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
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
That 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?
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.
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??
"Furthermore, graduates agree to work for us directly if our offer is as good as their other employment offers." - So you're tied to whatever job/management/role you're offered unless you can score a better offer. This seems very suspicious and concerning.
How Orwellian would it be to try to avoid calling a pig what it is because the word describing it makes you feel bad? Software development, regardless of how much you want to shout from the rooftops how much you like it, is labor. You trade your time for money to someone else who wants code. We are damn fortunate that wealth is attracted to code enough to provide this small segment of the working class as much luxury as it can reap from its labors.
How was this measured?
My first association would be for a newly modernised incarnation of a Labor Party, just like Tony Blair gave us New Labour.
I'm from the UK, so my first impressions may not be thought relevant. :)
Brand name choice is extremely important, please give it a deep thought.
Use labor, self-titles and related synonyms: Work, Studio, Atelier, Space, Office, Lab, Laboratory, Place, Court, Library, Market, Identity, Passport, Expert, Master, Etc.
For example: BinaryPassport
It’s quirky, cool and kinda makes sense - Passport to software engineering.
I hope, though, that you'll be honest with your students about what your program will deliver.[1] While it's currently still possible for many non-programmers to achieve upward mobility just by learning to code, there's a huge skill gap between those who can cobble together a few libraries to make a website, and those who understand theory/systems well enough to build something novel.
While compensation levels for both groups are currently still comparable, the steadily increasing supply of bootcamp grads and self-taught engineers could result in a pronounced bimodal distribution in a matter of years. Some subset of folk will have the motivation and resources to make the jump;[2] others may end up in end-user programming roles that pay poorly or aren't fulfilling.
Somebody entering your program should have a realistic view of what it takes to reach the parts of our industry that they hope to find themselves in. If they know that Modern Labor is step 0, and see themselves on a long road of learning and growth, they're likely to do very well!
[1] I wouldn't have worried about this, except that I've seen some bootcamps tell their students that they should consider themselves "senior" upon graduation, and that their skills are comparable or superior to graduates of top computer science programs.
[2] I run https://bradfieldcs.com and maintain https://teachyourselfcs.com, both of which aim to help such folk make the jump. As much as I try, many people aren't interested or driven enough to start, let alone persist for the years that it takes.
I wonder if an educational program like this is far superior. I would be curious to hear about the results.
If you are teaching JavaScript and client-side skill I recommend teaching the standard DOM methods and how to efficiently “walk the DOM”. It is becoming a lost art, but there is no alternative. The DOM methods remain the only true standard to access markup as everything else is an abstraction that compiles down to that at an incredible performance cost. It’s little things like that that add up over time that crush an application and complicate what are otherwise quick and simple architectural decisions. I am biased because that kind of standards based approach has made me more employable.
There is a big difference between lacking confidence and feeling like an imposter versus a fraudulent qualification. This is solved in most industries through licensing/certification. If you want to practice medicine, law, or nearly anything else you need a license. You need a license to be a truck driver. With such licensing comes testing, a validation of experience, background checks of your professional employment. Software has none of this.
That being said how do you identify if a potential software applicant is a fraud to the skills they claim to possess? You really don't. You interview them and hope to separate the capable from the incapable, but often it isn't clear until after they are hired and spent some time on the job. The second order consequence is when you hire only weak developers that weakness is the new (lower) baseline of acceptable competence.
> Many of these senior developers are surely skilled at walking the DOM but due to their toxic attitude
I think that is a gross generalization to suggest that somebody has enviable valuable skills they are therefore toxic. They could be, in fact, abrasive. It could also be that the people without the valuable skills are defensive and insecure. The best way to answer this is if everybody in that scenario had the valuable skills would the toxic nature still be present? In my experience toxic people remain toxic even when the environment changes.
Please forgive me, but this reads like a satire post from /r/programmingcirclejerk
Any sane program aiming to get candidates ready for real world jobs would teach their students modern front-end frameworks like React/Vue/Angular/Ember
These frameworks typically come with a virtual dom and they optimize state mutations onto the real DOM better than any human can.
> The negligence is so common it has names like imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome is a real thing supported by real research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome#References
This is also real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
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.
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.
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.
I agree that this is a great way to unearth some talent trying to break through.
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
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.
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?
A misconception I've often encountered in first time founders is that engineering productivity accretes linearly with headcount.
This way to put it is sure less appealing than "we pay you to learn" but closer to the actual business model.
