Thread by @____abiodun____

You kept mentioning “training” as a magic word, so perhaps, I should give you a genesis of how it started, where it went wrong, and where your assumptions are wrong and the pain this sort of misconceptions/miscommunication caused fellows.

The way you put it, it seems you are...

https://twitter.com/chaluwa/status/1176073122870648832

seeing Andela is a one-way street, they only do favors for the fellows, and the fellows put it 0 or no effort.

Andela actually started a training school, they took in young Nigerians with little or no programming experience and trained them for software development, heck...

the company started as flora, an online training platform, only that they wanted to have more impact and make the training physical so it was started from Nigeria.

And no it’s not like the shitty training you had to pay 400k for at APTECH or NIIT (I’ve engaged with a lot of....

NIIT graduate and always ended up disappointed)

They had a group of foreign-trained experienced software engineers in the early days, Curtis, Andre, Obie to name a few, these people came and in it’s first years trained the first set of fellows and trainers together, the ....

trainers now go on to train other fellows, while the first set of fellows get on client engagement and “KILLED” it.

Why was this? The company invested in its employees, and these same employees poured their heart and soul into their work regardless of the pay.....

Some people left their high paying job/changed carriers to come and join Andela because of its culture, and it’s revered brilliant people, not because of it’s pay. When you come around to the workspace, you will see people working for long hours (18+) and only getting to sleep...

Some people left their high paying job/changed carriers to come and join Andela because of its culture, and it’s revered brilliant people, not because of it’s pay. When you come around to the workspace, you will see people working for long hours (18+) and only getting to sleep...

for 3 - 4 hours daily ( I think I developed my sleeping defect during those days)

I don’t know who designed the selection process back then, but the selection process for the fellows was pretty accurate, You won’t see anybody that you would classify as dumb in that group, they..

were all smart without any programming experience, which made the teaching easy because you are teaching a bunch of reasonable people and they can catch up fast.

Through this Andela built what I classify today as the companies best strength, it’s a community, regardless of where

you are from, once you are an Andelan, you are more like family and you are assumed to be on the higher end of the spectrum

Obviously, this had some terrific results you can see here medium.com/@tyler_44463/m…, and in many other sources. Andela built a reputation of having....

the best developers in Nigeria along this time, every Andela developer was accorded with some respect. But all this changed though

Early 2016, a contract was introduced that was bound to bind the fellows to the company for 2 years, else pay $15,000 for the total cost of training

, this wasn’t only outrageous, it was met with some stiff resistance by the present fellows who pushed back on it, but they ended up implementing this for the incoming set of fellows and the contract was binding, and it was around this time that the training STOPPED.

The trainers gradually shifted from being trainers to managers, instead of doing the normal code reviews and having a talk around architectures, it shifted to just giving the newbies some project, and the d0 fellows were left to figure this out on their own....

so they turned to the only source that’s left for them, the older experienced fellows, with the culture already previously built, the older fellows welcomed the new ones with open arms and act as mentors, taking the time out from their own engagements, and putting the junior...

fellows through

At this time Andela, already gained enough PR as a training school that they continued riding on that horse for a long long time, the fellows initially didn’t care, but then it became so apparent that the public sees Andela fellows like you, @chaluwa are seeing.

@chaluwa it now that we won’t be what we are without Andela, failing to recognize the tremendous amount of work that the fellow had to put it to stay afloat, Andela had turned to a full-time business, so if you were not performing especially at d0 you were shown the door....

@chaluwa I think this was when the term “you can take a walk”, became popular internally.

Back to Andela, training was no longer happening, and newer fellows were finding it hard to find there fit on the ground, we helped as much as we could to help them stay through, so the d0 program..

@chaluwa was failing internally, why was this, a few months later if you asked a once d0 what the person did for his simulation/assessment project, he/she would tell you he had no idea of how the code is working he just wanted to scale through so that he is no longer on probation...

@chaluwa The ripple effect of this soon began to show, the untrained fellows started under-performing on client engagements and clients started complaining, instead of going to back to basics of what worked and trying to refined that, you know what we did? We started hiring SC's 😂😂.

@chaluwa I’ll come back to this in a moment, let me talk about how Andela itself doesn’t value the work the fellows put in, or even see them be a competent senior engineers despite 1) some of them have previous years of experience in a particular technology before joining Andela, 2)....

@chaluwa show tremendous amount of technical/management prowess that warrants to be granted that title.

