[3uclid]

Checked their LinkedIn and the employees who work there. The founder is non-technical and there are two developers: one who is a "back-end intern" and the other is a front-end developer (both are fresh from bootcamps).

...Yikes.

[thedance]

The career path of prep cook -> software certification mill -> wrecking american democracy is the best thing I've ever seen.

[eagsalazar2]

For most software development work a bootcamper is just as likely to be a solid team member as someone with a CS degree after a few years of good industry experience. They key issue isn't that they are bootcampers but that they are fresh bootcampers with no more senior people around to guide the project or mentor them. (similarly a fresh CS grad is fairly worthless in serious production work and will not improve much if they don't get the opportunity to work on serious projects with great sr devs and leadership invested in mentoring them)

[mardifoufs]

A fresh bootcamp graduate can be a good developer, but I would argue that someone fresh off of bootcamp is way less prepared than a CS grad to directly start working in a small team with mostly non technical people. A CS grad is usually way more knowledgeable when it comes to software architecture, handling data, optimization etc. Bootcamps usually focus on specific stacks and tools, which can be great. But that means almost no skill/knowledge outside of that specific stack

[unlinked_dll]

My experience has been the same with fresh grads from everywhere. There's a non negligible amount of work to get them up to speed with business communication and task definition.

Basically schools give you assignments or projects that are well defined and have clearly defined goals/results and cover solved problems. While that's true in the generic sense of business problems it's not how we work, we have to be able to take initiative to define and adjust those goals as reality shifts and goals are more loosely defined. You really have to put it the work to get new folks up to speed with defining their tasks to reach the goals.

Not for nothing but it's tough when you don't have a senior or two on hand to bring people up to speed and mentor them for a month or two before you can really get a new grad productive. And it's difficult with time constraints to do that well, I have to define my own tasks and can't spend as much time defining things for a junior as well as I'd like or train them as much as I should.

College grads may be more blank a slate but I haven't noticed a big difference in terms of actual onboarding. For what it's worth I think boot camps are the next trade schools and we're going to see a division in labor between software techs and engineers just like we have for electrical engineers and electricians or MechEs and mechanics. Tale as old as time, all the work is valuable, just more nuanced.

[thedance]

That might be true, but if I get to choose between someone with no industry experience, and another person with no industry experience whose mind has been poisoned by a certificate mill, I’m taking the former. Those boot camps are, literally, worse than useless.

[eagsalazar2]

Yeah I guess I would choose a CS grad also but "poisoned by a certificate mill" is pretty dramatic. I don't have any illusion fresh bootcamp grads are awesome sr devs but seriously you can, again surrounded by more senior mentors, put a high potential bootcamp grad on a project and they will be far from worse than useless almost immediately and certainly after a few months be quite valuable because their albeit very minimal and focused training got them a toehold and some skills they could apply and expand on over time. Sounds like you had a bad experience.

[uoaei]

Private sector everyperson-entrepreneurship has reached its logical conclusion.

[krainboltgreene]

> wrecking american democracy

It's a reporting tool. How the heck did you get to this position?

[Barrin92]

it failed to reliably report on one of the traditionally pivotal elections in the American election cycle. Which is pretty bad in an era when trust in political institutions is low.

Given the numerous safety standards and qualifications we require of engineers in the most mundane jobs I'm not sure why interns get to write software that underpins the electoral process.

[taurath]

And putting literally any failure at the feet of a jr. developer is completely wrong.

State party officials who made the plans to use the app without clearly any vetting, the management of Shadow who must have been making insane promises on a shoestring budget, the DNC who allowed the app anywhere near an election, and even pushed the state party officials in the direction of using it.

In big tech areas, there's usually a firm assumption of liberal-leaning employees and technologists. Maybe all the democrats who can code are too busy in the advertising industry.

[sct202]

The CTO is a former Googler SWE.

[3uclid]

Nice -- they market the company as "made by former Google and Apple engineers", but built the product with...an intern?

Lmao.

[corporateslave5]

Haha! Guaranteed that was the pitch somewhere

[runawaybottle]

I mean, isn’t that obvious. Our industry is just as ridiculous as any other. Cheers to a good lol.

[Aperocky]

For a company of its size, it certainly got a good amount of C-titled people.

CEO, COO, CTO...

Here's the thing I don't understand about them, I thought startups were averse to this? Am I wrong about startups or am I wrong about them being a startup?

[umeshunni]

Titles are a form of compensation. When you are a cash-strapped startup, especially in a domain that's not particularly lucrative, you pay people with titles.

If this incident hadn't happened, these folks could have proudly claimed that they were the CTO/COO/CPO etc of Shadow Inc on their LinkedIns and whatever article BuzzFeed/Forbes wrote about them.

[Aperocky]

With the exception of CTO, none of them seem to be engineers.

If I'm on the hiring end, this is not something that will help. Instead, if someone's going to sell me the importance of their title at their 6 people startup, it's going to negatively affect their chances.

[umeshunni]

It's the other way around - if you're trying to recruit an engineer or ops person from FAANMG, you can tell them "Well, I know you're an SWE 2 and make $300K/year, and we can't match that, but guess what, you can be the VP of Engineering at our 2-person startup and when we go public, you'll be a VP or SVP of a public company." You'd be surprised how many people fall for that.

[neuromantik8086]

The COO majored in Music Technology at Oberlin. That's quite a bit more technical than most people realize. TIMARA (the music tech program at the Oberlin Conservatory) involves a decent amount of programming and/or audio engineering. To put that in perspective, the founder of Macromind/Macromedia (Marc Canter) is also an alumnus of TIMARA.