This Week in Startups - E1049: freeCodeCamp Founder Quincy Larson shares insights on democratizing developer skills, which programs to learn to land a coding job, if anyone can learn to code, maximizing earning potential & more!

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

0:50 Jason thanks the front-line workers & intros freeCodeCamp's Quincy Larson 7:45 Why & how did Quincy start freeCodeCamp? What is freeCodeCamp? 12:16 Jason & Quincy discuss starting & running large online communities, benefits of Discord & Slack 15:36 Can you jump right in on freeCodeCamp.org? What types of certifications do they offer? 17:38 COVID-19's impact on user growth & why Quincy is emulating Red Cross, YMCA & other non-profits 21:19 Do they track outcomes at freeCodeCamp, how do they compare to Lambda School? 26:05 Can anyone become a web developer? How many hours would it take for an average high school graduate to be able to build a 1.0 version of Twitter or Shopify? 35:09 Quincy shares some freeCodeCamp success stories 41:21 What's the quickest way to get a job through coding? What program should an aspirational developer start learning first? 45:57 Should new developers prioritize mobile development to maximize earning potential? 48:24 What % of freeCodeCamp users are non-US? Which country has shown the most potential? 50:44 What does the post-COVID world look like for developers? 53:21 freeCodeCamp's developer cards project

This week in startups is brought to you by Clavio helps brands build relationships across any distance, delivering email marketing moments your customers will appreciate, remember, and share. Visit clavio.com slash twist to schedule a demo. That's K-L-A-V-I-O.com slash twist. Fiverr. Find the perfect freelance services for your business.

Go to Fiverr.com and use code twi-y-o-o-com. to receive 10% off your first order. And MintMobile. Stop paying for unlimited data that you never use. Cut your wireless bill down to just 15 bucks a month and get a plan shipped to your door for free at mintmobile.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. We're in month two of quarantine here in San Francisco.

And it's been a trying time for everybody. But move forward is the only thing we can do. Sometimes the way to get through something or the way to get to the other side is to go through it. And that's what we're doing right now. We're just going to go right through it. Through the soup, through the muck, through the fog of this horrible, challenging moment. For the folks who are on the front lines,

I just got to say it at the start and the end of every show, thank you. The Uber drivers, Uber-Each drivers, Dory Dash, postmates, to the doctors and nurses and interns. and the security guards, the police, the firefighters, EMTs, the janitors, just everybody out there who's on the front line exposing themselves potentially to this horrible virus. My God, thank you. Just thank you. On behalf of everybody in the audience.

And it feels like we've saved a lot of lives. That's a great thing. But it feels like we've lost a lot of livelihoods. And as I'm sitting here today taping, I've gotten. news that another four million Americans file for unemployment. That is about five, six, seven, eight times the record. But by the way, we've set a record every week, even as it's gone down a little bit every week, we still have over 25 million Americans filing for unemployment, 16, 20 percent of the workforce, depending on who numbers you count, are done. They're done.

They're home. Jobs, gone. Maybe some come back. My gut tells me, many do not. It's going to be a challenging time. We had record low unemployment. And there's a lot of strife in the world. A lot of people believe the system's rig. A lot of people believe that you cannot move up in the world, that it's a fixed caste system here in America. It's not true. You understand why people believe it, but I am on the front lines watching startups being formed, watching entrepreneurs create new things. I can tell you the majority of them. And when I say the majority, I mean the overwhelming majority of them. 70, 80% plus are nobodies who didn't go to some great college.

They're not coming from Harvard, business school or Stanford or Penn. Great schools are all. I've spoken at all of them. You've got a case study on me at Stanford. How mind-blowing is that? You don't need those degrees. It's great that you get them sometimes if you're privileged enough or smart enough to hack the system or your parents paid to get you in there or bought some building

or put your photoshopped your hat onto some badminton player to get you in there and paid somebody off, whatever. The truth is, and now you know why people think the system is rigged, because in that case it actually is. So you know what? My whole preample makes no sense now because the system is rigged in some parts. But one thing that's not rigged, one thing that's not rigged, is the freedom you have at any point in time to start a company in America.

It's not like that in China. certainly not like that in North Korea, not in the Middle East. And even in Europe, starting a company, you're on the hook yourself personally for everybody's salary, so it's really hard. You're going to make personal guarantees. Here in America, anybody can start a company anytime. You could do it this weekend. We talk about it all the time at this week in startups.com slash slack, our private Slack instance.

It's secret, so don't tell anybody about it, but there's 14,000 people in there now, while talking about startups all day long. But if you want to go on this journey, and if you want to go on this journey, and if you want to take advantage of living in this amazing country. As flawed as it is, as effed up as this situation and has exposed all the faults in our system, one thing that's perfect about our system is that you living here in America can start a company tomorrow. Even if you don't live in America, you can start a company here tomorrow in all likelihood. There's ways to do that, too. But what you need is you need skills. And I know what you're going to say. Oh, I can't afford

to get skills. I can't get into Harvard. My parents don't want to Photoshop me and hire somebody to put me on the tennis crew team, whatever that thing is when they go on the river and they row boats. I don't know what the point of it is. God damn it. There's one thing you can do. And people will tell you you can't

is you can sit down and learn a goddamn skill. And nobody can stop you from doing that either. And you know what startups actually are at their core? Their products or services. And you know how products and services are made? They're made by people with skills. So there's no big mystery here. You're a human being with a pulse.

