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Comment by yjhoney | Hacker News Reader

I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students.

Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time.

From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all full-stack software engineers.

If anyone wants to help out, send me an email to song at garagescript.org. I believe the real long term solution is to train under-served communities better and help them acquire technical skills.

edit remove donation link.

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First thanks for what you're doing. I think it's definitely part of the solution. My worry though is that I don't think everyone is equipped to be a programer. The thing I keep coming back to is my younger brother. He's got mental disabilities which mean he can't read or do math at more than a very basic level (first grade maybe) and for what ever it's worth he also scored pretty low on IQ tests. Despite a bit of a falling out he's working in construction and doing fine, but he could never go into a highly skilled occupation. There's plenty of people like him some not nearly on such an extreme who would have been perfectly capable of working in management or similar, but as we require more and more training for simple jobs I worry that we loose places for people who can't keep up

Replying so that the other person pleading for skepticism in this thread, and myself, can be seen near the top. This non-profit is not vetted, has a very basic website, has no proof of the students, this persons account is 24 days old.

Please be mindful that while this all sounds like a great idea and I hope it really exists, this also could be a scam as there is no evidence or any 3rd party that this is a real nonprofit which has been paying 20 people 2k a month to learn to code.

Please don't donate until you're sure this person is using the money as they claim. Attempting to verify their website and facebook leads to some red flags - no pictures of events, just events on facebook with 1 or 2 people attending, no documented proof of the 16 people who are full stack developers. If the non-profit is successful as they've said it is, then if he doesn't want to burn through his own savings (again supposedly) then he needs to seriously do better marketing and proof. Even with those things, I'd be skeptical unless it was independently verified.

Thanks for reminding people be aware. Fundraising wasn't the point of my original comment, so I took out the donation link. My focus primarily has been to teach students, so I haven't had time to update any of the social media or the landing page.

I lost the pw to my original account on HN, but here's my username: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=songzme

Here is a link to your previous post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16043552

I would generally only donate to non-profits that have 501(c)(3) status (not sure if this one does). Not just because I want to save money on my tax, but also because the IRS has some checks in place to make sure the money is used as intended.

EDIT: It looks like they do have it.

Thank you for sharing your story. I don't know the severity of your brother's disabilities but I believe that there is a potential place for him as a teacher to teach introductory courses (like JS basics, html, etc). The daily interaction someone like your brother might have with other people might help with his mental disabilities.

Just a my two cents, but I'm not trying to advocate for everyone to learn coding though. Simple jobs will always be there in the near future for those who need it. I just have a problem with people who are capable of a skilled jobs being forced into simple jobs because of financial reasons.

I remembered one of our students has a brother who has severe ADHD (to the point where he had to be heavily medicated). He comes in and tries to learn but couldn't seem to hold his attention for more than a few minutes before disappearing into reddit and gaming sites. I wasn't able to help him. Remembering that, I realize my response above is (unempathetic? I can't find the right word to describe the feels) and I apologize for that.

I think gardening is a pretty lucrative business right now in the bay area. Atleast by the rates that many are asking. And I've seen many of my neighbors asking each other if they know of any reliable services. All one needs to be is reliable, communicate well and do a decent job.

But gardening is a skilled job requiring a couple of years or more apprenticeship to learn - not much easier than going into tech.

Hence being lucrative.

Generalize your argument and reply please. Many things require skill, maybe initial capital and upfront investment is the OPs point. OP claims to pay "2k/mo" to get people to quit their jobs and focus on learning X, where X is programming.

> Generalize your argument and reply please.

Generalise it? No, because it was specific.

The person said ‘why aren’t people immediately filling demand for gardeners it pays well’ and the answer is... they don’t know how to garden it’s a skill they don’t have that takes years to acquire.

Gardening is an unskilled job in the main.

Which is why so many people hiring gardeners get poor results. Mow and blow is cheap and easy but also extremely bad at generating healthy landscapes.

