By: E.B. Boyd
Via: Fast Company

Tech companies can’t find enough engineers. So why not train them yourself? For free. And then make $20K a pop on recruiting fees.


The shortage of engineers is a perennial source of woe in Silicon Valley. Once they’re done combing the graduating classes at places like Stanford and MIT, tech companies start sniffing in each other’s backyards, hoping to lure over desperately needed talent with juicy salaries and tasty perks.

When David Albert and two partners joined Y Combinator, a VC firm that invests a small amount of money in a large number of startups in exchange for stakes in the companies, in the summer of 2010, they thought they could help solve that problem with a sophisticated algorithm that would match candidates and jobs. But what they’ve come up instead with is something surprisingly analog: a real-world school, based in New York, where they spend three months at a time helping people who already program get better.

What’s revolutionary about the program is both its business and operational models. There are certainly other schools that have set up shop recently, to help crank out engineering talent. In Chicago, Code Academy offers 11-week courses in web design and development, and at San Francisco’s Dev Bootcamp, students learn the fine points of Ruby on Rails and HTML5.

But at Hacker School, there’s no tuition. Students attend for free. (Though Albert and his partners, Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock and Sonali Sridhar, do vet for talent and aptitude.) The three make money through Hackruiter, a seperate [sic] arm of their venture, when companies like Airbnb snap up the participants. (The average recruiting fee is $20,000, the industry standard.)

And once school opens, there’s no instruction. Instead, participants work side-by-side on personal projects, usually involving open-source software. The learning comes by being jammed together in the same place and having smart people nearby to learn from and ask questions of. “It’s like a writers retreat for computer programmers,” Albert tells Fast Company. “You don’t learn English at a writers retreat, but you hone your craft.”

The venture has attracted funding from Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Founder Collective, which includes entrepreneurs like Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake and Meetup cofounder and CEO Scott Heiferman

David Lee, of SV Angel, tells Fast Company that Hacker School and Hackruiter are emerging at a time when the tech world is rethinking the conventional wisdom that says you have to graduate from a school of higher learning in order to become a programmer. “There’s not the same sort of blind faith that people had in institutions and the conventional way of doing things,” Lee says. “There are now ways of demonstrating that you’re the best coder without going to a four-year college.”

Hacker School’s first session–a test drive–took place last summer with about half a dozen participants. Just about all–five out of six–were later hired. Same with a second session of 12 people. The third session starts next week with two dozen students.

Given that there are no classes, it might look to outsiders like the school’s founders aren’t really doing anything, and still earning some cushy dough for their efforts. What’s to prevent someone else from copying the idea and stealing Hacker School’s clientele? The answer: It actually takes skill to create an environment where self-motivated learners can develop skills and get better, Lee says. “It’s like throwing a party. Some people do it better than others.”

To that end, Albert and his partners plan to see if they can grow the school to 200 students. Along the way–in true Y Combinator iterate-as-you-go-style–the business model might evolve.

“The goal in the long term is to create an awesome school for programmers and hopefully inspire more people to want to be craftspeople,” Albert says. “How it’s going to do that in the long run, we’re not exacty [sic] sure.” But as long as the school pays for itself (and their expenses are low–mostly just salaries for the three founders), he explains, “that gives us license to experiment.”

By Catherine Rampell
via economix.blogs.nytimes.com

We’ve written several blog posts about the small share of American college students majoring in the so-called STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — with the implicit premise that more bachelor’s degrees in technical fields is both desirable on a macroeconomic level and is professionally advantageous at the individual worker level. A former dean of an engineering school suggests that thinking may be wrong.

Daniel Jelski, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and previous dean of New Paltz’s School of Science & Engineering, argues in a New Geography essay that humanities degrees may be more important for tomorrow’s job market than is generally believed.

He bases this on three “Laws of Future Employment”:

Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do. Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.) Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

The implications of Laws #1 and #2, he says, are that STEM jobs will not be particularly safe in the future, since he believes they are “easily computerized and tradable.”

