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Comment by songzme | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help.

Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3

I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going "ahhh" when something clicked for them.

Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.

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FAANGM has left us with an impression that if you build a decent product you will magically make so much money that you can divert portions of it to a fancy office, great salaries, open source and other philanthropic causes, with no consequences. The truth is few industries carry that much of a margin especially when VC, founders, and seniors, take so much off the top.

It's my opinion that some companies should never be done for profit, particularly Political Tech but also other social tech including portions of ed tech.

These industries should be left for FI/RE folks who are rewarded with various social credits, like awards, tax credits, and peer validation.

This is awesome! I love hearing that others are doing this. I do something similar but I run after school clubs. I work mostly with 5th through 8th graders and run clubs 5 days per week in 5 different local schools.

It is a lot of work but so rewarding and I feel it has made me a better developer. I myself have learned so much from doing it. I have met so many amazing kids & parents too and it's made me a much bigger part of my community.

I love hearing stories like this, and I feel what you feel. Definitely rewarding and fun, playing a bigger part in your local community feels amazing.

This is really inspiring. Thank you for sharing.

Few questions if you do not mind:

1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students?

2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons?

3. How do you avoid burnout?

4. Do you plan on open sourcing your lessons?

Thanks for asking!

1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room / parking even though we only have 4 consistent students. (Libraries love it when tech community volunteers to help teach).

2. I was honest with students that I can't help everyone and my time is limited (though I try). If they helped each other it would make my life easier. They have been good at helping each other.

3. I don't understand burnout, I'm guessing it's a symptom of ambition and expectations (I'm really not sure because I've never understood it. If I experienced it previously I never noticed). I just make sure to have no expectations. All I hold myself accountable for is to show up. If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help.

4. Yes. I want to open source it completely, such that if people wanted to repackage it into their own bootcamp they have the freedom to do so (not sure what license that would be, but I'm not at that point yet). Right now I just document everything in notion: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...

> If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help.

This is such a good mindset and, knowing myself and those around me, a rare one.

Appreciate you taking the time to answer.

I am really into what you are building here - are you looking for volunteers to help?

Yeah! We are always needing help. Just consistently show up if you are around the area and answer questions. Or signup and go through help people in the chatroom! The instructions are here: https://www.notion.so/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3...

Basically... if you are a seasoned engineer, just going through what we are working with and being curious about it and understanding our approach is really helpful.

What wouldn't be helpful is to show up (in person or online), try to implement a bunch of new changes without understanding the current student journey, and then don't follow through. The intention is good, but I think the students end up more confused.

In the Netherlands (and by now a couple of other countries, I believe), there's a similar initiative called HackYourFuture [1], in which professional developers volunteer to teach refugees to code. This contributes to solving both to the lack of developers, and the challenges refugees face in contributing to the country they migrated to. It's really gratifying, and with volunteer sessions being limited to three Sundays in a row every now and then, less taxing than going there before work every day.

[1] https://www.hackyourfuture.net/program/

This is fantastic!

Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard, so it's also worth noting that there is a whole range of options for folks.

Obviously, there are public and community colleges that teach programming. Many of these have a long history of working with non-traditional students who have jobs or other commitments. Some are remote-only or remote-friendly. In my state (GA), tuition for an accredited public community college is about $6,000 over 2 years for a programming diploma. That's $3,000 per year, and there's no income share required. (I'm not sure if people can do it faster for less money.)

There are also a set of nonprofits and foundations that offer free programming programs to certain populations. I believe NYC has something along these lines.

> Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard

These are very much not the same. For profit schools have an incentive to get more students through while maintaining an acceptable level of quality because that way they make more money. Non-profits have much less motivation to make more money. If they get more applications than they want to fill their prestige goes up as does the quality of their student body. So you see the top US universities having more or less the same size student bodies as when there were 200m people living in the US.

Non-profits optimise for a pleasant work environment for faculty, for profits for maximum numbers students.

> Non-profits optimize for a pleasant work environment for faculty

Some do, some don't. Some Non-profits optimize for maximize impact to their vision.

