MakerSquare

Spring 2016, MKSLA. 

NOTE: MKS later became part of Hack Reactor. Your experience w/ HR will likely be much different in terms of curriculum. 

My time at Makersquare was one of the most challenging and rewarding things I've done. The reviews aren't kidding that the program was 6 days/week, 11 hrs / day. Often students put in 6-7 days/week and 11+ hours a day. I know I did. 

The program really teaches you the fundamentals of JS and relevant modern technologies (ex. React). Also exposes students to the challenges of data structures and algorithms. 

The instructors were awesome. They pushed us in class and after class. Also providing support and encouragement along the way. 

IMO, this program does not create someone who is already mid level or senior level unless they have some experience already or have some transferrable background (I had neither). What it does a great job of is prepare you for the rigors of looking for a job and the curriculum prepares you for the challenge of being successful at your first job. If there's one thing I took off in my rating it is for this. I don't know if things have changed but this was my impression after graduating. 

It's not an easy path to take, the curriculum is fast paced and if you don't keep up you will struggle. But! It is possible to keep up and succeed and change your life. It changed mine. Best of luck!

I'm writing this quick review to make sure you don't have to go through what I went through in LA, and that you're fully aware of what you're getting into.

Overall, based on my class turnout and the online reviews, a good portion of the students ultimately get pretty much what they were hoping for out of the program; a decent paying job.  But my experience was not so.

The first 4-5 weeks were fine.  We were learning the fundamentals of programming with decent material and ok instruction (the instructor was a recent hack reactor graduate ...6 months....who really was not knowledgable and couldn't teach worth a **^%).  After about week 5, the material obviously got tougher, and we began more and more to watch recorded instruction videos from a Hack Ractor instructor in SF, probably because our instructor was inept, and couldn't really answer questions adequately when asked.  I was completely lost and had no support and was just not advancing at all.  And from week 6-12 you're working all alone with your classmates on a project.  They'll tell you that that's part of the program.  

At that point, I decided to talk to the management and put in my withdrawal from the course, and that's when they turned real ugly.  All the staff who were so nice and loving all of a sudden turned into the evel empire...LOL.  Long story short, all I wanted was a pro-rated refund, which they initially refused.  they started strong-arming me and separating me from my classmates.  In the end, they agreed to give me a pro-rated refund (after they nickeled and dimed down to the hour of when I came to them), only if I agreed to sign a non-disclosure form and keep everything hush.  I couldn't even say bye to my classmates.  

Anyway, you won't find a lot of negative reviews for MakerSquare because they work reall hard to manage it and strong-arm people. 

Conclusion:  MS LA is just a Hack Reactor wanna be, you'll end up with an inept instructor and watching online recorded videos from a HR instructor, which is absurd (for $17K).  

 

I am really hoping standards and expectations, for what was previously MakerSquare Los Angeles, are improving under the new Hack Reactor brand. Even when I attended, MakerSquare implemented the Hack Reactor curriculum and functioned in the same way. I found my experience at MakerSquare in Los Angeles to be a mediocre experience at best, with a poorly implemented curriculum, untrained staff, a lack of oversite, and a huge waste of money.

When I arrived on-site with my cohort, MakerSquare was going through some staff turnover, which left inexperienced lecturers who had great intention, but lacked the experience to run the operation. The HR person was also new, and they just hired on the outcomes/career coach. Unfortunately, with an operation like MakerSquare, you don't have a way to insure stability of product, and whatever alteration to the curriculum the bootcamp wanted to try out at the given cohort was based on the feedback of the previous cohort. This was really frustrating since it would be nice to know exactly what you're paying for, and to know the people running the operation have appropriate experience.

The first half of the program is where you go through sprints learning JS fundamentals, Angular, Node, React, etc. Since everything is so condensed, if you're paired with a horrible partner, your learning is greatly diminished. For example, I was paired with a partner who had a chip on his shoulder and refused for our group to ask for help so we could "learn by figuring it out all on our own", so my learning for that sprint was hijacked. When you're paying a lot of money to be there ($16 - 17k), this is incredibly frustrating.