Exactly. Programming is not for everyone. Probably not for even half of the population so if we fail to diversify our economies and pour all our resources into tech it's going to be a very sad world where the other half of the population are good for nothing. A world fuelled by tech at the expense of everything else is not a world I want to live in.

The amount of people who actually have significant mental disorders is a small percentage of the total population.

This article is instead talking about the middle 90% of the population. And many many people in this group are perfectly capable of moving to tech.

That's great, but isn't it orthogonal to the topic at hand? We need non-tech jobs in Silicon Valley as much as anywhere else. Even if we could get every single person in the bay area a job as a software developer of some kind, we would be left in a barren wasteland of office buildings with no services. The solution clearly has to be to somehow make living here viable regardless of how you're employed.

If there were fewer people interesting in taking up non-tech jobs, then supply/demand would drive up wages for non-tech jobs. So before we get to "barren wasteland of office buildings with no services", there would be a happy medium where service industries would be high paying.

Supply/demand is not the only thing driving the difference between the salaries of a middle-school teacher and a Google software engineer.

The difference is not as big as you might think:

http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salar...

Everything about this post is highly dubious, especially all the numbers involved. And then this:

We do not teach for loops and while loops. (Recursion is the only loop we use) 

...okay. Maybe that's a joke, but look at that Github account! Your typical 18 year old CS freshman could throw together a more impressive set of code than this "charity" that has the wherewithal to pay out 25,000 (or 24,000) times 20 dollars and landed 14 of said students "full stack" positions. My shit company would drop all 14 of their resumes right in the garbage. Where are they getting hired?

And who in hell would spend their 401k on something like that? No one. Not the greatest fool in the world. Especially not a fool who managed to gain all of 41 Twitter follows in the process.

...just a plea for a minimum of skepticism. Hate to see a rather obvious swindle fool people.

Thanks for the healthy dose of skepticism. We moved away from Github (their closed source policy always seemed fishy to me) and started hosting our own gitlab instance instead. Some products our students are building: llip.io and c0d3.com.

The students working on llip.io built an android/ios react-native app as well as a webapp. Everyone working on that project got a job, so there is no development on that anymore.

The remaining group of students is working on c0d3.com and running beta on it. Currently they volunteer at the library with FCC on Saturdays to get more people using it to improve it. If you want to meet them, show up for the Saturday meetups! https://www.meetup.com/Free-Code-Camp-SF/events/qzddrmyxpbgc...

I do empathize with your concern though.

It's awesome what you're doing. Keep it up. I wanted to do something like that a long time ago but never had the willpower. Keep in mind that HN comments are always going to be discouraging. I find the comments to be 80% discouraging, stop what you're doing, and you suck compared to X. Read them, but don't let it kill your flame. Then double down on the constructive posts that make up the other 20%.

Thank you! Aside from the name calling in the comment, it does have some merits so I took out the paragraph about donation and my contributions. Love your positivity, thank you for your encouragement.

From article -

> low and middle income jobs, such as teachers and firefighters or nannies and cooks, are key to the local economy.

Someone else commented in this thread how all these jobs (meaning every non-tech, middle-class job) will begin to pay more once they're more in demand. The assumption is that programming/tech is highly paid because it's so in demand, and every other job isn't because vice versa.

Let's just take one job that is critical for a local economy - teachers. Some might mention that because of online learning places like Udemy, teachers for middle or high school education could be gotten rid of without too much harm. Even if you think that's true, consider children ages 0-12. Those children, undoubtedly, still need teachers/daycare of some kind. They're simply too young and at this point most adults prefer not to deal with kids, pursuing their careers instead (this is good! More brains in the knowledge economy helps spur innovation).

However, San Francisco is currently experiencing a teacher shortage of several years [1], so that vice versa I mentioned above is simply not true. The city is offering cash bonuses for teachers now, and it introduced some legislature to attempt to incrementally increase their wage, but it's not enough. Fewer people are entering the profession, knowing they need more than a cash bonus but a continually valued job that gets them consistent revenue to be able to afford to buy a house here. Even those that might have been attracted to teaching, they figure - well, I need more money to live than what being a teacher pays. That's simply an unacceptable standard of living for me and my future children.

