Coder Space

Having finished the Coderspace 13 week Bootcamp on 20th December, I feel the need to warn people about this course.

The coderspace website gives the pretence that the instructors are experienced. The lead instructor taught the class for the first three... Read More weeks and to be fair he is a good teacher. We were told that another instructor was joining later in the course to teach PHP and databases. When the other instructor started much earlier in the course than we were initially told (he ended up doing a lot of the javascript frameworks as well as PHP & Databases) the quality quickly deteriorated.

Class time was often spent with the new instructor reviewing his code to see why it was not working and also changing the lecture slides which the students would often advise him that they were wrong and full of mistakes. Having paid a substantial amount of money for an ‘intensive’ bootcamp I was not expecting the classes to be run this way and at the very least the lecturer should have prepared his code and slides to make sure they were correct.

Feedback was given midway through the course to the lead instructor / MD as the class was becoming frustrated and we felt the need to share our views to improve the quality of the teaching and hopefully help the business moving forward. None of it was taken on board and if anything the lead instructor further distanced himself from the course and was not around as often (possibly preferring to develop the online learning side of the business rather than rectifying the problems in the classroom).

Teaching did not get any better and many of the students resorted to online courses in the evenings to make up for what they were not getting taught in the classroom.
The new lecturer was not very knowledgeable on the subjects he was teaching. When asked questions he would often be unable to answer and would say ‘It will all make sense shortly’ which a lot of it never did!!
The Coderspace website also claims to have links to major organisations who are their hiring partners, including BBC, NHS and numerous local software development agencies etc.

A networking event was organised in the Coderspace class room to bring in employers (which we assumed would be the hiring partners listed on the website). Unfortunately the lead instructor cancelled this event a few hours before it was due to take place. A second event was scheduled which took place on 19th December. 1 company turned up who only had an apprentice position available. This was the final kick in the teeth for the students who had all worked really hard developing their portfolios to show the ‘hiring partners’.

The group of students have since found out that the ‘lecturer’ that was brought in to teach us the majority of the course, who was left on his own for most of the time is in fact only 18 years old and does not have any teaching experience and only being 18 has very limited real world commercial developing experience. With a class size of 13 students of mixed abilities and ages how can any teaching establishment assume that an inexperienced 18 year old is ok to be left on his own to teach the group? – It is for this reason that the new instructor lied to the group claiming he was in his 20s. Luckily we found an article on him online from 2016 when he was 17 years old.

Sadly the feedback from the first cohort of the Coderspace bootcamp to try and bring the course up to the specification it was being marketed as was ignored resulting in the 13 students walking out with no links or offers from any of the ‘hiring partners’ listed on the website. We have also had to give a considerable amount of extra time (and extra cost) to teach ourselves correctly through online resources and to pick up on topics that were listed on the curriculum but never delivered by Coderspace.

Should anybody wish to take the Coderspace Bootcamp please allow extra funds and time for the additional learning you will need to undertake.

After finishing the 13-week bootcamp at CoderSpace, I can safely advise anyone who considers this course to please avoid it. Their website promises a lot regarding the quality of the course, teachers, support and the learning curve, but these promises... Read More have not been met. I would like to focus on the two main aspects: quality of teaching and quality of career support.

Quality of teaching

According to their website, the course is taught by expert tutors. Although the lead instructor is indeed a good instructor with teaching experience, after approximately four weeks the teaching was given to an 18 year old teenager with no teaching experience. The lead instructor was often not in the room, leaving the young instructor with 13 students of different skill levels.
The result was that the lectures deteriorated. Most of the code felt untested since we sometimes spent an hour waiting for the instructor to find the errors in the code. There were often mistakes in the code, which is confusing, and some of the code examples were taken directly from the internet (including the errors) and prepared the day or days before (confirmed verbally by the trainer). The slides were uninformative and had errors in them, and the trainer often struggled to explain how the code works in the background, leaving us with a ‘that is just how it works’ or ‘It will make more sense later’ (it does not).
Finally, there has been no active checking on students in terms of their well-being, how they are performing and whether they understand the materials taught.

Quality of career support

Although on the website it shows an impressive network, we have barely seen any of this back into the course. The hiring partners often had no jobs available, offered apprenticeships (instead of junior roles), had no knowledge of what the students were doing or what was covered in the course, and use completely different programming languages than those taught in the course. The networking day was cancelled about 8 hours in advance and was replaced to a later date, where only one company showed up.
Very basic cv advice was given by an unqualified staff member with no experience in recruitment and with no experience in and zero knowledge about programming or IT, but who is supposed to be in charge of our hiring process.
Finally, the business partner who supposedly has a ‘hands on’ approach during our hiring period, was not around (I have never seen him) and was on a holiday during the hiring weeks of the course.

