Do Software Engineers need and like taking courses - an insider view from Barbara Felix

23.10.2024, 10:33
with Barbara Felix & Greg Tomasik

 

Hi Barbara, thank you for taking the time to participate in our SwissDevJobs Interview series. In your career before co-founding Letsboot.ch with Jonas Felix, you also had some experience in the gastronomy industry from the marketing perspective. Would you mind walking us through it?

When I look back on my career, I am surprised at where I am today. Namely at a completely different point than I would have thought 20 years ago.  Back then, I had just finished gymnasium and didn't know exactly what the next step would be. I didn't want to go to university - I was and still am too practical a person for that. I wanted to do something now and not focus on lectures - although I attended many lectures in my career. Unfortunately, everything at gymnasium back then was geared towards going to university after graduation. There weren't really any alternatives. By chance, a report about the Lucerne Hotel Management School (SHL) was being broadcast on Swiss television at the time. I liked the practical approach of the training programme: You went through five different semesters, completing an internship for each one, so that at the end you really knew as a manager what was being done in the different departments and what was important in order to be able to manage a business. My mother finally dragged me to the information day at the Lucerne Hotel Management School, where I learnt that - due to the success of the TV series - there was a waiting list of four years. But that didn't stop me, especially as you had to have a certain amount of work experience in the catering or hotel industry to study. 

So I started working. My first job was as an all-rounder during the summer season on the Brienzer Rothorn, followed by a winter season in Sörenberg in a ski hut. Both businesses were run by the same family and it was my first experience of what it means to work in a family business - and I swore I would never do it again. And where am I now? Well, Karma's a Bi**h. But more on that later. I was thrown in at the deep end and learnt an incredible amount. I realized that I'm the type of person for whom ‘learning by swimming’ works better than just learning about it in theory. I then took this attitude with me to all the other internships I completed during my studies. I quickly realized that this mindset of ‘there's nothing you can't learn’ went down well with my various supervisors. 

During my studies, however, I also quickly realized that I didn't want to work in the traditional hotel or catering industry after graduation. This journey led me from managing a Restaurant at a Golf course, through starting my own small Marketing Consultancy to somehow sliding into the role of a Project Manager in a Web Engineering company. That was my first taste of managing and working with Software Engineers and I actually did build and deliver training for customers on a complex gas transport pricing software probably somewhere around 2010. 

It was my luck that I saw a job advertised at Coop when I was finishing hotel management school that immediately appealed to me: ‘Marketing Specialist in Gastronomy’. I was even luckier that I got the job. And that with only a few months of marketing during my studies. I learnt that I had beaten a trained marketing specialist out of the race because I had this ‘you can learn anything’ and ‘make it work’ mindset. 

I spent the next 10 years at Coop's headquarters in Basel. After the first few years, I was able to take over my own team and manage the marketing department for the Coop restaurants. Here I had the challenge - and the luck! - to work with career changers, whom I was able to train, mold and support. I really enjoyed being able to pass on my mindset to my employees and to see how they were thriving. The job was constantly changing around me, so the 10 years went by very quickly. I quickly learnt that personal relationships were the most valuable thing at Coop and that being open to new things opened doors. 

The restaurant sector was one of Coop's smallest business units and so we were welcome guinea pigs for innovations - especially in the area of IT. During my time at Coop, I was able to implement many projects with the internal IT department: from multiple website relaunches to the development of event booking platforms to the creation of a recipe database and much more. I was fascinated by the way the IT guys worked, which was so much more structured and efficient than in our department. I absorbed as much know-how as possible and transferred it to my team. I also felt the gratitude of the IT team that someone from the marketing department was interested in their work and tried to understand exactly what they were doing. And of course, I soon knew everyone's ice cream preferences and was able to sweeten the relationship even more with targeted deliveries. 

After 10 years, I made the decision to leave Coop in order to join our family business Letsboot full time - yes, exactly! Me in a family business! - and to have more flexibility for the family. 

 

What led you to found Letsboot, and how did the company grow in the first few years?

I co-founded the company behind Letsboot together with Jonas back in 2012—during my studies. To the misconception of many, I was the CEO from day one and provided Marketing Consulting services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As Jonas was fully focussed on his very successful web engineering company, he was the “silent co-founder” in this company. Then the Coop job came along, and the company lay mostly dormant for a few years. Letsboot actually started as a stopgap solution. In 2016, Jonas sold his company - cab services ag. As part of the deal, he was hit with a hefty non-compete clause. At least he was able to negotiate a few exemptions, one of which was teaching courses. And that's how it all started — with Angular courses.

