The Build #11: Kids

Veteran Sylvester Mobley founded Coded by Kids to bring technical training into neighborhoods where access to new economy jobs can make a huge difference.

More about today’s guest:

• Sylvester Mobley website
• Coded By Kids on Twitter

Transcript

Announcer:
From 2820 Radio in Philadelphia, it's The Build, conversations with entrepreneurs and innovators about their dreams, their triumphs, and their challenges.

Joe:
Kids, let's say you're a typical American kid, and you're thinking, like most kids do, about what you're going to be when you grow up: football player, movie star, dancer. Those are all careers that we can see kids striving for at early ages. In fact, for some kids in America, practicing hard on the field or on the stage might seem like the only way to get out of a rough neighborhood or a tight financial situation. Yet, the job market for NFL quarterbacks or for Hollywood talent is still really, really tight, so what if we started to look at software development and database programming the same way we look at blocking and tackling? What if kids who learn to code today can be guaranteed six figure jobs in just a few years instead of competing for a one in a million chance at a career on the gridiron? That's just one of the questions we'll consider today with help from Sylvester Mobley. He's a veteran with experience in multiple branches of the Armed Forces, and he's taking a new approach to learning how to code into rec centers and classrooms. What he's discovering in the process could even impact the lives of adults who need to learn new job skills. It's the story of Coded by Kids, coming up next on The Build.

Announcer:
The Build is made possible with support from 2820 Press, providing business consulting and content strategy services to customer obsessed companies nationwide. More information at 2820press.com.

Joe:
It's The Build. I'm Joe Taylor, Jr., joined today by Sylvester Mobley. Welcome.

Sylvester:
Thank you.

Joe:
You are the founder of two organizations with kind of collaborative overlapping goals to a degree: Coded by Kids, Coded by U. We love to collect origin stories here on the show, so tell me a little bit about how Coded by Kids came into being.

Sylvester:
Coded by Kids started out as me teaching web development to one kid at a rec center on Saturday mornings. For me, I got a start in tech when I went into the Air Force Reserves. Up until that point, I didn't know anything about tech. I had no idea what opportunities were available in the industry, what the industry was like. I ended up falling essentially into the job. The job I picked in the Air Force, I had no idea what the job was.

Joe:
You came into the Air Force Reserves after having been in the Marine Corps.

Sylvester:
The military has this thing a lot of people don't realize that you can reenlist, but you don't have to reenlist in the same branch, and essentially you're called Prior Service. After four years in the Marine Corps, I then went into the Air Force Reserves, and then after four years in Air Force Reserves, I went into the Army National Guard. I spent a total of twelve years in the military in three branches. If you think about it, the average person ... In America, less than 1% of American society serves in the military, but I served in three branches of the military.

Joe:
Now that's highly unusual even by the standards of entrepreneurs that we talk to to go from branch to branch. What's it like to transition out of one branch of service into another like that?

Sylvester:
I think going from the Marine Corps to the Air Force is probably the biggest transition. As a Marine, you are a Marine. That's how you define yourself. Marines can be extremely fanatical in the way they carry about everything, the way you go about everything from day to day. The Air Force, it's a lot more laid back. I can remember at one point my Chief Master Sergeant in the Air Force pulled me aside and said, "Look, you're not in the Marines anymore. You need to calm down. We don't do things like that here." That transition was a big transition. Also, the Air Force puts a really high priority on education, which in the Marines, they would always say, "You're a Marine first. That's it. If you want to take some classes or whatever, you're a Marine first. You figure out how to work it in with being a Marine first."

Sylvester:
The Air Force, if there was something I wanted to do that was in line with what my job was, they always found a way to make sure I had the training or the education. I learned about hardware, I learned about networking, I learned about fiber optics. Having that support and that experience to really learn about the technical field was huge for me, and then going from the Air Force to the Army wasn't as big of a transition, and by that point I had already been in eight years, so after eight years in the military, it all just starts to blend together.

Joe:
You've done this grand tour of service. You've gotten into the cultures of different branches of the Armed Forces, and then you segue back into civilian life.

Sylvester:
While I was in the Army National Guard, I was doing my one weekend a month duty and still working a civilian job, so I was working as a project manager. I was actually not working in tech at my civilian job at that point. Essentially what I said to myself was when I was doing tech in the Reserves, I didn't want to do the same thing I was doing in the Reserves in my civilian job. I wanted to have a broad range of what I was doing. I was working in construction project management, my civilian job were working in tech, and my job in the Reserves. I had went to Temple. I ended up earning a degree in finance, so I was happy managing construction projects. I worked for a company that specialized in prisons, and so I was building prisons essentially all over the country. I expanded, I think, six prisons for the State of Pennsylvania. I was building prisons as far out as Lubbock, Texas.

