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Comment by s17n | Hacker News Reader

If you are actually producing high demand graduates, you will be able to make plenty of money by charging recruiters / hiring companies for access to them. None of these programs use this model for a simple reason, they are not actually producing high demand graduates.

To be clear, I have no idea what life is like outside of the world of selective schools and employers - as far as I know, Lambda/Bloom actually delivers on their goal of improving their student's employment prospects. But the fact that they need to charge the students at all implies we're not talking about anybody getting a FAMGA job or similar.

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> as far as I know, Lambda/Bloom actually delivers on their goal of improving their student's employment prospects

The root problem seems to be that most students don't end up finding jobs.

According to leaks, only 27% of graduates ended up making over $50k, which is the threshold where they had to pay back the company. Each student costs the company $13k, with $2,500 in CAC alone. At the time, the ISAs maxed out at $30k, which you'd hit way below the FAANG scale of wages.

https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucra...

Let's say you have a cohort of 100 students. It costs $1.3m to train them. 73 pay back $0. Even if the remaining 27 end up in FAANG jobs, you only make back $810k.

And from what I can tell, the root of the most-students-don't-find-jobs problem is that as much as people love to promote coding as being something for everyone, the reality is that it is not. It is actually really hard to become (and stay) a good software engineer. You have to really want it AND work really hard at it. And a lot of the people attracted to these ISA bootcamps are people who don't like their current career/job/trajectory and have heard that software pays well, and maybe they've done some Hello World tutorials that give you a bit of a rush but don't scratch the surface of what this career actually entails. Then when these people get 2 months in the bootcamp they realize that software engineering is difficult, and requires possibly more strenuous mental work than they've ever done before, but now they're on the hook and it's not easy to reverse course, so they finish the bootcamp with a half-hearted desire and poor-to-mediocre skills that hundreds of thousands of other wannabe devs from all over the world already have, and then they get smacked in the face with 6 rounds of technical interviews that they can't pass. It's not a good scenario.

The root problem is that in my experience completing a bootcamp tends to be a reliable signal to identifying bad hires (when it comes to software engineering). I have interviewed quite a few from different bootcamps, I've hired a few of them and so far the results have been very poor. The only good hire from a bootcamp I've had, I hired in a project manager role where she shines, she's honestly not able to code but she understands enough that she's an effective manager and has great interpersonal skills. Great hire but not a good testament to a bootcamp.

How would you recommend this problem be addressed and fixed?

I don't know if I buy the whole, "A four year degree at Stanford and 12 years of mathematics from age 6-18 is the only way to produce a successful software engineer." I know you're not making that claim explicitly, but it feels like an implicit claim.

> you will be able to make plenty of money by charging recruiters / hiring companies for access to them

How? What prevents those recruiter from just contacting your institution's graduates over LinkedIn?

Sound a lot like the dog-walking app that found themselves with an unreliable business model because dog owners and walkers just started using cash and circumventing the app.

This is a smart comment because this is exactly what we run into (I operate a coding school that uses ISAs). Employers love our graduates, but if we charged employers, we'd have to play a cat and mouse game of "please don't contact our students directly" or "please don't apply to their website and go through me". By charging students, we can be at ease with making introductions or promoting employer/student activities without having to police their communication.

That said, I believe there's a lot more we can do to help ease the financial burden from students and I love the direction of trying to move the cost of education from students to employers. I'm working on that.

> This is a smart comment because this is exactly what we run into (I operate a coding school that uses ISAs). Employers love our graduates, but if we charged employers, we'd have to play a cat and mouse game of "please don't contact our students directly" or "please don't apply to their website and go through me". By charging students, we can be at ease with making introductions or promoting employer/student activities without having to police their communication.

Have you actually tried it? I'd be pretty surprised if the employers attempted to cut you out like that. They're already accustomed to paying recruiters, and the access / promotion that you can provide them is worth the money. You could also sue them, whereas if you try to sue your students for repayment of their ISAs you run a high risk of bad PR.

Since they're on the market looking for jobs, our graduates are pretty easy to find so any company can just contact them directly without partnering with us. There's no real way to prevent that. And, I don't want to prevent companies from reaching out to our graduates; I actually want the opposite.

Further, grads can (and should) apply to companies that aren't partnered with us. I don't want them to only apply to a limited set of partnered employers.

We've been operating for about a decade, so we've tried basically everything once :) Our current corporate partnership program is here if you're interested: https://launchschool.com/employers/placement

I think the biggest issue is that they're advertising it as a way for literally anyone to break into the tech industry. I love to imagine that everyone can code but that's not necessarily the case.

If you're capable you'll probably get a job regardless of what path you take (4 year university, community college, or bootcamp) and if you're not capable then it will be a struggle. However, the people who are capable overwhelmingly choose the more traditional paths and bootcamps end up getting the rest.

If there was a way to select students who were extremely smart and create a class of those people then I think you'd get a really good flywheel going. Smart people attract other smart people.

Interestingly enough this exactly the model that the Recurse Center[0] uses and it's completely free to do. However, you have to be accepted to attend

[0] https://www.recurse.com/

Why would FAMGA companies need to pay the school?

Wouldn't the schools' students graduates apply there anyway?

I mean, if FAMGA companies need to pay recruiting fees for entry-level roles, why doesn't Stanford get paid recruiting fees?

> why doesn't Stanford get paid recruiting fees

Stanford and most tier 1-2 colleges do get paid recruiting fees. If you've ever worked with a college career center or talked to a recruiter who has, you'll know that it costs a ton of money to set up a career fair booth or organize a talk.

AFAIK a table at a Stanford career fair costs about $1k:

https://forum.stanford.edu/events/careerfair_affiliatefactsh...

FAMGA won't pay them but lesser known companies will pay them for access to desirable prospects.

> But the fact that they need to charge the students at all implies we're not talking about anybody getting a FAMGA job or similar.

So? Engineering pays much better than most industries so even if you're not getting into FAMGA it's still a success income wise.

Your criteria for “high demand graduates” is getting into a “FAMGA job or similar”?

The criteria is that they could get a job at FAMGA, not that they necessarily choose to, but yes. I honestly have no idea if you're suggesting that's too high a bar or too low a bar.

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