Opening Doors: David Delmar Sentíes (CFA’06)

Opening Doors
David Delmar Sentíes,

Founder and executive director of the nonprofit Resilient Coders

October 9, 2021
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They are determined to use their experience, influence, and positions to help make their business, organization, and world more inclusive. They are breaking barriers—and then reaching back to help those behind them overcome the same hurdles. They are BU alumni, faculty, and staff—of every race, ethnicity, age, and gender—and they are “Opening Doors” for the next generation.

David Delmar Sentíes is founder and executive director of Resilient Coders, which trains people of color from low-income backgrounds for high-growth careers as software engineers and connects them with apprenticeships. Students aged 18 to 30 pay nothing, receiving a small stipend to spend 20 weeks learning programming principles through JavaScript; they go on to work as full-time software engineers for companies as big as Wayfair, Constant Contact, athenahealth, and Humana, as well as numerous start-ups. The only request is that they help pull others through the door after them.

A Syracuse native, Delmar Sentíes (CFA’06) is a professional designer and interface developer. Before founding Resilient Coders, he was at PayPal, leading a team that designed and built first-to-market digital advertising concepts for brands like Starbucks, Coca-Cola, FedEx, and Pepsi. He has a book coming out, Power and Resistance (Beacon Press, 2023), about creating a culture of economic justice in tech.

Bostonia sat down with him at his organization’s Kendall Square headquarters in Cambridge to find out how and why he founded Resilient Coders and what’s next for the organization.

Q&A

With David Delmar Sentíes

Bostonia: How did you get from the College of Fine Arts to running this nonprofit?

David Delmar Sentíes: I’m Latino, I grew up in a Spanish-speaking home. My parents immigrated from Mexico, and I was born here. I was able to go to BU, fortunately enough, to CFA, the School of Visual Arts, which was awesome. Plan A was to be a comic-book illustrator. Batman was my superhero favorite. Obviously, later on I fell in love with indie comics. I still make a lot of art. 

Then I graduated and needed to pay the rent. I just wanted a job in design, and everybody was like, “Cool that you can design this, but can you also code?” I was like, no. And finally I kind of exaggerated—by which I mean, made up—my skills. I didn’t really know much when I got my first job. They took a chance on me, and I, frankly, taught myself on the job. It was eminently self-teachable. And I realized that we should be teaching more people.

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself working in the tech start-up world, which I really love. But you look around you and it’s like, “Where’s mi gente [my people]?” I became very frustrated by that. I wasn’t sure at first what I could do about that, but I knew at the very least that I could teach. And I believe in the idea of education as a liberating agent. And so I started volunteering, spending down my vacation days at a youth detention facility in Roslindale, the Judge John J. Connelly Youth Center. I volunteered down there with a bunch of boys and realized that I really needed to grow it.

I’m loud. I was able to talk about the injustices these young men experienced, and pull together enough resources and funding to start Resilient Coders, with some early funding from the tech community and the Boston Police Department.

Bostonia: Did you, personally, ever feel a door was not open to you because of your background?

David Delmar Sentíes: I don’t think so. In this country we tend to think of Latinx as a race, and it’s really not. It’s a whole collection of races, nationalities, people. And I happen to be white Latinx. People often don’t even know I’m Latino unless I tell them. So whenever I’ve sat down in front of a college admissions officer, a loan officer, an actual police officer, they’ve only ever seen a white boy. This discovery of “where’s mi gente?” was also a reckoning around my whiteness. 

Bostonia: At first you worked with younger students?

David Delmar Sentíes: The problem working with high school–age folks is that what everybody seems to care about is college matriculation. That’s a solution, but that’s not the solution. So what we needed to do was build a boot camp program that would allow people to leapfrog college.

Bostonia: And your program has grown…

David Delmar Sentíes: In 2016 we launched the boot camp. It was short, only eight weeks long, because that was all we could afford. And it wasn’t good enough—I failed an entire group of students. The program wasn’t strong enough, and the employers weren’t there the way I expected them to be. So I decided to spend the next several years in start-up mode, in a state of progressively more intelligent failure. Over the years we have pushed and grown and expanded to the point that now we offer five months of direct instruction, plus additional effort put into supporting our alumni, both on and off the job.

Bostonia: Is it working?

David Delmar Sentíes: I’m proud to say we do this pretty well now. Every single one of our graduates in December 2020, all of them, have jobs—16 or 17 folks. We decided to make it small for the back half of 2020 because of [COVID] lockdown, but employers came back in force. They are making good money. The average starting salary for that cohort is in the $90,000s. So we’re pretty good at it now. So we’re scaling up. We’re operating in Boston, Philly, and Pittsburgh, and thinking about who we are and why we are.

Bostonia: Do you still see racism from employers?