Sylvester:
It helped me because one thing I decided early on was I was never going to live in something that I built, so it was interesting but also depressing. It was depressing to see the amount of money that was going into the corrections industry and the amount of money that was going into building prisons, and then being able to look at the amount of money that was going into the education system. It was really sad to see the disparity. Even if you take right now, there's a $400 million prison that's being built to replace Graterford in Pennsylvania, but we can't find funding for our schools. We think about that disparity. It's sad, it's depressing. I was doing that, and while I was doing that I ended up being pulled out of my civilian job to deploy to Iraq. When I came home from Iraq I was trying to figure out what's next. It's this odd thing where I came home from Iraq, and I wasn't really sure whether I had changed and everyone else has stayed the same or everyone else had changed and I had stayed the same.

Sylvester:
You're trying to figure out where your place is in the world, and you're trying to almost refind yourself. Going through something like that, it's easier to do that when you're on active duty. That's what you do. That's it. When you're in the Reserves and you get pulled out of your civilian life, all the sudden they're like, "Hey, this is what you're going to do for the next twelve to eighteen months, and you're going to do this every day," and you come home from a place like Iraq and you're just not sure anymore where you stand, where you belong, what you should or shouldn't be doing as far as just life, what your path forward is. I wanted to figure out what that path for me was, and I started to really figure out, "Where do I want to be?" I didn't want to be in construction anymore, so essentially I took the construction project management experience that I had, the tech experience that I had, and combined the two and went into tech project management and started managing tech projects.

Joe:
The skill sets are pretty transferable from construction to technology.

Sylvester:
Right, right. Having a really good background in tech that I was able to get from the military and then having the experience ... A lot of times when I'm talking to people and people ask me the difference between managing a construction project and managing a tech project, often I say it's easier to manage a tech project than a construction project. In tech, delays are common. In construction, you don't have that luxury of saying like, "Well, we can push the project back." I always get interested this time of year when I'm looking at construction sites and I see the sense of urgency with getting a building capped before it gets too cold or before you start to get snow. There's a lot of luxuries that you have in tech that you don't have in construction, so it forces you to take a very disciplined approach to how you manage your projects. I was able to take those same skills, and those skills do. They transferred right into tech. Essentially managing a budget, managing people, managing schedule, it doesn't matter whether it's a building or whether you're building a system.

Joe:
As you segue back into the technology community, what did you start to observe about the talent development process, about folks that were coming onto your teams?

Sylvester:
One of the biggest things I started to realize were there were very few people who looked the way that I do. I'm a African-American male, and by and large I was always either one of two or one of three. I was always either one of two or one of three with large companies. These weren't small shops for the most part. I was working for a large publicly traded company, and there were two other people who looked the way that I did on the tech teams. When I started to really ask myself why was there such a lack of diversity in tech, what the issues were, I wanted to separate out race, sex, age, and I always say age because a lot of people forget that age in the tech industry can be just as big a discriminating factor as race and sex. I wanted to separate those things out and look for what the common thread was that would prevent someone from gaining access to the industry.

Sylvester:
The one thing I landed on over and over was skills. When I think about my background and what it was like for me being a product of the public school system, for me tech education in school and computer science class was essentially learning to type and learning to open and close documents. I didn't learn anything that was substantial. I didn't learn anything that would prepare me for the tech industry. The teachers that I had didn't even know the tech industry themselves, so even if I was curious, even if I had questions, they wouldn't have been able to answer those questions for me. The teachers who taught computer science in the schools that I went to, they were an English teacher who ended up becoming a computer science. It's your math teacher. None of these people had any tech experience and none of them could go beyond teaching basic tech, basic computer fundamental.

Sylvester:
If that's the foundation of your education, unless you major in computer science or a tech related field in college, you have no skills that prepare you for the industry. I wanted to find a way to solve that or to bridge that gap, because even if you go to college ... For me, I went to college, but if you don't even understand what's available, you don't even understand what the options are, then you're probably not going to major in computer science or software engineering or something like that. If you hear a lot of the misconceptions, people say all the time like, "Well, you've got to be good at math, and you have to be good at this." I'll say, especially to parents that I talk to, and they'll say, "Well, you know, I don't know if it's right for him. He's not very good at math." "I'm terrible at math, and I'm fine as a developer. I've never had a problem as a developer. I'm terrible at math. I have a degree in finance and I'm terrible at math."

Joe:
That's what the spreadsheets are for, right?

Sylvester:
Right. Don't put too much weight in that. There's a lot of misconceptions, and it honestly steers people away from the field, so I wanted to have a way of taking kids as young as possible and one, introducing them to the tech industry, introducing them to the field, because the only reason I was able to get introduced to it was from going to the Air Force. I only picked the job that I picked because the recruiter basically said, "Okay, you're Prior Service, you've been in." Because I had been in the Marines before, I didn't have to go through the Air Force basic training or anything like that. I just had to pick a job that my test scores qualified me for, and I just saw a bunch of guys sitting in an air-conditioned office with nice chairs. They looked like they were eating three times a day. After being in the Marine Corps, I was like, "I don't want to be outside in the cold anymore. I don't want to be wet. I don't want to be hungry. They look very comfortable. That's the job I want." Had no idea what the job was. She told me what the job was, like, "I don't care, whatever." The job was computer network and cryptographic switching systems. I don't know what it means.

