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2016 - While working as an engineer at Google, I decided to start a free coding bootcamp on the side. I believed I could teach anyone how to become a software e

2016 - While working as an engineer at Google, I decided to start a free coding bootcamp on the side. I believed I could teach anyone how to become a software engineer so I made a public post asking if anyone is interested in learning how to code and about 30 people showed up at my house. While I was at work in Mountain View, 30 people strangers used my house as a coding bootcamp. 2017 - 30 students were hard to manage and students started leaving. It bothered me, so I quit my job at Google to focus on this full time. I reached out to the students who left to see what happened and one of the reasons was money. So for the students who are struggling financially, I started giving them 2k / mo stipend. 2018 - Paying 9 students 2k / month used up all of my savings so I had to look for a new job. Also started a non-profit to write off all my payments as donations. This helped alot because to keep paying the students I took out my 401k savings and the donations helped offset the tax penalty. 2019 - Students got jobs. Realized that I want to train students to become good solid engineers that I want to work with instead of gamifying the interview process. Instead of padding resume and LeetCode, our curriculum focuses on building good products with good tests and maintainable code. 2020 - Ran into financial trouble, had to let all the students go and gave them a 3 month notice. Now I'm primarily lurking on the chatroom of our final product, helping and teaching students who are following my curriculum. https://c0d3.com https://c0d3.com Next year I will get more RSUs and with that money I plan to kickoff a free code house, a safe environment for students to learn (much like 42) with free food and housing.

