BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff
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I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.
I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the quality of the teaching. The first was the initial pool they advertised too. I think I saw the post on Hacker News before everywhere else. I'd wonder if you're more selective from already technical people at the beginning and then sorta widening the net as time goes on to include more people if you could get initial big numbers push followed by more ok numbers.
The instructors I met were all great. I think a lot of that flack went more towards later cohorts or alternative program from the main full webstack track.
Do you think greater selectivity applicants would increase the success rate? I had thought the ISA model would incentivize this, but when I learned lambda was selling ISAs that seemed like it removed this incentive.
If you only selected students who had been tinkering with writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who we have seen become software engineers.
The only way we've found that does it well is to have people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy it. That's why we now have multiple free classes, have a free dropout period once you're in the school, and even have a three-week free trial of the school itself.
The notion that financing ISAs removed the incentives isn't really accurate.
First, most of the time ISAs are financed it's in the form of a loan you have to pay back with interest with an ISA and its repayments as collateral, or it's a sale to a neutral SPV with recourse in the case repayments don't hit a certain threshold.
In the rare instance (we've never done that) schools have been able to sell ISAs full stop, it's been at extreme discounts or based on discounted predicted likelihoods of future revenue, and if those ISAs don't repay the buyers bail and the school trying to sell them is out of business.
I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed, I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint.
For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The selling ISAs thing was a bit weird when I learned about. I honestly kinda wonder about the actuarial calcs of it all.
Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions, I can assure you doing interviews is possibly the worst.
As far as ISAs go, it all comes out in the wash. If you create a pool of ISAs and students don't get hired you may have more ISAs but the average ISA is worth less, so the only thing that matters is whether each individual student gets hired. There's no financial wizardry that can let you sell $1 for $2 in the long-run.
For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure that there's a better process now.
School mentality (and I might add: grifter mentality as well)
However, I've seen students use Stack Overflow and other resources as a source of "program stamps":
- They enter their problem in an Internet search engine.
- Click on the first result with code in it.
- "Stamp it" on their own code: I.e., copy/paste it.
- Using editor/compiler, find any issues by trial and error and fix them so the editor/compiler doesn't complain anymore.
They might try a simple example or two to see if it works. And that's it.
There's not much reflection on their final solution, or on the bits they copy/paste. They don't seem to understand their solution, nor care about that or their problem solving process. They put in effort, they expect a passing grade.
Is this a knock on Lambda School, though?
You can go to MIT but if you never apply your learnings you won't be a good engineer.
At least from what I've heard of bootcamps, you need to really go above and beyond to have similar chances with that route.
Ironically this is not that different from my university experience.
Am I missing something, surely this is exactly what you should be doing?
Obviously not every single student has been hired, but our hiring rates have always been pretty good (they're better now than they were in the past), and thousands of BloomTech (we had to change our name because of a trademark lawsuit) grads have increased their lifetime earnings by billions of dollars, and work at nearly every major company you can think of.
Some of it I'm thrilled about, some of it shows us where we have more work to do (or need to do better in admissions - candidly it's always a difficult balance between giving folks chance and certainty of those folks' outcomes.)
High level:
90% of those who are job seeking got hired.
Our median hired grad increased their income by $27,500 (and that's just their first job - obviously software/data science salaries shoot up quickly after a first job).
About half of our students have degrees, and half do not.
Learners are divided into three groups: graduated (59%), still enrolled (5%), and withdrawn (36%). Graduated learners are further divided into two groups: job seeking (63%: ~37% of all learners) and non-job seeking (37%: ~22% of all learners). Here's the definition of “non-job seeking”:
“A BloomTech graduate who has been unresponsive to outreach, has explicitly indicated they are not pursuing a technical role, or has explicitly indicated they have paused their job search.”
When we apply the base rate to the 90% rate, we conclude that 33% of those who attend the program (learners) got hired.
You have to remember that (for this outcomes report) nearly every student uses an ISA under which no one is required to pay us unless/until they get a job using the skills they learned. There are a number of people who attend never intending to switch careers, a (large) number who ghost us the day after graduation, and a (large) number who get a job but don't tell us until we get tax returns (so we learn they were hired only after this outcomes report).
