Turning people into extraordinary builders
to build amazing things, you need amazing people
👋 This post first appeared in my bi-weekly newsletter on Product Management.
Sign up here to get the next post straight to your inbox.Apologies are in order, as it’s been a year since I last posted. There’s good reason for it.
In this post, I am going to tell you about a problem statement I’ve been working on with my friend Anub over the past 12 months. (Anub is also the CEO of Opscale, a Bangalore based tech company that helps high-growth startups design and engineer their code for reliability and scale.) Anyway, This is a problem that both Anub and I are very close to and feel strongly about — and the problem statement is — How do your turn ordinary people into extraordinary builders?
We are facing a Skills Problem
In my experience, first as a coder, then as a product manager and now, as somebody recruiting builders to work on product ideas — I’ve realized two things.
- First is that to build amazing things, you need amazing people. People with skills, People that can build things out of nothing. People who are able to not just dream up things on a resume, but actually have the chops to turn them into reality.
- And Second, skilled people are in short supply, and unless we do something about it, we will have a huge shortage of builders in the future. The second one is a particularly big problem.
For instance, there is a massive demand for “high quality” software programmers and product builders, but not nearly enough people skilled to fill that demand.
Anubhav and I have for sometime believed that this skills shortage (especially in tech) will soon become the pacing item to technological growth and innovation.
It’s a problem both of us deeply care about, as this skills shortage directly affects our ability to build products and services.
But the question is what do we do about it? How do you plug this demand supply gap in skilled tech workers?
Educated, Unskilled & Unemployed
Skills shortage is an unbound problem, and unbound problems are hard to solve. One must ringfence them further to make them easier to understand, articulate and ultimately solve. So we narrowed the problem to India and specifically to tech “skills” shortage in India.
Note I say *Skills shortage*, not degrees.
Every year literally millions of people finish graduate and post-grad college- but unfortunately, a vast majority of them do so with degrees that nobody wants. In other words, Yes, they have degrees, but not the skills that employers are looking for.
In fact, in India, almost 2 million graduates and half a million post-graduates are unemployed in India at any given time ( or when employed are doing odd jobs stuck in low wage cycles) These are India’s “Educated Unemployed & Underemployed”.
Educated Unemployed
It is a massive waste of the demographic dividend that India has been blessed with and especially at this point in her economic and social history. It is also a waste of national resources spent on getting people degrees, but ultimately no employment.
So that made us think.
How great would it be, if we could take this massive group of Indian graduates (educated, unskilled & largely unemployed) and train them to become product builders, software developers and product designers ? How great would it be, if in the process we could transform people’s lives.
So this is the core idea that led us to start SCRIPL.
What is SCRIPL?
SCRIPL is a community where people, irrespective of their background, can learn to code and ultimately become high-quality Full-Stack engineers, Machine Learning developers, Mobile application devs, and UI/UX designers. Its been operational since 12 months now (hence the writing hiatus )
We’ve worked with employers, startup founders, and industry experts to curate a curriculum that transforms anybody that is willing to put in the time and work, into a high quality software developer with technical skills of today and the future. And, by the time you are done with the coursework we help you find your first job in tech with one of our hiring partners.
*At this time, we are focused only on candidates from India. specifically Candidates who are graduates, but without a job. If you know anybody that might be interested please have them apply here* 🙏🙏
SCRIPL’s hiring partners today are some of India’s most promising startups, and we continue to add to that partner pool.
Now one might ask, okay that’s all great — but aren’t there lots of coding Bootcamps in India that help you learn to code?
Good question, and Yes, there are.
But many of these boot camps unfortunately need you to pay anywhere from 100,000–500,000 INR upfront, which it a lot of money for an average unemployed Indian with no source of income or financing. Remember these are folks that are already in the red after using up family savings (or worse a student loan) to get graduate degrees that led them nowhere.
And this is where SCRIPL is different.
SCRIPL pays you to learn to code
At SCRIPL, you learn to code for FREE — actually its even better. We pay people to learn to code. (calm down, we have a screening process 😊 )
While we’ve been building SCRIPL, we have realized that many of our most promising applicants come from low-income households who’ve already spent a big portion of their parents’ savings on engineering/higher education degrees that basically did not land them a job. (Remember, Low income households in India see education as the only way to upward social and economic mobility ).
full time, distraction free learning
As we talked to and interviewed more potential applicants, we learnt that these applicants not only did not have any money to pay upfront bootcamp fees, they would not be able to commit to full time, distraction free learning if they were constantly anxious about meeting their personal expenses and making ends meet. So at SCRIPL we decided to pay people a reasonable stipend to make learning distraction free.
Who are we looking for?
Our ideal candidate is somebody that has the willingness to learn to code, but perhaps never had the opportunity, or didn’t know how to navigate the process, or are unaware of what it means to become a software developer.
We look for people who will be able to put in the effort and focus necessary for “full time learning” , but CANNOT do it today because they are stuck situations where a vast majority of their day is spent working to make ends meet.
This is what we’ve been working on for the last 12 months. SCRIPL is our attempt to help India’s youth re-skill and ultimately transform young Indians into people who can build the future.
If you are interested in talking, have questions or know somebody that might be interested to join SCRIPL, just DM us here!.
Thanks for reading!
