Update on Microverse, the Global Platform for Software Developers

Originally published on Medium.com

Microverse is the only coding school in the world that’s crazy enough to forgo payment until you’re employed — regardless of what country you’re from. At Microverse, students learn through full-time pair programming while gaining a professional support network for their future.

This is an update on some of our milestones, lessons learned and plans as we work towards new milestones. Feel free to join the conversation and ask questions on Product Hunt.

I started Microverse in February 2018 to help anyone, anywhere, learn software development and connect with life-changing global opportunities.

While we have much work to do, I’m happy with what we’ve been able to accomplish at just over a year old.

💪🏼 Created an incredibly selective process to identify the world’s most talented individuals (current selection rate is 0.3%).

📈 Enrolled full-time students from 48+ countries.

🗺️ Received tens of thousands of applicants from ~200 countries.*

💲 Students from Africa, Asia, South America, Europe, and North America whose salaries are 2x-8x what they made before.

🌍 Accumulated dozens of inspiring stories ranging from students from Serbia and Kosovo who decided to put their differences aside and work full-time as coding partners to alumni from Nigeria saying “If you can get stable internet and electricity, Microverse is what you need to do.”

👩‍💻Grown our global-first, fully distributed team to people from 7+ countries. (We’re hiring! 😄)

A year later, we are more confident than ever in three core beliefs central to Microverse’s success, and we can’t wait to push them further.

#1 Global opportunity reveals the world’s top talent.

We believe that providing global opportunity reveals the best talent in the world, and that’s why our mission is to provide the most talented individuals, anywhere in the world, a path into the global economy.

Microverse is the first school in the world to offer people the opportunity to become professional software developers without charging them anything until they get a job. By providing this opportunity, we’ve seen amazingly talented individuals join our program throughout the world. In fact, for every cohort of 30 students, we currently receive 10,000 applications to join our program.

However, we know most people can’t quit their job to learn for 6–8 months, and we’re experimenting with initiatives to push our belief even further. For example, one of our students from Nigeria couldn’t afford to pay for gas to keep his electricity generator running, which prompted us to start trialing a living stipend program that has proven incredibly effective. We have a few other experiments along these lines, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

#2 The best online education experiences will focus on designing amazing support, not just creating proprietary content.

We want to create the best online education experience for anyone to become a professional software developer. And as learning content becomes a commodity, we decided to differentiate through our community, accountability, and support systems, not our content.

We’ve invested a lot in our collaborative, instructor-less learning approach. Microverse students learn through an open-source curriculum as they’re supported by mentors, code reviewers, a student success team, and a personal career coach. They learn through pair programming while improving the communication and collaboration skills needed to thrive in a global, often remote, workplace.

As we grow, we’ll continue to invest in creating world-class collaboration, support, and community systems while seeking out the best undiscovered technical talent across the globe.

#3 Global talent is a competitive advantage.

Companies can’t hire the best people in the world if they limit themselves to a small fraction of the global population that lives in a western country or developed economy.

Businesses from Poland to the US have hired Microverse Alumni from around the world. They’ve been happy to learn that great developers with 1,200+ hours of experience working in diverse, distributed engineering teams don’t have to cost 6-figure salaries.

We plan to double down on helping businesses connect with thousands of alumni while helping our students land these life-changing global opportunities.

We also have a global, fully-distributed team, and it would be almost impossible to attract the kind of talent working for Microverse right now if we hadn’t started that way by default. We’ll continue growing our diverse team in the coming months — and you’ll never see a “you must have the right to work in the US” clause on any of the positions we’re hiring for.

That was this past year, and we can’t wait for where we’re headed! 🚀

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