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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 stud

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.

StudentStuff 8y ago
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!
snazz 8y ago
You should post this as a Show HN. That’s a wonderful idea. I’m sure many people would gladly donate.
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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!
  - ENGNR 8y ago
    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
    - yjhoney 8y ago
      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.
space_fountain 8y ago
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
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
  - yjhoney 8y ago
    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.
- pkaye 8y ago
  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.
smudgymcscmudge 8y ago
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?
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
refurb 8y ago
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?
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
0xffff2 8y ago
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.
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
  - MaybiusStrip 8y ago
    Supply/demand is not the only thing driving the difference between the salaries of a middle-school teacher and a Google software engineer.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ma2rten 8y ago
      The difference is not as big as you might think: http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salary%2017-18.pdf http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salar...
mynameishere 8y ago
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.
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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/ https://www.meetup.com/Free-Code-Camp-SF/events/qzddrmyxpbgc... I do empathize with your concern though.
  - rhacker 8y ago
    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%.
    - 8y ago
tropdrop 8y ago
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-signing-bonuses-amid-big-teacher-8344621.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-offers-rare...
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
voxl 8y ago
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.
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
IloveHN84 8y ago
And how did you get back the original investment of 2k$/month?
- yjhoney 8y ago
  When it comes to nonprofits, donations and goodwill are not the same as investments.
czechdeveloper 8y ago
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.
- yjhoney 8y ago
  Advice: Don't shy away from doing something you want to do because you think you're not good enough / not qualified.
isostatic 8y ago
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)
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
ma2rten 8y ago
Do you screen the students who want to get into the program?
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
tru3_power 8y ago
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.

StudentStuff 8y ago

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!

snazz 8y ago

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

yjhoney 8y ago
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!
- ENGNR 8y ago
  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
  - yjhoney 8y ago
    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.

space_fountain 8y ago

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

yjhoney 8y ago
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.
- yjhoney 8y ago
  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.
pkaye 8y ago
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.

smudgymcscmudge 8y ago

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?

yjhoney 8y ago
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.

refurb 8y ago

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?

yjhoney 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

0xffff2 8y ago

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.

yjhoney 8y ago
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.
- MaybiusStrip 8y ago
  Supply/demand is not the only thing driving the difference between the salaries of a middle-school teacher and a Google software engineer.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ma2rten 8y ago
    The difference is not as big as you might think: http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salary%2017-18.pdf http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salar...

mynameishere 8y ago

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.

yjhoney 8y ago
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/ https://www.meetup.com/Free-Code-Camp-SF/events/qzddrmyxpbgc... I do empathize with your concern though.
- rhacker 8y ago
  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%.
  - 8y ago

tropdrop 8y ago

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-signing-bonuses-amid-big-teacher-8344621.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-offers-rare...

yjhoney 8y ago
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.

voxl 8y ago

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.

yjhoney 8y ago
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.

IloveHN84 8y ago

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

yjhoney 8y ago
When it comes to nonprofits, donations and goodwill are not the same as investments.

czechdeveloper 8y ago

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.

yjhoney 8y ago
Advice: Don't shy away from doing something you want to do because you think you're not good enough / not qualified.

isostatic 8y ago

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)

yjhoney 8y ago
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.

ma2rten 8y ago

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

yjhoney 8y ago
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.

tru3_power 8y ago

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.