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The tech industry has a habit of describing its talent shortage as a supply problem. Not enough developers. Not enough graduates. Not enough people coming through the pipeline with the right skills.
That framing is comfortable, because it locates the problem somewhere abstract, in schools, in government, in the slow churn of cultural change. It is also, largely, wrong.
The talent exists. What has been missing, consistently, is access. And access is something the engineering community has the power to create, if it chooses to.
The Access Gap Is Not Abstract
Leon Noel, Managing Director of Engineering at Resilient Coders and Distinguished Faculty at General Assembly, built 100Devs on a specific premise: that people underrepresented in tech are capable of high-growth careers as software engineers, what they lack is not ability but structured entry points. The programme he created has helped tens of thousands of people learn to code, running as a completely free, 30-week bootcamp that takes participants from zero programming knowledge to employment-ready, working on real client projects throughout.
The model is deliberately cyclical. Engineers trained through the programme return to lead the next cohort, which means the community compounds rather than depletes.
Every developer who gets through does not just benefit themselves. They become part of the infrastructure that gets the next person through.
Why Open Source Is the Right Vehicle
Open source has always operated on the logic of shared contribution. Code is written, shared, improved, and built upon, compounding value without requiring anyone to start from scratch.
Mentorship, when it is practised with the same discipline, works identically.
Leon Noel, speaking on the CodeNewbie Podcast, described the community plainly: “It’s a community of folks that are coming together to help individuals learn how to code that changed their economic reality.” That economic framing matters.
For many participants, a career in software engineering is not a lifestyle upgrade, it is a structural change in financial trajectory. The stakes are real, which is why the mentorship has to be real too, not performative.
100Devs’ model, where trained engineers return to lead the next cohort, is a radical rethink of how education compounds, and it shows exactly how the best open source projects sustain themselves: through contributors who give back because the community gave to them first.
What the UK Tech Ecosystem Needs to Reckon With
Over 70% of UK tech companies now collect ethnicity data. A meaningful share have launched diversity initiatives. These are steps, but data collection is not the same as pipeline development, and an initiative is not the same as a culture change.
The distinction that matters is internal to engineering teams themselves. When senior developers treat mentorship as part of the job, not an optional extra, not an act of charity, the pipeline starts to move.
Reviewing a junior’s pull request carefully. Explaining an architectural decision without condescension. Creating space for questions without making the person asking feel like a burden.
These are not grand gestures. They are the daily work of building a profession that is genuinely open.
The Multiplier That Compounds
The most durable thing a senior engineer can build is not a product. It is a developer who goes on to build ten more.
One 100Devs graduate captured it plainly in a note to Leon Noel: “You always said that we have to bring others with us, and my intention is to do just that.” That instinct, to bring others along, is what turns a career into a contribution and a community into an industry force.
The next generation of tech talent does not need anyone to lower the bar. It needs the people already inside to stop pulling the ladder up behind them.
Otutu Chinedu is a software engineer with experience across distributed engineering teams spanning Nigeria, Portugal, and the United States, having trained through community-driven programmes including 100Devs and gone on to build production systems at scale; he currently develops infrastructure at GreenPlaces, a sustainability technology platform.
