Software Engineering
12 ready for release
A professional rehabilitation organization
Junior in. Senior out.
That's the whole thing.
The Yard is a professional rehabilitation organization for early-career workers displaced by the AI economy. We hire everyone. We keep no one. We consider both of those things a success.
Live intake counter
340
currently rehabilitating, across 67 disciplines
1,847
released to date
94%
release rate. We are proud of this number and also it is the whole point.
Facility, est. 2023
Muddy boots, full inbox
The premise, stated plainly
Something is happening to junior professionals.
CEOs discovered that ‘we're investing in AI’ is a sentence that raises stock prices. Layoffs followed. Not because the work disappeared. Because the work could be reframed as automated, at least long enough for the quarterly report.
The people let go were mostly juniors. People one, two, three years into careers they'd worked their whole lives to begin. People who hadn't yet accumulated enough experience to be protected by it.
Here is what nobody is saying out loud: when today's juniors don't get to become tomorrow's seniors, there will be no seniors. The pipeline doesn't pause. It empties.
The Yard is not a solution to this problem. It is a response to it. We take in as many as we can, give them real work, real mentorship, and real experience — and when they're ready, we open the gate.
How The Yard works
For junior professionals.
Five stages. Each one designed to end. The last one most of all.
- 01
Intake
Apply with whatever you have. A degree, a half-finished portfolio, a certification, a genuine interest in a field you haven't worked in yet. We assess not what you've done but what you could do with real work in front of you.
- 02
Placement
You are matched with live projects appropriate to your discipline and slightly beyond your current comfort level. This is intentional. Growth does not happen inside the comfort level.
- 03
The Work
Real projects. Real clients. Real deadlines. Real consequences when things go wrong, and real credit when they go right. The Yard does not simulate professional experience. It provides it.
- 04
Mentorship
Every Yard intake is paired with a senior-level mentor from their discipline — professionals who remember what it felt like to not know things yet, and who have agreed to help anyway.
- 05
Release
When your skills, portfolio, and professional confidence reach a threshold determined jointly by you and your mentor, you leave. We help you find where you're going. We celebrate your departure. We do not offer you a retention package.
For clients
Good work, supervised, with something to prove.
The Yard takes on real work from real organizations at below-market rates. In exchange, you get talented early-career professionals supervised by experienced mentors, genuinely motivated to prove themselves, and structurally incapable of coasting.
Nobody at The Yard is comfortable enough to be lazy. We consider this a feature.
Submit a projectCurrent intake board
Who's in the facility right now.
Updated as residents arrive and depart. Headcounts are accurate as of this morning's stand-up.
47 in intake
Graphic Design
6 ready for release
Construction Management
2 ready for release
Library Science
We built them a library. They are thriving.
Urban Planning
1 ready for release
Journalism
High volume. The market is particularly bad right now.
Marketing
9 ready for release
Architecture
3 ready for release
Data Analysis
7 ready for release
Film Production
Currently producing a documentary about The Yard. We have mixed feelings about this.
Legal Research
4 ready for release
Music Production
We're not entirely sure how we're going to place these ones but we'll figure it out.
Logistics & Supply Chain
3 ready for release
Education
We have started a school. This was not the plan.
Miscellaneous
We do not turn people away. We have a political science major running our internal research department. A classics major is handling client communications and she is, genuinely, the best writer in the building. A former sommelier is managing our project intake process with a level of discernment we did not anticipate. We find a way.
The Release Wall
Everyone we've opened the gate for.
Names anonymized to initials after 90 days. Destinations real, verified, celebrated. A small sample shown below.
J.K.
Frontend Development
Intake March 2023 ·Released November 2023
Mid-size fintech, Chicago.
A.M.
Graphic Design
Intake January 2023 ·Released September 2023
Independent studio, Portland. Started her own thing six months later.
T.O.
Construction Management
Intake June 2023 ·Released February 2024
Returned to his previous employer, who had laid him off, at a senior level and 40% higher salary. He asked us not to comment on this. We are commenting anyway.
R.L.
Library Science
Intake August 2023 ·Released April 2024
Head of collections, university library, New Mexico. Cried at her release. We also cried.
D.P.
Journalism
Intake February 2024 ·Released October 2024
Staff writer, regional outlet, Philadelphia. First byline published three weeks after release. We have it framed.
S.N.
Data Analysis
Intake May 2023 ·Released January 2024
Public health department, Minneapolis.
K.V.
Urban Planning
Intake October 2023 ·Released June 2024
City planning office, Tucson.
M.B.
Marketing
Intake April 2023 ·Released December 2023
Outdoor apparel brand, Boulder. Sends us postcards.
