[HN Gopher] Single mom sues coding boot camp over job placement ...
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Single mom sues coding boot camp over job placement rates
Author : akanet
Score : 36 points
Date : 2022-04-15 21:36 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| cryptoaquinas wrote:
| lvl102 wrote:
| 1) You can find free materials all over Youtube in 2022. There's
| no reason for "bootcamps" and 99% of them are useless. These pay-
| only-if-you-get-hired schools are gimmicky at best. Build 4-5
| real-world demos/products. It's really not that hard these days
| to piece that together in a couple of weeks. It's literally
| building LEGO.
|
| 2) They still don't teach you how to really code in most
| undergraduate CS programs and curriculum absolutely sucks for
| non-academics. 99% of the population is not interested AND smart
| enough for academia so why are they still teaching you nonsense
| for four years? Boggles my mind.
|
| 3) So between those two major labor sources, you can see why we
| are still experiencing developer shortages decades after the dot-
| com rush. No one is out there teaching people how to properly
| code. The fact that best resources are well-documented open-
| source projects says a lot about this industry and why there's so
| much gatekeeping going on.
| jbirer wrote:
| lucb1e wrote:
| You have _no idea_ what the circumstances were, her major life
| decisions are none of your business, plus it is entirely
| irrelevant to the lawsuit. For all you know the father died of
| something horrible and entirely out of their control, or maybe
| she isn 't heterosexual, or there could be so many things. This
| comment seems short-sighted or flamebait, I cannot tell which.
| uuyi wrote:
| listenallyall wrote:
| The article is entirely unclear about whether she paid anything
| to Lambda School, or whether she currently owes anything to them.
|
| > She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science
| programs
|
| "Took out" of where? Her bank account? Why would she be in an
| income-share if she paid $30,000 up front?
|
| > for any student's ISA payments to be activated ... landed a
| role leveraging skills learned at Lambda School that pays $50K or
| more in salary.
|
| She has not earned anything from being a web developer. So it
| would appear she doesn't owe Lambda anything. Are they suing her?
| roguecoder wrote:
| That's not how crimes work.
|
| The crimes happened whether or not she paid them money, and any
| harm is enough harm to sue. If you spend your time, that is
| still something you spent. If the person you spent it on was
| committing fraud at the time, that's a crime.
| ipnon wrote:
| It seems like she took the ISA, then took out a personal loan
| to cover external expenses of taking the course. This is
| unfortunate, but it doesn't look like it's Bloom's fault.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The faults she's suing for would be deceptive business claims
| about placement rates, program strength, and the hiding of
| illegal behavior.
| yakak wrote:
| I don't really get the claim about misrepresenting their
| financial incentives.. Is there a lender in the middle that pays
| the school a lesser amount and assumes the risk? I can't imagine
| they qualify for a federal educational loan guarantee.
| akanet wrote:
| in my first story[1] on lambda school, my point about
| misrepresented financial incentives was about, fundamentally,
| lambda selling off its ISAs to a hedge fund. in this case, the
| school managed to recoup income on a students irrespective of
| whether they found the job.
|
| [1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-
| job-p...
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Generally these ISAs get securitized, so the risk shifts off
| the school's books and the school just gets paid the cut for
| originating the security.
|
| That being said bootcamps (or really school in general) are not
| a magic bullet that automatically gets you a job. Even a
| bachelor's in CS might not get you the skills needed to become
| a web developer. The core point of a real degree is it teaches
| you how to learn and instills basic principles that apply
| generally to any field. But you still need to put in the effort
| to learn domain specific things.
| [deleted]
| lucb1e wrote:
| What would be actually interesting, and core to the story, but is
| of course entirely omitted from the article, is the alleged and
| actual placement rate.
| akanet wrote:
| btw, this story is notable in that, unlike the other cases
| brought by the NSLDN, this student opted out of the arbitration
| clause in her ISA and can therefore sue in civil court. This
| confers numerous advantages, including being able to compel
| discovery.
