A-Team

Update: On 20th October 2015, this proposal was adopted with 27 votes for, 1 abstention and none against.
During the voting process we also asked people what companies they admired and what was important to them in their developer journey. You can find the anonymised answers here: Voting for adoption of A-team proposal - Responses PDF (zooming required).

Contents Guide

• Why?
• What?
• Overview
• Our key values
• Responsibilities
• F&C student/alumni journey
• Financials
  • Developers
• Next steps
• FAQ

Why

Founders & Coders (F&C) alumni have expressed a desire to continue their learning by freelancing after the course finishes but historically this has been problematic as there is no dedicated full time person/people to:

• Finding freelance projects to be undertaken, leading to a lot of uncertainty for developers and big gaps between projects
• Providing project oversight, removing interruptions/blockers and managing the client (expectations), leading to developers having to wear too many hats (Hugh did this for a while and FAC3 alumni considered his position essential to the success of their projects)
• Undertaking regular code reviews, ensuring the project is going in the right direction and vouching for the quality of the code
• Getting the word out about F&C and its offerings, leading to the majority of this weight falling on the shoulders of 1 or 2 people who had to try to find 'free' time to do this

Given the lack of resources to bring on such a person or team (and given no one in the space offered to take this on), over the summer of 2015 it was proposed that F&C move to just help alumni find external employment.
This was debated by the employment sub-group and it was decided that this was also problematic and not in the best long term interest of the school if it could be avoided (see #11).

An alternative solution is therefore required to these problems which will allow F&C students/alumni to continue learning (by doing) after the 16 week course while providing a sustainable income to fund the mission of F&C.

What?

A proposal for setting up a commercial organisation, run by @iteles & @nelsonic to provide interesting and targeted project work (with oversight and mentorship) for F&C alumni. For more, see responsibilities.

The company will be developed fully open source and completely transparent creating a replicable model for making free learning sustainable.

Stipulations imposed by F&C employment group:

• This must be a separate company from Founders & Coders CIC, so that F&C can focus solely on the mission; Providing great technical learning, free and open source.
• The company will and should participate in F&C meetings but not have the power to dictate what happens in the school.

Proposal

Overview

The aim is to create a way to simultaneously make F&C sustainable as a project, while still maintaining its replicability and providing alumni with a continued learning curve where they learn-by-doing while doing interesting and meaningful work after the 16 week course.

After the 16 week course, students have a number of options:

• Start their own project/adventure (with the support of their peers)
• Work on freelance projects of their own accord
• Work on freelance projects through F&C
• Find full time employment

We believe all of these can co-exist.

This proposes that a commercial-focussed organisation is formed - run by @nelsonic and @iteles in the immediate term - which will take on these last two, particularly concentrating on finding and running development projects for F&C graduates.
For more on the reasons why this has come about, read the 'Why?' section above and for more on the specific responsibilities of the organisation, read the 'Responsibilities' section below.

Our Values

Since we started dwyl, we've had a clear manifesto that explains why we do what we do.
Worth highlighting here are:

• Treating others the way you would like to be treated. In everything we do, we follow The Golden Rule

• Open source. We want every aspect of our organisation to be open source, from the setup and the processes, questions raised and solutions found. We always make 'out in the open'. We hope this encourages everyone to contribute, ask and answer questions. We're aware this is "unconventional"; it's deliberate.

• Full transparency. Transparent in our thought processes, in our decisions and in everything, right from the start.

• Continuous learning. Good Great developers people realize that in the pursuit of mastery (in any field) they can never stop learning.
  This isn't just about learning code; being technically competent is essential but no longer "enough". It's about going along to client meetings and estimating tasks, proposing projects and learning all the things you want to learn. We do it for ourselves and we want to set up an environment that provides opportunities for everyone to put in the time to do it too.

• Keep it simple. Wherever possible, eliminate complexity.

• Accountability for the work you do. We're here to help people do their best work for the project team they choose to be in.

• People first, product second. We recommend watching Vineet Nayeer's short lecture on this subject if you haven't already. He's the former CEO of HCL Technologies, an extremely interesting organisation with a relatively flat organisational structure.

Ultimately we value helping everyone we come into contact with (and complete strangers who find us on the internet) learn and grow.

Responsibilities

Freelancing

• Develop F&C's freelance offering
• Find and speak to potential clients about projects F&C could work with them on
• Guide project conversations to ensure realistic scope and expectations
• Manage client relationships (before, during and between projects)
• Scrum mastering Coaching throughout the project (multiple projects in parallel)
• Client management throughout the project (multiple projects in parallel)
  • Note: This does not mean developers will not interact with clients, it means we will intervene to stop constant interruptions
• Regular code quality reviews
• Ensure project lookbacks happen and lessons are carried through to other projects not lost in the ether
• Ensure shared learning and reuse of code
• Provide some guidance during the MVPs in the last weeks of the course
  • This helps improve the learning curve, provide some quality assurance, ensures the client relationship is not lost if that team decides to move on from F&C and also helps us get to know students before they start freelancing officially!

