Pros
My experience with Mthree. I had joined Mthree in June 2020 and in this review I will go over my personal experience with the firm. Earlier in 2020, I was a senior in college and with the pandemic going on my job prospects were not looking good after tirelessly applying and interviewing for jobs. I had also applied for internships including one at Wiley, the parent firm for Mthree. I had made it to the final stages of an internship at the company when I was given the news that the internship program had been cancelled due to the ongoing pandemic concerns. I received a follow up email referring me to their company Mthree and a referral to apply to the company. The interview process to get into Mthree was pretty straight forward. I had received an email from Chanel Ford, a recruiter at Mthree. I was given a simple coding challenge on a website similar to hackerrank to complete 3-5 easy/medium leetcode style questions. I also advise anyone taking the challenge to be familiar with standard input/output because your answers are read through that. A lot of times people will be able to get the answers right, but if you’re not familiar with standard input/output you may not be able to submit the answers properly and get the points for your answers. You don’t need to get all the answers correct but I believe the threshold is probably around 65-75 percent of the total points that you need to get a followup interview. I had passed the interview and didn’t completely get all the points. After the coding challenge you will probably have a follow up interview with your recruiter that is very relaxed in nature and is just a very standard behavioral interview and nothing to worry about. Once you have completed that interview you will have been accepted into Mthree. Following my acceptance into Mthree, I communicated with Chanel to set up a starting date for my coding bootcamp with Mthree’s partnership with the Software Guild. The bootcamp covered a wide range of topics starting from basic java to more advanced concepts of java such as interfaces, access modifiers, etc. Overall the java portion of the class was really great. Previously I had experience with working in Java, but I think I would be able to call myself a Java expert now because I know the wide range of utility that Java has to offer. After Java, we went into many different topics such as Maven, Test Driven Development, Spring/Springboot, MySQL, MVC design structure, and React. The curriculum is constantly evolving to better suit the needs of the modern workforce so your curriculum might be slightly different from the one that I had. I was instructed by Kyle Rudy, who was a phenomenal teacher. He has a lot of patience with his students and does a great job of explaining concepts that might be difficult to understand the first time around. In my time at the 12 week boot camp, I had learned more practical on the job experience than in my entire four years of college. As for the pace of the course, it is pretty fast since there is a lot to learn. And when I mean fast, I mean faster than the pace college professors would go through material. The bootcamp was 8 hours long Monday to Friday and was essentially a full time job. It was definitely challenging at times, but if you put in the work, it's definitely worth it. Each week we would learn material for the first three to four days and usually around Thursday we would be assigned a project relevant to the course work that we had completed that week. Usually the projects would be “due” on Monday, but it wasn’t a hard deadline. The projects ranged in difficulty, some taking 2 to 3 days to complete and others a whole week. After completion of the project, you would submit it to github and would have a one on one code review of the project and its functionality with your instructor. In my case it was Kyle Rudy. Kyle was a great teacher and an excellent grader as well. What I mean by that is that he gave you opportunities to get points back on projects that didn’t have the desired features. During code reviews, if something didn’t work properly he would give you opportunities to fix them and give you your full points back. I think this is the ideal way to grade, since I believe that your grade should reflect what you’ve learned and if in the end you learned from your mistakes, then your grade should reflect that. The boot camp all in all was a great experience and definitely prepared me for the workforce. Also, you were paid biweekly to learn. It wasn’t like some really high end salary, but it definitely makes learning much more rewarding. While the bootcamp was going on, I was receiving emails from Chanel discussing potential employment opportunities from Mthree’s client list. Some of these included Morgan Staley, JP Morgan, FINRA, Centene and more. She really worked with me to find me a role that best suited my ability. I had the opportunity to interview for JP Morgan. This was around the time that I had gotten a chance to speak with Maxim Letcher, the Client Lead Specialist at Mthree. If you ever get a chance to speak to Maxim make sure you do. Maxim is a great people’s person and we built a great professional relationship over the course of a few months. He gets to know you well and will vouch for you, given that you are a hard worker and put in the effort. After the bootcamp was completed I was in contact with Maxim for the months that followed and he gave me a lot of pointers and tips regarding my interview with JP Morgan. He made sure to tell me all the topics to study and the types of questions that they would be asking me during the interview. Behind the scenes, given that you are an exceptional candidate, he will put in a good word for you with the managers that you are interviewing with. I ended up getting the role at JP Morgan, but had a few months in between before I started. It was approximately two months. In the meantime, I was given the opportunity to work at Mthree’s parent company, Wiley. I worked there as a front end developer for about a month. Not bad because I got to add more experience to my resume. When the time came for me to start at JP Morgan, Maxim would do weekly calls asking me how things were going and would also talk to my manager at JP Morgan to make sure everything was going good. The beginning was a bit challenging because this was my first real job as a software engineer and on top of that I was onboarding remotely which is confusing at times. Maxim was always there to ensure that it was typical to feel this way in the beginning and connected me with others who had been in my position to get pointers on how to adapt. I have been working at JP Morgan for about three months now and am finally settled in to my new job. In the next section of my review, I will be talking about the most important thing that’s on everyone’s minds: The Salary! In this section of my experience with Mthree, I will be talking about the pay and how it is structured. Without delving into the numbers, I will say that the pay structure is defined by the region in which you get placed at. The tri state area is the highest and regions more in the south and midwest are slightly lower due to the cost of living being cheaper there. When you get placed, you are employed by Mthree, with the goal of converting into a full time employee of the company that you are placed at. Mthree provides you with a salary as well as benefits such as health insurance, 401k, etc. There are different terms as well for your contract. For instance, in my case I was hired by Mthree with a three month conversion from a Mthree employee to an employee of the company I am contracted by. The salary was a bit low, but there is a caveat to that. I am in the process of converting to a full time employee of JP Morgan and have just signed my offer letter. With the offer letter I have signed, I am just a bit short of earning six figures, almost doubling my initial salary in only three months. I’ll let you do the math and figure out my initial salary. All in all I am very happy with my experience with Mthree because they delivered on what they promised me and have a fulfilling career and now about to earn a great pay that is higher than the range most people less than one year out of college would be earning. So who is Mthree really for? In this final section I will discuss whether I think Mthree is a right fit for you. If you are one of those superstar students in college who had multiple internships at big name tech companies and have multiple returning offers, then Mthree is probably not for you. However, if you are like me and you would consider yourself a competent engineer but maybe didn’t have all those high profile internships in college, and are having a difficult time landing your first job, then Mthree is for you. With Mthree, if you are able to be a little patient, you could be earning just as much as those superstar students in college in just a few months longer than it took them. And now a few months since I’ve been working I am still in touch with Maxim and he gives me great career advice and how to proceed in the job market. I hope you found my experience informative in making a decision as to whether or not Mthree is worth it for you.
Cons
I ended up clumping my whole review into the pros section but my whole experience is there. To summarize the cons, pay is little low when on contract but upon conversion your salary will get a great boost Placement is not guaranteed so you still have to interview with the firm you are trying to get placed at. Conversion from contract to full time employee of the firm you are placed at isn't guaranteed but I am pretty sure its very close to 100%. In my case I was able to convert. I've heard from other Alumni, that there experience in the training course was not the same as mine in that it was a bit rushed and a bit disorganized, this was not the case for me however. Although my contract was only three months, I've heard others who had a longer contract to conversion time so that could be a con.
