Daniel Sato

Review of Hack Reactor

My experience with MakerSquare was enormously posi...

My experience with MakerSquare was enormously positive, and I'd recommend it to anyone with a genuine commitment to pursuing software engineering as a career.

I was reasonably well-established in my previous career in sales before attending MakerSquare, and I'd like to think I did my due-diligence in terms of researching outcomes and comparison-shopping with similar programs - I even went all the way through the admissions process with one of the others. I chose MakerSquare because it seemed like the most rigorous, and I wasn't disappointed. I showed the pre-course work to a friend who'd attended another program, and she was blown away by the depth of knowledge we were required to have just going in.

The curriculum was well-designed, and it included a lot of fundamental CS topics that I've heard employers express concern about when discussing boot-camp candidates - in fact, most of the topics that seemed at all abstract or esoteric came up in interviews during my job search. I think in that way, MakerSquare responds very well to the market conditions for its graduates.

The program is loosely divided into the a curriculum phase and a project phase, and the curriculum phase wisely avoids delving too deeply into the hot modern frameworks (though when I attended, it included Backbone, and a quick introduction to Angular at the end). The project phase gave us broad latitude to select and learn the technologies we thought would be most relevant, and ultimately the ones we thought would look best on a resume.

MakerSquare also provided a great deal of guidance during the job search, which I was grateful for. I ended up with three offers on the table, and I couldn't be happier in my new job as an engineer. MakerSquare suggests budgeting for a 3-month job search, and all of my cohort-mates that I've kept in touch had jobs within that time frame.

My only criticism, and it's a small one, comes from the project phase, where I felt in retrospect that the instructors could have been more proactive in steering us away from less marketable technologies. The flip-side, of course, is that we were able to take advantage of full autonomy. One group wrote their back-end in Go instead of Node; my group pursued mobile-first development using Meteor and Cordova. The skills ultimately translated well to more widely-adopted technology stacks in the workplace, and so I don't see it as much of a negative at all.