Will WeThinkCode succeed?

[tridev]

I'm sure many of you guys have heard about the free 2 year coding training called WeThinkCode.
If you haven't, you can read about it at http://wethinkcode.co.za

It's based off the teaching model in Paris called 42 created by a French tech billionaire who gave the school a 70 million Euro donation to get started. You can read an article about 42 here. It's an interesting read.

Basically:
- there are no teachers
- you get given a fast internet connection and top of the range Mac to work on
- you are coding real world project after a two week bootcamps
- you learn coding though help from the other students and google

Two attractive chicks, a French and a South African, while drinking wine in a coffee shop decided to bring the model to South Africa.



For it to work you need the best programmers so the two are appearing all over SA TV, websites, newspapers and magazines to market it in order to get as many candidates to do the qualification test on their website.

So far about 9000+ people have written the test and 300 have passed and are invited to a 2 week bootcamp. That's about a 3 % invite rate.
At the bootcamp it will be decided if they are suitable and the end number will probably end up a quarter of those invited.

I can understand how the French school works as the founder is a billionaire as he is banking the alumni will give back to the school when some of the students startups succeed. It will attract top coders who want to skip boring classes and teachers in order to work on their own startups. The French founder would also be in a good position to invest in those startups.

The South African model is a bit different than the French as the funding is from companies where the students will get placed at after 2 years of coding. Instead of working to create their own startup like the French school the coders are working to learn to prepare themselves for their guaranteed job from companies sponsoring them.

I was thinking that it probably won't be the success like they are planning to for the following reasons:

- The end goal is to learn to get placed at a company rather than to start a startup. Since there are no teachers the expectation that students will help each other could be problematic if you consider students need to learn as much as possible by themselves to prepare for their guaranteed job.
If I was a student I know I wouldn't want to get distracted by helping weaker students all the time if self learning is the end goal

- Would a student who goes through a sexy tech school with the best equipment, having no one to listen to, be a good employee for a large corporate, where they have to start at the bottom getting given boring work and having to work off the 2 year bursary? I'm not so sure.

- It's in Joburg city center. An OKish place at best if you want to have a training institution with teachers but for a teaching model with no teachers where students need to be so much more productive than normal school, the 2+ hours wasted in traffic every day for 2 years doesn't seem very productive.

- If the goal is to get a job at a top company students could easily self study at home using the internet, get certified and apply to those companies themselves. Those smart enough would rather do that than wethinkcode as they won't get distracted by other students and won't have to waste time and money on transport.

- I find the online qualification test is difficult but it feels more like a puzzle than a programming test and one can easily cheat because you do the test at home on your own PC.
You can cheat if you register first with false info and see how to test works first before you decide to write the test.

The test is about 2 hours and consists of 2 parts
- The first a memory test consisting of +-50 block and about 5-10 lighting up. It gets played to you one block lighting up at a time and you have to afterwards select the blocks that lighted up. For me this was really hard but you can easily ace the test by putting sticky tape on your screen over the blocks that lighted up.
- I won't spoil the 2nd part but briefly explain it. it's basically selecting movement options into repeating procedural steps to get an object to cross over certain points. Since you don't have "if statements" in the game and just have the minimum available steps available, the order of the movement options plays a part, which makes it feel more like a puzzle game like sudoku than procedural steps.


What do you guys think. Will this model work in SA?

 

[mxc]

Education is in crisis the world over and in SA companies have no choice but to start to address the skills shortage themselves because government ain't going to do that. Its about time actually. Big business has big bucks and if they want to survive they will need to train their own staff.

Will this model work in SA? I hope it does but probably not. I reckon there will be a high drop-out rate. It appears that young people think studying is a waste of time and that they naturally "smart" or have "talent" and don't need any education. That's why we got people without degrees thinking they are engineers or business managers and generally screwing things up. After 2 years training they will probably expect to get R30k per month and drive a BMW etc. but they would have added 0 value to the companies involved, in fact it would just have cost them 2 year tuition.

A lot of these initiatives are marketing and publicity stunts - like a lot of these "start-up hackathons" - I reckon the sponsors will commit to two years and assess after that. Usually its more about the founders and sponsors than the participants. But I am a bit cynical. Maybe I should be more positive and give them the benefit of the doubt. If you have no cash, want to get into programming and have talent - I would say it definitely worth trying it out.

 

[skimread]

Education is in crisis the world over and in SA companies have no choice but to start to address the skills shortage themselves because government ain't going to do that. Its about time actually. Big business has big bucks and if they want to survive they will need to train their own staff.

