MakerSquare Wants to Teach You to Become a Developer in Weeks
Straight outta Austin, MakerSquare has teamed up with coding school collective, Hack Reactor, to open a new campus in LA to help fill the tech talent gap and to provide the area with the necessary talent pool to continue the Los Angeles tech expansion (as a call to action for President Obama’s TechHire initiative).
With the growing need for Software Engineers at technology, entertainment and media companies in the Los Angeles area, Hack Reactor, which has three founders who are University of Southern California graduates, identified fertile ground for MakerSquare to educate, train and mentor technologists in Southern California. Prior to coming to Los Angeles MakerSquare only offered training in Austin or San Francisco.
“We are excited to help bring MakerSquare to LA,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino who represents the 15th District. “Expansion of the tech industry into Los Angeles and my district are pivotal to our economic development. We are answering President Obama’s call to train a highly skilled workforce and are proud to partner with MakerSquare.”
“Coding isn’t just a niche field – it’s the core skill of the new economy and there is a need for coding schools to expand beyond traditional tech centers and into big population centers,” said MakerSquare Co-founder Harsh Patel. “Los Angeles is one of the regions hit by the shortage of highly trained Software Engineers. Currently, Southern California still lacks in number of advanced coding schools to sustain the workforce demand of the region. We are aiming to help fix that problem by graduating exceptional Software Engineers in the area.”
Many technology companies have opened up offices in Los Angeles in the past few years, including Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook and Google. There are also burgeoning startups there, such as Nasty Gal, Hulu, Dollar Shave Club, Tinder and Snapchat (how does Tinder work). MakerSquare and Hack Reactor already have graduates working in the LA area at companies like Google, Boeing, the Getty Museum and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Jeff Louie, who now works as a Software Engineer at NASA JPL in La Cañada Flintridge, cites attending MakerSquare as the pivotal experience that allowed him to quickly fulfill his career aspirations. “It’s important for MakerSquare to open a campus in Los Angeles – there is definitely a demand for a school of MakerSquare’s caliber in the area and there’s a tech scene here too,” said Louie. People don’t have to travel all the way to Silicon Valley, or in the case of MakerSquare, to San Francisco or Austin to learn the best in tech. Now they’ll be able to both go through the program in LA and immediately find a job here.”
MakerSquare graduates will be matched to jobs through Hack Reactor’s Hiring Network, which places hundreds of Software Engineers in jobs each quarter.
Individuals interested in applying to MakerSquare Los Angeles, visit http://admissions.makersquare.com.
