Utah’s Tech Economy: Getting The Kids Involved
Recently I attended the Code to Success celebration luncheon in Salt Lake. The luncheon was organized by Silicon Slopes, one of Utah’s most vocal advocates for the maturing technology sector of Utah’s economy. The event’s purpose was to recognize the hundreds of junior high and high school students who are completing a nine-week summer school program that involves writing web applications using the popular Ruby on Rails framework.
My company’s (Nanobox) CEO and I attended the event together as part of our effort to be more connected with what’s happening in software development in Utah. We were also on the lookout for potential candidates for a UI developer position and some others we’re trying to fill. What I experienced at the luncheon reinforced something generally well-known throughout the local business community: Utah’s continued success as a one of the nation’s technology leaders will require getting more youth involved in the industry.
What’s being done to accomplish that?
This Code to Success luncheon was sponsored by Pluralsight, a highly-touted example of Utah’s unique recipe for cranking out billion dollar companies. Pluralsight’s CEO, Aaron Skonnard, gave the keynote address, which naturally included lots of encouraging words for the 400+ young programming students along with an invitation to work for his company (assuming they’re qualified). The event was emceed by Holly Menino, an ambitious journalist who exhibited no shortage of enthusiasm for the cause, and who successfully hyped technology education among Utah’s youth who were present at the event. The message to those in attendance was clear: This technology stuff is important! Use it. Learn it.
At the luncheon, those of us representing the Utah business community were invited to interact as much as possible with the high schoolers who were participating in the summer coding program. Among those I talked to, I found a mix of motivations for taking the summer programming course. One person at my table told me she just needed to fill a STEM requirement for graduation, and she didn’t have room for it on her fall schedule. A teenage boy I talked to said that he liked to play video games and wanted to learn how to create one himself.
Utah: Cloud Computing’s New Capital
Forbes Magazine recently referred to Utah as “Cloud Computing’s New Capital”, specifically referencing three of the six Utah companies included on its Cloud 100 list for 2017: Qualtrics (#6), Domo (#15), and Pluralsight (#20). These companies and the hundreds of others that comprise Utah’s list of technology employers seem to be constantly in search of talent to help them grow.
Searching through the open jobs for the three companies highlighted by Forbes I found a sampling of listings that include devops engineers, a variety of types of software developers, data scientists, engineering managers, and several other jobs that are highly technical in nature. These positions come with high salaries and attractive benefits, and they tend to take longer to fill than the human resources personnel would like.
At local tech meetups, you’ll more often than not find at least one recruiter looking for talent. That was the case at two of the most recent meetups I attended, one for devops engineers all pumped up about learning to use Docker, and at another geared toward a general programmer audience. In each case, there were tech recruiters with big smiles, business cards, and questions about the current employment status of those attending the evening socials.
Filling In For Talent Shortage
During the Code to Success luncheon, one of the speakers mentioned that by 2020 it is estimated that there will be over one million surplus tech jobs. This talent shortage is expected to slow down economic growth as the gap between demand and supply widens, not to mention the lost opportunities for the million people who, if they’d developed the required skill sets, might have enjoyed the benefit of high-paying, fulfilling occupations.
Discussing Utah’s own portion of the talent shortage (around 15,000 open jobs in 2015), Silicon Slopes writer Tessa Curry observed, “Beyond finding talent offshore, companies are finding other ways to deal with the talent shortage by re-training talent, attracting transplants from out of state, educating young kids on STEM and looking at informal tech training such as bootcamps.”
Filling development and other technical needs off-shore with developers from India, Eastern Europe, or other growing developer hot-spots can provide temporary relief for Utah businesses, but that approach is often either a short-term solution or just a supplement to the local core team. A friend of mine who leads a Provo-based digital fulfillment agency recently told me about his own experience having developers overseas take over a portion of his coding workload: “It was good until the day it wasn’t…We had to rewrite a ton of code and it all fell apart.” Because of the difficulty in managing code quality, his stated preference is to hire someone who can be directly integrated with their local team.
Re-Training Talent: Bootcamps, Other Training
Bottega, another budding Utah startup that hosts accredited 12-week development bootcamps designed to transition people from non-technical occupations into programmers, was well-represented as a sponsor at the Code to Success luncheon. Bottega and similar bootcamp-model training companies are growing quickly for good reason. A survey by Indeed.com of HR managers found that 72% of them believe bootcamp graduates are just as likely to be get the job done as their BS degree-holding counterparts.
Alongside the bootcamps, self-paced, video-based developer training programs are increasingly being consumed among people ranging from beginners with little or no technical background to those looking to branch out from or deepen their existing skill set. Pluralsight’s business model is built around the idea that people and organizations are willing to pay for premium courses created by people who are experts at what they’re teaching.
Getting The Kids Involved
With all that is being done to educate grown-ups to support Utah’s expanding technology needs, the data still shows that the pipeline of talent is not yet on schedule to keep up with the increasing opportunities that continue to be made available for those who will qualify themselves. There are efforts underway in both government and private business sectors to update the culture and influence more kids to get involved at earlier ages.
At the state government level, Utah has created the STEM Action Center to improve and promote education in science, technology, engineering, and math. There are others stepping in from for-profit, non-profit, local government and community-based organizations to create an atmosphere that fosters desire in kids and teens to create via programming and other facets of modern technology. Tech Trep Academy, one such Utah-based program, was highlighted in Entrepreneur magazine for its creation of “affordable, online interactive learning community focused on technology and entrepreneurship that moves beyond traditional public-school curriculum and forms the foundation for fostering the skills, character and disciplines that young tech-minded treps will need to be successful.” Tech Trep makes its curriculum available to a wider audience through financial scholarships sponsored by the non-profit Forever Young foundation.
My own kids have benefitted from their involvement in My Tech High, a public school distance education program that has provided them flexible opportunities to do everything from programming electronic circuits to creating clothing styles using Adobe Illustrator.
For any parent, teacher, or mentor who’s interested, there are plenty of opportunities available in Utah to take a hundred or so of a kid’s idle hours and turn them into the start of a potential career.
Facilitating Their Potential
At the Code to Success luncheon, I couldn’t help asking myself, “Could we hire one of these kids and expect them to legitimately contribute to our dev or design team?” I ended up talking to about 10 students, one of whom had a job working as a real programmer. Several that I talked to were high school seniors or recent graduates who were looking for internships or some other legitimate way to contribute and be compensated in a more meaningful way instead of making fast food. One of the students I met even handed me his business card, on which was printed a link to the website he’d built.
As impressive as some of the students were that I met, I couldn’t help but wonder what credentials these kids might have possessed as late-teenagers had they understood the value of developing technical skills a few years earlier. Kids are usually capable of more than we give them credit for at an earlier age than we’re normally willing to get them started.
Can an 8-year-old learn to use Excel or write some basic logic? Likely. Can a twelve-year-old grasp programming concepts well enough to create something useful? Seems like not too big a stretch. Giving Utah’s kids exposure earlier to opportunities that challenge their technical and logical minds and help them to see the bigger picture and context for what they’re doing might ultimately relieve some of the pressure they’ll collectively be exposed to as adults to fulfill occupations that would be over their heads if they haven’t had sufficient experience as kids.
