Tina-Marie Gulley, Interim CEO at Ada Developers Academy, discusses her background and the intersection of technology, DEI, and education with Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. Tina highlights the importance of AI in the bootcamp industry today as well as the need for partnerships and community building to create a sustainable and inclusive future for tech bootcamps.
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Transcript
Kate
Hello and welcome to this RedMonk conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at RedMonk, and with me today is Tina Marie Gulley, Interim CEO at Ada Developers Academy. Tina, thank you so much for coming on the Monk cast to speak with me. All right. So Tina, I’m excited to hear your story. Can we start off by having you speak about your background? I’m especially interested in learning more about your sort of educational journey.
Tina-Marie Gulley
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, so I actually am a comms major with a nonprofit management background. So when I graduated, I thought I was going to work in nonprofits and stay in Seattle where I kind of grew up, but it didn’t happen. My journey was a little bit different. I’m an elder millennial, so we definitely, I kind of was part of that initial group that got affected or impacted by the recession, it started with me really just doing contract roles and freelancing roles before I found my path and it actually ended up being tech. So the first organization that I worked at, he was one of the early employees of Excel actually at Microsoft, and I worked at a .NET development organization that ran the Imagine Cup competition for Microsoft.
And so that’s a huge computer science competition, a global competition. And so of worked my way up from there, worked in tech either directly or as a consultant. a lot of emerging tech organizations, I I worked at Concur, SAP, I worked at Open Text. I’ve had the opportunity of working at an AI start up, so lots of different types of organizations and I’ve been able to work and manage a lot of teams throughout that path. then from there, volunteering has always been something that was super passionate and important to me growing up and in my family. And so I got involved with a STEM organization as a volunteer and then I became a super volunteer and made that like another job and so I ran a STEM organization it’s based in Portland it has regional chapters and I ran the Seattle chapter so there was a K -12 component where I had weekend workshops with teenagers and would collaborate with other tech organizations like Amazon, Microsoft some other startups as well to really showcase the importance of learning tech. And we really focused on girls who wouldn’t normally self -select to be in like a Girls Who Code. And then we also had a division of that where, we did a K through eight summer camp at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle when it was here. And that was really fun. Also worked with community centers to create some STEM programming for their kids there. And then we also had a component for helping women navigate their career in tech. So a lot of people were pivoting and then also people wanted to go into leadership roles or individual contributor roles. So we had a yearly conference that we did that was really some hard hitting content, so not only round tables, but also workshops. And so that definitely created my passion for later deciding to come to Ada, Developers Academy, which is a free online tuition -free program. It’s a collaborative learning environment. We provide individual support. So we have mentors, tutors. We also have mental health support and really create a program that is really community oriented, social justice minded and it’s really focusing on women, gender expansive adults, definitely communities of color, so black, latin -a, indigenous, native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, LGBTQIA+ as well as low income people. And so for me, joining the board, one of the things that was really important is really to help expand that mission to make Ada more inclusive and really have a focus on centering communities of color. And so while I was on the board, I was able to spear head that for the board, but also, work with the leadership at the time to make sure that that was something that we prioritized. So later on the mission and vision had evolved. I was on the board for three years going on into four, and then there was a lot of transition at Ada with, post pandemic, technology changing, lots of layoffs and, lots of other things happening. And so with that, I stepped in into the interim CEO role at Ada.
Kate
You mentioned that you have this deep background in marketing, but you always fell into or chose to work in these tech centric roles around marketing. Can you talk at all about where you see the intersection of technology
and education, in terms of less liberal arts, but more focused, targeted, trying to find a job education.
Tina-Marie Gulley
so I think first in terms of the intersection of technology and education, I think that we actually have not even under like kind of gone into the underbelly of how great that can be. I was able to go to a conference earlier in the year and, a big part of that was AI. Right. And so that’s something that I know is really huge in education.
