[LRUG] Juniors

[Evgeny Shadchnev]

Hello George,

I can't comment on GA but at Makers Academy (a 12 week course) we're
learned how to help great beginners achieve the level necessary to get a
job at companies like 8th Light (our grad got an offer today), New Bamboo,
Pivotal Labs, Springer and the like. I'll be very happy to show you (or
anyone else) around Makers Academy and tell you how it's possible if you've
got an hour to spare. We aren't perfect and it doesn't always work out, but
the vast majority of our makers are happy with the skills and the jobs they
acquire and would recommend the course to a friend.

There's a lot of room for improvement, of course. Tech education is
fundamentally broken right now and we, as an industry, have just started
learning how programming should be taught.

As I've said, if you would like to learn about what we do and how we do it,
I'll be more than happy to show you around and invite you for a lunch.

Best regards,
Evgeny Shadchnev
Co-founder and CEO at Makers Academy
http://www.twitter.com/shadchnev

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 7:40 PM, George Drummond
<georgedrummond at gmail.com>wrote:

> In my experience, "Graduates" of GA type courses leave with a very
> elementary knowledge in rails/testing/development and hugely inflated
> expectations of how valuable they are as developers.
>
> How much can one really learn in 8 weeks from an unaccredited course
> taught by self proclaimed educators? I also feel the "graduate" label they
> like to throw around is completely bogus and only clever marketing to
> quantify their extremely high course fees from an unlicensed educational
> establishment.
>
> One good thing GA does do is encourage open source contributions. The
> first thing I generally do when receiving a speculative email from a
> candidate is check out their GitHub. For me this is a very powerful
> indicator to their experience, commitment and skill set. Another important
> thing for me is if they have any interesting personal projects.
>
> Unpaid internships are totally unethical but at least you aren't paying
> thousands for a phony qualification.
>
> The minimum wage is a right everyone in this country shares and businesses
> should not be exploiting people asking them to do work for free.
>
> The best engineers I've worked with are either self taught or university
> graduates. Maybe one day I'll meet a brilliant GA graduate but I'm still
> waiting for that to happen.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:04 PM, Michael Pavling <pavling at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On 21 May 2014 15:57, Louis Goff-Beardsley <louisror at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  the developers [boot camps] produce are often not immediately
>>> employable.
>>>
>>
>> I can't speak for others (other 'boot camps' that is), but my experience
>> teaching at General Assembly (as a contractor... so I have no corporate axe
>> to grind) is absolutely antithetical of that - as is the employment stats
>> of the grads from the WDI courses that have run over the last year, and the
>> attitude of employers that attend the recruitment 'meet-and-greets' that
>> run at the end of each course.
>>
>> From what I hear of other providers' courses though, the stories are very
>> similar, so I'd be interested to find out what you're basing that assertion
>> on. What sorts of things do you feel the graduates you meet are often
>> lacking that causes them to not be immediately employable? (since the
>> curriculum of the courses are generally based on the premise that they
>> should be... and if we're missing anything, it would be nice to know)
>>
>>
>>
>
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