Regarding the senior phase of the program: There are some people who get a ton of learning and knowledge, and there are some who get little-to-none. The senior phase is the portion of the program where you build three projects with teams of engineers. In each group, there is usually one or two hot shots (perhaps simply because they were able to build in the frameworks of their choice) and the other members of the group are left in the dust trying to catch up with the framework they didn't focus on as a junior. Well, the staff doesn't really care about insuring everyone in the group is actually building.

Honestly, I see a lot of extension programs (UCLA Extension, UC Berkeley Extension, UCSD Extension, etc.) offering bootcamp-equivalent educational experiences that I think would offer much more value, stability, and oversite, simply because there's an institutional assurance of product, and staff/educators with appropriate expertise. Did I learn a lot in this program? Yes I did. I do not want to diminish the fact that you do learn a lot here. However, there are so many flaws with the design of this program that I feel that my time could have been better spent getting a couple certificates from a local community college or UC extension program.

I was a student in LA back in Jan 2016-March 2016. I graduated with a $95k base salary with benefits that exceed $120k (like paid lunches, ubers to and from work, health+vision+dental, bonuses + monthly paid out profit sharing of $1000 [untaxed] per month). So if you're questioning whether it works or not, it definitely works from my perspective. I was nervous at first when taking the dive - afterall $17-18k is a lot to trust in a school that is less than a decade old. But that's a better option than paying anyhwre from $65-200k on a 4 year degree. The dollar per time spent is a much higher value.

As I like to say: you take YOUR brain (no one else's) to job interviews, so it's your responsibility for what is inside it by the time you start your job search after the program. Like anything in life, you are responsible for what you know and what you don't. Anyone who expects to passively take the 12 week course and get good offers floodiing in afterwards without a spiffy online portfolio and stories of lessons learned while building applications during the program are fooling themselves. After you're done, you need to hunt for your livelihood in the real world - and it's a game of selling your skills and negotiating for the best offer after your time spent learning during the program.

While at Makersquare (hack reactor) you will need to put in 8-12 hrs per day to gain the skills necessary to earn a job in the field. Tha'ts what's great though - Makersquare gives you the focused cirriculum and support needed during the uncertain time of learning a trade to get you from novice to professional. If you learn on your own, it's hard to tell what is a waste of time and what will actually help you gain professional profficiency. For this guidance - Makersquare (aka hack reactor now) is very valuable. The students you are with are equally motivated to learn and they will help you discover tools / tricks of the trade. You will undoubtedly give back to them too with your unique perspective. 

A lot of people complain about the video lectures, and that makes sense. The video lectures are just about as good as you can get online (if not as good). But that's not really the point of going to a bootcamp. The real value you gain is from struggling on real projects during the program using modern javsacript/(fontend and backend) frameworks and tools with real people who know more or less the same amount about software engineering as you do. You can't rely on someone who is more knoweldgable than you to get things done (just like the real world). You make mistakes, you get lost, and you learn through collective struggle. My brain hurt a lot through all 12 weeks. It felt like that ache that you get in my muscles after I work out, but in my brain. Through this process, I became a better individual problem sovler, and a better teammate. 

As for career advice, i think the program was lacking here - but at the same time the confidence and negotiation tactics (aka learning the bravado necessary to make $100K/yr demands from employers) I got from the program did help me. They basically taught me how to look past the BS that recruiters will tell you, and how to defer saying a number first when negotiating for a salary (and what to ask for aka 100k/yr). I quickly learned while on the job search that recruiters are basically amateurs that dont know how to code that assume that they know everything about tech. It's best to avoid them, because they suffer from the Dunning Kreuger effect worst of all (which sadlly, we all suffer from but have to recognize in ourselves).  They trick themselves into thinking they know what companies value, when in reality, they dont truly know what it takes to provide value to these companies (or else they would know how to code).

Anyway, I've talked too much already. In my opinion, you should do it because it lead to a great path for me. But if you're that baller that you can learn software engineering all on your own (see Dunning Kreuger effect) then by all means, go it alone. I'm proud to say this program helped me, and I dont need to listen to anyone else that doubts. 

There are a lot of things left out of the positive reviews here.  Mostly because most kids don't want to commit career sucide by publically admitting that there was not really much value added by MKS and that it is an organization that appears to operate without standards or credibility.

