Impacting Colombian Youth with Tech Opportunities
As a first-generation college student, it was a shock to find myself talking to a startup CEO during the pandemic after I had done a two-hour workshop on building a minimal Twitter (now called X) clone using Vue. The CEO, my would-be boss, offered me an entry web developer position at Cooweb — a tech startup offering web development services globally, with the distinct quality of working with the latest technologies.
This interaction occurred in my sophomore year of college, and at that point, I didn’t feel ready. I didn’t have any experience with this framework. The workshop that gained the CEO’s attention followed a tutorial I found after watching a couple of Vue videos from the YouTube channel “Coding Garden”.
Despite my reservations about my experience, my willingness to learn led me to start my journey as a trainee front-end developer. I have now been at Cooweb for more than three years. Since day one, I have experienced a lively and overall great work environment. Every day, without exception, I learned something new with the help of my assigned mentor. His teachings included valuable technical and non-technical lessons to become a better developer and team member.
What did I do for the startup?
My participation began with attendance at the company’s daily meetings. During these “dailies” I listened to all five members of the company tell each other: 1) what they accomplished the day before, 2) what they are currently working on, and 3) any identified stoppers to their assigned tasks. At the time, it was a curious experience for me to be part of. Not long after that first meeting I was exposed to, I began learning Scrum Methodology.
I went through an onboarding process where my mentor explained to me the project I’d be part of, the current state of the development process, and my first assignments. Back then, the company used Google Meet which meant that at every opportunity you could find me in a meeting session with my mentor just listening to his explanation or thought process while completing tasks, working on my assignments, asking questions, and so on.
But wait, as I mentioned, I was in school full-time, so how is it possible to be part of all that while studying? Well, Cooweb is flexible in its working hours as long as we as the developers deliver on their assigned tasks and attend the necessary meetings. When my tasks for a particular sprint were assigned, I’d work on them at different times of the day, depending on how I set my schedule for the semester. The smoothness and success that characterized the beginning of my journey at Cooweb serves as an example that being in college is not incompatible with acquiring real-world experience while maintaining good grades and fully participating.
Another case of free labor, working just for the experience?
Absolutely not! I have been compensated for every day that I have been part of the Cooweb team, so this is far from most free labor cases. I was getting paid to learn, practice, and apply my knowledge with real software products. Awesome, right?
After two months my boss asked me if any other classmates from my college might be interested in working with us. I proceeded to talk to my two closest friends in my engineering program. They were already familiar with some of the startup’s dynamics since they often saw me working. With these two new additions, the startup consisted of eight people. My college friends and I made up over a third of the company, just some college students without any official background experience…
As the months went by, our salaries were incrementally increased up to the point where by the end of my sophomore year, I was earning a significant salary for a college student living with their family.
My experience and that of our then-new hires, sparked a thought in the CEO and my mentor — there was great talent and potential to be found and nurtured in schools/colleges/corporations (corporations in Colombia are a bit like two-year colleges in the US). It had great outcomes both for the company and the lives of the individuals hired!
This observation marked the beginning of a journey to make our startup social-impact oriented. Specifically, the company’s new aim would be to benefit low-income Colombian youth from Barranquilla, high school students, technicians, and freshmen with or without “official” programming experience with the opportunity to be part of a software startup environment where the only requirement is to crave knowledge and desire to grow more and more.
After some time, I started to improve my skills and gained more responsibilities within the company, which led me to dedicated considerable effort to talking to my college professors about Cooweb and sharing the company vision.
Does Cooweb have any partnerships with colleges or any kind of institutions?
In the beginning, there wasn’t any kind of formal or official partnership with any kind of institution. There were informal relationships with some professors from my college and some from our CEO’s and CTO’s school. That way we were able to schedule multiple remote-live workshops available for most of the engineering faculty using different tech stacks (mainly involving the vue ecosystem).
Then, over a year ago, for the first time, we organized a software challenge in partnership with the second-best engineering college in Barranquilla, where almost 23 students from different years participated in a challenge where they had to create a web platform for a pharmacy to handle their daily services, backend and frontend required, use of Vue 3.x is required and all participants received an initial template for the challenge. At the end of the challenge, two sophomore students won two positions in Cooweb’s Seed program — designed to provide the mentoring, dedicated training, and roadmap for trainees to grow into their fullest potential in the tech industry.
We will talk about Cooweb’s Seed Program in the next article :)
David P. Avila
Lead Full-Stack Developer at Cooweb LLC
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