About 4 years ago, we started hiring some “Apprentices” from a Bootcamp company. They only had a few months training, and it wasn’t even targeted to the languages we needed. So we basically were paying fees to this company for them to give us random people we could have just got ourselves. Recently, a few more of these people have left the business, so I wanted to look back and reminisce on the disaster.
“in partnership with Bootcamp, the Apprenticeship Scheme was launched in April this year and currently supports 14 apprentice software developers, including four employees who have moved within the business. Apprentices spend 20 percent of their time learning new skills and the rest based in the work environment. The company is hoping to take on more apprentices in 2020.”
Local Newspaper 2019
It’s interesting reading this quote because the 4 people were actually from another Bootcamp company we hired from a year prior. I think we switched companies because of some management issues (leading to a lack of communication) at that company. Those initial guys were quite good overall, but then the second company gave us generally poor people.
The part about 20% of the time learning was just nonsense. We never had a plan for them. Some people got moved about between teams every few months, sometimes being told to learn a different language so we never really allowed them to become good. But then most of them that I interacted with just didn’t seem to care; we were giving them money for nothing. I guess they had way more than 20% to learn since we often didn’t assign them any work.
“We are embracing this way of attracting people from less traditional backgrounds and allowing people like Sadiq to challenge themselves. In the process, they are to contribute significantly to our future success.”
HR Director 2019
“we don’t want another Sadiq Situation”
Colin (2022) – on the plans to hire more Juniors. We actually need a training plan for them to succeed.
It’s evident that Sadiq didn’t contribute to our future success.
It would be interesting to know the reasons why each person left since I think they were on good money for their ability, and it’s a low-pressure environment. Most were working on our new software that hasn’t been released so maybe they got frustrated about never having their code reach production.
| Anonymised Name | Status | Estimated Time Spent |
| Mason | Left | 4 years |
| Elijah | Left | 2 years |
| Tester | Resigned (Health issues) | ~ 1 year |
| Chris | Left | 3.5 years |
| Daniel | Still here | 3 years |
| Sadiq | Still here | 3 years |
| Paul | Still here | 3 years |
| Jon | Sacked | 3 years |
| Brogrammer | Left | 3 years |
| Simon | Left (Failed Apprenticeship exams) | 6 months |
| The Mountain | Left (Decided to change career) | <1 year |
| Kat | Still here | 3 years (1 year Maternity leave, yet to come back) |
| Harry | Left | 3 years |
| John | Left | 2 years |
So there are only 4 left. Sadiq and Paul have been asked to go through some Training that we have put together, and could be sacked if they don’t show signs of improving. I don’t know much about Kat, but she’s taken a year of maternity leave. Daniel is the only one actually contributing and seems a quick learner. So after ploughing money into the future generation of developers, we ended up with one (maybe 2) future developers. Some of the others did contribute but then thought there were better opportunities elsewhere.
I found these chat logs about the initial batch of Apprentices, mainly targeting Elijah. It was a slow start until they got stuck into proper work, but Mason and Chris were actually really good developers.
Me: what approach are we taking with these Bootcamp guys? Steven: 16:23: I think it's the "lounge about all day and get paid to learn how to write crap code" approach because the company thinks it's cheaper to do that the guy next to me has written an app that takes a list of countries and people, and would assign each person to a random country - a sweepstake generator he seems right impressed with it called one of his mates over to see it Me: 16:27: for the World Cup? doesn't Different Elijah Wood sit next to you? Steven: 16:30: yeah! he sounds like a robot robot Elijah clone I think he must smoke 75 cigs a day Me: 16:30: does his random algorithm work correctly better not be newing up instances of Random at the same time and generating the same numbers Steven: 16:32: that's a good point I haven't code reviewed it Me: 16:32: has he written it at work? Steven: 16:33: yep yesterday and today Me: 16:33: our guy, Mason just reads Reddit all day he was running the Build last time I saw him though Steven: 16:33: he's got a learning C# book was reading about collections today I've been given no info on these guys so don't know what to do about it Me: 16:33: are you looking forward to training him up to expert level Steven: 16:33: well that's the thing, I'm not employed as a teacher I expect everyone to be capable and if not I'll be raising it as an issue Me: 16:34: what information do you want? what they should be working on? I was expecting some info on that as well Steven: 16:34: yeah should they be reading BBC News or learning all day? or should they be picking up WIs? what even is a junior dev? if a junior dev doesn't even know how to code seems a big risk to me not even sure why I went to uni anyone can code, right? bring your gran to work day I didn't manage to write any code today, but I did write a poem. <Pats gran on the head>, yeah gran you've done well today, here's a hundred quid, maybe tomorrow you'll be using the collection pattern Me: 16:37: I don't mind teaching people but they do need to pick things up quick otherwise the extra member is just losing time for someone else so it's a net loss I think they should be like the old "Apprenticeship scheme" we had - get them testing, that way they can learn what our software does and learn when they are waiting for work Steven: 16:37: I don't mind teaching more advanced stuff, or anything not intuitive yeah, I think that's the best really Me: 16:38: but they don't need to be a Software Tester for 3 years; just 6 months or something Steven: 16:38: help the "tools guys" make our Internal Tools decent or have templates for test environments the tools team don't seem to have time to make any tools Me: 16:39: and I guess they could do some kind of assessment to see if they are ready for simple WI and if not, then they get out or stay as a tester Steven: 16:39: they're more bothered about useless stuff no one wants
So even when the initial apprentices joined, Steven and I were sceptical that they could contribute since we didn’t really have a plan. It seemed I had a good solution though – by starting them off as Software Testers. They can learn about our Software, Agile Development, Processes, Internal Tools etc. Then later start learning C# more and gain experience with the codebase. I think this is roughly what Colin has in mind for the new recruits…
We are going to be hiring again, but going for Graduates this time, but are we going to do better?
Stranger Coding Tings 