Others ask for experience, we want your passion

Should experience be a predictor of capacity? I think Guardiola would object. This is a good story about an experiment going terribly right: the Netcentric Academy

(this is the original writing that was published here)

A year ago, the Netcentric director from the Barcelona office approached me with a crazy idea (he usually does that during the summer). He said: “Let’s get graduating students from the university and train them to become backend and frontend developers in three months.” He was really optimistic and certain that it would work. I, on the other hand, thought the dates were aggressive. Additionally, nobody had done it before and, as new experiences go, uncertainty gives away to fear and rejection. Several colleagues also feared getting inexperienced youngsters with no professional experience into our offices without being able to place them in projects facing the client. I am glad to tell you this is a story has a happy ending.

So we did not have much time to prepare. I was myself doubtful it was even possible. However, this is Netcentric, and we do things differently. We set to define the classes that were going to be taught, select the professors that were going to teach them, and the plan to follow. The first major obstacle was the opportunity cost in getting our own developers to teach classes. Therefore, we came up with a solution: let’s leave it open for the students to do their own project. The rest of the time, the students will receive a basic introduction to our building blocks. This decision turned out to be the key of succes. The project was the best part of the academy and allowed a good assessment of motivation, teamwork, and learning.

Things were not easy, though. From the start the resources were limited. Students were mostly gone for the summer. We did not even have office space to teach the classes, so we had to rent tables and chairs, and review the planning in sudoku fashion to align everybody’s requests. It was challenging but it worked. Each Netcentric person I approached showed his/her pride in what they do and willingness to participate.

Today we have more than 20 bright developers that have been onboarded into the company and with a high level of satisfaction from both the tech leads and the developers themselves.

It is not only passion that we asked, of course. Those selected showed a potential for deep analytical thinking and fast learning. They worked under little supervision and were able to be motivated and deliver high quality work in their projects. At the beginning, we debated much about motivation. Were those guys be able to attend a full 8-hour day of classes? Should we have a 6-hour day? Should we include motivating videos from code.org? Reality sometimes is better than fiction and the students did wonderfully, even arriving an hour earlier to have their daily stand-up and staying late to finish their work.

Several times I have asked the students who participated what was the factor of success. I would have never thought possible that level of commitment. The answers vary and everybody has their own reason. However, the most common response is that they wanted to prove how much they could do. I hope society in general would do the same: give a chance to the youth to show what they are capable of.