Revature coding program promises jobs but costs $36,500 to quit

They operate like coding bootcamps. They hire tens of thousands of random grads, put them through a “bootcamp” of six months and contract them out to Fortune 500 firms. They also have these kinds of exit clauses where you have to pay them if you quit early. These people often have no CS backgrounds.

These bootcamps will also end up shifting to India and turning into outsourcing firms. Nothing more nothing less. It can absolutely work and be huge but as you scale the quality drops and it’s not a panacea.

If I were the lambda school CEO I’d just start a remote first outsourcing firm in India and cut to the chase.

If I were an IT service company CEO I’d rebrand myself as “disrupting education” to get some of that sweet VC $.

My idea is to hire these devs that aren't ready to write code themselves, and have them do lots of technical QA. Pull down the code, run it on their machine, test all endpoints in Postman, write some simple scripts, etc. Then after several months doing that, give them a raise to move them closer to a dev salary and move them to active dev work.

You get to 1. Hire devs at a big discount since they won't be doing dev work quite yet. 2. Get to work with them for several months before letting them get active on code. 3. Even with the raise post QA period, they would be at a below market rate for junior devs.

Junior devs get 1. Experience in a technical position. 2. Opportunity to continue learning and see what it takes to build professional quality code. 3. On ramp to being a dev.

Maybe I got the numbers wrong on this and it isn't feasible. But it seems like a good tradeoff for agencies to bring on devs. Because devs are crazy expensive in the US and agencies have a hard time bringing them in while staying profitable.

The only scenario in which you'd pay the full $36,500 is if you found an alternative job that would be at least that much better. In which case you move on and make them collect from you. How difficult that is for them and how much of a hassle it is for you varies by state, but I suspect you could settle the debt for a payment plan that returns at most 50 cents on the dollar.

IMO, more people need to be educated on the debt collection and bankruptcy system they have, and learn what their actual best alternatives are, rather than what creditors want you to think your alternatives are. Debt collection is slow and risky at best, and these exploitative programs are run by slimeballs, so fuck 'em and play hardball.

I doubt I would’ve ever taken a deal like this, but I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to have to eat some shit for a year or two in order to break into what you want to do. If your choice is between earning $8/hr working retail, and earning $8/hr as an engineer, the latter is the way to go. Maybe also judge it against going to grad school where you’re not just not making money, but you’re actually going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

I find it interesting to compare getting hired at these places to the big tech firms. I've applied to places with collectively thousands of open engineer roles. But they all have a process to find a reason not to hire you. Like one place I did well on 3/4 coding challenges and kind of bombed the system design interview. None of these companies will look at that and say, well this person has potential let's give them a chance. They all will say, well they don't raise the bar so let's just keep our dozens of needed roles unfilled.

I owe my soul to the company store."

-- Sixteen Tons by Merle Travis, performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford

So my experience with Revature, I am not sure if I even applied to them or if they scraped my CV off of Indeed at the time. The "job interview" was a 20 minute phone call. It included a painfully easy trivia type quiz with 5-10 basic programming questions "What is the differences betwee == vs === in Javascript" level questions. The recruiter said "Wow great, we would like to hire you". The contract was for $50k a year, and with $25k quit clause if I left the company for any reason before 2 years for anyone but one of their clients, AND this was in DC so a painfully low salary. So basically I they put you through a short training program, find you a job as a contractor, they make >$50k a year selling you as a contractor, if you leave before your slavery is over they get even more money, if you leave for the company you are working they probably get even more money. I told them no, they tried to hard sell me telling me it was normal, I told them to fuck themselves and to not call me again.

I could see how someone desparate for a job might fall into this. Total Scam and those companies should be forcibly shut down by the government.

Entry level programmers are told that there is a huge demand. There is a huge demand, but everyone wants at least some experience. Some will do personal projects, maybe work at a chop shop for a few months and work their way in. Others won't or never get past the project phase. Coding bootcamps come in and claim to bridge that gap for an exorbitant price. The attitude is so often "just pay for this piece of paper and get a job." Students pay up front and are left out on their ass when they realize it was a scam.

Unfortunately by the time I see people get desperate enough to buy a piece of paper from a bootcamp I think they should either work on their soft skills or reconsider this industry altogether. I personally know a few people who either have gone or are considering such programs and they all lack passion. They only want to program because they see it as a stable line of employment. Hiring managers can see this from a mile away and lose interest. If it's just a lack of soft skills then learn how to sell yourself and communicate your interest. But if you don't really want this and can't bridge the gap then I'd find something else to do.

How does this happen? I know it's nearly impossible to find people to fill open positions.