“You need someone to show you how to teach yourself.”
We spoke to Alexandre Plennevaux, Head of Pedagogy at BeCode, the coding school on a mission to close the skill gap by providing accessible, seven-month inclusive bootcamps across Belgium and recruiting students through illegal streaming sites.
You run an intense, seven month-long, full-time bootcamp. Students need to be highly motivated. Why are you advertising on ‘time-wasting’ hubs like movie streaming sites?
We are looking specifically for the people who have the skills to be coders but have never considered it, people who have fallen through the cracks of the system.
This includes school drop-outs, unemployed people, or people stuck in low-income jobs, refugees, people with challenges at home, or with a handicap. They are usually not reachable using traditional advertising. So we advertise on sites where they might hang out if they have no job, no money, and are bored. We have to get creative to reach this audience. Running banner ads on streaming sites has proven to be successful.
“It motivates me every day. But there is also a sadness to seeing all these talented people succeeding with us. It just proves they have been let down by the system in their previous lives.”
Your communications are aimed at a young audience as well. I saw a poster targeting people who “hate math.” Is that targeting the right people?
We can see that it is. People who hate math don’t always lack the intelligence or aptitude for it. They might have been failed by the system. Not having good grades can be because of a million reasons. Same goes for being a school drop-out. Many times education has to do with stigma, people might write themselves off or self-exclude, because nobody in their family finished school, nobody spent the time unlocking their skills.
For example, we had this young guy who was 22 when he joined us and had been working as a removal man since dropping out of school at the age of 15. We were going through the typical cycle every programmer faces multiple times a day: from “This is impossible” to “I am the best programmer in the world.”
For him, however, it was the first time he experienced this. As he came in, you could see he was already writing himself off. So to not lose face, he kept saying, “PHP, what is this? This is for intellectuals. I am no intellectual!”
Guess what? He ended up finishing the exercise first in the group, and you could see he had grown an inch: “Turns out I am an intellectual!” We provide a space for him to let his guard down and try something new. To help someone who spent seven years moving boxes, seeing him learn that about himself was a gratifying moment as a coach.
“We don’t teach developers; we provide a safe environment for people to discover they already have everything they need to learn to code.”
Is that what your class does, create a place to fail?
It’s how you learn to code from the start. Trial and error. Looking for the best solution without fear of failure, but by embracing it. If our students learn to keep pushing, to move a project across the finish line, they have all the skills to take on a project in a professional setting and continue their growth inside the company.
How much do people pay to attend your classes?
It is entirely free! That is the whole point. We are supported by industry donors and public funding. In order to be truly accessible, the entire program is free.
You mentioned you train students who might not be used to such an intense learning environment. Can everyone be turned into a success story?
With our alumni, we aim for an employment rate of 80%, for students to land a job after six months or take on a more “classical” training in IT: in both cases, it means that reskilling in IT was successful. Of course, a tricky part of the job is that we sometimes have to ask people to leave because they are disturbing the learning environment for others.
Overall, people are adjusting super quickly. That’s the beauty of programming. The one thing they have to learn is: fail and fail again. So they can do this on day one.
What qualifications do you look for in a trainer?
Our bootcamp is all about accessibility. Not only do we believe that there are a lot of dormant software developers out there, but we also think that the best way to become a trainer is to start training people. All the better if you have had that experience in your past. If you have completed a few coding projects in a professional setting and would like to mentor people into becoming coders, we will support people to set them up as trainers.
What do you teach in seven months?
Our first module is learning not to be scared of the terminal. Then follows markdown, Git, front end, and later back-end development. The last weeks of the training switch to an “outboarding” phase where the students focus on learning by teaching, working on projects (personal or client), and finding an internship or job.
You also work with companies to get people into the workplace, tell us more about that.
Since it is our goal to keep classes 100% free, we rely on sponsors. There is some government funding now, but the initial funding came from private investors. In Belgium, 70% of employers blame inadequate training for the shortfall in skilled workers. So some of them were ready to put their money where their mouth is.
We then help the trainee find an internship at the end of the program. And we do make sure we give them career advice as well. As part of the curriculum, they need to give a presentation, lead a session, become trainers themselves, if only for a day. So we make sure everyone gets a good picture taken in this scenario. And then we promote them to our network on LinkedIn: “Check out student X giving a great talk today.” So they get a real boost to their personal brand.