Will this model work in SA? I hope it does but probably not. I reckon there will be a high drop-out rate. It appears that young people think studying is a waste of time and that they naturally "smart" or have "talent" and don't need any education. That's why we got people without degrees thinking they are engineers or business managers and generally screwing things up. After 2 years training they will probably expect to get R30k per month and drive a BMW etc. but they would have added 0 value to the companies involved, in fact it would just have cost them 2 year tuition.

A lot of these initiatives are marketing and publicity stunts - like a lot of these "start-up hackathons" - I reckon the sponsors will commit to two years and assess after that. Usually its more about the founders and sponsors than the participants. But I am a bit cynical. Maybe I should be more positive and give them the benefit of the doubt. If you have no cash, want to get into programming and have talent - I would say it definitely worth trying it out.

I'm not so sure I believe this skills shortage hype. One of the selling points the two are using, is saying there are about 70 000 programming positions in South African that cannot be filled because of a skills shortage.
I find this hard to believe. Lots of posted ads are fake ads from unethical recruiters or just duplicates. Ask anyone who decided to look for programming position. The best guys maybe get a handful of opportunities with decent salaries in between all the red herrings. Nothing near the 70 000 open positions claimed.

Also if you as a company you want to get IT workers and there is a shortage is it super easy for companies to get foreign Indian IT workers.

It's hard not to be sceptical when an attractive woman with a glamorous finance job and jetset lifestyle decides she want to change the world by entering a industry she's never been in and an industry which is notorious for fly by night training institutions.

I must give it to those two. It pretty amazing all the free media coverage and attention from IT companies they've gotten.
For me, if there is one thing those two have proven based on the attention they've received, is there is major shortage of attractive smiling women in IT.

 

[mxc]

It's interesting that people think there is a shortage of skilled jobs. I have heard this argument put forward before but its hard to find any substantial evidence for it. I can only say what I think is happening, also based on experience onlym and no study. It will probably upset some people but its not meant to antagonise.

There are plenty of skilled jobs around, what is the problem is that people would rather sit idle than work for the salary that businesses are prepared to pay for them. There is a huge mismatched between the skills people need for a job and what they think they have. Its not uncommon to get CVs where someone has been working at 3-4 companies in 2 years. These get tossed in the bin straight away. It takes an employee, especially an entry level one, at least 6 months to begin to cover their monthly costs and then it make take a year before the company begins to see any profit from employing the person. Why 6 months you may ask? Just getting an employee to understand the systems, procedures, code base frameworks, skill them up and settle them into the team can take a long time. Most entry level people leave before they get any experience and go to the next job where the same happens so after 2-3 years they only really have 3 months experience. The at least 6 months can be worse in big companies because their procedures are really slow - something which they should look at addressing.

In days-gone-by a company wouldn't mind investing in employee skills because they knew the employee would stay with them a long time. At least 5 years. Today people often don't last longer than 6 months. So why should a business spend money training someone up? On top of this people want to get paid as if they were top of their game already. So people just out of any tertiary schools think they worth 20-30k a month. If you want to get paid that you better have the equivalence of 5-10 years real experience.

So what has lead to the the expectation and skill gap? I think its a number of factors. The growth in consumerism with everyone thinking they need the latest iphone or luxury car is one factor. The whole commercial world is premised on getting people to desire things they don't really need and to spend all their money on products even if you don't have the money. They convince people they absolutely need these things in their lives. Then there are the schools doing the training. They charge a truck load of money for a course and then justify their fees because " you will pay it off with your first two months salary" because that's what the latest salary survey says - another marketing tool. So marketing and greed. Then there is the tendency in today's world to think that everyone is special and talented. Everyone is deserving of respect as a human being but we aren't all gifted. M-TV etc have taught people that if you don't succeed its not your fault or because you need to do things differently its because someone or something, i.e society, has frustrated your ambitions. You don't need to change - everyone else must change.

The education system is also not providing skills that are useful in business. In part this is due to the speed of technological change. It moves way to fast for the curriculum to keep up. It used to be people were educated and not trained. This meant someone would still need to be trained when they joined a company but had an education that enabled them to be effective and efficient once they had some experience. Now a lot of institutions just train people - but in tech stacks that are too old or too simplistic for business.

