Bloom/Lambda School requires applying to 460 jobs before giving tuition refund | Hacker News Reader

Bloom/Lambda School requires applying to 460 jobs before giving tuition refund

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64 pointssmitop26 comments

Related, I believe General Assembly's debt can only be discharged after 8 years of not finding any job that pays higher than $60,000(?). Notably, a $62,000/year job as the manager of a supermarket will count, and the number does not appear to be adjusted for inflation. So if inflation were (an admittedly eye-watering) 6% per year for the next 8 years, then any job equivalent to today's $37,700/year would prevent you from "escaping" the bootcamp debt.

Additionally, GA does not have control over the debt forgiveness, rather their underwriter (some financial institution) gets to make the final call...8 years from now.

If you never sign up for their school and just do the things required for the refund, you'll easily land a job.

And reach out to 460 people for professional networking. And 230 public commits on GitHub. And various unspecified other criteria (which are present in the PDF linked by sandofsky, including always being available for interviews and job hunt audits).

I guess they really want people to apply to a lot of jobs but 460 still seems like a very large number. If someone applied to 5 jobs a day (a very high estimate) then it would take them at least 3 months before they would be able to claim a refund. This is assuming they weren't doing anything else other than applying and interviewing.

I graduated from Lambda. I did... pretty much exactly that. I hit 250 applications total, did that five days a week, spent a sixth writing a medium article on the sixth, and the seventh I spent away from the computer. I targeted around 3 jobs a day, and would do that first thing, any interviews/coding challenges I managed to get were right after.

It was incredibly demoralizing, especially as I watched other people I knew get hired, or worse not get hired.

GitHub is certainly gameable, but reaching out to 10 people a week for networking is ridiculous. Also, the requirement that you follow up with each job app by email/phone/text, which is almost never what employers want.

I finished a hiring round a few months ago and I’m going into a bigger one now.

We were flooded with applications, 90% of them real bad fits. We were also hounded by HR to move quickly.

I already couldn’t do my job and was expected to.

A follow up after an interview is absolutely fine. A follow up right after an application before hearing back either way will likely get you dropped.

Can't quite put my finger on it, but something makes me feel like I should rank a candidate lower if I have reason to believe that they have an incentive to apply to hundreds of jobs... this is not a good look.

I think it is a little harsh to set the tuition refund bar to be so high. On the other hand, if I had a friend who was rejected from 459 jobs, I would still advise them to keep applying. What else could I say?

The more worrying part of the Tuition Refund Guarantee is where the student forfeits their right to a refund if they receive a job offer that they turn down. Many coding bootcamp students apply to companies with a serious red flag--such as startups that are about to run out of money. The student may only be able to see the red flag after the company has given an offer, but if a student rejects a "red flag offer", they must assume they will never need a tuition refund.

For anyone else who wants to dig into the full terms and conditions: https://bloomtech-catalog.s3.amazonaws.com/Tuition%20Refund%...

That's a lot of stipulations. I wonder how strict they are on proving that you did all 9 steps and substeps for 46 weeks, like I'm not even sure how I would prove a lot of those things (linkedin, phone calls, texts) happened except with screenshots.

I'm sure they put the burden of proof on the person wanting the refund. Yikes.

I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!

Not only that, but Lambda seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]

I don't think I've seen a single hire out of a bootcamp work out in the end. Except a few cases where the person actually came from a STEM degree from a good school (and more crucially, already had some exposure to programming during the degree) but it's unclear to me that they actually needed the bootcamp and not just a good primer on modern software development and something like the Missing Semester [2] or a few classes at their school covering software engineering.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610

[2] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

Huh. You seem to like pasting the same comment a lot.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Yes.

And I hope people who are thinking of spending time and money on a bootcamp read it.

It doesn't feel good to talk to someone and realize they are going to be barely employable and stuck with thousands of dollars of debts.

I can't talk about Lambda, but I know a bunch of successful devs (including myself) that started with no prior programming experience. Many don't even have anything more than a highschool diploma. (If that)

You can easily apply to 20 jobs a day at least in bigger cities (though the requirement here is just 10 a week for a longer period). It sounds like a lot on paper but it's really not that unreasonable and I fequently advise people to apply more if they don't get something after a mere 10 applications.

I don't think you can sustainably send out 20 high quality applications a day. I think you should send emails or cover letters about why you are interested, and would be a good fit.

Plus, finding opening where you are a good fit takes work, especially if you are a new grad.

The fine print doesn't mandate that the applications be of high quality. You do the best you can with the one's that are "real" and cheese the rest, if you really think you're going to get your refund by doing so.

Honestly sending out 20 applications a day sounds like a nightmare. There are sites where it’s easy and simple but many companies still insist on using their own internal hiring software which is often a complete and total usability nightmare and if you actually want to fill things out you’re going to be spending a long time repeating information from your resume in the format they desire. It sucks.

I truly can not stand how shitty and annoying it is to fill these out. There are some circumstances where I understand it regarding security clearance/background checks but even then there are absurd cases of duplication. Admittedly I’m in a somewhat unique position of having lived in something like 10 places in the last 7 years so it’s especially bad but multiple government agencies I’ve applied with have required information that I’ve already sent at a different phase of hiring repeated again, and the USPS Postal Police background check site which is very similar to SF-86 is possibly the most user-hostile site to fill forms for.

I could easily apply to 20 jobs, assuming they existed, via indeed in half an hour. But once a company requires you to go to their own site it can take half an hour to an hour to complete the process.

Austen Allred rebranded his business because Lambda is such a toxic joke of a program.

He’s a modern day tech grifter who’d suck Zuck’s avatar dong in the Metaverse if he could.

Lambda is telling people that they can make them professional programmers, so the onus is on Lambda to do that to get paid. The grad is obviously going to try to get a job, but if it's demoralizingly difficult to do so, Lambda hasn't done its job.

These stipulations are a scam.

What??? 460 job applications? That's crazy man. I applied exactly one time and I shiver of thinking to applicate at some time again.. Is that proper practice with schools that take tuition fees?

Well, without a regular degree and without going to those schools, you are just going to apply to at least that many anyway! Source: coding for 7 years and am a receptionist.

I'm sure the terms and conditions specify against this, but couldn't you just apply to positions like CEO of Google, or President of the UN?

I don't think this is unreasonable. For juniors, often it takes 50-100+ applications to get a handful of interviews anyway. 460 jobs can easily be racked up over a 6-12 month timeframe of searching.

Just look at cscareerquestions on reddit. Juniors face these battles all the time.

I don't think it's reasonable to apply for 30 jobs, get rejected, then give up. I'm a staff level engineer with a lot of experience and still I get rejected a significant amount of the time.

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