David Delmar Sentíes: All the time—oh my god, all the time. We used to keep a list of the most racist sh-t that employers used to say. One recruiter at a company told us they prefer candidates who have paid for their education, because that means they must want it more. Of course we’ve been told a bunch of times that so-and-so is not “a culture fit.” That’s before seeing them code. We had somebody visit the classroom, take a peek in the door, and say, “It looks like a call center in there.” It’s a long list.

Photo of David Delmar Senties, wearing a gray hat, and a black t-shirt, as he leans across a clear balcony with a silver railing.
David Delmar Sentíes (CFA’06), founder and executive director of the nonprofit Resilient Coders.

The really nefarious stuff is the stuff that’s not quite as flashy. With remote work, we’ve had a lot of managers who have really micromanaged and surveilled some of our alumni and set pretty impossible goals for them. And then when those goals get met, because our employees are badasses, the goalposts get moved.

I also think that tech culture is fundamentally exclusionary. Not just on race. There’s a certain degree of peacocking about who’s the smartest person in the room that we all kind of eye-roll and laugh about. But think about it: if you’re someone who already has doubts about whether you belong in that space with those people, that peacocking makes you think, maybe I really don’t belong here. 

Bostonia: How has COVID changed things for you?

One thing that came out of the pandemic that surprised me is that we’re very good at remote. We did have to shift and change some things. Remote needs additional support and intentional community building. We have an LGBTQ community, we have an arts community, we have a healthy-living community, where people can share recipes and join bike rides. We have an activism group. We have a pasta night and game night here on Friday nights for students, alumni, staff.

Bostonia: What’s the next step in your growth?

We’ve spent a lot of this year reflecting on who we are and why we are. When you are a skills training provider like we are, you live with a certain degree of discomfort, knowing it’s not really about the skills. It’s about the systemic barriers that preclude non-white people from entering the workforce and succeeding on a level that is commensurate with their skills. I used to say as part of my spiel at events that there is nothing we can do about those systemic barriers except build a springboard, that we can springboard people over the wall into jobs. And after springboarding and springboarding and springboarding, what happens is that we have normalized that process and people are out there clapping. But they shouldn’t be clapping, they should be dismantling the wall.

Bostonia: What are you going to do about that?

The boot camp will be there, and it will continue to grow. But we’re starting to put a lot of effort into thinking, what does it mean for us to play a role in dismantling that wall? I don’t have a real solid answer for that yet, but what I do know is that it comes down to the development of community. Not just our own community. We need to find our place within a broader community of folks who feel the way we do and are as restless as we are to change the field.

Bostonia: What does that mean in practice?

Our fiefdom is tech, so when I talk about changing the field, it’s really tech. I believe that tech culture has to fundamentally change. I believe it’s going to have to come down to tech workers to lead that change. I believe it has to be led by Black and Latinx technologists, so a big part of what I’m trying to do these days is educate myself on who else is out there, who’s active and where, who’s got the same commitment to economic justice? I would like to see us come together, and see if there’s an opportunity to build a national coalition. That’s the dream. I don’t know what that looks like yet. I know the need exists, and I know we can’t do it alone.

Bostonia: How has the current climate, from COVID to the racial reckoning, affected your goals?

I actually, believe it or not, think it affords us a certain degree of hope. We have more allies, more folks who recognize this is a real problem. It’s not that it has never occurred to me in the past that we should dismantle the wall that we’ve been springboarding over, but it had never occurred to me that it could be possible that there would be enough people out there who would join us. So I’m actually coming out of this last year hopeful.

Do you know BU alumni, faculty, and staff who are opening doors or breaking barriers themselves? Email Cindy Buccini at cbuccini@bu.edu and recommend them for our series “Opening Doors.”

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There are 4 comments on Opening Doors: David Delmar Sentíes (CFA’06)

  1. This article should be required reading for every single person at BU, and especially for the university’s board of directors/trustees, leadership, and faculty (aka, those in positions of power and decision making who can actually hard code real change). Sentíes is one of the rare few one would call REAL.

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  2. I love this idea of bootcamp for low-income kids. I would love to volunteer myself for something like this (having lots of years of experience coding for various corporations and nonprofits). I love the idea of leapfrogging college and providing opportunities for people of all backgrounds to get into tech. theses are all great things and should be encouraged.

    What is troubling though is the incessant language surrounding race and making it all about race providing really flimsy and substance-free evidence of race being being a significant barrier. As an example from this article, to the question: “Do you still see racism from employers?”, we get: “All the time—oh my god, all the time… One recruiter at a company told us they prefer candidates who have paid for their education, because that means they must want it more. Of course we’ve been told a bunch of times that so-and-so is not “a culture fit.” Really? That’s your best evidence that skin color is used in hiring decisions? Okay…

    My experience in the world of tech (30 years) is that if you are good at coding, if you are good at finding solutions to software problems, if you get along with people of all different backgrounds, truly nobody cares what your shade of color is, what your ethnic background is, where you were born or how rich your daddy is. Not in the 21st century … Not for the last 30 years that I’ve been in this field. Some of the places I worked at had half the coding workforce being people of ALL shades and colors from all over the world – India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Iran to name a few places.