Looks like you could have partnered with an existing program (or several) for the teaching part, and only run the lending/revenue sharing. What pushed you towards handling the school yourselves? More confidence in the results? Difference in the legal/financial stuff due to the business structure? PR value? Taste for teaching? Bit of all that? Something else?
The second reason is that we think that by paying people to finish tasks, assignments, and learning material, we can actually incentivize completion in a much cheaper way than employing a lot of supervisors. So not only are we able to grow faster because of our integration (like above), we can be more efficient at producing students. I think if we weren't trying to scale extremely fast and sustainably we would probably focus on the training portion.
A loan is bad because it doesn’t align incentives as much and pushes risk onto the borrower.
My point was that if you strip out the marketing "good intentions" part (not saying that the good intention aren't there), then this looks like a financial product of sort. Which made me wonder why bother combining the financial part with the school. But I got the answer about that.
Note that I'm not in the US, so I can't really get a feel of how risky this is for the student. Is 40k/y a common starting salary for a beginner or is it usually higher? 15% is due when you get to 40k salary, so that would leave you at 34k/y. Is that comfortable, or is that 6k loss hard to absorb?
I guess that depends a lot on the location?
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.
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.
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..?
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.
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)
How do you enforce this? I.e. what stops someone from simply lying about their income?
Also, I know some people in the US who might be interested in this. But, can you give me the stats about how many people enrolled, and succeeded to get a programming job?
We will have meaningful data in six months to share.
I was wondering if the money effectively lent to the learners would be income or a loan.
For practical purposes the money paid to learners bears little resemblance to income. Someone who receives 10K while learning must necessarily pay back at least 12K over 2 years at 40k per year or 18k at 60k per year.
This bears on two matters. Taxes paid and benefits received.
In the first case if the money paid is considered income the user may be paying in effect a substantial fee to the us government to borrow money in the form of income tax.
In the second health care is presently ridiculously expensive and 2K monthly income is just enough in most places to opt the user out of the free medical care that might otherwise render the 2K very livable.
Essentially users who opted to participate in modern labor could find it impossible to pay for medical insurance for any reasonable ammount while "earning" just enough that the state wont pick up the tab either.
Alternatively the user could opt to work 2 full time jobs and face a much higher chance of failure.
We think of ourselves as underwriting, in the financial sense, someone's near- to medium-term earnings. Some of the negative tax treatment is offset by our assumption of risk. If a person has the skills to go out and freelance and earn $10,000 over 5 months -- and can bear the risk of not earning that -- then we aren't necessarily the right fit. In the freelance case, income would be 1099, which includes both sides of FICA tax, but it also includes the risk of not finding enough clients. When people use us, they are guaranteeing $10k which allows them to plan and learn without worrying.
This is actually similar to how IPOs work. If you are company who wants to sell public stock to investors, there's a possibility that not enough people will buy your stock at a reasonably price if you sell directly to investors. So historically, investment banks would underwrite this transaction and price your stock and buy 100% of your offering. The company gets enough money at a reasonably price and then the investment banker goes out and sells it to investors. In this case, the company may have left money on the table, but their absolute risk is lower, since it's now the investment banker who bears it. Some companies, however, are in such a strong position (like Spotify) that they don't need the investment banker and they just sell directly to the market. Similarly, some individuals have such good prospects/finances that they don't need us, and that's not our market.
Paying just over the threshold for free medical care for the state means substantial costs for the learner who will pay hundreds of dollars more for earning literally $50 too much to qualify for free medical.
We aren't talking about people whose prospects are to good to need an option like this we are actually talking about people who are trapped in poverty because earning slightly more ends up being ruinously expensive instead of a step up.
It's profoundly depressing.
E.g. if the threshold is 5k, we pay 10k, medical insurance goes to $1000 from $0, it might be still positive for the trainee (earning $10k - $tax - $1000 might be better than no earnings at all).
Stupid question time. It seems like the money would more accurately be expressed as a loan. Is there a reason it's expressed as income? Complexity of lending regulation? Lending regulation particularly disallowing the chosen model?
With GitHub now turning into a Facebook for programmers, I’ve anonymized my profile there too. I’m happy to provide code on request or complete challenges but turning everything into an altar for Self may be the greatest mistake of our generation.
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.
You should mention this on the website.
Also, I think your business model would be much more scalable if you left the educating to others and instead focused narrowly on being a financial program.
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.
> 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.
