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I think that many people have been in similar situations: You want to increase the number of your team members. A friend or family member asks you to help and hire a cousin/child who wants to code but have limited commercial experience. And you get a warning light in yourĀ mind:
Should I do it? Should IĀ help?
This could pose a problem and the first thought in your mind is: Am I willing to lose a friend or fall out of favor with a family member? Noā¦ to both questions
In my case, I donāt have to make that choice. Iām building my project without funding and I only have twoĀ options:
- I could code myself and probably goĀ insane
- Form a team aroundĀ me
- The third option would be to get a job, butĀ ā¦)
- The fourth option is to get funding, butĀ ā¦)
I can form a team of interns, who WANT TO LEARN and Iām ready to teach. Later, when they are able to work on small tasks, Iāll assign these tasks to them and move my project forward, and this is the way these interns giveĀ back.
This was my assumption, back to Oct 2017ā¦.My story is about how I tried to find interns in bulk can be easily followed in various websites. And a few times (around 80%) I wasĀ banned.
[AngelList]
I wrote and sent a bunch of similar messages to a different number of people. I have hinted that maybeĀ ā¦ I was reported by my fellow countryman. I think there is a 50% probability because he was angry with me due to my āstupid salesā technique and follow-up messages. And I got reported. Support didnāt remove me completely from a platform. I work hard and have a good profile with a nice number of connections. But they froze me, and I couldnāt add any new connections to my network. I could only follow new people.Job sections however still worked well. And I still got new applicants.
[Treehouse]
I was there too and got good help from support. They advised me to write in their forum. But in order to get access to itāāāI should be registered and paying customer fees for theirĀ courses.
[Freebootcamp]
It was a strange situation. I think that my messages there would be relative because itās a website where students learn how to code and where they can seek jobs. It has an active forum, where people share their job-seeking experience in Tech, but I couldnāt write there too. Or maybe I needed to be smarter. I created a long post with a detailed explanation of what I was looking for. And I immediately got ālockedā because of the violation of their terms. I also think that sometimes people, working as admins and moderators are getting personal. But rules areĀ rules.
[Github]
At some point in the summer of 2018, I figured out one lifehack.
Iām an active GitHub user too, and there a lot of students.
Students keep their code at repositories. Usually, a tech student who learns to code via online courses stores his homework code publicly. And usually they keep titles or keywords up-to-date, so itās easy to find someone by tech stack, the name of the e-learning platform or the famous course name. A lot of recruiters search at Github, so there is nothingĀ new.
I decided to write to these students without any hesitation. I created a task, with the titleāāāāLetās collaborateā and promoted my work in basic sentences. Maybe I should have been smarter ( once againĀ ).
Do you know that you can find an email of a person who keeps their code publicly? Read about it here:* https://github.com/paulirish/github-email* https://www.sourcecon.com/how-to-find-almost-any-github-users-email-address-2-0/
I donāt think that this is a good idea and I hope that Github will close this loophole. If I had used this ātrickā, I donāt think I would have beenĀ banned.
I send a message/create new similar issues at repositories of 100ā200 people. And after that, I got banned for 1,5 months. I was upset. All my work right now stored there. And support has a fun way to teach me. They hide all created issues byĀ me.
In order to be unblockedāāāI should remove that spammy title and replace issue content with ā.ā. For all of that āspamā-issues. And I really work hard in order to clean up that mess. But I also have some rest. Whole work was paralyzed. So few weeks I was just laying down reading the Harry PotterĀ series.
I think you understand at this point of the reading article, that I donāt want to be tied up to some platforms.
Each project has its rules and itās hard to not broke them or didnāt violate something.
They grow, they change their terms and you actually didnāt owe anything.At any second that you violate terms and youāll be punished. And itās hard to adapt right now. Maybe this will change in theĀ future.
So donāt use one major source(donāt keep all eggs in one basket). But, to be honest, in a long run, it can work. I was limited and cannot actively network at AngelList from June, but I still receive inquiries from a new people, that want to apply. But Iām slow-rolling anyone rightĀ now.
This is why I want to have my own separated source of new interns. Each project has itsĀ rules.
Some numbersI didnāt count it precisely from the summer, but from the beginning, I send about 2500 requests to students. A lot of them was interested. Active was 200ā230. I set up about 120 interviews and about 60 join me and start to help me with myĀ project.
Students learn using the same courses/tutorials that I find and use or made myself. People that didnāt leave in the middle of working on these coursesāāāthey became ready to work with real tasks. And start to code with me on my project. If they didnāt give up quickly, then after touching/collide with āreal worldā development tasks, in a few months they will start to use that knowledge.
It will increase their self-confidence. After this period they start to attend interviews again and with upgraded confidence in their skills and maybe with my experience certificate -> they quickly land a real full-time in-office job with aĀ salary.
And Iām happy about it. Iām blessed to have an ability to help them and clean up myĀ karma.
Please Clap if this was interesting to read. Ask questions, if youĀ want.
The next article will contain some advice, observations, conclusions, that I made during the last year, working withĀ interns.
Btw, One of my next ideas was about creating an education project. It will be focused on mastering skills. Not just give students to āeatā tutorials, that will be buried in their GitHub accounts, but helping them with facing a real-time experience. Educate students to code in a practical way
So if this idea worth exploring for you -> buzz me. I will be happy to chat or get any help orĀ advice.
Photo by Suzanne D. Williams onĀ Unsplash
How I Built My Startup Team with Interns was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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