Do you introduce people to Stack Overflow as part of your course?
No need to. Students will google a problem and end up on a Stack Overflow site anyway. We strongly encourage students to become independent problem solvers. We do mention to pump up their profile on Stack Overflow and set their job search status as “active” on our list of tips to get a job.
Learn how BeCode found trainers through Stack Overflow Talent in the Case Study.
13 Comments
Can i get someone to teach me code online?
Codementor is one option.
You could, but it’s the hardest possible way to learn programming.
What would your suggestion be?
“Our first module is learning not to be scared of the terminal. Then follows markdown, Git, front end, and later back-end development.”
This is a very thoughtful progression, and I endorse it wholeheartedly. Too often, I see fledgling developers lacking basic skills like these. While you don’t need to be a command-line junkie to be a successful developer, at the same time, it is very important not to be afraid of it—or anything else on a computer!
“No need to [introduce people to Stack Overflow]. Students will google a problem and end up on a Stack Overflow site anyway. ”
While this is certainly true, I would advise you to reconsider the decision to at least introduce Stack Overflow. Too many new users end up on Stack Overflow for the first time, dumbfounded by the process of asking a question and frustrated by their misunderstanding of our quality standards and admittedly high expectations. Asking a good question is hard, so if you’re really intending to outfit these prospective developers with the basic skills they need to continue their educational journey, then you really need to spend at least some time developing their asking skills. This will pay massive dividends both in the short-term (reducing frustration in their first experience on Stack Overflow) and in the long-term (as they grow as a developer and are able to get the help they need at any time).
No, that’s exactly backwards. We shouldn’t be “afraid” of command line UIs; we should be disgusted by them. They’ve been obsolete for over 35 years now, ever since the Macintosh proved it was possible to run a full-fledged computing environment without even having one at all. Any development tools that can’t be run, easily, intuitively and discoverably, from a GUI without ever needing to know that a command line exists is a failure, and people who produce them ought to be ashamed of themselves for trying to keep programming stuck in the 1970s.
Absolutely true, while would I waste my time doing stuffs in the terminal, meanwhile most the new way of writing code doesn’t demand much of terminal kinds of stuff and it literally very basic stuffs to that, introducing the terminal to a newbie is a total confusing for him during an early stage in coding.
UI is the best these days and teaching a newbie requires going with the UI and of the makes comfortable with he’ll find the terminal way as well when he keeps going along the line.
This is incredibly short sighted. A UI is great for some tasks, but plain awful for others. To name just one example: I have a script here that sets up the development environment for one of our projects: Environment variables, databases, HTTP ACLs, dev certs, additional tools and whatnot.
People afraid of the CLI or who think it is obsolete would presumably write a ten page Word document with screenshots and whatnot to explain people how to do the same thing via all the various GUIs you need.
Everybody can decide which approach they prefer, but I argue that the former is superior in almost every single way: It’s faster, it’s self documenting, it’s consistent.
There are also millions of repetetive tasks you have to do on a recurring basis – being able to automate these is a great time saver.
Or for another example: Any devops CI/CD platform will invariably execute some scripts in one way or another.
Ah, yes, the classic strawman that always comes up when someone dares to point out that command line UIs are obsolete and should not be used: automation and scripting.
There’s definitely value there, but you can’t disprove a claim that CLIs are a terrible user interface by giving an example that is not a user interface. Scripting repetitive tasks is, in many ways, the exact opposite of a user interface; it’s what you use so the user doesn’t have to do something manually via the UI. And for that, it has some utility. But as a user interface, for people to interact with to perform tasks manually, CLIs are terrible and always have been, which is why the first alternative to come along took over the world literally as quickly as hardware constraints allowed.
I’m not refuting your claim that the CLI is harder to learn than some GUI, I’m refuting your claim that a professional programmer shouldn’t have to know the CLI because GUIs are so much easier to learn.
Which I guess you are agreeing with after all since you admit there’s utility in automation and scripting.
oof this would be awesome here in suriname
“You need someone to show you how to teach yourself.”
That’s good advice, even on Stack Overflow. We need a bit more teaching people how to fish, rather than simply giving them a fish.
We used to, in the old days, which is where the whole reputation of how mean SO is for asking people to use their head (and reading the FAQ) before posting a question comes from.
That ship’s sailed a long time ago I’m afraid.