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MakerSquare is now Hack Reactor
As of 11/1/16, Hack Reactor has unified its network of schools, including MakerSquare and Telegraph Academy, under the Hack Reactor brand.
Subject to regulatory approval, MakerSquare's network of schools are rebranded as Hack Reactor Austin, Hack Reactor Los Angeles, Hack Reactor San Francisco and Hack Reactor New York City.
If you graduated from MakerSquare prior to October 2016, please leave your review for MakerSquare. Otherwise, please leave your review for Hack Reactor.
To view updated and accurate information, please visit the
Hack Reactor Course Report page.
MakerSquare is a 12-week immersive career accelerator program in Austin and San Francisco that aims to turn ambitious beginners looking to learn computer programming into marketable software engineers. MakerSquare's curriculum focuses solely on JavaScript with a large focus on software engineering fundamentals. NodeJS, Angular, Meteor and Express are just a few of the libraries, frameworks and platforms students work with. Additionally, throughout the program, MakerSquare hosts a variety of interactive events like mentorship night, weekly Makerstories sessions, Demos 'n' Drinks nights, hackathons, and career prep events. MakerSquare hosts a Career Day at the end of every class and also provides ongoing graduate career support to help students get interviews with partner companies. MakerSquare is looking for students who are passionate, tenacious, curious, patient and critical thinkers.
I would not recommend MakerPrep to anyone who has been studying JavaScript/HTML/CSS for 2-3 months. The class is mostly for people with little to no coding experience so it felt very slow and a huge waste of time and $750 for me.
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 ...
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.
They Scam you for Money, It was a waste of time. I would have been better off watching YouTube Videos at Home and not wasting $17000 for 12 Weeks. The instructors were the worst. They just tell you to look everything up on Google and figure it all out for yourself. They are rude also. I will never recommend anyone in their right mind to go to Maker LA. Childish Teaching. They don't guarantee anything but say you should be getting a $120000 Job after going through 12 weeks where th...
They Scam you for Money, It was a waste of time. I would have been better off watching YouTube Videos at Home and not wasting $17000 for 12 Weeks. The instructors were the worst. They just tell you to look everything up on Google and figure it all out for yourself. They are rude also. I will never recommend anyone in their right mind to go to Maker LA. Childish Teaching. They don't guarantee anything but say you should be getting a $120000 Job after going through 12 weeks where they lecture you half the day and send you with to pair program with another newbie to figure it all out later in the day. Then you do a stupid group project. You don't get a job after it, you are on your own to then send out 5 resumes a day at Linkedin and say you should get a Mid Level Software Engineering Job within 3-4 Months. All Lies basically. They have had 5 or more Cohorts and talk about 98% job placement, but each cohort has like 30+ packed like sardines students and so out of 150 people they can name like 3 people who have jobs, and always it's the guy working for JPL story that has a physics degree lol So if you want to waste all your money and 3 months of your time in Los Angeles and get nothing from it, make sure to go to MakerSquare.
MakerSquare was barely okay, and okay is unacceptable when you’re paying $17,000 in cash for a 12-week experience.
MakerSquare sells itself on a premise that sounds too good to be true. Interested in becoming a software engineer? Join our highly selective school, we’ll teach you everything you need to know, and we’ll set you up with a job that pays about $105,000 in salary. Don’t believe us? Look at our 96% job placement success rate!”
This isn’t the truth. The truth is...
MakerSquare was barely okay, and okay is unacceptable when you’re paying $17,000 in cash for a 12-week experience.
MakerSquare sells itself on a premise that sounds too good to be true. Interested in becoming a software engineer? Join our highly selective school, we’ll teach you everything you need to know, and we’ll set you up with a job that pays about $105,000 in salary. Don’t believe us? Look at our 96% job placement success rate!”
This isn’t the truth. The truth is MakerSquare is ran by a very small staff and they take in a lot of students. You'll only get a job if you work extremely hard for it and don't give up after over 100 companies turn you down. It might also be a shitty job: a contract job at a start-up that's going nowhere, or an internship. For the amount you pay, you’d expect to be getting focused attention from JavaScript experts, but really, you’re left on your own most of the time to figure things out for yourself.
Your experience at MakerSquare is broken up into two parts:
I’ll break my experience up and rate them by pieces:
1) Curriculum: Almost 100% of the information is taught in the first 6 weeks. 85% of the time, they are video lectures. Most of these video lectures are times pre-recorded lessons that were given at Hack Reactor, so they are very long, sometimes unorganized, and interrupted with long pauses while the instructor waits for someone to give the correct answer. Some of these videos are actually PowerPoints you scroll through. While the curriculum does a good job of exposing you to many topics you need to know to become an engineer, the presentation was very low-par compared to what I expected for the money. EVERY SINGLE ONLINE LEARNING WEBSITE, from egghead.io to Lynda.com to CodeSchool to CodeAcademy, had much, much better videos that were easier to understand.
