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saganus

Why?

Is it wrong for boot camps to do that?

I am genuinely asking since I'm not familiar with that. What exactly goes on and why is it bad?

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Two reasons come to mind:

1. People who just graduated from a 12 week bootcamp are not really practiced and skilled enough to be mentoring others, imo.

2. It sounds like a way to inflate the bootcamp's placement rates, which seems really sketchy and borderline false advertising to me.

My friend is considering this bootcamp around here called DevMountain and was telling me that the placement rate is supposedly around 90-95% within 3 months of graduation. This is for a 13-week program that costs over $10,000 I think. It might be a great program, but it sounds expensive to me and that placement rate sounds too good to be true. I warned my friend that they've probably found some way to manipulate that number, like people getting short-term contracts or something. My friend hears "90% placement within 3 months" and thinks he's got a 90% chance of getting a good, full-time job within 3 months of finishing the program (which is probably what the bootcamp wants him to think).

I don't recall which one, but one of the bootcamps does an independent jobs report where they hire some firm to track down how a cohort does. The 90-95% rates could be accurate, but probably for a 6 month period.

Because a student who just graduated should not be teaching new students. They are way too junior and inexperience even if they are the top in their class. The bootcamp should be investing in quality instructors.

Also, some bootcamps hire students that have trouble finding a job in order to keep their percentage of students finding jobs high.

This assumes that students hired by bootcamps are in primary teaching roles-- they're not! They usually end up employed as teaching _assistants_, which they are definitely qualified for. This also gives them an opportunity to continue learning while being paid, and it helps them launch into bigger and better jobs.

Source: I was a bootcamp grad who was thrilled to be hired by my bootcamp. I learned a ton there. I work for Udacity now :)

Can I get in touch with you?

You can get in touch with me!

rasheed [dot] bustamam [at] gmail [dot] com

I'm a Udacity graduate who works "for" Udacity as a code reviewer, and I had a mentorship role not too long ago.

The general rule was, if you don't know the answer, direct the students to more senior person, but there were very few questions that students had that I was unable to answer. I actually learned more as a mentor than I did as a student, which was nice.

Interestingly, this practice is more common than you'd think, even at name-brand universities. My own alma mater got in some controversy over this [1]. This is also a shady practice of a lot of "for-profit" college chains [2].

This happens whenever any organization optimizes towards maximizing some narrowly-defined KPI: they find ways to game the system to juice their numbers.

[1] http://www.c-ville.com/uva-law-funds-the-first-jobs-of-many-... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/corinthian-colleges...

It allows them to say "X% of our students get a job within N months"

They hire those students as teacher/aides. Most students want to be developers, not teachers, and are willing to pay $X to become a developer. Manipulating the hiring rates without full transparency re the odds of getting a real development job paints a false picture of value of the education.

Thanks for the answers. They do make sense.

So you basically operate a revolving door (or more like a ponzi scheme) and then get to "honor your guarantee for getting hired" in a way that is misleading.

Indeed it sounds unscrupulous.

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