But I think there’s opportunities to explore where AI can go within education. So not only, when you’re talking about traditional K through 12 education, but also higher learning and then, Ada’s pathway, which is really around that upskilling. And so what I find is, organizations that are focusing on ensuring that folks have that skill set that they need. a lot of those folks come from all different types of backgrounds. some of them have liberal arts backgrounds, some of them don’t. Some of them don’t even necessarily have regular access to computers, but they definitely understand technology. A lot of the things that we’re building in terms of technology are really catered to communities that we serve. And so what I think is really important is as we’re thinking about upskilling, as we’re thinking about the future, is really to have that three -pronged approach to it, right? It doesn’t, I think a lot of times when we have these conversations, it always goes back to high school and K through 12.
And so I think the real opportunity is really thinking of it as, a pathway for everyone. Everyone needs to, be able to, use tech and be enabled to use AI specifically in their role and figuring out how we can do it to have impact. One of the things that we thought about early on in Ada when we built some of our curriculum is how can we create partnerships and pathways for folks that are part of our preparatory foundational coding programs that are free and available? How can we partner with folks to make sure that if we’re changing the face of tech that we’re not doing it alone? You know, it really takes a lot of us and so it takes not only the organizations that are doing the training, but it also has to be the corporate organizations and entities that really want to help create a pathway for their lower earning employees to have opportunities to learn how to be a software developer or a technologist. It’s really kind of an approach where you have to think about how do you do the most good to a lot of different groups and see how we can support each other
Kate
Okay, and so a lot of these corporations, they’re also providing internships. Is that another sort of partnership that you have with them?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yeah, so for our program, and I just, I’m super passionate about internships. I was one of those people that had, I think, five or six internships. And so I know as a person working in tech and have started internship programs at other organizations that internship can be a great experience or a horrible experience. And so at Ada, we really wanted to create an experience that is really positive for our students. So what we do is after they’re done with the curriculum part, so the six month curriculum, they then have a five month internship with one of our corporate partners. And so what’s really amazing about our corporate partners is, tech lives everywhere, so some of our corporate partners are tech organizations, but some are nonprofits. Some are education legs. And we’re showing that tech and software development and being a technologist can live anywhere. And so creating those different pathways for folks.
Kate
Okay, yeah, and I’m glad you brought up the AI factor in this conversation in conjunction with the internship program because in some of the research that I’ve done on this and some of the folks that I’ve spoken to, yeah, Ada Developer Academy has come up repeatedly, both from meeting some of the grads at Render ATL, which is how Tina and I met the first time, but also just as part of the online conversation around boot camps
Tina-Marie Gulley
Thank you.
Kate
what they can achieve. And so I guess I’m curious, so the internet is abuzz with the fact that there’s less junior developer roles, there’s less internship, less apprenticeship opportunities. so you’re saying that it is part of the program now through these sort of partnerships. Is that part of Ada’s mission right now that every student is gonna have, that wants it, is gonna have an apprenticeship or I guess an internship available to them after they graduate?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yeah, so that’s always been a part of our curriculum. we really think that, having that hands -on motion is really important. Now, I will say, during the pandemic, when things went on hold, we definitely had, some pause and folks were able to do their internships at a later date. But now, since things have, transitioned back, we’re at regularly scheduled programming where that is consistent across our Ada core curriculum. And that’s one thing that I think that may set Ada apart from some other coding boot camps is we really think that not only the mentorship piece is important, also helping to develop engineering managers to create a welcoming environment for Adees, which also reflects to them making a more welcoming environment to other folks. So we really want to make sure that, we have initial conversations with them. We do training. We really want to make sure that we’re identifying opportunities for learnings for the engineering groups that our Adees are a part of.
Kate
That’s fantastic. And Adees are what you call graduates from the Ada Developers Academy, correct? I love
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yeah, so we call our students and our graduates Adees, yes.
Kate
Okay, so once an Adee, always an Adee.
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yes, yes.