Our team works their asses off to work with these students, and is doing everything they possibly can. Slacks, calls, texts, emails, some of which are auto-generated from me personally, and in some cases even physical mail, to try to get them to work with us. If they respond _in any way at all_ with anything other than something that equates to, "I don't want a tech job" they are job-seeking in the outcomes report. We have built tooling to make applying to jobs easier, we find jobs that you should apply to for you, have an outreach generator where our team will write emails to hiring managers for you, and more recently even what we call "job search takeover" where we work with students on resume/portfolio/job criteria in advance, and we will actually do all of the work to fill up your calendar with interviews.
Students who look for a job in any way whatsoever get hired at a very high rate. In my view, if you're a prospective student, that's the information you actually want to understand. The fact that there are a number of students students (most of whom are using ISAs) who never intend to look for a job or don't look for a job is a fair indictment of our business model, but not a fair indictment of the quality of the school or the likelihood of getting hired.
So how should we treat that in an outcomes report? If you're a prospective learner do you want to know about the hiring rate of the people who ghost us or don't intend to look for a job, or do you want to know the hiring rate of people who map to the profile of what you expect to do?
If anyone has ideas of a better way to slice that data to convey the best information to a prospective learner, I would love to hear it.
If you go by graduated learners, it's 56%.
The selling on the entire page makes it feel untrustworthy, which is the exact opposite of the intent.
Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field, so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so (without spending 4 years on college again).
My general advice is to get some one to try https://www.theodinproject.com/ as it's free. If they try it for a bit and find they don't like it, no harm they can just stop. If they want to continue after a bit and still want to go a boot camp they're more likely to succeed at any of them.
Now we have a free trial (https://www.bloomtech.com/risk-free-trial) that everyone can try out for three weeks without even signing any documents.
A lot of people like the idea of making software engineering salaries, but don't particularly like building software. Then there are others that fall in love. We haven't found a great way to predict other than having people try it out.
I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools for y" lists, etc.
CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6 months).
A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest employment rates were relatively low-profile schools teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.
For example, we used them for our first outcomes report and paid extra to have them "verify" our outcomes report, but they literally never opened the Google Drive file we sent them.
I think it was a great idea set up by well meaning people, but the self-governing aspect and comparisons created ended up in weird incentives that resulted in it falling apart.
The review sites are perhaps marginally better, but the positivity of reviews are almost 100% correlated with how hard schools work to farm for positive reviews, and their business model is selling leads to the schools, so the incentive isn't for objectivity there either.
Honestly the best way, though it requires more work, is to find a handful of recent grads on LinkedIn and ask them about their experience.
The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.
I would recommend that if your friends are serious about getting into coding, ask them to take a few React basics courses (just go by the most popular ones on Udemy).
I found that overloading beginners with theory doesn't really work. Getting them to build something and figure out the why of it works better - at least that was my experience. I learned about, say, json webtokens way before I used them, but it wasn't until I built an app of my own with account authentication feature that I figured out what JWTs actually were.
A lot can also change in a year, so take this with a grain of salt.
It's a self-paced online curriculum that generally takes 1.5 - 2 years to get through, with an optional 4-month "Capstone" intensive after graduating the core curriculum. Progressing out of each course in the curriculum involves having to pass rigorous, easily failable, assessments; you just can't progress until you've cleared a pretty high bar of knowledge in each domain. There is a good mix of live interview assessments, written assessments, and coding projects.
The job placement statistics are staggering in comparison to the 'quicker' options -- as they should be given the time investment involved. I'm unaware of any institution that has had more success in placing students in high-quality software development positions.
Disclosure: I've been studying for about 14 months now using the Launch School curriculum.
There are no shortcuts unless you’re self-motivated/have a knack and can use online resources to learn (of which there are many).
Were you aware of YC before attending Lambda (ie, did the association lend credibility to Lambda) or did you find YC after attending?
1. Scale. When you're self taught you can make decisions that only really impact yourself. Or maybe 3-4 other people for some of the projects. The company that I walked into has two monoliths (front end, and backend), and working in a code base that's 5 gigs files is a lot different. There's so many files. My editor is now slow. There's no way for me to understand the details of the entire codebase. Badly documented internal libraries are all over the place. This isn't what a bootcamp or self made codebase looks like for a beginner normally.
