Some of our favorite hiring managers in San Francisco share successful experiences recruiting and hiring diverse engineering teams, from bootcamps like Hackbright Academy, to building healthy engineering cultures:

Pat Poels, VP Engineering, Eventbrite

"I don’t want to hire only very senior people who’ve been in the industry for 10 or 15 years. I want to have a mix of new ideas and new developers as well. Hackbright is a great channel for that. We call that 'junior developer' role a Software Engineer Level One. There are a lot of interesting problems to solve at Eventbrite, so we don't really look for a certain kind of engineer from Hackbright Academy. We're looking for people we think are a good fit for the company, people who we think are really smart and have a great potential to learn."

Danny Chi, VP Engineering, Tripping

"I’d love to come to Hackbright Demo Night because you can meet over 20 candidates in one night. It provides individuality a chance. I'm currently mentoring for the fifth time at Hackbright Academy. Because I'm mentoring, I've participated in whiteboarding sessions and we've been able to meet candidates outside of the recruiting cycle. For example, a Hackbright graduate participated in a whiteboarding workshop I was at, and gave me her resume for consideration. We’ve interviewed 30 candidates for 3 engineering hires. This is the same hiring clip as hiring across other recruiting channels, so being a part of the Hackbright community is a win. My one recommendation for bootcamp grads is to add React or any type of JavaScript to your app, as this will help you differentiate yourself from computer science graduates who tend to be heavy on theory and backend work."

Alex Bekker, Director of Engineering, Udemy

"Ignore what languages candidates have experience with and instead focus on what they are capable of producing with them. Regardless of experience, everyone starts at the bottom of the learning curve on day one of a new job, so it's a question of how quickly they can learn and how high their ceiling is, both of which are answered by what they can do today with what they learned so far. At Udemy, we like to give candidates take home projects and have them present to the team rather than the typical phone screen and on-site whiteboarding process, which is all kinds of broken."

Emma Lubin, Engineering Manager, GoDaddy

"Someone making a mid-career switch can leverage their previous professional experience and learn quickly. Leading small teams and shipping projects are accomplishments that hiring managers will look at even if they were achieved in a different industry. I condensed nearly a decade of biology research into a few lines on a resume, and devoted more space to descriptions of small coding class projects that were nowhere near that kind of accomplishment. I started getting attention to my resume only after I put ALL of my skills on it. Software engineering is a tool to solve a wide array of problems, and it needs engineers with diverse backgrounds and approaches — that’s one reason companies are hiring from bootcamps.”

Brina Lee, Engineering Manager, Quip

"We not only bring a more diverse group of team members onboard, but we also make them want to stay and to give Quip their best. That’s important: You need to focus not only on recruiting good people, but retaining them. We’ve seen that once we started bringing in a broader range of people who stick around, our diversity snowballed. That can work for any company. Once you’ve got your first woman in engineering, it’s a lot easier to hire your second. And third. And fourth…"

Learn more about bootcamp grads:

• "Higher percentage of female [coding bootcamp] graduates offers a more diverse talent pool. Women attain just 14% of computer science degrees, whereas they represent between 36% and 40% of bootcamp graduates." (1-page)
• "Even at colleges with a high percentage of women CS grads, the numbers are still small. ... 511 total women in 2013. If Google hired ALL these women, it would increase their female percentage by 1.5 percentage points, leaving the whole rest of the technology industry bereft of female new-college-grad hires." (TechCrunch)
• "Bootcamp grads are junior programmers. They have a lot to learn, and represent an investment on the part of a company that hires them. This is also true of recent college graduates. We’ve found bootcamp grads as a group to be better than college grads at web programming and writing clean, modular code, and worse at algorithms and understanding how computers work. All in all, we’ve had roughly equivalent success working with the two groups." (TripleByte)

Interested in hiring brilliant grads of Hackbright Academy? Learn more about how to partner with Hackbright Academy to hire your next female software engineers!