Calling All Teachers

Photo by msr.

Today, the mirRoR blog features a guest blog post. We’ve never done that before but we think our friend Michael Kaiser-Nyman has an idea worth sharing! We first met Michael when he was hiring developers earlier this year. Recently he approached us with a great idea about Rails education and we’ve been helping him brainstorm strategy. We think Michael’s program would be enriching for the Rails community and we’re happy to support it. Read the details below and contact Michael if you’re interested in learning more!

Every once in a while, there’s an opportunity to do enormous good while turning a profit. Teaching people software development may be one of these rare opportunities. Let me explain.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a software developer, and you’ve probably got it made. You’re in the fastest growing job market in the country, with wages rising at a speed to match. A couple years ago, when the economy slumped, you might have had a bit of trouble finding a job. But now you’re pretty much set, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon: as Marc Andreessen said, “Software is eating the world.”

At the same time, unemployment among the rest of the country is around 10%. The “natural” rate of unemployment, the rate to be expected because of normal job turnover (as opposed to the recession), used to be around 4%, but economists think that it’s more like 7.5% now. The main reason is that a large segment of the population doesn’t have the skills employers need, as outsourcing and technology have eliminated a huge number of low-skilled jobs that simply will never exist again.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s easier than ever to learn one of the most-demanded skills - programming. It used to take a very special type of person to understand concepts like pointers and memory management; now, we have languages with English-like syntax that deal with these problems for us. Very few people can write C on Unix. Many more people can learn Rails on a Mac.

I’m not under any delusion that the entire unemployed 10% of our country could quickly become developers (although I’d bet many of them could with time). But surely plenty of mid-skilled people in dead-end office jobs, or our current crop of recent college grads working as servers and bartenders, have the minds and the motivation. If only someone would teach them.

But there is no school that offers long-term, in-person classes to non-developers to teach the skills they need to get jobs. Sure, there are some fantastic strides being made in this direction, from one-day workshops like Railsbridge to fantastic online training videos like Treehouse. But every existing program either relies on self-teaching with online classes, focuses on developers coming from other languages, or isn’t long enough to teach students everything they need to know to get a job.

So, here’s my hypothesis: a good instructor, with the help of a TA, could take 20 non-programmers for 3 hours a day, 4 days a week, and turn them into employable, entry-level developers in 6 months.

Let me lay that out again, in more detail. 1 teacher and 1 TA would teach a class of 20 students. Classes would be Monday through Thursday, from 6 to 9pm, for 6 months. The first half would be working through a text like the Ruby on Rails Tutorial to learn the basics of technologies like Ruby, Rails, TDD, HTML, CSS, Git, and Heroku. The second half would be working on a project of students’ own choosing, pairing with another student and getting help from the instructors as they went. The goal would be to place them in entry-level jobs or internships at the end.

Before you start to point out all the ways this plan should be changed and the reasons why it won’t work, let me just say: you’re right. There are a million different ways the class could be laid out - shorter, longer, different technologies, different format - and I’m open to all of them. And there are even more reasons the class won’t succeed - too hard to find good teachers, too hard to find good students, too hard to place entry-level developers - but we won’t know until we try. Nobody has done this before, and the opportunity is too great not to give it a shot.

Here’s where you come in. I’m not a developer, and I’m not a teacher. I’m CEO of Impact Dialing, a company that builds software for heavy phone calling operations, like political campaigns, fundraisers, and salespeople. Ever since I discovered how difficult it is to hire developers, and how relatively easy it is to learn to program, the idea for this class has been bouncing around in my head. But while I know how to run a business, I need a partner who’s passionate about teaching, who can help come up with a vision for how to educate one classroom of students and then, if we’re successful, scale to thousands of classrooms.

If that’s you, we should talk. Drop me a line at michaelrkn@gmail.com. Let’s figure out how to teach more people software development.