Assembler Institute of Technology

My experience with Assembler has been very intense, yet an absolutely rewarding academic experience. It´s been full of real-world-oriented tech challenges in which I have learned the latest technologies, the best coding practices, to have independency in resolving complex scenarios and situations, and where they have helped me improve my soft skills to continue growing as a developer in the long run.

The entire academic CV is designed to provide students the closest possible experience to a real-world scenario, with tech leads, agile methodologies and SCRUM and version control systems. Besides learning to use technologies such as Javascript, React, Redux, SCSS, Node, MySQL, MongoDB or PHP, you will also gain fundamental experience on working in agile teams, and will end the degree with a real project portfolio. 

If you are committed to making a career as a Software Engineer and willing to be really prepared for growing as a developer, I would 100% recommend Assembler.

As a former student of Assember School I can only recommend it.

They help you out with every step of the way, from the onboarding and the firsts steps with code -where the teachers patiently support you, provide you with good advice and show you the basics of a handful of languages and frameworks (PHP, JS, Laravel, React, MySQL, nodeJS...)- to the end of your journey when you get to apply to your first developer jobs -where Career Services will introduce you to their network of partners and recruiting tech companies-.

The experience has been awesome. The entire master is based on real-work experience building project which includes requirements and design specifications using the latest technology, learning how to work in team, like a real work environment. 
I'm not only learn how to write better code, but also improve all my soft skills, that are fundamentals when you'll work in a company or with other people. 
I think that in Assembler you can growth professionally and also personally from all the interesting talent you'll meet there.

More than 120 euros a day, with teachers who ramble, inexperienced in the subject matter, and those who are supposed to work in the field explaining very basic things at a very slow pace. The worst decision I have made.


I'll break it down for you to make a decision:
Python is something you can learn on YouTube. We spent about three days learning the for loop at that pace. But we did a live coding session where the teacher made continuous mistakes and went off on tangents because they wanted to learn why the errors occurred, or sometimes they would talk about other topics. I ended up exhausted after attending 2 or 3 hours of class for something I could have learned in a literal 15 minutes on YouTube. We didn't learn how to create classes, but I learned that on my own during the summer before starting this course. Like I said, YouTube is better. Then came a month of R. You know that it's not required for work unless you're a university genius or doing research in universities, etc., but it seems like since it's what the teacher knows best, they spend a whole month on it. The teaching improved here, or maybe I just adjusted my expectations. Now the mentors who work in companies come in and in two weeks, they teach us the basics of pandas, numpy, matplotlib, and seaborn. It's clear they have a good command of these topics and explain them well. It's very easy and you can learn it anywhere like on YouTube. Then a girl spends three days teaching us statistics for about 3 hours a day, but it seems like it's her first time teaching. She stutters a lot and sometimes explains things incorrectly. The work she gave us to follow was a mess.


I have to say that working on real projects means this: they give us a task with its solution based on famous datasets, which is something I've read from professionals that you shouldn't include in your portfolio when looking for work. Furthermore, they don't teach us how to work in a team, although they tell us to say in interviews that "we have worked in a real work environment from 9 am to 6 pm using agile methodologies like SCRUM," and the only truth is the schedule. At the end of the master's program, we had a 2-hour class on what agile methodology is, and they taught us an app (ClickUp) to use, which I convinced my team to use, but the rest wanted to work as they always had, and I have to say it was a disaster. We only used it for the final project, which lasted a month.


After the statistics teacher, a new teacher told us not to worry, that we would cover everything with her when we got to machine learning (which was a lie). Now SQL comes along, and it's the same, slow as if we had all the time in the world. On the first day, we made a schema of what a database would look like. In a week or more, we learned how to create databases (which we later found out is not what data scientists do). In the live coding sessions, they would give about half an hour to see if each of us could program something live from our homes, and sometimes someone would share their screen.


By the way, don't expect them to correct your work. I was sick, and a group left me their machine learning work, which was approved, but I found mistakes that meant they didn't understand anything! I had taken a good machine learning course before. I was also surprised when presenting the projects, seeing the mistakes they made, and then they would only congratulate them, and I think they didn't want to explain to them because it would require effort and they would give up, and all that matters in this school is just the show. They want the students to believe they are learning and not get upset, especially before reaching 40% of the course, as I believe the school doesn't receive the rest of the money from student finance or bcas.


According to what I heard from a staff member, as long as we upload the projects to the classroom, they don't even look at them. They believe whatever we say in the 5-minute presentation each of us gives with a PowerPoint slide.


