[HN Gopher] BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff
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BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff
Author : lxm
Score : 279 points
Date : 2022-12-02 01:22 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| j-bos wrote:
| Bias declaration: I'm a hired Bloomtech grad, so overall a
| satisfied customer/student.
|
| Meta comment: It's intersting to see how many comments on any
| Bloomtech/Lambda post are very knee-jerk in nature, mostly
| negative some positive. And to be clear, I'd say most are
| thoughtful. The thing that strikes me is that I can't tell if
| this is normal HN tenor for a tech story or if it's just because
| I have opinions on the subject. The only other stories witg
| comments that strike me as remotely similar are those dealing
| with privacy.
|
| So an ask, if Bloomtech is something you don't care about,
| neither positively nor negatively, do you find the comments for
| this article of average "pitch"?
| theCrowing wrote:
| It's not a normal HN tenor there is not a HN hivemind. Why is
| everyone trying to make themselves special by posting the same
| shit everytime there are comments with different views than
| their own. You are just biased.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Yes and perhaps your bias clouds your perception or desires a
| more positive reception of your "alma mater". Boot camps
| generally illicit a negative reaction from experienced
| programmers. Primarily because their primary stated goal is to
| give a "student" enough experience in an extremely compressed
| amount of time for them to enter the workforce as productive
| developers. The issue is that experience, by definition, can
| only be gained over time and with diverse trials and
| tribulations. Only the most motivated bootcampers can achieve
| this during their program by supplementing with copious amounts
| of self-learning.
|
| Unfortunately even then a boot campers "experience" is quite
| limited but many come out of their program believing they are
| equals to more experienced mid/senior level programmers which
| results in those in the industry having animosity to those
| individuals. I think this explains the general "negative tone"
| you see in this comment section.
|
| Are boot camps bad? No, I think they are quite useful but I
| think we need to acknowledge that they really only effectively
| create a pipeline of junior developers and replace the need for
| corporations to have internal education/training programs.
| sidlls wrote:
| The experience argument seems thin: new grads have a similar
| issue, and yet companies have hiring programs targeting these
| individuals, sometimes aggressively.
|
| It seems the core of your argument is not that they are
| inexperienced, but rather that the bootcamps somehow convince
| them they are not and this leads to friction in the positions
| they seek and the expectations around the work they're
| capable of accomplishing.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Comparing to new grads is a strawman argument, I didn't
| make that comparison in my orginal comment. I would argue
| new grads can have the same or more experience (courses,
| assignments & internships) yet they would still be treated
| as entry level when entering the industry. Regardless, I
| wouldn't classify either cohort as being particularly
| experienced. Educated? Trained? Practiced? Sure. Not
| experienced. To make a bad analogy, take a soldier from a 2
| year training bootcamp and put them shoulder to shoulder
| with a 1 year combat veteran and you will see a significant
| discrepancy in the majority of cases.
|
| Yes, I personally believe that the animosity isn't usually
| targeted at the fact that boot camp grads went through boot
| camp. Hell, programmers are most commonly self taught using
| free online resources for the majority of topics. My
| impression is because the boot camp is sold as a "get
| programming experience quick scheme" that most candidates
| would still be entry level after their program but are led
| to believe they are more senior.
| safog wrote:
| Neutral observer, don't particularly care about lambda.
|
| I think it's worse than average - lots of strong opinions being
| bandied about. If I had to make up a score it's somewhere
| slightly above Google shutting down Stadia and significantly
| below FB / Cambridge Analytica scandal.
| jdsleppy wrote:
| The comments seem of average pitch to me. I did have to scroll
| to the bottom to see the more inflammatory ones, but even with
| those it matches what you get on any exciting topic. Ask devs
| what they think of golang and you almost get the same!
| dokein wrote:
| Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less
| optimistic. The tone of the comments here are not significantly
| different from many other topics.
|
| Note that I am not saying that HN is now less _neutral_ --it
| may be that the current level of optimism vs. cynicism maps
| better to reality.
|
| That said, I think more optimism is generally better (for
| motivating action) if you want to start a new business or build
| a new technology; more realism is generally better if you want
| to go down an established path or join a venture purely as an
| employee; and more cynicism is better if you want to be a rabid
| online commentator (joke!).
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Over the years, I 've subjectively found HN to be less
| optimistic._
|
| The largest companies on the planet, that the majority of us
| here earn a living from, directly or indirectly, are
| essentially data gathering advertising companies. I feel like
| the lack of optimism is justified.
| [deleted]
| chis wrote:
| HN really hates the idea of coding bootcamps for some reason. I
| think it's because the median HN person is pretty independent,
| libertarian, self-taught, etc and can't imagine any other model
| working for people.
| MivLives wrote:
| I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work
| in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to...
| Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA.
|
| I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of
| it but I watched a lot who didn't.
| gniv wrote:
| Somewhat tangential: Lambda School sounds so much better to me
| than Bloomtech. Any idea why they changed it?
| yunohn wrote:
| I thought it was PR white washing -
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/16/lambda-school-rebrand-
| bloo...
| austenallred wrote:
| No, the fact that it was a trademark lawsuit is a matter of
| public record. https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california
| /candce/4:2019cv...
| austenallred wrote:
| Because of a trademark lawsuit https://dockets.justia.com/doc
| ket/california/candce/4:2019cv...
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Agree 100%
| cocoflunchy wrote:
| There was a trademark issue with another company I think.
| malikNF wrote:
| What do you wish they could have done differently?
| MivLives wrote:
| Honestly, not much. I'm one of the success stories. I think I
| was just early enough to have small classes and knew enough
| basic html and programming concepts from doing IT work to
| have the bootcamp work for me. I was also incredibly lucky
| the company that hired me had a program where they took on
| essentially fresh college grads and boot camp grads, and
| funneled them into Junior positions with a project before you
| were assigned a team. It took me a lot of interviews before I
| actually got a job.
| OrwellianChild wrote:
| What do you think you learned at the company thru the early
| project and junior work that you _didn 't_ get from Lambda?
| prescriptivist wrote:
| > AMA.
|
| Were you aware of YC before attending Lambda (ie, did the
| association lend credibility to Lambda) or did you find YC
| after attending?
| Egrodo wrote:
| Not OP but I also attended a part time Lambda School cohort
| around 5 years ago and the YC association was huge for me.
| MivLives wrote:
| I was doing help desk, but I was pretty plugged into tech
| news. I was on hacker news and saw the initial post here by
| Austin himself. It seemed like a good idea and much better
| then what I was doing in the time. I was frugal and had
| expenses saved up to go a year at it. At the time I knew YC
| was involved and I think it did lend an air of legitimacy to
| a super new concept.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| Why weren't lambda grads able to get good jobs? I think that
| was the main controversy. Was it the instruction or what went
| wrong there?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Or why were they? What percentage number is to be considered
| a success here? I don't have the faintest idea.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If you go on the HN Algolia, there are a lot of posts from
| students and people involved with Lambda over the years that
| might paint a clearer picture of what kind of dysfunction was
| taking place at the company.
| MivLives wrote:
| Most of the people I saw get successful were people were
| people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They
| were taking what they learned and applying it. Others
| organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small
| support network of people in a similar position. I completely
| understand that not everyone has the time for that.
|
| I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that
| effected the quality of the teaching. The first was the
| initial pool they advertised too. I think I saw the post on
| Hacker News before everywhere else. I'd wonder if you're more
| selective from already technical people at the beginning and
| then sorta widening the net as time goes on to include more
| people if you could get initial big numbers push followed by
| more ok numbers.
|
| The instructors I met were all great. I think a lot of that
| flack went more towards later cohorts or alternative program
| from the main full webstack track.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| > Most of the people I saw get successful were people were
| people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes.
|
| Ironically this is not that different from my university
| experience.
| [deleted]
| MivLives wrote:
| Mine too actually.
| ivanche wrote:
| Not ironically at all! If someone expects to attend
| programming classes (or any classes for that matter), not
| do any extra work and as a result to become a programmer,
| that someone will have a rude awakening. Or as one of my
| university professors said "Attempt to learn this subject
| by just listening these classes is equivalent to
| attemting to become a gymnast by watching Olympics on
| TV".
| [deleted]
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before
| accepting students? This really resonates with my
| observations. The people who got the most out of software
| bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game
| modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of
| coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people
| who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability
| to code. They approached the bootcamp with the mindset that
| they already knew they had technical interest and ability,
| and wanted direction on building marketable skills.
|
| Do you think greater selectivity applicants would increase
| the success rate? I had thought the ISA model would
| incentivize this, but when I learned lambda was selling
| ISAs that seemed like it removed this incentive.
| MivLives wrote:
| They had a prebootcamp with a free course that taught the
| basics. Some people cheat through that though and didn't
| quite process that... you can't really pull that off
| through the whole program?
|
| I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed,
| I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would
| do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint.
|
| For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The
| selling ISAs thing was a bit weird when I learned about.
| I honestly kinda wonder about the actuarial calcs of it
| all.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Funny how some people think that "programming though
| Stack Overflow" will keep working after you progress to a
| certain level
|
| School mentality (and I might add: grifter mentality as
| well)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I'm Senior Staff and still have to use Stack Overflow
| regularly!
| ht_th wrote:
| Sure, not a problem. Most programmers do, probably.
|
| However, I've seen students use Stack Overflow and other
| resources as a source of "program stamps":
|
| - They enter their problem in an Internet search engine.
|
| - Click on the first result with code in it.
|
| - "Stamp it" on their own code: I.e., copy/paste it.
|
| - Using editor/compiler, find any issues by trial and
| error and fix them so the editor/compiler doesn't
| complain anymore.
|
| They might try a simple example or two to see if it
| works. And that's it.
|
| There's not much reflection on their final solution, or
| on the bits they copy/paste. They don't seem to
| understand their solution, nor care about that or their
| problem solving process. They put in effort, they expect
| a passing grade.
| [deleted]
| austenallred wrote:
| Honestly I was a little surprised at the cheating too. I
| think I was a little naive in the beginning that if you
| actually wanted a job you would understand that you would
| have to be able to write code. But some folks are in a
| school mentality that if you get a grade/diploma you're
| good, regardless of whether you understand the things
| required to go into that.
|
| Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions,
| I can assure you doing interviews is possibly the worst.
|
| As far as ISAs go, it all comes out in the wash. If you
| create a pool of ISAs and students don't get hired you
| may have more ISAs but the average ISA is worth less, so
| the only thing that matters is whether each individual
| student gets hired. There's no financial wizardry that
| can let you sell $1 for $2 in the long-run.
| MivLives wrote:
| Yeah that's fair enough. I don't think the people
| cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job
| stats. It was pretty easy to sus out who actually knew
| enough to keep going. I don't fault Lambda for that, it's
| just the reality of any educational goal line.
|
| For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing
| at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure
| that there's a better process now.
| austenallred wrote:
| > I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough
| to actually effect job stats.
|
| Yeah, some do a remarkably good job of cheating and would
| get into hiring stats for sure, but I think we've almost
| entirely cut that out now.
| austenallred wrote:
| This is generally true but not always. As you can imagine
| we have loads of data on this.
|
| If you only selected students who had been tinkering with
| writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful
| in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who
| we have seen become software engineers.
|
| The only way we've found that does it well is to have
| people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy
| it. That's why we now have multiple free classes, have a
| free dropout period once you're in the school, and even
| have a three-week free trial of the school itself.
|
| The notion that financing ISAs removed the incentives
| isn't really accurate.
|
| First, most of the time ISAs are financed it's in the
| form of a loan you have to pay back with interest with an
| ISA and its repayments as collateral, or it's a sale to a
| neutral SPV with recourse in the case repayments don't
| hit a certain threshold.
|
| In the rare instance (we've never done that) schools have
| been able to sell ISAs full stop, it's been at extreme
| discounts or based on discounted predicted likelihoods of
| future revenue, and if those ISAs don't repay the buyers
| bail and the school trying to sell them is out of
| business.
| austenallred wrote:
| Edit: It's too late to edit my comment, but I noticed an
| error we have sold ISAs with minimal recourse not at
| enrollment, but at the point of _graduation_; we would
| sell half at an extreme discount at graduation (based on
| likelihood of being hired) and keep half on our books.
| morgante wrote:
| > Most of the people I saw get successful were people were
| people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes.
| They were taking what they learned and applying it.
|
| Is this a knock on Lambda School, though?
|
| You can go to MIT but if you never apply your learnings you
| won't be a good engineer.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Going through the motions of a CS degree is probably
| sufficient to land a decent job if you're getting good
| grades, not cheating, and you get an internship (or
| similar).
|
| At least from what I've heard of bootcamps, you need to
| really go above and beyond to have similar chances with
| that route.
| jwmoz wrote:
| "They were taking what they learned and applying it."
|
| Am I missing something, surely this is exactly what you
| should be doing?
| austenallred wrote:
| I don't think the assertion that "lambda grads weren't able
| to get good jobs" is true.
|
| Obviously not every single student has been hired, but our
| hiring rates have always been pretty good (they're better now
| than they were in the past), and thousands of BloomTech (we
| had to change our name because of a trademark lawsuit) grads
| have increased their lifetime earnings by billions of
| dollars, and work at nearly every major company you can think
| of.
