Launch HN: Modern Labor (YC W19) – Paying People to Learn to Code
We are Modern Labor (https://modernlabor.com). We pay you to learn to code. We take people with little or no software skills and pay them a livable wage[1] for 5 months while they learn to code, using our content, most of which is open source. In return graduates pay us 15% of their income for 2 years if they are earning over $40,000.
The company is born out of a phenomenon I’ve been fascinated with for a long time: many people wake up every day at 7am to work at a low-paying job but they often have difficulty completing a class that might help their future. For some people, it might just come down to money. A job pays now, a class pays off in the future and only maybe. For many reasons--time, energy, motivation, financial pressures--many choose or are forced to choose the job that pays now and their long-term income sometimes suffers as a result. So we had an idea: Why don’t we just pay people to learn? So that’s what we do: we pay people, now, to learn an in-demand skill.
I remember back when we were building Leif, a startup we sold last year. I told Dickie, one of our co-founders, if I only had an extra $10,000 I could build out the product to an acceptable quality for a couple months. Otherwise I had to work. He ended up giving the money. We sold the company the next year for a good outcome. That couple months of being able to focus made a big difference in the quality of the product and I think ultimately on how successful we were with customers. We think Modern Labor can give people enough time to make a real change in their lives.
Our program isn’t for everyone. It’s full time. We pay $2000 for 5 months. Sometimes that’s more than enough to live on, sometimes it’s not, especially in the Bay Area. Nearly impossible with a family. You need the right to work in the US. The program is mostly self-directed and online. We guide students with a learning pathway and code reviews, but it’s ultimately up to them. If they don’t do their lessons, we don’t pay. It’s far too short for some people. Right now the curriculum is JavaScript (React, Redux) and Python and focuses on the web, which is only one sliver of the software universe. Most of the content is open source. Some of it’s from places like Freecodecamp, which is available for free. If you have money, you don’t need us.
15% of gross income is a lot. Why so much? It comes down to simple risk/return: returns must be adequate given the risk. If it sounds a lot like Lambda School (YC S17), you’re right. Our former company Leif arranged financing for them. We discovered Austen (CEO) here on HN. It’s a big space, though, and our program is different from theirs. We have fewer mentors and our focus is on giving money to students.
How many people will do our program? About 50,000 people pay to attend coding bootcamps in the US each year. We believe, and may be wrong, that a lot more people will choose learning when we pay them to do it.
Thank you HN -- HN was the first thing people told me to read when I was learning to code and it’s been a big part of my life ever since. Happy to answer any questions and looking forward to hearing your ideas and feedback!
[1] Right now it’s $2000/month
269 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadThat said, it was through a union and they have certain guarantees about the level of pay and conditions that are acceptable for work, and the usual benefits of collective bargaining. What are your thoughts on software developers / engineers and unionization?
Can't you just leave the union, move jobs?
I'm guessing this is going to be one of those "I can't believe USA thinks it's a [good example of a] democracy moment"?!?
So, pics or it didn't happen??
As for unionization, I am not sure. The demand is high enough for software developers that we are willing to take risk to not get paid back if they earning below $40,000. So we don't guarantee a salary but we make sure they don't pay us if they are aren't earning enough.
Anyway, is it literally $40k you pay 15% ($6k), below you pay nothing?
Is there any sort of tax saving, do "graduates" pay tax on the full amount but pay out 15% to an "educational trust"?
Are you a non-profit?
We are for-profit. We think that model can help us scale faster than the tax advantage of the non-profit can help us. Larger non-profits can play a role in the future of this market though, with various guarantees and cheaper capital.
Further, do you work with students on actually getting recruited and getting through interviews? Coding is great, but whiteboarding and interviewing are their own skillset.
We help with recruiting as well. If we don't offer them a role with us and our staffing company at the end of the program, we help them find a role with other employers. Whiteboarding/testing/soft skills are a part of the curriculum.
> After the program, graduates pay 15% of their income for 2 years if they are earning over $40,000. Furthermore, graduates agree to work for us directly if our offer is as good as their other employment offers.
Or are there some monetary penalties if they match other employers' offers and you don't take the job?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalties_in_English_law
Some feedback on the website: The image of the man on a laptop sitting in the dark gives off an eerie feeling and reminds me of those cheesy stock images of hackers wearing a ski mask. A man sitting in a well lit room and smiling may be more welcoming to a potential applicant.