So yes, those potential teachers can instead come to your non-profit and those individuals will be able to afford to live, fairly comfortably, as full-stack engineers.

But the community as a whole will have an even more drastic lack of teachers. While non-profits like yours help a few individuals, it is certainly not the panacea HN purports it to be.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-offers-rare...

Yeah, the issue with the idea of the market sorting out public servants is that schools, police departments, fire departments and other public agencies can not simply charge what the market will bear to raise revenue for higher salaries. They don't have control over their revenue stream and that is by design, because their incentives can be quite difficult to manage.

Teachers at least can control the revenue stream fairly effectively by going out on strike next time their contract is up for renegotiation. If the schools shut down then local governments will find a way to raise the funds. Unfortunately that hurts the students but the only way to effect real change is to force the issue.

Unfortunately, striking as a public servant is a double-edged sword. Specifically, back-to-work legislature can force you back on the job, with no new contract.

That's not a very direct way to control revenue. What they can't do, is post higher prices.

The kind of teachers who have control over revenue are private school teachers, ballet teachers, music teachers, teachers at cram schools.

If teachers makes 100k / year and good ones make 200k / year, there would be alot of people going into teaching. Personally, I don't think that teachers should be making less than an entry level software engineer.

I'm also not advocating everyone learn to become a software engineer. I think its unfair for people to become stuck in their low income jobs because of financial responsibilities. The goal of my nonprofit is really to help unstuck as many of them as I can.

Teachers can make more than 100k:

http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salar...

Only takes 19 years of experience to get that salary in Cupertino.

https://www.cusdk8.org/cms/lib/CA02218495/Centricity/Domain/...

> However, San Francisco is currently experiencing a teacher shortage of several years [1], so that vice versa I mentioned above is simply not true.

SF only has a shortage of teachers at the currently offered pay levels. If tech jobs paid the same as teaching, there'd be a "shortage" of tech workers too.

But for some reason the pay doesn't increase. So apparently the "offer/demand" law doesn't work for salaries.

So why do we see only people complaining about the shortage of teachers, and not an increase in offered salary? Maybe cutting taxes to tech companies so they come to SF instead of the Peninsula wasn't such a good idea?

Well perhaps they don't care that much about the teacher shortage.

That's still supply and demand. A perfectly reasonable response to a shortage is to simple live with the consequences of the shortage.

Experienced teachers in some districts make 6 figures in the Bay Area.

6 figures is pretty much the baseline for software engineers in Bay Area, is it not?

For 9 months' work?

Teachers work more than 9 months, but even if they didn't, compare the top teachers with the top programmers.

Glassdoor reports teachers teachers average $68k, Software engineers $137k.

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/san-francisco-teacher-s...

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/san-francisco-software-...

Teacher salaries are public information. You don't have to rely on glassdoor.

Compare apples to apples

All the legislation and public spending won't make a jot of difference to the state of the housing market whilst one assumption goes unchallenged - that it's ok for one class to "make money" out of speculative property investments whilst the rest of society has to spend most of it's meagre income on extortionate rents. Serious regulation of the housing market is the only way forward.

> However, San Francisco is currently experiencing a teacher shortage of several years [1], so that vice versa I mentioned above is simply not true. The city is offering cash bonuses for teachers now, and it introduced some legislature to attempt to incrementally increase their wage, but it's simply not enough.

A "teacher shortage" isn't the same as an increase in (free market) demand for teachers (or education). Who says that people actually demand the education that the public system forces upon them? It's more like the government can't fill the poorly paid positions it decided it needs to educate people.

If a private company figured out that it could make more money by hiring workers at a higher price, they would do it. But if they just have a "shortage" of cheap-enough workers to make more money, that's not actually more demand. That's equilibrium. Everybody always has a "shortage" of getting something for nothing.

This is why I constrained my argument to only consider children ages 0-12.

Regardless of whether "people actually demand the education the public system forces upon them," people do demand a safe, stimulating place to put their very young kids while they go to work.

