Great immersive bootcamp - Graduate Student Enspiral Dev Academy Employee Review

There’s a lot of lovely, hard working and dedicated people at Dev Academy. Helping students change their lives is rewarding and inspiring.

Lots of redundancies. While I was there, there were over six separate redundancy rounds in which very vital people were let go. This enormously affected staff morale and negatively affected the curriculum quality due to the loss of industry expertise and knowledge. There are specific people in management who are actively detrimental to the business. Awful and very avoidable miscommunications by one person in particular had a direct negative impact on students on multiple different occasions, with staff left to pick up the pieces of management mistakes. It’s a huge shame because there are lots of amazing staff who have been let down by those at the top.

I taught at EDA for about 18 months in total, part and full-time. I also attended their Wellington bootcamp. EDA is a fascinating place to spend some time. It's full of genuine, passionate people who really care about what they're doing, and who are intent on having a wider cultural impact. Most could be making significantly more money almost anywhere else, but choose to invest in promoting change within the industry and providing an alternative to traditional career pathways for developers. This is a community of humans who believe in the ability of small groups of passionate individuals to create change, but that's the meta. What you'll also find at EDA are humans who are there for their students, with what was to me an unprecedented level of care and attention given to their welfare and advancement. Everything revolves around the student cohort: it has always been clear to me that the students come first, and it's not unusual for teaching staff to sacrifice time to almost everything else in favour of working with the class. By and large, it's a place where your voice can be heard and where your ideas are valued. Staff can quickly find themselves with a lot of autonomy and license to make positive changes. The undercurrent is one of innovation and improvement. "How could we do this better?" "Is this working?" "Are we still aligned with our values?" I have heard these questions asked and answered.

(I criticise where I love.) Because EDA staff often need a scarce-as-hens-teeth combination of deep technical understanding and highly-evolved human skills, hiring and retaining staff is incredibly tricky. Hiring for the long-term will continue to be a difficult subject, but I feel EDA is broadly making the right decisions there with some quality people coming through. As a distributed team, EDA still has some work to do around comms. Being able to talk to each other is such a crucial part of maintaining an organism like this! I have seen dramatic improvements, but there's more work to be done in closing the loop between campuses.