>"You do not need to apply for an EAD if you are a lawful permanent resident. Your Green Card (Form I-551, Permanent Resident Card) is evidence of your employment authorization. You also do not need to apply for an EAD if you have a nonimmigrant visa that authorizes you to work for a specific employer (for example, you have an H-1B, L-1B, O, or P visa)." (ibid) //
I've only done a cursory check but all the USCIS talks about residence, do they allow non-residents the right to take up employment; is that anticipated as a possibility, do people have to reside in (or have rights to reside in) USA to be a worker there?
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CFR-2012-title8-vol1/CFR... is probably useful to others looking at this (AFAICT you have to "download" you can't view it online, but I'm on mobile).
So you take another C# job that pays you the same. But now you have to give Modern Labor 15 % of your pay.
You are taking a chance that the new job will pay you at least 15% more than your current one after 5 months.
I don't think 15% is a lot at all. Assume $60-70k for first job out of a bootcamp (which is more than reasonable) and you are essentially charging $10k tuition for a 5 month program.
I hope the numbers work out for you, as it sounds exciting!
I'd love a similar program for experienced or senior engineers that want to shift into an entirely new space (spend 4-6 months learning data science and machine learning, for example. Or low-level programming for embedded devices. Etc)
I'm still working out the ethics of this in my head though. Is this ethical or exploitive? I think the answer depends on the employer. I feel like it's good for the student, since after two years they will have had a chance to learn on the job at a discount to me, and if I've done a good job training them further, they'd be valuable enough to me to keep on board without the discount. But I worry that an unethical employer might only keep them two years and abuse them and then cut them loose when the discount runs out. So you'd have to prevent that somehow.
What if graduates don't get (or decide not to pursue) a coding job, and instead return to their original or similar field? Do they still need to pay part of their unrelated jobs salary to you?
That's a pretty horrendous (and possibly incredibly destructive) outcome for someone looking to improve their outlook, and will definitely give me pause in recommending they apply to the program.
It also contradicts your mission:
>We believe that money should never be a barrier to learning and that with the right motivation and funding, anyone can learn new skills and make a better life for themselves.
At the very least people shouldn't be punished for either not succeeding in finding a job (a failure that could be partially the responsibility of Modern Labor), or simply deciding coding isn't for them.
If you are making around $40k per year, you have nothing to lose; if the program doesn't improve your state in life at least you don't have to pay too much back.
Non-marginal (15% of everything) plus the "you must work for us if we beat offers" theoretically could lead to them offering everyone a $40,001 per year job, essentially forcing them to work that for 2 years and incur high payback costs.
I am curious if there are other skills/jobs that would be viable to teach in a similar manner (definitely outside the scope of the launch, but I'm curious).
Offering this would possibly rise the interest in IT related skills and capture intelligent people.
I'd like to change that. IT is hard,. it pays double.
P.S. I think this is a great project and I am very interested to see how this goes.
How do you enforce this? I.e. what stops someone from simply lying about their income?
1) What if you make $40k even? Is the 15% adjusted based on your salary?
2) What happens if you lose your job 1 year in? You've paid back half your debt... what about the other half? I would feel bad telling people about this to see them do it, and then get jobs (either with Modern Labor or somewhere else), and then a year in they get cut, have no job, and are thousands in debt.
3) What if someone is in the program, and halfway has to drop out for xyz reason? Do they owe the money back?
I really like the idea, just wish there were some more details so I could feel confident telling friends about it.
As is, there's a weird gap in incomes ($40-47k, roughly) where you'd end up taking home more money by taking a voluntary pay cut.
And just to clarify... if the program lasts 5 months, and they drop out of the program 2.5 months in (and they would have received $5k so far), what would they would owe..?
I don't think 5 months is sufficient for most persons with "little or no software skills" to reach a level at which they can work as programmer, software engineer, or (maybe even) computer scientist.
Are you saying 5 months is not sufficient? ("[...] we will make the program longer (year or longer) and open it up to more people.")
> Most [...] have a dabbled on their own (picked up htm/css/js) for a while[...]
Which is it?