gibolt 6y ago
How are you planning to keep this sustainable for the long term? Burning out one's personal finances doesn't sound like it furthers your mission/passion.
- songzme 6y ago
  The way I see it, I'm paying to study how people learn and how people's standing in society affects their learning. It is very interesting and definitely opened my eyes and helped change my philosophy in life. I haven't learned enough to confidently strategize a way to keep this sustainable, because I noticed a pattern between people who don't do well and their personality (but I can't quite put my finger on it). I'm still observing and trying to figure this one out.
  - gibolt 6y ago
    You probably should add a 5-20% take of atttendees first 6 month or year pay. You could argue that is 'expensive', but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost. Your incentives are aligned, and this could help you enroll even more students. The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse.
    - songzme 6y ago
      > ...but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost. I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. I'd rather have them keep their money so they can help improve the world in their own way. > The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse. Worse for who? Society? I don't believe it is my job to fix societal problems. I can help in a way that makes it fun and interesting for me and if any of the graduates want to continue providing the service and charge 5-20% of the students pay, they are free to launch their own service. Everything is open source.
      - mkolodny 6y ago
        > I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. What do you think students shouldn't be paying for? Education? Some people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for learning materials and a certificate of completion. Up front. With no guarantee of future income. And no refund if you don't finish. Offering learning materials that only cost money if you profit from them seems like a much better alternative.
        songzme 6y ago
        I don't think students should pay for education, correct. I would enjoy life more if education was free and I'm free to pursue whatever I wanted to learn. It would be even cooler if I was paid to learn so teachers get to experiment with all different ways to teach and they are fully vested into my growth.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply? I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required. I contemplated doing something similar in London (not paying money per-se, but providing a location & good hardware for the students to use) but was kind of worried about ending up with an office full of freeloaders that just enjoy the amenities provided without caring about the curriculum itself. I've experimented with a few people I know that are stuck in bullshit jobs and gave them hardware, software and any books/resources they'd need to learn programming, but while they are very grateful for it I haven't actually seen any progress or frankly even long-term motivation.
- dvt 6y ago
  > Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply? I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required. I think people that never worked in the public sector, particularly in something like social services, overestimate the goodness (for the lack of a better word) of average people. People that do this usually come from highly-competitive and privileged backgrounds -- top tier universities, FAANG jobs, etc. And the assumption is that "anyone else" could have made it, too! Everyone is just as stubborn, just as motivated, and just as smart. But FAANG jobs and top-tier universities are self-selecting. There's a nugget of truth here, and we shouldn't forget what Rawls taught us about the Veil of Ignorance[1], but the reality is that social mobility (particularly in the West) is at a historic all time high. I'm not saying don't donate or don't give back (as a Christian, I feel a moral obligation, in fact, to donate to the less fortunate), but just that implementing welfare policies or -- as @songzme did -- giving resources away, is pretty tricky. Not only do you want to avoid the Free-rider problem[2], but you also want to make sure that people won't end up being wholly dependent on the resources they're the beneficiaries of. [1] https://fs.blog/2017/10/veil-ignorance/ https://fs.blog/2017/10/veil-ignorance/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/
  - songzme 6y ago
    You comment was downvoted but I upvoted it because you bring up a valid point. I've noticed first hand the free-rider problem and I have mixed feelings. I thought it was interesting that all students with the free-rider symptoms did not feel good about free-riding. They tried to help out and feel bad when we meet for 1-1 and they haven't done much. Sometimes, I feel like I'm actually fighting against FAANG because these companies are spending billions trying to capture as much of my students' attention as possible and I have to spend more time helping manage my students out of these distractions. I'm actually starting to wonder if the free-rider problem exists because of FAANG creating addictive content and the media glorifying a certain lifestyle. If students were not exposed to these distractions, would they still be free-riding? I honestly don't think so and my next year's plan is to try and simulate this.
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
You are one retarded bastard. Bleeding yourself dry for random strangers. Fucking cuck. I’m sure you have family members who would have benefited from the 18k/month you wasted on trying to pay people to like you. I guess you don’t care about your family. You are a miserable atomized bastard wandering aimlessly through life. Your self-destructive behavior is a cry for help and basically identical to someone preparing to commit suicide, you’re just too cowardly to take the final step. You belong in a mental institution and you should never be allowed to vote again. Fucking lunatic.
jahewson 6y ago
Please stop throwing good money after bad. You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it! Go find yourself a more business-minded partner in this undertaking so that it can be financially sustainable. Noble intentions are great but in the end you will be left with nothing and unable to help anybody.
- songzme 6y ago
  > You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it! I haven't proven anything yet and I have learned alot. You seem to have reached a conclusion though, care to share how?
  - askafriend 6y ago
    You spent 4 years failing to find a sustainable, repeatable model with economics that work. Right now it’s a matter of when you burn out, not if.
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  The only thing here that "doesn't work" is that there aren't enough people like the OP. He's helped dozens of people learn a worthwhile, mind expanding skill that pays well enough to have a family. Let the man help people. He's got plenty of time to make back money and I highly doubt that after helping all these people that in the end he'll be left with nothing. He already has more than most people.
sizzle 6y ago
I sincerely hope the students that went on to become full time developers paid you back handsomely to pay it forward to future students, otherwise you have nothing to retire with if you sacrificed your life savings. I hope your altruism is rewarded because you are such a good person for doing this. Maybe take donations and create a fund from wealthy tech enthusiasts?
- songzme 6y ago
  Thanks, but I've come to realize that I'm not altruistic so I want to clarify so you don't leave with the wrong message. I'm using my wealth to build a learning environment and remove obstacles so I can observe what the true barriers to learning are. I essentially created my own lab because it was too much work to convince others to create it for me. So, I'm not the good person that my story seems to convey, just curious.
  - 3pt14159 6y ago
    Well I for one am happy that your deep seated curiosity is so aligned with an altruistic cause that despite my typical trait of believing people when they describe their motivations I still have some doubt about your true motivations. I've taught a number of people software or data science for free. And yes, teaching is its own reward and seeing people that you've taught land gigs as data scientists at companies like Shopify is gratifying, but ultimately it would be dishonest of me to say that my teaching others was purely for selfish reasons. It wasn't. I like helping people and I wish more people did too. Thanks for doing what you're doing and please keep pushing forward to make the world a better place.
searchableguy 6y ago
Thanks for doing this. This is really awesome of you but you need to find some way to subsidize the cost in the long term. Have you got any ideas? I am thinking for-profit divisions such as a hiring agency (you will be able to fix the hiring processes) and training services for interns and juniors of companies, etc. You can sell enterprise subscriptions that companies can pay to give their employees access to training material whilst still providing an open source version via GPL. Maybe crowd funding. Some kind of lambda school agreement or help spin off companies from projects and take a cut. I would love to talk more about this. I am starting a similar endeavour as a hobby. Email is in the profile.
- songzme 6y ago
  will reach out and we can bounce ideas :)
vmception 6y ago
This was one of my dreams, using my excess wealth to do some form of subsidized education with my twist on it, as an alternative to hoarding it all and ignoring requests for handouts, providing no opportunity to earn the money. Thanks for spelling out the financial disaster that is, pass.
- songzme 6y ago
  good. It is difficult, but interesting.
tttp 6y ago
Really nice! "After completing our curriculum, you will gain access to our internal code repository that powers c0d3.com" Out of curiosity, why aren't you opensourcing the code? That would make it easier for your students to showcase their contributions and how they communicate. My personal experience when I was a gsoc admin was that it was hard to get the students stick around after the end of the summer, do you manage and have some tips to share?
- songzme 6y ago
  it is open source: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app It used to be closed source, but it was only because I wasn't confident about the quality of the codebase. Now it is much better. > My personal experience when I was a gsoc admin was that it was hard to get the students stick around after the end of the summer, do you manage and have some tips to share? First you should realize that some people just don't really see the point in coding. These people are just going to wander off. The ones who are dedicated though, its important to spend time to talk to them and make sure your project aligns with their goals. Then they will contribute above and beyond. Our project mission is simple because most students want an engineering job: Working on c0d3.com repository will not only help you gain the skills as a software engineer, it also counts as work experience and makes your resume look amazing. Does your gsoc project lead to a full time job conversion? 100% of the people I know who did gsoc did it with only one goal in mind: get a full time job.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
I think what you're doing is absolutely brilliant, despite the financial difficulties, which are not your fault, because you're a programmer -- not a businessman (don't feel bad, I'm sort of in the same boat, and many users/posters of HN are in that same boat too...) But the fact that you're helping others is absolutely awesome! More power to you, and I'm sure if you persist down this path, you'll figure out better ways to handle the financial side of things! Business is its own learning process -- much like programming was a long time ago! <g> Anyway, best of luck with your endeavors!
- songzme 6y ago
  thank you!

