[poof131]

I think it’s a fantastic idea and applaud you for your work. The major hurdle is leading companies only want to hire senior devs. Why spend money and implement a training program when you can outsource it. There seems to be 3 paths in. One, go to a top 10 CS college. As a hiring manager, our internship choices were broken down by school with less than a dozen choices: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, CMU, etc. and a few diversity conferences. The candidates resumes where literally partitioned in folders for each school or “diversity”, so to peruse through hundreds of candidates you had to go by school or conference, with no way to see who had interests or experience in distributed systems, front-end, AI, etc. without choosing a school or conference to look through. I couldn’t believe how biased it was. Two, go work at a startup or small company for below market wages to get experience and try to work your way up to better and better companies. Three, work overseas for a couple years, pay full price for a masters in the US, and then work the H1B masters recruiting pipelines.

While there are exceptions the bootcamps seem to be geared toward path two. I wish bigger companies had training programs. I was working with a veteran who recently graduated from a local college and helping him with interview prep. He couldn’t pass the phone screen for the role I had available and ended up working for a small local consultant which seemed to be more IT focused than dev. I couldn’t in good faith just hire him without support from the team. I wish companies had training programs to hire local people into these jobs, but there really isn’t a shortage of talent that requires them to set these programs up. The shortage is in quality senior devs who could get into a top company but are willing to work for less elsewhere. Anyone who sets up one of these training programs and doesn’t pay FAANG salaries, is just training up candidates to move to FAANG. I guess in a way path two and three really are the training programs you are talking about.

And the stuff you are talking about regarding documentation, testing, etc. also sounds like other tangential roles like TPM or quality, which unfortunately are just being put on developers themselves at many places. I think most companies should have more people in these roles with the aspiration of moving into dev. Maybe a “training” role focused on this could help, but you may also run into resistance from people who are in these roles in organizations.