Can Coding Change Lives? These Organizations Think So.

Coding pays well. Just look at the typical salaries for software developers here in Seattle. Glassdoor publishes the average income range for software engineers as $86,000 to $149,000, 13% above the national average. But a career in this industry often comes with a 4-year college degree in Computer Science or a related field, something that’s out of touch for many Americans.

Two Seattle-area organizations are saying that’s just not necessary, and are turning the tables around on what it means to offer coding education, or what it means to be a coding student.

The first is Nucamp, a Bellevue-based community coding bootcamp and the brainchild of Founder & Chief Product Officer Ludo Fourrage. As a former Microsoft employee, Fourrage oversaw the development of the company’s online courses for customers, partners and employees. While using online courses for training purposes wasn’t new, the courses’ sky-high completion and satisfaction rates were. Fourrage explains that this experience led to him thinking about coding bootcamps. “The Microsoft courses were successful because they were about bringing people together and having them share their expertise and experience, albeit in a digital context. I realized we could apply this same model to coding bootcamps with the goal of keeping the costs low while leveraging the scale of online learning.”

Fourrage points to several issues with coding bootcamps today, including that their presence is limited to only major US cities, they frequently charge $10,000 or more for their programs and that students must attend in-person during the entire day, requiring them to quit any full-time job they may hold. “We love the idea of the quick learning turnaround time that coding bootcamps offer, but the way they have been traditionally set up makes them impossible for anyone with a job, family obligations, or limited financial resources to actually attend. We wanted to change that around, starting with decreasing the tuition costs 10-fold.”

To do this, Nucamp implemented a learning method called a “flipped classroom,” which delivers instructional training through online lectures and allows students to apply their knowledge in a classroom setting with their peers and instructor. Students are assigned to a cohort based in their city, allowing them to meet on the weekends and work together on their portfolio project. This part-time, hybrid model offers a flexible and more affordable approach to learning how to code. With community bootcamps ranging from $320 to $1,620, depending on length and subject-matter, Nucamp is making coding education available to a far broader audience.

With coding communities first open to residents of Tacoma, Spokane, Marysville, and Bellingham, and a new community set to open in Seattle this February, Nucamp is deliberately targeting underserved areas where coding education has never been available. According to Karim El Naggar, Nucamp’s CEO, the company’s success doesn’t just come from its education approach but also the students they served. “We have a fantastic and diverse set of students, everything from truck drivers looking for a way into a new career to small business owners that want to be empowered to tackle their website needs on their own. Our bootcamps give students the training needed to be junior developers, opening a new door to technology careers they never could have had before.”

While Nucamp is delivering coding education in a new way, Seattle-based nonprofit Unloop is offering coding to a completely new type of student. With the tagline “Building the pipeline from prison to tech,” Unloop provides incarcerated individuals with in-prison coding education, aiming to give them sustainable careers, living-wage employment and a way to end the recidivism cycle.

According to Troy Osaki, Unloop’s Community Engagement Specialist, the idea of offering incarcerated individuals with training on such a widely needed skill as coding was a natural one. “Currently, two in three released individuals will be rearrested within three years, and the Department of Justice has identified unemployment as one of the major predictors of future recidivating.” Osaki adds, “At any given time, there are more than 6,000 open software developer jobs in Washington state and demand for these roles outpace supply. Unloop is working to bridge the need for skilled jobs for those re-entering our communities and the need for skilled workers by local tech companies.”

Offered in conjunction with Edmonds Community College and Tacoma Community College at Washington Corrections Center for Women and Monroe Correctional Complex, a men’s prison, the Unloop program first starts with a one-year, 550-hour, 36-credit full-stack web development program. During the program’s second component, released graduates are supported with re-entry plans, mentorship with volunteers from local tech companies and on-the-job professional learning experiences. Graduates have been placed in internships with Seattle tech stalwarts like Moz and Substantial as well as offices like the King County IT department. Others have pursued additional computer science or data science education.

Program graduate Travis (last name intentionally not disclosed), who spent over 26 years in prison and had no prior Internet experience, adds that the Unloop program is more than just coding education. “It is easy to list the programming languages, the professional techniques, and industry best practices. But that’s not the whole story. Through Unloop people learn both the tangible and intangible aspects of the industry. Hard coding skills, interpersonal skills, and those little, but meaningful, unspoken rules. Those things that are difficult to explain or label.”

To-date, no Unloop student has recidivated