2. Specific practical stuff. I had been coding JS mostly on Linux. I had to learn PHP on Mac OS. I had never used either. And a number of other tools connected to the build process that are internal to this company.
By not dropping you straight into a team you can also control where you landed a bit. People who didn't like UI stuff ended up a deeper backend team, people who prefer ui ended up more towards the front end. Almost everyone in the group I cam with (17 people) had to learn PHP. When you have 16 other people learning the same stuff at the same time, you start to work together and organize into groups. We begin producing our own docs for the project and other helpful things.
Now after reading https://mobile.twitter.com/fulligin/status/14526586408091975..., I’m much more negative.
The CEO seems like a con-man who has conned himself. The worrying part is that some commenters seem to be falling for the lies he’s telling himself.
Can non-self motivated people succeed if they go to say an Ivy League? I didn’t, so it’s a sincere curiosity for me. Would Zuckerberg have ended up bagging groceries if he went to a community college rather than Harvard?
Cost is more expensive than a code school but not absurd like the first two years of university. My alma mater (is that a thing?) is now $46 a credit, up from about $35 when I attended.
Lambda School and other tech education programs start out well with VC money but it's not sustainable because there is no money in it. This is something that can be reasoned about a priori because you can see the budget focus of community colleges. Tech doesn't change the fundamentals, but the illusion can be sustained in the good times.
I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class.
None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great experience.
Give them about 32 hours of work a week and 8 hours of tutorials on other things. Build them up from there.
I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow. Because the ugly truth is a lot of the bootcampers hit a plateau. I have had a couple push through to my bar for senior, but most cap out in my mid range.
During the shortage the ability to hire and get solid mids out of 65% of them was a net positive. Right now though it is less important given the talent coming into the market.
I've had similar problems. We've had some bootcamp grads who were good to work with and acknowledged that they were still very junior. We've also had some bootcamp grads who felt entitled to mid-range to senior compensation after their first year, while still getting their bearings on basic developer work. It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp after a couple years in the industry.
I dunno, I think what you have right there is pretty good explanation wise, haha.
People who treat the bootcamp as the terminal level of knowledge plateau.
A couple of simple hobby projects and participation in meetups and chats can give both faster ramp-up (beyond very basic) and solid job leads. My 2c.
One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github (though, yes, you should include those).
I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the bootcamps, a way to pad their “successfully employed” rates while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault the candidates for putting those experiences in their resume. They need that money to keep their job searches going, and recruiters are always biasing against gaps on the resume.
If you’re being paid by them for any reason, put it on your resume. (And if you’re not…move it to the education section, where it belongs.)
There might be perfectly legitimate reasons to be employed. Maybe they were aiding instruction of earlier students as they got more experience, akin to a tutor or teaching assistant in colleges. Maybe they took a temporary job because they were unable to find a job right out of bootcamp, and the reasons for not being able to get a job don’t necessarily have to be negative (e.g. they had familial commitments).
Getting a job from a bootcamp is already hard and it wouldn’t quite sit right with me to reject someone outright for something that could be explainable. Perhaps if you are drowning in applicants then you are forced to be harsher out of practicality, but even then surely there’s a better filter then someone reporting what is ostensibly an experience applicable to job they’re pursuing.
If you make this the metric to evaluate on, you're going to end up with the Ivy League scenario where bootcamps only admit people who would have succeeded anyway.
The POINT of education is to give people a chance to succeed who were likely to fail without it, and you have to accept a failure rate for that to work.
I've seen this, too. At some point, everyone coming out of certain bootcamps was an "instructor" rather than just a graduate. I suspect one of them is running a scheme to have their own grads teach their own classes for reduced tuition.
I second the cover letter section. GitHub goes a long way, but it needs something unique. I know exactly what projects are taught at local bootcamps because they're in every single bootcamp grad's GitHub profile. Show me something you worked on by yourself.
And why on earth did you keep the job posting open to accumulate 2000+ applicants? Legal reasons?
I just throw the cover letters in the bin...
