Radical Equity: Automation-Resilient Careers for PoC Workers

In Boston, the median net wealth for a white household is $247,500, $8 for Black households and $0 for Dominican ones. This disparity is partly driven by the gap in access to employment and higher education, and Boston's high cost of living. Furthermore, communities of color have an uncertain economic future, e.g., African Americans tend to be over-represented in jobs that are less lucrative and most likely to be automated. Families and whole communities depend on these jobs.

We propose radical equity as an approach to workforce development and reducing the racial wealth gap. We take advantage of the current tight labor market to pioneer alternative pathways to prosperity that put communities of color first. Given Boston’s booming tech economy, we believe that by training and placing young adults of color in software engineering, we are making these communities more resilient to changes in the economy.

For many the future is already here: one the most common job for black men is driver, for black women, it's retail associate, and those jobs are disappearing. CVS and McDonald's keep rolling out automatic points of sales, companies in this very city are testing driverless cars that perform better  than humans and robots that will replace scores of warehouse workers. This will exacerbate the racial wealth gap in Boston which is driven by inequitable access to good jobs and higher education, and a high cost of living. 

Boston benefits from a thriving tech economy. Software developers have median wages of about $100,000. Those jobs are projected to grow by 26.4% between 2016 and 2026, with 2,048 annual openings. And they are becoming increasingly accessible. Today, a college graduate can pay for a coding boot-camp and work as a developer. But for young adults with a high school diploma and little financial security, the door is too often closed. Somehow simply graduating from college is considered a good proxy for how good a developer one might be; but when only 25% of Black people and 18% of Latinx people have college degrees in Massachusetts, college becomes a proxy for whiteness.

We serve young adults of color from Greater Boston's low-income communities who are unemployed or underemployed. The vast majority of them don't have a college degree and all come from low-income households. These young adults have the grit, intelligence, and resourcefulness to be  contributing members of the tech economy; we simply provide an equitable pathway for them to get there.

Our highly competitive coding bootcamp trains young adults of color from Greater Boston’s low-income communities as full-stack software developers. Our graduates are proficient in some of the most in-demand technologies: responsive CSS, vanilla javascript, jQuery, React, Node, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL. These are the technologies that power applications like Gmail, Netflix, and Facebook. 

With our success in 2019, we were faced with the question of how to scale our impact. Our gating factor is the “demand” for our trainees, which is why after each cohort, we embark on a tour of "why not". We reach out to employers who have decided not to hire from Resilient Coders and listen to their feedback. In the last year or so, employers have expressed a desire for graduates to spend more time practicing. We realized that they were looking for the sort of experience that other candidates get during unpaid college internships or when building personal projects during their free time -- which are both luxuries our students typically can't afford. In response, we decided to extend our 15-week boot-camp to 20 weeks. We’re adding five weeks of employer-informed training which acts as an on-boarding period to facilitate the transition from student to employee. In other words, after training our students in the fundamentals of software engineering, we’re focusing on the specific skills (technical and/or professional) which will enable them to perform even better on the job. During that time, students’ days mirror those of software engineers: they work on larger projects, learn about typical development workflows, work in sprints using agile methods, etc. They also have the opportunity to hone in on the languages or frameworks that will be most useful for the specific job they are hired for.

Furthermore, we're asking employers to commit to hiring graduates before the program begins, select their employees on week 15, and work hand-in-hand with us in preparing their new hire for the position. Our partners also commit to paying a fee per student for assistance in sourcing and fomenting talent from non- traditional backgrounds. Through our model, employers are training for hire rather than relying on exclusionary proxies for technical and professional skills. Our impact is momentous: in 5 months our graduates go from being low-income to commanding 6 figure salaries.

We take advantage of the current tight-labor market to pioneer alternative pathways to prosperity that put communities of color first. In 2019, we trained and placed 34 young adults as software engineers with an average annual salary above $98,000. With our recent successes, the question we are now trying to answer is: can we increase the number of people we serve while keeping a radical equity mindset? Indeed, we are hesitant to increase the number of people we serve until we are confident we can scale in an equitable manner, which means being able to:

1. continue providing high-growth full-time jobs. No internships or jobs paid under-market rate;

2. have a financially sustainable program that does not rely on students going into debt. That means having a free and stipended program with no loans or income-share agreements;

3. have an inclusive pedagogy. That means no tests and a focus on discussion, co-learning, and  project-based learning. We conceive of education as a tool for liberation and center our communities of color in all aspects of our work.

We believe that our 20-week bootcamp is a potential answer to this problem as it allows us to strengthen our relationships with employers, provide quality and inclusive training to a large number of people, and deepen our commitment to our community. 