Joe:
That sounds fine.

Sylvester:
I don't care. They-

Joe:
As it turns out, that's a pretty complex gig.

Sylvester:
It is, and it really was, and it wasn't what I was expecting, but the only reason I was able to get into that was because of that job. The average kid who's graduated from public school isn't going to go into the military at all, so how do we expose these kids to this? That's really what I was searching for, and that question, I didn't really have an answer to it in the beginning. Even now, two years into it, I'm still figuring it out. In the beginning, the answer to that question was, "Okay, well I'm just going to start teaching web development to inner city kids at a rec center. I'm going to just have a free class, and kids can come in and I'll teach them."

Joe:
You start with class number one and student number one. What's the pitch? Who did you go to? We often talk with entrepreneurs who say there's a point at which you realize you don't have to ask permission. You just start doing things. Did you just roll into a school and open up a laptop? How did it start?

Sylvester:
I went to the director of the recreation center and basically said, "Hey, I noticed you have a computer lab. Also noticed that your computer lab is not being used. I want to use it. You have no classes going on in the computer lab. There's no programming going on. How about I set up a class in the computer lab?" He was like, "You know what, that sounds great. The computer lab is sitting upstairs. It's locked most of the day. If you want to do a class there, you have something you want to do, I'm more than happy to support that." I then went to the schools in the area of the recreation center and basically said, "Hey, would you mind making an announcement to the parents and students that I'll be at the rec center teaching web development classes, and anyone who wants to come is welcome?" From that initial push I was able to get that one kid.

Sylvester:
After that one kid started to come, the same director of the recreation center came to me and said, "Hey, I notice you only have one kid coming. It's okay if you don't want to come back. If you don't want to keep doing this, it's not a big deal. It's all right." I said, "Look, you know, whether it's one kid or one hundred kids I'll be here. I'll keep coming." I think that was more the Marine in me saying like, "Hey, I've made a decision, so I'm going to stick to it." I didn't really fully understand what that meant, but I quickly learned as more and more kids started to come and that one kid grew into ten, and to twenty, and to thirty kids.

Joe:
That growth, did it happen organically? How did it go from one, to ten, to a hundred?

Sylvester:
A lot of it was organic. We started to get a lot of kids from word of mouth. A parent would tell another parent. A kid would tell another kid. A teacher would tell a parent. We started to build relationships with schools in the city, and organically kids just started to come in the door. For me it seemed like it happened so fast where it was one day we had five or six kids coming in and then the next thing I knew we had more kids than computers, and we were asking for donations for computers to deal with the overflow of kids. I started out with one class on Saturday morning, and before I knew it we needed to add a second class to accommodate the number of kids we were pulling in.

Joe:
How many classes do you run now?

Sylvester:
Right now we're still running two classes. We're running a Saturday morning class and a Thursday evening class.

Joe:
Okay, and so the classes are spread out throughout the week. Where do you start with kids that come in?

Sylvester:
Age-wise we start at five. All of our kids regardless of age start at the same point, and they essentially start with a basic introduction to HTML. A big thing for me is I don't like the idea of treating kids like they won't understand something or they can't get something. I found that from teaching both children and adults, children are often easier to teach than adults. In the beginning, the problem was essentially the adults. We were holding our kids back because we would talk about a different technology or we would talk about a language and say, "Well, you know, that might be too hard, so we're not going to teach them that, or we'll wait for that." Then I realized just give it to them. All of our kids regardless of age start out with basic HTML. We then introduce CSS, and then once they get good with HTML CSS we bring in JavaScript. As they get good with HTML and CSS and JavaScript, we then introduce back end technologies, so we teach our kids Node.js, MongoDB for the back end.

Joe:
As a person who runs an agency who hires people who have no JS and Mongo together, I can look forward to a steady stream of folks coming from your program who are probably seventeen, eighteen, nineteen in five years.

Sylvester:
That's one of the biggest things we're trying to build. In a lot of ways, and when I'm talking to people, I look at this like youth sports. I've modeled a lot of what we do off of youth sports, and that's the same approach that I'm taking. The stakes in technology are just as high as the stakes in sports. You think about the deals people are getting in the tech industry, and you compare that to the deals that people are getting in sports. The stakes are pretty high.

Joe:
The last Node Mongo developer that we placed for a client for our agency is earning $240,000 a year. Statistically that's probably easier to attain than a kid that thinks they might be an NFL quarterback.

