Kicking Off the Front-End Engineering Program
This week, we kicked off the brand new, front-end engineering program at the Turing School of Software and Design. I walked into the room Monday morning to find 16 students (er, 15 — one had jury duty) who had decided to put their lives on hold for seven months in order to make a major shift to a brand new career. It’s an incredibly brave move and I’m humbled.
The first week is tricky because you have to balance a number of important things: You need to handle the administrative logistics and get everyone acclimated to the existing routines of the school. You need to get everyone set up on their computers. Ideally, you’d like to actually teach some basic programming concepts. But most importantly, you need to create the culture that’s going to stick around for the foreseeable future.
What Does It Take To Be Successful?
After taking care of some administrative details, we started the week off by talking about what it takes to be successful in a program like this. We also talked about some of the patterns we’ve seen when things don’t go according to plan.
As an instructor, I’m only successful if they’re successful. It’s a tricky problem. Regardless of the quality of the curriculum or the effectiveness of my instructional delivery of that content, there are some factors that are completely out of my control — such as their ability to maintain an emotional buoyancy over the course of an intensive seven-month program.
We don’t require any previous experience in software engineering to become at a student Turing. So, it’s not like you need any kind of domain-specific knowledge to be successful. Instead, it all comes down to mindset and how you handle struggle. It comes down to how you handle the existential fear that comes with making a radical shift in your life. It comes down to how you work with other people. It comes down to how you communicate. It comes down to the mental and emotional barriers that you either put in place yourself or don’t realize that you have the power to tear down if they’re getting in the way.
The program is intense. This is by design. Many of our students are putting their entire lives on hold. In some cases, they’re burning through their life savings. In other cases, their significant others or families are supporting them. Some students are parents and missing out on time with their children. I have infinite respect for all these situations and take it extremely seriously.
That said, we can’t fit all of the content into less than seven months. If we could, we would owe it to them to do so. But, that would come with a number of sacrifices on quality that we’re not willing to make. If we could deliver the same amount of material into five months, then we’d do that instead and let them get on to their new lives. It’s on us to find the optimal balance where they can learn everything they need to know to be great developers in the shortest possible amount of time without burning them out.
Avoiding Burn Out
Avoiding burn out is partly on us, but it’s also on the students. A good part of the first morning was spent acknowledging that this is going to be really hard and it’s okay to feel self-doubt. But, you can’t let it destroy you. Being too proud to ask questions isn’t really going to do you — or me, for that matter — any favors. Keeping your struggles to yourself means that I can’t help you with them.
They’re going to be challenged. They’re going to be frustrated at some point over the next seven months. There are going to be times of uncertainty, for sure. The trick to being successful at Turing is how you cope with all of those feelings. Everyone I know that I respect in the field — whether they went through a program like Turing or if they were self-taught like me — struggled at some point and many of them still struggle.
They Already Have What It Takes to Be Successful
Despite these moments of struggle and self-doubt, the odds are in their favor that they’re going to be successful — if they don’t let stress and self-doubt get to them, that is.
We have an admissions process that we’ve been refining for over two years. This means for anyone sitting in the room, we’re pretty confident that they have what it takes. We’re sure that if they put in the effort, do the work, and don’t let their own fear or ego get in the way that they’re going to be successful. We’ve been wrong before and sometimes it’s not a good fit, but we’re right a lot more often than not.
After two years, we’ve seen a wide number of people be successful. We’ve seen people with backgrounds in computer science be successful, for sure. But, we’ve also seen students without any experience being indistinguishable from the former group. We’ve had students fresh out of college, single parents, students with special needs, and career changers all succeed. Rarely does a particular life situation mean that a student in the program won’t be able to succeed.
That said, we have also seen people become crippled by imposter syndrome. We have see students create a self-fulfilling prophecy that they can’t do it. In many of those cases, we’re able to turn them around to some extent. Many of them complete the program, but don’t reach their fullest potential. It’s one of those things where an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Asking Questions
One of my jobs is to create an environment where students feel comfortable asking questions. Any curriculum I write is — at best — a guess about the best way to explain something to a group of people. Questions from students are so incredibly important for making sure that I’m getting across the concepts and ideas in the correct manner. That said, it’s up to me and the rest of the instructional staff to create an environment where students feel comfortable asking questions.
At the end of the day, there is no such thing as asking a stupid question, because we’re already taking for granted that they are smart. It’s important to be willing to fail publicly and it’s important to allow others to fail publicly. I believe strongly that everyone in the room this week has what it takes to be super successful. Our job is to equip them with the technical skills as well as the soft skills necessary to make it happen. Common among our highest performing students is their willingness to ask for help, try new things that are outside their comfort zone, and cut their losses when it’s not working out.
One Week In
When we started the original program back in 2014, our first students shaped the culture of the school. Nothing was set in stone and if they thought something should be different, then they were empowered to change it. Over the last two years, as Turing has become more established and successful, one of the negative things that have happened is that some subset of students have resigned to trusting that the instructional staff will take care of everything and they just need to follow the steps.
The Front-End Engineering program is in a temporary space, a few blocks from the rest of the school. There are obviously some inconveniences that come from being separated, but I truly believe that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It affords us the ability to create a culture and environment that is uniquely our own.
One of the really cool parts of starting a new program is that we’re able to rethink a lot of things that we’ve come to take for granted over the last few years. In many ways, it’s a return to 2014 when everything was a bit more experimental. This first group of students has the ability to shape the culture of the new program and from what I’ve seen so far, they take this very seriously.
At their group retrospective this week, they spent a significant portion of time asking each other how they can help each other learn JavaScript and CSS outside of the normal class hours. When not all of the small, extra curricular groups in the back-end program fit their needs interests, they pushed to start their own. They came and participated in community meet-ups around Denver, even though they had only been writing software for a day or two. I suspect they’ll start their own student-led extracurricular sessions in the next few weeks as they get more confident in their abilities and find topics that they are curious about.
I’m excited that they care about the process of learning and the craft of writing software. I’m proud that they regularly stop me and ask question — and I’m doubly pleased that many of those questions are about accessibility.
Looking Forward
I’m really excited about the energy and passion of this group and that I get the honor and pleasure of getting to work with them over the course of the next seven months.
Be on the look out for 16 really great front-end engineers and wonderful people in about 26 weeks.