> for profits for maximum numbers students.

Some do, some don't. Some for-profits optimize a small number of wealthy clients.

Please tell me of these non-profit schools that maximise for impact to their vision, or for-profit schools that optimise for small numbers of wealthy clients.

Sorry, in all honestly I don't know enough back my previous claims, I'm speaking from my personal perspective (which may be biased).

Some of the regular students that come into the library lives off non-profit assistance and one is homeless. They speak highly of local nonprofits providing them food / shelter. I've volunteered at a few shelters that were impactful (don't know them by name unfortunately, I'm too privileged). Staff there definitely didn't have the comforts I have at my current work place.

I spent a chunk of my childhood growing up in Beverly Hills around some peers whose parents run profitable businesses. They have always valued few wealthy clients over many average clients.

Again, take my experience with a grain of salt, I'm not interested enough to prove this point.

I wasn’t talking about generic for profits and non profits. I was talking about those which provide education. The incentives are very different.

Good on you for responding and explaining your reasoning.

> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people

This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things, even a profitable one.

wouldn't be surprised if there's typically a "finance" guy making profit driven/marketing decisions pulling emotional strings on a the (willingly) naive "entrepreneur" partner

Why do you believe that the folks running bootcamps are "tech people" themselves? If they weren't, would the profit notice make sense?

Well they must at least be aware of the tech scene and how it works, since they're working closely with it.

But they’re not. They’re salesmen selling a product to uneducated people.

There’s no requirement they be part of the “tech scene” ... whatever that is.

> “tech scene” ... whatever that is

The companies they're trying to get people hired into.

Why don't you think schools can scale? You need instructional material and the equivalent of professors/lecturers and TAs. Instructional material scales really well; that's what textbooks and MOOCs are. Professors scale well; otherwise 100 plus lectures wouldn't work at all. They obviously do. Intro classes in the huge majority of US universities are in the 100-600 range. I wouldn't be surprised if there are bigger. So the only possible limiting factor that might not scale is TAs. You can render this irrelevant by having high enough standards for entry, like GA Tech's OMSCS, or you can work on scaling it.

There are definitely people who can do a challenging Master's degree with minimal help and feedback, just books, marked essay assignments and a final written exam. This is a model that's as old as the University of London. TAs and structure will increase the proportion of those who start who actually finish.

What about running a school obviously doesn't scale?

It is dubious to me that 40+ lectures work well (especially with first year students).

I didn't say they work well. But they definitely work. And you can take an existing crappy partial solution like video lectures, and add support structures until you have something that in aggregate works as well as a university course. Plain vanilla MOOCs work well for a small minority, about 10% now, when no one cares at all about them. If you can't quadruple that by actually trying I'd be very surprised.

IMHO we should aim at better than 40%, and I doubt that can be done without actual presence ?

> So the only possible limiting factor that might not scale is TAs. You can render this irrelevant by having high enough standards for entry, like GA Tech's OMSCS, or you can work on scaling it.

They said bootcamps don't scale, not that education or schools as a whole doesn't scale. And your solution of raising the entry requirements so only people who can teach themselves can attend is proving their point. Someone who can teach themself isn't going to pay to go to a bootcamp, but people who want to switch careers and can't figure it out without help, will.

Bootcamps are a kind of school. If we agree that schools can scale why should bootcamps specifically not be able to scale?

I mentioned two solutions, raising entry standards and providing greater support. There are people who can teach themselves. There are very few people who can teach themselves as fast and as well in a self-directed environment as they can learn with a real curriculum and some feedback on their work. If you are confident you can teach yourself in two years or reach the same level of employability after nine months of Lambda School the latter looks pretty good even at $30K once you get a job paying over $50K.

I did some back-of-the-envelope numbers on the one I came into contact with previously (also keep in mind this was 6 years ago now too!):

20-30x students per cohort who paid ~$20K upfront for a 12 week program. 20% signing fee (based on 1st year comp) from employer on placement.