gibolt 6y ago

How are you planning to keep this sustainable for the long term? Burning out one's personal finances doesn't sound like it furthers your mission/passion.

songzme 6y ago
The way I see it, I'm paying to study how people learn and how people's standing in society affects their learning. It is very interesting and definitely opened my eyes and helped change my philosophy in life. I haven't learned enough to confidently strategize a way to keep this sustainable, because I noticed a pattern between people who don't do well and their personality (but I can't quite put my finger on it). I'm still observing and trying to figure this one out.
- gibolt 6y ago
  You probably should add a 5-20% take of atttendees first 6 month or year pay. You could argue that is 'expensive', but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost. Your incentives are aligned, and this could help you enroll even more students. The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse.
  - songzme 6y ago
    > ...but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost. I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. I'd rather have them keep their money so they can help improve the world in their own way. > The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse. Worse for who? Society? I don't believe it is my job to fix societal problems. I can help in a way that makes it fun and interesting for me and if any of the graduates want to continue providing the service and charge 5-20% of the students pay, they are free to launch their own service. Everything is open source.
    - mkolodny 6y ago
      > I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. What do you think students shouldn't be paying for? Education? Some people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for learning materials and a certificate of completion. Up front. With no guarantee of future income. And no refund if you don't finish. Offering learning materials that only cost money if you profit from them seems like a much better alternative.
      - songzme 6y ago
        I don't think students should pay for education, correct. I would enjoy life more if education was free and I'm free to pursue whatever I wanted to learn. It would be even cooler if I was paid to learn so teachers get to experiment with all different ways to teach and they are fully vested into my growth.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply? I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required. I contemplated doing something similar in London (not paying money per-se, but providing a location & good hardware for the students to use) but was kind of worried about ending up with an office full of freeloaders that just enjoy the amenities provided without caring about the curriculum itself. I've experimented with a few people I know that are stuck in bullshit jobs and gave them hardware, software and any books/resources they'd need to learn programming, but while they are very grateful for it I haven't actually seen any progress or frankly even long-term motivation.

dvt 6y ago
> Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply? I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required. I think people that never worked in the public sector, particularly in something like social services, overestimate the goodness (for the lack of a better word) of average people. People that do this usually come from highly-competitive and privileged backgrounds -- top tier universities, FAANG jobs, etc. And the assumption is that "anyone else" could have made it, too! Everyone is just as stubborn, just as motivated, and just as smart. But FAANG jobs and top-tier universities are self-selecting. There's a nugget of truth here, and we shouldn't forget what Rawls taught us about the Veil of Ignorance[1], but the reality is that social mobility (particularly in the West) is at a historic all time high. I'm not saying don't donate or don't give back (as a Christian, I feel a moral obligation, in fact, to donate to the less fortunate), but just that implementing welfare policies or -- as @songzme did -- giving resources away, is pretty tricky. Not only do you want to avoid the Free-rider problem[2], but you also want to make sure that people won't end up being wholly dependent on the resources they're the beneficiaries of. [1] https://fs.blog/2017/10/veil-ignorance/ https://fs.blog/2017/10/veil-ignorance/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/
- songzme 6y ago
  You comment was downvoted but I upvoted it because you bring up a valid point. I've noticed first hand the free-rider problem and I have mixed feelings. I thought it was interesting that all students with the free-rider symptoms did not feel good about free-riding. They tried to help out and feel bad when we meet for 1-1 and they haven't done much. Sometimes, I feel like I'm actually fighting against FAANG because these companies are spending billions trying to capture as much of my students' attention as possible and I have to spend more time helping manage my students out of these distractions. I'm actually starting to wonder if the free-rider problem exists because of FAANG creating addictive content and the media glorifying a certain lifestyle. If students were not exposed to these distractions, would they still be free-riding? I honestly don't think so and my next year's plan is to try and simulate this.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