Learn a goddamn skill and then build a product. And if you don't have a certain skill, either learn it or find somebody who wants to learn it or has learned it. At the core of those skills is building code. And as we know from the drama from Lambda School, which was on the podcast, I got to invest a little bit in that company, by the way, which I have to disclose, full disclosure. I put a little bat in there. It turns out you can even go to Lambda school, and it's deferred payment. So you're taking almost no risk.

The only rest you're taking is a couple of months of your life, which to me is no big risk. And we all got time. But in the process of talking about Lambda, I found out about something super interesting. A free version of Lambda. It's called Free Code Camp. It's been going on since 2014. And I asked Quincy Larson, who is the founder of Free Code Camp, to come on the podcast. and he's here with me now.

Welcome to the pod. Quincy. Hey, thanks for having me. You heard my preamble there. And before we get to business and talk about the incredible work you're doing, I want to know if you're okay, if you've been impacted by this virus, and how you personally are holding up through all of this. I can't complain.

Can't complain. Nobody impacted in your family in your extended circles. We're fortunate. Pretty much everybody in my family is able to, just hunker down and do our jobs remotely. My wife and I have just been working remotely and basically living remotely. We're in Dallas, Texas, and we just stay out here. And the main difference for me personally is that my kids are home all day and they're not in school.

That's a blessing. And also very intense. Yeah. Very intense. But if that's all I have to complain about, the fact that it's harder for me to work because my kids are hanging around the house and I need that help take care of them a little bit more. Like, I've got absolutely nothing to complain about. Yeah, literally nothing to complain about.

And if they jump on the podcast, now we used to be all panicked. Like if they jump on the podcast, now I go out to Zoom. Some people are like, oh, yeah, your kids saw them. Yeah, have them come on the podcast. I'm like, yeah, absolutely, yeah, you know, jump on the podcast with my attorney and my venture capitalized. Nobody cares. Nobody's taking showers. Nobody cares if your kids are screaming in the background, dogs, if you're fighting, it doesn't matter.

We're all in survival mode, and I love it. Tell everybody, just quickly, and briefly and concisely, who you are and when you started and why you started free co-camp? Sure. I'm Quincy Larson. I was a teacher and a school director in the U.S. and in China. And at some point, I wanted to help my staff get more, help more teachers. I wanted these teachers to help more students and be able to spend more time with the students. So I did some basic Google searches and figured out some tools to automate some of our school's back office workflows. And that's when I really realized, wow, I should learn more of this.

We were able to completely revolutionize our school through just a few tools that I built as a layperson without any formal programming experience. And then I went deep into that. I became a software engineer at a startup in Santa Barbara. And then I moved to San Francisco and just started working on a whole bunch of different tools around technology education. And eventually I created Free Code Camp about five years ago. And that was the one that started to really get traction and have a lot of people start using it. So how does Free Code Camp work? If I am an individual who has never written a line of code, how does it work? Is it 12 weeks? Is it a year? Is it nine months? Do I come in person? Do I do it virtual? How does Free Code Camp manifest itself in the world as a product or service?

So it's a community. We have a core curriculum that a lot of people work through. Millions of people work through it. And it is completely self-paced. You can do it at your own convenience. You don't have to go anywhere. It's totally free. You just go to a website and there's an interactive coding environment

and you work through lesson after lesson after lesson. And after you finish about 3,000 hours worth of instructional design of curricula, then you come out the other side. How many hours? It's about 3,000 hours. Three thousand hours. That's a full year of 60 hour weeks. Yeah.

That's the thing that marketers will say, oh, learning the code is not that hard. You can do it in 12 weeks or whatever. But they're not telling you. You're going to be learning it ramping up to, you know, a coding boot camp or ramping up to getting, you know, a CS degree. And then after you get that credential, you're still going to be learning while you continue to a job

searching, you're still going to be learning once you get a job. Once you get a job, your first developer job, that's where the real learning begins. All right, how much does all this cost at free co-cab? What do you charge? It's totally free, as the name would imply. Ah, got it. I'm glad the joke landed. Right now, a bunch of people on the podcast are Elizabeth going, wait, did he just as how much free co-capiness? So it's free. And what I want to know when we get back from this quick break is how, was there a spike? in people signing up when the country went into quarantine when we get back on this week's first.

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And a bunch of dirty, rotten marketers and spammers trying to get you into the top of the funnel that we will absolutely ban for life. Banned about 10 people this week. One of them complained. And I said, well, if you didn't post your ebook like seven times, maybe the community would not have complained and ratted you out for being too aggressive. Isn't it an amazing quiz? When you're part of like an online community, like, I don't know if you get this their free code camp, but you set up a community and you're like,

here's the purpose of this community. And then somebody comes in and they're like, oh, is the purpose of the community for me to jump on the middle of the table up and down and tell you what I do for a living and sell you something? Yeah, we've learned a lot about running communities over the years. we had, you know, we basically broke Slack because we were using a Slack community back before more recently. Yeah.

And we hit some invisible undocumented limit, the number of people you could have in a Slack back in like 2016. And it apparently was like 8,100 and some random number. Like some arbitrary number. It wasn't like a multiple of two or anything. We just hit it. And Slack was like, oh, sorry, you can't have any more people join the Slack. Oh, wow.