| MivLives wrote:
| There were for sure people I knew who got good positions in
| companies. I don't mean to imply otherwise.
| Dwolb wrote:
| What are the hiring rates and the average and median
| improvements in salary?
| austenallred wrote:
| You can see our 2021 audited outcomes report here with
| all of the data
| https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report. (Note:
| 2021 outcomes report is very recent as you have to get
| students graduated, give them time to get placed, etc.)
|
| Some of it I'm thrilled about, some of it shows us where
| we have more work to do (or need to do better in
| admissions - candidly it's always a difficult balance
| between giving folks chance and certainty of those folks'
| outcomes.)
|
| High level:
|
| 90% of those who are job seeking got hired.
|
| Our median hired grad increased their income by $27,500
| (and that's just their first job - obviously
| software/data science salaries shoot up quickly after a
| first job).
|
| About half of our students have degrees, and half do not.
| laserlight wrote:
| This comment got me interested, so I dived deeper into
| the report [0].
|
| Learners are divided into three groups: graduated (59%),
| still enrolled (5%), and withdrawn (36%). Graduated
| learners are further divided into two groups: job seeking
| (63%: ~37% of all learners) and non-job seeking (37%:
| ~22% of all learners). Here's the definition of "non-job
| seeking":
|
| "A BloomTech graduate who has been unresponsive to
| outreach, has explicitly indicated they are not pursuing
| a technical role, or has explicitly indicated they have
| paused their job search."
|
| When we apply the base rate to the 90% rate, we conclude
| that 33% of those who attend the program (learners) got
| hired.
|
| [0] https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I wouldn't count the withdrawn and still enrolled in that
| calculation, though.
|
| If you go by graduated learners, it's 56%.
| ibarearer wrote:
| I see, that's ... extremely unimpressive especially if
| you take the median salary increase from above. And I
| think maybe we should take everything else this guy is
| saying as potentially dishonest. Not including people who
| stopped trying to get a job is just an absurd way to do
| this calculation. Imagine a clinical trial that just
| ignores everyone who disconues due to adverse events.
| These stats seem borderline predatory
| rchaud wrote:
| It's largely unregulated. Institutions formally
| registered as colleges and universities have more
| stringent disclosure requirements.
| austenallred wrote:
| It's extremely, extremely regulated!
| crazypyro wrote:
| It's amazing, if you pre-filter all the non-successful
| outcomes, the success rate raises tremendously...
| fakedang wrote:
| The gold is always under the shit.
| austenallred wrote:
| We should do a better job of getting more granular on
| that piece, because it really does matter, but the above
| isn't the right way to do that math to answer the
| question prospective students have, and is misleading in
| the opposite direction. The outcomes report is directed
| at prospective students who want to understand what will
| happen to them if they attend the school and look for a
| job.
|
| You have to remember that (for this outcomes report)
| nearly every student uses an ISA under which no one is
| required to pay us unless/until they get a job using the
| skills they learned. There are a number of people who
| attend never intending to switch careers, a (large)
| number who ghost us the day after graduation, and a
| (large) number who get a job but don't tell us until we
| get tax returns (so we learn they were hired only after
| this outcomes report).
|
| Our team works their asses off to work with these
| students, and is doing everything they possibly can.
| Slacks, calls, texts, emails, some of which are auto-
| generated from me personally, and in some cases even
| physical mail, to try to get them to work with us. If
| they respond _in any way at all_ with anything other than
| something that equates to, "I don't want a tech job" they
| are job-seeking in the outcomes report. We have built
| tooling to make applying to jobs easier, we find jobs
| that you should apply to for you, have an outreach
| generator where our team will write emails to hiring
| managers for you, and more recently even what we call
| "job search takeover" where we work with students on
| resume/portfolio/job criteria in advance, and we will
| actually do all of the work to fill up your calendar with
| interviews.
|
| Students who look for a job in any way whatsoever get
| hired at a very high rate. In my view, if you're a
| prospective student, that's the information you actually
| want to understand. The fact that there are a number of
| students students (most of whom are using ISAs) who never
| intend to look for a job or don't look for a job is a
| fair indictment of our business model, but not a fair
| indictment of the quality of the school or the likelihood
| of getting hired.
|
| So how should we treat that in an outcomes report? If
| you're a prospective learner do you want to know about
| the hiring rate of the people who ghost us or don't
| intend to look for a job, or do you want to know the
| hiring rate of people who map to the profile of what you
| expect to do?
|
| If anyone has ideas of a better way to slice that data to
| convey the best information to a prospective learner, I
| would love to hear it.
| ak_111 wrote:
| I think presenting this data using the "funnel
| visualisation" is the most informative way of doing it.
| snowypine wrote:
| I know someone who went through the Lambda/BloomTech
| bootcamp. Although they weren't able to transition to a new
| role, the experience helped them start to code in their job
| at the time. And iirc, because he didn't land a swe role, he
| didn't have to pay Lambda based on the ISA.
| kirillbobyrev wrote:
| Where _would_ you encourage people to go for similar purpose
| with higher quality? Are there any particular bootcamps/online
| schools you think are good?
|
| Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly
| capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field,
| so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so
| (without spending 4 years on college again).
| MivLives wrote:
| I do not have this knowledge. There used to be a site that
| categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?
|
| My general advice is to get some one to try
| https://www.theodinproject.com/ as it's free. If they try it
| for a bit and find they don't like it, no harm they can just
| stop. If they want to continue after a bit and still want to
| go a boot camp they're more likely to succeed at any of them.
| austenallred wrote:
| It's certainly true that BloomTech isn't for everyone, and
| that not everyone will want to become a software engineer.
| We try to filter for that, but it's tough.
|
| Now we have a free trial (https://www.bloomtech.com/risk-
| free-trial) that everyone can try out for three weeks
| without even signing any documents.
|
| A lot of people like the idea of making software
| engineering salaries, but don't particularly like building
| software. Then there are others that fall in love. We
| haven't found a great way to predict other than having
| people try it out.
| a_lieb wrote:
| > There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by
| results. Maybe try that?
|
| I think you're talking about either the Council on
| Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report
| [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school
| industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report
| has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with
| tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools
| for y" lists, etc.
|
| CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their
| reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around
| in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from
| less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems
| to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a
| given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most
| reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6
| months).
|
| A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest
| employment rates were relatively low-profile schools
| teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but
| nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.
|
| [1] https://cirr.org/
|
| [2] https://www.coursereport.com/
| austenallred wrote:
| I love the idea of CIRR but it is largely a failed
| institution. Their measures have changed dramatically
| over the years (the last CIRR event anyone at BloomTech
| attended resulted in the notion that anyone who adds
| anything new on LinkedIn could be considered "hired,"
| even if it was a portfolio project or self-employment),
| and are used very differently from school to school,
| resulting in every major school I know of stopping to
| work with them.
|
| For example, we used them for our first outcomes report
| and paid extra to have them "verify" our outcomes report,
| but they literally never opened the Google Drive file we
| sent them.
|
| I think it was a great idea set up by well meaning
| people, but the self-governing aspect and comparisons
| created ended up in weird incentives that resulted in it
| falling apart.
|
| The review sites are perhaps marginally better, but the
| positivity of reviews are almost 100% correlated with how
| hard schools work to farm for positive reviews, and their
| business model is selling leads to the schools, so the
| incentive isn't for objectivity there either.
|
| Honestly the best way, though it requires more work, is
| to find a handful of recent grads on LinkedIn and ask
| them about their experience.
| a_lieb wrote:
| Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original
| post :)
|
| The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem
| a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too
| big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found
| the same thing if I looked at any individual school over
| time, as the rules and practices changed.
| MivLives wrote:
| Thank you for pulling these up. I am in fact talking
| about both of these (admitted in my head I had mixed them
| into one site). I know at one point Course Report was
| flooded by Lambda Students as they were encouraged to
| leave positive reviews.
| elsif-maj wrote:
| Launch School is an incredible option:
| https://launchschool.com/
|
| It's a self-paced online curriculum that generally takes 1.5
| - 2 years to get through, with an optional 4-month "Capstone"
| intensive after graduating the core curriculum. Progressing
| out of each course in the curriculum involves having to pass
| rigorous, easily failable, assessments; you just can't
| progress until you've cleared a pretty high bar of knowledge
| in each domain. There is a good mix of live interview
| assessments, written assessments, and coding projects.
|
| The job placement statistics are staggering in comparison to
| the 'quicker' options -- as they should be given the time
| investment involved. I'm unaware of any institution that has
| had more success in placing students in high-quality software
| development positions.
|
| Disclosure: I've been studying for about 14 months now using
| the Launch School curriculum.
| mplewis wrote:
| Turing School is the only one I recommend. I personally know
| four people who got into software careers through their full-
| time programs.
| dehrmann wrote:
| With all the recent layoffs, this might not be the best time
| to do a coding bootcamp. Not as many companies are hiring,
| and you'll be competing with people with better credentials
| and more experience.
|
| A lot can also change in a year, so take this with a grain of
| salt.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Community colleges are cheap, supported by federal grants,
| and deliver proper education.
|
| There are no shortcuts unless you're self-motivated/have a
| knack and can use online resources to learn (of which there
| are many).
| [deleted]
| hello_newman wrote:
| Definitely App Academy Open. App Academy is one of the
| original bootcamps and they have solid curriculum. They have
| their entire course for free online
|
| https://www.appacademy.io/course/app-academy-open
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Not OP, but I did go to a bootcamp but didn't get much from
| it. I learned a lot more from Udemy courses.
|
| I would recommend that if your friends are serious about
| getting into coding, ask them to take a few React basics
| courses (just go by the most popular ones on Udemy).
|
| I found that overloading beginners with theory doesn't really
| work. Getting them to build something and figure out the
| _why_ of it works better - at least that was my experience. I
| learned about, say, json webtokens way before I used them,
| but it wasn 't until I built an app of my own with account
| authentication feature that I figured out what JWTs actually
| were.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Bootcamp "grads"? I mean really? Folks, this is a scam.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Why anyone would give money to this guy is beyond me. Hey, we
| fucked up our reputation so bad, instead of making good on it,
| let's change our name to a shitty Silicon Valley-esque one. It's
| a shame nothing will happen to Austen after all the people he's
| hurt.
| j-bos wrote:
| Were you hurt?
| dzader wrote:
| no, but thousands of people who were simply trying to make a
| better life for themselves were grifted by Austen and his
| merry gang of con artists
| [deleted]
| j-bos wrote:
| Sorry about the phrasing of my comment, reading it now it
| comes off as snarky.
|
| I ask because before I attended, I read many posts by
| people who left Lambda with a bad taste and that put me off
| from attending. But I did, and now I could play in an ad
| copy. But that's my data point.
|
| I'd like to talk to someone who had a bad time with Lambda,
| in a non combat context, because we clearly had vastly
| different outcomes and I clearly I'm missing or
| misunderstanding some important context.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Wtf. This is not how layoffs work. " Employees were called into
| an All Hands meeting this morning in which BloomTech CEO Austen
| Allred notified staff of the impending layoffs. After the
| meeting, those impacted were notified via e-mail. According to
| documents seen by TechCrunch, employees will get normal pay and
| medical benefits until January 31, 2023 and are "expected to
| work" through that period. Those laid off were also offered
| optional time with managers to talk."
|
| If you lay me off you give me severance and I say adieu. I need
| that time to find other work. What kind of dystopian BS is this?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| This is literally how they should works as directed by federal
| WARN act. Usually corporations just cut ties and pay out at
| least 60 days tho because it's easier for both parties and you
| can get some concessions from employees like a gag clause
| gigatexal wrote:
| ' are "expected to work" through that period.'
|
| That's the bit that makes no sense though. A lay off means I
| get to fuck off. Bye. You cut ties with me. Pay me what I'm
| owed and then leave me be to find new work. Do not expect me
| to work knowing I'm being let go.
| user3939382 wrote:
| If I may comment on the abstract: I don't get these bootcamps.
| I've been programming for 30 years and I still feel like there's
| another 60% of the craft to learn. More data structures,
| algorithms, functional strategies, large system architecture,
| read/write fanning, I'm just getting into websockets now. The
| list goes on.
|
| These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?
| austenallred wrote:
| If your point is one must understand 100% of computing before
| being hired as a software engineer none of us would ever be
| hired.
|
| You can produce value long before you understand everything
| there is to know, of course, and a lot of being a software
| engineer is being able to problem solve on the job.
|
| BloomTech exists to help people get to the point they can do
| that and create value. No school can pretend to teach
| everything there possibly could be to know about how software
| works.
| user3939382 wrote:
| My point isn't to learn 100% but how about 5 or 10? The
| complexity of the work just doesn't seem to match the
| duration of these programs.
| nemo44x wrote:
| A lot of software jobs are collecting data from a source,
| doing something with that data, and then putting it
| somewhere. It's just CRUD over and over.
| austenallred wrote:
| I can't speak for other code bootcamps, but BloomTech is at
| 960+ hours for our shortest program, and considerably
| longer for our longer ones. And it's really hard,
| intentionally.
|
| That's an absolute minimum six months full-time (and a lot
| of students spen dmore than 40 hours/week) with no breaks;
| longer hour for hour than the time in a CS degree spent on
| software-related topics (though those vary far more widely
| than most of us like to pretend).