Sylvester:
Not probably. It's without a doubt easier, but a lot of people don't realize that you have a far better chance of achieving a level of success through technology than through entertainment or sports. A lot of kids in the inner city, they're only seeing people achieving success through sports and entertainment. They feel like, "Well, this is the path I have to take because the only people I see becoming successful are becoming successful from this," but if you show a kid and say, "Well, no. There's something else. You can also become successful from technology as well," it changes the dynamic. It changes the perception. For me, if you're teaching kids at six, seven, eight years old these technologies ... We have nine and ten year old kids that are using the command-line. They understand variables, they understand functions.

Sylvester:
We had a thing in one of our classes, we had a situation where some of our computer science students, who are third and fourth year CS majors who help us out in class, couldn't help two of our ten year old boys because what they boys were doing they hadn't learned in college yet. If you take these kids and you're giving them these skills at this age, and you create a structure that they never have to leave, they're able to progressively move throughout their growth and development through our programs. By the time they graduate high school, they're so much further ahead than their peers. If you think about people who go to the NFL, you don't all the sudden decide in college, "Well, you know I'm going to play for a Division I school, and I want to play for the NFL." You've been playing football from the time that you were old enough to walk, so why aren't we doing the same thing with technology with our kids?

Sylvester:
Why aren't we saying, "From the time that you're old enough to sit in this class, from the time that you're old enough to walk and talk, we're going to immerse you in this, and we're going to do it in a fun way. We're going to make it feel like it's not school. We're going to make it feel like it's something that you want to do. It's enjoyable. You're going to be happy doing it, and we're going to help you grow and develop as you move through your childhood." One of the things that we're building out now is a tech entrepreneurship curriculum for our kids. More and more I've realized a lot of the conversations, especially with our teenagers, always turn to entrepreneurship. We're teaching them essentially how to build products. Everything we do is project-based, so our kids are picking projects and they're saying like, "Well, how would I make money off of this? How do I find customers? How do I charge people for this?" You organically are having these conversations around monetization, and traction, scalability.

Sylvester:
I said, "All right, if we're giving kids the skills they need to build products, then we also need to give them the skills they need to build companies around these products." For me it's about pushing innovation with these kids out of the inner city. Historically the inner city has not been that place where you've seen tech innovation coming from, but you have a huge, huge wealth of talent in the inner city. It's just not being developed. If you develop that talent and you give these kids the tools, the resources, and say, "Look, I'm going to give you the support system. I'm going to teach you how to start a startup by the time you're twelve or thirteen years old," you have kids graduating high school then essentially going through the same things that someone who goes through an accelerator has gone through. You have kids who have real tech skills as well as real business skills. I think that it has the power of changing the dynamic in inner cities.

Joe:
I like the comparison to youth sports because you would go through a youth sports program with lots of artifacts, game reels, plays, trophies, newspaper write-ups. Kids going through this program come out with actual websites, services, and now businesses.

Sylvester:
Right.

Joe:
What are some of the things that the kids have actually built? Are there things that we can see that are running?

Sylvester:
There are. One of the transitions we've been making is having all of our kids use GitHub from day one. With that we're able to leverage GitHub pages so that our kids can publish the websites they're working on on GitHub pages. For our front and back end work that the kids do we're using Heroku to push our kids' projects to that so that they can show people what they're working on. The projects they work on, it really runs a broad spectrum. One of our young ladies, I think she's eight, nine years old, she loved the movie Frozen, and so she wanted to build a website about Frozen, and that's essentially what she did. She built a website that showed the characters that she really liked. One of our twelve year old young men recently started building a website for Star Wars. As we got closer to the Star Wars movie coming out, he wanted to build a website that would become like a fan website where you could go and find out information about the different vehicles, the different weapons, the different characters.

Sylvester:
A group of our high school kids at Freire Charter just finished building a after school extracurricular activity portal where the teacher that manages extracurricular activities can now go online. This has already been deployed to the internet. They can go online, the teacher can enter extracurricular activities, and students that are interested in participating in extracurricular activities can now go to that website, see what's available, see what they need to do to sign up, figure out the times, and they have all the information they need via the web now. It can be managed through the online console that the kids built.

Joe:
Now this is the kind of service that large organizations would try to sell into K-12 for six figures or higher, and a kid built it.

Sylvester:
Right, right, so and you know one of the biggest things, especially our teenagers, is getting them to function like a real software development team. You have a group of ninth and tenth graders who have their own project managers, they have their own front end developers, their own back end developers, their own designers. By the end of the fall session, these kids were functioning the way a software development team would function. By the end of the fall session, I was able to step back and say, "Okay, now you guys have to manage yourself. You know what you need to do, you know what needs to be done. It's your project. I'm here if you have questions, but I'm going to sit back and I'm just going to watch." They essentially did that. The project manager, she would write on the board in every class, "This is what we need to get done in this class. This is what is coming up for next class. This is how much time we have." She would check with everyone, "Hey, where are you? How long is it going to take you to do this?" It was funny. At one point she came to me and said, "You know, I think being a project manager is like being a stalker. I feel like I'm always stalking people."