| kodah wrote:
| I was reminded by someone at my company that by opting out of
| my companies arbitration clause _I_ can also be sued directly
| by a multi billion dollar corporation. I 'm not a fan of
| arbitration clauses, but even having the opportunity to sue is
| not tipping the scales much.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a great excuse for an arbitration
| clause. Unless you're in a position to alter the contract,
| the terms of arbitration are chosen by your employer. They
| wouldn't set themselves up for failure by handing out too
| many protections by adding an arbitration clause; if the
| company doesn't benefit, they would avoid the clause.
|
| I don't know the terms of your clause, but I haven't heard of
| any arbitration clause that's beneficial to the party not
| writing up the contract.
| 32gbsd wrote:
| qiskit wrote:
| Community colleges should really be filling this role not for-
| profit vultures preying on the poor and the desperate. Can't
| community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp
| equivalent?
|
| Does the $30K income sharing agreement mean that she has to pay
| $30K to the school once she starts working? And if that's after
| tax, then doesn't it mean she'll have to make around $50K to have
| $30K in after-tax income to pay back the school?
| okaram wrote:
| They do ... but it is called an associates degree and takes 3-4
| semesters. A one semester course is snake oil in most cases.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| My guess is the community college can't attract a teacher who
| knows the topics well and a bootcamp can. Note: I'm not saying
| all bootcamp teachers are good, nor am I saying community
| college teachers are bad. Rather I'm completely guessing that
| bootcamps pay teachers significantly more than community
| colleges and I'm making the assumption that would attract more
| talented teachers "on average".
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| {{citation needed}}
|
| Longstanding experience is that tone is set at the top (i.e.
| the President and Dean), consequently the level of teaching
| is much more dependent on the leadership than on the money.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Community colleges could probably do it for cheaper, but they
| probably wouldn't do it as well. Most colleges are really
| terrible as teaching relevant material.
|
| My friend learned more about coding from 4 months of FlatIron
| than I learned going to a prestigious state school for 4 years.
| ipnon wrote:
| Hot take: All of the information in boot camps is available
| online for free, and people who aren't willing to search for it
| and self-learn have a harder time breaking into the industry.
| Any programming job requires solving new problems everyday.
| People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep
| hill to climb.
| ravenstine wrote:
| As someone who went to a coding bootcamp (Dev Bootcamp), I
| have to agree.
|
| Most of what I got out of doing the bootcamp was being
| surrounded by other coders, collaborating on stuff in person,
| and being exposed to the bay area tech scene.
|
| I don't regret going and I had some really great times there,
| but if today someone asked me if they should go to a
| bootcamp, I would suggest recreating that experience
| themselves at a fraction of the price.
|
| Here's what I would suggest:
|
| - Take online courses and use Stack Overflow. Everything
| that's available for cheap or free is better than anything I
| was taught at bootcamp.
|
| - If you can, move to somewhere that has some semblance of a
| tech scene, and find the smallest, cheapest cubby hole to
| live in so you don't have to worry so much about paying rent.
| At most, have a part time job that won't interfere with your
| studies, but even better if you don't need to work.
|
| - Go to tech meetups, mixers, etc. Start networking ASAP.
| Meet other coders. Do presentations, no matter how novice the
| topic.
|
| - Start blogging about what you're learning.
|
| - Have some project to show for your effort to your potential
| first employers. Doesn't matter how dumb and impractical it
| is. I attribute part of my initial success to hammering out a
| live chat with playlist and rewind control on top of YouTube
| years before YouTube implemented that themselves.
|
| - Practice working your butt off. If you really want to
| achieve your goal, you'll stay up late to solve problems when
| it's necessary.
|
| - Make sure you're having fun at every step of the way and
| don't let people distract you.
|
| There, I may have just saved you thousands of dollars.
| Potentially that can all be done for free depending on where
| you're situated geographically or how much money you're
| sitting on.