|
| If you eliminate context switching, have the right tooling
| and instruction, yeah you aren't coming out the other side
| a principal engineer, but you can certainly build stuff,
| contribute to code the right way on teams, understand data
| structures and algorithms enough to make stuff performant,
| problem solve and build a whole lot of stuff and a lot of
| value.
|
| That's enough to start getting paid, and 30 years later you
| can continue to marvel at how you're still just scratching
| the surface.
|
| That's kind of beautiful, actually.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > BloomTech is at 960+ hours for our shortest program
|
| I helped run a large school for 6 years with 4,000
| students/year who took an 850 hour program. Sad to say
| that amount of training isn't necessarily as much as it
| sounds.
| austenallred wrote:
| 850 actual hours, butt-in-seat and required, or 850
| scheduled hours?
| user3939382 wrote:
| The rules are complex but feds require 90% attendance for
| clock hour programs receiving financial aid.
| gobias1234 wrote:
| To do the frontend work with more recent tech like websockets
| that you're just now learning about.
|
| In all seriousness, considering the amount of bootcamp grads
| now at all (yes all) levels of the industry, this is an out of
| touch take. They're getting hired to work hard at entry level
| software engineering jobs, and most of them quickly move beyond
| that.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > this is an out of touch take
|
| I'll grant that possibility. Also, my anecdata isn't an
| objective truth right? But I can only judge by what I know
| and have seen. I wouldn't hire myself at my 2 year mark, all
| I could produce then by my standards now is a bunch of code
| I'd have to fix. I've had the same experience with junior
| developers I've hired.
|
| Maybe these bootcamp grads are great, I haven't hired them
| because of the issue I raised so I don't actually know.
| lkrubner wrote:
| I've hired several developers straight out of dev boot camps
| and I've had good experiences with them. I wrote about that
| here:
|
| http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...
| decohen wrote:
| Several of my relatives are Mechanical Engineers.
|
| In that field, it seems typical to have both engineers and
| technicians working on projects. Engineers are responsible for
| design, and have degrees; Technicians do assembly and
| maintenance, and only need on-the-job training.
|
| I've often wondered what our industry would look like if we
| adopted a similar distinction. In which case, bootcamp
| graduates would be a natural fit for a technician role.
| s3000 wrote:
| The difference is that mechanical engineers need math to
| understand what they are doing. Engineers are essentially
| applied mathematicians. They are responsible for design
| because you cannot design without math.
|
| For software development, you don't need math. This may
| change when data science is taken more serious and companies
| have to guarantee the quality of the derived knowledge. So
| it's the other way round. When our industry changes, we will
| adopt a similar distinction.
|
| Software doesn't need math because testing is enough. Unlike
| physical objects, it doesn't cost much to test software,
| especially because reproduction is almost free. Additionally,
| with SaaS, software doesn't run unsupervised and thus there
| is constant testing. In that environment software can almost
| always be adjusted and reproduced when there are problems.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| That's just gatekeeping based on having a degree.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| People hire junior devs everyday. These people are at least a
| prepared as most of the folks coming out of CS programs. And
| are definitely more prepared than I was.
| [deleted]
| mym1990 wrote:
| Graduated from a boot camp in 2014 and I can confidently say I
| did not learn a ton(3 months 5 days a week) but it did
| reinforce my desire that I wanted to be in the field and that I
| wanted to learn more. In some ways the whole thing is a money
| grab, but when I went in to my first job interview after the
| bootcamp(which wasn't even a junior dev role, it was a bit
| lower on the rung), they gave 0 craps about my 4 year undergrad
| degree and we instead had a lengthy conversation about my
| bootcamp experience(I did end up getting that job).
| setgree wrote:
| Not sure what to make of this, but Austen, who is normally a
| prolific tweeter, hasn't tweeted about this yet [0].
|
| I have gotten used to CEOs tweeting apologetic stuff when this
| happens. Perhaps this is norm _should_ be bucked? I don 't know.
| I just note that Austen is going against the grain.
|
| EDIT: missed this: "In a now-deleted tweet posted earlier today,
| Allred quoted a prior statement of gratitude for employees
| pushing through the work despite being attacked from all sides,
| adding "even more so today."
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/Austen
| sandofsky wrote:
| The "attacked by all sides" comment is quite bizarre. Every
| pain the company experienced was self-inflicted.
|
| They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their
| reputation and is a source of active lawsuits.
|
| They dodged California regulators and then lied to students
| about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
|
| They launched an unpaid intern program, which created a
| backlash in the tech community.
|
| They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which
| was a lie that go them in even more legal trouble.
|
| I could go on and on, but the recurring pattern is them doing
| something reprehensible and the "attack" is "getting caught."
| ec109685 wrote:
| Also, lame they charge companies to attend Bloomtech career
| fairs: https://www.bloomtech.com/hire-from-bloomtech
| austenallred wrote:
| That's not a charge to attend career fairs; our partner
| companies pay us for white glove recruiting services,
| advanced access to grads, and for us to find and deliver
| unique sourcing criteria from our student body.
|
| It costs us a lot of money to offer those services, and I
| think that program _almost_ covers its own costs, but has
| been a big winner.
|
| The purpose is to create a relationship that helps learners
| get hired, and it's been succesful.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Sorry for misrepresenting. Are there free career fairs
| arranged by your school that companies can attend?
| austenallred wrote:
| "Career fairs" as such haven't been very successful for
| us, so we don't run them, but it's not because we charge
| for them. There are other mechanisms to meet grads (and
| our most successful connections are 1:1, not many:many)
| but until recently when we had some major hiring partners
| come in for our backend program most of our grads were
| hired by companies that don't pay anything.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Okay.
|
| Is there a place where we can view your graduates? Not at
| this time.
| austenallred wrote:
| * They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged
| their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits
|
| No we did not.
|
| We've been over this again and again, and I know you
| understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form
| comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students
| making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with
| investors because that indicates how much we get paid vs. how
| much we spend. The other is (hired students/graduated
| students), which we share with prospective students because
| that's what they want to understand and what every school
| shares.
|
| Those were both called "placement" in different contexts to
| different people, but the numbers that we report externally
| are always hired students/graduated students (and even that
| isn't simple, as there are many different definitions of
| "hired," and different cohorts of students who are job
| searching or not, and various time lags around when we learn
| a student is hired or not), but this is not unique to us as a
| school. (Though an ISA incentivizing people to _not_ tell us
| when they are hired until tax returns are do perhaps is a
| little bit unique to us.)
|
| * They dodged California regulators then lied to students
| about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before
| 2020.
|
| Neither of those things are true. Our counsel told us we
| didn't need to register with the BPPE because we didn't
| operate physical classrooms (this was a somewhat novel
| concept in 2017). They reasoned that if the BPPE were going
| to claim that online schools would need to register in every
| state there was a student, that the claim would be if you
| have a single student who attends online classes from a state
| you have to register as a school in that state.
| Correspondingly, teaching anything on the Internet would
| require you to register separately and abide by varying
| regulations with every state educational body in the United
| States. The BPPE said they were going to regulate online
| schools, and sent us a letter with a threat to fine us. We
| immediately submitted our registration, and the registration
| approval process took just over a year, and the BPPE reduced
| the fine to a minimum level. There was never any attempt to
| flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the
| experience any student had in any way.
|
| Now we have a very large legal team, and are regulated
| separately and uniquely in every state in the US, often using
| laws that don't contemplate virtual classrooms or online
| learning in any way, and that's just to exist as a school in
| the first place. It's a complete nightmare that needs reform,
| and the vast, vast majority of schools are simply below the
| radar enough that they don't get fined, but it's incredibly
| difficult and expensive in the United States simply to be in
| compliance with each state where you might have as few as one
| or two students.
|
| Beyond that fact, entirely online school where students don't
| pay unless/until they're hired is a round peg that doesn't
| fit into the square holes of existing financial regulation
| either.
|
| * They launched an unpaid intern program, which created
| backlash int he tech community.
|
| Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where
| _companies didn 't pay_, but _we paid the students_ , and if
| the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us
| back. It was successful and operates to this day.
|
| * They told students they couldn't discharge their debt,
| which was a lie that got them into even more legal trouble
|
| This is another misconception, but we were actually in the
| wrong here. Because an ISA isn't a traditional student loan,
| if a student doesn't get a job the ISA immediately goes away
| after a five year deferment period. We had some language in
| the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring
| bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove
| that clause. We happily did so, but that clause didn't harm
| anyone.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If I were your lawyer I would advise you to delete this
| comment as it would likely be used against you in court as
| proof of your pattern of misrepresentations.
|
| But you do you, I guess.
|
| At any rate enough people have been made aware of your lies
| that the harm you can continue doing is limited.
| austenallred wrote:
| I will happily defend everything I've said in a courtroom
| if necessary.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Why are you even wasting your time on this forum? Aren't
| you the CEO? Do you really have nothing better to do with
| your time?
|
| This explains both your worship of Musk and the failure
| of your bootcamp.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Is that how we now treat execs who bother to come
| _directly_ address criticism aimed at their companies on
| HN?
|
| This is one the few places on the web that happens. You
| can still disagree with him if you want, but coming here
| to talk with us directly is respectable IMO. Focus on the
| arguments and not ad hominem.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If he's going to lie, yes.
| austenallred wrote:
| Feel free to point out where I lie
| effingwewt wrote:
| I will- every single line ever written by you.
|
| Or he, like every one else can simply read all your past
| comments or do an internet search of your name.
|
| I'm guessing you changed your 'businesses' name from all
| the negative press.
|
| All you do is lie, at this point giving you the benefit
| of the doubt is a fool's errand.
| austenallred wrote:
| The fact that we changed our name because of a trademark
| lawsuit is a matter of public record https://dockets.just
| ia.com/docket/california/candce/4:2019cv...
| dzader wrote:
| lol you're such a scumbag liar I wouldn't put it past you
| to have paid them to sue you so you'd have a little link
| to post on HN when everyone called you out for what you
| were doing
| educaysean wrote:
| We're fully in the territory of conspiracy theories now
| austenallred wrote:
| Hmm, it is interesting to me that sometimes when clear
| evidence conflicts with an existing mental model it's
| easier to create imaginary evidence than to adjust the
| mental model.
| shytey wrote:
| Literally every past comment of his is contentious or
| negative. Probably worth ignoring from here, clearly
| isn't acting in good faith on here.
| dzader wrote:
| lol completely agree. there is ample clear evidence
| you're a scumbag liar yet you continue to create
| imaginary evidence that you're actually a good person.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| - Employment stats. The fact that you use the same term
| to mean different things to different people is prima
| facie evidence of an intent to misrepresent.
|
| - Requirement to register with the BPPE. A physical
| classroom has not been a threshold requirement for
| registration with the BPPE since at least 2009. The
| relevant statutes are available online. Also note that
| online classrooms were not "novel" in 2017 as you claim,
| so that's an additional misrepresentation. If you claim
| that your lawyer advised you contrary to the explicit
| written language of the relevant statutes, you would have
| clear grounds to sue them for malpractice, and even if
| you chose not to sue them, the Bar would be interested in
| disciplining them.
|
| - Claim of unique regulation burden. No, you're dealing
| with the same regulations that apply to all private
| schools in the jurisdictions in which they operate.
|
| - ISA. It was found to be illegal. By itself it could be
| innocuous, but combined with the other deliberate
| misrepresentations there is evidence of exploitative
| intent.
|
| And that's just your statements on HN. Don't get people
| started on the misrepresentations you've made elsewhere.
| austenallred wrote:
| That's a totally fair question.
|
| When we were a much smaller company I would take a lot of
| time to respond to communicate with folks directly, and I
| learned a lot from it, and think everyone benefited from
| that level of direct communication.
|
| As we got bigger we got an expensive PR firm who built a
| big wall around me and put everything I said through
| review 8 times to massage it for _just the right tone_.
| There are too many other variables to know whether that
| was the right move or not, but it always felt wrong to
| me.
|
| I now regard that as a mistake, as I do many other "big
| company" things we did. (Broadly, my mental model for
| success was that we needed to grow up and become a "big
| company." Now I'm of the opinion that to be a successful
| company should actively fight against everything that
| feels "big company." Fewer meetings, more focus on the
| little details, etc.)
|
| So I don't know that it will work, but I'm intentionally
| carving out time to keep my ear to the ground and be
| responsive directly.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| This seems unnecessarily aggressive as a general comment.
| Part of what makes HN interesting is the CEO's (and other
| high profile individuals at least in the tech industry)
| that sometimes comment. Certainly I think a CEO should
| have the time to write something on HN.
| sandofsky wrote:
| I will bet $1,000 to the charity of your choice that you
| will settle your personal lawsuit-- the one on this very
| matter-- before your day in court.
| austenallred wrote:
| You have no idea how much I'm _yearning_ for a day in
| court. The problem is it costs millions of dollars to get
| to that point.
| shytey wrote:
| You can surely see they are helping a lot of people, in
| addition to what you believe on the negative side of
| things. Not trying to be snippy or offer a trick
| question, but genuinely, what do you get out of this?
| Surely it's not worth your time. Even if he is the
| biggest scammer on the planet you are probably better off
| spending your time on constructive things.