Joe:
It's not far off.

Sylvester:
I was like, "Exactly." I was like, "You're exactly right. That's what it is." For me to see a group of ninth and tenth grade kids who can function like a software development team and push a product out with a little adult supervision, it shows what they're capable. I think it's amazing.

Joe:
I'm also envisioning this skill set coming into college. Part of my background was supervising a bunch of internship programs at Penn, and one of the biggest challenges we had was getting students as undergrads, first year, second year students who had no skills whatsoever, organizing a project or collaborating with peers. This may have been the first time that they've ever, at an Ivy League institution in their first year, been on a team of five, or six, or seven, and no one knows who's in charge. You've got folks coming out of this program by age eleven, twelve, thirteen, already knowing what the different kinds of roles and responsibilities are. What's going on with our approach to education, especially in the public sector, where this is still considered something that is okay to be an extracurricular program, but we don't have it built into the curriculum at all?

Sylvester:
I think one of the biggest problems I see ... Usually when I talk about issues with education, I tend to bring a unique perspective. Because we run our own standalone programs, we function almost like our own school, but we also run programs in schools, so I spend a lot of time in schools. I'm also in a lot of what I do deeply involved with the tech industry as a whole, so I spend a lot of my time talking to CTOs and CEOs, so I'm seeing both what teachers are doing, and I'm seeing how much effort they're putting out, and a lot of times I think teachers ... We often point our finger at the teachers and the schools and we're saying, "No, you're not doing a good job. The teachers are failing. The teachers are doing this." I'm in schools running programs, and day after day I see teachers that are giving 120 and 130%. I also see what the result is.

Sylvester:
I see the kids who are coming out of high school and kids who are coming out of college, and I talk to the people who are running the companies who are saying, "I'm not getting what I need. I'm getting kids that can't think outside of the box. I'm getting kids that aren't creative thinkers. I'm getting kids that can't work independently." I think that there's, one, a disconnect between the school system and industry. Schools are working in a silo. We're saying, "We have a curriculum that we work with. These are the measures and metrics we need to hit. We did what we were supposed to do," but the schools aren't looking at what that end result is. If you look at a child almost like a product, the schools never look at what that product is when that kid goes into the workforce. The schools never take a step back and say, "Is this child that we've produced really able to contribute in the workforce the way they need to?" The schools just say, "Hey, we produced this kid. They passed their test. We did what we were supposed to do."

Sylvester:
The biggest problem with that frame of thinking is our school system is still set up to send people to work in factories and farms. We're using a school system that was designed you're talking about fifty, sixty years ago where people were going to work in factories, and all they needed to do was prepare you to go to work in a factory. Our society has changed tremendously since then, and to say we can still use the same methodology and the same school system to prepare someone to go to work for a company where even if they're not in technology they're going to be immersed in technology. The reality is there is no tech industry anymore. It doesn't matter what you do, you're involved in tech. The question is just how much. To use that same system and expect a good outcome is crazy. For teachers, it doesn't matter whether you put forth 120, 130% if the system that you're using itself is flawed, and I think that's a big part of the problem. The system is flawed, but no one really wants to look at, how do we change the system itself?

Joe:
One of the effects of that or one of the ripples is when we speak with CTOs, a lot of what we hear is, "We can't find talent. We're struggling to source candidates that understand how to work in a team, how to work with this kind of technology." I heard you give voice to the idea that technology needs and programs often change faster than schools can even build curricula around them. Tell me a little bit about the new venture that you're opening up, Coded by U, which is an opportunity to address some of those shortfalls with students who are adult learners.

Sylvester:
Coded by U essentially was born out of Coded by Kids. We wanted to start doing programs for adults for a couple different reasons. One, looking at some of the households and communities our kids were coming from, I had to ask myself, "Are we really taking a holistic approach to our kids if they're coming from homes where they have a single parent who can't put food on the table or can't keep the lights on? We're running all these great programs for the kids, but they're still going home and they're not eating dinner, or their electricity's getting cut off." I wanted to make sure that we were taking a holistic approach to the communities that we serve, so I wanted to start running programs for adults. I quickly found that adults didn't want to come to a program called Coded by Kids, so we started to brand our adult programs as Coded by U.

Sylvester:
Coded by U really started out as a way of giving low income adults access to high quality programming focused and software development focused education classes and education programs and do it at a fraction of the cost that they would have to pay for a traditional dev boot camp and give them more flexibility than they would have at a traditional dev boot camp. When you think about the costs associated with a traditional development boot camp, it prices out the people who would need the training the most. The people who are low income, the people who are struggling to get by and struggling to find a career path, they can't pay what these programs are asking.

Joe:
I think, too, the other issue is it's about time, too.

Sylvester:
Right.

Joe:
For folks listening that don't know the format or structure of a development boot camp, typical development boot camp takes how long and costs how much?

