Since the beginning of the year, I have been made an employee of RebelHold, LLC.  It is because of RH, that I am even working as a Ruby on Rails developer.  Prior to last fall all I ever did in RoR was tutorials, tutorials, and more tutorials.  I advertised that I would work for free just to get experience.  Can you believe that NOT ONE PERSON took me up on that offer!

So there I was, a desire to quit my job and become a programmer but no way to do it.  It would be different if I were a college student and could study/practice more but I had a full time job that amounted to working a good 50 - 60 hours per week on salary.

Then I met Michael (@m3talsmith) on Twitter and the rest is pretty much history.  I worked together with Michael and with Fletch (@fzf) by pairing with them and watching them work.  They were available to answer questions and to help me.  Then they offered me a paid internship!!  They offered to pay me hourly to learn and work with them!  Can you believe that?  I was trying to find people to let me work for free just to learn and these guys at RebelHold were going to PAY me to learn RoR.

I quit my day job......

So what is RebelHold?  In Michaels own words:

"Rebelhold is a workers collective, completely worker owned and run.

RebelHold was created to equalize the playing field for workers, providing full health care (with no copays), paid training, equal salaries, and to meet the physical and social needs of communities all around us. We believe that putting the means of production in the hands of the workers is a first step, and that training new people to be able to work in whatever capacity they can is valuable. Every worker is an owner, all decisions are made by consensus, and every worker has the combined responsibility of training others. We are highly motivated to taking care of the needs of others through this process; and open to other processes to help.

To create a mass of workers on equal grounds with each other who are taken care of completely; to pour ourselves in to improving the communities around us through training, through direct action, and through charity as needed; to communicate well with others; and to make high quality software that we can be proud of."

Now mind you we are still in our infancy stage and not all of the ideas have been implemented yet.  Decisions are made by the partners in a community like manner.  There is no Alpha male or boss or anybody in charge.  And opportunity to advance?  Well, I guess to ability to make partner is about as high of advancement that is possible.  As a partner, the incomes are all the same and decisions are made by the partners.  A truly employee owned and operated organization.  Notice that I didn't say company!!  It is more of a group or organization than anything else.

We are always looking to add members to our group.  We intend to have a well rounded group of resources skilled in many facets of programming.  We call interns apprentices as they are learning a skill.  We endorse free training and open-source.  Our website is currently under construction and we are making it a community project called 'Communal' which is and will remain open-sourced.  Many of the things done at Rebelhold are open-sourced.  We are currently talking about Fridays being set aside for just this purpose.  Oh, yeah, we do NOT charge for training!!

If you have read my other posts you know that I am pretty anti charging to teach programming.  Now there are tutorials and the like that I have paid for but not training.  We plan on offering free Ruby and Rails training here locally as has been expressed to the local Ruby::AZ group.  We have given presentations for the group already and will continue to do so in the future.

We are still small at this point but slowly growing.  We will have a great group of programmers because it is fun to be here.  We are RebelHold.