Yeah. It was weird. We just had, we have a free account with these 14,000 people on it, and they just made it a pro account until the middle of July. And they've sponsored the podcast. I know Stewart, so I don't know if somebody at Slack was gracious enough to just upgrade it because they saw it going on, or if they just did that as like a little T, so we install more than 10 abs and then pay. But I'm like, I think it's, what is it, $6, 70 bucks a month for a user? So I think our bill right now would be like a million dollars a year, which is what they charge a 14,000 person company, I guess, which makes.

sense. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, we have a discourse, a Discord server right now. And more importantly, we have a form. We'll get back to CodeCamp in a second, but this is a free code camp in a second. And by the way, I'd ask to shout out the domain name. It's FreeCodeCamp.org. Go ahead and check it out while we're talking if you're not driving. Tell me the difference between Discord, because people have been telling me I made a mistake setting up a Slack. And I was like, well, all the people in my world use Slack, they're not gamers or developers. What's the key difference between Discord and Slack for larger groups, large communities? I mean, I don't know what the primary feature differences would be.

Our experience with Discord is it seems to be really well engineered. And there's a group called reactive Flux. It's focused on React and Flux and a couple other big JavaScript libraries. And they have like 80,000 people in there. Wow. And in a single instance. So we were like, okay, well, we may eventually have 80,000 ourselves. so it's good to know that it can capacity that many people without problems.

Yeah. We're doing just fine at 14,000. So when we went to break, I wanted to know how did things change for your pre-corona, quarantine, and after, and then as a follow-up to that, how does one apply to get into Free Co-Camp or could anybody just literally go there right now like Khan Academy and start learning? What do you have to apply? Yeah, so the quick answer to that last part of the question is anybody can just go to Freakocamp.org and click the sign-in button and you'll just jump right in, start learning.

And one thing to note is we have certifications that you can earn if you build projects. They're verified certifications that live on our server and you can put them on your LinkedIn and resume and everything. You can earn those without actually having to work through all the lessons. You just have to build the five certification projects. So this is something that even more experienced developers can come in and just quickly grab some certifications. So it's sort of like merit badges.

you know, like gamified a bet. You can do that and get a badge or get a certification to put on your LinkedIn. How do you then do the certification? Because you're, doesn't, does a human review the code and make sure you didn't just cut and paste it? Or how do you certify somebody?

Yeah, we have like plagiarism detection. We have a really strong academic honesty policy as well. And we ban a lot of people who just come in and like, oh, get a certification. Yeah. Naively thinking that we weren't going to catch them. But most people, like a vast majority of people, put in, you know, hundreds of hours building these projects.

all the projects have test suites and everything and you can host those projects on your own domain, you can host them on a cloud IDE type thing. You can build them basically anywhere and then you just give us the link and we run the tests remotely against your code and we

neat. How much time does it take you to do that? Like a human to certify it? Does it take 10 minutes or an hour or five? So we issue the certification then we do the like we just have batch processes. Got it. Awesome. Catch these things. And also the community, like if they notice something fishy on our profile, they can report it.

Yeah. I mean, and also, if you're cheating, you're only cheating yourself, as every teacher told you, and you're going to get caught anyway when you go get your job. So, I mean, anybody can hack or cheat any system. We all know that, especially if you're a developer, you know that. And so, yeah, I mean, you could have somebody go take your driver's license test for you and then you're going to get behind the wheel of a car and you're not going to know how to drive. So you might want to just go through the testing process yourself.

So how many people a month? were actively going through the content or taking a course before coronavirus. And where is it now, you know, week six, depending on where you are, five, six of quarantine. Six million monthly unique visitors. Wow. Before. And now it's like 10 or 11 million. So it's been a big increase.

Great. So are you raising money for this project? So we're a donor-supported nonprofit and- Great. So you're willing to convert it to a for-profit. No, I mean, in a way, do you ever? think about as having created this nonprofit? What if I had made this for a profit? Does it ever go through your mind? I'm curious. We're much more interested in optimizing for the long term.

And, you know, like I look at institutions that I have a lot of respect for, like the Red Cross, the YMCA, and, you know, Doctors Without Borders, and they have these long-story paths. And we want to be that, you know, multi-generational tool. How much, what's the donation base? like every year. What was it last year? What is it this year? Because you published all that anyway, right? It's published. Yeah, we got about $371,000. So it's not a lot of money, but it's enough to support a small team and pay for servers. We have emphasized capital efficiency and just trying to grow sustainably. We don't have any big cash donors. We've had people that have given, you know, a thousand here, maybe 10,000. You don't have any big cash donors, Zuckerberg,

Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Foundation, Jeff Bezos. None of those people have given you $10 million. I mean, didn't Gates give $10 million to Khan Academy? It seems like somebody should just give you at least a million bucks and get this going. So good for society. Yeah, we've helped more than 40,000 people get their first job as a developer. I mean, you know what you should do?

Just thinking like a capitalist is anybody who donates six figures or more gets a thank you on the homepage in an icon. And so if you're AWS, if you're Azure, having your logo there and you just say, we're going to have four tiers of logos, you know, seven figures, six figures, and, you know, they're just going to be three, six, you know, five tiers or whatever.

Have you ever thought about doing that and just putting up a type form and just taking their money and stripe? Because you might be able to roll back code pretty quick. Yeah. If anybody wants to give us a bunch of money, email me at Quincy of Freakocamp.org. No, even better.

Freecodecamp.org slash partners fill out the type form. By the time this episode's come out, you can have it up. And I'm just letting everybody know there's five tiers, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 250,000, and a million. And your logo is proportional to the size of the donation. You're ranked on the homepage. And you get to have your own channel in the Slack. I'm sorry, in the Discord to talk to them. That's it.