I took a coding boot camp when I decided to leave academia to join industry, and it was a useful primer on the “in” technologies that folks would be hiring for, and of the “style” of code that was fashionable at the time. I would not have hired any of my classmates (well, I might have hired one as a junior), but the bootcamp did what I needed it to do, exposing me to the “culture” of programming at tech companies.
I was hired as a mid-level and quickly progressed to senior at a large global tech company. I have been at a few different tech companies now and haven’t run into any major challenges or problems, and have only received positive feedback from my peers and managers.
If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential. I think it helped that I had a number of usable “products” that I had made over the course of my career as a solo programmer that didn’t really fit any mold. I also think it helped that I didn’t have any trouble with basic algorithm brain teasers, finding them sort of fun at the time I was interviewing. I’ve never tried leetcode but I suspect I’ve only seen leetcode “easies.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do any of that for any of my subsequent jobs as I don’t think I’d have the patience for it anymore.
You would be wrong. The most important indicator the hiring manager saw in you is that you worked in academia. Hiring someone who worked in academia and also learned to code on the side is a lot different than hiring a middle aged soccer mom whose MLM scheme didn't work out. Both may have a 3 month bootcamp under their belt, but one has an entirely different work ethic.
By the way, hiring is all about judging people‘s past work, and I‘m sorry to pop your bubble if you think past MLM work or having large gaps in your employment history doesn‘t reflect bad on anyone.
I would love to ask why didn't you pursue programming in the first place, but last time I did that the person explained to me that they have a complex, chronic, hard to diagnose rare digestive tract disease and they went to study nutritional science specifically so that they could at least figure out what to eat to not makes things worse.
Overall, I’ve had a terrible experience with the bootcamp “mills” that cram people though dozens in a batch and where all of them have some bullshit story about how they did customer interviews and then built an inventory manager or CRM or e-commerce site for this (made-up) business. The story rhymes with a story that would be relevant but it’s 100% veneer with no backer.
They’ll have a GitHub link on their resume. On it, you can see the same code as 5 other applicants. All the green days are clustered together and all stop abruptly at the same time as each other.
Those candidates are what a lot of people think of when they think bootcamp.
tl;dr: bad bootcamps are bad. I don't think I've ever crossed paths with a Lambda School/BloomTech grad to have an opinion on their program.
* this is the type of bootcamp experience that reads to me like the rare positive exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33826116
Most bootcamp students will be young and not know the rules of the game, or the cultural signifiers that make them look 'employable'.
- You have to have an environment where they can learn - You have to have staff who can actually mentor them up
If you don't have either of those (which many startups don't, just due to not simply having the time/bandwidth) then hiring them can be detrimental.
So to answer your question: I know a few, but these companies that can do it are few and far between, and that's the dirty secret here unfortunately. The schools themselves seem to select for "can we place this person here and get our money" rather than necessarily where they can grow.
On the other hand, I dropped out of school and have been programming for a majority of my life. I was never accused of being incompetent or underperforming, but there was a point in my career where I was not going to progress without deeper math skills. That said, it only takes a couple years to learn.
As are many of the college-level lecture notes, assignments, and answer keys.
I mentored another woman in a bootcamp about ten years ago and she later went on to be a senior engineer at HashiCorp. She then got a PhD in Mathematics and eventually got into an academic role in cryptography/security/privacy.
I only have a high school diploma and I've had a successful 20+ year career in software. Honestly, there are people that are driven that go through all sorts of education pathways. I don't see a bootcamp certification being a strong signal towards success or failure. It's just a tool that folks can use.
In my mind, code bootcamps are just like anything else in the realm of professional education - there's a ton of scammy and low quality stuff out there, but there are genuine upsides to the format and some people are served really well and come out as strong engineers.
A number of us has made good careers of it, but yeah the largest % were not capable. It was so bad it made the camp pretty painful at times.
After graduating I was worried about walking into a skeptical audience after they encountered some of my classmates….
Yes and no, because it depends on your expectations. At the last company I worked at, I made sure to have a chat with management to understand what they were looking for before I did my round in the interview loop. I also advised on what potential questions to probe with since I had some insight having worked as a lead instructor at a bootcamp. Sometimes that meant I would thumbs down an otherwise promising bootcamp candidate because they were weaker on say, the frontend when we needed a frontend junior dev. Our VP of Eng had already understood that and we batted way above average… at first.
