal feeling of being able to learn and tackle anything, even outside the domain of coding. The atmosphere was incredible and support was also very good on both the technical side with the passionate coaches, as well as the human side with Dana being a superb joy officer looking our mental and physical wellbeing.

I don't like to make dramatic statements but easily the best decision I've made in my life so far.

I had been working in the hospitality industry for around 7 years before I realised that enough was enough and decided to change my career. I became aware of the concept of coding bootcamps and did some investigation. There are a few other companies out... Read More there other than Makers that offer a similar product, but I decided that Makers Academy was the one for me. It was the right choice.

The course is tough, but manageable. You can't walk into it thinking that you'll breeze through it, it takes a lot of time and effort. But if you put the work in you'll reap the rewards.

In my opinion, the best thing about the course is that they teach you the basic principles right from the VERY beginning. OOP, TDD, BDD and a whole bunch more acronyms. The reason this is good is because whilst the main languages you'll be working with on the course (and become most familiar with) are Ruby and JavaScript, when you leave to enter the big wide world, you'll be able to take those (highly valued in the industry) principles and apply them to other languages. The syntax changes, the principles don't.

Bad stuff? Not much. Milk would sometimes run out on a Friday. Same with peanut butter. For me, the course was a means to an end. That 'end' being a change of career. If I wasn't able to get a job then I would probably have a different opinion. That being said, due to the quality of the course, I'm 5 weeks out of Makers and have just had to turn down a job offer from a very well respected company, in favour of another, equally well respected company. Not a bad position to be in, and all thanks to Makers.

tl;dr. S'good, do it.

***Switchup Full Disclosure: This reviewer has worked for Makers Academy.***

A little about me: I studied politics at university, co-managed a martial arts school, tutored english & maths, and wanted more intellectual challenge. I was looking for a way... Read More into the industry, prompted by a developer friend and was stuck between a more traditional masters CS conversion course or a bootcamp.

I got offered a job last week as a junior software developer working in Ruby which allowed me a moment of massive validation that the career-change gamble I took actually worked. I couldn't be more excited! However, Makers could have done a better job in setting good expectations for how long it would take to get a job. Budget on 3 months job-hunting after you finish Makers. I was among the first few in my cohort to get jobs and i'm 2+ months into the magic 'three months'. (Of course, there are a host of factors involved)

Makers Academy is not just a place to learn to code(in fact i'd say it's a place to learn how to problem-solve), it's a place of community and friendship and self-development. The educational philosophy that Makers seems to follow is to enable you you to learn as much as possible. The traditional model of timed lectures at fixed points during the day or course doesn't work for them. Instead I felt constantly encouraged to find answers myself and then given tools to do so. Standups twice a day and retrospectives at the end of the week help keep the communication flow up, not to mention the constant pair programming which has made me grow immeasurably as a communicator and as a coder. There is a set escalation process when struggling through a challenging part of the syllabus. Online research, then the peer group, and the assistants, and then the coaches. If the coaches are being asked similar questions a breakout lecture inevitably happens. The whole place breathes Agile practices to give a better feedback loop to students and to staff.

Each week's topic is broken down into challenges which we complete as much as we can each day in pairs. and the weekend has a related challenge to be completed by yourself. And the syllabus then keeps marching on. The rest week in the middle of the course was fantastic to catch up on sleep and revisit some earlier challenges and even get started learning other things. The coaches are fantastic and have different strengths and weaknesses, and yet combine together to give an all-round solid net to catch and resolve any question we've thrown at them. My advice is to always ask the coaches as much as you want or need.

Not everyone is suited for Makers Academy. A couple of the reviews here seem to show this. The strength of the course is in the highly selection process that whittles down candidates into a cohort of roughly 30 students. Sometimes the recruitment process makes mistakes. You live and breathe code with the guys and gals for 8-10hours every day for 12 weeks. Now I was the type to be first in the door and last out the door and always trying to find the answers myself. Others aren't quite like that and expect to be handed information. So if you're looking for lots of lectures and lots of 1:1 time each day with the coaches, this is definitely not the course for you. If you're looking for a course that challenges you to rely on yourself until you've banged your head against the wall for an hour trying to understand dependency injection and you finally crack it or trying to debug some omniauth authentication errors but can't but there's a system in place to help you resolve it, and this constant struggle while learning excites you, then this is definitely the course.

Because that's as close a resemblance of the real world as Makers gets in order to train you to be a job-ready dev when you finish. And it's crazy and intense and filled with a wonderful array of personalities from all over the place. Make sure you understand what Makers is, come for a graduation day, speak to us grads, and then make your mind up! And if you are accepted, study hard during the precourse, and study hard during the course!

Definitely, no holds barred, recommended.

So 12 weeks and 8k later, what have I got going on after going through Makers Academy? Well I’ve gotten really good at googling stuff, that’s for sure.

Going in to the course I was really pumped up and perhaps a little guilty myself of believing all the... Read More hype. I don’t know what previous cohorts were like but I don’t think I got value for money and feel like a lot of time was wasted. Time that could have been used to give us a really solid education.

The biggest problem for me was the lack of trainers. The first few weeks were fine but it got to the point where all the staff were working on other things or unavailable for some reason. It’s really hard to learn a subject properly if there’s no one around to teach it.

I got so fed up of being told to go away and google everything. When I asked what would we do if google wasnt an option, I was told to use bing or yahoo. I’m not sure if this was a joke or not. I understand as a new developer we will have to rely on google a lot but I want to at least understand the basics and have the ability to solve simple problems.

