“It’s midnight. I’m in bed. But I’m not getting ready to sleep. I’m getting ready to code.”
Maker Nadia Odunayo wrote this in the Independent in November 2013, talking about how her Dad had walked in on her working on her coding throughout the night.
Years later, Makers continues to be an intense experience: our Makers talk about how the course changes not only their careers and their lives but also their mindsets through the people they meet.
And that’s exactly what our mission is — to transform lives, accelerating the careers of software development professionals by integrating training with employment.
But where did it all begin?
Five years ago, co-founders Evgeny and Rob met at Forward Labs and got to talking about the problems people have learning to code.
Evgeny had trained as a software developer at Imperial College and as he was trying to build out his team he discovered a lack of qualified developers on the market. Rob had been through the an arduous process of teaching himself to program through a book on Objective C.
They both saw that traditional education was broken, as Rob describes in an early blog post:
…the average number of University students studying computer science have increased by 1%, while the number of jobs have increased 21%.
As Marc Andreessen so famously puts it, software really is eating the world.
With this increase in the demand for people that know how to program, where are they going to come from? Is four years at University sitting through lectures and getting drunk three nights per week truly the most efficient way to learn?
The vision they had was for Makers Academy to be an alternative to university and a vocational route into a job as a software developer.
Makers would train people to become software engineers in only three months — it would be a platform to provide the world’s most efficient introduction to programming principles.
Several months later they kicked off their first class of nine students.
Back then, Rob wrote what still rings true today:
Makers Academy is not for everyone. Some people are okay investing the time and money into getting a computer science degree and that’s great.
Others are okay with the inefficiencies in teaching themselves and just want to learn enough to get by.
For the rest, we’re building Makers Academy.
As we approach our 5th birthday, we’re proud to have:
- Trained over 1248 Makers (on average 30% of them were women);
- Connected them to over 250 of London’s top technology companies (Deliveroo, British Gas, Starling Bank, Financial Times, Compare The Market.com, Tesco, among others);
- Been profitable without external capital except the seed round;
- Grown to a team of 35, with the philosophy of ‘trust over fear’ — we still set our own salaries;
- Been included in this year’s UpScale cohort, which aims to support the growth of the UK’s most exciting and innovative companies — we’re excited to leverage that to widen our impact on the tech industry.
How We (Still) Teach at Makers Academy
After Makers had been open for only a few weeks, Rob wrote a post on the original seeds of our teaching philosophy:
“It’s impossible to teach people how to code. It’s only possible to help them to learn to code.
First, we believe in the “fail first” approach. New programming concepts are really hard to understand unless you have some frame of reference. The fastest way to make sure you really understand the problem is to fail first and then get expert advice on how this problem should be solved.
Second, the most efficient way to learn how to code is to actually code. We spend most of our time pairing and not listening to lectures.
Overall, we give the students the direction they need to follow. We expect them to be extremely proactive in their studies and we help them on every step of the way by making sure they don’t get stuck for more time than necessary to gain the incremental “pain benefit.”
Another reason our teaching process is structured this way is that we teach our students how to think like developers, not coders that can just list features.”
Everyone deserves a job they love (including you)
Today our CEO Evgeny reflects:
“I’m really proud of all the lives we touched over the last five years, having trained over 1248 software developers. This is really what’s been driving the business from the very beginning. I distinctly remember a conversation with Rob, my co-founder, at the end of the first year.
We said that even if Makers Academy isn’t successful — many startups fail! — the effort was still worth it because of all the lives we changed for the better.
Since then our ambition widened to changing not only individual careers but the tech industry as a whole — can it be more diverse? more inclusive? with better employment practices?
In the last five years the tech industry in the UK went from “we don’t hire juniors, period” to “how can we hire and support the best junior developers”. If Makers Academy played a small part in that, the work we’ve been doing wasn’t in vain.”
Where to next?
We’re proud to have proven that a complete beginner can get an amazing job in software development in just a few months.
In the coming years we’ll double-down on making our course even more accessible and inclusive; helping our Makers learn a wider range of skills; working with even more hiring partners across all industries, so that many more thousands of newly trained software developers can start careers they truly love.