Then C-level management took that as a sign that all we needed was juniors and cut the budget for hiring mid+ roles in the then hot hiring market. After a long dry spell (rejected offers), we relented and hired more bootcamp grads into junior roles. That eventually flipped the ratio of juniors to non-juniors which will never go well because you end up with an environment that can’t support their growth. On top of that, C-level management expected that more staff == immediate improvements on velocity and were vocally disappointed when we slowed down. We expected it and tried communicating it - ramping juniors sucks up time, they won’t be a net positive until waaaay later, but of course, they knew better.
Looking back on that experience, I learned a lot about the importance of managing upwards and setting very very clear expectations. Because that’s where I see a lot of these hiring situations go wrong. You need to make an honest assessment of both what qualities you need in a junior and of your own environment to know if they work for your company, bootcamp or otherwise.
The curriculum, the teaching style, and the aptitude/ drive of the cohort matters a lot.
This is what drives me nuts. My bootcamp has a legitimately high placement rate (90% hired as SWE or dev within 90 days), that is audited externally, but somehow it is in the same category as something that takes 1/4 the time with a legitimately terrible curriculum.
There needs to be some better differentiator for vocational training.
Something that I learned before I converted fully to SWE is that most other domains of engineering have this class of job I'll call a "tech." In the hardware world they're electricians, or electronics lab techs, in mechanical they're mechanics, and in the other domains you'll call them lab techs or factory techs.
It's a highly technical role with a different entry point that has a harder path to a higher tier of compensation, but also contains a pathway to management and more integration at an organizational level (similar to technical vs management tracks for engineers).
What's different is that domains outside SWE have pretty well-defined ways for people to enter into the "tech" position. Vocational training, like through trade schools, community colleges, the military, etc. We do not have that in software, yet.
Bootcamps are like an experiment into the vocational training to develop a "tech" for software development. Our industry is still very young, so we haven't found a way to define the roles for people that go through that training, and people don't know how it fits in or what the job responsibilities/management should look like yet. I think the model of treating a bootcamp grad like a potential junior engineer is wrong - it's really a separate track for career development.
Like most companies, we hired them into our apprenticeship program and then they worked their way up from there.
Most of them now are senior engineers or moved into management across the globe.
I’d say DevBootcamp seems to have put out some of the strongest students and they’ve done extremely well for themselves with strong representation at FAANG and other “good” tech companies.
Can’t speak for the other camps besides saying I cant think who made it through our apprentice code day.
Some of the other anecdotes in this thread are disheartening, for sure.
Flatiron, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright also had similar reputations early on. A very different landscape now.
There was definitely some bias against it in a few corners of our group but by and large, most didn't care. Ironically, the guy on the team that didn't like her because she came from a coding bootcamp (he had a CS degree) was by far my worst performer.
May be that’s my own biases speaking (and my degree), but I’ve spent all my professional life in a firm belief that a math degree is way more preferential than a CS degree for an SWE job. Like you should hire a CS graduate only when there is no math graduates willing to take the job (but we never had a shortage of those feeding on the Moscow State).
If forced to rationalize this belief, I would say that CS is just a subset of math, and not that intellectually challenging actually, so a person that has chosen a CS course over a math one has voluntarily agreed to narrow his intellectual perspective in order to possibly get a better pay in the future.
(Hides quickly).
It was rough at first but I had a chip on my shoulder and voluntarily worked 10-11 hours a days for 2 years straight to make up the time difference and learn all the things I needed to learn
I was a good hire (and was also bored AF living in Ohio)
I have worked with bootcamp grads who are amazing engineers and ones who are terrible, same with ivy league CS grads.
Early movers in the space like DevBootcamp and App Academy were able to be quite selective about who they took, often picking primarily non-CS grads from elite universities looking to redeploy high levels of baseline intelligence and communication skills into a more lucrative field than whatever they studied at university. That was definitely my motivation once I realized I might never afford a middle-class lifestyle (e.g. homeownership, children) if I kept going in the scientific field I trained for.
