“Thank you for your service, but we can’t accept you for this position.” That’s what Jerome Hardaway, an Air Force veteran, heard from several potential employers after he returned stateside from three tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Coming home amidst the second worst economic slowdown this country had ever seen didn’t help, but Hardaway suspects being fresh out of the armed services was a big problem to those looking over his résumé. “Inheriting the stigma of the Vietnam veteran, some people considered us unskilled or untrained,” he says. Today, with the economy largely back on track, Hardaway still hears about comrades struggling to find jobs. The overall veteran unemployment rate recently fell below the civilian unemployment rate, hitting a seven-year low of 3.9 percent in October 2015, but that still means about 422,000 veterans are out of work.
“For a lot of these [employers], the last person that served in their family was in World War II. We’ve gotten so far from there. If you served your country then, you knew you were not going to go homeless, that you’d get a job,” Hardaway says. “We’ve gone from joining the military being the best decision of your life to now, it could possibly put you in a worse position.”
To change that, Hardaway started looking for work in a rapidly growing sector: the tech world. The barriers to entry, like knowing how to code and compute, were higher there, but so was the possibility of finding a high-paying job. Hardaway had some experience — he started fiddling with computers in 2007, while stationed in Iraq, mostly “as a way to keep my sanity,” — but it was General Assembly’s 12-week boot camp in 2014 and a full-ride scholarship from the group’s Opportunity Fund that helped him transition to a full-time career in coding. Now, Hardaway is paying it forward by setting a goal of helping 1,000 fellow veterans follow him into software development.
When Hardaway enlisted, the wars in the Middle East were still new. Soldiers hadn’t started coming home, and the recruiters were persuasive, appealing to his patriotism and the sense of duty he felt coming from a military family. Hardaway, to be sure, doesn’t regret his service — “I’m happy I did it because I wouldn’t be where I am now,” he says, but finding financial stability as an African-American male and combat veteran in Tennessee was tough. Hardaway occasionally found freelance web design gigs, but on the whole, Memphis felt more “old-folksy” than “tech-savvy,” he says. “They call themselves a city,” he jokes. “They have tall buildings, but it’s really a town.” Its social structure operates on who you know, and Hardaway missed six and a half years of making connections while deployed.
He considered enrolling in a degree program, but he couldn’t find a school that offered what veterans needed as “24-year-olds reintegrating into civilian society.” A class might teach him HTML or CSS, but he wanted a foundation of strong logical reasoning to solve problems that would come up on the job. By chance, he saw a post about General Assembly’s Opportunity Fund on Facebook and applied. The first year, his application was rejected. Determined, he reapplied the following year. Within a week of losing his job, he was accepted for a boot camp in Manhattan.
He says practicing, “just making us solve problems every day,” was the most helpful part of his experience. “It’s like boxing,” he tells other veterans. “I can teach you how to throw all the punches, but you’re not going to be able to know if your first punch should be the right cross or an uppercut.” Now, he knows which tools to use and when. He says he’s started to think like a programmer, rather than a guy who liked messing around with computers.
“I tell people I’ve gone from no job to having one. I can’t understate the importance of General Assembly,” he says. “But I don’t feel like I’m special. I was willing to do the work. I went from being fired to being hired and getting invited to the White House.”
Dressed in sharp suits, a fan of shaken martinis and hot bowls of ramen, Hardaway today might not appear like the stereotype of a veteran. But his military training quickly comes out in conversation. “Roger that,” he wrote in an email about setting up an interview. His yes and no are “negative” and “affirmative,” and they’re often followed by a “Sir.” Above all, Hardaway strives to live up to the Air Force’s core value of excellence in all you do. That’s the principle that guides his nonprofit, Vets Who Code, in closing “the digital talent gap” for veterans. (A celebration of the group is why Hardaway went to the White House.)
Hardaway says veterans are particularly attuned to tech, because from the minute they enter basic training, they’re constantly working on solving problems in high-stress situations. While some employers may doubt those skills can translate from the battlefield to an office, Hardaway is blazing a path for other warriors to follow by sitting down at the keyboard.
Watch the video above to see how General Assembly helped Hardaway achieve a career in the tech sector.
MORE: The School That’s Making a Career in Tech Possible for Everyone
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Minorities Only Make Up 13 Percent of Tech Workers. This School Is Changing That
Lyn Muldrow says she’s always been a “computer nerd.” At 14 years old, she started playing with code, building websites, “trying to create things online.” As an adult, she was good enough to freelance her web design skills, setting up home pages for mom-and-pop stores or creating message boards for community groups. Muldrow wanted to be more involved in programming, but she realized the tech sector didn’t look like her, an African-American female from Baltimore raising her kids as a single mom.