When you add up all the time spent clapping, meditating and other non related events you realise you’ve spent half of your 12 weeks doing nothing that is related to the actual course subject. Do we really need so much relaxation and stress management. The only thing stressing me out was not doing the course i’d paid for.

One thing that is probably just me but still stood out was the staff and trainers swearing. Now swearing doesn’t offend me and I understand that the odd word here and there is usual in the workplace. The problem is when you swear all the time people don’t hear what you’re saying, they just hear a bunch of swear words. It’s basically very distracting.

So, have I walked away as a junior full stack web developer? No. Have I walked away with a solid foundation in ruby and pair programming skills? Yes. Would I recommend based on my course? No.

This course is intense but will prepare you for the real world of development. At my work my line manager said he had applications from other bootcamps but none of them had the coding skills that i got at makers.

The atmosphere at makers is awesome as... Read More well, as soon as you arrive you feel welcomed into the family.

I'll start by saying that I quickly found a development job after graduating from Makers Academy, so in that respect if you're looking to make a career change and break into the web development arena, it's certainly an option, however I'm not convinced... Read More if Makers is the best option when it comes to the bootcamp experience...

The on-site portion of the course is broken down into two sections where students are classified as either Juniors or Seniors. Both sections of the course are six weeks long. I found the first six weeks of the course to be to a great standard; learning was well structured, the instructors (Sam, Leo and Roi) were passionate, engaging and knowledgeable in their field. I honestly could not fault this portion of the course.

In contrast, the final six weeks of the course leaves a lot to be desired. I found that the new set of 'Senior' coaches may well have been non-existant as a means of developing our skill set. They were often missing in action, late to stand-ups, unable to explain concepts concisely or convincingly, etc. When posed with a question, the go-to response always seems to be 'Google it', which is palmed off as being a means of improving your investigation skills as a developer. While I can appreciate this to a certain extent, I feel that the coaches should have been more involved in helping to solidify our understanding of certain concepts. Had I the intention of spending the majority of my time 'Googling' issues, I would not have attended the course.

I almost felt like some suggestions went in one ear and out the other, as your questions or suggestions would often be met with an unconcerned shrug (given that one such coach was only recently a former Makers student and quickly left the organisation after I graduated, I'd argue that this is an issue with the Makers hiring process and that they need to more carefully select their staff).

One particularly irritating point was that, upon offering suggestions on how the coaches could be utilised more effectively, my cohort was often told 'the coaches are busy doing other things, such as working on the curriculum'. Please bear in mind that the curriculum in question is the curriculum that the next Cohort will be using, i.e. it benefits the current Cohort in no way, and as such, is not our concern. From my point of view, the coaches' primary concern should be addressing the needs of their current students.

The after-course careers support service is also, unfortunately, very poor. Makers works in coordination with hiring partners that often employ Makers Alumni, and while this works for some, I found that there were a small number of companies hiring for an equally small number of roles, some of which are based in obscure locations that I can't feasibly see many people being in a position to take. I found that the majority of people are finding work outside of Maker's partner circle.

Now onto the positives; what are you getting for your £8k? You're getting a structured (albeit incomplete) curriculum that progressively builds upon concepts that help to solidify your understanding of the product development lifecycle. You're getting access to equipment and a space occupied by like-minded individuals who you can partner with to solve a common problem - in essence, you're learning from and with your peers. Personally I did not find the course as challenging as others have made it out to be, however if you find yourself in this position the more spiritual aspects of the course (such as yoga and meditation) are there to support your health of mind and body.

Despite the above rant, I've given Makers a 3/5 in recognition of the fact that I was able to obtain a job quickly after graduating. I honestly had a great time on the course, spending time with a fabulous bunch of people, however my critiques are in view of the fact that I, and others, paid a large sum of money to attend the course and therefore expect extremely high standards. Had the second half of the course been in line with the standards of the first half, this would have been a 5 star review without a question.

Makers is capable of great things so I hope they do not allow standards to slip; I only hope that the negative portions of my experience were a result of on-going, unexpected change in the organisation and not reflective of what is to come.

I would urge Makers to strive for improvement and not be content with the current service that they are offering. There needs to be more engagement between coach and student, the curriculum needs to be improved (which I understand is a work in progress), more practical demonstrations should be offered (whenever they were, I found that they were greatly beneficial in accelerating our learning). There also needs to be more transparency over the careers support, which I hope I have highlighted in this review.

I've had a poor experience with Makers Academy.
There is a lack of quality communication and general support with learning to code.
The emphasis is more on learning to pair code rather than the code itself.
I've finished the course still feeling like I don't... Read More know how to code on my own.
My advice to anyone thinking of applying is to decide whether you actually want to learn to code or just get a new job and be a pair programming drone. If you just want a job then at least make sure it is paid.
If you're going to attend the sample event day then make sure you pay the lowest price. I think it's unfair to charge people different amounts for the same event.
Be careful with the after course recruitment help. Don't take an unpaid position just because of pressure and that it gives you experience.
I'm out of pocket and left dissatisfied. I wanted to feel confident about coding.

I took the Makers course in order to retrain as a software engineer after 20+ years of working as a journalist. It was an intense experience – you get thrown in to learning all sorts of technologies at a breakneck pace, but I was astonished at how much... Read More I absorbed. Any coding course can do no more but prepare you for an actual job but I thought Makers did an excellent job of getting across the concepts, skills and standards I needed to land my first job.