You are one retarded bastard. Bleeding yourself dry for random strangers. Fucking cuck. I’m sure you have family members who would have benefited from the 18k/month you wasted on trying to pay people to like you. I guess you don’t care about your family. You are a miserable atomized bastard wandering aimlessly through life. Your self-destructive behavior is a cry for help and basically identical to someone preparing to commit suicide, you’re just too cowardly to take the final step. You belong in a mental institution and you should never be allowed to vote again. Fucking lunatic.

jahewson 6y ago

Please stop throwing good money after bad. You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it! Go find yourself a more business-minded partner in this undertaking so that it can be financially sustainable. Noble intentions are great but in the end you will be left with nothing and unable to help anybody.

songzme 6y ago
> You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it! I haven't proven anything yet and I have learned alot. You seem to have reached a conclusion though, care to share how?
- askafriend 6y ago
  You spent 4 years failing to find a sustainable, repeatable model with economics that work. Right now it’s a matter of when you burn out, not if.
3pt14159 6y ago
The only thing here that "doesn't work" is that there aren't enough people like the OP. He's helped dozens of people learn a worthwhile, mind expanding skill that pays well enough to have a family. Let the man help people. He's got plenty of time to make back money and I highly doubt that after helping all these people that in the end he'll be left with nothing. He already has more than most people.

sizzle 6y ago

I sincerely hope the students that went on to become full time developers paid you back handsomely to pay it forward to future students, otherwise you have nothing to retire with if you sacrificed your life savings. I hope your altruism is rewarded because you are such a good person for doing this. Maybe take donations and create a fund from wealthy tech enthusiasts?

songzme 6y ago
Thanks, but I've come to realize that I'm not altruistic so I want to clarify so you don't leave with the wrong message. I'm using my wealth to build a learning environment and remove obstacles so I can observe what the true barriers to learning are. I essentially created my own lab because it was too much work to convince others to create it for me. So, I'm not the good person that my story seems to convey, just curious.
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  Well I for one am happy that your deep seated curiosity is so aligned with an altruistic cause that despite my typical trait of believing people when they describe their motivations I still have some doubt about your true motivations. I've taught a number of people software or data science for free. And yes, teaching is its own reward and seeing people that you've taught land gigs as data scientists at companies like Shopify is gratifying, but ultimately it would be dishonest of me to say that my teaching others was purely for selfish reasons. It wasn't. I like helping people and I wish more people did too. Thanks for doing what you're doing and please keep pushing forward to make the world a better place.

searchableguy 6y ago

Thanks for doing this. This is really awesome of you but you need to find some way to subsidize the cost in the long term. Have you got any ideas? I am thinking for-profit divisions such as a hiring agency (you will be able to fix the hiring processes) and training services for interns and juniors of companies, etc. You can sell enterprise subscriptions that companies can pay to give their employees access to training material whilst still providing an open source version via GPL. Maybe crowd funding. Some kind of lambda school agreement or help spin off companies from projects and take a cut. I would love to talk more about this. I am starting a similar endeavour as a hobby. Email is in the profile.

songzme 6y ago
will reach out and we can bounce ideas :)

vmception 6y ago

This was one of my dreams, using my excess wealth to do some form of subsidized education with my twist on it, as an alternative to hoarding it all and ignoring requests for handouts, providing no opportunity to earn the money. Thanks for spelling out the financial disaster that is, pass.

songzme 6y ago
good. It is difficult, but interesting.

tttp 6y ago

Really nice! "After completing our curriculum, you will gain access to our internal code repository that powers c0d3.com" Out of curiosity, why aren't you opensourcing the code? That would make it easier for your students to showcase their contributions and how they communicate. My personal experience when I was a gsoc admin was that it was hard to get the students stick around after the end of the summer, do you manage and have some tips to share?

songzme 6y ago
it is open source: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app It used to be closed source, but it was only because I wasn't confident about the quality of the codebase. Now it is much better. > My personal experience when I was a gsoc admin was that it was hard to get the students stick around after the end of the summer, do you manage and have some tips to share? First you should realize that some people just don't really see the point in coding. These people are just going to wander off. The ones who are dedicated though, its important to spend time to talk to them and make sure your project aligns with their goals. Then they will contribute above and beyond. Our project mission is simple because most students want an engineering job: Working on c0d3.com repository will not only help you gain the skills as a software engineer, it also counts as work experience and makes your resume look amazing. Does your gsoc project lead to a full time job conversion? 100% of the people I know who did gsoc did it with only one goal in mind: get a full time job.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

I think what you're doing is absolutely brilliant, despite the financial difficulties, which are not your fault, because you're a programmer -- not a businessman (don't feel bad, I'm sort of in the same boat, and many users/posters of HN are in that same boat too...) But the fact that you're helping others is absolutely awesome! More power to you, and I'm sure if you persist down this path, you'll figure out better ways to handle the financial side of things! Business is its own learning process -- much like programming was a long time ago! <g> Anyway, best of luck with your endeavors!

songzme 6y ago
thank you!