First Factory

Education in Costa Rica

 Education in Costa Rica InfographicAfter a civil war in Costa Rica, the army was abolished in 1948. This event became one of the foundations of Costa Rican culture. A year later, work began for the establishment of a new model of State, including social and labor guarantees, solidarity health plans coverage, human rights and education.

In 1957, these efforts proved to be extremely effective through the issuance of the Fundamental Law of Education. The idea was to build a new “army” of Costa Rica, made up of teachers, armed with books and blackboards. The most important goal was to make Costa Rican society the Central American example of solidarity, education and welfare. Through universal and required primary education, Costa Rican society has been able to achieve this goal.

Costa Rican leaders understood that education was the first step in the advancement of society, and that the improved education model needed to be extended to higher education. Advances in the creation, consolidation and diversification of state higher education in the 1960s and 1970s were accompanied by the expansion of private universities in the 1990s. This expansion provided a wide range of opportunities for the development of different academic profiles, economic and social research and more development of the country.

As of 2018, advances in the quality of education allowed Costa Rica to have two state universities and one private university considered among the best universities in Central America and Mexico. Many other Costa Rican universities, both state and private, hold privileged places within the world rankings.

The Premier Nearshore Destination

On top of the stable political and economic environment, a central location and an oasis of natural beauty, Costa Rica also has incredible human talent to offer.

With an annual 4,000 new graduates going on to engineering and technology careers, Costa Rica is beginning to position itself as an attractive technological development destination for clients from around the world.

A Leader in Technology and Science

How can Costa Rica, a country of only 4.5 million inhabitants, be able to produce so many world-renowned professionals in the areas of technology, medicine and science?

The promotion of free and universal education, and the commitment to create training and education programs have allowed Costa Ricans to develop their full potential in these areas. Quality standards have been established to accredit graduates of state and private universities, ensuring a comprehensive professional profile, which is both attractive and competitive in the current global market. The commitment to education has paid off through the attraction of medical and technological companies looking to Costa Rica as a destination with a skilled and eager talent selection.

Another essential characteristic of Costa Rican education is the study of several languages.  Bilingual, trilingual and technical studies programs have been implemented since the 1990s that give added value to the Costa Rican workforce.

Universities play a central role in the development of the country. Out of 141 higher education centers that exist in the country, more than half are located outside of the Central region, which guarantees all Costa Ricans access to quality education programs.

The following is an overview of the main universities in Costa Rica, listed in order, according to international quality rankings:

  • Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) Public University

National Ranking: 1
Latin American Ranking: 18
Global Ranking: 411

  • Universidad Nacional (UNA) Public University

National Ranking: 2
Latin American Ranking: 50
Global Ranking: 801

  • Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC) Public University

National Ranking: 3

  • Universidad Latina de Costa Rica (ULatina) Private University

National Ranking: 6
Latin American Ranking: 201

  • Universidad Latinoamericana de Ciencia y Tecnología (ULACIT) Private University

National Ranking: 8
Latin American Ranking:122

  • Centro de Formación en Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación (Cenfotec) Private University 

National Ranking: 23

Costa Rican Higher Education in numbers

  • The five state universities enroll more than 102,000 students annually, while the 54 private universities in the country absorb 105,000 students per year.
  • More than 15,000 new professionals graduate from state universities each year and enter the labor market.
  • Private universities graduate around 45,000 people per year. This difference is due to the length of state university programs being longer than the private institutions.
  • 94% of the graduates of state universities manage to place themselves in jobs related to their profession.
  • Every year in Costa Rica, about 4,000 people from the universities graduate from an engineering program.
  • The lowest percentage of unemployment in graduates is presented in the areas of Engineering and Health Sciences.
  • This year Texas Tech University will be open in Costa Rica, expanding the academic offerings of the country.

University overall stats

  • Gender distribution: 55% of university students are women and they graduate relatively more often than men. Nonetheless only 7% of women choose a career path related to Engineering and Technology. Historically, most women chose Education, Social Sciences or Business Administration as majors. 22% of the total of graduates in technology and engineering are women.
  • Age distribution: Most students enroll at age 18 in public universities and graduate between ages 23-26, while 42% of private university students are 25 years or older. By 2017 48.5% of Costa Ricans between ages 18 and 25 were enrolled in Higher Education Program. Overall 25% of the adult population in Costa Rica has a University degree.
  • Enrollment rates: Most public universities offer financial aid, scholarships and lower enrollment fees. A year in a public university will cost, at the most, $600. Private universities have higher enrollment fees and fewer financial aid or scholarship options. The tuition of a year of private education can cost up to $2,000.
  • Academic Offer: By 2017 the estimated amount of careers offered was 1300,  mostly in Education, Social Sciences and Economic Sciences. 19% of the academic offer is focused in Technology related areas (Software engineering and the like). 94% of postgraduate programs for Technology fields are offered in public institutions.
  • Demographics: 75% of university students come from urban areas.

