As a neighbor and local supporter of Iron Yard Tampa Bay (St. Petersburg FL), losing our growing economy's only code school was a big letdown this week. In my

As a neighbor and local supporter of Iron Yard Tampa Bay (St. Petersburg FL), losing our growing economy's only code school was a big letdown this week. In my experience, admittedly Iron Yard graduates were often too green to join our small engineering team (and we don't utilize .NET or Ruby). I'd like to say we have better training and mentorship for junior devs, but we don't yet. However, when we listed an iOS position, it was The Iron Yard's campus director who spread our ad through their national network. She found an Atlanta Iron Yard graduate who spent two years at a large company, receiving on the job training that now qualified her for our role. The Iron Yard St. Pete was meaningful in that it provided a starting point for people in our area to make a career change and offered a meeting place for tech (located in the same building as our co-working space). The closure for us here locally is less about losing a code school and more about losing an anchor in our developing startup ecosystem.