|
| If you know what a shell script is, you probably don't need a
| bootcamp. That said, if you are completely clueless to tech,
| _maybe_ a bootcamp would be a good thing. Depending on the
| bootcamp, of course.
| gh02t wrote:
| Isn't the actual material covered in these camps secondary?
| What people want is a certificate to put on their resume and
| some help with networking/placement. I mean I also think
| these programs are just as ripe for shady dealings as places
| like ITT Tech, but that's why people are paying into them.
| ipnon wrote:
| Everyone still has to jump through the
| Leetcode/whiteboard/design hoops to get in the door. My
| impression from working with bootcamp grads is that they
| are well-prepared for this trial, better than CS grads. The
| bootcamps don't teach them any theory that will "never" be
| used on the job.
| arcticbull wrote:
| While true they still need a certification to put on a
| resume to get past recruiters. It's fine to think they
| shouldn't but IRL they probably do.
| sshine wrote:
| There's also the people who just need a bit of guidance
| before they can improvise.
|
| They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and
| "can only repeat from memory".
| mindvirus wrote:
| If you want to learn pretty much anything the information is
| there, but it's not curated, and you don't have the support
| of a guide. Especially if you're new to the field, you don't
| necessarily know how to even ask the right questions about
| where to start or how to get unstuck.
|
| To make an analogy, if you were learning to exercise for the
| first time, the information is out there, but there's a ton
| of bad and conflicting information out there too, and if
| you're not careful you'll make no progress or even get hurt.
| So it makes sense to hire a trainer or learn from friends,
| especially in the beginning.
| blowski wrote:
| In my teens and early 20s, I had all the time in the world to
| experiment. As a middle-aged father, I get very few hours to
| learn, and so have to use them efficiently. Being spoon-fed
| helps a lot with that. It's an especially acute problem given
| how much junk info exists on the internet.
|
| If you can afford the time to spend a whole day learning how
| to solve the problem yourself, it's probably the best way to
| learn. But if we restrict the industry to those who can
| afford that time, we'll be poorer for it. Many people can be
| good developers despite going through a different learning
| path.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I disagree with this hot take and I'm a hiring manager. I
| know for a fact recruiters aren't going to be forwarding
| resumes from single moms who self-teach learn python the hard
| way purely because there's no job experience or credential,
| even a shitty one. They won't even give her a time of day to
| send a seedy LinkedIn message. Resumes like that will be
| sorted out even if she might be brilliant, intelligent, and
| just needs a chance.
|
| At least boot camps I know do job placement as well as the
| camp itself. An entirely self taught person has all the chips
| stacked against them.
| psyc wrote:
| I'd say I have always been conspicuously amazing at learning
| in isolation, from written text alone. However, it is still
| the case that I learn even better in a room with other people
| and some direction. So I can understand why it helps people.
| Also, it's a kind of credential.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I've hired plenty of engineers; most hiring managers know
| that.
|
| Problem 1: it's too easy to apply to jobs. Unqualified people
| blast resumes at you. If each resume takes you 2-3 minutes
| for a fast discard, and 15+ minutes to really look at, but
| only a handful of seconds for someone to send to you...
|
| Problem 2: interviews aren't all that useful, and junior
| people don't have a track record to rely on. When I hire
| someone, I'm investing piles of senior eng time onboarding,
| etc. A bootcamp is a useful filter for candidate being worth
| the effort (time, $, opportunity cost) to hire and train.
|
| To quote you,
|
| > _People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a
| steep hill to climb_
|
| A bootcamp -- much like a college degree -- shows drive,
| motivation, and the ability to execute over time. Is this
| exclusive to bootcamp or college graduates? Absolutely not,
| and I've hired people with neither. But again, hiring is very
| time expensive.
| warent wrote:
| Being an autodidact is not a requirement for being smart
| enough to become an engineer. Some of the most brilliant
| people I know happen to have a very hard time with self-
| teaching.
|
| Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an
| autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career
| still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Absolutely. I worked without effective teaching for the
| first five years of my career, and I was okay at my job.