This expectation gap between entry level work and entry level work seekers can also be blamed on companies' original response to the skills problem of throwing money at it. So some people are paid unsustainable amounts of money. I have come across teams where people have been employed for 6 months at R450/hr and haven't produced a line of code because they have been "researching" the technology stack. So maybe business, especially big business, have themselves to blame. I think they also thought the old model where a company paid well and people stayed for a long time (4-5 years) still worked but it doesn't anymore.

What making this all more acute is that companies are now facing increasing costs and cannot just pass these off onto consumers. South Africa is an oligopolistic economy. The old pattern was pay more, charge more and with economic growth this could work. But growth is down and more importantly the pace of technological change is increasing meaning people need to be more agile. It is getting increasingly difficult to keep up.

As for India as a solutions - I think people are realising that is not a solution. The problem with skills is world-wide.

Businesses will be happy to pay 100K a month - as long as they can make 150k a month from it. There is corporate greed - where they want to pay as little as possible but I don't think that is the reason for why entry level people can't find work.

 

[nfbs]

You can't blame people for moving between companies. I am in IT and passionate about it. Most of the time you have to move if you are passionate about tech if you want to continue to learn. For me IT is about continuous learning and improving.
Companies which understand this will keep their employees. Others who don't, won't. You shouldn't fault employees for job hopping because of that. In IT you stop learning and improving you turn intp office admin.

If you use length of time as a measure of a good employee I can easily point to IT employees in government departments who have worked 5+ years at their employer but because they don't have the daily practice of thinking, learning and improving on the job, they aren't the ideal candidates for a job. Just look at the arms lengths of language and technology requirements in job specs. You won't get the job if you don't have experience in half the number of technologies. You can only get that varied experience if you seek out varied jobs.

If South Africa is going to follow the US model of hiring, it's going to be more about your portfolio and github account than your work history. If you compare the two, the current South African criteria of phoning references and looking at work history stability as the most important criteria, looks prehistoric in comparison.

I'm not sure if WeThinkCode and the no teacher model will succeed but it's good as at least we will start these way of doing things discussions in the SA IT industry. If you give passionate people the environment to express themselves and you trust them enough without having a leash around them, they will end up being much more successful than others in traditional run companies. They'll stay longer too.
South African IT companies need to be competitive with international IT companies in order to get international contracts. With our weak rand it's definitively a huge opportunity but we cannot be competitive unless we start disrupting the work environment to match the US run IT companies.

 

[1441568916]

If South Africa is going to follow the US model of hiring, it's going to be more about your portfolio and github account than your work history. If you compare the two, the current South African criteria of phoning references and looking at work history stability as the most important criteria, looks prehistoric in comparison.

As per usual, SA stone last. Most recruiters don't even know what GitHub is, go figure.

 

[nfbs]

As per usual, SA stone last. Most recruiters don't even know what GitHub is, go figure.

Most IT recruiters in South Africa don't even have job listings on their websites.

Most IT recruiters don't even specify location or all the skills or the remuneration in job ads. The situation in SA is pretty horrific if you think about it.

One thing that recruiters are using more is linkedin but I hate asking my boss, colleague or clients for references. Only reason you would be is because you're "looking". Good references also doesn't always mean you are good at your job.

 

[philaniH]

you cant even play those games

 

[Spacerat]

you are not a coder after 2 weeks. woe the poor user

 

[cguy]

You can't blame people for moving between companies. I am in IT and passionate about it. Most of the time you have to move if you are passionate about tech if you want to continue to learn. For me IT is about continuous learning and improving.
Companies which understand this will keep their employees. Others who don't, won't. You shouldn't fault employees for job hopping because of that. In IT you stop learning and improving you turn intp office admin.

If you use length of time as a measure of a good employee I can easily point to IT employees in government departments who have worked 5+ years at their employer but because they don't have the daily practice of thinking, learning and improving on the job, they aren't the ideal candidates for a job. Just look at the arms lengths of language and technology requirements in job specs. You won't get the job if you don't have experience in half the number of technologies. You can only get that varied experience if you seek out varied jobs.

If South Africa is going to follow the US model of hiring, it's going to be more about your portfolio and github account than your work history. If you compare the two, the current South African criteria of phoning references and looking at work history stability as the most important criteria, looks prehistoric in comparison.

I'm not sure if WeThinkCode and the no teacher model will succeed but it's good as at least we will start these way of doing things discussions in the SA IT industry. If you give passionate people the environment to express themselves and you trust them enough without having a leash around them, they will end up being much more successful than others in traditional run companies. They'll stay longer too.
South African IT companies need to be competitive with international IT companies in order to get international contracts. With our weak rand it's definitively a huge opportunity but we cannot be competitive unless we start disrupting the work environment to match the US run IT companies.

