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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic!

Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard, so it's also worth noting that there is a whole range of options for folks.

Obviously, there are public and community colleges that teach programming. Many of these have a long history of working with non-traditional students who have jobs or other commitments. Some are remote-only or remote-friendly. In my state (GA), tuition for an accredited public community college is about $6,000 over 2 years for a programming diploma. That's $3,000 per year, and there's no income share required. (I'm not sure if people can do it faster for less money.)

There are also a set of nonprofits and foundations that offer free programming programs to certain populations. I believe NYC has something along these lines.

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> Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard

These are very much not the same. For profit schools have an incentive to get more students through while maintaining an acceptable level of quality because that way they make more money. Non-profits have much less motivation to make more money. If they get more applications than they want to fill their prestige goes up as does the quality of their student body. So you see the top US universities having more or less the same size student bodies as when there were 200m people living in the US.

Non-profits optimise for a pleasant work environment for faculty, for profits for maximum numbers students.

> Non-profits optimize for a pleasant work environment for faculty

Some do, some don't. Some Non-profits optimize for maximize impact to their vision.

> for profits for maximum numbers students.

Some do, some don't. Some for-profits optimize a small number of wealthy clients.

Please tell me of these non-profit schools that maximise for impact to their vision, or for-profit schools that optimise for small numbers of wealthy clients.

Sorry, in all honestly I don't know enough back my previous claims, I'm speaking from my personal perspective (which may be biased).

Some of the regular students that come into the library lives off non-profit assistance and one is homeless. They speak highly of local nonprofits providing them food / shelter. I've volunteered at a few shelters that were impactful (don't know them by name unfortunately, I'm too privileged). Staff there definitely didn't have the comforts I have at my current work place.

I spent a chunk of my childhood growing up in Beverly Hills around some peers whose parents run profitable businesses. They have always valued few wealthy clients over many average clients.

Again, take my experience with a grain of salt, I'm not interested enough to prove this point.

I wasn’t talking about generic for profits and non profits. I was talking about those which provide education. The incentives are very different.

Good on you for responding and explaining your reasoning.

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