A few times, we would get live, very short (think 15 mins) lectures from the instructors, both of whom sometimes lacked subject expertise and could not answer certain questions when students asked them. There was a lot of “Let me get back to you on that” because the instructors simply weren’t senior level teachers or experts themselves. Sometimes, they would even teach us something incorrect, leaving the smartest students in the class to correct the teacher. Groan.
There was also no lessons at all on BackBone.js or Express.js, or React, or CSS, unit testing, the latter of which is crucial to getting your foot in the door at a tech company.
Since the answers to these sprint projects were video-recorded, you’re not able to ask questions when something confuses you. They are long videos, about 50mins-1hr, and they are not organized, there is no order, and they are not broken up into chunks which make them hard to follow. The online video system they use to show you the video is very poor and would often break, skip or reload. They would ask us to write questions we had in a spreadsheet so our class could discuss them with the teacher during a 15-min session, which was a sloppy, ineffective way to get answers.
Even though they are video lectures, you cannot watch them from home because they limit your access to them to protect their materials.
Oh, and you never, ever get any of your code graded by the staff. Nobody looks at your code except you and your partner, so good luck building your expertise or learning from your mistakes when none of the teachers corrects them for you.
Grade: C
Verdict: While they cover a good number of important topics, the pre-recorded live lectures and limited teacher time makes you wonder if you could have better learned it all using online options like egghead and Lynda, whose videos are much more polished.
2) Staff
MakerSquare has an extremely small staff and they run MakerSquare like a true start-up. In the middle of our program, our teacher (who wasn’t that knowledgable anyways) left for good because they opened a MKS in LA and he likes LA better than SF. So for the rest of the time, the other guys cycled in, but you could tell they were not prepared to teach us.
MakerSquare has about 2 teachers, 2 people running the school, 1 career person, an admissions person. Their staff is extremely small for the 50~60 students that are there, and you can feel it. During the last 7 weeks I was in the program, I received personal attention from a teacher for only 2 hours. Once is during a 1-hour mock interview and another is during a whiteboarding session. But I expected more, much more for the money.
MKS tries to make up for it by having 4-5 “teaching fellows”. These fellows are simply students who just finished the program, and stay at MKS to teach and continue building their knowledge. These are the only people who you can call on for help while working on your sprints or projects. But that’s the thing, these fellows have barely finished the program themselves, and whom, 12 weeks before, were simply applicants to MKS. They aren’t highly trained staff, so many times they weren’t able to answer questions when you’re stuck because they don’t have any experience teaching.
The staff acts like they care about feedback. Once every week, there is an hour-long feedback session where you can give feedback on the school. While the feedback was important, it often became a place for staff to make excuses for why their super selective and expensive school was being ran so poorly and has so few resources.
Grade: C-
Verdict: Ran like a true lean start-up, you are nothing but a number to the limited few who work here.
3) Career Services
What Career Services(CS)? The CS guy told us that the job search is a numbers game, that on average for every 100 job applications you turn in, expect to get at most 2 job offers. Uhm, what?!
We had an hiring day, where about 10 companies came and we showed them our projects, but many of them dropped out at the last moment, and only a few of us actually got follow-up interviews from the hiring day. Only 2 out of 20 of us got jobs from a company at Hiring Day. The rest of the time, it was on us to turn in applications. While the CS guy did help give feedback on our resumes, that was about it. They really didn’t have any advice except “keep your pipeline full”. I expected much more from how they market the program, that they could help connect us to companies who were looking for people looking to move into engineering, but this wasn’t true.
Grade: D+
Verdict: While they pitch their program as a school-to-hire pipeline, any job you get is a result of your own hard work. Their career/job listings portal with Hack Reactor is worthless… nobody heard back from any of those companies.
Location:
MakerSquare Is located in the bustling Financial District of San Francisco. It’s easy to get to by BART, and there are a lot of good restaurants in the area. The actual campus needs some work. Most of the chairs in the classroom are made of fabric and attached to the carpet, so they’re uncomfortable. The space is way too small for the amount of students that they are packing into the program. The men’s restroom gets pretty dirty and the toilet overflowed several times due to the number of men using it. There are a few comfortable couches but you can’t use your laptop on them, and there’s a kitchen with an eating area as well.
Grade: B-
Here’s the pros and cons:
PROS:
CONS:
OVERALL GRADE: D+
Ok so I'm saying go to Hack Reactor over MakerSquare because even though they share the same curriculum, the job network is Hack Reactor's and Hack Reactor is a much better reputation. That reputation will open doors that MakerSquare's name won't.
Aside from that, I feel like most students "drink the coolaid" at MakerSquare. They blindly trust the system and tend to praise MakerSquare and its staff when they get results rather than seeing that it was bec...
Ok so I'm saying go to Hack Reactor over MakerSquare because even though they share the same curriculum, the job network is Hack Reactor's and Hack Reactor is a much better reputation. That reputation will open doors that MakerSquare's name won't.
Aside from that, I feel like most students "drink the coolaid" at MakerSquare. They blindly trust the system and tend to praise MakerSquare and its staff when they get results rather than seeing that it was because they worked so god damn hard.