The way I look at it, a 5+ year stint tells me that someone may have stagnated, doing the same narrow piece of work on the same tech. Alternatively, it also tells me that that person may have seen several full lifecycle iterations of a large development project, seen what works and what doesn't work, and may have even participated or been responsible for the design and specification of the project.

What a resume showing multiple short term stints over many years tells me, is that it is very unlikely that person had ever worked on something substantial or participated in a meaningful way. Incidentally, for experienced hires, a solid work history is mandatory, even in the US.

 

[skimread]

you are not a coder after 2 weeks. woe the poor user

It's 2 years

 

[Hackson]

It's 2 years

Two weeks bootcamp and then you are expected to code real world applications.

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

As per usual, SA stone last. Most recruiters don't even know what GitHub is, go figure.

I would not use a recruiter again. Personally it will be my code in github that I want to get me hired and not a recruiter bribing a manager to take me on.

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

I think it will not work in SA. The original french version "42" was started by a billionaire who donated close to a billion Rand to get it going and continues to pour money into it.

The SA model seeks funding from local businesses - in essence it works like this: For 100K a corporate sponsors a student. In exchange the student will then complete 8 months of internship at the corporate. After the student completes the course it is expected to work back the value of the sponsorship (when I discussed this with the local guys running it, there was mention that this will take 2 years) with the sponsor.

I did not go for this model, as it would require me:
- To pay 100K for a student to finish the course which takes 2 years
- During the 2 years, the intern will work (with pay) two internship periods of 4 months each with me
- After the course the intern will work back the internship cost

My current model (which I believe is fair to all):
- I already hire interns and pay them 7,5K/pm and give them within 12 months full certifications (i.e. full LPIC1/2/3 or full Oracle Java)
- The intern is fully productive and knows our environment within 8 months
- After 12 months we (company and intern) decide if we continue with perm employment. If the intern wants to move own, he/she moves on with full certifications and there is no requirement to work off training

The problem with the WeThink model in SA:
- I have to commit 100K to get an intern for 8 months in two years. I am stuck with a person which might not fit into my environment or who does not work in my environment.
- If the intern does not work out, I not only write off 100K but also write off 2 years
- Any person qualifying for the WeThink course will also qualify for an internship elsewhere (in my case the student will earn 7,5k/pm for the first 12 months while learning and after that bumped up to perm-salaries - this will not be the case in the WeThink model)
- Companies will abuse the model and "ride" the interns for a full two years to pay back the stipends (it is therefore no surprise to see which companies are supporting this model) - in short: young, ambitious people will be sent on a guilt-trip, and work in a sweat-shop for at least 2 years.

Most big corporates already have SDPs (skill development programmes) and many of my C-level peers are deploying a similar model to mine - it has the benefit to bootstrap skilled labour very quickly. I do not have to work with recruiters and I find that interns (paired with senior staff) produce the same quality output as a team of just mid-level staff.

 

[Johnatan56]

I think it will not work in SA. The original french version "42" was started by a billionaire who donated close to a billion Rand to get it going and continues to pour money into it.

The SA model seeks funding from local businesses - in essence it works like this: For 100K a corporate sponsors a student. In exchange the student will then complete 8 months of internship at the corporate. After the student completes the course it is expected to work back the value of the sponsorship (when I discussed this with the local guys running it, there was mention that this will take 2 years) with the sponsor.

I did not go for this model, as it would require me:
- To pay 100K for a student to finish the course which takes 2 years
- During the 2 years, the intern will work (with pay) two internship periods of 4 months each with me
- After the course the intern will work back the internship cost

My current model (which I believe is fair to all):
- I already hire interns and pay them 7,5K/pm and give them within 12 months full certifications (i.e. full LPIC1/2/3 or full Oracle Java)
- The intern is fully productive and knows our environment within 8 months
- After 12 months we (company and intern) decide if we continue with perm employment. If the intern wants to move own, he/she moves on with full certifications and there is no requirement to work off training

The problem with the WeThink model in SA:
- I have to commit 100K to get an intern for 8 months in two years. I am stuck with a person which might not fit into my environment or who does not work in my environment.
- If the intern does not work out, I not only write off 100K but also write off 2 years
- Any person qualifying for the WeThink course will also qualify for an internship elsewhere (in my case the student will earn 7,5k/pm for the first 12 months while learning and after that bumped up to perm-salaries - this will not be the case in the WeThink model)
- Companies will abuse the model and "ride" the interns for a full two years to pay back the stipends (it is therefore no surprise to see which companies are supporting this model) - in short: young, ambitious people will be sent on a guilt-trip, and work in a sweat-shop for at least 2 years.

