Coder Space

The Coder Space course does not live up to the majority of promises made on its website.

There are a few key points on where this course fails to deliver and is why I would seriously advise you to consider whether there may be better options for you to spend your money and time.

The advertised main tutor comes across as friendly and approachable. If he listened to the feedback the cohort pro-actively gave him un numerous occasions  and was more realistic with his promises, then the business could have been a success. Sadly, however, he did not provide any response to our feedback and the course has remained at very low levels. Instead the mood at Coder Space became incredibly sour and it made it incredibly difficult to continue with the course, with many participants deciding they could learn more effectively from home.

The key issues with the course are: the low level of one-dimensional teaching, which is ineffective and does not at all reflect the level advertised on the website; the complete lack of hiring partner and career support; and the level of deceit presented on their website and social media.

With regards to teaching, the website promises that you are taught by expert tutors who have great knowledge of the industry. This is not true. The main trainer or tutor is eighteen years old and seems to have been provided at the last minute for the course. This tutor taught the majority of the course and the experienced tutor was absent for the majority of this first course. The course was unnecessarily frustrating in places due to the fact that the majority of the material was prepared the night before or last minute. Furthermore, most of the code was untested and most teaching days involved troubleshooting the code so that it works. This could be expected for projects which are cutting edge research. However, the majority of what is learnt is basics for which there is no to little reason why it should be poorly executed. One example is the fact that a cURL request took a whole day to sort out. Furthermore, the teaching was very one-dimensional and slow-paced. It was usually follow code on the board and do labs, whereas a structured day with faster paced activities would have been more beneficial. 

The course advertises a lot of prestigious hiring partners such as the BBC and the NHS and makes bold claims that they need to train 100 web developers in the next year. The hiring climate conveyed through this course does not at all match this view. The companies which turned up to talk during the course required skills in C# and using the .NET framework. These two topics are not taught in the course and so refutes the claim that the course is organised in conjunction with ‘hiring partners’. The majority of the so-called hiring partners are also looking for apprentices. The salary for an apprentice is much lower than the advertised range of 20-35k. The nadir of the course involved a ‘demo evening’ on December 19th, where only one company turned up. 

The website also mentions one of the partners in the business who has many years experience in hiring and recruitment and would be involved in ensuring that we all become job-ready and help us with hiring skills. This partner was absent from the course apart from one instance where he spoke to some of the students for a brief period of time. There was no support on this end of things, which was greatly disappointing.

The level of deceit from the point of Coder Space is severe. We were lied to about the trainer’s age and hiring partner connections and one wonders what else is not bona fide about the course.

The unfortunate and very much the real reason for posting such a review is the fact that feedback was ignored and not acted upon. Because the feedback was ignored, it appears inevitable that the course will continue to operate on this lower level rather than improving to becoming the course that it promises to be.

In conclusion, it is your choice whether you decide to pursue this course, but please bear in mind these key points when making your decision . Think whether the issues present in the course and the greater time you will need to spend outside of the course using Udemy or online tutorials are worth the cheaper fees.

I've just had the misfortune to complete the 13 week bootcamp at Coder Space. Whilst their website and marketing is slick what was delivered was a million miles away from that.

Please don't waste 4k (or whatever amount they decide to charge) with Coder Space, instead I would recommend far higher quality online courses done by: The Net Ninja, Free Code Camp, Wesbos & Colt Steele.

Some of these are free but even the ones you pay for would in total come to less that 10% of Coder Spaces costs and they are all infinitely better!

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 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.

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 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.

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

The course website is misleading and gives the impression that it has been running for some time and has lots of false reviews from “ex-students” of the bootcamp who appear to have attended previous Coderspace boot camps prior to the Autumn 17 intake. The Autumn 17 intake was actually the first course that Coderspace has presented – see press releases from Jon Dando 15th June 17 stating first course starts on 25th September confirming this. 

The website also gives the pretence that the instructors are experienced. The lead instructor taught the class for the first three 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!! Class time was also affected by the instructor setting up new virtual machines for us to work on etc. 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). The teaching did not get any better and many of the students resorted to online courses (net ninja, freecodecamp, pluralsight etc) 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 group of students arranged a further meeting with the lead instructor / MD on week 9 to again give our feedback and suggestions on how the teaching could be improved (which was now becoming too late into the course for our benefit but would hopefully benefit future students). Despite the lead instructor initially refusing to meet us as a group, the meeting finally took place. Once again the feedback from the group fell on deaf ears and the majority of the feedback was not acted upon.

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. Richard Salmon the cofounder is quoted saying that Coderspace takes graduates of all ages, train them in full stack web development and places them into web developer vacancies throughout the UK. There was in fact very little career support throughout the course, the career advisor was straight out of university, had very little if any knowledge of the IT industry and did not bother attending city wide networking events to meet potential employers and spread the Coderspace name.

However, 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.