Kate
So recently I’ve been following the evolving issue of how AI is disrupting the skills building industry. Folks like Mark Thompson, who’s a senior developer relations engineer at Google, who goes by Mark Techson on Twitter, folks are familiar with his social credentials there. He’s argued that quote, boot camps will have to evolve. so I think that’s a really interesting perspective because we’re always thinking about roadmaps and how the industry is being disrupted, but I think with AI and the way that it is relating to boot camps, there’s something really fundamental happening right now. So guess, my question to you would be, do you agree with Mark that these programs are gonna have to evolve? And if so, how is Ada evolving? Like, how are you guys trying to keep up with the times and how are you preparing your students?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yes, I definitely agree. I think that’s something with bootcamps in general. I think with curriculum, it always has to evolve. At the end of the day, the trajectory of folks learning is so much shorter at bootcamps. So we have to really make sure that we’re able to not only make sure that they have skills to do their job, but also skills for them to be able to create. And so a part of that is really adapting to AI. So right now, of course, we have, for Ada in particular, we’ve developed AI curriculums that our Adees are using, you know, Chat GPT, they’re using co -pilot, they’re using Open AI API. So all of those things are really important, but I think the next level of that will be making sure that students have that initial understanding of algorithms and with regard to like machine learning and really kind of how do you build on AI independently of a technology? How can it support things? And so I think what we’re learning is that a lot of organizations are adopting AI differently. And so what we’re doing is really just to make sure that we build a curriculum that allows for those different pivots depending on the organization. And so we’ve been able to do that through a grant that we got with MIT Solve. And that was really focusing on changing the face of tech specifically in gender expansive spaces. And so for us, it really is continuing to build on that curriculum. So right now it’s using AI as your co -pilot, but it’s also going to be a part of their capstone project.
And so I would envision that, if programs want to continue to be successful, to do things like that, that they’re looking at ways that they can build on their curriculum. So obviously, we see that with AI, we’ve seen that in the past with, you know, blockchain. And so I think that’s just as an organization, you’re always going to have to pivot and see where things are going in terms of technology and development.
Kate
A lot of folks who are in the development community are extremely concerned about whether or not AI is going to be replacing these jobs. And in fact, when Mark Thompson was speaking about how the bootcamp industry is going to have to evolve, he was thinking of the fact that a lot of these junior developer roles and also like interns, apprenticeships, all of these are going to be replaced by Chat GPT, that these automated systems are gonna be able to crank out the sort of boilerplate that historically folks who were a little less qualified have done in the past. And then a senior developer looks at it, does a pull request, and then ultimately approves it. And so now we’re in this new world where that role is maybe disappearing. And there’s a lot of fallout around that and a lot of anxiety. So I’m interested in your perspective here. Do you see that as something that happen? Are you already seeing it happening? What are the repercussions of AI on the job market from your perspective?
Tina-Marie Gulley
I’m not seeing it replace folks. I’m really seeing it, you know, it’s changing in terms of folks want engineers with more experience. And so we’re really trying to figure out what is that sweet spot for folks.
We’re also seeing organizations that are also outsourcing their engineering components instead of hiring that early engineer. So I think more than anything, that’s what we’re seeing. It’s not really AI, it’s outsourcing to the Philippines or South America. And so that’s the part that is definitely a little challenging in that we definitely want to make sure that folks that are not only in our program, but other programs and and still have a pathway into tech. I think when you’re thinking about engineering teams and the most robust and remarkable engineering teams, it takes people from all different walks of life and all different kind of mindsets and educational backgrounds. And so when we do things where we’re potentially offshoring so much of software development talent, it makes me scared for folks that are in school, learning engineering, whether it be through a coding boot camp, a university, or a technical college. So that’s what I’m thinking about.