Most big corporates already have SDPs (skill development programmes) and many of my C-level peers are deploying a similar model to mine - it has the benefit to bootstrap skilled labour very quickly. I do not have to work with recruiters and I find that interns (paired with senior staff) produce the same quality output as a team of just mid-level staff.

Nice post.

 

[skimread]

From the sound of it, they're not in competition with startup accelerators like 42 seems to be, but rather they're just competition for local training and placement companies. It seems glamorous from the outside but the most innovative thing seems to be the tests to get the best candidates. Apart from that ,their model seems similar to companies like VZAP (Van Zyl & Pritchard) who had free training and placement in the past. Not sure if they still do.

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

From the sound of it, they're not in competition with startup accelerators like 42 seems to be, but rather they're just competition for local training and placement companies. It seems glamorous from the outside but the most innovative thing seems to be the tests to get the best candidates. Apart from that ,their model seems similar to companies like VZAP (Van Zyl & Pritchard) who had free training and placement in the past. Not sure if they still do.

That is probably the best comparison to VZAP. They still offer "free" training. You get bootstrapped with "free" training, but I recently heard that with VZAP they now body-shop you for a year at some mediocre salary (or you have to pay back the "training fees"). One of my staff wanted to do the whole VZAP thing but he then joined us on the internship programme - I will ask him how the whole VZAP setup was supposed to work, but as far as I can recall it was to the financial disadvantage of the candidate.

The french Born2Code/42 (http://www.42.fr/) private school is a philanthropic approach and the billionaire put down enough money to have it run for more than 10 years. The school is supported by the French department of education and everything (training, lodging, food etc) is free for the student. I can not recall that 42 asks students to paybackthemoney though. I did hear that some of their projects are intense with weeks demanding up to 100 hours - a good exercise as sometimes you will have to do this in a regular work-environment.

Perhaps WeThinkCode works out, but it is very naive to think that it will be as successful as the overseas model which received almost half a billion Rand in funding. I honestly do not think that one can fund the training for a student for two years with 100K and I also don't think the local model has been properly thought through (i.e. what happens when I student drops out / who is going to volunteer to teach the kids - certainly not for free / who will maintain infrastructure etc) and the cost will not be sustainable. I doubt that the department of education will endorse it, because this model will focus on the "elitist" and not the masses.

 

[skimread]

Perhaps WeThinkCode works out, but it is very naive to think that it will be as successful as the overseas model which received almost half a billion Rand in funding. I honestly do not think that one can fund the training for a student for two years with 100K and I also don't think the local model has been properly thought through (i.e. what happens when I student drops out / who is going to volunteer to teach the kids - certainly not for free / who will maintain infrastructure etc) and the cost will not be sustainable. I doubt that the department of education will endorse it, because this model will focus on the "elitist" and not the masses.

Wethinkcode is a non-profit though so being elitist shouldn't hurt them. They probably got free funding from donations already for the initial setup e.g. PCs, rental, iPads for onsite candidate tests.

I find it interesting this trend of non profit IT startup companies and how far this trend will go especially in Gauteng.

Is almost like being a non-profit and you want to disrupt government you can bypass the bureaucracy and kickbacks. Like wethinkgcode another example is Alan Knott Craig Jr. and his free wifi company. He resigned from iBurst, moves to Cape Town, giving the reason of his family is not secure in Gauteng. However he later creates a non profit in Pretoria offering free wifi hotspots, a basic services that the government themselves could be doing or could have put on tender, but we all the local ANC government isn't good at anything operational.

If you think about it, in Gauteng, because of government deals and tenders being very political and corrupt, a non -profit is a good option as a startup.
You don't step on political toes. No need for BEE shareholding. No problem if you need to travel to France regularly or every week back and forth from Cape Town. it's merely an admin expense.
You can also decide your own admin salary and you get donations from the lotto, government orgs, international funders of wherever . Adrian Gore would be a good example of just how successful one can get making money off admin fees.
Even if you are not even involved in the day to day running you can still be on the board pulling a nice salary and starting other companies e.g. AKNJ.

It wouldn't surprise me if non-profit startup type companies in Gauteng becomes a trend.