In 2018, we placed 73% of our graduates within 1.5 months of graduation and with a starting salary of $68,000 with some salaries hiking up to $100,000. Our demand-driven strategy is proving to be successful: in 2019, our first two cohorts had a 96% placement rate with an average starting salary of $98,300. Our last cohort, which graduated in December seems to be on a similar trajectory. Of the 15 who graduated, 10 have already found jobs and the rest are actively interviewing. All in all, we trained and placed 34 engineers of color in 2019 who are receiving an average starting salary above $98,000. 

More importantly, our alumni are increasingly active in Boston tech. One (of many) example, a team of Resilient Coders alumni won the HubWeek Dell Policy Hack. As a result, they were flown down south to attend the Dell Tech Summit where they connected with leaders at Dell Technologies to explore their winning concept – a blockchain healthcare solution to host, read, and update medical records. During the opening remarks, they received a special shout out from Michael Dell himself! 

Though the long term impact of Resilient Coders on alumni and their community at large is anecdotal at the moment (our earliest software engineering cohort only dates back to the end of 2017), our impact looks promising given alumni engagement and retention (more than 80% of placed alumni are still employed 1 year later).

We hope to scale our activities from 60 students enrolled per year in 2019 to 90 by 2022. We are going from running three 15-week sessions of about 20 students each to running two 20-week sessions of 45 students. 2020-21 is our transition period: in 2020 we are validating the 20-week bootcamp model as a scalable solution, and by the end of 2021 we aim to increase our class size to 45 students.

2019: 63

2020: ~ 60

2021: ~ 75

2022: ~ 90

2025: ~ 135

Our goal is to scale a movement for an equitable workforce that increases access to automation-resilient careers, not an organization. We are not scaling up a technology solution or a process but rather a value system. We wish to build a network of transparent and equity-focused organizations and leaders. We have built a community of practice locally whose focus is to make the Boston tech industry equitable and inclusive of the city’s communities of color and at the center of which are our software engineers. This is what we’re planning on replicating at a national level.

Our strategic plan contains three phases:

Phase 1: Validation of our local expansion model by 2022

• Maintaining a high placement rate (above 80%) while increasing our class size. The goal is to go from serving 60 people a year to 90 by 2022
• Approaching financial sustainability. The goal is to have at least half of our placements paid through our fee-for-service model.

Phase 2: Discovering the top of the market in Boston 2022-2025

Stabilization of activities with at least 75% of placements paid through our fee-for-service.

Phase 3: Replication in at least one other US metro area by 2025

Our Executive Director visited and started conversations in Philadelphia, Miami, and Baltimore. These cities all have emerging tech ecosystems. Other cities to consider include Minneapolis, St Louis, Cincinnati. By 2025 we want to support local leaders in launching a workforce development program in at least one of the above-mentioned cities.

Labor Market Slack 

We are currently benefiting from tight labor market, with an unemployment rate below 3% in Boston. This has led employers to broaden their hiring requirements to access alternative pools of talent. However, this may change in the event of an economic downturn, which may lead employers to downsize or outsource their IT teams instead of investing in local talent. Though we believe that this effect would be mitigated by the fact that we focus on software engineering, which is projected to continue growing in the US, a labor market slack might affect employers' willingness to pay Resilient Coders for talent. 

Capacity Building 

We are a demand-driven and high-touch program which leads to some internal challenges to scale

1. Building a sales team. We won't increase the number of people we train unless we feel confident there will be a job for them at the end. Therefore, we need to grow a sales team that will procure and maintain employer relationships. 
2. Though lectures can be delivered to a large number of students at a time, Resilient Coders model mostly relies on individualized learning and small group discussions. However, with software engineers being in high demand, we will have to offer competitive compensation to our technical staff to remain attractive.
3. Our program is in person, so the more we grow, the more space we will need.
4. Finally, we need to grow our fundraising capacity to be in line with our growth trajectory and make the above-mentioned investments. 

Labor Market Slack 

In order to sustain employers' commitment to hire equitably, our bootcamp program is designed to be an integral part of companies' recruiting processes akin to campus recruitment. This requires deep collaboration between Resilient Coders and local employers through, for example: 

• a staff attuned to the local tech industry trends;
• a dedicated community of volunteers of local software engineers;
• a Corporate Advisory Council convening tech leaders from local employers e.g., Audible, the Broad Institute, Humana, Hubspot, AthenaHealth among others.

In response to employers' unwillingness to pay for talent in the event of a labor market slack, we are also advocating for more sustainable solutions such as a Workforce Equity Trust Fund proposed by the Center for American Progress.