You get a logo. I mean, it's not too much to give up. I mean, and how much would Google Cloud computing or Azure or whatever, you know, want to have that logo up there? I think I just raised a million dollars for you, by the way. I think I just doubled your budget. Yeah, I mean, that would be fantastic if we could get some. I mean, just in-kind donations. Bottom up from the platforms and things too.

So. But, yeah, just large cash donations would be a big help. Explain to me the, you have six million people coming there. Do you track how, because one of the big things Lambda does, and you probably saw, I don't know if you saw the episodes I did on like all the criticism of Lambda, da-da, so I'm curious if you track outcomes yet on the site. And if you do, can you share with me some of the outcomes you've had? I mean, six million people coming to the site is undeniable.

They're not coming there to watch like some dopey YouTuber, you know, play video games or something to go into the right code. So that is incredible in itself. But what are you, are you tracking outcomes? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to track because most people, just go and get a job and kind of soundly are working. And I find out of it through some random Reddit post or somebody tweets like, oh, yeah, free goat camp. Like I use that, you know, three years ago when I was applying for developer jobs.

So, but we have a LinkedIn alumni network with maybe like 60,000 people. 60,000. Wow. Yeah. And more than 40,000 people have gotten their first developer job that we determined through, you know, analyzing the data from LinkedIn. And so you could say that like a lot of people, just like any free online learning resource,

a lot of people are going to, their eyes are going to be bigger than their stomach. But for a lot of people, they actually carry through. And they actually do put in the time and make it work. Explain to me the criticism. Oh, I'm curious what you think of Lambda. That was my second question there.

What do you honestly think of Lambda having seen that episode? And I guess people will say, oh, why would you go to Lambda? if you can just get it for free here. What's different about the two programs, in all honesty and candidness? And I would think that you're kind of like a great resource for people in Lambda and a great way to, if you're not sure if you want to make the commitment to Lambda, which let's face it, is a bigger commitment.

Yours is no commitment. There's a pretty big commitment, or time commitment, I should say. You know, comparatively, you're a much less commitment. Are you seeing people do one and then the other? And then what do you candidly think of Lambda and Austin and what he's doing? Yeah, well, I'm grateful that there are so many different experiments being done in higher education and continuing education for adults. And I'm optimistic that, you know, like across MOOCs and across online coding boot camps

and across just free curricula, like free code camp, there will be something for pretty much everybody who wants to ramp up their skills. When we get back from this quick break, I want you to answer the question that a lot of people have and that there's a lot of cynicism. about because a lot of people in Silicon Valley will say to journalists who are getting laid off, why don't you learn how to code or say to, you know, somebody who is unemployed or even homeless, hey, why don't you learn to code? And everybody attacks and says, you people are clueless. You can't just learn to code. I want you to answer, do you believe anyone can code?

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All right, Quincy Larson is here. Follow him on the Twitter OSS-S-I-A. He is the founder of FreeCodeCamp.org from 2014 to present. We've got a modest bottom-up donation of $400,000 coming in a year or so to run this very modest operation that's having extraordinary impact in the world. If you've got a bunch of money, you've got some product that you could help, that you want to get in front of six million developers a month or people who want to be developers, even better. Just go to freecodecamp.org slash partners, where you can donate between 25 and 250 or even a million dollars to freecodecamp.org.

I just made that URL. Will you put that URL up now that I've done this? I'm already an advisor to free code camp now and an investor in Libda. You remember my question from the break. Yes. Can anyone become a developer? And I'll just take a U.S.-centric point of view so people have their bearings here. Yeah, I mean, like I've got to qualify that because I don't think just anybody can become a developer, frankly.

Like you have to have to have sufficient motivation. So I'd say any sufficiently motivated person can become a developer. Now you might think like, oh, well, what if you're blind? How would you become a developer if you're blind? Well, there's a significant portion of people in the Free Code Camp community who are blind and many of whom work as developers now and contribute or moderate Free Code Camp. So even something like blindness, which seems like it might be some sort of inassailable problem, how would you overcome that?

It can be overcome with sufficient motivation. The tools are out there. It's just a matter of figuring out how you can budget your time and how you can stay, you know, fired up about learning to code because it's a long, difficult process and it's relatively ambiguous. We do our best to take the ambiguity out of learning to code by just having a single linear curriculum that everybody does and having, you know, a forum and having a chat room where you can go to get inspiration, all those things. At the end of the day, though, it's ultimately up to you and how bad you want it.

And even if you do learn to code really well, you still have to go ahead and get a job. And skills are just one component of that having a good network, having a reputation, those are other really vital things. So being able to get a job can be a slog. And even if you're a really great developer, it can take, you know, hundreds of applications before you actually get somebody who's willing to take a chance on you. So I'm going to just repeat back what you said to me, just so I'm clear.

