Tech school coming to state

NEW HAVEN — A Silicon Valley tech school is bringing its contemporary learning approach to Connecticut.

The Holberton School is a software engineer training program with nontraditional education methods and a track record of successful graduates. Based in San Francisco, it was founded by tech industry professionals Julien Barbier and Sylvain Kalache.

After seeing the school’s graduates get jobs at the biggest tech companies in the world, they are bringing their teaching methodology to New Haven in January.

“The idea of having an advanced, world-class two-year training program means we will again start to meet the needs of our employers,” Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said during the announcement Tuesday. “Right now, there are thousands of unfilled jobs in Connecticut because we’re still catching up with the pipeline we need to establish.”

“Nobody knows what are going to be the jobs of tomorrow,” Barbier said. “Nobody knows what the skills will be to fill those jobs . ... Even though Holberton school is about software engineering, our education is focusing on three things: learning how to learn, critical thinking and problem solving, and teamwork.”

The mission of Holberton is to create the “full stack” engineer, meaning the graduate of Holberton doesn’t just know one specialty, but has a wellrounded knowledge of all the areas of software engineering and is able to sell his or her skills to big companies.

“A lot of companies are going through this digital transformation,” Kalache said. “Tech is not only for tech companies. It’s health care, transportation, retail, you name it. Most of the jobs that require software engineering skills are not in Silicon Valley anymore. Only 10 percent of them are in Silicon Valley. The rest are across the U.S.”

Barbier and Kalache are also keen on finding students who are not just like them. In the application process, they don’t look at gender, age, background or GPA.

They only thing they do look at is a person’s resiliency as a fit for their school, Barbier said. Applicants also don’t need any type of engineering background to be successful, but it takes between 18 and 50 hours of work to complete the application process, he said.

“Holberton is beginning to dominate in finding people with alternative backgrounds, with high skill levels but not necessarily with any coding experience and people with no formal degrees or formal background in tech fields and taking them and making them into coders,” New Haven Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson said. “It’s people who have been problem solving their whole lives who get brought into a startup or special project. It’s really the top people who are tapped of people of different backgrounds. You’re looking for people who can solve problems other people haven’t been able to solve. That’s why these independent coding academies have become so important, because you need something that’s a little crazy and a little unstructured.”

In choosing New Haven as Holberton’s East Coast campus, Kalache said they looked where they could find a diversity of people and talent, where there was a large need for software engineers and where the cost of living wouldn’t be as high so more people would have access to high quality education even if they weren’t financially stable, Kalache said.

“We have to rethink education and make sure everyone has access this time,” Barbier said. “We removed the human bias in the application and the financial barrier by giving the option of students not paying anything until they find a job.”

Tuition for Holberton is $45,000 for the first year and $40,000 for the second year, but students have the option of not paying anything up front and once they find a job making more than $40,000 a year will pay 17 percent of their salary for 3.5 years.

Barbier and Kalache are looking to start small — accepting 30-50 students every cohort — and build up to eventually accommodate up to 1,000 students.

Applications for the New Haven campus are live on their website, with the first cohort beginning in January.

Kalache said Holberton will have three acceptance periods throughout the year. There are no formal classes or teachers; instead, all the learning is project-based. Holberton graduates have gotten jobs at Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and other major companies.

“They had to compete with Ivy League school graduates,” Barbier said. “Holberton School is a very different kind of education and it works. Every single graduate from Holberton has found a job and most of them found a job before the end of the two years.”

The school will be in the District building at 470 James St., which offers customizable office spaces for people and businesses startups.

District CEO and founder David Salinas said the state is taking a “giant leap forward in workforce training and education” with the opening of Holberton.

“New Haven is the burgeoning center of biotechnology and pharmacological research,” Mayor Toni N. Harp said. “New Haven is going to need the graduates of this new coding school.”

The school was named for Betty Holberton, who was one of the women “computers” selected by the U.S. Army to calculate ballistic trajectories in WWII and work on the Army’s experimental, all-electronic, digital computer, the ENIAC.

Her nephew Phil Holberton said he was immensely proud that Barbier and Kalache named their school in honor of her.