| But I learned more in the first six months with solid
| feedback from skilled developers than I had in five years
| of stumbling around on my own.
|
| There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself,
| especially how to make code that is easy for other people
| to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively.
| People who focus on teaching themselves are doing
| themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a
| disservice.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I'm a hiring manager and coder. This last 12 months alone,
| i've interviewed 100+ engineers.
|
| Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the
| bootcamp's perverse incentives:
|
| - Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be
| senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after
| leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing
| them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job
| market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an
| engineers learning curve looks like.
|
| This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find
| the above to be true. They're not students, they're
| customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale.
|
| I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to
| self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I find it varies a lot by bootcamp. It seems like the ones
| coming out of the Ruby community frequently have better
| pedagogy & more realistic expectations than the ones
| teaching React & pretending that's all there is to software
| engineering.
|
| React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who
| are only experienced with React end up completely
| unprepared when they need to start creating their own
| abstractions.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| If the typical ads on YouTube for bootcamps are any
| indication, I can believe the self worth issue.
|
| The clear implication is that you finish the bootcamp and
| you will be on top of the world.
| goldcd wrote:
| Exploitative education has been around for decades - I'm
| just bemused how it manages to survive in IT. And I do
| blame 'IT' for not snuffing it out. With a computer and an
| internet connection, there's more education available for
| free than any one person could ever need. I'm non-
| technical, but can't see why anybody couldn't take the
| skills and say contribute to a open source project to build
| a CV that could be taken seriously, for no expenditure.
| paxys wrote:
| Would you apply the same logic to a 4-year bachelor's degree?
| ipnon wrote:
| No. I was aware during my CS undergrad that I wasn't
| learning how to be a software engineer. I was learning the
| theories of computation from professional computer
| scientists. There were plenty of warnings on HN and the
| rest of the Web that internships, side projects, and
| Leetcode grinding would be required to land a job. A CS
| degree does not guarantee a job.
| paxys wrote:
| And yet everything I learned in my CS degree could have
| been done on my own time without paying a massive amount
| of tuition. That doesn't make the degree worthless. Same
| can be said for bootcamps.
| roguecoder wrote:
| The most important thing about bootcamps, and the reason the
| best ones produce people who are better-prepared than many CS
| programs, is because they provide real feedback from skilled
| coders on the code individual developers are producing.
|
| You can no more replace bootcamps with internet websites than
| you can replace teachers with books: people need interactive
| experiences built on sound pedagogy to learn most
| effectively.
|
| The reason the VC-funded bootcamps are scams is because they
| call what they do teaching without having any foundations in
| pedagogy or instruction and using un-qualified recent
| students as the only "instructors" looking at students' code.
| aaron695 wrote:
| ipnon wrote:
| A few points:
|
| 1. I'm surprised Bloom doesn't have an arbitration clause.
|
| 2. Bloom doesn't say what percentage of privates[a] get a job
| afterwards. I can't imagine any lawyer would put a guarantee in
| the contract.
|
| 3. Bloom _fully refunds_ the tuition if you don 't get a coder
| job in 365 days. Getting that education for free is a good deal,
| even if all you get is web dev code monkey 101. If you have 2
| neurons to rub together you can extend that into learning other
| areas of programming. Although admittedly that's hard for a
| single mom, it's not Bloom's fault she's in that situation.
|
| 4. Were coder bootcamps so successful that the labor market is
| now well and truly saturated with juniors?
|
| My estimation of the story is that the litigant is salty she
| didn't read the fine print and probably just isn't very talented.
| Learning how to program computers isn't an economic panacea, and
| it's hard. I got a CS degree and struggled to get a decent jobs
| for years. Maybe we'll see CS graduates sueing their universities
| if this litigation provails.
|
| [a] Somehow graduate seems inappropriate terminology for a boot
| camp.
| roguecoder wrote:
| There are a lot of coding bootcamps out there and some of them
| are great. Having hired people who had the misfortune of ending
| up at Lambda school before, good for her.
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