What we, in your estimation, having seen people who are blind, which would seem like a non-starter for being able to code or be incredibly challenging, and it must be incredibly challenging, you have a significant number of people who are blind who are going through co-camp. So in your estimation, what we lack is not an opportunity to learn to code, but a lack of motivation and discipline to learn to code. Is that correct? Yeah, and to be fair, like not everybody has the circumstances where they can allocate time. People have kids. They have jobs. They have aging parents. They have other obligations. So, but I mean, and it's interesting because based on your reaction, I can tell that you two may have

been in this position where if you say something like what we lack is not opportunity. and the way I'm saying it is very specific to trigger snowflakes out there on Twitter, and I hope they cancel me because working sucks, man. I've been working really hard. Please cancel me for this comment. What we lack is not opportunity. What we lack is discipline

and motivation to do this. And then you came back to me with the responsible, but also Jason, please do consider that people might be single parent, you didn't say single parents, but I'm going to say that single parents. They lack time, they lack

this, you know, opportunity. Certainly that is the case as well. But to become a basic level programmer, let's just unpack this, to be clear, to become a basic programmer who can build, you know, let's just say Shopify level, Squarespace level websites, the 1.0 version of Twitter, to do something in that range, a Shopify site, a 1.0 version of Twitter, something like that. how many hours of learning to code for the average American would be necessary? Well, I mean, you can build those, and you'll build those as part of Free Code Camps curriculum. Like our current curriculum has 30 projects that you're built, and we're getting ready to move to a completely project-oriented learning curriculum.

Amazing. So how many hours would it take for somebody to do that, to build that 1.0 version of Twitter, you know, basic square space, e-commerce-enabled website? I mean, it's going to depend on, like, how much of a pre-existing math, computer science theory. Let's just say you suck at math or your average at high school math in America. Like, if you were just like a total high school graduate who just had like the common core type stuff that you learned through high school. Yeah, kind of. Or less, yeah.

Or less. Common core or less. Yeah. Let's say you can basically, you can read and you can do very basic math. Sure. And you have very basic critical thinking skills. But you're motivated. So how many hours?

But you're motivated. Yeah. Yeah. I would say probably within, you know, 2,000 hours, you could be building pretty sophisticated applications. So in 2,000 hours, just so people know, there's 50 weeks in a year. You take 2 off for vacation, 40 hours a week. When most people calculate somebody's work, they actually calculated based on 47 weeks

because you have other weeks off. And 47 times 40, you kind of get into the range of people work 1,800 to 2,000 hours a full time. If you were to do this part-time, the average American watch is four or five hours of television per day. So the average American, and they do this day in a day out, they don't take a day off from this, it's not like work. Average American is watching about 1,800 hours of TV a year, 1500 hours of TV a year,

go ahead and look it up. If an American just swapped out half their TV time, what you're telling me is in 18 months or so, they could be building significant applications by only cutting half their television time viewing just to do back of the envelope math. And this is where I think a lot of the arguments about the system being rigged that open the show with and people being unable to steal it. I believe it's a false narrative that in some cases, very liberal people are putting out there that you do not have the ability to change your station in life. You do not have the ability to learn this. This is something from

the ivory tower that you're just not allowed to do. Do you agree that? Did you agree with my basic premise here? Well, you have to believe that it's possible and that you can, that you can in fact do it. And you're going to have to push back against a lot of people who are going to tell you, just stick with what you're good at. Or like what makes you think that you could do this? You're, you know, a high school dropout or you're, you know, just like a janitor at some sort of facility or you're working as a checker at a grocery store. Like what makes you think that you could learn this really sophisticated skill

and go out there and build something that would be helpful or maintain an existing project? You have to be able to push through those people and you have to be able to say, you know, I don't care what the social conventions are. I'm going to go for this. And that's a big reason why there has to be kind of a tribe that you can join. Yeah, there has to be like a community and you have to be plugged in with people preferably locally in person through a hacker space or through some in-person meetups. So you can stay motivated because a lot of society is telling you just stay where you are

or, oh, you're not meant to do this because you didn't go to college or, oh, you went to college and studied Spanish. Yeah, this is a tremendous insight, Quincy. And I think most people are reticent to say it, but the company you keep and the people around you can sometimes want to keep you down in the ditch where they are. And you see parents do it inadvertently. You can see peer groups do it. You can even see teachers. When I went into my, when I was at Severian High School, and there's a reason why there's no building at Severian High School with my name on it, even though they've asked me over and over again, because I wouldn't give them a dollar. and they

I went into my counselor and he said hey what are you thinking about for college and I said I read about Brown and they said at Brown University you can make whatever a degree you want you can like make your own thing

and I have an idea I want to do like this like human computer thing and literally the counselor laughed in my face he said Jason you have a 71 3 average you can't not go to Brown. And there was such a better way to say that, but it scarred me or just hit me so hard. I thought to myself, oh, I'm an idiot, right? I just not capable of that. Okay. Well, what was I thinking? You know, I kind of left there and I was just like, what was I thinking? I was a sophomore, I think. They do this like very early on. And I think that this is a tremendous, tremendous insight from you,

which is if you're hanging out with people who believe it and you yourself believe it, you can do it. And give me a story of a person who you've met, you've worked with, who you think, you don't have to say their name, you can just give us the composite of the person, if you're comfortable with that, or you can make a composite of multiple people. But a person who you have who just shines as somebody who, you know, started from the bottom is now at the top or is on their way to the top. Yeah, sure. Well, one of our early contributors was in the Army, and he'd been basically career. in the U.S. Army. He didn't go to college. It just wasn't for him. He didn't have the discipline to sit down in a desk. And so he wanted to go out in the field. And he was doing bomb disposal. And, you know, he did tours in Iraq and maybe in Afghanistan. I can't remember he did one or both.