Mentoring

• Ensure each developer has written (personal) goals and that they take steps towards reaching them with every project
• Always bring students into client conversations to learn how to interact with clients, what to expect and how to respond
• Aim for people to work on projects that they want to work on and fit with their personal goals
• Help direct developers' learning when advice is needed/requested
• Regular individual catch-ups to understand how people feel, concerns/potential improvements and celebrate achievements
• Implement a continuous feedback loop
• Technical mentorship through code reviews

Others

• Maintain F&C's existing and future relationships with employers (those who take on F&C students as permanent employees)
• Find employment for students who don’t want to be freelancers
• Develop and run a corporate training offering

Admin

• Financial admin (raising invoices, chasing them, paying devs & contributors, HMRC)
• Contract admin (between client & company and between company and developers)
• All project management admin
• Fielding enquiry emails
• Fielding any commercial F&C emails
• Keeping CRM system perfectly up to date
• Continuously updating readmes and externally facing info
• Office running admin (stationery, manning phones, ordering fruit, updating calendars, etc)
• Organise extra training for developers where needed/possible

Inbound marketing

• Creating & refining site
• Writing blog posts
• Editing and maintaining blog
• Social media
• Continuous testing and metric analysis for all the above

F&C Student journey

Financials

Calculations based on developers working 80% of the year (to provide a conservative estimate) suggest that at current cost levels (£2700 per month rounded up to £3000), F&C will receive enough income to break even as soon as there are 7 developers working on projects.

If people prefer to be placed directly with employers and this is done through the commercial organisation, there will be a commission going to F&C - the amount is to be agreed as part of the next steps.

Developers

Q: What will people learn?

Simple answer: Everything you need to be a top-rate freelancer or start your own company.

Q: What can people expect to get paid?

• All developers will start on £120 per day (equates to £15 an hour for 8 hour days)

• Commission for Founders & Coders does not come out of developers' day rate

• Within 4 months, developers will undergo a peer led day rate review (for more on this, see issue #4)

  • Most companies like to say they raise compensation based on merit, but it's often decided by HR people who have no real idea of what individuals are contributing to the organisation or the quality of their work
  • As people's skills/abilities/fluency increase over time, we need to ensure that rewards match effort and the best way to do this is to look at the contributions (code/comments/issues) each person makes to the team and collectively agree when to increase a person's compensation in proportion to their contribution
  • We expect peer feedback to be positive and encouraging and to foster a learning culture.

• Commission and structure for bringing in clients and projects will exist and is one of the things that needs to be researched in the coming month.

Next steps

First, F&C people must vote on this proposal.

If it goes ahead, we would need to bring in 1 full time person at market rate for at least 1 month to help with:

• Research on clients, organisational models and the many open questions that will come up in the coming days/weeks such as 'What is the best CRM system to use or should we build one ourselves?'
• Creating a solid foundation of processes and tools
• Code necessary open source tools with us to be used in projects
• Investigate and confirm/disproove any assumptions made
• And all the other setup tasks we will encounter!

This will provide a different point of view but crucially also allow @iteles and @nelsonic to start speaking to people and find work that is required in the immediate term.

FAQs

Q: How will this affect F&C's responsibilities?

Q: What will the interaction be between this organisation and F&C?

Q: What if I find a piece of freelance work by myself? Do I need to bring it to this new company?

Q: What about if I find a piece of work and I need a team of developers from F&C? Do I have to bring it to this new company?

Q: What if a client wants me (as an individual) to do a piece of non-related work for them outside of F&C after I met them through an F&C freelance project?

Q: What can people expect to get paid? (expanded)

A: Developer Income Example (illustrative)

There are 253 working days in a year; everyone should aim to take off at least 25 days holiday.

That leaves 228 working days. So the initial annual income would be 228 days x £120 = £27,360,
however given the be peer-led rate reviews every 4 months we expect rates to be
higher for people who stay for 4, 8 & 12 months. We expect everyone to earn market rates.

Consider the following scenario: First let's divide the year into 3 equal parts; 76 days per "Tertile". Lets assume that a developer's peers deem them to be exceeding expectations both in technical ability and "delighting the customer" at each of the first two peer-feedback sessions.

This will mean:

• First 4 months rate is set at £15/h --> 76 days x £140/day = £9,120
• After 4 Months rate increases to £17.50/h --> 76 days x £140/day = £10,640
• After 8 Months rate increases to £20/h --> 76 days x £160/day = £12,160
• Total: £31,920 (annual)¹

We urge people not to focus on the cash amount. Especially since, if we succeed together (in delivering great project results) the peer-determined rates could be considerably more favorable.

But to give you an idea, IBM's Starting Salary for a graduate is £29,000 and they don't do anything resembling the kind of interesting & creative full-service/stack work we expect to be doing!

Notes:

¹We cannot guarantee developer income beyond the initial 4 month term. However provided the person shows proactivity we expect to have enough work for 10+ people for 12 months.