Honoring Veterans Day and #VetsWhoCode
We’re “doing it live” with Jerome Hardaway, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft and the Executive Director of Vets Who Code — a veteran-led and operated 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that focuses on training veterans, active duty military, and military spouses in software development and open source with the goal of starting careers in the technology industry.
This is a lengthly conversation in and around Jerome’s story, the Vets Who Code mission and impact, the experience of being in the United States Military, and the opportunity and potential of 1.5x’ing one of the most elite group of people on the planet.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Jerome Hardaway: Yeah, I’m there. Right now, it’s only up in these industries, up in these companies. So you now have to leverage Vets Who Code to do that. That’s your goal, that’s your entire mission. If you need training, talk to me. If you need me to connect you with a high-level mentor, speak to me. If you need me to connect you to – like, if you have a passion that I may not be the best person [unintelligible 00:56:50.00] I’m connected in every part of the industry. I can connect you with people in infrastructure and SRE, even though I don’t do anything with SRE. I can [unintelligible 00:57:02.18] people that are making low-level build tools… I know a guy with a Ph.D. in Egypt who focuses on garbage collection. So I can do it all. I can do what I do well, and if I don’t do it well, I know who to connect you to. So talk to me about what you wanna do, where you wanna go.
And that’s my life’s work. That’s my legacy. I wanna be the dude that – basically, I want the HashFlag coin to be worth, on average, $85,000 to a recruiter. When that HR or recruiter sees that, “Oh, that’s an $85,000 troop there, minimum. That person right there is worth $85,000, because he/she has the HashFlag coin.” That’s my life’s work.
The average salary of entry-level is anywhere – the national average is from 49k to 94k. I want that number to be 85k. So they know “I need to start at 85k, and probably go up some, because I know that this person is gonna come into my industry, come to our job, and they’re gonna bring it.”
That’s my life’s work. When I’m done with Vets Who Code, I want people to be able to say that - “Jerome - his people come in here and they crush it.”