The more valuable skill sets, he argues, will be those that computers can’t offer, like empathy and sociability — skills that you might be more likely to learn in an English course than one in linear algebra.

By Liz Dwyer, Education Editor
via www.good.is



With the unemployment rate hovering near the 10 percent mark—and hiring freezes and layoffs still the norm—an increasing number of college grads are turning to the one employer who’s always hiring, even in tough economic times: Uncle Sam. The number of bachelor’s degree holders enlisting in a branch of the United States Armed Services is on the rise.

Over the past two years, the Army’s seen the biggest spike in diploma-holding enlistees. In 2010, almost 6,000 college graduates signed up for duty, 2,000 more than in 2008 when the economy still seemed healthy. The Navy saw 1,425 college graduates enlist, up from 1,000 in 2008 and the Air Force bumped its college graduate enlistment up to 900 from 2008′s total of 553.

We may be at war, but Ben Harris, a political science and communications double major from Ohio State University, isn’t dwelling on the possibility of dying in combat. He graduated two years ago, and given the realities of the recession, he had to settle for a job at a “chicken-finger place” and shack up with his parents. Instead of heading off to graduate school to wait out the tough economy—and rack up more student loans—Harris told the Columbus Dispatch that he’s considering joining the Army or the Air Force because, “I’ll get more skills and more education.”

The perks—VA benefits, access to military base stores, preference for government jobs, and a reduction in student loans (the Army will repay up to $65,000 of a soldier’s qualifying student loans, the most of the armed services branches)—are undeniable. Plus, when you enlist with a bachelor’s degree, you enter as an officer, which means you receive higher pay.

The only branch to not see a significant enrollment bump is the Marines. According to Maj. John Caldwell, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, “Young men and women join our ranks to become a United States Marine. They do not see the Marine Corps as a path to something else but rather as a destination unto itself.”

photo (cc) via Flickr user Boston Public Library

By Catherine Rampell
via nytimes.com

Still don’t believe us when we say that college is worth it? Just look at the latest jobs numbers.

In December, workers with bachelor’s degrees or other postsecondary educations gained jobs. On the other hand, the number of workers with high school diplomas or less who were employed fell.

Here are the numbers:



Workers with at least some higher education have been doing better than high school grads for a while now, too.

Over the last year, an additional 1,068,000 bachelor’s degree recipients have found work, for example, while the number of employed workers with no more than a high school diploma fell by 551,000.

Interestingly, though, the least-skilled workers have also added jobs over the last year. The number of high school dropouts who had jobs rose by 126,000 from December 2010 to December 2011:



It’s not clear why those with the very least education would be doing better than those with high school diplomas.

The numbers do support David Autor‘s argument that the work force is hollowing out, producing very low-skill service jobs that generally cannot be done by machines or workers abroad (like food services) and higher-skilled jobs that require greater schooling (like medical jobs).

By Motoko Rich
via nytimes.com

Private Sector Gets Job Skills; Public Gets Bill



When companies are deciding where to build new facilities or whether to expand in places where they already have factories or offices, states compete to shower them with incentives like tax breaks and help buying land. Increasingly, companies have come to expect that state and local governments will pay for job training, too.

For Sunday’s paper, I wrote about a $1 million customized training program that North Carolina designed for the benefit of Caterpillar, Inc., the global industrial equipment maker. The company opened a new plant in Winston-Salem in November, and the state is paying to train nearly 400 workers who will make axles for mining trucks.

North Carolina is also spending about $1.5 million to train workers for a new Honda Aircraft plant in Greensboro. About 163 workers went through training at Guilford Technical Community College in various areas including jet assembly and electrical system installation in the hopes of securing a job. Because Honda delayed the opening of its production lines, some of those workers, like Kent McDaniel, featured in this report from the video journalists at Purple States, decided to seek work elsewhere. Others, like Linda Merritt, stuck it out and are now working at Honda.

By Catherine Rampell
via nytimes.com

Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force.

