Interns for your side projects

Hello menternship.org

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Being a programmer is good. The money is good. The work life balance is good. The vacation is good. The freedom to work from where ever is good. The ease to change jobs is good. As a programmer, you have at the edge of your fingertips the power to build the wildest ideas in your imagination, but you’ve done the calculations and you realize there’s a problem. There are 10 other developers working on the same project at work with you, each contributing approximately 40 hours a week. How are you supposed to put together a full fledged application by yourself with just evenings and weekends? It’s not possible, or if it is possible, the odds are so poor that it’s unlikely to happen to you. As programmers we need to change the game. We need more time.

The free economy in the programming world is ground zero for a new generation of programmers. Smart coders are coming out of the woodwork in droves, and they’re hungry for a piece of the workforce. They can soak in all the free coding education they want, and since the free knowledge out there today ranges from coding basics to undergraduate Ivey league courses, they’re not missing much that official degrees or diplomas don’t deliver. There’s just one problem with the new generation, and it’s getting job one. A piecemeal education from a variety of free resources just doesn’t roll of the tongue like an undergraduate degree in computer science does. Now there’s a lot this new generation of developers can do to improve their odds of landing their first programming job, but there’s one that trumps the rest. Work experience.

This isn’t exactly a new revelation, FreeCodeCamp offers a volunteer internship at the end of its certificate programs for non-profit partners. Free educated developers are looking for experience, so there is already a potential match here between the $0.00 tuition programmers, and the battle hardened professional developers with passion projects and not enough time. New programmers get the experience of working on professional grade software, the practical knowledge of how to string technologies together, and feedback from code reviews to get the details right. Professional developers get interns, and a natural transition to the administrative role that is required by all founding programmers. I’m talking about a web application called Menternship.

Menternship is a place where seasoned developers post their side projects, and new developers apply to work on those projects. This isn’t just some grab bag for professional developers to exploit new developers though. The internships are regulated and rated with a unidirectional critique system, and there’s an expectation that it’s not just an internship. These new developers are getting a mentor, someone who they can talk to about the industry, get advice from, and get a reference from to help them land that first job.

It’s probably obvious at this point, but Menternship isn’t just about getting side projects built. It’s about furthering the free economy for aspiring programmers by facilitating the process for landing job one. I’m not against coding bootcamps by any means, and I think a lot of people need the structured learning environment they provide, but the lack of transparency surrounding them certainly worries me. They boast incredible job placement rates, but the quality of these jobs aren’t always made public, and there’s no official body actually ringing up the stats at this point. There’s also a major cost consideration to bootcamps that is a potential barrier to low income families. They don’t typically fall into the student loan paradigm of most countries.

This is just a pitch to the professional developers of the world. Menternship does not exist yet, but I am putting it out there to gauge interest. Personally I have a need for this type of application, both as a seasoned developer, and because I have a younger brother who is completely self-taught, but finding it difficult to stand out on paper when applying for jobs. If you are interested in this project, let me know by either sending me a tweet, or following the official Menternship Twitter account, or join the Menternship Slack workspace, or applaud this article. I would love to hear any ideas or feedback you have, and anyone who’s interested in collaborating on this project would find welcome arms.