| | Anonymous | When I first came to Learners Guild, I was happy to see people who look like me and that you didn't have to pay to get in and you get a stipend while attending the program. In the beginning, we would get paired up in groups of two or three and we would vote on a project on what we wanted to work on. We would build projects such as To-do-list, book store, working on algorithms and data structures. At first, I was happy to be here and working with smart, up and coming engineers and while there were some flaws, I left it alone. We would have meetings that didn't involve coding and we would talk about how we were feeling, whether it was good or bad. Basically a therapy session. It felt like a big kumbaya for a moment but things slowly and surely begin to change and not in a good way. I've been hearing complaints about sexism at the Guild and even I had dealt with it but learn to just deal with it because I didn't how to go on about it. Then one of the founders would verbally attack a learner just for stating an unpopular opinion or say something he didn't agree with and would go back and forth with them. Plus, I had heard from other students that they had an issue with them. But what completely ruined it for me was when the founder kicked out two women because he felt they wasn't improving enough. What made it worse was how he did it. He didn't even warned them that they were leaving. If we were warned about not improving or not showing any growth, we had two weeks to improve or else we would be asked to leave and that was understandable. But what he did was not cool at all.
Ever since then, my opinion of Learners Guild has changed. I could go on and on about bad this place has gotten but I would be here all day. It's unorganized, we don't have a lot of help, it's not as diverse as the website makes it out to be and they cater more to people who are either white male or part of LGBT and if you don't fit that criteria or say the correct pronoun/, they don't really care about you. The only reason I stuck around was simply because of the stipend and even the stipend doesn't pay us enough for half the crap we deal with. The only good thing about this place is the people I have met. I have grown friendships with the people from the Guild but another than that, it's best to not come here or even think about coming here. I feel like I wasted my time and energy here. |
