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Comment by graham_paul | Hacker News Reader

What's the catch?

Are they legally obligated to work for Shopify after graduation? Are the grads forced to work for Shopify and accept whatever Shopify wants to pay them?

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It’s a regular old software job while you work through college. Plenty of companies big and small have students working for them (not just summer interns, year long work, for years while they study).

It’s cool, but there’s a lot of PR here that’s dressing up a pretty common thing in the verbiage and marketing of ‘dev bootcamp’ stuff.

if anything, the "catch" is that I believe they're only taking about 20 students a year, and that was after a recent expansion. They also standardize wages in the first year, so some students have to make a tradeoff between the program and making more money with more variety of jobs in the US. (tuition is covered too, but Carleton tuition is something like 10k CAD or 7k USD, usually 7k CAD with grants/automatic scholarships)

(disclaimer I worked at Shopify for a while, but this information is from when I applied for Dev Degree)

No obligation at all. I think many dev degree students will stay as they have had good experiences (from the friends I have in the program). I assume Shopify is getting the dev degree student's wages subsidized by the government as it is work integrated learning (WIL aka coop).

Source: Lassonde School of Engineering student at York University

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