If we wanted to turn Hawaii into the next Detroit, a new nexus of the automotive industry, what would we need to do?

On the human capital side, we’d need talent in auto manufacturing at all levels, from engineering to safety to design to welders to management to test drivers. To drill down on engineering, we’d need expertise in glass and metal and aerodynamics and paint. Going deeper on paint, we’d need expertise on paint application, paint sourcing, paint adhesion, and paint waste disposal.

That same breadth of talent is required for Hawaii’s tech industry, especially if we want it to grow and prosper, and even if we never become the next Silicon Valley. For example, we don’t just need “developers,” we need software architects, front-end developers, back-end developers, database engineers, user experience designers, quality assurance, managers who understand it all, and more.

While the University of Hawaii is cranking out computer science graduates, not much else is being done to add to our local software talent pool. Honolulu-based DevLeague is trying to change that.

A Boot Camp for Programmers

DevLeague is a programming boot camp where, in 12 weeks, students learn “full-stack JavaScript” which, according to its website, equips graduates “with the tools and skills you need to become a programmer today.”

“We’re on our seventh cohort of students,” said Russel Cheng, DevLeague’s highly confident and buzzwordy cofounder. “We’ve graduated 36 developers already and we expect to graduate a total of 100 by the end of the first quarter of 2016. That’s great progress considering that we just started the program in January 2014.”

The idea for DevLeague came to cofounders Cheng and Jason Sewell, who’s also one of DevLeague’s instructors, during their work together on the now-defunct Honolulu startup, Readerie.

“We used to complain about there not being enough developers in Hawaii and that we should do a boot camp to start training some people,” recalled Cheng.

Fast-forward a few years and DevLeague is now the only (according to them) software course of its kind in Hawaii, putting students through an intensive course that runs six days per week, 11 hours per day, and consists of short lessons followed by longer “coding challenge” projects.

Typical DevLeague applicants are in their late 20s, have a college degree, and are looking for a career change. Former student Victor Lee can’t say enough great things about the program.

“It’s a game changer,” said Lee. “I went from knowing zero to getting job offers. I now have a project portfolio that I can show to potential employers.”

Lee, along with some other former students, bypassed those job offers, however, and took a role on the DevLeague management team.

“We can easily work for a big company, but why?,” Lee asked. “People who come here want to do something more. We’re making a difference.”

As the conversation turned to jobs, Cheng started spitting out numbers and statistics like Rain Man on his sixth cup of coffee.

“Our graduates are getting offers for $40,000 to $60,000 in Hawaii and $80,000 to $90,000 on the mainland,” said Cheng. “We have 48 local companies in our employer network. We have 36 graduates to date with a 97 percent hire rate, and 86 percent are working in Hawaii. Our graduates are contributing $1.5 million annually in salary to Hawaii’s economy.”

While one recent graduate has been hired by the local Uber office, most have taken jobs at marketing agencies and software development shops, such as Anthology Marketing Group and Sodukrew (which Sewell also cofounded and still runs).

DevLeague graduates — 30 percent of whom are women — are also making their mark in the local startup scene, from joining startups to launching their own to taking over local hackathons, like Startup Weekend. According to Lee, DevLeague students were part of the top three teams in each of the last two Startup Weekends, with one team of DevLeague grads subsequently applying for entry into local accelerator Blue Startups.

You Gotta Start Somewhere

Boot camps, some in the industry say, are just a small part of a larger need that must be addressed if Hawaii is going to grow its tech industry.

“DevLeague is a first step toward low-level (software development) competency,” said one local software developer, who asked that his name not be used due to the small size of Hawaii’s tech industry. “Their graduates need to find companies that can facilitate further career growth and give them robust exposure to a particular technology stack.”

In Hawaii, that’s a tall order.

A second local developer who also asked that his name not be used for similar reasons, echoed the concern that DevLeague is addressing only one small part of our tech industry’s talent needs, specifically related to DevLeague’s JavaScript-only curriculum. (For the layman, JavaScript, or JS, can be used to develop everything from smartphone apps to web applications to modifications in Minecraft, but is generally considered a “front-end” technology, with front-end being what you see on the screen when you use an app or visit a website.)

“All JavaScript, all the time just seems arbitrary to me,” the developer commented. “(Graduates) are only going to do web front-end work. (But) DevLeague has certainly tapped into something that people seem to be excited about.”

Sewell says that they chose JavaScript for a few reasons, but primarily because, he says, “we were seeing the beginning of the rise in demand for JavaScript developers across the industry, while some other languages seemed to be fairly flat in growth in demand. We wanted to be ahead of the curve in that sense. JavaScript is really everywhere these days, the web, mobile, hardware, connected devices.”

So, to continue the automotive analogy, while the industry does indeed need painters and engineers and aerodynamics experts, imagine that there’s a growing demand locally and nationally for welders. DevLeague is cranking out the tech equivalent because, regardless of their place in the industry hierarchy, they are still required to build the industry and there’s a growing demand.

“There is no shortage of people who need help with tuition, and the state could help there.” —Russel Cheng DevLeague cofounder

DevLeague does have plans for growth and expansion, according to Cheng, some of which he didn’t want to discuss but hinted that it aims to disrupt the local startup ecosystem and its existing structure. It also has Junior DevLeague, which is targeted at local middle and high school students. Another project is an upcoming hackathon, run by tech behemoth Uber but administered locally by DevLeague, Oct. 23-25.

When asked about taking the state’s money — which seems to be a requirement for local tech organizations, from Blue Startups to Startup Weekend to Startup Paradise Demo Day to MaiTai Maui, and on and on — Cheng said that DevLeague has yet to take a penny of taxpayer money, but then he hesitated.

“You know where we could use help?” Cheng asked. “Scholarships. Each year so far, we’ve subsidized about $50,000 in tuition for our students. There is no shortage of people who need help with tuition, and the state could help there.”

Regardless of where DevLeague’s grads fit within the industry machine, they are creating a real, tangible, measurable impact on Hawaii’s tech sector. As opposed to some of our other taxpayer-financed tech initiatives, that sounds like money well spent.