    What this shows is that a tech companies most important priority by far is not people’s racial or ethnic background but the ability to get the job done and get along with people so that THE COMPANY CAN MAKE MONEY. That’s it. If we’re talking startup companies, their most important priority is just to survive (most startups fail within a few years). Whatever talent helps them survive and make money will be who they are interested in hiring AND keeping. If you happen to have blue skin and possess only one arm NO ONE will care if you can satisfy the above-mentioned criteria. Again I am speaking from experience working for 10 different companies over many years.

    Obsessing over race distracts from finding solutions to the very real problem of the majority of kids of color as well as a significant percentage of white kids in this country having little access to a quality K12 education so that they lack basic real-world skills by the time they get out of high school.

    Why not ditch ideology and laser focus on this one HUGE problem? There is something seriously wrong in this area, and needs to be fixed urgently with whatever solutions work. If something has not been working for decades and public education has only gotten worse and worse perhaps it’s time to rethink public education. Not to dumb it down so that everyone passes regardless of how much they actually learned as is the trend today, but to make sure that everyone who graduates is proficient in basic skills. Based on the results of the last 40 years, the way we’ve been doing public education in this country just has NOT been working. Alarm bells need to go off at this state of affairs! Instead we get politics!

    Without getting too much into the weeds, it certainly feels like bad government policies keep kids tied to bad schools, as one example. Many parents with little access to quality schools are begging that policy to change. Why not give school choice especially in areas where public schools are receiving large sums of money per pupil but are still producing bad results. Or more generally, why not just look around the country with an open mind to see where successful schools have been implemented and are ACTUALLY working based on the actual results! Study why they work and try to replicate more of those models (regardless of ideology) around the country?

    Solving K12 educations would do more than any other single fix to provide access and opportunities for kids in tech and all other field.

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    1. I appreciate your thoughtful note. I would say that just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. At the height of the #MeToo movement, for example, I was absolutely blown away to learn just how much toxicity women that I knew well were experiencing. I had no idea. I accepted that my perspective as a male was blind to their experiences.

      I will also note that you’re arriving here at the difference between interpersonal and structural racism. Structural racism is when the system is racist without any one person behaving in a way that is explicitly racist. For example, the fact that K12 schools in which 90%+ of students are non-white are the ones struggling the most with standardized testing results and college matriculation is not necessarily because there are specific people choosing to behave in a way that is explicitly and personally racist. It’s the result of systems that cannot be disentangled from our country’s racist history. This includes racist mortgage lending practices, disenfranchisement from decisions around how schools are run, and much more.

      Poverty has a structurally racist dynamic. The median impoverished White household holds $13k more in assets than the median impoverished Black household. Education has a structurally racist dynamic. On average, Black men with a BA earn less money than White men without one.

      Your description of a tech community in which no one cares about your background as long as you can code is different from what our alumni have been experiencing.

      That said, I share your restlessness. Resilient Coders is small potatoes — I’ll be the first to say so. We’re a band aid that, quite frankly, shouldn’t need to exist. We need comprehensive and national reform.

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    2. Sam, I appreciate your perspective however, consider that your scope may be limited. I am a recent graduate from Resilient Coders and am currently employed at a FAANG level company. For this specific company, ALL I had to do was prove I could code and get along with people of different backgrounds. However, your assertion that this is the standard in tech is disingenuous. Your experience does not represent tech as a whole even with your decades of experience. My experience in a matter of MONTHS into my tech career is drastically different from the community you’re describing.

      I interviewed with a startup where the Director of Engineering felt the need to explain that there were no “diverse” members on their team. The first round technical interview for this company had ZERO coding questions. They were all CS theory questions, that in no way measured my ability to code (Luckily, Resilient Coders has a robust program that includes theory). Sure, you can say this isn’t about my race specifically, but that doesn’t negate that these gatekeeping measures largely affect people of certain demographics.

      Additionally, let’s consider that the barriers for a career in tech are entirely class/education based. The demographics that are most likely to be left out of education based access as you described above, would still be majority people of color. Couple that with cultural differences, (consider a white middle class tech lead trying to connect with a black candidate from a lower income background during an interview). What does that small talk look like? Two candidates that performed equally in the technical interview may not be considered “equal” when it comes to who is a better “fit” for the team. Del speaks to these issues as a race issue because class, education, race, and culture all go hand in hand.

      You posed issues within the K-12 education system and you are absolutely correct in that it needs reform. “Why not ditch ideology and laser focus on this one HUGE problem?” Well, that’s because it isn’t the only problem that needs to be resolved. Additionally, There are many programs and political initiatives working towards education reform, that will undoubtedly help the children today have more hopeful futures. But what of the millions of disenfranchised folks now? The tech industry needs to change from within and Resilient Coders is successfully doing that.

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