Engineer Chooses Nonprofit Start-Up Over Microsoft Job — but Gets to Keep Both

As Kevin Wang considered his options for supporting his nascent computer-science education nonprofit, his thoughts turned to his driveway. Specifically, to his white Porsche 911, which he loved to drive to his job at Microsoft in Seattle.

If he was going to quit his engineering career and commit full-time to his nonprofit, which paired computer-science professionals with local high-school teachers to improve the quality of technology education, that beautiful car would have to go.

“There are certain priorities in life, and I was thinking computer-science education and helping classroom teachers learn was more important,” says Wang, now 38.

Ultimately, he sold the Porsche — but he didn’t have to quit his job. That’s because when Microsoft caught wind of Wang’s plan, the company offered to adopt the education program and keep him on the payroll. It’s an unusual example of a corporation taking an active philanthropic role by bringing a nonprofit program in-house.

“A lot of stand-alone nonprofits have certain missions, and it’s rare those match exactly with a company’s mission,” Wang says. “I understand how incredibly lucky I am.”

Tough Choice

When setting their career paths, young professionals can feel torn between doing good for others and doing well for themselves. Wang knows this dilemma well. When he was nine, his family moved to the United States from Shanghai with about $200. His mother worked at a bakery, his father in a warehouse spooling telephone wires.

“It was quite a treat to have a McDonald’s Christmas meal,” he says.

Then his dad earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from North Dakota State University and moved the family to the Bay Area so he could take a job in Silicon Valley. From a young age Wang was interested in educating others: He tutored during high school and taught at a robotics summer camp during his college years.

After college, where he studied electrical engineering, computer science, and art history, he taught computer science at a Catholic school. He subsequently earned a master’s degree in computer-science education at Harvard University.

His engineering skills landed him a job at Microsoft. But after several years working on major projects like Office 365 and Microsoft Cloud, he says, “I got the teaching itch again.”

So in 2009, Wang made an arrangement with a local high school. If it scheduled its computer-science class first thing in the morning, he would teach it — and then head to his Microsoft job.

By Thanksgiving, several other schools caught wind of the arrangement. They wanted part-time computer-science teachers, too. The high demand laid bare schools’ struggles to attract and retain people who could teach technology classes, since the private sector can pay them handsomely to work as engineers.

“The high school literally within a three-minute walk of Microsoft didn’t have computer science,” Wang says. “It was a big, big problem.”

Making His Move

Soon Wang found himself driving to multiple schools each month, checking in on the engineers-turned-teachers he had placed in each institution. By the time he got up to 35 schools, he realized he had a decision to make: stay at Microsoft or commit full-time to his project, which he called Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, or TEALS.

“That was not something I could do on my lunch break, early mornings, or after work,” he says.

Wang decided to go all in on building TEALS into a full-fledged nonprofit and quit Microsoft. But Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, recognized an opportunity.

“Rather than losing Kevin to a start-up, Satya wanted to retain a talented employee with a passion to do good and to build out the potential for TEALS to scale quickly to have real impact,” said Mary Snapp, who heads Microsoft Philanthropies, through a spokesman. “Working within Microsoft, TEALS could build on the company’s commitment to computer-science education in schools and to address the urgent need for teachers who can teach the subject.”

Now Wang runs the program full time with Microsoft’s money and support. It’s taken off. During the 2017-2018 school year, 1,050 volunteers are serving 349 high schools in 29 states, plus D.C. About a quarter of volunteers are Microsoft employees.

Classroom volunteers teach computer science while simultaneously helping teachers — whose specialties are often math or business — master the curriculum, too. Once the teachers are ready to lead on their own, the volunteers “fade into the background,” Wang says. “We’re teaching the teachers to teach.”

Culture of Giving Back

There’s an unfair perception among some in the nonprofit world that engineers don’t want to give back to their communities, Wang says. He has found the opposite to be true. Just as lawyers take pro bono cases and doctors work in free clinics, “engineers are professionals and want to give back to the community in their area of expertise,” he says.

Emily Johnson, a software-development engineer for Amazon in Seattle, has volunteered with TEALS for three years. For her first assignment, she and three other volunteers worked with a math and finance teacher during an 8 a.m. Advanced Placement computer-science class.

“It’s satisfying when you’re explaining something to somebody and you see the light go on that they finally understand it, and how excited they are about it, too,” she says. “I get a lot out of my job. I get fulfillment out of it. I like the idea of being able to use my skills and education in a more direct setting.”

Diverse Interest

Nearly half of students who responded to a TEALS survey said they were more likely to want a computer-science career because of the program. TEALS eagerly points out that 32 percent of students in its classrooms are underrepresented minorities, and 30 percent are girls.

“I really like the involvement of trying to get more women and minorities interested in this field and become a role model for some of those people,” Johnson says. “I get to demystify what a software engineer does.”

The Blue Cross Blue Shield office in Birmingham, Ala., encouraged its employees to volunteer with TEALS in part to help build a stronger pool of local job applicants who know computer science. That’s how Ashanti Bradford, a systems analyst, heard about the opportunity. She ended up volunteering in the same school system she attended as a child.

She likes demonstrating to her students that there are “people who look like them who can go out and make great careers.”

Coal Country

One-tenth of TEALS classrooms are in rural schools, which often receive volunteer instruction remotely using video conference calls. Wang hopes his program can help rural communities in the country’s interior catch up to the economic growth he’s witnessed in coastal cities like Seattle by preparing kids for technology careers.

The opportunity his dad got to study engineering at North Dakota State “immediately boosted our family into middle class in the U.S.,” Wang says. “This is the reason that I wanted TEALS to be in North Dakota.”

He was pleased to hear that in one Kentucky high school, a TEALS student recently received a scholarship to study computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.

It’s one step toward demonstrating to school systems across the country, Wang says, that “the most precious natural resources we have are the kids.”

Note: This article has been updated to include Kevin Wang’s age.