Software Development Talent Pool of Costa Rica

First Factory is uniquely designed to foster a culture of continuous learning with its talented developers in Costa Rica. The market may not be as tough as Silicon Valley in San Francisco or Silicon Alley in New York, but it is competitive, nonetheless.  There are dozens of outsourcing software development companies with bases in Costa Rica, and many major companies have large footprints here.

So, why is Costa Rica such a hub for software development?

A Bit of History

Good education, stable government and a great trade partner.  In 1948, Costa Rica disbanded their military and redirected their funds toward education. With an education-first philosophy, the younger generation of Costa Rica began learning English very early on and have been using it for most of their lives.

Costa Rica has enjoyed strong and stable economic growth. Costa Rica and The United States have a long, formal diplomatic relationship, and trade between both countries is strong. High quality agriculture exports such as coffee, bananas and sugar make Costa Rica a strong trading partner, and the country’s political stability and relatively high education levels make foreign investment in Costa Rica very attractive. Costa Rica secures one of the highest levels of foreign direct investment per capita in Latin America.

The combination of outside investment, strong education systems, and high levels of English proficiency yields an environment that produces a talented workforce and provides an excellent source of recent graduates that are looking for work.

Recruitment

First Factory is well connected in the development community and is able to attract and retain great talent.  In addition to targeted recruitment ads on job sites, we leverage a growing social and professional network of over 12 thousand people. This community follows our team through our Facebook posts, and other channels, celebrating our culture and highlighting our developers. We work directly with developers and recruiters on a regular basis to identify candidates with whom we can directly communicate when the right role becomes available, thus reducing the time to hire. Once our network is energized about our open positions, we begin a thorough screening process to ensure that only the best candidates make it through.

Hiring Process

After an initial resume screening, applicants must pass a recorded spoken English assessment that places them at or above a professionally-acceptable level of proficiency.  The second assessment is a coding challenge on the HackerRank platform which times, records and assesses basic conceptual understanding and working skills specific to the role and language for which we are hiring. Everything about their assessment is evaluated and the entire session can be played back to review even the smallest details, including the edits the applicant made to their own code.  Candidates that successfully pass the English and Skills-based screening process are invited to a technical assessment video call with two of our senior developers. Only those candidates who show strong skills or great promise (depending on the level we are hiring for) are invited to an in-person interview which seeks to further evaluate technical skill (sometimes including a paired programming session), evaluate a cultural fit, and establish expectations for internal and client relations. It is a tough process, but a necessary one. Only those with the right chemistry and the unique combination of skill, will, and a strong desire for self-improvement will make the team.

Onboarding

Our efforts to provide our clients with the best developers doesn’t stop at the point of hire. We actively coach and support our developers through their entire career at First Factory. Perhaps this is why we have significantly lower turnover rates than others in the industry. We are hands-on with each developer and establish training programs for each based on their current skill level, from entry level to senior developer.

Entry Level Developers are placed into a customized training program to reinforce foundational knowledge of object-oriented programming, test driven development, and to refine soft skills needed for successful client relations. Training programs last up to six months, with the first half of our Academy focused on technical skill building and the soft skills required to effectively communicate with our clients and within the team. The second half of our Academy is spent building actual internal products using the latest technologies and design patterns.

Junior Developers are indoctrinated to the common Agile practices, internal standards, and tasks geared toward exceeding client expectations. Junior Developers are assigned mentors (senior developers with an average of 5 years experience) who provide ongoing coaching, review code, and help identify options for impediment resolution. Junior Developers are never on a client solo, as a senior developer is assigned a few hours per week to help with code reviews, architectural decisions, impediments, and communication, if necessary.

Feedback and Coaching

All employees receive feedback and additional coaching. All Entry Level and Junior Developers are formally evaluated every six months for their first two years where we provide 360 degree feedback, including input from clients.  Mid and Senior Level Developers are reviewed annually with the same 360 degree feedback. All Senior Developers meet weekly in one-on-one sessions with the COO to discuss team performance, client satisfaction, professional development and more. Our Senior Developers and our in-house computer science professor conduct workshops for the company during lunch and learn sessions and are available to all for problem solving and guidance. We have open office space and rotate seats regularly to foster communication, ensure that growing teams stay together and that Senior Developers are embedded throughout.