| [deleted]
| hitekker wrote:
| Nice try. The same question applies to you, since you've
| jumped from one comment thread to another defending a
| sketchy business in the midst of a downfall.
| shytey wrote:
| Fair point!
| sriram_sun wrote:
| tl;dr: The word "placement" was sometimes used to refer to
| students who graduated without a job offer.
| austenallred wrote:
| No, perhaps I can be clearer.
|
| There are different ways to measure placement
| percentages.
|
| * You can measure percentage of enrolled students who get
| hired.
|
| * You can measure percentage of graduates who get hired.
|
| * You can measure percentage of students who get hired
| making more than $50k/yr.
|
| * You can measure percentage of students who get hired
| making more than $50k/yr within six months of graduation.
|
| Those are all different placement rates.
|
| Say 100 students enroll, 80 graduate, 60 get hired.
|
| Investors would want to know what percent of students get
| hired (because you outlay costs for 100 students and get
| repaid for 60). The answer is 60/100 = 60%.
|
| Student outcomes reports say what percentage of graduates
| get hired. So you say 60/80 = 75%.
|
| Those numbers are different. They are also both
| completely correct.
| sriram_sun wrote:
| Lambda/Bloom: "X% were placed"
|
| People: "X% found jobs."
|
| A lot of folks seem to be asking if Lambda's claims of
| "X% placed" mapped to "X% found a job at a software
| company." Yes or no?
|
| edit: I just noticed that your answer started with "No".
| Thanks.
| sandofsky wrote:
| > We've been over this again and again, and I know you
| understand that this isn't true, but don't care. The
| misconception comes form comparing two different measures:
| one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled
| students), the other (hired students/graduated students)
|
| Your website, September 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/2
| 0190930144525/https://lambdasch...
|
| "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months
| and make over $50k a year."
|
| Let's run the math on current outcomes, which I believe
| you've called, "the best they've ever been." 994 students
| graduated and 453 got a job making $50k or more. We're
| already at 45%, and that's before narrowing it down to,
| "within six months."
|
| You may try to argue, "Not all of those 994 students count
| as 'job seeking,'" as if it's totally normal that 32% of
| graduates give up looking for jobs. That's moot. There was
| no fine print.
|
| Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report
| includes the upset students you pressured into signing
| NDAs?
|
| > There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge"
| regulators, and this never affected the experience any
| student had in any way.
|
| They told you to cease operation. You didn't. _After_ the
| BPPE news came to light, you told students that no school
| has ever been shut down for continuing to operate.
|
| One point of the lawsuits are the students who felt they
| should have been told about the whole BPPE situation before
| signing up. I get why you didn't want them to know, because
| according to the law, the ISAs issued before you were in
| compliance are invalid. Yet you're still trying to collect,
| which I'd say very much impacts students.
|
| > Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows"
| where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and
| if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay
| us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
|
| When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right
| there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School
| for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
| https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1329116385629245440
|
| Within hours of the tech community calling you out on this,
| you apologized. Then you deleted the apology. I find it
| amazing that your strategy is to just pretend none of that
| happened.
|
| > We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that
| mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in
| California said we should remove that clause.
|
| Your contract said: "this extension of credit is a
| qualified educational loan and is subject to the
| limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in
| Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code."
|
| It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8)
| is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
|
| https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/337/2021/04/CFP...
|
| After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called
| out your blog post as deceptive.
|
| https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-
| settlem...
| austenallred wrote:
| Oh boy, you keep taking all sorts of things out of
| context and comparing all sorts of things that don't make
| any sense to each other.
|
| A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the
| best they've ever been. That is a different set of
| students than those included in that outcomes report, and
| it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth
| of average placement. If you try to take a very specific
| comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it
| just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's
| intentional or not, but you continually, over and over,
| take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever
| and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it
| simply makes no sense.
|
| > Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes
| report includes the upset students you pressured into
| signing NDAs?
|
| Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed
| NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any
| kind in 2021.
|
| The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is
| tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the
| details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was
| involved was when a student unequivocally was going to
| owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and
| forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of
| other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in
| retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here,
| and it bit us.
|
| > When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was
| right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda
| School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
|
| This is fair - there were students who just wanted
| experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to
| build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I
| changed my mind on that one after conversations with a
| few students, and we changed the design as you pointed
| out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's
| also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students
| doing unpaid work.
|
| > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section
| 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not
| dischargeable.
|
| Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI
| on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone
| wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement
| between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But
| again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers
| doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime
| where laws are unclear (and at times even directly
| conflict).
|
| > After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI
| called out your blog post as deceptive.
|
| The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're
| commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our
| legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm
| paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had
| requested.
|
| The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not
| necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA
| is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing
| that they asked us to clear up.
|
| I think the important point here is that you're trying to
| spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil
| company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine
| print of legal documents between multiple regulatory
| bodies.
|
| OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I
| remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS
| curriculum didn't include things that would get a student
| through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your
| favorite charity for you to point out any single thing
| that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well
| some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
|
| I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge.
| You clearly think we're an evil company and are never
| going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you
| can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong,
| and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing
| our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their
| lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of
| having done so.
|
| I think if you met the people who are working day in and
| day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a
| malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and
| we're trying to do something really difficult and help
| millions of folks move into tech and change their lives
| in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet
| successful in reaching millions, but there are many
| thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of
| success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any
| scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find
| good things to say about the work that we do you would
| find just as much (if not more) to point to.
| conscion wrote:
| Austen, I bet it takes you a ton of time to write all
| this up and I want you to know it's appreciated. It's
| really insightful to see your perspective and insight on
| all these topics.
|
| So thank you
| sandofsky wrote:
| > I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you
| continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not
| the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply
| them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
|
| You keep running in circles around a very simple
| statement that was on the front page of your website:
| "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months
| and make over $50k a year."
|
| Just tell me how you got to 86%, because that's wildly
| inconsistent with _years_ of outcomes data, in addition
| to the leaks.
|
| > This is fair - there were students who just wanted
| experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to
| build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I
| changed my mind on that one after conversations with a
| few students, and we changed the design as you pointed
| out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's
| also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students
| doing unpaid work.
|
| I'm sorry, did you just lie to my face, say, "This is
| fair" and try move on?
|
| I'll be honest, I can't follow the story you're trying to
| tell. It sounds way more complex than what everyone
| watched unfold.
|
| Your FAQ at launch clearly says it's unpaid. You had a
| product manager on Hacker News trying to defend the
| program while all the commenters explained, "This is an
| unpaid intern program and probably illegal." He even
| tried the same, "Well our lawyers said it was ok." After
| the Twitter backlash, you tweeted and deleted an apology,
| and then started acting like none of that stuff happened.
|
| As for "no student ever did any unpaid work," didn't you
| pilot the program for months before publicly announcing
| it? (This is a rhetorical question. At this point I lack
| faith you'll tell the truth.)
|
| >> > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section
| 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not
| dischargeable.
|
| > Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the
| DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is
| everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no
| agreement
|
| Let me get this straight. You're saying, "There's no
| legal precedent, but hey, it might be true? So we threw
| it in!"
|
| > OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I
| remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS
| curriculum didn't include things that would get a student
| through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your
| favorite charity for you to point out any single thing
| that we were missing
|
| You blocked me, making it impossible to reply.
|
| > and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your
| students' code on github wasn't very good."
|
| Despite the block, I said: "Your students publish their
| homework to GitHub. Half a cohort failed to grasp memory
| management, but you rubber stamped them through the
| program.
|
| You even hired one of those students to be a section
| lead, to teach other students."
|
| https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1270761157595262976
|
| "I am not publicly linking to the students who struggled
| with it, because it's not their fault. But I did share
| the GitHub projects with two senior iOS developers I
| trust, and they agreed these students didn't get it."
|
| https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1270761955976859650
|
| So to answer your challenge: memory management. I have
| sign-off from two senior, ex-Apple iOS devs. Please wire
| that money to the National Student Legal Defense Network,
| who seems to be handling that lawsuit against you.
|
| > I don't know why this has become such a personal
| grudge.
|
| It's interesting that you think this is all about you.
| austenallred wrote:
| Our iOS curriculum covered memory management extensively.
| [deleted]
| sandofsky wrote:
| I said, "After looking through Lambda School's
| curriculum, I'd say students are going to struggle with
| very basic questions you'll get on first phone screens,"
| and "Out of ten student projects available, five should
| have failed."
|
| Yes, you had a page in the curriculum on memory
| management. You also rubber-stamped through people who
| didn't understand it, and even contracted one of those
| people to not-help other students on the topic.
|
| Anyone can link someone to a page about a topic and say
| it's covered, but the difference between a Udemy course
| and $30k worth of training is the expectation that
| someone will actually look at homework.
|
| Anyway, the reason you won't explain the 86% placement
| number claim is that it was true for one cohort in 2018.
| That's why you only submitted a single report to CIRR. At
| scale, the number has always been somewhere between 30%
| and 50%, but that's easier to obfuscate by coming up with
| your own methodology.
|
| There's a strong parallel with the time you claimed 100%
| of your UX cohort was hired, without disclosing that only
| one student graduated. You said it's ok because you
| tweeted, "VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813371
|
| And I'm sure you'll argue you didn't lie moments ago
| about the Fellows program due to what the word "launched"
| should mean. You have shown a pattern of deflecting the
| substance of criticism by focusing on technicalities.
|
| Maybe this worked out for you in a different life. I
| suspect you've gathered so many critics, you're "attacked
| at all sides," because you're now among engineers. They
| just take your data, plug it into a spreadsheet, and let
| the facts speak for themselves.
|
| https://applieddivinitystudies.com/lambda-lies/
|
| But I don't think this had to be. There's an alternate
| timeline where you did a mea culpa, cut out the
| shenanigans, and the tech community washed the bad taste
| out of its mouth. This could have been an incredible
| reception arc. Instead, Paul Graham enabled you with that
| whole "haters" pep talk, and things went downhill from
| there. So it goes.
| mplewis wrote:
| And what about the rest of the criticisms of your
| methodology?
| austenallred wrote:
| Which ones?
|
| The team that built our iOS curriculum is _literally_ the
| team that built the iOS curriculum at Apple.
| (https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebhicks).
|
| Honestly at this point I'm getting back to work, I don't
| think this conversation is fruitful.
| rideontime wrote:
| It's been very fun watching this flailing get more and
| more desperate over the years on HN. Thank you for this!
| shytey wrote:
| Just wanted to say you have done a good job explaining
| here. Unfortunately people love to concentrate on
| negative outcomes without thinking about the positive. On
| balance the few, arguably "bad" things Lamda has done
| seem to be hugely outweighed by the positive.
| rguzman wrote:
| i was going to sit this one out, but i want to +1 the
| above with more than just an upvote. Austen seems to be
| arguing and explaining all the happenings in good faith
| with someone who appears to be hell-bent on "catching"
| him with something by misconstruing things.
|
| i have never understood why Lambda/Bloomtech has so many
| haters but the other commenter here appears to me to be
| in that camp.
| dzader wrote:
| Austen is a terrible person and has been caught lying
| dozens of times and always hides behind the "we're just
| good people trying to help others" line to distract from
| the fact he and the rest of the lambda school staff
| (which is just all of the un-hired grads so they can
| boost their already pathetic placement rates) are
| scammers and frauds.
| shytey wrote:
| Calling someone a terrible person, liar, scammer and
| fraud with little evidence is not a good look. Even if
| all your points are true (Austen has refuted at least a
| few), "terrible person" is a huge stretch.
| dzader wrote:
| no, it isn't. defrauding and taking advantage of
| vulnerable people looking to better their lives is the
| definition of a terrible person.
| OliverGilan wrote:
| Don't really know the situation too well but I really
| appreciate these explanations. I think what people often
| misunderstand about Bloom and other bootcamps is 1)
| education is really really hard in general and software
| engineering is a really hard topic. I'd argue the default
| is most won't succeed. 2) Bootcamps like this are
| fighting an uphill battle because of selection bias. If
| you're applying to a bootcamp like this it's probably
| because you couldn't get into a college or you did but
| dropped out or don't have the money, etc. People think
| it's bizarre when 30% of grads stop looking for a job but
| it makes sense. These are people from all walks of life
| with different constraints than the average student. 3)
| Regulatory schemes in general is batshit crazy in the US.
| Messing up here and there is not always indicative of
| malintent, especially for a startup.
|
| This is certainly a problem domain that needs to be
| solved imo so I'm rooting for Bloom unless they really
| prove to be harmful. We need better pipelines for people
| with talent and motivation to climb the social ladder and
| learn new skills outside of traditional academia.
| digianarchist wrote:
| Vincent Woo's reporting is a must read if you're considering
| any interaction with this company.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Seconded. Vincent puts out good stuff!
|
| https://twitter.com/fulligin
| babelfish wrote:
| Perhaps irrelevant to the thread at hand, but as I see other
| commenters mentioning programming fellowships I'll ask here:
|
| I recently saw a mention of a programming fellowship program on
| HN that I thought sounded really interesting. It was for
| experienced programmers, I believe mostly virtual, and was free-
| or-cheap. The idea behind it was to give programmers excited
| about programming a space to explore new ideas. I've been unable
| to find it since - Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
| cyberbanjo wrote:
| Recurse Center?