> This is why I constrained my argument to only consider children ages 0-12.

I don't see how that changes anything regarding what I said.

> Regardless of whether "people actually demand the education the public system forces upon them," people do demand a safe, stimulating place to put their very young kids while they go to work.

That's still not demand in the economic sense. People can "verbally" demand anything they want, if they're not willing and able to pay for it, it's not real economic demand.

If $1300-$2100/month is not a "demand" in the economic sense, what is?

https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-daycare-cost-in-the-Bay-...

Nobody has dropped out or decided coding isn't for them? It sounds like you found students who really know what they want. How hard was it to find students and what was your selection process like?

None of the paid students dropped out. If you were paid the same amount to improve yourself and learn vs packaging boxes at an amazon warehouse, I think the decision is easy.

We didn't have an interview process (in terms of selection). I was originally volunteering at a local library at a Free Code Camp meetup and got our first couple of students from there (the ones who really needed help). Afterwards it was word of mouth.

Finding students wasn't hard. We ran a 3 month pilot at our local library to teach coding for free (our students teaching the public) and many students showed up. In Silicon Valley, libraries wants to provide more technical resource / training but there aren't enough volunteers.

It's interesting. Where I live, I was thinking about vice versa situation. We have good developers who are paid quite bad salaries. I'd love to make company that can bring good projects and pay good salaries. But I'm not good entrepreneur, so it will likely remain a dream.

Advice: Don't shy away from doing something you want to do because you think you're not good enough / not qualified.

Given the (relatively) massive income your ex students are now receiving, do they donate?

Have you looked for sponsorship from the big companies who are ultimately benefiting (the more potential staff they have, the lower the salaries they can pay)

They have donated, yes. Most of the donations came from friends made at previous companies I've worked at (Google and Apple). Apple is the most generous when it came to company matching.

I haven't had time to look for sponsorship yet, our numbers are pretty low and I've been focusing on each student, one by one.

This is awesome. I grew up in a low income household/poor and always try to push getting into tech to people looking to make a change in their life.

Are you operating at a loss? It's hard for me to see how this is financially stable. Obviously its a non-profit, but you still need to pull in money to maintain the non-profit.

I've heard of other ventures similar to this that would take a percentage of the students wages after getting them successfully hired, but even that seems to have fallen out of the news.

Its not financially stable. I have a hard time telling my mom where all my money is going to and I feel guilty every time I go home for family dinner.

You should post this as a Show HN. That’s a wonderful idea. I’m sure many people would gladly donate.

I'm currently just focused on helping students with their learning. I don't plan to do a Show HN until the remaining students get a job because I think the attention might be distracting. I plan to do a writeup after the remaining 6 students gets a job and while I take a breather, hope you get a chance to see it next year!

It sounds like you should apply for Ycombinator, they accept non-profits too

The hardest bit will be doing the marketing, getting sponsorship or donations from alumni so that it’s a sustainable organisation

Tried to, but got rejected every time. I don't think we have the numbers. 20 doesn't seem like a number that scales very well. I might try again next year.

This seems like a great model, and your a kind person to burn through all your savings and 401k to build a nonprofit that helps some of the most disadvantaged among us. Hopefully more than a few of us will support your efforts!

Congrats on an original model and impressive results. I love how donors know exactly where the money goes - to support themselves while training.

Do you think it's scaleable?

I don't think a donation model is scalable if it came from corporations. In my group of friends of high income earners (> 200k), most of them donate less than 5% of their income.

Our students are grouped into teams to launch real products so they can list work experience on their resumes. When they start their interview process, they train new students on their codebase.

I think if some of our students launch profitable products that are sustainable, we could show corporations that it might make sense to invest and train their community and hire from there rather than constantly 'look for the best' around the world.

And how did you get back the original investment of 2k$/month?

When it comes to nonprofits, donations and goodwill are not the same as investments.

Do you screen the students who want to get into the program?

Sort of. We didn't have an official way to screen it was more of seeing the same people showing up to learn every weekend at the library and then offering them an opportunity to learn full time.

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