Capacity Building

1. We are hiring a Sales Development Representative. We anticipate the growth of the sales team to be linear with the number of students served. 
2. We anticipate a ratio of 1 EiR for every 15 students. We embrace the fact that this role might be a revolving door for young engineers by positioning it as 1 to 2 years of service for young engineers of color to give back to their community and invest heavily in their continued learning (20% of time dedicated to professional development, PD budget, mentorship etc.).
3. We hired a development consultant to assist us in building a fundraising strategy that is in line with our growth objectives. This may include planning a capital campaign if we can no longer benefit from sponsored space. 

Full time staff: 6 

Part time staff: 0 

Volunteers: ~50

1. We are governed by the communities we serve

We are representative of the communities we serve because we believe that the leaders of a movement must emerge from the movement itself. Our success is built on trust and a sense of common purpose. Race, culture, and immigration background are particularly salient issues. Our staff is 100% composed of people of color who grew up in circumstances similar to our students'. We appointed Dunia Goncalves, a developer and Resilient Coders alumna, and Ester Peña, a tech leader from the Latinx community in Lawrence, MA to our Board of Directors.

2. We are active in the local tech community

Leon Noel, our Managing Director of Engineering, is an internationally recognized entrepreneur. Before joining Resilient Coders, he co-founded SocialSci, a scientific surveying company relied on by over 4000 academic institutions. He is supported by Experts-in-Residence, Nick DeJesus (React Native and Gatsby), and Alex Soto (tech educator and grassroots organizer), who provide technical coaching. 

Stephanie Castaños, our Relationships Manager, was a program manager at Startup Institute. David Delmar Sentíes, Founder and Executive Director, is a prominent and visible member of the tech community who has worked with award-winning startups as well as established brands.

3. We are impact driven 

We see ourselves as Workforce Equity Activists who are primarily concerned with the economic prosperity of Boston's communities of color. Rouguiatou Diallo, Chief of Staff, has experience in impact assessment and performance management, through her work in management consulting.

We work closely with employers on building pipelines to recruit entry level engineering talent. We extended our bootcamp program from 15 to 20 weeks to formalize how employer partners engage and recruit s. 

• Weeks 1-14: intensive training in software engineering. Employers volunteer at Resilient Coders by sending their employees to mentor our students during Community Hours or mock interview nights. 
• Week 15-20: By the end of week 15, employer partners are matched with talent. Students are divided in teams and work in sprints, modeling the workflow of the engineering teams they will join. By the time our students graduate, they're ready to work as full-time software engineers at partner companies.

We are active in the local workforce development community, most notably through Project Catapult, an initiative of Skillworks and the Boston Foundation to take advantage of the tight-labor market and bring about the next-generation of workforce development organizations. In fact, we contributed to the Catapult Papers in 2019.

Finally, we collaborate with the Boston Private Industry Council on employer outreach and to provide case management for the younger adults we serve (18 to 24 years old). The Boston PIC convenes a group of tech talent providers under the TechHire initiative.

We provide a path towards economic mobility: in 5 months our graduates go from being low-income to commanding 6 figure salaries. Though our program is modeled after for-profits coding bootcamps, we are committed to racial equity: 

We are radically affordable. Our bootcamp is free and we provide a stipend of $250 per week to our students because our population can’t afford to leave the workforce for 5 months. We also don't ask them to pay us back. Instead, our graduates use their income to repay loans or debts and support their families. We refuse to depend on our alumni for our financial sustainability, we see them as agents of change within their communities. 

We are demand-driven. We train our students in the skills that they will use on the job. That means that employers are directly involved in the program. Being demand-driven also means that employers are the ones who pay for our services through a placement fee.

We center community. Alumni are crucial to the student experience as they serve as the primary mentors for new students and are our main source of referral for new talent. They also rely on Resilient Coders for their continued learning especially for the first year on the job. Not only do alumni take advantage of Community Hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays to check in with the Resilient Coders pedagogy team, they also continue learning and growing as young professionals through workshops (wealth building, open-source project, etc.) and clubs (Math, Bookclub, Hacktivism, etc.)

Earned income carries the most potential in helping us reach financial stability. There’s an opportunity to align employers’ commercial and social impact priorities by innovating on their recruitment processes. We are implementing placement fees on a sliding scale based on the size of the company (between $8,000 and $15,000 per hire). This allows us to raise the stakes for employers, fortify our partnerships and remain accountable by tying financial results to program success. So far, companies are responding positively to the fee for service model, with 5 companies who have already paid for placement services. Our hope is to have at least half of our placements paid through our fee for service model this year. 

Winning this challenge would allow us to one: 

1. secure funding to invest in building capacity for our solution. That includes investing in our staff (sales, pedagogical, and fundraising). 

2. have a platform and a network to promote our radical equity approach to workforce development.

Wrap around services: organizations that can provide the types of supports we can't to some students in our population.