|
| https://www.recurse.com/
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| https://www.recurse.com/ ?
| babelfish wrote:
| Definitely it, thank you!
| segmondy wrote:
| No surprise, the founder was just on Twitter praising Elon for
| staff cutting and marveling at the amount of money saved.
| [deleted]
| Stranger43 wrote:
| Where you get the statistics that shows real value to coding
| camp, despite a lack of tech passion is when you teach modern
| data science tools to "domain users" currently stuck within the
| limitations of excel(The only successful low code platform in the
| market), or web skills to existing content managers, but that is
| a much smaller market then trying to push the vision of easy
| money to youngsters still trying to break into the job market as
| something other then baristas or line cooks.
|
| And the companies that chased the market for youngsters without
| any real passion or plan is now running out of customers due both
| the the fact credit is now tight and that the publics infatuation
| with the tech industries is waning. And from the looks of it
| BloomTech looks to definitely target the market for youngster as
| their primary revenue stream.
| miketery wrote:
| This is excellent insight. In a previous role, on the side I
| ran an SQL training for the customer success team, and that was
| fun and beneficial.
|
| What kind of curriculum do you think is best for these folks
| coming from excel or the other BI tools?
|
| Is python jupyter too advanced?
|
| It feels like we're still early in the tooling for "no code".
| Stranger43 wrote:
| SQL is definitely where the curriculum should start. and
| Jupyter(or in reality pandas and matplotlib) is definitely
| not too advanced unless you make it so by talking machine
| learning and complex statistical modelling.
|
| What gets used in the organizations that do try and exit
| excel is typically batch jobs written in either
| python(pandas) or powershell taking data from one or more
| databases for display in a reporting framework like tableau.
|
| no code is im my view basically a myth when we start dealing
| with systems more complex then what the average high school
| student can create as a spreadsheet, as the effort in
| learning the low code platforms idiosyncrasies are similar to
| those needed to use an modern scripting language.
| kadomony wrote:
| Austen Allred is a fuckin' tool.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Have any ISA bootcamps become sustainable, or even better, led to
| VC-grade returns so far? It seems like a model that hasn't proven
| its ability to scale, but I'd be happy to see some counter-
| examples.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| The entire anti-college movement needs to die. This is a good
| step in that direction. LambdaSchool was an exploitative bad idea
| from the start.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I agree that the percentage they take is predatory. However I
| have a junior we hired right out of lambda school who was not
| in a position to go back to college even if they could have
| gotten loans. He now makes six figures and has a career he
| doesn't hate.
|
| The elitism of keeping knowledge in overpriced institutions is
| what needs to die. I know dudes who work construction that have
| deep math skills, but believe themselves idiots because schools
| don't meet them half way or peak their curiosity and thus they
| did poorly.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| The overpriced part is the problem, not college itself.
|
| 40 years ago anyone could complete a 4-year degree at nearly
| any college with grants and a part-time minimum wage job
| working 10/hrs a week.
|
| Today you could only do the same if that job paid $70/hr.
|
| The reason? Reagan and his racist republicans hated that
| college was a leveling playing field. They wanted to put a
| financial gate in front of college that only white upper
| middle class/rich students could navigate.
|
| Unfortunately, it went too far and it's now even too
| expensive for anyone but the most wealthy people.
|
| We need to go back to subsidizing public college so anyone
| can work a part-time job with federal grants to complete a
| 4-year degree while affirming minimal grades along the way.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I disagree here. Unified courses work for only a percentage
| of people, a lot of (most?) people find it boring. These
| are the people we are failing. We teach math, history you
| name it in such a mundane way that even I (who is obsessed
| with math and history) did poorly in the day to day (but
| passed because I'm a good test taker.)
| throwaway2729 wrote:
| The CEO was cheering on when Musk laid off half the company. Not
| surprised.
| dzader wrote:
| calling Austen a CEO is like calling Bernie Madoff an investor.
| sure maybe it's 'technically' true, but they're both just
| clueless scammers looking to make a buck.
| austenallred wrote:
| I wouldn't say I was cheering; I was simply acknowledging that,
| though difficult, Twitter certainly has too many employees for
| the amount of revenue they're bringing in, and I am skeptical
| of claims that Twitter will cease to function as they go from
| 8,000 employees to whatever the new number is (2,500 seems to
| be the latest)?
|
| There's certainly internal knowledge that is lost in a
| transition of that kind, but the amount of money Twitter was
| burning makes no sense, and while reducing numbers of engineers
| is risky (and complex systems require more engineers than most
| people assume), I completely believe that Twitter will be able
| to sustain the technical operations and move quickly in
| shipping product with a mere 2,000 engineers.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| It was the way the layoffs were conducted which was the
| objectionable part. Not even taking a week to assess means it
| was just haphazard.
| austenallred wrote:
| That is fair.
|
| Elon took an 8,000 person company and went full "move fast
| and break things" mode.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| You were cheering. You're still cheering. And you're doing it
| while you've had continuous layoffs of your own staff that
| have put everyone who works for you, or anyone unfortunate
| enough to be part of your predatory boot camps, in jeopardy.
|
| I don't take any joy or schadenfreude from your failures.
| Real people's lives are involved and it genuinely makes me
| sad.
|
| But glass houses dude. Glass houses. Maybe when you're own
| company is falling apart, you should refrain from publicly
| commenting on someone else's.
| austenallred wrote:
| I was not cheering, and my opinion is consistent; as money
| becomes much tighter companies have to rightsize themselves
| to the amount of revenue coming in. This is true across
| Silicon Valley and it is true of us.
|
| https://twitter.com/austen/status/1588336949403611136?s=46&
| t...
| dzader wrote:
| this is only true of shitty businesses built on scams and
| lies. company producing results don't need to.
| austenallred wrote:
| Sadly that's not true. Even the very best of companies
| try to grow and occasionally miss and have to shrink, or
| layoffs would be far more rare.
| throwaway2729 wrote:
| You had no empathy for the people getting laid off. The
| drama at Twitter was 'interesting' to you.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of
| revenue they're bringing in
|
| Twitter was profitable (pre-Musk acquisition, and ignoring a
| one-time lawsuit settlement that wasn't an ongoing expense);
| it objectively did _not_ have too much headcount (or other
| recurring expenses) for its revenue, prior to the added
| expense burden of debt service costs it was saddled with by
| Musk as part of the acquisition.
|
| Their recent failure to properly execute payroll in some
| European jurisdictions, and the fact that they apparently no
| longer have sufficient account managers to even stay in
| contact with major advertisers at a time when they are trying
| desperately to actively manage those relationships and
| maintain them despite the distrust the takeover has
| engendered seem to be signs that the cuts were to deep on the
| non-technical side for the operation that Twitter is trying
| to run; I don't see any real analytical reason to reject that
| the same is true on technical side.
|
| (And that's before considering that the reductions also seem
| likely to have broken both contract and, in many
| jurisdictions, labor laws, and legal costs associated with
| that are starting to mount, with at least one case already
| lost.)
| runako wrote:
| [I am explicitly not weighing in on whether this gambit will
| work or not. Could go either way, there is a lot of luck
| involved in business.]
|
| > Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of
| revenue they're bringing in
|
| This doesn't make any sense given that Twitter's revenue per
| employee (RPE) was roughly _double_ that of well-run
| companies like Oracle or SAP and in the ballpark of EA and
| Adobe. This metric is a red herring currently being used to
| trim workforces. Which, that 's the game and this is where we
| are in the cycle. But the ratio of revenue:employee doesn't
| tell the story here.
|
| Granted cost structures and business models are different
| across these firms, and Twitter likely could have cut some
| staff (they all likely will in coming months now that it is
| timely to do so). But that's exactly the point here: the
| Twitter ratio between employees and revenue works fine at
| other companies, and has done so for a long time. Expedia has
| built a sustainable business with a lower RPE than Twitter,
| and it is similarly a pure-play Internet company. From a
| strictly financial perspective, it's equally likely that
| there were other levers that could have equally been tuned to
| fix Twitter's persistent problems.
|
| IMHO the bigger problem was they are tooled as a high-growth
| company, but they were not growing fast. Even a modest bit of
| consistent growth, say 15% y/o/y, sustained for years, would
| likely have ameliorated their problems. Perhaps they have a
| large fixed cost to running Twitter, and they simply have not
| scaled the business enough to make it worthwhile yet -- could
| they double their business from the pre-acquisition base
| while only increasing staff 25%? That would be a good
| business! But I would guess the fundamental issue was that
| they are tooled for hypergrowth that is likely not on the
| radar.
|
| Big staff cuts, modest (but smaller) revenue drops, then
| aiming to grow at a slower, sustainable pace is pretty stock
| PE stuff (although they typically try to pay at or below
| market instead of much higher than market). Can only assume
| people who see this as genius have never observed PE work.
| austenallred wrote:
| Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven and would
| have lost money the quarter ahead of Musk's takeover had
| they not sold MoPub. Even before Musk took over they had
| planned on a 25% headcount reduction.
|
| Their revenue per employee pales in comparison to other
| companies of its ilk, and I think we would disagree whether
| SAP and Oracle are well-run companies :)
| runako wrote:
| > Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven
|
| This also fits the model where they have a large
| relatively fixed cost base to operate, but could reap
| profits if they reached a larger elusive size. Again --
| my hypothesis is they are tooled for hyper growth and the
| business has not been able to deliver that. Giving up on
| high growth and cutting to profitability is part of the
| stock PE playbook and definitely makes sense in the
| absence of strategies for generating massive growth.
|
| > we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run
| companies
|
| Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that
| they have operated for decades in competitive industries
| while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over
| that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run
| companies as poorly. :-)
| austenallred wrote:
| > Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that
| they have operated for decades in competitive industries
| while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over
| that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run
| companies as poorly. :-)
|
| Very true, but Twitter has lightning in a bottle captured
| the way few other companies do.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Not aware of that but he always seemed like the kind of CEO who
| would benefit from a lot less time on social media trying to be
| a thought leader and a lot more time working on the company.
| austenallred wrote:
| Hmm, perhaps. I actually don't spend as much time on social
| as it would seem. It takes very little time to dash off a
| tweet. It's almost like a background process that runs in my
| mind, and it helps me think through things and shave the
| edges off of my thinking.
|
| There's also probably a dopamine hit that I get from it that
| I'm not as aware of being a driving indicator, but I don't
| believe it negatively impacts my ability to run the company.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Absolute dirtbag
| gigatexal wrote:
| Not sure what BloomTech gives folks over FreeCodeCamp?
| Accreditation? Career services?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Vincent Woo who sold CoderPad also did some investigative
| journalism on Lambda School / BloomTech showing that they didn't
| really place as many people as they claimed they did and that
| generally the company had some internal dysfunction.
|
| https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658640809197569?lang...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I interviewed a number of veterans & spouses for Operation Code:
|
| https://operationcode.org/podcast
|
| Not all were bootcamp grads; a lot went to traditional 4-year
| colleges. One guy said that in his bootcamp, several of the
| students had a job offer before they even finished.
|
| Things may be different now, a few years later, but we tend to
| underestimate how many regular old businesses need a web site and
| some kind of analytics. They don't pay like FAANG companies and
| they can't hire the sort of people who'd work there.
|
| Edit: I should have mentioned that one of Operation Code's signal
| achievements was to make code schools eligible for GI Bill money.
| I found, in asking vets why they enlisted, that "paying for
| college when you get out" is a big, big motivator. There are some
| who study remotely while they're still in.
| bitL wrote:
| Wasn't BloomTech replacing its staff with contractors from the
| some tech sweatshop for a year already?
| adoxyz wrote:
| My brother went to Lambda school 2019-2020. Would not recommend.
| They had recent grads that had just completed Lambda the previous
| year teaching the new students and most of them had just a vague
| grasp on the content matter. So many inaccuracies and bad
| practices taught. The only good thing about it was that it was
| structured and you were coding each day for 5-8hrs so if you
| weren't the most self-motivated person, you were held
| accountable. But again, a lot of it was taught badly or
| inaccurately, so unless you spent a lot of time doing outside
| research on your own, you weren't learning much. If you do have
| self-motivation, you don't need Lambda or BloomTech. After
| graduation, there was no follow up of any kind. So overall,
| pretty disappointing.
| 2devnull wrote:
| I guess that sounds a lot like a community college to me, but
| maybe faster and better.
|
| Can non-self motivated people succeed if they go to say an Ivy
| League? I didn't, so it's a sincere curiosity for me. Would
| Zuckerberg have ended up bagging groceries if he went to a
| community college rather than Harvard?
| blululu wrote:
| Community colleges deliver a reasonably good quality of
| education at a very modest price point. They do accept
| basically anyone who shows up and unfortunately a lot of
| people are just not that motivated or are not adequately
| prepared for college level work. That said, if you show up
| and do the work you can easily get an associates degree and
| spin that into a career or transfer into a 4 year university.
| In California I believe that community college transfers
| generally have a higher graduation rate from 4 year schools
| than their their freshman admit peers. I have known many
| people who went to community college who are doing fine. I'm
| sure Zuckerberg would have been just fine with a community
| college curriculum (he might not be a billionaire but he
| could easily achieve a pleasant middle class lifestyle).