This comment has the same energy as the person I once worked with who told me (a lesbian) with total confidence that they'd never met a gay person before. Just because you aren't aware doesn't mean it's not happening all around you.
It's very common for graduates to not talk about it, precisely because of the attitudes you see in these comments. It's easily left off LinkedIn because the experience only lasts a few months. And after you've had some success at the first job, it's not relevant anyway.
How many people do you know in the industry without CS degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps, whether they cop to it or not.
I considered it a shameful secret for years, and it's only now as I approach my tenth anniversary in the industry that I've become more open about it -- I'm confident my work now speaks for itself.
It doesn't include any information about their education but what I can do is pick a selection of the staff level engineers at random and look them up on LinkedIn.
Here's the highest level of education attained by the first 50 I looked at:
7 had a PhD in Computer Science
1 had a PhD in Physics
1 PhD in Electrical Engineering
12 had a master's degree in Computer Science
1 had a master's degree in Computer Engineering
1 had a master's degree in Information Management
13 had a bachelor's degree in Computer Science
1 had a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering
1 had a bachelor's degree in Information Technology
6 did not list any educational experience
6 I could not find on LinkedIn
I did not see any that mentioned a coding bootcamp explicitly.
People tend to play down their bootcamp experiences because of stigma associated with it. It’s possible that there are bootcamp grads that don’t mention it because a lot of people think lesser of them.
People without CS degrees or degrees at all are fairly common, including at staff level and above. Many of these people have been in the industry since before bootcamps became a thing.
I had a few friends wash out of their tech jobs, and we certainly had some people that were never very good. Most of us were good enough for and entry role, and a few of us were slightly overqualified.
I’m now at a really great and highly technical company.
Some of these programs have serious problems. I think the ones with ISAs are the worst offenders.
Another tip would be, don't interview a bootcamp grad for mid-level jobs.
My golden 2 pieces of advice to bootcamp grads:
Don’t use the resume template the bootcamp gives you. If 2/3 of your resume is “software projects” you’re probably getting screened out at this point even if you’re actually good, it’s a tell.
Second, since you’ll still need to include one or two, spend time polishing the heck out of them and make sure they are online and working! Best if they’re not a microblog, recipe/beer picker, or pokedex. Do the same polishing for your personal site. If it looks like crap you’re probably getting screened out on this, too.
Yes, but most interview candidates from bootcamps couldn't pass the tech screen, and most of the hires were mediocre. One was stellar.
Personality type tends to trump experience. Unless of course you need a specialist to hit the ground running out of the gate.
In general, I have not hired many bootcamp grads over the years. They tend to present as very non-technical in most cases
bootcamp grads make more sense to be brought on as some sort of intern level hire with similar expectations
They joined a successful small e-commerce site (Javascript), then a few years later joined Loon (Google X) (Python), and sensing the wind switched to another Google X project before Loon shut down.
They're doing pretty well, if I say so myself.
Which in 2018 was bought and integrated into Galvanize!
The interesting thing is that much of the value of a diploma/certification is in the "brand" backing it.
In any case, I don't think my partner was counting on the value of the Makersquare brand as anything other than getting their foot in the industry, so that's done and gone.
Of course, all these programs are what you make of them. The best graduates are people that were really invested in learning and took advantage of the curriculum and mentors. For those that put in the work, they come out punching way above their years of experience.
I have gotten used to CEOs tweeting apologetic stuff when this happens. Perhaps this is norm should be bucked? I don't know. I just note that Austen is going against the grain.
EDIT: missed this: "In a now-deleted tweet posted earlier today, Allred quoted a prior statement of gratitude for employees pushing through the work despite being attacked from all sides, adding “even more so today.”
They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is a source of active lawsuits.
They dodged California regulators and then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
They launched an unpaid intern program, which created a backlash in the tech community.
They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that go them in even more legal trouble.
I could go on and on, but the recurring pattern is them doing something reprehensible and the "attack" is "getting caught."
No we did not.
We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get paid vs. how much we spend. The other is (hired students/graduated students), which we share with prospective students because that's what they want to understand and what every school shares.