And I met him because he was just at home, like pounding on the keyboard, like checking in code, doing tons of pull requests to our open source code repository. And I was like, who is this guy? And he was just so motivated. And it was clear that he'd been doing bomb disposal for like 10 plus years and just didn't have real big expectations for what he was going to do. He was just cool with that. And then at some point something clicked and he's like, no, I can do a lot more. And he went through the community and just helped contribute.

into the code base, went through the projects, got a job at MongoDB. And now he's working as a software engineer in New York City. Wow. Yeah. This is an incredible story for so many reasons. But your Hurt Locker, Bomb Disposal Guy. By way, great freaking film. Just incredible.

And by the way, the director did Strange Days, too, completely underrated science fiction film about the turn of the millennium with a lot of incredible ideas about virtual reality. You're nodding. You've seen it, huh? Just a great phone. Oh, yeah. I loved it as a kid because it came out right when I was like, you know, 17, 18. Yeah, right around the time of the millennium.

Time of the millennium. Strange day is just amazing, amazing. Just so many great concepts, you know. I don't want to ruin it for anybody, but a lot of great concepts. Putting that aside, this is a problem in society. Somebody who had the Hootspah, Cajone's ability to walk up to a goddamn bomb and disarm it in a bomb suit may have for a moment. thought that writing code was just too big of a challenge for them. You know what? If you can raise a kid, if you can disable a bomb, if you can deal with, you know, running into a burning

building, whatever it is that you're doing in your life. I mean, if you can shine shoes for 10 hours a day and deal with the intensity of that, you can go learn to code. We've established that here. We need to get people to just believe they could do it. It's a lack of support in the world for human ingenuity and human, the triumph of the human spirit is something that people just diminish constantly. It's almost like there's a narrative where people want to believe that this door and this route is not there. When we get back from this final break, I want you to tell me about what would be the easiest

path for somebody to get a paying job? If they could learn only one scale, even if it's outside of developing or adjacent to it, like ux or no code i want your thoughts on no code as well but what would be the clearest path if i said you know what i want to put in 500 a thousand hours and i want to get a job i don't i just need a job because we got a lot of people who have no jobs i just want a job it could be a 30 000 40 000 50 000 all your job a 20 an hour job what's the quickest path for somebody with no experience coding to use your service or adjacent services to just get back in the pool of the employed you know because we're going to need to do that with the 26 million people

as of the taping of this who are unemployed when we get back on this week of startups. It's 2020, and you are still using one of these big wireless providers. Have you ever asked yourself, what the heck are you paying for? I mean, think about what these expensive retail stores cost. Think about the inflated prices, all these hidden fees, the sticker shock you get when you get your bill. You're being taken advantage of.

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You're on your Wi-Fi at work. You're at the Wi-Fi at the cafe. And you're not using these unlimited data plans. So you're getting ripped off. Stop getting ripped off and get better service at Mintmobile.com slash Twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Yeah, Catherine Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, one of my favorite films.

I know some people felt she didn't deserve the Oscar for that. There were some other better films that year. but I think that's a triumph of a film, and I think Strange Day's was an amazing film as well. That's a director. I'd love to direct, man. If we could do some off-topic episodes, Catherine Bigelow would be an incredible interview.

My guest today, Quincy Larson, he is the founder of Freakot Camp, Freecodecamp.org. If you want to sponsor and send them 25,000, 100K, K. Where are you, Jeff Bezos? Where are you, Sergey Brin? Let's get some Satya. Let's go.

Let's get some cash over to this very important project. Freakotcamp.org slash partners. If you want to give money, there's a form there, tell me your uncle Jason sent you. What's the clearest path for somebody who's unemployed to get a job? What would you say to learn? If they learn no code, would that be the way to do it, UX, be able to build wireframes, functional wireframes?

What's the quickest path to get into job through coding? Yeah, so I was just learned JavaScript really well. JavaScript is the lingua franco of the web. It's been around for 20 plus years. Microsoft's investing heavily in it. Google's investing heavily. Facebook, of course, created React. they're investing heavily in it.

It's not going to anywhere. And you can do pretty much anything with it. You know, you can learn HTML basics, CSS basics in like a few days. And then you can just go really deep on JavaScript. Now, you asked about no code, and I think no code's amazing. And a lot of what I did when I was first trying to automate parts of my school was use what, I guess back in the day would be called node code, right, like Excel macros, and use this tool called Auto Hotkey to like programmatically click on things.

There are some great scraping tools that are essentially no code. You just use like a Chrome plugin or something like that's like the elements you want and then it will iterate through all the pages. There are lots of tools like that. No code is kind of a buzzword, not to disparage it, but that's it's basically a new name for a phenomenon that already existed but didn't already have like a. People used to call it scripting maybe or macros or work. or workflow.

I guess there are a lot of different names that people would refer to and they would diminish it. But the truth is, a lot of the stuff that you would hire a developer for 10 or 20 years, 20 years ago on the web

can be accomplished with Squarespace, Slack, Zapier, Notion, a lot of this API kind of glue, webflow, bubble. There's a bunch of these.