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Former CC student, yep. The folks who do the transfer
| program are extremely motivated. A lot of them had shitty
| jobs beforehand. Far better students than the average
| 4-year university student I'd work with when I transferred.
| The quality of education was great and the teachers were
| wonderful people. Class sizes were usually small and it was
| easy to get a lot of 1:1 time with the profs.
|
| Cost is more expensive than a code school but not absurd
| like the first two years of university. My alma mater (is
| that a thing?) is now $46 a credit, up from about $35 when
| I attended.
| Benlights wrote:
| Idk about cost, DevBootCamp was about 11k in 2014.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Only the CC credits are cheaper, yeah. But factoring in
| the other 2 years of undergrad and it's much more
| expensive than a bootcamp. Still far, far cheaper than 4+
| full years of undergrad, though!
| whatever1 wrote:
| Great talent is lost as a result of missing resources and
| connection and thus opportunities.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| to become zuckerberg you need to be smart, industrious and
| have luck on your side. If he went to CC, he would still make
| his way to upper middle class life no doubt but maybe not a
| billionare.
| zerkten wrote:
| This is nothing like community college. Community colleges
| are held to some reasonable level of accountability. It's
| unlikely that they are going to be leading edge, or trendy,
| but you know that people learning some critical skills to a
| reasonable level.
|
| Lambda School and other tech education programs start out
| well with VC money but it's not sustainable because there is
| no money in it. This is something that can be reasoned about
| a priori because you can see the budget focus of community
| colleges. Tech doesn't change the fundamentals, but the
| illusion can be sustained in the good times.
| Kalium wrote:
| My understanding of community colleges is that they generally
| make a sincere effort to have qualified instructors with a
| good grasp of the materials.
| austenallred wrote:
| If I am interpreting the parent's comment correctly, he's
| referring to TAs (we called them "team leads") not
| instructors. Based on the context of the comment I'm
| assuming that this was a time when we had a TA for every 8
| students on top of a layering of instructors for each
| cohort, and indeed the TAs would do a lot of the 1:1
| interaction. There has never been a time we didn't have
| qualified instructors, though I would readily admit the
| quality of our instructors has improved over time as we got
| better at instructional design and hiring.
| hitekker wrote:
| Before I read this article, I was on the fence and didn't know
| much about lambda tech.
|
| Now after reading https://mobile.twitter.com/fulligin/status/14
| 526586408091975..., I'm much more negative.
|
| The CEO seems like a con-man who has conned himself. The
| worrying part is that some commenters seem to be falling for
| the lies he's telling himself.
| hancholo wrote:
| I've been on the fence on going to a bootcamp for years, since
| the dev bootcamp days because I don't feel I could complete a CS
| degree given all that math. I've also been in various FAANG
| companies the past 5 years and while not in a dev/swe role I have
| picked up some things as I go. The front end and user interfaces
| is something I've been interested for a while so I think I may
| pivot to front end dev or some kind of automation engineer for UI
| testing. Are there any release engineers here?
| lazypenguin wrote:
| If you are motivated you can learn everything that's in a boot
| camp on your own. However, going through a boot camp
| successfully is a good signal during hiring that you have some
| experience in programming in relavent technology. It's much
| harder to signal your experience when it's all self taught.
| Whether it's good value for the money depends on your own
| circumstances.
| hancholo wrote:
| That's a fair point. From what I've seen it really comes down
| to the hours you put in outside of class and your own side
| projects. Being able to speak the language, walk through the
| stack you used and why, issues you ran into and how you
| overcame them.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I've always been conflicted about this company. The
| marketing/news is always controversial(ISA, outcomes, lawsuits,
| etc), but clever in terms of media manipulation(more eyes on it
| to their service). The service is noble and good to fill the
| demand and change people's lives.
|
| It's hard to use the words morally wrong and noble goals in the
| same sentence though given it's a contradiction.
|
| Layoffs suck regardless though.
| btheshoe wrote:
| makes sense, considering that the current economic climate in the
| tech industry will impact bootcamp grads the most.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Teaching more people how to code is a very noble and worthy goal.
| I for one applaud the hard work the team at Lambda/Bloom does.
|
| The press coverage has been insane especially if you think about
| all the problems universities have.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| This one's a head-scratcher. Presumably in a downturn people want
| to upskill or change careers so demand would go up for a program
| like this? Though I do think it is far too expensive for what you
| get.
| vcsmjk wrote:
| Glad to see this, Lambda School is extremely scummy. Can't be
| bothered to operate legally, and lied about it:
| https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1211717254712135680?lan...
|
| I really think that the law should be changed so that doing stuff
| like that would have been a prison term for the CEO (Allred).
| austenallred wrote:
| This is fundamentally not what happened and a prison term for
| this would be insane (even California's BPPE would agree with
| that).
|
| Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE
| because we weren't offering in-person classes (this was
| somewhat rare back in 2017 - certainly more rare than now). The
| BPPE sent us a letter that said we needed to register and we
| did so and began working with the BPPE instantly. We never ever
| lied about that fact, and there was no attempt to avoid
| regulation in any way.
| ec109685 wrote:
| https://applieddivinitystudies.com/lambda-lies/
|
| He also lied about having an auditor verify their placement
| rates. Caught asking Bookface for an auditor reference while
| proclaiming it was audited.
| austenallred wrote:
| No, that is not true. We never claimed to have an audited
| report until we actually had an audited report.
|
| I asked if there was an auditor who would verify them after
| the fact to show that they were accurate, but we had had
| never claimed they were audited at that point.
|
| Unfortunately auditors doing that is a months-long process,
| so we could only have them audit subsequent reports (which
| they have done).
| avalys wrote:
| A prison term for not registering with some bureaucratic state
| agency? Why?
|
| The "California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education"?
| This is indistinguishable from parody.
| sandofsky wrote:
| The BPPE was formed because California was the world capital
| of diploma-mills in the 80's. It falls under consumer
| protection, similar to how California has a special bureau
| that punishes scummy "extended warranty" companies.
|
| The reason you register is so the state can periodically
| check your marketing material and field students complaints.
| For example, Lambda School lied about how many students get
| jobs, and it would have been real nice for the agency to have
| stepped in before the lawsuits, which are still in
| litigation.
| [deleted]
| rrss wrote:
| Why is it unreasonable to have people in a government agency
| to address fraudulent colleges and stuff?
|
| Do you feel the same way about the bureau of consumer
| protection in the US FTC?
| lmm wrote:
| You don't have to register or get a license from the FTC to
| open a business. At least I hope you don't.
| ffssffss wrote:
| It's not about the importance of the act of filing
| paperwork, it's the fraud of lying to customers that you
| are following the law and then taking their money. For
| what it's worth, I don't think prison would help. But
| maybe some non-dischargable liabilities and a ban from
| being a corporate officer would.
| austenallred wrote:
| If you were actually to commit fraud regulators can come
| for you whether you register or not. The act of
| registration is simply to make it easier to tell
| regulators what is happening.
| swang720 wrote:
| I'm actually glad there's a state department for this.
| Fraudulent private colleges are a _real_ problem.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Ah yes, prison for trying to teach something useful across a
| zillion regulatory domains, sinecures for administrators at
| "real" universities while students rack up piles of debt for
| English degrees.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Just because one route is rotten doesn't validate alternate
| scummy routes. Cops are rotten so drug dealers are good? Lol.
| Varauk wrote:
| > employees will get normal pay and medical benefits until
| January 31, 2023 and are "expected to work" through that period.
|
| So severance but they have to keep working too? Seems rough. Hard
| to imagine anyone in that situation would focus on working for
| their soon-to-be former employer.
| wheels wrote:
| That's actually very common in a lot of countries. I think the
| US is the outlier in the expectation that notice and stopping
| of work are concurrent. Same with quitting a job. In Germany
| it's normal to give 3 months notice before quitting.
| austenallred wrote:
| This actually isn't true.
|
| There are a few edge cases where folks will be working through
| that period and contract with us afterwards in different/new
| roles, but impacted employees are _not_ expected to work with
| us during that period.
| kawsper wrote:
| In europe it's normal to keep working after employer-side
| contract terminations.
|
| In Denmark, depending on how long you've been with the company
| your employers contract termination notice period can be
| anywhere between 1 month (after 5 months with the company) to 6
| months (after more than 8 years and 6 months with the company).
|
| Also, most commonly, if the employee is the one terminating the
| contract, the notice period is 1 month (although it can be
| negotiated higher for key employees).
|
| It is understood that your motivation will plummet when you're
| terminated, but you're still expected to maintain your
| responsibilites, and eventually, hand over your obligations.
| But you're also allowed to go to interviews during and if you
| get a new job your own 1 month termination warning will count.
|
| I've experienced that some employers will offer garden leave to
| the affected employees, as in they don't have to work or show
| up daily, but they will hand over responsibilites immediately
| and be available if there's any questions.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Immigration status dodge? Say you "expect them to work", but
| don't enforce it, so they aren't technically unemployed and the
| H1B clock doesn't start ticking right away?
|
| Maybe trying to game unemployment insurance rates? If someone
| is employed they can't go on unemployment, hopefully in two
| months some of them find something new driving down your costs
| compared to firing them and having them apply right away?
|
| It's a pipe dream if they think anyone laid off will be putting
| any effort in.
| pkaye wrote:
| The WARN act requires 60 days of notification before a mass
| layoff. So the company can choose to either notify employees
| 60 days before layoff or pay 60 days of severance pay and
| layoff immediately.
| mirzap wrote:
| Lambda School always looked as a scam to me. I mean, $20k+ for a
| "bootcamp" and couple of courses is crazy expensive. It's like
| they designed this program to squeeze all the money from people
| who can not afford ridiculous tuition fees in the US by giving
| them hope they will progress faster if they pay them instead of
| self educating or taking much cheaper competitor's offers.
|
| Udacity has very similar thing with curriculum for various
| positions, 1:1 mentoring, interview prep etc. for a fraction of
| BloomTech price, like 1/10 or even 1/20. Which I still consider
| expensive, since cost of digital goods are close to 0 to
| replicate and deliver to more people. Point I make here is they
| can earn more by delivering $100 program to 1m of students or
| even 1/5 of that, than delivering $1.2k program to 10k students
| or $20k program to 1k students.
| dzader wrote:
| it's a verified scam, your intuition was correct
| gigatexal wrote:
| Ahh a rebrand is always a good sign /end-sarcasm.
| awb wrote:
| Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads?
|
| I've interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like
| "Fellow at [bootcamp]" or "Instructor at [bootcamp]", and it
| turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr
| intro to JavaScript class.
|
| None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level
| dev jobs, but I'm curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp
| grad for a junior role and had a great experience.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| bootcamp grads not being immediately good when hired makes
| sense in the context that even CS majors with at least 4 years
| of coding experience generally suck when they start. What could
| you possibly expect from somebody with 3-6 months experience?
|
| bootcamp grads make more sense to be brought on as some sort of
| intern level hire with similar expectations
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| I recently advertised a role and had over 2000 applicants (yes,
| really). The vast majority of applicants went through
| bootcamps. Personally, I'm fine with that, heck, I'm Head of
| Engineering and I'm a university drop-out i.e. didn't even
| complete a course!
|
| One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told
| students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at
| the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are
| supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings
| alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to
| candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is
| cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover
| letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a
| bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between
| candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github
| (though, yes, you should include those).
| philliphaydon wrote:
| > Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover
| letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters!
|
| I just throw the cover letters in the bin...
| b800h wrote:
| Yep, a lot of companies would bin them for unconscious bias
| reasons too.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| That seems like a odd reason. Are they also tossing the
| resumes in the bin for potential bias?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly
| told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow
| employed at the bootcamp.
|
| I've seen this, too. At some point, everyone coming out of
| certain bootcamps was an "instructor" rather than just a
| graduate. I suspect one of them is running a scheme to have
| their own grads teach their own classes for reduced tuition.
|
| I second the cover letter section. GitHub goes a long way,
| but it needs something unique. I know exactly what projects
| are taught at local bootcamps because they're in every single
| bootcamp grad's GitHub profile. Show me something you worked
| on by yourself.
| sbisker wrote:
| I've noticed that a lot of bootcamp grads are, in fact,
| legitimately hired by their bootcamps - just not to write
| code. They are often brought on term by term as TAs until
| they find work.
|
| I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the
| bootcamps, a way to pad their "successfully employed" rates
| while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault
| the candidates for putting those experiences in their resume.
| They need that money to keep their job searches going, and
| recruiters are always biasing against gaps on the resume.
|
| If you're being paid by them for any reason, put it on your
| resume. (And if you're not...move it to the education
| section, where it belongs.)
| [deleted]
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers,
| because they'll be producing good quality candidates. So
| all you're really doing is highlighting the fact you went
| through a lower quality bootcamp. There's so many bootcamps
| I don't know which ones are legitimate and which are scams.
| Without that signal on the candidate's CV, I'd have no idea
| where the one the candidate has been through ranks.
| However, to me that's a clear indication that the bootcamp
| (or perhaps the candidate) are dodgy.
| noisenotsignal wrote:
| If the vast majority of applicants from one bootcamp
| claim to be employed by them then I can see why you would
| be suspicious, but I'd be hesitant to throw out all
| bootcamp grads who say they've been employed by their
| bootcamp.
