New contest could draw 100 coders to Wilmington
Dozens of the nation’s most talented, young computer programmers are expected to descend on Wilmington in November for a virtual battle royale designed to highlight the city’s burgeoning tech scene.
The inaugural OpenBracket Delaware competition was announced Wednesday by the event’s organizers – an all-star team of educators, entrepreneurs and angel investors.
“The idea came from us asking ourselves how we can make Delaware stand out when every state is trying to be the developer state,” OpenBracket President Ben duPont said. “So we decided to create the largest coding competition in Delaware history, which admittedly isn’t the highest bar.”
OpenBracket will begin on Oct. 15 with a round of online trials devised by HackerRank, a Palo Alto California-based startup that organizes coding contests and challenges designed to help employers find talent.
The winner of that round will receive a $10,000 prize, while the top finalists will be eligible for travel stipends of $200 to $500 to attend the OpenBracket finals in Wilmington.
The live event is expected to attract more than 100 coders to the Grand on Nov. 5 when a $15,000 grand prize will be awarded, along with smaller awards for second and third place.
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The exact rules of the competition are still being hammered out, but the contest is expected to include six coding “sprints” each lasting about an hour.
“The idea is to make it part coding competition and part rock concert that’s also a fun event to watch and be a part of,” duPont said. “We want to attract skilled programmers and higher-end thought leaders from around the country, but particularly on the East Coast.”
The not-so-hidden, secondary goal is to convince those world-class coders to stay in Delaware.
“There is a real effort underway now to carve a niche for Delaware as a great state for coders and entrepreneurs, two skill sets that are increasingly linked,” said duPont, an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and member of the family that launched the state’s best known chemical company.
The Delaware Business Roundtable, a group of 50 local chief executive officers, recently pushed for Delaware to make tech startups and entrepreneurship a central component of its economic development policy. The University of Delaware’s Horn Program in Entrepreneurship and several co-working spaces in Wilmington are working to foster that state’s tech startup culture.
At the same time, Wilmington is on a quest to attract millennials – particularly highly skilled, upwardly mobile young adults 25 to 34 years old.
Developer Buccini/Pollin Group has invested millions in recent years on bars, restaurants and music venues along Market Street and the city’s Riverfront in an effort to fill its apartments and condos with the young professionals who fueling renaissances in other cities like Austin, Texas; Minneapolis; and Pittsburgh.
Some of Delaware’s largest employers are working to hire from the same demographic to fill a growing number of coding and software development jobs in the state’s banking and financial service sectors.
Many of the local employers looking to hire talented coders also are sponsoring OpenBracket Delaware, including Chatham Financial, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, WSFS, M&T Bank and Christiana Care.
“We are proud to employ more than 3,000 technologists here in Delaware and believe it is critical to continue to build the technology talent pipeline here,” JPMorgan Managing Director Mike Zbranak said in a release. “Events like this celebrate technology, as well as the community, and we’re thrilled to be a part of it.”
First State Innovation, a 10-year-old nonprofit focused on developing angel investor networks, business incubators and other support for the state’s startup community, also is playing a central role in planning the competition.
“This is a break-through event that could really help put Wilmington on the map,” said FSI Chairman Ernie Dianastasis, who previously helped to run the global IT company Computer Aid Inc. – better known as CAI. “We agree right away to help support and advise OpenBracket because we believe it can promote the opportunities that Delaware offers to the tech community.”
According to the White House, 10 percent of the 5 million jobs available today are in the field of information technology and offer an average salary 50 percent higher than the average private-sector American job.
The demand for employees who can fill those jobs is reportedly greater than the number of college graduates able to fill them, leading to a so-called “tech skills gap.”
U.S. tech companies, such as Facebook and Apple, insist they need foreign workers to make up the difference, while critics argue the skills gap is being used as an excuse to hire cheaper talent.
President Obama last spring announced his administration would provide $100 million in competitive grants to boot camps and other programs that can turn low-skilled workers for jobs in software development, network administration and cybersecurity.
One of the programs highlighted during that announcement was ZipCode Wilmington, a 12-week boot camp for the computer programming language Java.
In addition to a marketable skill, the school provides graduates with a six-month job at one of about a dozen Delaware businesses. Those companies agree to pay the graduates at least $26 an hour and cover more than 80 percent of ZipCode’s $12,000 tuition.
Launched by duPont and two other partners in 2014, the school has produced 66 graduates to date, most of whom have landed paid positions with the companies that subsidized their tuition.
“OpenBracket is the second phase of what we started with ZipCode,” duPont said. “While we build up our own workforce in Delaware, we also want to establish the state as a coding hub in the minds of people in the region.”
Contact business reporter Scott Goss at (302) 324-2281, sgoss@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ScottGossDel.