I think it's important that we don't gatekeep as a community and encourage people, especially visible minorities, to join the industry and help us build better stuff! https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50
A misconception I've often encountered in first time founders is that engineering productivity accretes linearly with headcount.
I did a bootcamp in 10 weeks and got hired immediately. People may be against that for whatever reason but I was able to meaningfully contribute to my company, and it allowed me to learn while working in the industry. Been going 2.5 years now, and admittedly, I still have a ton to learn, but I'd like to think I'm not a fraud at this point.
My bootcamp had 90% placement rate within 90 days and has for years. This question kind of ridiculous though, no education system works for every single participant. There are plenty of people with B.A.'s not getting hired. Even people with law degrees occasionally. Much less financial and time risk with a bootcamp tho.
In this context it is useful to think of bootcamps, ideas like this, and even most undergrad degrees as a filter - not a certification.
If someone is motivated enough to do a program like this and shows some good understanding of basics, that gives you a lot of information in hiring.
I agree that this is a great way to unearth some talent trying to break through.
If you mess up a CRUD app as a junior full-stack developer, prod is broken until somebody fixes it. And you can learn enough to not break prod pretty quickly on the fly. It's a very reversible mistake in comparison.
Any compliant healthcare software project would keep a junior developer very far from the patient -- there are many layers of review, testing and validation that would prevent one developer's mistakes from significantly putting patient health or data at risk. Even senior developers (usually) shouldn't be able to touch stuff that close to patients.
A doctor literally has their hands on a patient. There isn't a review pipeline that makes sure a doctor's mistakes are caught before they reach a patient.
(That's not to say mistakes that harm patients don't happen in healthcare software, just that it's hard for one developer to cause harm without many others approving it first)
Non critical software is push into production following reasonable practices for non-critical software. Then, with time, what was once non-critical became the stonewall of a much larger and complex systems and now it is a really "non-critical" system that powers other critical systems.
One would hope so, but I'm not quite as confident as you are…
Imagine if this is your power company and a bugged website means you can't pay your bill before your power goes out.
Problems in prod can have affect people's lives.
CPA, even for being a barber you need to go to school for 2 years and get a degree, electricians, if you even want to work on nail, you need to be certified!!!!!
Barber: You hold a sharp object to somebody's head wrong, you could take out a chunk of scalp. If you're malicious, you could do more.
Electricians: You do it wrong, you can literally fuse your corpse to the thing you were working on.
All of these are greater consequences than having prod going down. In these fields, things can go very wrong very fast, and all these professions are right to same some form of certification.
>>In these fields, things can go very wrong very fast, and all these professions are right to same some form of certification.
Licensing is not the same as certification. Licensing means you are forbidden from doing something until you meet certain conditions. In any occupation where the parties subjected to risk are consenting to that risk, there's no possible justification for such a restriction that doesn't involve a paternalistic argument that people should have their liberty curtailed by the state for their own good.
Maybe Boeing and Airbus will never have an Ada developer make an error that kills a plane full of people but there's already a push for javascript to be used in embedded systems and I'm sure it's coming from someone seeing the large numbers of javascript programmers coming out of coding boot camps and similar programs.
Surely you mean to design systems with modularity that helps RAM-limited brains made of meat to avoid defects and defense-in-depth which reduces the impact of defects.
It’s a problem larger than the field.
I mean, in an ideal world we could even render doctors redundant in most cases by some incredible Elysium(the film)-like medical bed.
The problem is what do we do with our time instead? It’s a question that can inspire all kinds of hope or dread depending on your outlook.
Its a problem of convincing the society that its not anyones place to dictate how someone else decides to spend that time. There will be massive resistance to any economic model other than the established scarcity based capitalist regime enshrined in most of the west for the last 150-200 years. Trying to ensure the fruits of the societies labor that led to that automation are properly apportioned to said society will be a long uphill battle against people of substantial greed that see automation not as a liberating force for humanity but as a source of permanent, infinite wealth allocation and centralization.