|
| There might be perfectly legitimate reasons to be
| employed. Maybe they were aiding instruction of earlier
| students as they got more experience, akin to a tutor or
| teaching assistant in colleges. Maybe they took a
| temporary job because they were unable to find a job
| right out of bootcamp, and the reasons for not being able
| to get a job don't necessarily have to be negative (e.g.
| they had familial commitments).
|
| Getting a job from a bootcamp is already hard and it
| wouldn't quite sit right with me to reject someone
| outright for something that could be explainable. Perhaps
| if you are drowning in applicants then you are forced to
| be harsher out of practicality, but even then surely
| there's a better filter then someone reporting what is
| ostensibly an experience applicable to job they're
| pursuing.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment
| numbers, because they'll be producing good quality
| candidates
|
| If you make this the metric to evaluate on, you're going
| to end up with the Ivy League scenario where bootcamps
| only admit people who would have succeeded anyway.
|
| The POINT of education is to give people a chance to
| succeed who were likely to fail without it, and you have
| to accept a failure rate for that to work.
| vsareto wrote:
| You could probably message 3 random engineers at random
| companies and invite them to coffee and it'd be a better
| return on time invested for your career than writing cover
| letters. I'm not sure why you'd want to read 500 cover
| letters as opposed to reviewing 500 CVs.
|
| And why on earth did you keep the job posting open to
| accumulate 2000+ applicants? Legal reasons?
| carabiner wrote:
| It's like asking, has anyone had success hiring college grads?
| My data science bootcamp had actual Harvard and MIT degree
| holders (bachelor's, I don't mean their extension / online
| certificate programs). I guarantee you they had much better
| experience getting their resumes seen than the guys with no
| degrees. I'm in another bootcamp-esque program for SWE's and
| some participants have joined Google, but most have joined
| random second-tier companies or startups.
| noodle wrote:
| I've hired quite a few, and generally speaking they've all
| turned out great. Having said that, the volume of resumes that
| come in to the ones that I've actually hired is vast. Myself
| and my recruiters have probably sifted through 10,000 bootcamp
| resumes per 1 hire. You have to be ruthless about who you
| actually talk to.
|
| Another tip would be, don't interview a bootcamp grad for mid-
| level jobs.
| kodah wrote:
| I've met some people with physics and accounting degrees who
| took boot camps and had success, but the people I've seen
| succeed were already problem solvers and math-aware. They just
| needed to know the language and routines.
|
| On the other hand, I dropped out of school and have been
| programming for a majority of my life. I was never accused of
| being incompetent or underperforming, but there was a point in
| my career where I was not going to progress without deeper math
| skills. That said, it only takes a couple years to learn.
| da01 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how/where you got your deeper math
| skills?
| kodah wrote:
| Books. A lot of people gave me books, many college-level
| books are free on the internet in PDF form. I also had to
| read back through algebra and calculus to pick up on some
| concepts I had forgotten. Earlier in my search I used Udemy
| and Khan Academy. There's good courses on both but they
| really only get you so far, imo.
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| > many college-level books are free on the internet in
| PDF form
|
| As are many of the college-level lecture notes,
| assignments, and answer keys.
| seneca wrote:
| dang wrote:
| It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for
| ideological battle. We ban that sort of account, regardless
| of ideology, because this is the opposite of the curious
| conversation HN exists for.
|
| If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to
| the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| One of my best new hires is a bootcamp grad with 0 real world
| experience. But he's a huge outlier, very self motivated,
| hardworking.
|
| Personality type tends to trump experience. Unless of course
| you need a specialist to hit the ground running out of the
| gate.
|
| In general, I have not hired many bootcamp grads over the
| years. They tend to present as very non-technical in most cases
| jurassic wrote:
| I was a bootcamp grad in 2013. Myself and my classmates are now
| mostly filling Staff+ roles, many working in FAANG level
| companies. So, yes, many people have hired bootcampers and had
| a good experience.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Filling out staff roles at FANG? Not at the FANG company I
| work at. I've never met a single boot camp person, and
| absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I
| know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and
| never talk about it.
| jurassic wrote:
| > I've never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely
| zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of,
| unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk
| about it.
|
| This comment has the same energy as the person I once
| worked with who told me (a lesbian) with total confidence
| that they'd never met a gay person before. Just because you
| aren't aware doesn't mean it's not happening all around
| you.
|
| It's very common for graduates to not talk about it,
| precisely because of the attitudes you see in these
| comments. It's easily left off LinkedIn because the
| experience only lasts a few months. And after you've had
| some success at the first job, it's not relevant anyway.
|
| How many people do you know in the industry without CS
| degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps,
| whether they cop to it or not.
|
| I considered it a shameful secret for years, and it's only
| now as I approach my tenth anniversary in the industry that
| I've become more open about it -- I'm confident my work now
| speaks for itself.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _How many people do you know in the industry without CS
| degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps,
| whether they cop to it or not._
|
| People without CS degrees or degrees at all are fairly
| common, including at staff level and above. Many of these
| people have been in the industry since before bootcamps
| became a thing.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Previous comment showing a sample of 50 staff engineers
| shows only 1/50 having a non CS or CS adjacent degree and
| only 6 didn't show any degree. So idk if I would call
| that 'fairly common'.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I'm skeptical of that claim as well. I happen to have a
| roster of product and engineering employees at a FAANG
| company.
|
| It doesn't include any information about their education
| but what I can do is pick a selection of the staff level
| engineers at random and look them up on LinkedIn.
|
| Here's the highest level of education attained by the
| first 50 I looked at:
|
| 7 had a PhD in Computer Science
|
| 1 had a PhD in Physics
|
| 1 PhD in Electrical Engineering
|
| 12 had a master's degree in Computer Science
|
| 1 had a master's degree in Computer Engineering
|
| 1 had a master's degree in Information Management
|
| 13 had a bachelor's degree in Computer Science
|
| 1 had a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering
|
| 1 had a bachelor's degree in Information Technology
|
| 6 did not list any educational experience
|
| 6 I could not find on LinkedIn
|
| I did not see any that mentioned a coding bootcamp
| explicitly.
| jurassic wrote:
| My claim was not that all or even most Staff engineers at
| prominent companies come from bootcamp backgrounds but
| that bootcampers can and have achieved this level of
| success. My bootcamp cohort was over 9 years ago...
| anybody who didn't wash out in the very early days has
| had plenty of time to grow and make significant
| contributions. Not sure why people find this surprising.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Can also confirm worked at multiple faang never seen
| anyone with a bootcamp. Sorry to break it to you but It's
| pretty rare.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I personally know people from my one bootcamp that have
| worked at Google and Apple. That's without having looked
| to see if there are others I don't know.
|
| People tend to play down their bootcamp experiences
| because of stigma associated with it. It's possible that
| there are bootcamp grads that don't mention it because a
| lot of people think lesser of them.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think the point of contention is with "Staff+" roles.
| I'm at a Big Tech company and we've seen lots of success
| with bootcampers, but I've noticed many of them hit a
| wall around Senior or Staff. Though I worked with an
| engineer who was super intelligent and a blast to work
| with and she is now a Staff engineer and was from a
| bootcamp. (At the time we were smaller and didn't really
| have any Staff level roles.) We've also had several
| bootcamp engineers move onto other Big Tech/FAANG
| companies so I have no idea what they're up to there.
|
| I can see why folks might want to hide their bootcamp
| path if they already have past non-bootcamp experience
| they can point to. In all fairness, _most_ engineers,
| whether top-10 CS school or bootcamper, tend to hit a
| wall around Senior or Staff. Without knowing the true
| denominator of bootcampers we 've hired, I can't properly
| answer the question of whether bootcampers tend to do
| better, the same, or worse at these levels than average.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Everyone I worked with had a undergrad is
| CS/math/engineering and plenty had masters / PhDs. That's
| generally what the profile of devs at faang looks like.
| I'm sure there are some people who have different
| backgrounds but it's not common.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I have heard that early classes from bootcamps tend to have
| great people, while the later classes are both more "dillute"
| in terms of raw talent and more starved of instruction time
| (as the bootcamp pinches pennies to make a profit).
|
| I have worked with bootcamp grads who are amazing engineers
| and ones who are terrible, same with ivy league CS grads.
| jurassic wrote:
| I do think there was a bit of a gold rush with fly-by-night
| programs popping up everywhere; as a result the quality bar
| for bootcamp grads has probably shifted down on average,
| but I expect there are still some very talented trying to
| jumpstart a new career this way.
|
| Early movers in the space like DevBootcamp and App Academy
| were able to be quite selective about who they took, often
| picking primarily non-CS grads from elite universities
| looking to redeploy high levels of baseline intelligence
| and communication skills into a more lucrative field than
| whatever they studied at university. That was definitely my
| motivation once I realized I might never afford a middle-
| class lifestyle (e.g. homeownership, children) if I kept
| going in the scientific field I trained for.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I'm coming from the other side of things. I was a non-
| programmer with a programming passion that used programming as
| a part of my work voluntarily, but didn't know the first thing
| about the kind of programming that companies hire for.
|
| I took a coding boot camp when I decided to leave academia to
| join industry, and it was a useful primer on the "in"
| technologies that folks would be hiring for, and of the "style"
| of code that was fashionable at the time. I would not have
| hired any of my classmates (well, I might have hired one as a
| junior), but the bootcamp did what I needed it to do, exposing
| me to the "culture" of programming at tech companies.
|
| I was hired as a mid-level and quickly progressed to senior at
| a large global tech company. I have been at a few different
| tech companies now and haven't run into any major challenges or
| problems, and have only received positive feedback from my
| peers and managers.
|
| If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today,
| I'd probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential. I
| think it helped that I had a number of usable "products" that I
| had made over the course of my career as a solo programmer that
| didn't really fit any mold. I also think it helped that I
| didn't have any trouble with basic algorithm brain teasers,
| finding them sort of fun at the time I was interviewing. I've
| never tried leetcode but I suspect I've only seen leetcode
| "easies." Thankfully I haven't had to do any of that for any of
| my subsequent jobs as I don't think I'd have the patience for
| it anymore.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > I'm coming from the other side of things. I was a non-
| programmer with a programming passion that used programming
| as a part of my work voluntarily
|
| I would love to ask why didn't you pursue programming in the
| first place, but last time I did that the person explained to
| me that they have a complex, chronic, hard to diagnose rare
| digestive tract disease and they went to study nutritional
| science specifically so that they could at least figure out
| what to eat to not makes things worse.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Honestly, I thought there was more glory AND autonomy in
| academia than in "industry." I came from a family that
| valued education and learning and monastic-like traditions
| over things like money or productivity. With the way my
| blinders had been fashioned, it simply didn't occur to me
| until later in my life that doing "problem solving for
| hire" was a viable life-path, and that software as a
| pursuit in and of itself offered me everything academia
| offered me and more.
| j-krieger wrote:
| > If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire
| today, I'd probably consider me a risky hire with unknown
| potential
|
| You would be wrong. The most important indicator the hiring
| manager saw in you is that you worked in academia. Hiring
| someone who worked in academia and also learned to code on
| the side is a _lot_ different than hiring a middle aged
| soccer mom whose MLM scheme didn 't work out. Both may have a
| 3 month bootcamp under their belt, but one has an entirely
| different work ethic.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| That specific example seems sorta yikes opinion for
| somebody with hiring power. Aren't people who get targeted
| by MLMs victims? More importantly, what does that say about
| how hard they work? Or being a mom?
| emptysea wrote:
| Hit or miss really. Like anyone hiring is difficult but I
| wouldn't shy away from hiring someone with a bootcamp
| experience
| Klonoar wrote:
| The companies who have hired them successfully (that I know of)
| tend to understand two critical things:
|
| - You _have_ to have an environment where they can learn - You
| _have_ to have staff who can actually mentor them up
|
| If you don't have either of those (which many startups don't,
| just due to not simply having the time/bandwidth) then hiring
| them can be detrimental.
|
| So to answer your question: I know a few, but these companies
| that can do it are few and far between, and that's the dirty
| secret here unfortunately. The schools themselves seem to
| select for "can we place this person here and get our money"
| rather than necessarily where they can grow.
| [deleted]
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I have, and through many years of training (and more
| importantly, tons of hard work + raw talent on their part) have
| watched a few become very senior engineers / senior leaders in
| engineering management. This was years ago and they were from
| one of the bootcamps that only gets paid if you get a job as a
| software engineer.
| jraines wrote:
| I have hired them and taught a class. Rule of thumb if you can
| find they were top 1 to 3 in the class they're probably a good
| if not great junior dev candidate.
|
| My golden 2 pieces of advice to bootcamp grads:
|
| Don't use the resume template the bootcamp gives you. If 2/3 of
| your resume is "software projects" you're probably getting
| screened out at this point even if you're actually good, it's a
| tell.
|
| Second, since you'll still need to include one or two, spend
| time polishing the heck out of them and make sure they are
| online and working! Best if they're not a microblog,
| recipe/beer picker, or pokedex. Do the same polishing for your
| personal site. If it looks like crap you're probably getting
| screened out on this, too.
| ucm_edge wrote:
| I hire them and give them a task somewhere between support
| engineer that executes well documented code snippets in run
| books and junior engineer that does very basic CRUD web app
| development. Making internal dashboards for the customer
| success team, etc.