We've had a bunch of them on the show as well. If you had to choose going as a no-code script kitty or learning JavaScript, would you do one first than the other? Or how would you tell a friend who said, should I go all in on no code or should I go all in on JavaScript? What would your advice to them be? They say, listen, I'm going to put 500 to a thousand hours in a year for the next two or three years. What should I do in what order? Yeah, I would learn. I mean, if you have opportunities

at work to apply no code tools to like make yourself more productive, that's a great place to start. But there's not really any substitute for actually learning how things work. And it's, you know, the fundamentals, people act like, oh, my gosh, I'll learn it. And then it'll just be obsolete a few days later, a few months later or whatever. But most of what you'd be learning, if you just learn a single scripting language really comprehensively, whether that's Python or JavaScript, you would be learning the same kind of computer science fundamentals that were pioneered in like the 30s, 40s, 50s, and refined. You'd be learning the same kind of mathematics and algorithms that had, you can

go way back to human, you know, like the ancient Greeks, ancient, you know, Mesopotamians. So a lot of those fundamentals are going to continue to be just as good. And if you can learn them now and reap the devidence going forward, or you can kind of be more of a technician as opposed to an engineer where you're just grabbing this part and you don't know how it works, but you know that it does work and you plug it into the other thing. So no code is kind of like the really, really, really high level of that abstraction using something like JavaScript is like a few layers of abstraction lower and much more flexible as a result. No code is the biggest asset to developers. It's not necessarily business people

because developers know exactly how things work and they can just save times of time by grabbing by using Zapier or using ifs or some of these other tools so like pipe together different services instead of having to build an API. And because they've got that engineer's mindset that they built up over the years, they can look at a problem and decide, does this require custom code that I should maintain? Or should I just grab an off-the-shelf solution that somebody else is going to maintain for me? And when people look at the marketplace, a lot of times people say, I'm confused if I should learn like a JavaScript Python and go web, or I should learn how to do apps, which is a better career,

which is more sought after? And then talk to me about the difficulty level of, you know, of app building. I know that there's React, I guess, and Swift and a lot of different ways to build apps. But I know with my startups, finding a world-class iOS developer seems to be the hardest thing in the world to do, and they're incredibly well sought after,

and they're incredibly well compensated. I see JavaScript people getting work from home, you know, 60, 70, 80, 90,000. But I see on the cap tables, you know, these elite iOS engineers you're getting 125, 150, 175, even 200K. So talk to me about app building. Yeah, well, it's just like specialization.

I mean, you should learn web development first because that's the foundation. Like mobile apps, if they have a backend, their web apps, essentially, because you're going to have some sort of API that's piping data to the client. The mobile app is running on somebody's phone. If you look at like Uber or some of these other really complicated apps, I would be willing to bet that they have a lot more people working on the different APIs and services on the back end and then are working on the iOS app itself. What I would recommend you do is just be a generalist first, get a developer job and specialize

with where the company has work for you to do. And if that's moving into mobile app development, great. If that's creating some machine learning training models and things like that, great, do that. Or if that's just learning a whole lot more statistics and becoming a lot. a data scientist, great. But knowing how to code is kind of like the baseline skill that pretty much everybody needs to have in order to be able to unlock the next tier of developer jobs above that. So you're not going to be able to skip from not knowing how to code to working as a mobile app developer generally because you'd be skipping a whole lot of foundational

tools. It's much better to just try to work in linear order and then it gives you a lot more flexibility and a lot stronger foundation to stand on. I'm not saying it's out of, out of any possibility that you'd be able to go directly into a mobile app development job. But I'm saying that most of those people who go in there have already worked as web developers and are further specializing into that area. What percentage of the people coming to your website and the percentage of people who are actually getting certificates are non-US? It's about 30% U.S.

And the rest is like Asia, Africa, Latin America, Ocean. So like everybody in the world. The biggest countries, though, are definitely the U.S., India, Nigeria, China. And Brazil is a big one, too, Russia. Like, places that have a lot of people. Places with a lot of people. If you had to pick a country that has surprised you with the intensity and motivation to learn, more specific than just raw numbers.

But the engagement and intensity, like you saw that, you know, hurt locker, bomb diffuser, and you notice they were pushing a lot of code. What's the country or two that you've been like, whoa, a lot of like really deep commitment and intensity? I found that with entrepreneurship in Australia, where I was just shocked at the intensity level. It felt like the Australians in some cases were not only matching the American Silicon Valley, you know, intensity, but in some cases exceeding it. Like they wanted it more.

Who wants it? Who really wants it out there in terms of learn the code? Country. Yeah, I mean, Nigeria immediately comes to mind. There are so many ambitious developers in Nigeria who are creating courses and writing libraries and putting themselves up there, you know? It's creating YouTube channels, creating podcasts. It's really impressive.

And I think it's, you know, they've got like a very entrepreneurial culture there and they're making things happen. It's really impressive. What do you think the post-coronavirus world, as we sort of get to the grounding third base here on the podcast, what do you think the post-coronavirus, post-pandemic world looks like? People seem to think there's some change of remote work and companies embracing remote work. And let's face it, tech companies were already doing that, but now they're going 100% remote from, you know, they were arguably 5 to 50%. But now everybody's getting a quick lesson in being 100% remote. I would think that this. goes in your favor. But what do you think the post-coronavirus world looks like specifically for developers? Yeah, well, I think that it's going to accelerate a lot of trends that were already there, like the trend to, you know, ditch the office and have remote teams.

And free code game's always been remote. We've just always brought on people from whichever country, wherever they happen to be. It's not practical to relocate people to a country and have to deal with the visa restrictions and try to get people together in a physical office and a lot of people have kids and all that stuff. So I think remote is part of it. Asynchronous is another part. So I'm hopeful that this pandemic,

if there's a silver lining of this pandemic, that it's going to be that there was a proof of concept that there was a time when most people worked remotely and it worked out and now employers can't say, oh, working remote doesn't work. Maybe there will be some data that suggests that remote work isn't as productive, but all the research that had been conducted prior to the pandemic suggests that working remotely was more productive. You don't have a commute.

