Founders and Coders

When I was learning on my own, after six months of coding I managed to make a website about football scores with three differently sized boxes and a button that randomly generated the football scores because I couldn't figure out how to actually get the real football scores. 

 

After six weeks of Founders & Coders, my team and I have created a working blog from scratch, a soundcloud playlist app, a wordsearch app with autocomplete search and dictionary definitions, a version of twitter (ours distinguished itself by allowing 141 characters), and most recently a working version of instagram. I'm not even slightly exaggerating. 

 

That's six weeks' worth of projects. In the ninth week, we'll move out of the classroom and start working on projects for clients. Where else could you imagine that after eight weeks of training, you'll be in a position to deliver genuine value to someone else's business? 

 

Through a mixture of expert instruction and collaboration with our peers, we've made faster progress that I ever dreamed was possible. I couldn't recommend Founders & Coders more to anyone who wants to devote a helluvalotta effort, with the guarantee that they'll get out of it what they put into it. 

Well, as f&c are famous for their social commitment (more on this later), let me join Mattia with a late #meToo post. Sorry for the lateness, but I have to admit I procrastinated too much, not having much time and trying not to follow too much the endless amount of discussion and polemics it created.

Let's get straight to the point: my experience was BAD, as I think was the case with most people, despite the very positive reviews that were written (or rather marshalled?) here. Not many, if you think how many "professionals" nominally were sent to the market by f&c; or if you consider that the first one is from the son of the "founder of founders and coders", as he proudly likes to declare, although he preferred *for some reason* not to use his father surname here. He uses it without a problem when he gives interviews (in one they even present him as a "founder of founders and coders" himself) or when he gets good contracts on some of the partner company which are instead far from taking all the past students in. And that is one of the first problems I would like to address: f&c does NOT help you much to land a job, as they seem to currently prefer to enrol middle-class people [Mattia addressed this point in one of the meetings - so surprise they didn't call him for further projects!] who might stay for a long while either out of the market or working for peanuts in DWYL not-so-complex and not-so-well-managed projects. But, after all, and here I go in reverse to another problem, that is a good amount of alumni can expect, not having been trained properly due to the scarcity (some cohort might say "absence") of PROPER mentors. Having people who just graduated teach the next cohort on paper sounds really cool, but in fact it tends to be more disastrous than anything else: most of the alumni, as per requirements (often bent, but I will talk also about the selections), do not have a single day of professional experience and expecting them to magically become good enough to mentor others at the end of the course is plainly absurd. Don't get me wrong, I have met former alumni who were really good, and given the selection rate it does not surprise, but if we talk about fresh mentors, it is a hit&miss with many, many more misses than anything else. Well, more misses is good for the gender quotas, isn't it :D? Speaking of which, I am sorry to confirm Mattia's impression: if half of the attention that was given to ideological propaganda was instead addressed to better developing training and curriculum, well, in that case f&c might be a much better job. It is also true that the kind of divisive, mysandrist and sometimes even violent sentences and speeches he reports are not only unsanctioned, but often even encouraged. To the point that one of the people who were in Mattia's cohort and that maybe spent more time making propaganda than learning to code was even promoted to mentor for multiple cohorts as an UX designers. Despite: * not having a single hour of professional experience before; * not having a solid grasp of the core concepts of UX; * acting in a confrontational (or, let's be honest, fairly childish) way every time that an objection is raised; * not even showing up for lessons in the morning, with a wide set of excuses; * trying to co-run the "coding for women" meetup and having caused a good amount of embarrassment, being consistently unable to solve even white katas despite being among the "veteran" alumni; * a massive negative feedback from past cohorts, including even the meekest students, who were fed up with wasting so many days to learn UX (which, incidentally, is not even so meaningful in a cramped bootcamp to become fullstack devs). As f&c is definitely a meritocratic environment, the same person has even been put in charge of the UX for some DWYL project and of the selection of new candidates. Basically on congeniality level, as "attitude is the most important part, learning to code is easy". Shame the easy path never seems to allure much... There are constant rumours about this being a reward for helping set up the camps in Israel, but I would not indulge in gossip, letting everybody draw their own conclusions. Speaking of Israel: the greed underlying the nominally altruistic spirit of f&c went more or less public since they started to run even less organised meetups, but still claiming success after success via twitter and other channels. A shame a cohort, for example, ended up with less than the initial number of "surviving" members, including 2 natives dropping out, as apparently they were selected so well that they had serious trouble in properly understanding English. Of course, the fact that having locals there would have brought more government money must not have been an element of pressure.   Anyway, bottom-line: I would not recommend it, as you either get to waste time or, if you are a good, autonomous learner, you might have a better time just going on coursera, treehouse or wherever you wish to learn how to be a real developer.   No ideology, no pressure to be part of a community (which does not accept you so much as soon as you even start to politely dissent on minor points) and no amateurism.   Again, sorry for all the good, competent and/or dedicated people who did a lot of good, but the current indisputable system and philosophy will just push more of them away and make f&c a less and less decent training ground.