|
| Give them about 32 hours of work a week and 8 hours of
| tutorials on other things. Build them up from there.
|
| I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of
| ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions
| and raises come slow. Because the ugly truth is a lot of the
| bootcampers hit a plateau. I have had a couple push through to
| my bar for senior, but most cap out in my mid range.
|
| During the shortage the ability to hire and get solid mids out
| of 65% of them was a net positive. Right now though it is less
| important given the talent coming into the market.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack
| of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when
| promotions and raises come slow.
|
| I've had similar problems. We've had some bootcamp grads who
| were good to work with and acknowledged that they were still
| very junior. We've also had some bootcamp grads who felt
| entitled to mid-range to senior compensation after their
| first year, while still getting their bearings on basic
| developer work. It's hard to explain that, no, I will not
| give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+
| years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K
| comp after a couple years in the industry.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| > It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a
| raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of
| experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp
| after a couple years in the industry.
|
| I dunno, I think what you have right there is pretty good
| explanation wise, haha.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Are they able to go elsewhere and find better pay?
| enumjorge wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to in the 2020
| to early 2022 job market. Today's market will be a good
| litmus test to see if people with surface-level knowledge
| and limited experience can land $200k+ a year jobs in
| tech.
| granshaw wrote:
| Their bootcamp should have added the caveat: at a FAANG
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Do you build those apps from scratch? Or are you using
| something like Retool?
| disruptthelaw wrote:
| Have you observed any other path for new want-to-be
| developers other than boot camps that tends to yield better
| outcomes ?
| ptero wrote:
| Not the person you are asking, but I'd say a genuine
| interest in the field.
|
| A couple of simple hobby projects and participation in
| meetups and chats can give both faster ramp-up (beyond very
| basic) and solid job leads. My 2c.
| ucm_edge wrote:
| Activity is the signal. Self taught but goes to a ton of
| meetups. Enrolled in one of the legit online master's
| programs, etc. Ofttimes bootcamps can appear on these
| resumes. Someone did a bootcamp, realized it wasn't enough
| and kept growing in a manner.
|
| People who treat the bootcamp as the terminal level of
| knowledge plateau.
| SystemOut wrote:
| Yeah, we found an amazing engineer through one of the bootcamp
| programs. It might have helped that she had a math degree and
| so she probably started with an analytical approach but either
| way, she did really well. This was in a rapidly growing
| enterprise software company with rigorous reviews.
|
| There was definitely some bias against it in a few corners of
| our group but by and large, most didn't care. Ironically, the
| guy on the team that didn't like her because she came from a
| coding bootcamp (he had a CS degree) was by far my worst
| performer.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > It might have helped that she had a math degree
|
| May be that's my own biases speaking (and my degree), but
| I've spent all my professional life in a firm belief that a
| math degree is _way_ more preferential than a CS degree for
| an SWE job. Like you should hire a CS graduate only when
| there is no math graduates willing to take the job (but we
| never had a shortage of those feeding on the Moscow State).
|
| If forced to rationalize this belief, I would say that CS is
| just a subset of math, and not that intellectually
| challenging actually, so a person that has chosen a CS course
| over a math one has voluntarily agreed to narrow his
| intellectual perspective in order to possibly get a better
| pay in the future.
|
| (Hides quickly).
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| My partner went to Makersquare (since bought & rebranded Hack
| Reactor).
|
| They joined a successful small e-commerce site (Javascript),
| then a few years later joined Loon (Google X) (Python), and
| sensing the wind switched to another Google X project before
| Loon shut down.
|
| They're doing pretty well, if I say so myself.
| eastbayjake wrote:
| > My partner went to Makersquare (since bought & rebranded
| Hack Reactor)
|
| Which in 2018 was bought and integrated into Galvanize!
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| lol I can't keep up!
|
| The interesting thing is that much of the value of a
| diploma/certification is in the "brand" backing it.
|
| In any case, I don't think my partner was counting on the
| value of the Makersquare brand as anything other than
| getting their foot in the industry, so that's done and
| gone.
| duxup wrote:
| I changed careers with a bootcamp. I'd say about 20% of the
| class was "hire-able". But everyone "graduated".
|
| A number of us has made good careers of it, but yeah the
| largest % were not capable. It was so bad it made the camp
| pretty painful at times.
|
| After graduating I was worried about walking into a skeptical
| audience after they encountered some of my classmates....
| hysan wrote:
| > Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads?
|
| Yes and no, because it depends on your expectations. At the
| last company I worked at, I made sure to have a chat with
| management to understand what they were looking for before I
| did my round in the interview loop. I also advised on what
| potential questions to probe with since I had some insight
| having worked as a lead instructor at a bootcamp. Sometimes
| that meant I would thumbs down an otherwise promising bootcamp
| candidate because they were weaker on say, the frontend when we
| needed a frontend junior dev. Our VP of Eng had already
| understood that and we batted way above average... at first.
|
| Then C-level management took that as a sign that all we needed
| was juniors and cut the budget for hiring mid+ roles in the
| then hot hiring market. After a long dry spell (rejected
| offers), we relented and hired more bootcamp grads into junior
| roles. That eventually flipped the ratio of juniors to non-
| juniors which will never go well because you end up with an
| environment that can't support their growth. On top of that,
| C-level management expected that more staff == immediate
| improvements on velocity and were vocally disappointed when we
| slowed down. We expected it and tried communicating it -
| ramping juniors sucks up time, they won't be a net positive
| until waaaay later, but of course, they _knew_ better.
|
| Looking back on that experience, I learned a lot about the
| importance of managing upwards and setting very very clear
| expectations. Because that's where I see a lot of these hiring
| situations go wrong. You need to make an honest assessment of
| both what qualities you need in a junior and of your own
| environment to know if they work for your company, bootcamp or
| otherwise.
| whoIsYou wrote:
| I was a bootcamp grad that was hired for a junior level role (5
| years ago)
|
| It was rough at first but I had a chip on my shoulder and
| voluntarily worked 10-11 hours a days for 2 years straight to
| make up the time difference and learn all the things I needed
| to learn
|
| I was a good hire (and was also bored AF living in Ohio)
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Nope, that was also my experience. They either fell apart when
| asked to do a programming problem that required coming up with
| a data structure on their own (not one right answer, but not
| given to them) or on simple programming challenges when asked
| to adjust for a rule change.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Yes. One of our best mid-level developers finished a boot camp
| in 2020. Excellent mix of coding and communications skills.
| andrew_gs wrote:
| I hired a bootcamp grad and she's doing well. She did already
| have a mechanical engineer degree though and did program as
| part of that degree and so has a good mindset for solving
| problems. I hired her explicitly as a junior role though, I
| can't imagine hiring a bootcamp grad into a mid-level role
| directly - that would seem to be setting them up to fail?
| [deleted]
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| I'm very biased because I went to a bootcamp. However, it was
| very focused on placement and had good access to roles. I felt
| more than qualified for an entry level role, and completed
| progressively more serious projects.
|
| I had a few friends wash out of their tech jobs, and we
| certainly had some people that were never very good. Most of us
| were good enough for and entry role, and a few of us were
| slightly overqualified.
|
| I'm now at a really great and highly technical company.
|
| Some of these programs have serious problems. I think the ones
| with ISAs are the worst offenders.
| mhensley wrote:
| I've hired Code Louisville [1] graduates across multiple roles
| now. This is a totally free program in Louisville, KY and does
| a great job of getting people setup for a new career. CL grads
| are all over the Louisville area doing amazing work.
|
| Of course, all these programs are what you make of them. The
| best graduates are people that were really invested in learning
| and took advantage of the curriculum and mentors. For those
| that put in the work, they come out punching way above their
| years of experience.
|
| 1: https://www.codelouisville.org/
| xapata wrote:
| > hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great
| experience.
|
| Yes, but most interview candidates from bootcamps couldn't pass
| the tech screen, and most of the hires were mediocre. One was
| stellar.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Bootcamps are scams stealing money from the clueless.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| The range of quality is extremely high in bootcamps. I've
| interviewed many bootcamp grads the median quality is pretty
| low. However, I went through a bootcamp (Code Fellows in
| Seattle) and almost my entire cohort went on to eventually join
| a FAANG, technical co-founder, or something fairly prestigious.
|
| The curriculum, the teaching style, and the aptitude/ drive of
| the cohort matters a lot.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Fellow bootcamp grad here.
|
| This is what drives me nuts. My bootcamp has a legitimately
| high placement rate (90% hired as SWE or dev within 90 days),
| that is audited externally, but somehow it is in the same
| category as something that takes 1/4 the time with a
| legitimately terrible curriculum.
|
| There needs to be some better differentiator for vocational
| training.
| duped wrote:
| I'm really interested in your last sentence there -
|
| Something that I learned before I converted fully to SWE is
| that most other domains of engineering have this class of
| job I'll call a "tech." In the hardware world they're
| electricians, or electronics lab techs, in mechanical
| they're mechanics, and in the other domains you'll call
| them lab techs or factory techs.
|
| It's a highly technical role with a different entry point
| that has a harder path to a higher tier of compensation,
| but also contains a pathway to management and more
| integration at an organizational level (similar to
| technical vs management tracks for engineers).
|
| What's different is that domains outside SWE have pretty
| well-defined ways for people to enter into the "tech"
| position. Vocational training, like through trade schools,
| community colleges, the military, etc. We do not have that
| in software, yet.
|
| Bootcamps are like an experiment into the vocational
| training to develop a "tech" for software development. Our
| industry is still very young, so we haven't found a way to
| define the roles for people that go through that training,
| and people don't know how it fits in or what the job
| responsibilities/management should look like yet. I think
| the model of treating a bootcamp grad like a potential
| junior engineer is wrong - it's really a separate track for
| career development.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| I've hired quite a few mostly from the old DevBootcamp before
| it was acquired by Kaplan and spun down.
|
| Like most companies, we hired them into our apprenticeship
| program and then they worked their way up from there.
|
| Most of them now are senior engineers or moved into management
| across the globe.
|
| I'd say DevBootcamp seems to have put out some of the strongest
| students and they've done extremely well for themselves with
| strong representation at FAANG and other "good" tech companies.
|
| Can't speak for the other camps besides saying I cant think who
| made it through our apprentice code day.
| jfarmer wrote:
| Glad to hear our students worked out for you! We tried hard
| to give students a career, not just their first job.
|
| Some of the other anecdotes in this thread are disheartening,
| for sure.
|
| Flatiron, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright also had similar
| reputations early on. A very different landscape now.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I have a couple of bootcamp grads who are good. Thing is, I'm
| 99% sure they'd have been good without the bootcamp time as
| well.*
|
| Overall, I've had a terrible experience with the bootcamp
| "mills" that cram people though dozens in a batch and where all
| of them have some bullshit story about how they did customer
| interviews and then built an inventory manager or CRM or
| e-commerce site for this (made-up) business. The story _rhymes
| with_ a story that would be relevant but it's 100% veneer with
| no backer.
|
| They'll have a GitHub link on their resume. On it, you can see
| the same code as 5 other applicants. All the green days are
| clustered together and all stop abruptly at the same time as
| each other.
|
| Those candidates are what a lot of people think of when they
| think bootcamp.
|
| tl;dr: bad bootcamps are bad. I don't think I've ever crossed
| paths with a Lambda School/BloomTech grad to have an opinion on
| their program.
|
| * this is the type of bootcamp experience that reads to me like
| the rare positive exception:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33826116
| rchaud wrote:
| That's a _very_ rare exception: the mid-career professional
| that has already coded in a professional setting, and used
| the bootcamp to figure out how to market himself for SE
| roles.
|
| Most bootcamp students will be young and not know the rules
| of the game, or the cultural signifiers that make them look
| 'employable'.
| benbjohnson wrote:
| I've hired 2 bootcamp grads from Turing in Denver. They were
| great and have both gone on to senior roles.
|
| I mentored another woman in a bootcamp about ten years ago and
| she later went on to be a senior engineer at HashiCorp. She
| then got a PhD in Mathematics and eventually got into an
| academic role in cryptography/security/privacy.
|
| I only have a high school diploma and I've had a successful 20+
| year career in software. Honestly, there are people that are
| driven that go through all sorts of education pathways. I don't
| see a bootcamp certification being a strong signal towards
| success or failure. It's just a tool that folks can use.
| tndl wrote:
| Was also going to comment about Turing school. I've worked
| with Turing school grads who were really strong, as well as
| Galvanize/gSchool grads from the period when Turning and
| Galvanize were still the same thing. I think Turing School's
| non-profit (not for profit?) status affects its practices a
| lot, as I know it has smaller cohort sizes and pretty
| rigorous entry requirements.
|
| In my mind, code bootcamps are just like anything else in the
| realm of professional education - there's a ton of scammy and
| low quality stuff out there, but there are genuine upsides to
| the format and some people are served really well and come
| out as strong engineers.
| ativzzz wrote:
| I graduated from a bootcamp 6-7 years ago and had several
| offers for entry level positions from smaller companies I
| wanted to work at - that said I have a degree in math and have
| taken several coding classes and have done some self learning
| projects already so I was ahead of the pack and went overboard
| on all of our projects. Like some of the others have said,
| maybe 20-30% were employable out of the bootcamp
| connectsnk wrote:
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