Sylvester:
Typically, you're talking about eight to twelve weeks and for these twelve week, a lot of of them are either full time or part time where you're in class four to eight hours a day four to five days a week and you're talking about 10 to $15,000 out of pocket that you're spending. To say to someone not just, "I'm going to expect you to spend 10 or $15,000 out of pocket for this program ... " Even some programs have tried to be more flexible with payment where they've said, "Well, you know, we can do a payment plan," or, "We'll take a certain percentage out of your paychecks when you find a job." You're still saying to someone who's struggling to keep their lights on, "You need to do this at a minimum part time program where four to five days a week you're in class at least four hours a day." This person is struggling, often working two to three jobs just to sustain themselves. Now to say, "Hey, you're going to have to stop that and do this," it's unsustainable. It's just not something that they're able to do.

Joe:
The idea by Coded by U, and what I love again, because we're on the radio, it almost sounds like Coded by University in a way, Coded by the letter U. The approach here is to spread out the time commitment a little bit and then you've got different options for how people can enroll and pay for this course, in some cases maybe not even at all.

Sylvester:
Right, right. As we start to adjust our pricing to be more competitively priced as far as market, we're still maintaining the slots for our original target market which was low to middle income adults. Essentially we're rolling out and we're calling it the Coded by U Fellows program where everyone who's in the Coded by U Fellows program receives a scholarship to the programs. We have it set up so that it's one day a week that you actually have to come in class, and that one day in class is in the evenings. Everything else we're working virtually. We're doing Google Hangouts. We're communicating via Slack and via email. That gives our students a lot more flexibility as far as, when do I need to be in class? How do I get the work done? It does require that our students function more independently.

Joe:
I think that mirrors a lot of the work environments that I see developers going into these days. I see more folks spending time on Slack than together in a room.

Sylvester:
It does, it does, and a big thing for us, too, is we do want to push a lot on our students. I want to make sure that we're not just doing something that benefits our students but also benefits the companies that they're going to go to work for. I don't want anyone to come out of Coded by U and then their employer say, "Hey, this person just can't do the job," or, "This person can't work independently or can't work on a team." We want the people who are coming out of programs to be able to go to work and add value. It's a two-way street. We want to give an opportunity to our students, but we also want to contribute and add value to the companies that they're going to become a part of.

Joe:
You're getting input into the curriculum from some potential employers as well.

Sylvester:
Right. Coded by U's taking the same approach as Coded by Kids, and Coded by Kids in a lot of ways has been a product of the tech community. From the very beginning, I was asking developers in the tech community, "Hey, what should we be teaching?" These are still conversations we're having every so often. As technologies are changing, as new things are coming out, we're constantly having conversations about, "Hey, what do our kids need to know? What should we be teaching? What shouldn't we be teaching?" Coded by U is no different. We can't say we're going to pick. I can't say I'm going to pick and decide on my own what I think we should teach, and I'm going to say to companies, "You should hire these people even though I made the decision." I want companies to be involved.

Sylvester:
For me this is a collaborative process. "Hey, let's come together and decide what do we need as a whole? What does the industry need? What can we teach? What's feasible in a twelve week program? What's feasible in ten weeks or eight weeks?" Let's come to that middle ground so that we're running a high quality program that's giving people the skills that they need to be successful, but we're also giving them the skills they need to add value to the industry.

Joe:
A typical large organization staffs up a big HR enterprise automated screening tools looking at where was your four year degree from? Did you get a master's on top of that? How do your candidates end up getting into a recruiter's pipeline.

Sylvester:
Through a lot of the partnerships we've been making with the companies that we partner with, the companies directly that we work with. Essentially a lot of it is me saying, "All right, what are you going to be looking over the next six to twelve months? Let's talk about how we could meet that need. Let's talk about how we could produce those developers that you need to fill those spots." We've also gone into a partnership with a tech recruiting firm, AgileHires, and through AgileHires, they're also working with clients saying, "Okay, you need two or three developers, and Coded by U can provide those two to three developers. Let's figure out what skills they need to have." In a lot of ways we also have a little more flexibility. Because of the way we structure time and the way we work with our students, we're able to say to a company, "Okay, we're not just going to train somebody and dump the person on you. This is a partnership between you and us, so you tell us, what does the person need to be able to do when they walk in the door on day one? That's what we're going to focus on."

Sylvester:
When they walk in the door on day one, you're also going to tell us, "Hey, this is what the person's doing really good on. This is what the person's weak on." Because we essentially don't go away, Coded by Kids and Coded by U, they're more communities than anything else, our students are coming back. We had an issue with one of our teenage students who was working as a front end developer, and his employer said, "Hey, he's really good. He's doing great work. He just needs a little work on version control." I said, "Oh, that's simple. He'll be in class on Thursday, so when he comes in class on Thursday, we'll focus that class with him on version control." That kid was able to go back to work the following week and he had version control down.

Joe:
I wish version control was the biggest I had had as a teenager.