You don't have a lot of the distractions you have in the office. You can just sit in your home office and get things done there. So I'm optimistic that that'll make a big difference. I think it will. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. For those of you who want to get involved, please go to freecodecamp.org. Follow Freecodecamp on the Twitter. And you have the largest YouTube channel for programming with nearly two million or nearly two

and subscribers. I'm assuming that's YouTube.com slash free co-camp. That's correct. So everybody goes subscribe to that right now. They have 10 free verified certifications in the front and back end, scientific computing, security, machine learning,

and over 3,000 or so, or around 3,000 hours of coursework, over 40,000 people got their first developer job after completing at least one part of the curriculum. So this is the real deal. It's free. And, you know, Lambda, I think, is probably a little more high touch.

You get to, you know, maybe and you know it's just a different program it's more high touch right and it's you're going to probably be in there for eight hours a day more structured I guess is the way I would say it

so if you're just getting started you don't have any money free co-camp if you're just getting started on money and you have more time I guess Lambda sounds like a good option and probably both I'm sure Lambda does Lambda use any of your courseware as part of their courseware or link people to it

I don't know a lot of coding book camps and a lot of universities are increasingly using pre-co camps courses and that's something we are happy about because we created these, the community created these to help as many people as possible. Our mission is just to help as many people as possible learn a code. So we're happy if other organizations are picking these resources up and using it. Hey, tell me about this fun project you did as we wrap here about the program or developer cards. Yeah. So there was this in during the first go for, actually maybe in the second go

for. The U.S. government, the military, was giving out these decks of cards. And they had, like, all these Iraqi officials and, you know, people essentially suspected of war crimes. And so people would be in the barracks just playing cards in between different missions and stuff. And as a result, a whole lot of officers and people out in the field were able to successfully

identify these Iraqi. potential war criminals and bring them to justice. And a big part of that was that they were seeing the faces and the names over and over while they were playing cards and they were able to recognize. And they're like, oh, that's that guy from the ace of spades. No, I mean, it was like literally Saddam Hussein's like kids were each, you know, whatever, kings or jokers or whatever. And you're playing cards there and you're learning the names.

It's a brilliant idea. They should do it for America's Most Wanda. The FBI Most Wanda list should be a deck of cards. I don't know why it's not. Yeah, so we thought, let's teach people using the same method, like not random people wanted, but actual important developers throughout software history, you know, from Ada Lovellace all the way up to Satoshi Nakamoto, right?

Let's have some information about them, have a picture if one's available, and you can read about some of their accomplishments, some of their contributions to software development. And so we published a thousand packs of these. we could probably do a second run. Wow. So smart.

Yeah, we printed them in China on PVC, so it's super durable cards. I don't know. You play poker. I play too much poker, yeah, especially now in Corona land. You prefer PVC to paper or paper to PVC. Yeah, basically there are cards that just are harder to mark, harder to bend. And so one of the tricks with card marking is like, you know, it's not just marking the card. You could also put a little kind of like indentation on it.

Like if you had a nail, you could use your nail to put a little indentation somewhere. and then if the light hits it in the right way, you can see it. But yeah, these are hilarious. We should do this for entrepreneurs. Nick, take a memo. Like, maybe we'll do this next year, this week in Startups Deck, and we'll put, like, guests on it and different famous entrepreneurs and what they did.

That would be hilarious. Great idea. If you need help manufacturing them, I've got a place where you put. Yeah, there are people who do this, yeah, yeah. And then there's also, if you have a shufflemaster, which is like the thing that automatically shuffles cards. I'm not saying I have one or I don't, you know, allowed to have them.

as private citizens. But those shuffle masters need a certain type of card that can go through them and there's like a whole standard. And then, you know, there's this whole card sorting thing that Phil Ivy was involved in where there were certain imperfections

in the cutting of certain decks where, you know, if you looked at the deck and you turned it around a couple of times, you could see on the edge if it was a face card or not. Because the cards, just when they would print them in sheets and then cut them,

there was just a tiny little perfection. And so I guess Phil Ivy went to play back around in Atlantic City and London and just basically said, I want to bet this much per hand, I want to have this lucky person with me, and I want you to turn the cards and rotate them and I want to have a $10 million line. And he's because, you know, when you're a big whale, you can go set up like whatever you want to do when you play. Like you literally could say, I want to have a dealer who's this height, who's this race, this gender, and I want the room empty and I want the lighting at this.

I want the temperature. Like literally people do this. It's crazy. and I want this beverage and this bottle with this many ice cubes. Like you can literally do whatever you want. And he wound up getting sued. And I think he lost in at least one of them, if not both. And they didn't pay him out in one and they are trying to get the money back from the other.

It was basically like sophisticated cheating or getting an edge would be the charitable. But it was pretty interesting as a concept. All right. Great job on the pod. Quincy continued success. Thanks for doing what you're doing in the world. And we'll see you all next time on. And let me just say again, to the people out there fighting the good fight against the coronavirus

and keeping us safe, thank you. Thank you to those folks, your heroes. And, you know, you might not hear it every day, but you can be sure that we're thinking about you out there. Stay safe, everybody. Keep your distance. Wear your mask. You know what to do.

And let's get back to work soon. And take care of, let's all take care of the people out there who are suffering. If you know somebody's suffering, you know, it doesn't take much to just give a simple gift or send some food to somebody you know is that a work or even send a nice message to them i'll see you all inside the slack this week in startups.com slash slack bye bye