Kate
Well, that is very clarifying. I would love to hear more about the support systems that you have in place. So you had mentioned mental health services. You’re mentioning the like career counseling, it sounds like, that you’re offering as well. What all does that look like? What other support networks do you have? like, can you dig a little bit deeper about like, what all does that entail?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Right. so for us, wraparound services are just, it’s not even something that like we can say like we’re going to put a pause on or we’re not going to do it. We know that historically communities of color have not had the economic growth as other communities, right? And so we really needed to make sure that if we are going to have a program that does well, that is really centering these communities, that we have a lot of options that are available to folks. So that includes our learner laptop program. So if folks don’t have a laptop that is able to do all the things that they need to do in terms of their learning, their curriculum, are able to get loaned a laptop throughout their needs of it. So it can even expand beyond the internship if needed. We’ve also offered childcare assistance as well to make sure that as parents are going through their learning and development that they can get some extra support to pay for sitters and daycare.
We also have a mental health partnership to make sure that, we know that not only is it important for Adees to be strong physically, but mentally it’s very important. A lot of people are coming into an environment that they’ve never been asked to do these kinds of things, right? And so it’s definitely can be stressful. And so we really wanna make sure that we have those types of supports. Some other things that we have going on as well is because during the Biden administration, there were programs for free internet. A lot of those programs have since gone. And so now one of our newer wraparound services will be support with getting internet. So that’s something that we’re finalizing now. So that’s another area that we know is really important. If you’re in class at a coffee shop or at a library, can be very distracting. So we really want to offer the option of folks to be able to do their learnings at home with high speed internet.
One area that’s really important to us too is just the mentorship piece. And so we’ve partnered with Wevise, is actually ran, the CEO is the CEO of the organization that I used to run in Seattle. So just like totally coincidental, but they basically manage our mentorship aspect of it. So we’re able to pair Adees with different mentors throughout their time with ADA. So while they’re students, while they’re looking for a job, while they’re alumni. And then we recently partnered with Career Village, who has an AI coaching platform that we’ve made available to all of our Adees as well. And so it really allows them to get more specific support from people that are in the roles that they want now, but they might have specific questions and answers and so that’s another great way to provide additional support to our Adees.
Kate
I think you’re doing a really great job differentiating Ada from the range of other boot camps. You know, for folks who maybe don’t follow this space, there’s some boot camps that will do some sort of wage reduction, like you agree to pay a certain percentage of your wage after you get your first job. There’s other boot camps that just tend to be very expensive upfront. And so there’s all kinds of options. And of course, we’re seeing this sort of new time of transition right now. So just for you personally, what made you fall in love with Ada’s model? Like what is it that really makes them so special? And what makes you find Adees to be this group that you wanna help to succeed?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is they are community oriented. I’ve never seen anything like it. I actually first heard about Ada through the Adees. They were volunteering as part of my program, right? And so that’s one of the things that sets our organization and the folks that apply to our program apart is we really are not focused on the individual, we’re really focusing on building the community.
You are, working in a cohort throughout your education. Lots of these folks are now lifelong friends. And then, when you’re also part of the Adee community, you have an amazing network of folks that you can get insight, get advice from. If you’re looking to pivot into another area, we have just a great group of alumni that can really support you in that as well. So I think part of it for me was, in addition to the community aspect, was really thinking of it from what is a holistic standpoint. How can you just continue to do better? I’m always one of those people that’s growth mindset and I think that’s how Ada is as well. When Ada first started it was just that core curriculum and since then we’ve built preparatory curriculum to teach a lot of different people how to code beyond our target base and then we have our continuing education component called Lovelace Learning Labs and it’s a combination of hard and soft skills that we do at least one of those a month. And so we recently had one building AWS technical skills. We’ve had others where it talks about, how to pivot to government opportunities. So we’ve been able to have a multitude of types of learning because we know not one Adee is, you know, like another one.
Kate
So what does a cohort size look like and where are you located geographically?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yeah, so we started out as kind of like Seattle’s best kept secret. We were in Seattle for a while. With the pandemic, we went remote. So we definitely have presence a lot of different places. But even before we went remote, we were expanding into Atlanta and DC. And really, the way that our model works depending on where the internship is, is kind of where we try to recruit from or make sure that people are available to do the internship in that area if it isn’t remote. And so we also have partnerships to offer no interest loans. So if you have to temporarily move to Texas or Seattle to fulfill, your internship, you’re able to do that. And it’s not a huge cost.