It's reasonable to assume software development will follow the legal path (or similarly, of business grads who aspire to careers in finance) over time: a few graduates of elite universities, with some combination of greater ability or prestige-signalling degrees, will land elite jobs at global firms making six figures directly out of school, while most earn a small fraction of that elsewhere. In the late '00s / early '10s you had a confluence of events--the settlement of anti-competitive hiring case against the major industry names, a boom in revenue for tech companies, quantitative easing causing a global hunt for yield and explosion in VC, and other factors--leading to a scenario where in the span of a year or two, tech jobs went from "not on most college kids' radars" to realization that this was a well-compensated career. In 07, my top 30 university nearly shuttered its CS department, which would be unthinkable now. That kind of rapid change causes a shortage. It won't last forever.
I think exploring more of the possible solution space for how to train and pay tech folks has all sorts of potential for society as there are definitely parallels there in terms of the potential social utility of making technical labor more abundant and less expensive. Obviously there's a downside for people who work in tech and keep wanting to make fuck-you money, but so it goes.
In the early 90s, universities threw students straight into data structures and algorithms in LISP and expected fully half of them to drop out first year. By the early 2000s, the market was already full of useless grads. I was always on the east coast, but near as I could tell from the refugees I interviewed after the dot bomb, SV had been hiring anyone who could type as a senior developer, and the market just kept going downhill from then on. The schools must already have been complicit in it, because I had employees with degrees who didn’t even recognize the names of basic algorithms and data structures when the need for them arose. Now I see intro curriculum from serious schools that’s just a few loops in python or even visual programming in a browser. Less serious CS schools seem to be little more than job training programs. And of course, like this post shows, tens of thousands of coders who really have just completed a job training program are flooding the market.
When I started working, every programmer I worked with was at least competent. If they weren’t, they just didn’t have a job. There wasn’t such a desperate need for people and it wasn’t hard to find someone competent. Now I assume that someone’s code can’t be trusted until I see evidence to the contrary. I used to bring people straight in for in-person interviews or do a really quick phone screen. Then I started doing much deeper questions on phone screens. Now I have to start with a coding test, because 95+% of candidates cannot write simple programs in their language of choice, even though they’ve got a fancy degree and they sound like an expert on the phone, because they’ve been trained for that... but apparently they have not been trained to actually create software from scratch. One company I worked for had a well researched candidate screening program and was talking about spinning it off as a service by the mid-2000s. Now extensive screening is universal and there are multiple companies that you can outsource it to.
There’s no shortage of developers on the market, but there’s a real shortage of good ones. If you’re right and that shortage ends at some point, there’s going to be a sea of unemployed, unqualified coders who need job retraining or something. But I don’t see the shortage ending unless the pipeline starts spitting out more well qualified people.
There are more Charlatons in tech than ever before.
If you don’t have an interest first in side projects and exploring your curiosity with programming, you’re probably not going to make it.
As we move forward and software does impact people's lives more and more and in some cases can lead to injury or death, we will see many more professional hurdles put in place. But it won't be to keep the profession pool limited.
If software were to impose such restrictions it would be much harder to justify other than "we want to preserve our high salaries". When laborers formed unions they were genuinely exploited in many cases. Not sure how you rationalize a software engineering union...
The parallels to modern computing and programmers are uncanny and provide a good reminder about how unions, capital, and labor all interact. Even though we imagine ourselves on some grand crusade of science and reasoning, ever towards the Kurtzweilian singularity of rationality and thinking sand, we are still bound by the same forces young Samuel Clemens was lashed into.
In general, it's a great read and a great look into the life of one our greatest writers. Highly recommended.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_the_Mississippi
Right now, the big thing keeping the supply of software engineers down is the lack of housing available near software companies, but this will slowly change as more and more companies start outside the bay area.
As software eats the world, people with 10+ years of field experience working at high organizational levels aren't threatened by a supply of people learning how to code any more than a surge in people learning to be medical office administrators threatens those doctors with the 10+ years into medical school and residency.
Lots of bootcamps crank out a disproportionate number of web development juniors compared to other specialties, but surely a business will also require other roles, many of which aren't strictly software engineers or which may involve more investment than a macbook (e.g. designers and wacom hardware + Adobe licenses)
I'm also curious how you plan on tackle tech debt in your platform, given that from my personal experience, some of the scariest codebases I've worked on were ones where there was a lot of newbie turnover.
Another thing I'm curious about scalability. At some point, adding more workers tends to not scale and you start to need a ballooning number of middle-level managers, whose required skillset might primarily be soft skills.
As for the core platform, we keep that to more senior people for now.