At the beginning, Jonas was on his own, offering training here and there as a side gig besides the new companies he started. Then, more requests came in, and from time to time one of our contacts in software engineering asked to join as a trainer for a specific topic. Over time, we got to know more and more people who were passionate about a specific technology and were eager to share their enthusiasm and knowledge with others. And so, Letsboot became an instructor-driven business. New instructors brought new topics and expanded the course catalog. 

Today, we offer over 50 different course topics in our portfolio, and our instructor pool consists of more than 40 trainers from various sectors of the Swiss tech industry. It’s important to note that we invest a lot of energy in supporting our trainers with the necessary lab machines, environments and guidance to build great training. We also invest a lot of time to really understand what the teams of our customers need and what the best approach is to boot them into a new topic.

We have several hundred companies trusting in our ability to provide training and also a core group of customers, who rely on us to form and support their overall training strategy. Although we provide a broad set of courses, we also get requests from customers, for which we go and actively search for the best instructors. And most of the time, we're quite good at finding the right people within our pool who bring both the know-how and passion for the requested topic. Still we set clear boundaries as to which clusters of topics we want to offer and which we clearly declare as out of our scope.

In recent years, Letsboot has grown significantly year after year, which was one of the reasons why I transitioned from working in the background to taking on the role of full time CEO, in order to actively lead the core team and further foster Letsboot's growth.

 

Are your courses mostly offering introductions to particular technologies where no previous knowledge is needed, or are they aiming at advanced use cases?
Who is your main target group: companies who want to organise in-house trainings, or rather individual engineers that take the courses themselves?

There is a spectrum of courses and levels of prerequisites. We have a strong offering of public courses, for our evergreen topics, but the number of in-house engagements outnumbers them by a decent factor.

As we teach one or multiple teams at a specific customer, the range of experience can vary within the same training. We like to say “something advanced for one person, is basic for another and vice versa”. Therefore most training sessions have a clear “bootup” character, to get the participants in a state where they can continue to learn efficiently.

Here’s an example: A Kubernetes Security foundations course, is an advanced training for anyone who knows Kubernetes fundamentals. But for the Kubernetes Security folks, we offer an “Advanced Kubernetes Security: Learn by Hacking” course, where we fly in some of the best engineers in that field - our so-called “Topic Leaders”.

Rather than targeting career or certification goals of participants, our courses clearly focus on how to practically use a specific technology in a professional setting. Therefore our customers are most often companies which want to enable their engineers to be proficient in a specific field. 

 

What’s the perception of the in-house trainings by the engineers? Are they eager to participate in them?

We conduct extensive surveying efforts before and after the course. This shows us a spectrum in motivation, knowledge and goals for participants. Our trainers try to accommodate this spectrum and have a set of proven tools to keep a diverse group of participants engaged and learning.

There is a difference in public courses versus in-house courses. As most engineers sign up themselves for public courses, they put in the effort to evaluate the course and therefore are in general highly motivated.

For in-house courses the sentiment can range from:

“all of us have to do this tomorrow, let’s learn as much and as fast as possible… give us more!!!”

to a more relaxed approach of:

“We are fostering the basic understanding and acceptance of topic X in our organization, so let’s see if this is something I really want to work with…”

Both of those cases and mindsets absolutely have their merits. We’ve found that many people appreciate the opportunity to attend a course, learn something new, and have a break from their daily routine. 

Of course, in groups of up to 15 people, there will always be different attitudes, and you might encounter the occasional "why am I in this course”-participant but peer pressure tends to work in our favor, and major disruptions practically never happen.

Most of the time, the atmosphere in the courses is relaxed, inspired, and engaging. A major benefit is that participants—who sometimes come from different teams—can exchange ideas and learn from one another. 

Besides questioning each participant before and after the course with our surveys, we do a detailed debriefing with the instructor to further improve our courses, strategies and offering.

 

Did you have any funny or frustrating situations during courses where the participant(s) tried to outsmart the instructor?

Maybe this is not exactly what you ask for, but one of the coolest moments was with a blind student. The organizer informed us that a participant will work with a screen reader, but that he is already used to participating in technical courses. Of course we immediately reached out to him for testing our lab machines. The main participants' access to our lab machines are the VS Code Server and the Linux Remote Desktop, but both were rather cumbersome to use with a screen reader.  After some back and forth Jonas asked: “Do you rather just SSH into the machine and use vim?” The way we build course material as code mainly relying on Markdown as well as using Mermaid for Diagrams was of course the perfect setup for someone who works “Text-Only”. This enabled that specific participant to follow along and sometimes even outpace some of the other engineers. Things like that make you happy.

Before that course we actually didn’t expose SSH to the participants per default. But since that training every participant can access their lab machine through SSH using a reverse tunneling Jump-Host, as the lab machines have no public IP address.