That's not to say that people don't learn at MKS.  Most do.  But thats mostly because they are highly motivated, intelligent people putting in 80+ hours a week.  They largely succeed in spite of MKS, not because of it.  Here are some of the many things I would have liked to know before attending MKS, and which, aside from a handful of recent reviews on here, are not reflected in the information available to prospective students.

Makersquare provides you with a crowded, noisy, and busy co-working space in which your main educational resources will be a series of video lectures (half of which are low quality and pedagoically poor) and the guidance of a handful of teaching assistants, who, just a few weeks ago were in the same position you were.  This is, with little exagerration, almost the entirety of what you are paying for.  

This is not really communicated externally, but sit and think about it- you're paying $17k to have someone with 10 weeks of experience 'teach' you.  Depending on who the TA who is on call, half the time I didn't even bother to ask for help because I knew the TA knew as little about the problem as I did.  I say 'teach' because MKS emphasizes above all else 'self-suffieincy' i.e. google the answer yourself.  This is supposedly to help you become an independent learner but is mostly used as an excuse to largely not have anyone on-site with any relevant technical knowledge.  You end up with a half-baked base of knowledge cobbled together through trial-and-error hacking, trawling Stack Overflow, and otherwise doing stuff you could be doing from your own home, without MKS.

I say this not to demean the TA's, because they're doing their best.  Its just ludicrous to have them as essentially the sole educational resource available.  In my experience, a good number of the TA's chose to continue as TA's after MKS precisely becasue they felt a lack of confidence in their technical skills and wanted to spend a few more months post MKS improving.  This isn't to say anthing against the TA's, who do the best they can, and, in my experience, are highly motivated, caring, and dedicated professionals.  Its just an absurd situation that is succesful only in allowing MKS to staff itself at the lowest cost possible.  Its an amazing business model when you can get kids to pay $17k, add no value, and then hire them back for a pittance to teach the next generation.  But that's exactly what they do.

The first 5 weeks for me were extremely trying and consisted of sprints, which were presented in rapid-fire fashion without any real time for reflection or learning.

The sprints seek to bring you up to speed by layering on multiple concepts on top of each other in a way that is unhelpful and confusing.  Hey, today we're going to learn about databases!  But we're going to do it within the context of using an MVC framework you've never used, and oh, what the hell, let's throw in an ORM-layer on top!  Nothing makes it easier to learn than half a dozen layers of abstraction!  Don't worry if you don't get it, because tomorrow we'll be moving on to something completely different.  

Most of the TA's I spoke to admitted the sprints were poor and that they had been planning to rework them for ages, but last I'd heard nothing has changed.  This isn't really surprising since senior management seems checked out of the actual educational product and is focused on growing the business by adding new programs to sell, charging employers more to access students, and otherwise seemingly attempting to extract as much value as they can from students.

For the second half of the program, you are placed in a group to work on a project that will be the sum-total of value received for your 10 weeks and $17k.  If things work out and you get a good group, you might have a nice project to speak to employers about.  If you're placed in a dysfunctional group, you'll be on your own and MKS will not do anything to help you.

There is one person on the Austin instructional staff who cares.  His name is Gilbert.  You will be fighting for his attention with everyone else in your class.  The other 'experienced' engineer is a guy who is checked out of his job and will be absent from the curriculum if he can even bother to show up.  If you're wondering, hey, how might this actually be done in a production setting?  What is the best practice for this type of problem?  Save your questions for if/when you get a job, becasue outside of Gilbert, essentially no one here has a clue.

It seems that there are no actual admission standards, that the 'hiring standards' they claim to uphold are in fact highly flexible (no one I spoke to had ever heard of anyone failing), and in my experience, the school will always act in its own interests before its students.  Since they hire the teaching staff from the former cohorts, I know more about this place than I care to.  Management has leaned on TA's to accept kids who don't meeet basic technical standards in order to drive revenue.  When people fail technically, MKS apparently carves them out of the employment statistics by having you sign a release.  When people fail the hiring assesment, they're apparently given a special pass and allowed to graduate like everyone else.  This doesn't do anyone any good except MKS.

