Ben White

Review of Hack Reactor

TL/DR: Do it!

TL/DR: Do it!

I just finished MakerSquare at the end of January and the program was fantastic. It wasn t perfect as it continues evolve; however, these imperfections are vastly overshadowed by the unmistakable value it offers for those willing to work hard.

I do say offers for a reason, because you get what you put into it. You can expect to basically live and breath code for 12 weeks. I easily spent 70+ hours either at campus or at home pouring over a project or reading documentation and sleeping every once in a while, haha. You need to dive in head first and just try to absorb anything and everything and the investment will be worth it immediately.

You can go each day and be flooded with information and not learn a dang thing. But if you really throw yourself at the program, take everything in like a sponge, digest as much of it as you can and then throw yourself at it even harder as the topics get denser, deeper and more specific. I say this because there were some who came in with specific things they did/didn't want to learn or had preconceived ideas about what would/wouldn't be useful to them, and I think that held them back in many cases. Be the thirstiest sponge you can be, ask questions as you encounter them, but also be willing to trust that the instructors have thought long and hard about what is important to teach you and when.

We used JavaScript and Ruby on Rails for our lessons, which you will be extremely comfortable with by the end, but the true value comes from gleaning the programming concepts which can be applied to any language. There are lots of people from my cohort who took jobs in languages we never even touched during MakerSquare; employers see that although MakerSquare grads might not yet know the syntax of whatever language the company is using, grads come out of MakerSquare with a strong conceptual understanding and the ability and learn new technologies incredibly fast.

MakerSquare has promoted really high placement numbers. I am not sure the details of other cohorts, but all I know is that my classmates and I have been landing real jobs earning real paychecks; the salaries in Austin have been anywhere around 50-75k/year, generally in junior level positions. And while I understand that all this might sound too good to be true, it's not. Becoming a developer in 12 weeks is not easy, but it's absolutely achievable if you give it 100%.