We think is really important in terms of, again, getting that work experience, being able to have access to organizations that might not be in your area. We’ve had people that are in super rural areas, and they wanna be able to have access to things like that. So our low interest, no interest loan has been able to allow that for them.
And then in terms of our size, so Ada is now on our 22nd cohort. We’ve been around since 2013. The cohort sizes have changed throughout those years as well. You know, when we had three campuses, so we had a Seattle and Atlanta and digital campus, we had really big cohorts. But right now, because we’re a remote organization, it kind of depends on our partner, but we really try to not go any bigger than 50 or so students within the curriculum. We can go up to 60, of course, but we definitely, that’s one of the things is making sure that it has an appropriate student to teacher ratio, and then also making sure that we have enough volunteers and assistant teachers and then we also have a curriculum team that can support the amount of students that we have. So we have that part and that’s just talking about AdaCore. If we’re talking about AdaBuild, which has two different versions of that, one is AdaBuild live, which focuses, it’s a seven week course and it basically is again that preparatory foundational learning how to code and we do about two sessions every quarter. You know, spring, summer quarter, winter quarter. And we can have around anywhere from 50 to 75 people in each of those classes We’ve seen people from all over, so not just the U .S. and Ada live. You know, I think Egypt was one that surprised me. We had some folks in Egypt in that one. But, you know, we definitely in terms of our normal demographic, it’s, all of the US. And then in terms of AdaBuild, we’ve actually just started collecting information on that, that we just kind of offered it before and didn’t ask for anything. And so we’ve already seen, I think in the past month and a half or so, like over 600 people access that learning. And so we don’t even, we just started asking about like those demographics, right? So some of it are, know, cis men, other groups of folks that wouldn’t necessarily be a part of our normal Ada curriculum. But it’s kind cool that we’re able to expand and still change the face of tech and provide that first step for people really wanting to get those fundamental learnings around coding. And then of course our Lovelace labs are, depending on the topic, we try to make those open to other people, but it’s really centering our alumni.
Kate
And where do you find your instructors? Do they tend to be Adees who want to give back to that community or are they maybe ex academics? what does that group look like?
Tina-Marie Gulley
A lot of them are engineers that worked in the industry and they decided that they wanted to pivot to education. And so a lot of our instructors have worked at the Googles and the Microsoft and the Amazons of the world. And they decided that they wanted to work in the education space and really teach people the fundamentals and all the stuff that they need to be successful in their role. And so that’s been really amazing that we’ve had, sometimes when you look at coding schools, they are just people who just graduated from the coding school and they don’t necessarily have that work experience, that industry experience. And for us, we find that that’s really important to have that balance of folks that have worked in the industry that have that experience as engineers.
Kate
I’m curious, is Ada using any of the cloud vendor certification programs to support some of its curriculum? Or is it maybe partnering with any other of the big cloud vendors so that folks are prepared to be using some of these large vendor tools?
Tina-Marie Gulley
We have partnerships with Microsoft, with Amazon, and so we’re really trying to see how we can better incorporate those partnerships to make sure that Adees are a part of that. And so we don’t have any official partnerships at this time, but I think that that is the next iteration of what we’re looking to do.
Kate
Okay, okay. a lot of the vendors have these amazing certification programs. I saw that you have worked a little bit with Salesforce. I mean, they have an incredible up -skilling program. I’m always talking about Trailblazer.
Tina-Marie Gulley
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Kate
I always cite them as a really good model of how education can be integrated in this way that isn’t as painful, right? They’ve put a little sugar coating on the pill.
Tina-Marie Gulley
Salesforce has been an amazing partner of ours. And so that’s something that we’re on with them as well as like really making sure that we’re understanding what the evolution will look like at their organization and how we can continue to build an AI curriculum model that goes beyond preparing them for workplaces with AI but more of preparing them to build AI themselves.