Back in 2016, we were looking for an IOS developer in Nigeria, swift was pretty now, so not a lot of people knew how to work with the language, but we already had developers....

@chaluwa who had been programming in objective c for a long time and with experience building IOS applications, this same set of people set up a workshop to teach other fellows IOS development, after some interviews the “trainer” that was in charge of the interview process then...

@chaluwa informed the management that we have a good set of IOS developers in Andela, but this were fellows, for some flawed business reason which I think I understood then, but can’t anymore, the management can’t place a fellow as senior developer just like that.....

@chaluwa as there were no framework in place, everybody, including the junior fellows were classified as juniors.

We started hiring SD's, This in itself deserves another conversation, but the bottom line is, even though we ended up hiring some really good SC’s........

@chaluwa who I’ve come to respect a lot and have become friends with, we also happened to hire a lot of shitty ones who were able to circumvent the system by lying on there CVs about what their experience was? The resulting effect? More work for the fellows and going further to take the..

@chaluwa credit for the work developers had done, which makes me question overtime why are fellows and Sc’s treated differently, but that’s for another thread.

So effectively, the training in Andela ended in 2016, after that time, it was only internal mentorship that kept putting us...

@chaluwa afloat, and you must have seen some arguments on slack about how the fellows were pushing back on this, yet you are obnoxious enough to still put this out there. And oh! ALC

@chaluwa One thing I’ve learned about building a product is having empathy towards its users, making sure it satisfies the user’s needs, and it is easy to use. This means that you must have walked in the user’s shoes, done some extensive testing, taken care of most edge cases....

@chaluwa and do some research on how others are trying to solve this same problem that you’re solving because obviously, you won’t be the first solving it. The people in charge of ALC didn’t do this, rather it just seemed like a quickly put together track, bound to gain some marketing PR.

@chaluwa for the goodwill that the company is trying to do and put it out there and let the users figure it out, then reward the few that made it with whatever they have in mind.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I have two mentees, the first one had no programming experience....

@chaluwa whatsoever, in fact, despite me singing the praises and adoration of what power you’ll have as a programmer, it was when she applied for ALC and got admitted to the program, was when she took it seriously.

The second one had been doing FreeCodeCamp for like 3 months.....

@chaluwa He had a pretty good idea of javascript syntax, and had a pretty good idea of what he was meant to do, he too got admitted into the ALC platform and they both came to me for help, apparently once you are admitted into the ALC platform, you are given subscription to pluralsight...

@chaluwa I was able to monitor their progress and challenges and was there explaining the concept that they might find too hard to understand.

I have a _strong_ bias against video tutorials as I believe they were a lot of your time and teach you little, also since they are new to....

@chaluwa programming, this would be extremely boring to watch, what was on my mind was why not pay for code-academy subscription instead? I had the first time go through code-academy and she thoroughly enjoyed it, but both of them were not able to concentrate on the pluralsight...

@chaluwa videos for hours, I think this should have been researched before putting this out there, but then this can still be overlooked..

On progressing to the next stage they had to do a test, build an app using autogradr (autogradr.com), I do not know who uploaded....

@chaluwa those assessment or instructions, but there are so many things wrong with that assessment in its usability. I’ll start with the minor ones, for context this was the mobile web track. So students are supposed to write, some JS and HTML.
1. The program only allowed the use of...

@chaluwa const against let (but a valid way of initializing variables) without giving the student feedback as to the reason why.
2. If it’s not structured in a certain way, you won’t be able to proceed to the next phase without any feedback from the app.
3. Students were forced to use...

@chaluwa `reduce` in place of for loops, reduce is a hard concept to understand even for veterans, not only did it come as off, but also quite insensitive
4. No live debugger, not until you placed it somewhere in the source of the chrome console.

Note this is for only the web track...

@chaluwa I have no idea of the struggles the android or any other track might have gone through. But here is the kicker and why I think they shouldn’t have released it in the first place.

This autogradr still had bugs (from the maintainer's side) 24 hours before the ALC candidates...

@chaluwa were due to submit the project.
WHO DOES THAT? Of all the things to be incompetent at, the assessment software shouldn’t be part of it, you have to make sure that everyone is on a leveled playing field, or at least close to a level playing field, but if your software has a bug.

@chaluwa before important assessment that affects thousands of people, you should fix that before asking the candidates, who are still so new to this field to go an and attempt it. It might be a make or break for some of them.

This would be the last thing I would say on this matter