Here's a list of pros and cons I compiled about MakerSquare while attending the course.
Pros
Cons
Overall, these are my thoughts. MakerSquare promises a lot but delivers little. Don't expect to get into large companies. MakerSquare does not prepare you for that. Go to Hack Reactor instead of MakerSquare for the reputation and actual use of the network.
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 ...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.They count internships and contracted jobs into their numbers and pressure you to take jobs that you don't want or feel excited about so that they can keep their "numbers."
I attended MakerSquare a few months back and have bounced around from contract job to unemployment to contract job. MakerSquare has not helped me get a job in the slightest and has all but forgotten about me even when I ask for help. I guess once you've been included into their numbers they d...
They count internships and contracted jobs into their numbers and pressure you to take jobs that you don't want or feel excited about so that they can keep their "numbers."
I attended MakerSquare a few months back and have bounced around from contract job to unemployment to contract job. MakerSquare has not helped me get a job in the slightest and has all but forgotten about me even when I ask for help. I guess once you've been included into their numbers they don't care about you anymore.
My advice. Go to Hack Reactor instead. I had friends that went their and they said they received a good amount of job help. Also, be warned about some of these reviews! MakerSquare bribes their students with a "free" t-shirt for good reviews!
mediocre at best.
I'll start by saying that I got exactly what I came to MakerSquare for. I have an awesome job. I got that job quickly and easily after finishing. I felt qualified starting it.
In my six months at MakerSquare (3 as a student, 3 as a fellow) not everyone had as easy of a time and there were a handful of things I didn't like. This isn't meant to be a negative review. I learned a lot, got a great job, and met a ton of wonderful, intelligent people. But I do want to highlight a coup...
I'll start by saying that I got exactly what I came to MakerSquare for. I have an awesome job. I got that job quickly and easily after finishing. I felt qualified starting it.
In my six months at MakerSquare (3 as a student, 3 as a fellow) not everyone had as easy of a time and there were a handful of things I didn't like. This isn't meant to be a negative review. I learned a lot, got a great job, and met a ton of wonderful, intelligent people. But I do want to highlight a couple points that no one seems to be talking about on here.
The Instruction Team...
There are only two actual instructors. Most of your one on one time is happening with fellows, who are recent graduates of the program. Depending on the fellow and the question, sometimes they are really helpful and sometimes they're more lost than you. Also only one of the two actual instructors does any instructing for some reason.
The Junior Phase...
The first half on the program (the junior phase) consists of pair programming your way through various 2-day sprints (basically mini-projects). You receive a code base and then have to write/fix code to accomplish various goals. The curriculum can be sloppy and poorly thought out. There are more than a few moments where things are needlessly confusing. You usually get there eventually, but in a rather graceless manner. There also doesn't seem to be too much energy going into tightening these. When I have seen changes, they would change a sprint completely and in a way that was not necessarily positive.
The Senior Phase...
There is no curriculum. You'll just be working in groups doing larger projects. Totally self directed. On one hand, this is a great way to improve yourself as a coder. On the other hand, you're basically just paying for an excuse to get up every morning and go code all day.
Outcomes & Online Reviews...
They definitely put a lot of energy into curating a certain image of themselves, which is understandable. But there are a few questionable practices here. One is that the outcomes numbers you see only refer to students who decide to pursue full time developer jobs. If a student had a bad experience with MakerSquare and afterwards decided to just go back to their old career, they wouldn't be counted in the stats. If a student wanted a full time dev job but were having trouble finding it and decided to take an internship or part time position instead, they wouldn't be counted in the stats.
Also, every student receives an email after graduation asking them to please leave a review online, but only if they think it deserved 5/5 stars.
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 tak...
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.
How much does MakerSquare cost?
The average bootcamp costs $14,142, but MakerSquare does not share pricing information. You can read a cost-comparison of other popular bootcamps!
What courses does MakerSquare teach?
MakerSquare offers courses like .
Where does MakerSquare have campuses?
Is MakerSquare worth it?
MakerSquare hasn't shared alumni outcomes yet, but one way to determine if a bootcamp is worth it is by reading alumni reviews. 89 MakerSquare alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed MakerSquare on Course Report - you should start there!
Is MakerSquare legit?
We let alumni answer that question. 89 MakerSquare alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed MakerSquare and rate their overall experience a 4.41 out of 5.
Does MakerSquare offer scholarships or accept the GI Bill?
Right now, it doesn't look like MakerSquare offers scholarships or accepts the GI Bill. We're always adding to the list of schools that do offer Exclusive Course Report Scholarships and a list of the bootcamps that accept the GI Bill.
Can I read MakerSquare reviews?
You can read 89 reviews of MakerSquare on Course Report! MakerSquare alumni, students, and applicants have reviewed MakerSquare and rate their overall experience a 4.41 out of 5.
Is MakerSquare accredited?
Approved and Regulated by the Texas Workforce Commission—Career Schools and Colleges
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