On the more funny side we once had a participant who had a special version of Doom installed, which allowed them to play through the browser in your Kubernetes cluster and hunt down enemies which reflect Pods on the cluster. So by hitting an enemy in the game, the corresponding Pod is destroyed. Since then Kube Doom is an official chapter in our Container & Kubernetes DevOps course, so every participant, who wants to try it, can attack their own lab machine cluster.

 

Which courses (technologies) are the most popular right now, and why do you think it is? Is there a course which you think is a must-have for every software engineer?

Although we really do conduct quite a big number of in-house courses per year in Switzerland, it’s not necessarily representative of the industry if you break it down by our 50+ topics. There are for sure topics which rock the software engineering world, but did not yet lead to many requests on our side. On the other hand there are topics, where we know that we are absolute leaders in Switzerland - so they have a disproportionately big number of courses compared to their real market adoption.

I would rather recommend looking at the Swiss Developer Survey, which we have been conducting together with Swiss Made Software for more than 5 years: survey.swissmadesoftware.org

There is for sure a gap between what engineers would like to learn and what courses are actually booked by the companies - otherwise we would do much more Rust and Kotlin courses than Java related training. But on the other hand Java has a very loyal user and fan base, which will stick to it for their whole career. The same is true for Angular. Although many question the complexity of Angular, there is this slowly growing core of loyal Angular engineers, teams and companies, who stick to it for its long term support, stability and of course knowledge in the market.

In general we think it's super powerful if software engineers have a better understanding of containerisation, continuous integration, continuous deployment, as well as traceability and metrics. We like to provide a real world view on certain technologies for how to use them as software engineers. Which means going from “this is how the vendor wants you to use it” towards the “this is how the trainer finds it best to be used” approach. Our vendor independent and trainer centric approach also allows us to mix technologies in a course, which are often used together, but wouldn’t be available in a typical vendor or certification course. But that’s also a regional phenomenon. As we expand to other countries around the world, we learn how some areas are much more vendor driven or are mainly focused on certifications and career gains. Both seem not to be the case in Switzerland. It seems most engineers in Switzerland focus on how to actually use something in their real world projects and become more efficient in doing so. Which of course is our favorite approach.

 

Currently, you cooperate with over 40 instructors. How do you spot them, and what can an engineer do if they would like to become an instructor?

Our pool of trainers consists of passionate tech professionals who want to share their knowledge and help others grow. Nearly all of them have a proven and traceable track record of expertise for the topic as well as teaching, conducting workshops and or giving talks at conferences.

Our network is incredibly valuable in helping us find these people. By attending conferences or giving talks, we stay visible in the community and get to meet many interesting new individuals.  It's always fascinating and rewarding to see how the tech world works: Engineers have a thriving community, interacting with a very high level of engagement - especially in the Open Source world. I went to many conferences in other industries, but nothing even comes close to the spirit of Open Source conferences or meetups. 

Often, people approach us with the mindset, "I have a course topic - do you need more instructors?". So we actually get a very steady stream of highly motivated experts who want to teach for Letsboot. During an onboarding call, we explain how Letsboot works and what opportunities as well as support is available for them, as well as what quality standards are demanded of them. 

 

What do you think about the developments of AI in regard to teaching people technologies? Do you think we will have valid AI-tutors who might replace humans as instructors?

We already have valid AI tutors and several of our trainers already heavily use generative AI to generate, review, improve, refactor and extend course material. There will be some big news from our side within the next months considering this topic.

But now the important part: We do in person training. And that means a breathing, walking, talking, inspiring, sometimes even funny but for sure a super inspired person comes to your team, and makes sure they focus on a topic, and engage in it.

That doesn’t mean the whole learning and knowledge industry won't be heavily impacted by this technology. It absolutely will and already is impacted by it. For us it’s an absolute blessing and we’ll invest in and foster the empowerment of our participants, to be more efficient by using these tools in the areas where they can benefit from them. There is no “us against AI”, there is only a  “we improve, due to AI”.

 

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Barbara Felix is the CEO, Co-Founder, and a tech enthusiast at Letsboot, bringing years of experience in marketing, project management, and software engineering. Passionate about practical learning, she now focuses on helping engineers grow through hands-on courses that reflect real-world needs. Barbara’s journey from gastronomy to tech demonstrates a deep commitment to adaptability, innovation, and continuous learning.

 

Greg Tomasik, Co-Founder & CTO at SwissDevJobs.ch, GermanTechJobs.de & DevITjobs.uk. A Software Engineer with over 8 years of experience working at international companies. Involved in the recruiting industry since 2018, focusing on building transparent job boards for tech talents.