Road less traveled can aid a tech apprentice
Lyn Muldrow has been coding for a decade with big dreams of making it in Bay Area tech. She uprooted herself and her two young children from Baltimore last year to pursue her ambition.
But there’s just one problem. Muldrow, 32, has Web development and coding skills, a sunny personality — but no computer science degree. That, she said, made it hard for her to get noticed by tech companies here. An April study by online recruiting company HiringSolved looked at 10,000 public profiles for tech employees hired or promoted in the past 14 months. The top three schools: UC Berkeley, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon.
“It was a tough time proving and selling myself as someone who had the skills, because they were looking for someone with traditional back-
grounds,” said Muldrow. Instead, she worked about two years teaching and writing code at nonprofits before she landed her big job at LinkedIn under its Reach apprenticeship program.
She is one of 29 recruits in the six-month paid program. All came to tech from different career paths; Muldrow’s peers include an optometrist and a dancer. In LinkedIn’s San Francisco office, Muldrow is mentored by an employee and works on the user interface for its Sales Navigator product.
At the end of the program, they may be offered jobs at the company. But already, Muldrow’s feeling at home.
“I feel like I can be myself here. In previous positions, I always felt a little different from what the industry looked like,” said Muldrow, an African American lesbian. “There were times I was treated like I did not know what I was doing and I always believed that at the end of the day, my skills would prove that I deserve to be where I am.”
LinkedIn said that only 5 percent of Bay Area tech workers come from nontraditional backgrounds, according to its public database of profiles. With stiff competition to hire talent, tech companies are looking outward to recruit people who have coding skills, with or without the formal credential of a computer-science degree.
“We have been limiting ourselves by only looking at talent from a very specific pool,” said Mohak Shroff, a vice president of product engineering at LinkedIn and head of the Reach program.
He said the program did not look at applicants’ resumes or where they came from. Reach picked candidates who displayed talent in coding, ability to learn new skills, commitment to work and growth potential during interviews.
Pinterest started a similar apprenticeship program last year.
“The benefits of diverse perspectives is that when it comes to problem solving and innovation, those with the same type of education can all get stumped on a problem,” said Candice Morgan, Pinterest’s head of diversity. “Having someone with a different background allows them to solve problems with economics or design, like our apprentices do, and that is a real advantage.”
These programs are also seen as a chance to inject more diversity into a workforce that is primarily white or Asian and male.
Nearly 18,000 people graduated from 91 coding boot camps and academies in the U.S. last year, according to Course Report, a website that tracks coding camps.
Patrick San Juan, a 32-year-old economics major who switched from a career in nonprofits, graduated from Free Code Camp, an online academy, in 2015 and has yet to find a stable job in tech.
The Daly City resident has developed stock trackers and clock apps. He has applied to 300 companies and received calls from six. The only job he has been able to get was in Dublin, Ireland — as an unpaid intern. That position turned into a paid contract that ended in April.
“I think there’s a stigma for some companies in some job applications; they don’t want boot camp graduates,” said San Juan, who drives for Uber to get by while he looks for a job.
Sean Smith, a 27-yearold anthropology and biochemistry major, was hired as a software engineer for a cybersecurity startup after five months and nearly 200 job applications.
He broke into the industry last year after months of training for software job interviews, networking, rejiggering his resume and adding more projects to his portfolio.
Free Code Camp founder Quincy Larson, who says only 5,000 of the 750,000 people worldwide who have taken his courses have found a job in tech, said tech companies would rather go with the “safe” option than risk a nontraditional talent who might be a wild card.
LinkedIn’s Shroff says that mentality needs to change.
“I’d much rather sit with someone who can learn and collaborate than someone who just went to a top-tier school,” he said. “A school is a proxy for ‘safe.’ ”
Hiring from the same pool will also hurt companies if they want to serve customers of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, said Ellen Pao, the Kapor Center for Social Impact’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
“All startups are trying to hire the best, which is the hardest challenge,” she said. “If you’re only looking at a few schools, you are not going to scale. You also need to look outside the traditional schools. Look where I can build the best company possible.”