E.R.
Architecture
Intake July 2023 ·Released May 2024
Restoration firm specializing in historic libraries. Yes, really.
C.H.
Legal Research
Intake September 2023 ·Released April 2024
Public defender's office, Newark.
1,847 releases. We track every one. Not because we have to. Because they're the whole point.
The mentors
The people who remember.
The Yard's mentors are people who understand, viscerally, that their expertise did not come from nowhere. It came from early opportunities, from patient supervisors, from the chance to fail without it being fatal.
They are here because they remember who gave them that chance, and because they are not naive about what happens to an industry when the pipeline breaks.
Mentors at The Yard do not get paid. They get something harder to quantify and, we are told, more satisfying.
I have forty years in structural engineering. If I don't pass it on, it stops with me. That's not acceptable.
My first boss gave me work I wasn't ready for and stood behind me while I figured it out. That's all I'm doing.
I've released eleven people. Three of them I've since worked with professionally as equals. That's the best thing that's ever happened in my career and I didn't build anything.
I'm a retired librarian. The Yard called and asked if I'd come in for a few hours a week. I've been here every day for eight months. I don't know what to tell you.
The intake process
Apply. Tell us what happened.
We do not require a polished CV. We do not require references from jobs that let you go. We do not require you to present yourself as more ready than you are.
We have never turned away an applicant we couldn't find a place for. This has required creativity on seventeen occasions. We consider creativity part of the job.
The Yard does not have a waitlist. We expand to meet intake volume. This is financially complicated and operationally challenging and we do it anyway.
For organizations
Submit a project.
The Yard accepts real projects from organizations who want good work done and understand that junior means early, not incapable.
Your project is staffed by intake professionals appropriate to the discipline, supervised by a senior mentor, and delivered with the urgency of people who have something to prove.
We charge below market. The difference is the mentorship overhead, which we absorb. You get the work. They get the experience. That's the arrangement.
We do not take projects that exist only to give juniors something to do. We take projects that matter and trust our intake to rise to them. They usually do.
We once accepted a project to catalog and digitize a county historical archive because a history major came through intake and we needed to find her something real to do. The county now has a fully searchable digital archive. She is now a records manager for the state. This is a normal Yard story.
What we accept
- Real client work
- Internal organizational projects
- Nonprofit initiatives
- Civic projects
- Research
- Infrastructure documentation
- Archival work
- Communications
- Design
- Development
- Analysis
The economics
Explained with unusual transparency.
The Yard is a nonprofit. Our operating costs are covered by project revenue, individual donors, and a small number of institutional funders who understand what we're doing and why it matters.
We do not take venture capital. We have been asked. The terms always include something about growth metrics that conflict with our release policy.
We are not trying to scale. We are trying to do this right, in as many places as we can, without becoming something else in order to do it.
If you would like to fund The Yard, we will tell you exactly what your money does. We will name the people it helps. We will tell you when they leave and where they go. We think that's the best pitch we have.
A note from The Yard
On AI.
We are not anti-technology.
We are anti-pretense. We are against the specific practice of announcing AI transformation as a growth strategy while the transformation in question is primarily a headcount reduction affecting the most vulnerable people in an organization.
Junior professionals are not inefficient. They are inexperienced. These are different things. Inexperience is temporary. The elimination of the conditions that resolve it is not.
AI will need to be built, maintained, corrected, and directed by people who understand the domains it operates in. Those people develop that understanding over years of junior-level work. If you eliminate the junior years, you eliminate the pipeline that produces the people who can actually use the tools.
We did not build The Yard to fight AI. We built it to survive a particular moment in its adoption. We hope the moment passes. We are not waiting for it to.
From the released
They left. They wrote back.
I was laid off eleven days after my one-year review, which had been positive. The Yard took me in two weeks later. I was released eight months after that. I am now a mid-level developer at a company that has never used the word 'AI-washing' unironically. I think about The Yard every day.
I have a degree in library science. Do you know how many libraries are hiring? The Yard built one, put me in charge of it, and then spent six months connecting me with every library director their mentors knew. I have a job. I have a career. I have a reference who watched me build something from nothing.
The hardest part was the release. I didn't want to leave. My mentor told me that was exactly the right time to go. She was right. She is usually right. That is why she is the mentor.
They gave me real work. Not busy work. Real work with real stakes. I made real mistakes. Nobody fired me for them. That has never happened to me before or since and I think about what it meant constantly.
I came in as a graphic designer. I left as a graphic designer who knew what she was doing. The difference is enormous and very hard to put on a resume and The Yard helped me figure out how to put it on a resume anyway.