“I almost didn’t pursue tech, because I felt, maybe as a black woman, my opinions would not be validated,” she says. Despite her doubts, she enrolled in an intensive training program from General Assembly, a coding and design school, and received financial support from its Opportunity Fund. Thanks to both, Muldrow was able to switch careers and open her own firm about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “I sort of had to start from nothing,” she says.
Tech was — and in some ways, still largely is — a privileged white man’s world. Facebook doubled the number of black workers on staff two years ago, but they still numbered only 81 on a force of 5,470, according to a 2014 filing. It’s a problem that holds true across Silicon Valley. African-American and Hispanic workers together make up more than a quarter of the general labor force, but fill only 13 percent of computer and math jobs. Women are earning only one quarter of the country’s computer science degrees, down from 37 percent in 1983.
With workshops and full-time classes, General Assembly aims to change those numbers to reflect the diversity of those who want to pursue careers in tech. Ultimately, they want to see people doing work they love, says Megan Nesbeth, head of the Opportunity Fund. At its 14 locations on four continents, the school has trained 240,000 students in web development (the course Muldrow enrolled in), user experience design, product management, digital marketing, data science and business — fundamental skills that can be difficult to self-teach but necessary to enter the tech world.
Muldrow recognizes that challenge from experience. “Back then, I didn’t have a frame of reference of what it meant to be a programmer or developer. Especially when I was younger, I thought it was all numbers and math and algorithms, things you had to know and learn and do to create something on the web, to make something functional,” she recalls. Only after years of attempts did she start to realize that web design is fundamentally about languages. She didn’t need to memorize lines of code, only to learn how to speak the right commands to build what she envisioned. Which, she admits, is easier said than done.
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Muldrow’s progress started with signing up for General Assembly’s immersion class. With backing from the Opportunity Fund for tuition (which ranges from about $10,000 to $15,000), she enrolled in a 12-week course. To support her kids, she still had to work nights 40 hours a week. After the 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. school day ended, she answered customer service questions from Uber riders and drivers at home for an annual salary of just $28,000. “My body was exhausted and I was running out of money,” Muldrow broke down and confessed to a General Assembly counselor three weeks in. She had spent all her savings to come to San Francisco, and because of her past, a loan seemed out of the question. Muldrow didn’t know if she could handle the stress. “I was really at the point where I wanted to go back home.”
The counselor told Muldrow she admired how hard she was working and promised to find a solution. Two weeks later, the Opportunity Fund helped subsidize those extra costs, so she could focus on her coursework. “I literally broke down when she told me, because you know I’m so used to doing things on my own as a single mom,” Muldrow says. “Honestly I’m just so grateful to them for believing in me.”
General Assembly recognized the huge obstacles to a career change — loans for training and tuition, months without work, a cross-country move — when they set up the Opportunity Fund with CapitalOne and AT&T. A college grad might have savings or be able to take out a loan, but the fund backs low-income individuals who don’t have any other options. “If you think about somebody from a lower-income bracket, with no line of credit, taking money out of savings they need to support their families, those odds are very much against them,” says Nesbeth, who previously worked on increasing diversity in higher education. “These are people who face some type of barrier to access to the tech industry. It takes a lot of different forms, but it’s really about socioeconomics.” Helping them overcome various individual circumstances, the fund has supported 125 fellows, usually awarding $10,000 each.
Muldrow’s story adds one more number to tech’s diversity stats, an almost imperceptible change when looking at the country’s entire labor force. But Muldrow sees herself as a trailblazer and wants to do her part to give back. After General Assembly, she worked as an instructor for Hack the Hood, a web design boot camp for kids in Oakland, and she now leads a chapter of Lesbians Who Tech. “I feel like I have a lot of responsibility to help others to understand that tech is for everyone,” she says. “You don’t have to be a white guy to be a web developer. You can look like yourself and build something amazing. It isn’t all ones and zeroes.”
The School That’s Making a Career in Tech Possible for Everyone
Lyn Muldrow needed something in her life to change. She was a single mother living in Baltimore, eight months pregnant with her second child. After a long bought with unemployment, she found work as a customer support agent for a marketing company, but she wanted more for her family. That’s when Muldrow discovered General Assembly, where she was the recipient of the coding and design school’s Opportunity Fund fellowship.
Check out the video above to see how the scholarship enabled Muldrow to be successful in the technology field and to extend the same opportunities she received to a younger generation.
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