Pros
I enjoy working with children and coding, so the best part of my time there was working directly with the kids and guiding them through coding projects in Scratch and Minecraft.
Cons
The owner of theCoderSchool locations is horrific. I have several years of work experience, including as a leader of multiple teams, and this is by far the worst leadership I have ever witnessed. From the moment I had my first interview with the owner, it seemed like she had an issue with me. We had communicated over email and scheduled an in-person interview and she seemed unprepared when I arrived, to say the least. She had me sit in a little kids chair throughout the interview. I made it to the 2nd round technical interview with the Code Coordinator and that went really well. I breezed through the coding challenge, which was in Python. I ultimately received an offer and on my first day at theCoderSchool, I led 2 classes in Scratch and Minecraft, both of which I was transparent during the interview process that I had never used before but could learn in time. I am most comfortable with Python, which is what the technical interview was in. Overall, my first day went well, considering I was essentially thrown into the fire. However, I received an email from the owner, who wasn't even at the school on my first day, immediately giving me feedback on how I needed to spend more time practicing Minecraft and feedback that didn't even make sense about Scratch. When I responded to her email asking how I should track my hours spent preparing for lessons, all hell broke loose. She tried to twist my words and gaslight me for asking such a question, saying "to work at the Coder schools it is required to know block coding (scratch) and minecraft, along with python basics. This is a requirement and there is no additional hours that are added on for basic requirements to work at the school. That is the bare minim for the role. There are other coaches who have learned languages at the schools and worked on projects outside of hours because this is what they enjoy doing and they know this will better their coding skills in their future." According to the requirements listed in the job description, "General knowledge of languages is assumed, (some but not all) Python, block coding (scratch), JavaScript, PHP, HTML/CSS, Java are most helpful. Python is a must, must know basic python and willing to learn advanced python." So clearly the owner is not aware of her own job description because nowhere does it say that scratch is required, and Minecraft is not even mentioned in the job description. Either way, the real issue is that as an hourly employee, we are NOT compensated for time spent preparing for lessons. The other issue I had with this owner is that a VERY close friend of mine interviewed and started the job at the same time as me, and she treated us completely differently. My friend was getting paid for multiple DAYS of shadowing lessons before teaching on their own, whereas I did not get to shadow AT ALL and immediately began teaching. The owner also scheduled me for 1 hour of work on Friday evenings, which is just disrespectful. Why would I commute 30+ minutes each way to work just 1 hour, and more importantly, why would you schedule me for that in the first place? It seemed like the owner was intentionally trying to make me quit, and I resigned shortly after starting. From my experience, it is clear that the owner had an issue with me and is biased either toward females, asians, or both. TheCoderSchool's business practices are exploitative by the fact that they do not compensate hourly employees for ALL of their time spent working. This is probably why several of her employees are in high school! I would not recommend that anyone work here, especially as a college student studying computer science. Your time will be MUCH better spent elsewhere. However, if you are going to work here, and you are not an asian woman, be prepared to receive little to no support during "onboarding" and minimize your interaction with the owner.