Etsy has received widespread praise for its partnership with Hacker School to recruit more women for coding education generally and for its own engineering department specifically.
As a follow-on to this interview with Etsy’s Marc Hedlund, I spoke with Bethany Macri, a software engineer on Etsy’s core platform team, to get the student perspective on this initiative. Bethany was making a career transition from law to coding and applied for one of Etsy’s grants to attend Hacker School last summer.
Bethany is an example of a growing trend of engineers who choose an unconventional learning path. In her case, she built on her self-taught foundation with a very self-directed training program that was much different than a college degree.
In this interview, Bethany discusses her decision to change careers, what it was like to be a part of Hacker School, and the Etsy recruiting process.
How did you learn to code? Will the emergence of online and in-person training resources such as Codecademy, Skillcrush, Hackbright Academy, and volunteer study groups such as RailsBridge ever replace formal CS education? Tell us in the comments section below.