We definitely were not paying top of market as some of these students ended up at Uber and Facebook. That said the all in 1st year cost between base + signing bonus + equity wasn't much short of $200K. So:

30 * $20K + 28 * $200K * 20% = $1.72M/cohort

As for outgoings, all of the mentors were volunteers. As were most of the instructors. The content is mostly a one-time sunk cost to produce and is redelivered across cohorts. The largest overhead would have been a building lease. The biggest constraint on growth is how large you can make a cohort or how many cohorts you run (either multiple per year, or opening new locations).

Really felt like a bit of a racket that had found what was almost an arbitrage: between the inability of Bay Area companies to find local talent, the huge costs and risk associated trying to relocate people via H1B, and the desire for people to re-skill at any cost because tech jobs/salaries were distorting everything else in their city.

Sure it's not a $1B outcome. It's a pretty profitable and repeatable business, and especially given the limited downside risk (mostly carried by the students, who've already paid).

I've had a look at the books at a few different types of training style companies and the economics are always grim. It's one of those businesses where to the outsider, it's impossible to believe they're not spinning off unbelievable amounts of cash but they are always pretty marginal.

As additional evidence for this, the number of 1B+ exits in this space can be counted on one hand. General Assembly, for example, was acquired for ~$400M and it was one of the largest players. There was a player from Utah whose name eludes me now that had a, I think, ~$2B exit but that might be the only one.

> There was a player from Utah whose name eludes me now that had a, I think, ~$2B exit but that might be the only one.

Are you thinking of Instructure? They're based in Salt Lake City, and Marketwatch gives their current market cap as $1.86B

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was the one, thanks!

if you think 28 out of 30 enrollee's in every cohort getting 200k as their first gig is a repeatable business, you are delusional.

This is very generous, to donate your time like this. Just wanted to say you are doing a very good thing.

I tried to do something similar, but more as a mentoring program. I’ve been thinking about trying to do that with my company (having us mentor people outside the company—as a recruiting tool).

One thing I suggest is focus on code reviews for your students. I think that’s the best way to tech programming. They’ve already taken a stab at something, so writing comments on how it can be done better and why that way is better is much more useful than a lecture about something abstract.

You nailed it. I focus on code reviews and I agree that its the best way to teach programing. It teaches them how to structure their code to be maintainable. Just getting it to work is not good enough, you have to think about the engineer who is going to take over your code one day.

This is very cool! How did you choose the curriculum that you are following?

I made it over time based on observations with my coworkers and my personal work experience (I'm currently a tech lead at PayPal, formerly L4 at Google). What I want to do is to teach people to become good engineers, getting a job should be a side effect of that.

I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to show up at the library every day.

If neither you nor universities think that getting a job is more important than becoming a "good engineer" (whatever that means), then who is left to fill this void but the bootcamps you disagree with?

I think if a bootcamp is good enough, it will feed people directly into jobs (possibly without even a technical interview). This is my dream, I have no idea how realistic it is. My library experience (and my work experience) is one giant experience to find out.

If I find some great engineers in the library and bring them into my team directly, will they do good work? If they prove to do good engineering, would it be a sustainable model to hire directly from our volunteer program?

If this works out, we could replicate this model in other public libraries as well.

The comments above are my moonshot ideas, I'm currently experimenting to see if it can be possible.

As someone making a somewhat-late-in-life career change (foisted upon me, of course), thanks for the site!

I'm not a beginner coder, but I haven't worked on projects in a team environment before, so I signed up on c0d3.com hoping to gain some experience.

Any pointers?

Not sure what pointers you are looking for, but you can start by saying hi in the chatroom.

If you think it is helpful, you can breeze through the lessons and exercises so you know / understand how other students use the curriculum, then work with the more senior students as a team on c0d3.com and build features to make it better. Proudly put all your contributions (features, mentoring work, authoring work - if you contributed to the course material) on your resume.

Thank you for the inspiration. I'm tempted now to start doing the same myself.

Do it! We can share ideas :)

You can reach me via email: library at zheng.network

This is such a great demonstration of the value of public libraries.

Kudos to you for your actions. Much respect.

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