[lucasvo]

We have had some success with hiring out of General Assembly. Last summer we hired 3 interns out of GA who each first started off with a simple throwaway project and then proceeded on to some easy tasks learning our stack (Java/Groovy). We're not a ruby/python shop and a lot of our work is backend heavy. This was quite different to what these students were taught. During this period they got an internship salary. Out of the three we were interested in keeping two. The third person couldn't catch on to it fast enough. About a year later they are at about the level of a junior dev out of college. Their development since has been comparable to other junior devs. I count that as a success.

We'd probably do it again at some point but our engineering team is not big enough to absorb too many junior devs and train these. GA helped in building a foundation, we wouldn't have had the resources to do this training on our own.

And no, we were not paying 100k to people right out of the program.