If you are not offering much value in terms of the educational content (since it’s freely availabe), then aren’t you essentially just loaning people money. They get money now, and they promise to pay you back a higher amount in a while.
Wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper for someone to just get a 2k loan on their own and study the freely available content on their own?
edit: grammar
[0] https://www.calculator.net/interest-rate-calculator.html?clo...).
Where as, if you take out a normal loan and don't net a good coding job after your little educational hiatus, you're in a worse financial position than you before (except now you know how to code, yay).
P.S. I think this is a great project and I am very interested to see how this goes.
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.
https://lambdaschool.com/blog/announcing-lambda-co-op-commun...
What does this mean? If I get a job offer for $100k but you match I have to accept your job offer of working for your company?
Strange...
And I highly doubt you will expand beyond this given who you are likely to be contracting with.
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.
Have you considered custom pricing tiers based on skills set and/or progress speed through the program?
Do you take remote students?
How is the 15% of income you take from students spent?
- Everything is remote (the program is online)
- The 15% goes back to other students and the rest covers our other costs and expenses.
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).
As an aside, while teaching web dev, do you put any focus on accessibility for users with disabilities and other special needs? Is your platform accessible to students using assistive technology like screen readers? You're possibly offering something here which could have an impact on the high unemployment rate among disabled people, many of whom are lacking skills or opportunities to obtain them. Would be happy to talk with you more about this if you're interested - full disclaimer: accessibility and usability are my dayjob :)
Edit: oh, I thought it was 2000 total, not per month.
Never mind then, though I do think this is would ideally be a government program.
7.25 x 40 x 20 = $5800
we pay $10,000
Second, virtually all the work is not for any gain (it's purely instructional)
>"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).
In this case, I get the the sense that drivers(or paid programmer apprentices) are sold on the idea that they can make good side money whereas they're not factoring all the other expenses or finances that would come up front or even worse over time such as car maintenance, gas, tolls and etc. For the paid apprentice and everyone's living situation is different when you factor in location cost-of-living and etc.. to receive a set amount of $10k over the course of five months where it's being asked that you dedicate 40 to 60 hours a week for 5 straight months. You are essentially as the individual who signs up for this course committing to 800-1200 hours which also amounts to living off of roughly to $8 to $12.5 an hour just to learn to code.
Maybe if I was a high school student not looking to go straight into college yet or someone in somewhat desperate situation seeking a way out may consider this. I understand that Modern Labor is a company/business the word loses me is the commitment of taking 15% salary for two years straight or how to commit to work for the company if they match a competing offer.
This gives me the impression that the individual who signs up to be part of their program provides more value to Modern labor then they do for themselves. Kind of like Uber pays the driver, takes a % of gross revenue from the trips while they're being still funded by venture capitalists. Guess it's like how big Daddy Kane says, pimpin ain't easy..lol
Anyways, this may not be the best example but this is what comes to mind. Modern labor good luck to you guys if you guys becoming successful in this endeavor and perhaps some company will buy you guys out and in return we have a growing labor force the scale of uber where the promise is to take you from novice to master developer in 5 months where has a person who signs up for this program takes $10k up front but pays back 15% of their salary over two years or a maximum of $30k. Perhaps this is a small price to pay when it comes to doing business. Makes you wonder who's benefiting from from who. ️
We're already on the path toward blue collar salaries thanks to big pushes from government and big tech (Google,FB,etc.) to lower labor costs by inflating the supply of workers. You've heard it before - "not enough software developers!"... Yet salaries are barely moving? We didn't need it, but now startups like "Modern Labor" further incentives an ever growing influx of programmers into a market which is destined for over saturation.
Get ready folks. Your white color job, is turning blue faster than you even realize it. Find something to specialize in and do it fast.
I specialize in unfucking harebrained implementations written by teams of "engineers" with five months of experience.
It's good business once you know how to exploit it.
Would this actually be bad for society?
For what it's worth, I appreciate you not censoring me and letting my post get handled fairly by letting the users decide where my comment should be.
I'm almost never negative on HN, but I know something like this is going to be a hell on at least a few people's lives.
Therefore, the social contract here is that we all need to contain our discontents and express them in a factual, neutral way. I know that's not easy, believe me. But it's the skill we all need to learn together, if we're to have an internet community that doesn't burn itself to a crisp. That's a worthwhile thing to try for, don't you think?
2k + Equivalent to free content = 15% of gross income for two years.
All things are not equal, and this isn't a software library or news article, these are peoples lives.