Yes. No experience required, according to a blog post by Fora CEO, Iyin Aboyeji, announcing job opportunities for software developers in his edtech startup.
“If you make it through our rigorous application process, we will hire and train you to be a software engineer”, he said.
It doesn’t matter if you can code right now or not. Theoretically, if Fora hires you, you should be able to in three months. Three months, because this “initiative” is not without context. Not long ago, Iyin caught a bit of flak from the TC community for positing that good developers could be trained in three months. His exact words;
…because the cost of training good developers has crashed over the last 5 years. You can literally create good developers in 3 months without any prior background in computer science.
Iyin, an insighful contributor to the TC community, and famous for jumping in the deep end with controversial opinions is not known for giving quarter when a point is at stake. By his standards, going as far as actually hiring green devs to validate his theory is not extreme at all. We’ll see how that goes.
“Our ideal candidate must be a curious mind who is interested in tech but may not have had the training”, he says. He does appear to have revised his ambitions for making techies out of muggles somewhat though, and allowed for a more pragmatic time frame*.
Can’t wait to turn some unemployed young people into guru software engineers in the next 6 months – 1 year : http://t.co/mOQElOnrE0 #isthisu
— Iyin (@iaboyeji) May 4, 2014
But whether for the sake of argument or no, Iyin won’t be the first to employ this tack. Anaele Iroh has written about how he actively employs unskilled individuals who acquire technical skills by building his products. It’s much easier to whine about the dearth of talent than to boil the ocean for it, but it seems that the latter approach is slowly but surely becoming more popular.
*Updated after publishing, after I happened on that new piece of context.