Sylvester:
Yeah, it's funny working with teenagers, especially this kid. I was like, "You know, you're sixteen, you're working as a front end developer. Are you excited?" He's like, "No, it's cool."

Joe:
Oh, it's cool.

Sylvester:
It's cool.

Joe:
When I was sixteen I was sweeping up popcorn at a movie theater.

Sylvester:
Yeah.

Joe:
You're growing this community of alumni. Folks are actually getting jobs out in the community. How do you see this thing scaling? How does it grow over time? What's your dream for this organization?

Sylvester:
Coded by U is going to essentially take on all of our revenue for profit, our ventures that we've been doing. We work with schools, and essentially schools will pay us to design and run a programming class for them. We'll run coding classes based on the needs of the school. With our adult programs, adults are paying for those classes. We now have an internal development shop as well. We started the internal development initially as a way of being able to do the work for small businesses and nonprofits that had missions that we believed in but didn't have the budgets for a large development shop. It gave us the opportunity to give our students real world experience where a lot of times employers are saying like, "Well, it's great that they did this course, but they need to have work experience."

Sylvester:
With our internal dev shop, our students get work experience. They're working on real paid projects and we also have the ability to now say, "Hey, look, I can pay you to learn. You're going to work on this real project so you're able to continue your learning and continue developing, but you're also getting paid to continue learning."

Joe:
This is not unlike the kind of models I see at business schools where there are think tanks that are paid. You can have undergrad research students and master's folks working on projects for companies. It becomes part of that team's portfolio over time.

Sylvester:
Right, and that student is able to go out in the world and say, "Hey, I've done real things. This is the experience I've had." It gives us the luxury of time where we're not hindered by the constraint of saying, "We have to place this person in a job today." We're able to say, "Hey, look, why don't you keep learning this?" or, "Why don't you work on this technology? We have a project for you. We'll pay you to work on the project. You keep learning, and then once you finish let's look for a job. You'll be in a better position to find the job that you really want at that point."

Joe:
Maybe it's the hallmark of a program designed by a project manager, but I see it iterating over time, but this is also bootstrap. For the Philly nonprofit community it's probably heresy to talk about something that grew organically this way and didn't start with an $8 million foundation grant from somebody, but you've just grown this step by step one iteration after the next.

Sylvester:
Right, right. That's one of the things that separates us from a lot of nonprofits in the city. Often when I'm having conversations with other executive directors of nonprofits, you start to see those differences where a lot of nonprofits their path is, "We're going to get funding from a foundation and we're going to get funding from a grant. We're going to do our 501c3 process and we're going to sustain ourselves through grant funding and foundations." Coded by Kids started out as me saying, "Okay, I'm going to fund the organization, go to a good quality program, and then build a business model around that so that we're self-sustainable as a nonprofit. If a foundation wants to give us money and our goals are aligned, then we'll take that money, but we need to be able to sustain ourselves."

Sylvester:
By having the business model where we're running programs for the schools, we're also doing workforce development where we're partnering with larger nonprofit organizations and essentially saying, "Okay, you traditionally do workforce development, but you're training people to paint houses, or you're training people to work in kitchens. We can plug in our program and become your tech focus workforce development provider and this is how much it costs for us to do that." Having that business model, it gives us the luxury of saying, "We don't have to apply for grants. We don't have to take foundation money. It's nice. It's always welcome, but we can do it on our terms."

Joe:
Then the structure of the organization is really two pillars. One, Coded by Kids, that's nonprofit purely. Coded by U is actually a for profit organization, but whatever profits, whatever you throw off, you spin off, goes to fund Coded by ... That's where you're not having to go through the typical nonprofit registration. Your accountant cries at night and ...

Sylvester:
Yes.

Joe:
... rocks sobbing in the corner.

Sylvester:
We try to keep things as simple accounting-wise as possible, but having Coded by U as the for profit, we're able to essentially run a business and say, "Hey, the connection between the two organizations is really the commitment that Coded by U is making financially to Coded by Kids." It's more complicated than a lot of people would want, but on the other hand, there's a lot of advantages that it gives us that we like. It gives us the ability to both go after grant funding and foundation money through Coded by Kids but also look for impact investing and people who are angel investors who are willing to invest in a social venture through Coded by U. One, we have two avenues of raising funding and it gives us flexibility in how we operate.

Joe:
It seems like it also gives you the freedom that you're not beholden to a single stakeholder either. You can go out and find support wherever it comes from whether that's doing a for profit project for a business client in the dev shop or it's actually going through a traditional foundation and getting a grant to expand or scale. In terms of scalability, where are the instructors coming from? You won't be able to be teaching every single class yourself ...

Sylvester:
No, no.

Joe:
... for long.

