Launch HN: Hatchways (YC S19) – Internships Instead of Interviews

Your story really resonated with me, because of how similar it is to my own. I also graduated from Canada with a subpar gpa, and struggled a lot finding employment. In the end doing grad school in the US is what opened many doors into the tech industry for me, but I wish I hadn't wasted so many years looking for jobs between undergrad and grad school. I think your startup will do a lot of good in the world. Best of luck!

Hey Jaclyn I launched a website for bootcamp and self-taught coders last week: https://www.nocsdegree.com

It was top here for a few hours last Tuesday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20506945

So maybe we could team up some way :)

This is really great, and I wish this existed 6+ years ago while I was transitioning careers. I graduated from a "name brand" university with a Stats degree, but no relevant work experience, and no desire to pursue what most of my classmates were doing (actuarial exams, etc.)

I liked assembling computer hardware when I was younger so I ended up getting my A+ certification and started working in IT help desk, eventually doing more sysadmin work, but still felt pretty unfulfilled. I couldn't afford to take the time off a full-time job to do a bootcamp or something similar, and almost took a combined work/training gig (which would have been something like a 60% pay-cut for 2 years -- in retrospect, this was totally exploitative and a terrible offer, so I was right to be reluctant).

I told my then employer about the offer and leveraged it into a lateral move into their QA dept. After doing the job for a bit and learning the basics, I read online that people were automating the checks I was performing manually. I started spending as much time as I could (and several months of extremely late nights) learning how to code. Once I knew enough Ruby to be dangerous, it was a gateway to new and better offers until I found myself doing regular old Software Engineering. I was lucky to be given some great opportunities and tenacious enough to lateral my way into the career I wanted (at past jobs I would spend a chunk of my time unsanctioned working on various software problems that the company had, only to turn around and say "look what I built, could you give me a job doing this full-time?") but had I not already been in a field where I was working with developers and with computers every day, it would have been 10x harder to make the lateral moves that I did.

Anyway, that's my nontrad story. I think the best time for me to have joined a program like this would have been at the moment where I was doing lots of webdev side-projects but no "real life" problem to solve using the theoretical skills I had gained. It worked out for me in the end, but something like this could have definitely made my circuitous path a lot more straightforward.

As a former candidate now turned software engineer and interviewer, I seriously like your story and it does reflect the sad state of the tech industry's hiring process. When I need to find candidates, I usually ignore degrees or hello world based projects, but I ask for either original work or open-source contributions or features added into another project. As with your own project, I don't need to throw a test at you if you dealing with a project with advanced data structures like CRDTs, which I'm sure you already know to apply them well.

Unfortunately, this industry tends to believe that implementing something like a R*-Tree or a Van-Embe-Boas Tree in less than 10 mins is an indicator of being qualified for a CRUD application-level job. If I were hiring right now, I would preferably take on more candidates that have open-source contributions over leetcoders because with open-source, you can obviously code, use version control, do code reviews and as a bonus, you can show your work at a meetup / conference. Leetcode/Hackerrank/Codility doesn't allow you to showcase your optimal solutions and even if you attempt to, you risk breaching their plagiarism rules. So those platforms don't allow you to showcase those soft skills.

Your experience alone tells me you are already qualified for senior roles that these companies are 'struggling' to fill.

Hey Pete this is great! Thanks for sharing. I'll reach out. Would be awesome if there was some way to help each other :)