I mention their apparent focus on managing metrics because I took a week off after the program (it was the week of Christmas, FYI) rather than start my job hunt.  The main concern of MKS' careers team was to get me to sign a release so they could scratch me out of their hiring metrics, which demand that you adhere precisely to their instructions.  This is, in a sense, helpful in the very narrow sense that it insures that you have comparable data (i.e. everyone started looking for a job on the same day), but to my knowledge they do this with anyone they view as a potential problem case.  I would by very very suspicious of their reported metrics and I suspect that they are highly manipulated.  It seems to be that anyone that represents a potential problem case is removed from the data.  If MKS actually believed in transparency I would encourage them to report additional metrics that allow us to see how many people they carve out, what their outcomes are like, etc.  That will likely only happen with regulation because many of the practices I encountered suggests that MKS prioritizes itself over its students at almost every step of the way.  

As far as I can tell, the only tangible value from MKS comes from the project you deliever.  Ours was challenged because we had a highly disruptive group member who experienced almost daily breakdowns and proved to be impossible to work with productively.  Despite MKS feeling wary enough about this person to prevent them from using the school's career resources and disavowing any relationship with them (although these are largely worthless in any case), they gave us no assistance in dealing with this person.  This speaks to their apparent philosophy - if they're protected, the students' outcomes don't matter. 

Makersquare's management and educational philosophy is that if you repeat something over and over again, you actually start to believe its true.  

These pressures to focus on revenue over educational quality are probably worse than ever following the Hack Reactor acquisition.  Despite this supposedly being MKS's main campus, I saw the CEO onsite once in 3+ months, although the co-founder did drop by once to hit on a few of the women in the program and offer some bogus motivational speech about how much he cares about you.  For me, seeing how apparently tuned out of the core business management was was a reminder that I had just wasted $17k paying for the startup equivalent of Devry University, wrapped in a trendy and self-serving aura of BS. 

The career resources they emphasize consist of having a former pick-up artist coach and professional wrestler teach you how to negotiate through sleazy hard-ball tactics in 2-3 seminars in your last week (spoiler alert: these amount to 'negging' employers and refusing to ever name a price first).  This is the extent of your career prep, and his opinions are presented as the be-all end all reality.  I talked to more than one executive around town who told me that he was well aware of these tactics, found them distasteful, and had a negative opinion of MKS because of the kind of high-confidence, low-talent grads this place cranks out.  I have removed MKS from my resumes and professional references because I feel it raises as many questions as it answers for employers.  

Oh, also, they now charge employers a $15k placement fee for accessing MKS students through the largely non-existant job placement they offer.  This was a new policy for my cohort.  This wasn't communicated to us even though, to my mind, this makes previous hiring metrics irrelevant.  Obviously there is a much higher burden to hiring kids when you are charging a recruitment fee on par with what an experiecned hire woudl command.  Again, I only found this out from industry contacts.  In either case, the job board they tout is a phantom.  EVERY SINGLE JOB I APPLIED TO from the MKS board I was informed by the MKS careers team that the employer wasn't actually hiring.  

The degree of incompetence and laziness at MKS relative to the amount of value they extract from students seems to be so extreme that it borders on unethical.  I very much get the sense that management views this as a short-term play and is focused on maximizing their return before tech hiring slows down and it becomes impossible to hide how little value they add.

One last, infuriating example:

Literally the week of graduation they sent out an e-mail trying to sell us, for another $2.5k or something, an introductory course to algorithims and data structrues.  Even though that was supposed to be the first couple weeks of MKS.  It was one of the biggest middle fingers they could have possibly given me, and just reinforces the sense that this place is a start-up equivalent of a Devry University.  

I graduated from MakerSquare and enjoyed the program.  I am an employed engineer, but when I signed up part of it was the promise of future support including perpetual access to the application.  Less than six months after graduation they switched to a JS curriculum and would not open up to alumni.  Pretty much all support for us disappeared after that.  Then Hack Reactor bought them up and we were all basically forgotten.  MakerSquare wouldn't have existed had the first generation not taken the huge risk of enrolling in a completely unproven new industry.  I can't comment on the curriculum or experience anymore because the place I went doesn't exist anymore and it seems like the company wants to forget the very people who helped build it into what it is today.

