Hacker News Reader

Comment by honkdaddy | Hacker News Reader

>The very idea that she, a Black person living in Alabama, could make $75,000 a year in the tech industry after just a 10-week boot camp is what drew Aaryn Johnson into Flockjay.

Isn't this where someone with reasonable critical thinking skills could see that something smells very, very fishy? I think the people who run these snake-oil boot camps are jerks, but I also don't have too much sympathy for the people they dupe when what's being promised is so outrageous.

I'm not a great chef but I worked in a kitchen as a teenager, so if someone told me I could make $75k cooking after 10 weeks of lessons and I believed them, does that make them a scam artist or me a deserving sucker? In my admittedly shallow opinion, I'd say it's both.

View on HN

That's pretty heartless. People are trying their best to succeed in life.

I remember people getting pulled in by DevRy and similar. Places that I thought massively oversold the outcomes people would receive. I don't rate the education that highly, but you can't fault an individual for trying.

Even if she did think something smells fishy, due diligence would show everything was as good as you could expect for a new company. YC graduate, just raised a $11m series A, positive Techcrunch coverage (https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/backed-by-marc-benioff-flo...) - it'd be hard for someone to see all of this without wondering whether it might be a reasonable promise after all.

Screw people getting scammed if they're not smart?

It just isn't outrageous to jump into a high paying tech job. I know several people who did not finish high school but managed to get a $100k+ job in the tech industry, without taking any boot camp at all. Just teaching themselves to program. Clearly it is possible. It just doesn't work out for everybody. There's no boot camp that can get this sort of job for everyone.

> Just teaching themselves to program.

But how long did they learn to program? I guess yeah the "too good to be true" angle is, if it only takes 10 weeks to train anyone off the street to be someone who's $75k valuable to a company, the companies would be doing the training themselves...

Are people believing lies suckers? A lot of people do it and testify that they do make that much and more right? Truck drivers make a similar amount after two weeks training, roughnecks make more with almost no training. Perhaps research an asking questions on some programming forum might help but what critical thinking is missing here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com