“I was working part-time at Starbucks for a year and a half,” said Laura Baker, 24, who started a master’s program in strategic communications this fall at the University of Denver. “I wasn’t willing to just stay there. I had to do something.”

Many economists initially thought that the shrinking labor force — which drove down November’s unemployment rate — was caused primarily by discouraged older workers giving up on the job market. Instead, many of the workers on the sidelines are young people upgrading their skills, which could portend something like the postwar economic boom, when millions of World War II veterans went to college through the G.I. Bill instead of immediately entering, and overwhelming, the job market.

Now, as was the case then, one sex is the primary beneficiary. Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. The longer-term consequences, economists say, are that the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.

For now at least, many young women still feel that the deck is stacked against them.

“Almost everyone in my program is female,” said Ms. Baker, who hopes a master’s degree will help her get a job running communications at a nonprofit group. “That’s partly because of the program, but also because as women we feel like we have to be more educated to be able to compete in really any field.”

Women still earn significantly less than men. And in the two and a half years since the recovery officially began, men age 16 to 24 have gained 178,000 jobs, while their female counterparts have lost 255,000 positions, according to the Labor Department.

Apparently discouraged by scant openings, 412,000 young women have dropped out of the labor force entirely in the last two and a half years, meaning they are not looking for work.

Among young men, the labor force fell during the recession but has been flat since the recovery began. Today, across all age groups, an unemployed female worker is 35 percent more likely to drop out of the labor force in the next month than an unemployed male worker.

Some studies suggest that women are pickier about their job choices than men. Already earning lower pay, women are less willing to work when wages fall further, especially if they are able to rely on an employed (and these days, often newly re-employed) husband. Women are also more reluctant to work night or weekend shifts, according to government data on how Americans spend their time, partly because they have more family responsibilities.

“The jobs out there just aren’t very good, and men seem more willing to take them for whatever reason,” said Jonathan L. Willis, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “The women are looking at those same jobs and saying, ‘I’ll be more productive elsewhere.’ ”

Then there are societal influences that affect a person’s willingness to take a lesser job or return to school.

“There is still this heavy cultural message that men should be out there earning money and supporting themselves, and they feel more distressed by losing their breadwinner role,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. “We’ve made much more progress overcoming the ‘feminine mystique’ than this masculine mystique.”

While these roles evolve, community colleges are reporting record enrollment.

Both men and women are going back to school, but the growth in enrollment is significantly larger for women (who dominated college campuses even before the financial crisis). In the last two years, the number of women ages 18 to 24 in school rose by 130,000, compared with a gain of 53,000 for young men.

The education gap aside, in some ways young women will already have an advantage over men in the coming decade. Many of the occupations expected to have the most growth, like home health aides and dental hygienists, have traditionally been filled by women. That is not to say that men cannot take those positions, but they may not want to.

“Today young girls are told they can do anything, go into any occupation. But if boys express any interest in traditionally female occupations, they get teased and bullied,” Ms. Coontz said. “Lots of guys are not understanding what’s happening to traditional low-income or middle-income male jobs.”

Jobs in the male-dominated manufacturing industry and in other sectors involving manual labor have been, and still are, in structural decline. These careers can also be hard to maintain indefinitely because youthful strength eventually fades. And now many manufacturing workers do not have pensions to carry them through when their bodies do break down.

“It doesn’t surprise me that in a poor economy women are ramping up their schooling,” said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization. “The real question is: Why aren’t more men doing that too?”

The main risk in going back to school is the accompanying student loan debt. Tuition increases have been outpacing inflation for years, a trend accelerated by state budget cuts.

“Our funding per student has been cut 25 percent in the last three years,” said Stephen Scott, the president of Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, N.C., which is one of the fastest-growing community colleges in the country. Consequently, class sizes have risen, and so has tuition. But the students — again, mostly women — still pour in.

“We now have 6,000 students on a waiting list because we didn’t have the resources to offer more classes,” he said.

Those attending more expensive private schools, like Ms. Baker, will have an even tougher time guaranteeing that their educational investment pays off. Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.

“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”