Besides these two points, not all topics in the curriculum were covered, the industry expert talks promoted on the website were not given, and some reviews, specifically in regards to the 13 week bootcamp, would appear to be fabricated considering I was part of the first cohort of its type run by Coder Space. What bothers me mainly is that feedback was given on multiple occasions, but not taken into account at any point. This makes me wonder whether the course will improve in the future. A refund has been requested by the students, but unfortunately has been rejected multiple times.

Although everyone has its own right to choose whether or not to do this course, I can only strongly advise not to do it.

For the 13 week boot camp, Coder Space failed on so many promises: quality of instruction, support, content, and activities. The Lead instructor taught for 3 weeks and removed himself further from the group as the course progressed to the point where... Read More he stopped interacting with the group at all. The remaining 10 weeks were led by a teenage instructor who had no teaching experience. At any one time, there was only one member of staff involved in the teaching and learning.

Concerns of the course were communicated to the lead instructor in week 5. Feedback about the course was generally ignored and this led to further deterioration. We had to deal with unsatisfactory classes daily: large chunks of code untested, mistakes on slides, lectures written the night before, instructor unable to find problem with code so occasions were activity abandoned or not explained, activities not graded nor adequate opportunity to practice. The overall energy of the course was flat and non-engaging. This led to students requesting compensation in week 9; all requests from students were declined. We communicated further feedback in week 10 that on the whole again was not taken on board. Only in the last 2 weeks, the teenage teacher made an effort to check in on people, however this was their attempt to rectify problems too late in the course. At the end of week 11, one of the students had to plead with the lead instructor to interact with the group in week 12.

Career support was very generalised. There were two networking events organised: one was cancelled on the day with 7.5 hours notice and for the final developer demo evening to industry, there was only one company that turned up (the other 3 people were individuals with an interest in code). The overall engagement and interactions we had with hiring partners were not what they promised and often companies were not informed about what we were doing. The minimal interview practice we had in the final week didn’t seem to reflect real industry practice. On the website, it says that the co-founder takes a “hands-on approach, is a huge benefit to our students when it comes to the job application phase of the boot camp” – he had not once interacted with the group and was on holiday for the last 3.5 weeks when he should have been involved with the career support and hiring.

The overall experience was extremely disappointing and due to the way they continued to ignore feedback, I cannot see it improving in the near future. Their lack of passion for engaging people to get into tech comes across in their hands-off approach and the way the course was delivered. As a result, it’s damaging the confidence of people who want to get into the industry and undoing the good work of organisations that have worked hard to raise the profile of the tech sector and close the skills gap.

If you have signed up to January 2018 cohort, do what you can to get your money back. However, don’t let this put you off other boot camps. Consider North Coders, who seem to be doing it the right way!

Having recently completed the 13-week boot camp with Coder Space, I can safely say it was a huge waste of time and money.

The website has many promises about the quality, the approach and the experience of staff but unfortunately these were never close... Read More to being delivered.

The lead-trainer was actually only our trainer for the first 3 weeks and from then on was rarely seen. For the remaining 10 weeks our trainer was a teenager who had very limited work experience and no teaching experience at all. He was a nice guy but continually struggled to explain how the code works or why you would use it, and often left me completely confused.

Lectures were very long, one-dimensional and completely unengaging, and appeared to have only been pulled together the night before. There were regularly mistakes in code, and training slides were just blocks of code without explanation and completely useless for later reference. The afternoon labs either didn't exist at all, or if they did were generally such a jump from what was covered in the morning that you would need to spend hours Googling answers, which, according to trainers was a good way to prepare for the real world!

There were no constructive 1-2-1's, catch ups or check-ins to see how you were doing, if you understood, were struggling, etc. and when we provided feedback to the lead-trainer to try and improve the failings, which we did on multiple occasions, no serious actions were taken.

The hiring support is handled by someone who is in their first role after university with no links in the IT industry, no experience in recruitment and what appeared to be no interest in the industry generally or in promoting the profiles of students to hiring partners. CV reviews were basic and for me personally, actually provided completely contrary feedback to the professional recruiters in the industry. Any other 'preparation', if you can call it that, for making you job ready didn't arrive until week 12 of the course.

Incredibly, these are only the highlights of what is wrong with this course; the list of failures and undelivered promises unfortunately goes far deeper.

Avoid the 13-week boot camp and Coder Space at all costs. If you have already paid for a course, try to cancel it and get your money back. If you are thinking about taking a course with Coder Space then quite simply, don't.