Nulogy’s Developer Apprenticeship Program Launches for Women
Please note that the application process for our apprenticeship closed on March 22nd, 2017. Keep your eye out for the next round!
We are looking for two woman-identified* developers to join our team as apprentices!
Link is a paid three month developer apprenticeship which transitions into a full-time role upon successful completion of the program. You — the apprentice — will be partnered with technical mentors to strengthen your programming fundamentals, beginning with the core agile technical practices, and then moving on to applying them in our production codebase.
An intentional learning opportunity
You won’t be given busy-work or code that nobody wants to touch. The focus of Link is to familiarize you with the professional development practices we use at Nulogy. We do that through providing a rich learning environment which includes daily one-on-one pairing with a mentor. After the three months you’ll come onboard as a Full Stack Web Developer!
Are you a woman-identified developer interested in being an apprentice?
Who is this apprenticeship for?
It’s for women who are early-stage developers and are looking to ground their existing knowledge in strong technical practices. Whether you are a new graduate, have worked as a developer for several years or are self-taught, your skills are valued and we’d like to hear from you!
Beyond experience or education we’re looking if you:
- Display a pattern of continuous growth in your personal or professional life
- Have taken ownership over your own learning
- Can break down complex problems and communicate them clearly
- Are curious and guided by a growth-mindset
What is an Apprenticeship?
Professional software development is more than writing code. It involves working collaboratively to solve difficult business problems. It involves designing software that’s robust, readable and extensible. It involves continuous learning to remain current in the evolving technology ecosystems.
Although books and self-study are important in developing these skills, what we’ve learned from our previous apprenticeship cohorts is that we can accelerate this learning through close mentorship.
Our apprenticeship programs have been successful because we embed new developers in an immersive learning environment. Through it, we pass down these software development practices through doing rather than reading.
We created Link as a way to foster the growth of junior developers who have great potential. It is an investment in both our team, and the products we build.
Why are we focusing this round on women?
Nulogy is in a growth stage; we expect to increase the size of our product development team by 40% throughout 2017. Our intent is to grow the team in ways that both align with our values while building the best product for our customers.
For us, these two goals are complementary.
We will stay true to our values by building teams that reflect a broad range of diversity. This in turn will positively influence the quality of the software we build.
We recognize the importance of women on our development team
We recognize that everyone is vulnerable to unconscious bias. As creators of software, such implicit biases can adversely affect our products. These biases derive from our individual experiences, so the best way to minimize them is to increase the diversity on our teams.
Caitlin Winner, a designer at Facebook, shares several examples of this kind of thinking. Previously, many of the stock icons in the Facebook glyph kit positioned images of men in front of women. Caitlin extended the glyph kit to diversify the number of icons, and represent both men and women in equitable ways.
Of course, Facebook isn’t the only organization to address unconscious bias — it’s echoed here, here, and here (and many other places as well).
While the Nulogy team is diverse in many ways, and has in fact won awards for diversity, this is not the case for the gender diversity of our development team. Currently, we have only one woman on our development team, and we are not comfortable with this. We need more women on our development teams to enrich our thought diversity, and to contribute to building a better product and a stronger company.
Why haven’t we been able to hire more women?
Currently, women are not being hired as they make up only a small percentage (< 7%) of our applicants. But why is this? We are not alone with this challenge, and we understand that this isn’t exclusively a pipeline problem. We came to realize that there are many things we can do differently so that Nulogy continues to be a welcoming place for all.
We began by seeking advice from women leaders in the Toronto tech community.
Here is the advice we received:
1. Reformat job descriptions to emphasize non-competition and upward growth
2. Sponsor women-supportive tech organizations
3. Find woman-identifying developers who have potential, and nurture their skills
Since these consultations, there have been many changes both small and large at Nulogy. While we know this will be a continuous investment, here are some recent things we have done:
- Created Nuclusion, an internal committee focused on inclusion at Nulogy. The committee tackles projects like Safe Space guidelines and raising awareness about implicit bias.
- Refreshed the Full Stack Web Developer job description, as well as other company assets to reduce gender bias.
- Sponsored Rails Girls Toronto, a volunteer-led community group which aims to foster diversity and inclusion within the developer community in Toronto, and to provide opportunities for people who identify as women or non-binary to learn Ruby on Rails and web development.
- Leveraged our apprenticeship program as an opportunity to support and nurture the growth of women in web development.
What’s Next?
Want to be an Apprentice?
- Read our website for a more detailed description of the application process, or you can apply directly.
If you want to refer a friend:
Help us get the word out and find two amazing apprentices, click to share this blog post below.
Interested in joining Nulogy as a non-apprentice?
- Nulogy is growing, and we are hiring in many of our teams including UX, engineering, marketing, and our professional services teams. See our careers page to learn more.
Resources
1. Link Apprenticeship Website
Learn more about our application process and timeline.
2. Living FAQ
Do you have questions? Feel free to comment on this article or send an email to apprenticeship@nulogy.com
With the intent of being fully transparent regarding Link, we will host a ‘Living FAQ’ in which we post and answer questions that are given to us through email or Medium. This Living FAQ will be updated daily.
We encourage you to share your thoughts with us as a way to start a dialogue in the community.
3. Day in the Life of an Apprentice
If you’re interested in a first-hand perspective of a former apprentice or mentor, read Bryan’s and Cameron’s articles below:
4. Apprenticeship Patterns
As mentioned earlier, Link came out of a desire to mentor junior developers through embedding them in our engineering culture. We’re not the first organization to do this, and we’ve benefitted from the examples at other places (e.g. 8th Light, ThoughtBots). We’re also grateful for the advice and time Dave Hoover, author of Apprenticeship Patterns, offered us as we were developing our programme.
Footnotes:
* Any instance of the word ‘woman’ ‘women’ or ‘woman-identified’ is meant to capture all women in our community, including those who are cis or trans. This application is also open to those who identify as non-binary.
