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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to Trilogy specifically, but for many bootcamps, the deception is in the marketing about job and salary prospects, as well as padding the hiring statistics by giving jobs to graduates and counting those jobs towards those marketing numbers.

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> padding the hiring statistics by giving jobs to graduates and counting those jobs towards those marketing numbers.

I see this brought up quite a bit, and I don't really see the issue. They are offering their graduates jobs, so why should these jobs not count just like any other jobs?

Because the only way that would continue to work is they got more new students (at the bottom) to pay for the old students (at the top) jobs and it (the pyramid) would fall apart.

In other words it looks like a pyramid scheme if the grads only get jobs as teachers.

You just described 80% of the tertiary education courses unis offer.

Lol yeah sounds like grad school.

"Congrats on getting into the program, you're now adjunct faculty, the class you're teaching starts at 930am Monday."

5 years later maybe they have a piece of paper and maybe that impacts their job prospects.

FWIW, many teachers are only at bootcamps for a year or two before moving on to work for normal companies. I didn’t go through a boot camp, but I do work with people who did and were teachers at those boot camps before working here.

From what I understand, teaching is generally seen as a positive signal (if the boot camp is a good one), because it means they know the material well enough to teach it.

I can totally imagine the opposite becoming true (teaching is a negative signal), creating a positive feedback loop in the opposite direction, and turning the boot camp into a pyramid scheme.

I guess it all depends on the credibility of the boot camp, kind of analogous to universities, as a sibling commenter points out.

This all may be true, but hand waves away the point: students don't know this going in; they assume the high cost will get them a developer salary much sooner than is true. The marketing should be more transparent about this, and if it were, how many students would rethink the costs with a longer ROI?

People pay for a bootcamp for a developer job (with a developer salary), not a teacher's aid job (where they are undoubtedly not paying the salaries they also use in their marketing to attract students). Thus they assume that number reflects the career the bootcamp is promising.

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