Julie Charpentrat -
A spiring software engineers Kevin Yook and Becky Chen are hunched over a computer screen, discussing lines of code indecipherable to the average person.
The pair of twenty-somethings are students at the Holberton School in San Francisco, founded two years ago by French software engineers and poised to graduate its first class.
The goal: to level the playing field when it comes to access to the high-paying computer engineering jobs in Silicon Valley’s tech industry.
The method: anonymous admissions tests and no tuition fees. When students find a job, the school is paid 17 per cent of their income for three years.
The two-year programme is open to beginners, and its founders say it offers a path to the likes of Apple, LinkedIn and Nasa — sometimes even before the course is over as employers rush to snap up the best talent.
“Most people in the tech industry look like me: white and male,” said Sylvain Kalache, 29, one of the school’s co-founders.
But at Holberton, students are aged from 18 to 56, and 35 per cent of the more than 200 pupils are women.
More than half come from ethnic minority backgrounds.
In fact, many of the students — no doubt attracted by the prospect of a $70,000 internship salary or even $100,000 for a first job — are in retraining.
With former bartenders, artists and cashiers among his classmates, yoga teacher Lee Gaines, 30, is one of them.
“I was seeking something more financially secure because I had a dream of having a home and starting a family. What I was making as a yoga teacher wasn’t enough to support that,” Gaines said.
“I am confident I’ll find a job.”
Kalache said there are two traditional routes into programming: university and so-called ‘bootcamps’, which offer intensive training lasting a few weeks.
With university costing tens of thousands of dollars and a bootcamp’s fees averaging several thousand, both were out of the question for Jesse Hedden, 32.
A teacher by training, Hedden was studying in a corner of the school with Gaines, laptops on their knees as they worked to “debug” an Internet server.
Self-help and problem-solving skills are the name of the game here — with no teachers and no lessons reducing costs.
Around 150 mentors from Facebook, Google and Microsoft instead visit regularly to help students and update the curriculum at the school, which has received $13 million from investors. —AFP
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