Sylvester:
We've been pushing to develop instructors internally. If you look at our actual paid instructors on the for profit side, they've come from within Coded by Kids or Coded by U. Essentially as someone is going through the Coded by U programs, I'm identifying people who I think have the personality, the temperament, the character to go into the classroom. Being a good developer is completely different from being a good teacher, and I've seen a lot of great developers who once you put them in a classroom, it all falls apart. For me it's not just about producing good developers when we're looking at teachers, but also producing people who have that personality to go into a classroom. As we have people going through our programs, I'm always identifying people who I'm saying, "Hey, you'd be really good if you were teaching this." These are the people we've been hiring and bringing on as our instructors.

Sylvester:
We're also looking to expand how we do that be a little more deliberate with working with programs that train teachers, working with programs that are doing alternative teaching certification programs, and essentially saying like, "Hey, do you have people who want to teach technology? We have a program where we can teach them the teaching technology portion. You can prepare them to get their teaching certification, and now we have that constant sustainable pool of instructors." Sustainability and scalability are two huge things for us, and over the last I would say nine to twelve months, we've been doing a lot of work on really looking at how we operate, looking at what we do, what we need to. How do we make it scalable? Pushing with really nailing down a good process for onboarding schools and rolling out to schools, getting it to the point where we can rapidly onboard a school as a client, whether that school is in Philadelphia or in California, roll out a high quality program or a high quality class, adjusting our pricing model to allow us to be scalable.

Sylvester:
Sometimes your pricing model itself can prevent scalability, so looking at how do we price, how do we charge, how do we train our teachers, how do we train our instructors? We've had to develop our own teaching training program to train developers to be teachers because one of the things I realized was it's hard to be a teacher. Just in line with some of the things I previously said, you have to equip someone to go into the classroom, especially if you want to be able to scale what you're doing. We needed a way of rapidly onboarding people and saying, "Okay, you're a great developer. Now we're going to teach you how to take your development skills and take those into a classroom to teach people how to do it themselves."

Joe:
What's the biggest competency, what's the biggest skill that someone has to take on to be effective as both a developer and a teacher?

Sylvester:
Patience. Especially with our volunteer instructors, we're fortunate enough to get volunteers who come from a lot of the major development shops and companies throughout the city. We get developers from Azavea. We get software engineers from Comcast. We have developers from the Office of Innovation and Technology of the City of Philadelphia. We get people who have ten to fifteen years of software engineering and development experience. They're great developers, but once you stick them in a room with a bunch of seven, eight, and nine year olds and say, "Look, I want you to teach this kid how variables and functions work," you see quickly that it falls apart for some people. I've had people come to me, and these were highly experienced developers, and say, "Well, he's just not doing it." He's six years old. He's not going to just do it. You got to be creative. You got to figure out how to get him to do it without him realizing he's doing what you want him to do.

Sylvester:
That patience to really work through problems with this is the biggest thing that I find. Really having empathy. Sometimes we get really good at something and we forget what it felt like to not be really good at that thing. If we've been doing something ten or fifteen years, our short term memory is just of us being good at it. We don't remember eleven years before that or sixteen years before that where we were just trying to figure it out or just learning. Having the empathy, being able to put yourself in your student's shoes and say, "I remember what it felt like for this to be difficult, for this to be complicated. How did I feel when I was at this point, and what helped me to get past that point?" It's huge. It helps a lot.

Joe:
How do prospective students get involved in any of your programs?

Sylvester:
Usually by reaching out to us. Our students, both children and adults, can register online. They can go online and register there. For the adults it's a little different because there's a little more of an onboarding process that they have to go through and they have to wait to make sure that there's a start date that's coming up. For the kids, once they kids have registered, their parents complete all of the registration information, it's just a matter of them bringing them to class and then they start their first class.

Joe:
You have classes that start throughout the year?

Sylvester:
For our kids, we run every week unless it's a major holiday, so we don't do workshops or sessions. It's structured more like a Boys & Girls Club where we're there every week unless it's a holiday.

Joe:
It's not like YMCA basketball. You can just pick up and start whenever.

Sylvester:
Yeah, for our kids, they can pick up and start whenever they want.

Joe:
Great. Excellent. The website address for folks who want to get involved.

Sylvester:
The website for Coded by Kids is www.codedbykids. C-O-D-E-D bykids.com, and the website for Coded by U is codedbyu, the letter U, .com.

Joe:
.coms. Again, not even a .org for them.

Sylvester:
Not even a .org.

Joe:
Now I'm going to take this over to our nonprofit podcast and my cohost will have so many thoughts.

Sylvester:
Right.

Joe:
All right, Sylvester Mobley, founder of Coded by Kids, Coded by U, thanks so much for stopping by The Build.

Sylvester:
No problem. Thank you.

Joe:
The Build is a production of 2820 Radio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Our producer is Lori Taylor. Our associate producer is Katie Cohen Zahniser. Our talent coordinators are Katrina Smith and [inaudible 00:52:56], and our post production team is led by Evan Wilder at FlowlyAudio in Detroit. My name is Joe Taylor, Jr. Thanks for listening to The Build.