u/GoodnightLondon wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
\>>schedule sessions with industry professionals, hiring managers, recruiters, great coders, etc.
You'd have to pay those people for their time, if they were even willing to do this outside of the 40 hours they spend working; that means you'd have to pay some kind of tuition for
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah the platform I helped start is this, but it's expensive and it still requires a lot of individual effort to make the best use of that... we actually help people learn how to network, but yeah, the fees go to paying mentors, who often have FAANG senior salaries at their day jobs.
u/ge_Moore_dzx9isd wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Would love to hear more. I think paying mentors is both pricey and not a meaningful incentive to the mentors if they already make 180k+. I think there are some clever solutions to this problem though.
Would love to hear more about your platform
Woul
u/michaelnovatireplied·
The secret is to allocate those mentor hours very carefully.
1. We use patented technology to do that
2. We have small group sessions of 2 to 6 people to make that time more efficient
3. We allocate 1-1s when we think you actually need it and not just for fun
4. We dynamically create your schedule on the fly and weekly... like creating a college semester schedule every week from scratch.
Our team is full of 10+ year FAANG product engineers and recruiters so this might sound easier than it is, and it's indeed a unique approach that no one else has done.
I can also go into all the bad things about this approach :P
u/ge_Moore_dzx9isd wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Would love to chat off thread if you are open to it. Or on thread!
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah sure shoot me a DM if you have more questions!
u/cglee wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
If you're serious about this, I'd be very happy to help you brainstorm. I've been working on a better bootcamp replacement for about a decade. It's a tricky problem with a lot of conflicting goals.
As for your pods idea -- I tried this approach many years ago. The main problem
u/michaelnovatireplied·
We have simple ways to work on the skill gap problem that work okay but reported skill gaps is still one of the more common reported feedback for sessions.
We have mostly solved scheduling through both algorithms and product, in that people flaking entirely happens fairly minimally (but is terrible when it does and could still be reduced more). We can schedule sessions according to people's calendars, availability, magic factors, and then have all kinds of product to make sure people attend and to automatically follow-up with people who don't - with escalations.
One thing we launched recently is self organizing sessions for people that work well together (but doesn't address skill gap feedback directly). We have a cool new concept we are building for Q4 that should solve skill gap but it's a secret because it's not built yet but our entire team is working on this stuff day in day out, I certainly could not solve this on my own.
The idea is really really cool and one of those things that works BETTER the bigger you are so we ironically have to grow more in order to offer it which is the opposite of the school approach - where typically things get worse with scale.
u/cglee wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Right, so this is organizing people into different groups depending on ability, schedule, etc right?
I was thinking along the lines of the same group meeting to tackle a long term learning plan or project.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Right so we process everyone's schedules, needs, preferences, etc... and schedule about 500 sessions a week to optimize across all of those factors.
We don't have "sticky groups" because we match with people at your skill level - and the progresses differently for everyone. But people can express affinity towards others (both explicitly and implicitly) and that can factor into the matching.