Holberton, a Two-Year Tech School, Emphasizes Diversity
Version 0 of 1. SAN FRANCISCO — Like many computer science students, Max Johnson spends his days learning new programming languages, working with mentors and meeting with technology company recruiters. But that’s where the similarities end between him and a student at Stanford or Caltech. Mr. Johnson, 33, is part of an experimental two-year program called the Holberton School that aims to create a diverse group of engineers and place them in the industry’s top technology companies. Like many Holberton students, Mr. Johnson did not major in math or computer science in college. He attended Saint Augustine’s University on a basketball scholarship and studied psychology. He is African-American in an overwhelmingly white industry and lives in his car because he cannot afford to pay rent in San Francisco. If he had to pay tuition up front, he would not be able to go to school. “We want to remove any barrier to a high-quality education,” said Sylvain Kalache, one of the Holberton School founders. “No matter your age, gender, ethnicity or past professional life, you can come.” With just 103 admitted students, some of whom have only a high school degree, Holberton is still small. But it has already helped some of its students get jobs at Apple, NASA and LinkedIn, even though they have not yet graduated. And it is challenging the long-held wisdom around what types of people are best suited to work in the technology industry. Dora Korpar, 25, recently accepted a job offer from Scality, which stores data for other companies. She will work while completing her last nine months at Holberton. She declined to give her exact salary but said she’d earn four times as much as she did at her last job: a checkout clerk at a Trader Joe’s in Minnesota. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college, and then I heard about working in the tech industry from a friend,” said Ms. Karpor, who graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul with a degree in biology. “I thought, if he can do it, I can, too.” Before starting Holberton, Mr. Kalache and his fellow software engineer Julien Barbier noticed that they rarely encountered engineers who looked like Mr. Johnson and Ms. Korpar. They attributed the industry’s struggle to find skilled programmers and its inability to build a more-diverse work force to the fact that companies recruited from a handful of elite universities. Those schools did not attract and train a particularly diverse set of computer science majors. In Silicon Valley fashion, the pair decided that they could help solve the problem by starting a company. Mr. Kalache, 28, left his job at LinkedIn, the online professional network, and Mr. Barbier, 36, resigned from Docker, a company that makes tools for software developers, to build the school in 2015. Holberton, which is named after the computer programming pioneer Betty Holberton, has raised more than $4 million from investors including Trinity Ventures, the French venture firm Daphni and the former Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang. The pop singer Ne-Yo invested this year and joined the board of trustees, pledging to help enroll more minority students. There is no upfront payment to attend, but graduates who make more than $40,000 a year pay 17 percent of their gross salaries to Holberton for three years. Holberton’s enrollment is somewhat more diverse than the tech industry over all. About 40 percent of the students are women and 53 percent are minorities. Google’s technical work force is 19 percent women and 43 percent minorities. Facebook said that its proportion of female and nonwhite technical employees was 17 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Holberton’s founders, both from France, attribute the diversity numbers to the school’s admissions process. An online exam tests for the three qualities that the school screens for: problem-solving skills, collaborativeness and perseverance when challenges become harder. The test presupposes zero computer science knowledge and doesn’t ask about the applicant’s gender and ethnicity. Holberton staff members do not meet prospective students until the end of the process, after the computer algorithm has chosen who was admitted. At that time, the students can ask questions and decide whether they want to attend. Holberton got its start as other coding schools were flourishing. Boot camps like General Assembly and Fullstack Academy in New York and other cities, and Hackbright Academy in San Francisco, offer immersive multiweek programs that focus on specific, highly sought-after engineering skills. That business is growing, with nearly 18,000 people in the United States graduating from a boot camp last year, up from about 2,200 in 2013, according to Course Report, which tracks the industry. Other people have learned to code through online classes offered by schools like Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., and Udacity, which also had its beginnings in Silicon Valley. These alternative learning programs are gaining ground with big tech companies that had recruited primarily from schools like Stanford, Caltech and M.I.T. LinkedIn is one company that has decided to look further afield for software engineering candidates. “We got rid of the university requirement,” said Shalini Agarwal, who oversees LinkedIn’s Reach program, an apprenticeship for people who need to refresh their coding skills. The company also works with Holberton. Mr. Kalache and Mr. Barbier wanted to replicate a tech company workplace environment, rather than teach just one or two skills like at a boot camp. The two men decided against having traditional teachers. They structured the classroom around problems that the students would solve in small teams, like writing a piece of an operating system using a specific set of tools. They would inevitably have to research the problem and ask people for help, just as they would if they were confronted by a new problem at work. The men also asked the school’s 120 volunteer mentors, professional engineers and tech executives, to help create the curriculum. Tammy Butow, a site reliability manager at Dropbox, wanted students to learn to review one another’s code, a common practice at tech companies. Holberton worked that into the collaborative process of the program. She also suggested that the school break students’ projects, so the students must troubleshoot and fix them. A Holberton intern at Dropbox worked on a project that made the company’s storage product more reliable. Impressed by the school’s results, the company has created a pilot apprentice program to help employees like the Holberton students more easily transition into the work force. “The main thing we’re learning is how to learn,” said Ms. Korpar. “I was attracted to Holberton because my school is also about social justice and teaching populations that are frozen out of the information age, meaning people of color, women and people who are not wealthy,” said Vito Ferrante, a director of educational technology at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory in San Francisco and an adjunct professor in the education department at the University of San Francisco. “There are challenges for this model in that Holberton is fighting the traditional higher education model, which will be difficult to dismantle at best,” Mr. Ferrante said. “But Holberton’s model, where teachers are guides, is becoming more common. More and more schools are understanding that teaching is really about teaching critical thinking, especially in the information age, which moves very quickly.” The Holberton School is in San Francisco’s Financial District, not far from huge companies like LinkedIn and Google. There is a modest sitting area filled with photos of students that leads to a large, bright room with long tables and rows of computers. Men and women, spanning many ages, socio-economic groups and races, group together to discuss their projects. They mingle with guests and show the visitors what they’re working on. Each day one student gives a five-minute presentation on any topic, so that he or she can become more comfortable speaking in public. Students sometimes speak at tech industry conferences and are encouraged to write at least one technical blog post a week. “Soft skills are important,” said Mr. Barbier. “We know engineers who haven’t had great careers because they can’t present their ideas well or sell their point of view or talk to their managers.” As much as they prepare students to work collaboratively and solve problems, Holberton’s founders also push them to think about the culture of tech companies, which is sometimes negative. They know that the students won’t be protected by the school after they graduate and enter the working world. “Around the time the Uber scandals began, Julien and Sylvain pushed us to think about them,” Mr. Johnson said. “They wanted us to understand what can happen in a workplace.” After Mr. Johnson graduated from college, he bounced from one low-paying job to another for about a decade. Over the past couple of years, he considered learning to code, but was financially constrained. “I had limited funds,” he said. He read about Holberton on a message board and finished the entire application in just a few days. “It felt like now or never.” Since being accepted, he has visited Facebook, seen the Google campus and met an employee at the Department of Homeland Security. “I’ve learned a lot of humility here,” Mr. Johnson said. “That it’s O.K. to be wrong. That it’s O.K. to ask for help. And that I need to be patient with other people. All of this wouldn’t have happened to me if I weren’t at school.” |