Midway through the course, realizing that all that was left was machine learning and deep learning, and seeing the teachers and the schedule we had, I knew I wasn't going to learn anything else and I wanted to save around 7,000 euros, but they didn't let me leave because I had already surpassed 40% of the contract. The director, who also left halfway through the course along with the teacher who was supposed to teach us machine learning (only those two have left), asked me why I wanted to leave. I explained that I had already covered machine learning for three months and wasn't going to learn anything in the four remaining days of class. I also mentioned that I hadn't attended the statistics classes we were supposed to have. She told me that I would learn everything there. Well, when we got to the machine learning part, I asked her about the mathematics she mentioned, if it was about changing parameters in famous prediction models or changing the number of clusters in k-means. She said yes, that was it. They completely deceived me. That teacher taught us deep learning by providing us with a recorded 30-minute class each day on average and sometimes showing a few YouTube videos from DotCSV that I had already seen. The rest of the day was free for us to read documentation on whatever we wanted. But hey, I already paid for Coursera to learn, and I was taking a course on deep learning. I learned something very basic called batch normalization in 5 minutes. If you don't know that, you don't know something fundamental. She didn't explain it to us by her decision. Then she gave us an exercise already solved, and the whole class followed that solution, and we spent about two weeks on it, but in reality, the teams worked for only 3 or 4 days.


Don't expect this to be like university either. The teachers don't know how you work in a team. They don't visit the channels to see how you communicate, etc. They asked me for an opinion on some classmates. Am I qualified to give an opinion about a student? In university or a regular course, the teacher visits the groups and sees what's going on. Any recommendation from a teacher about a student would be a lie. I asked three teachers for recommendations just to see what would happen. One said yes, of course, and asked if I could give him a recommendation too. He told me to count on it, and I didn't respond because I didn't want to lie, and to this day, he hasn't given me the recommendation. Another one didn't even reply (we used to talk without any problem, so I assume it's legal), and another one said yes, but in reality, they only validated a few skills.


Then, after feeling like I haven't learned anything and not being able to do anything properly, the hiring fair comes. If you asked about it, they would get angry. So, I didn't know anything, and I thought it would be a couple of companies promoting themselves and that's it. But I was pleasantly surprised because there were about 12 companies that presented every half hour for two days, and then they told us to let our school know if we were interested so they could send our CVs to the companies. I liked the fact that they taught us that there are many job opportunities in the Netherlands and that if we knew English, we should apply because there were very few applicants. It seemed like they were desperate for data scientists, etc. So, I applied to many companies, but they all told me that there are a lot of applicants and that I didn't even pass the initial interview. Then, there was a company that I liked, so I asked the girl through LinkedIn for an interview, and she told me that it was a large company and that I should submit my CV through their website like everyone else.


So, my conclusion is that the recruiters come with their own interests, perhaps to say in their company that they have visited a school, I don't know. But here we are, some of us have been looking for a job for over 60 days, others for 30 days, when the average according to them is 45 days, and as far as I know, none of us have been hired. Another lie is that they told us the average salary for the first job is 28,000 euros. This year, in the advertisements, they say it's 30,000 euros. Well, at the hiring fair, with the recruiters from companies, they mentioned salaries between 18,000 and 23,000 euros, and the representatives from our school nodded in agreement. Everyone told me that I had been deceived, but I believed them. I didn't imagine that they would lie just to get the money. It seems like a business to me. They ask for around 300 euros per month for about 4 years if you work at a minimum wage job in a supermarket. And every month, you'll regret the decision you made.


So, my good deed and to have a clear conscience is to warn everyone who reads this. I don't care if I leave the school in a bad light, and I can speak freely without having to wait for a year or so.


It was the worst decision to choose this course for 16,500 euros. When I saw the content and the filler videos they put on YouTube to explain things, I came across the course I should have enrolled in, DS4B, which cost only 700 euros. I almost fell off my chair. Does that guy know that I didn't go to his school, and he teaches in another school that charges more than 20 times his price? I know that with that course, I would have learned 50 times more. 100 hours of well-explained classes!! Real projects that would make me gain experience. And the guy has over 20 years of experience. I really messed up by choosing this one.


Now, I recommend Coursera and ChatGPT.

Hope this helps, I have been in several universities being a very good student in some, one abroad, I did plenty of courses in my life after 40 years, and I taught myself, so I think tis review is of great value.

Have a good day,

Sergio.