SE Factory: A Success Story
Launched in February 2016, SE Factory’s pilot bootcamp consisted of: 1 lead instructor, 8 students and 3 intensive months. And the outcome? Well, SE Factory graduated 8 prominent full stack web developers ready to overcome any challenge. 90% of these students got employed as web developers in a matter of weeks after completing the bootcamp. Impressive, right?
After the success of the first cycle, SE Factory proceeded with Cycle 2 accepting this time around, 14 students. And the results were even more spectacular! Aside form the schedule assigned for them, the participants had the chance to encounter several speakers brought in by SE Factory to share their own wisdom and insights regarding technological topics as well as the soft skills needed to succeed in any position.
One of the participating speakers was Mr. Elie Mouchrik, a leading supporter of the program. As the Director of Software Development at Cardinal Health, Inc. (WaveMark Lebanon Offshore), Elie is very fond of the initiative undertaken by SE Factory.
Below is an article that summarizes Mr. Mouchrik’s involvement with SE Factory and his thoughts on the program.
SE Factory students surpassed our expectations. We interviewed several of the Cycle 2 alumni and offered many of them software engineering jobs at Cardinal Health, Inc. We were impressed by their skills in cutting edge technologies, processes, and various tools.
More so, we came to appreciate SE Factory’s student-selection process. Most of the students are bright, well-rounded, and hardworking young individuals. After all, only the truly committed are willing to enter an intensive 14-week program at SE Factory. This explains how most of the students passed our typically-tough employee evaluation exam. We’re very grateful to have access to this talent pool, and we’re glad to be supporting SE Factory.
During SE Factory’s last Cycle, we had the honor to host some of Lebanon’s most influential tech specialists, entrepreneurs and experts, who kindly gave some of their time to mentor and give workshops to SEF students. Amongst the most influential speakers, we had the privilege of collaborating with Mr. Elie Mouchrik, Director of Software Development at Cardinal Health, Inc. (WaveMark Lebanon Offshore). The latter is an affiliated company of WaveMark Inc., a Boston based startup acquired by healthcare giant Cardinal Health, Inc. in 2012.
Their team in Lebanon builds CIMS, a cloud-based inventory management system that allows hospitals to integrate RFID, barcoding, and 2-Bin Kanban to reduce costs, improve efficiency and support quality care.
In a recent conversation with Mr. Mouchrik, we discussed the impressive standard of emerging talent in the country and underlined the importance of the intensive programming scheme SEF offers to its students.
There is a remarkable progress over the past decade in the tech industry in Lebanon. And although the young generation is talented, I believe they can reach higher standards to match and compete on an international scale. That is why I support initiatives such as SE Factory coding boot camp.
Building on that, Cardinal Health, Inc. has already employed four of the Cycle 2 SE Factory students, and are looking into hiring a few more. This is very impressive seeing that their hire rate averages at 9.4%. This says a lot about the level of the SE Factory alumni!
Mr. Mouchrik also perceives the project undertaken by the SE Factory team as means to contradict the common belief that the Lebanese job market is saturated. He believes that opportunities in the country are rising and the ever-growing tech domain can only demand a more professional workforce. To name one such example, Mr. Mouchrik discusses his own company which has expanded its operations recently.
Our team in Beirut continues to build, expand, and refactor the CIMS platform. Our team already boasts 50 members, and we are forecasting an increase to 70 by the end of 2017[…]. I have faith in local talent. Together we’ve been doing international-grade software engineering to deliver value to our customers abroad. Our users manage the world’s best healthcare organizations. Accordingly, we stay focused on the quality of the product and the principles we follow in building it.
The success of the first 2 cycles has incited Mr. Mouchrik on giving more, using his connections to ensure a productive environment for SEF students to benefit from. Elie expressed his will to collaborate and support SE Factory further during its 3rd cycle.