Kate
And then just, can you talk at all about maybe the roadmap for the Ada Developers Academy? What are you hoping to do to expand the program? And, we’ve talked a lot about AI. I don’t know that we need to go there again, but, what is the future of the bootcamp industry more broadly, maybe? Where do we go from here?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s about creating resilience and sustainability for our organization in particular. So we know that that means a lot of different things. That means for us identifying other types of partners that we can really work with. We’re seeing that a lot of organizations that support women in tech, specifically women of color in tech, are no longer able to be around because they’ve lost corporate partners. And so we’re really looking at more ways to diversify our funding model through workplace giving programs, more grants and philanthropies that we were able to bring on a team to really focus on that. Because previously we just relied on our corporate partnerships. So I think for us, it’s really looking at how can we sustain our corporate partnerships, expand beyond your traditional big tech, but also how can we be a better community partner? How do we create a community broadly for women and gender expansive and people of color in tech and what can that look like? And so I think it’s our responsibility as folks that work in these coding schools and other educational boot camps and similar types of programs to really think about how are we building community? How do we work together to make sure that we’re, providing an offering that allows folks to be successful when it is time for them to transition into their career? If we’re thinking about specifically, this coding space, there’s definitely a lot of organizations that are predatory, you know, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, right? And I think that is something that we wanted to make sure that we don’t do, that we’re not predatory, that we really find opportunities to offset the cost so that’s not even something that our students have to think about. And so a lot of that is building that runway of funding to make sure that, we can continue our wraparound services. Like that’s a big part of what makes Ada, Ada. I think it’s really showing those impact numbers. Then when I talk about impact is really like, okay, typically, when you’re talking to boot camps, sometimes their students don’t get offered full -time roles, right? And even before the pandemic. And so, we know that our Adees do. We know that when we work with our corporate partners and they have other internship programs, we know that they often tell us that Ada is the superior program. And not as a competition type of situation, but it’s because we really get them prepared for the workplace. And so, what we find through that is on average, our developers are able to get hired a lot quicker than maybe some other graduates. And then they also give back, not only monetarily, but also with their time. And so for us, I think what it really comes down to is
As an organization, we really wanted to make sure that we are student centered. So everything that we do from the decisions the board makes to the decision that we make in our all hands meeting about changing curriculum or anything that we’re doing, it’s all student centered. And then even more so what’s important for us is really to make sure that our staff also represents the communities that we want to serve. Our staff is,
multiracial, multiethnic, lots of different age ranges, women, men, trans, gender expansive, for us that’s super important because that is the same type of student community we’re building and we want to see that reflected in the instructors and the mentors that come in as well as the executive staff.
Kate
I think that’s a really great place for us to wrap up. For folks who are interested in hearing more about both the Ada Developer Academy, but also your own thoughts on this, what would be the best social channels for them to follow you and Ada more broadly?
Tina-Marie Gulley
Yeah, LinkedIn is really our social channel of choice. So, Ada Developers Academy you can find us there. And then obviously myself, Tina Marie Gulley, LinkedIn is like our go to. We’re definitely trying to ramp up the thought leadership and really like provide, some insights that we’re seeing in the industry, the conversations that we’re having with not only, corporate partners,
community partners, also funders as well. We know that the election year is going to mean a lot of different things for a lot of different programs. And as an organization, it could change. And so really thinking about all of those things ahead of time. We know that DEI is something that is going into a backlash that was a huge area for a long time for Ada. When we say we’re pivoting, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that we’re pivoting from DEI.
It just means that we’re really thinking, how do we approach the way that we talk about DEI differently to make sure that folks know that it’s still relevant, that it’s still important, and that our partners and other orgs are also prioritizing it.
Kate
Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you, Tina, about your thoughts on upskilling and, of course, Ada. Again, I am Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at Redmonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on YouTube, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
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