 

 

Despite paying for in person education, the instruction from MakerSquare is primarily delivered through their online portal and the quality of their exercises is not as good as Free Code Camp or other online education platforms. The only benefit from the MakerSquare program is having a deadline, and because of that I recommend setting your own deadlines or doing any of the other less expensive programs.

  Their statistics for graduate performance are heavily skewed through data manipulation, and not a single one of the instructors I encountered had actually working in the industry.   The people who are successful here would be successful anywhere they went, so they should take a cheaper option.

I was in the 3rd Cohort at MakerSquare back when they still taught Ruby on Rails and JS.  The main thing I can say is it is well worth it in terms of value.  Learned everything I needed to to get a job at a company I had always dreamed of working at.  As far as the job placement / interview process it was definitely rough at times during the tech interview part, but overall not that much worse then when I first got out of College with my batchelor's degree.   Also I am sure their connections have gotten a lot better since I graduated.

My name is Brian Boyko - you can reach me at brian.boyko@gmail.com, so you know I'm a real person, real student, real everything. 

I'm going to give an unqualified, enthusiastic recommendation for MakerSquare. 

But, you have to come into MakerSquare with the attitude that you are there to learn.  You will be coached and pushed along by your peers and your instructors, but you only get out of the course what you put into it.  

And yes, you do need to *actually like* coding.  This is important: I think that the promise of bootcamps is not that "anyone can code" but that the potential for learning to be a good coder can be found in unlikely places. I'm kind of a "prototypical" example:  Before MakerSquare I was a liberal arts major and marketing consultant who thought he could never program because he was "bad at math", and had even tried to major in programing in the 1990s, only to be told by professors that I'd never succeed. 

But I always had an analytical mind, and if it wasn't for a (crazy) few life events, I never would have learned I had the talent, never would have gone to MakerSquare... never would be where I am now: an engineer. 

That said, it *is* possible to do everything in MakerSquare with something like FreeCodeCamp.  I actually like and recommend FreeCodeCamp for just about anyone considering a bootcamp program.  But there are a few things that MakerSquare offers that FCC doesn't:

* Free Code Camp is almost always done by one person, themselves. MakerSquare is structured so that the first half is dedicated to pair programming.  Both FCC and MS will teach you the technical stuff, but MakerSquare also makes sure you can communicate those ideas to your partners and teammates. 

* Free Code Camp relies entirely on self-discipline.  That can be difficult for many.  MakerSquare's structure and required attendance helps you stay on track. 

* MakerSquare prepares you for the job search, giving you guidance and advice for how to present yourself to employers, as well as lifetime career support.  

Here's my thought: If you're on the fence about joining a bootcamp, go to FreeCodeCamp.com and give it a try.  If you hate coding, you just found out for free that it isn't for you.  

If you are self-motivated enough to do it and have all the projects: Great! You saved a lot of money.  If you are happy doing this kind of work but maybe don't have the self-motivation?  That's where MakerSquare can help out. 

Ultimately, I consider MakerSquare one of the most transformative experiences of my life. 

With all the free and low cost training resources available online these days, enrolling in a bootcamp like MakerSquare is not required to learn how to code, but the program certainly can expedite your learning. If you read through the other reviews you probably can find arguments about how the program is a waste of time --- if you're convinced by such arguments then you certainly shouldn't waste your time because your mindset plays a big factor in how much value you can glean from MakerSquare (or really any other bootcamp). At the end of the day, most of these programs have only been around for a few years- they don't carry the institutional weight of a degree program, so yes, they can feel like a startup at times. Isn't that the type of environment most grads will end up in? Tolerance for ambiguity is probably the most valuable trait you can hone in a program like this - when you're on the job and there is no clear map, no clear Stack Exchange article or other resource to offer an easy answer to your problem, you'll have to lean on whatever resourcefulness you've learned in less than perfect environments where your success mainly depends on your own drive, not on the hand holding you feel you are entitled to because you dropped a few thousand on it. No one will hand you anything for free once you list MakerSquare on your resume, but an immersive experience like this just might get you into the industry faster than if you only had to rely on whatever hours of free online training you could squeeze into an already overloaded 9to5 schedule.