United we stand, divided we fall: an update on COVID-19 and Makers
A message from Evgeny Shadchnev, CEO of Makers
The way forward in every difficult situation starts with acknowledging the truth, however difficult it is. Let me start by saying this truth: I have found the past couple of months to be both incredibly difficult and exciting, confusing and rewarding.
I am genuinely proud of how our entire team responded to the first phase of the crisis. Today, I wanted to share an update with our broader community.
If you are reading this, you have most likely trained with Makers, hired from us, or worked with us. There are several things I wanted to share:
- Please take care of yourselves;
- We see this challenge as an opportunity;
- We’d welcome your help if you are in a position to offer it.
Please take care of yourselves
Many of us have friends who are coronavirus-positive, and relatives who need our support and encouragement more than ever. I’ve had several friends who have been struggling with the virus. It’s not “like a flu”, it’s far more dangerous. Please take utmost care to protect yourselves and your loved ones.
This has been my main message to the Makers team of late: I truly believe that in times like these your family is more important than your work. If you need to be with your family, let your manager know and use your best judgement to balance life and work.
I hope other CEOs are taking this approach as well. In times like these we must remember our common humanity, be kind to each other and remember that united we stand, divided we fall.
We see this challenge as an opportunity
COVID-19 is by far the biggest crisis we have ever faced as a company. We are in for an existential fight. I don’t know what the future holds. No one does. It’s a truly unprecedented situation.
I believe that the core premise behind why Makers exists — changing lives and training great technical talent — is relevant now more than ever.
The world will need even more developers, especially now that everyone’s working from home, and more people will consider changing lives to adapt to new social distancing measures that may be here to stay for a very long time.
We’d welcome your help if you are in a position to offer it
A few days ago, my colleague Becks posted this on Linkedin:
“Much of the hiring market is in a state of anxious watching and waiting to see what happens next, which feels slightly like me at the moment. If you are still in the position to give wonderful people the opportunity to add value to your organisation either paid or unpaid, I know lots of them. They are kind and warm career changers; professionals with programming experience poised to become future software developers, tech support engineers, DevOps engineers, testers, scrum masters, digital project managers and quite probably leaders of the future.”
I wanted to echo her message. While we’ve increased our support for our job-hunters, we are also leaning on our community — which includes you — to seek support. Here are several ways you can get involved in fostering the newest talent in tech:
- Join us for our upcoming Hack for Heroes;
- Share hiring opportunities from across the community with patrick@makers.tech;
- Pass this post on to someone you know who is hiring software devs.
When it comes to placing our technical talent, the organisations we tend to work with (which include large enterprises like Deloitte Digital, as well as startups like Freddie’s Flowers) are looking to:
- Invest in the diversity of their tech team (our devs come from a variety of backgrounds)
- Hire doers (our learning style is to ‘learn through doing’)
- Bring on junior developers (who they can coach and grow early on in their career)
Like many businesses, we are facing an incredible degree of uncertainty in the coming months. However, what I have always been most proud of is that Makers is more than just a coding bootcamp or a source of technical talent — it is a community. We take care of each other, and in times like this, we need to do that more than ever.
