Greetings all,
I taught for them early on, at the original location in Menlo Park. Woodshop, weirdly enough. (Take somebody with half a lifetime's experience with metalworking, and put them in the woodshop. Go figure.) Helped write some of the early woodshop safety stuff.
I'm sad to see them go, but not terribly surprised.
What I can say is that the members and line staff were some of the neatest people I've ever met. I walked in and it was an immediate sense of "I've found my tribe!". Brains and enthusiasm. What's not to like?
Yeah, you had idiots abusing the gear, but you get that anywhere.
We had a joke among the instructors: the *really* dangerous ones were the PhD's and Engineers. They already knew everything, you see... It being Silicon Valley, we had more than our fair share of them.
I taught for them for about 2 years, but eventually had to leave, for reasons that will become clear in a bit. The early instructors were very high skill people who were teaching mostly because they thought they needed to, because they were the ones in the group who already knew whatever skill it was. As things progressed from a group of believers in a startup space into a more corporate structure, the focus shifted,and it became more corporate.
The instructors were all contractors. Which is entirely normal in the valley. *Everybody* is 1099 scum, or was then. Remember that it really got rolling in the teeth of the 07 crash. Lots of people floating around looking for gigs. Most of the command staff were software management types, so of course they keep everybody as a contractor. Which is fine, in areas with low liability. They had been promising to work on an insurance policy to indemnify the instructors for more than a year by the time I finally got sick of it and left. I had been doing the woodshop safety stuff, and developing the basic SBU's for that. If somebody was going to get sued, the odds are good it was going to happen in the woodshop. So I even asked them to pull my name off the things I wrote for them when I left.
The problem with not indemnifying the instructors is that they limited themselves to young kids with nothing much to lose. Anybody who knew enough to be a serious instructor would have too much stuff to want to risk it for ?20/hr? or whatever it was.
I left in late 2010, and many of the early instructors were starting to fade out by then. Which left it to be run by the software types and the kids they hired.
The other issue is that the management was starting to remind me of some of the non-profits I've worked for.
I crewed tall ships in my 20's. Loved it. Love them still. They get into your blood. (Literally: rope splinters.)
But the problem with tall ships is they start to rot the second they hit the water, and they don't *ever* stop. You can work your heart out, and it's never enough. The damned things are always on the verge of some dire emergency or other, and no sooner do you get today's problem fixed than the next one smacks you in the face. It just never ends. Which is why they're where 20 year olds go to burn out.
Those who last, view it as almost a sacred calling. Sort of like the guys who keep the 10EE's rolling. (I can say that: I have one.) Or any of the other antique machinery restoration guys: you do it because it must be done to preserve the thing you love.
Which is great on a small, individual scale. But when you have a company who's business model is predicated on the line crew having the same messianic sense of mission that the original founders did, you run into problems. And TS's upper management was (in 2010) starting to remind me of how the ships owning foundations sometimes viewed their crews: people who were willing to work themselves to the bone for the ship, and there were always more where they came from.
Personally, I think they over expanded, in locations that were needlessly expensive, both for rent and buildout, but that's armchair quarterbacking after the game's over, so it's worth exactly zero as anything other than my opinion.
I'll leave it with one of my favorite memories of teaching for them: the time I had to do a 2 day woodshop safety course for a bunch of deaf Egyptian exchange students from the local college.
So you've got a bunch of kids who don't speak much English, can't hear me (or worse, the tools) and *do* speak an entirely different sign language than American deaf people do. (AmSign is just that: AMERICAN sign language...)
Fortunately, they had a translator to get over the language hump, so that wasn't as bad as you'd think, and good *lord* were they paying attention. It was a serious challenge figuring out how to explain how to tell if they were pushing bandsaw or table saw too hard, since so much of how you relate to how those machines are working is based on sound. Which they don't have.
I finally came up with a system where I'd have them put their hands on the underside of the table, or somewhere else safe on whatever tool, and then I'd do a cut normally, so they could feel the vibrations of 'right', and then I'd tap on the wood a couple of times and proceed to foul it up as hard as I could without breaking something, so they could feel the difference between 'right' and 'WRONG!'. Worked pretty well, actually.
What's funny is that metalworkers act like deaf people a lot of the time anyway. Anybody who's worked in a heavy shop for very long learns to lip read, whether or not they realize it, and we all have our own informal sign languages for things like "put it here" or "Push that" or whatever. Half the time I didn't need the translator, my own bastard handsigns worked well enough, even if the kids did laugh at them.
I remember a pair of those kids in particular: one boy whose father had pretty much written him off, since he was deaf, and clearly useless. He was *so* happy to be able to actually build something his father would understand and appreciate. He could go home and prove to his dad that he *could* use the tools. (His father was a carpenter or something as I recall.)
And a young woman who just *would not* be stopped. She was so focused on learning as much as she could, so she could eventually go home and make a living. Apparently Egypt had some pretty weird laws relating to deaf people (before the revolution. I don't know what it's like now) Like they couldn't own property, for some reason. So she was soaking up as much as she could, while she could.
So yeah, it wasn't a perfect (or maybe even good) business model, but it did *do* a lot of good, and I'm sorry to see it go.
Sic Transit.
Brian