We keep all developers active, whether working for clients or skill building. Developers that are not assigned to clients, as part of a staff augmentation model, lead our project-based work. When developers are between clients or client-based projects, they balance their time between learning new technologies and supporting internally developed products, thus always refining their skills. There is never down time that leaves developers idle or without direction.

First Factory is known in Costa Rica as a great place to work. It is known that to be hired here, you must be very good at what you do. We hold ourselves to high standards so that we exceed our client expectations and preserve a truly unique and remarkable culture.

First Factory Software Testing Procedures

All clients have unique development needs and different budgets. Given the best case scenario, and a client who understands the need for thorough testing, the following describes our software testing procedures:

Automated Deployments

By automatically deploying software builds across different stages of system environments (Development, QA, Staging, Production), we perform System testing. This ensures that the software works within different environments and that the deploy has everything it needs to function properly in the final stage, production. Let’s break it down by individual stages to give you a better sense of what this all means.

  • Development is where the developers do their work and their independent testing
  • QA is where a dedicated QA resource will test the build
  • Staging is where we do a smoke test, you do your beta testing and acceptance testing
  • Production is where the live product resides

Developer Environment

In the development environment, the developer does their individual unit testing, the team does code review and automated process run regression tests.

Unit testing is the process of testing each component, and group of components independently, to ensure they behave as expected. For a given set of input, the component(s) should return the same results. This can be done with code and the results can be evaluated automatically with a push of a button. This allows us to do automated regression testing.

We strive for 80-90% code coverage, meaning that 80-90% of the code that we write can be automatically tested to make sure that it continues to behave as expected with each new piece of code that we introduce.

Code review means that every line of code that is delivered to the build is reviewed by a peer on the team. This second set of eyes validates that the code is written well, is clear and does what the requirements specify. Doing a code review in this fashion helps find bugs early in the process and produces more quality code.

After code review, comments are logged in the source control system and the developer makes the appropriate adjustments. Then we come to continuous integration.

Continuous integration is the process of automatically testing and building the software with every push of the code to source control. Doing this ensures that the regression testing created by the automated use cases is run frequently. Bugs created by new software are identified immediately.

Quality Assurance Environment

Using an Agile Scrum methodology, we strive to deliver workable software with each two week Sprint. This workable software can now be tested as a whole (Integration Testing), and tested to ensure that it meets the original requirements (Functional Testing).

A dedicated QA resource (not a software developer) works with the requirements to write a verbose test plan for every feature of a project. As these features are delivered, the QA resource can manually test each plan by following its steps.

It is possible to automate a lot of the functional and integration testing, but some level of manual testing is always required.

The QA resource then either passes the delivery, or opens tickets with detailed failures for the developers to fix before the build is passed. If the build passes functional and integration testing, the build is moved to staging where it is prepped for delivery.

Staging Environment

This is a shared environment where we give the product one last look over before handing it off to the client for beta and user acceptance testing. Before making any delivery to our clients, the quality assurance individual will do a manual smoke test to ensure major functionality is still working in the new environment that the software has been pushed to.

Early on with any project delivery, as an extra precaution, either the COO or the CEO will perform a smoke test to make sure that the project can be delivered to the client.

Once delivered to staging, it is the client’s responsibility to perform beta testing with a subset of their users, and ultimately user acceptance testing to sign off that the build is a success, and should be pushed to production where it will be used.

As the project becomes more mature, the frequency of deployments should be very regular and quick. Automated testing in prior stages should give us increased confidence that working functionality is not broken with each subsequent deployment.

Other Special Case Testing

In some cases, depending on the project, additional specific testing needs to be done.

  • Usability Testing: This is when we make sure that the product being developed is intuitive to the user. If it is not, we can make adjustments to the user interface so that the application is more usable. Early on, usability testing can be done from paper, clickable mockups or a shell of the application. As the project progresses, usability comments should always be addressed in each revision of the software.
  • Vulnerability Testing: All public facing applications will be tested for vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and other hacks that can potentially allow the attacker access to data or the ability to corrupt data. Vulnerability testing can be done through automated test cases and by exploratory testing.
  • Stress & Performance Testing: For applications that can be used by large numbers of people over a short amount of time, we can automate stress and performance testing. This ensures the project can handle larger than expected amounts of usage.