Those were both called "placement" in different contexts to different people, but the numbers that we report externally are always hired students/graduated students (and even that isn't simple, as there are many different definitions of "hired," and different cohorts of students who are job searching or not, and various time lags around when we learn a student is hired or not), but this is not unique to us as a school. (Though an ISA incentivizing people to _not_ tell us when they are hired until tax returns are do perhaps is a little bit unique to us.)
* They dodged California regulators then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
Neither of those things are true. Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we didn't operate physical classrooms (this was a somewhat novel concept in 2017). They reasoned that if the BPPE were going to claim that online schools would need to register in every state there was a student, that the claim would be if you have a single student who attends online classes from a state you have to register as a school in that state. Correspondingly, teaching anything on the Internet would require you to register separately and abide by varying regulations with every state educational body in the United States. The BPPE said they were going to regulate online schools, and sent us a letter with a threat to fine us. We immediately submitted our registration, and the registration approval process took just over a year, and the BPPE reduced the fine to a minimum level. There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
Now we have a very large legal team, and are regulated separately and uniquely in every state in the US, often using laws that don't contemplate virtual classrooms or online learning in any way, and that's just to exist as a school in the first place. It's a complete nightmare that needs reform, and the vast, vast majority of schools are simply below the radar enough that they don't get fined, but it's incredibly difficult and expensive in the United States simply to be in compliance with each state where you might have as few as one or two students.
Beyond that fact, entirely online school where students don't pay unless/until they're hired is a round peg that doesn't fit into the square holes of existing financial regulation either.
* They launched an unpaid intern program, which created backlash int he tech community.
Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
* They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that got them into even more legal trouble
This is another misconception, but we were actually in the wrong here. Because an ISA isn't a traditional student loan, if a student doesn't get a job the ISA immediately goes away after a five year deferment period. We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause. We happily did so, but that clause didn't harm anyone.
Your website, September 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190930144525/https://lambdasch...
"86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Let's run the math on current outcomes, which I believe you've called, "the best they've ever been." 994 students graduated and 453 got a job making $50k or more. We're already at 45%, and that's before narrowing it down to, "within six months."
You may try to argue, "Not all of those 994 students count as 'job seeking,'" as if it's totally normal that 32% of graduates give up looking for jobs. That's moot. There was no fine print.
Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
> There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
They told you to cease operation. You didn't. After the BPPE news came to light, you told students that no school has ever been shut down for continuing to operate.
One point of the lawsuits are the students who felt they should have been told about the whole BPPE situation before signing up. I get why you didn't want them to know, because according to the law, the ISAs issued before you were in compliance are invalid. Yet you're still trying to collect, which I'd say very much impacts students.
> Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid." https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1329116385629245440
Within hours of the tech community calling you out on this, you apologized. Then you deleted the apology. I find it amazing that your strategy is to just pretend none of that happened.
> We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause.
Your contract said: "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code."
It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/337/2021/04/CFP...
After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlem...
A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
> Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021.
The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us.
> When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
> It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict).
> After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested.
The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up.
I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies.
OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so.
I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.
i have never understood why Lambda/Bloomtech has so many haters but the other commenter here appears to me to be in that camp.
You keep running in circles around a very simple statement that was on the front page of your website: "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Just tell me how you got to 86%, because that's wildly inconsistent with years of outcomes data, in addition to the leaks.
> This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
I'm sorry, did you just lie to my face, say, "This is fair" and try move on?
I'll be honest, I can't follow the story you're trying to tell. It sounds way more complex than what everyone watched unfold.
Your FAQ at launch clearly says it's unpaid. You had a product manager on Hacker News trying to defend the program while all the commenters explained, "This is an unpaid intern program and probably illegal." He even tried the same, "Well our lawyers said it was ok." After the Twitter backlash, you tweeted and deleted an apology, and then started acting like none of that stuff happened.
As for "no student ever did any unpaid work," didn't you pilot the program for months before publicly announcing it? (This is a rhetorical question. At this point I lack faith you'll tell the truth.)
>> > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
> Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement
Let me get this straight. You're saying, "There's no legal precedent, but hey, it might be true? So we threw it in!"
> OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing
You blocked me, making it impossible to reply.
> and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
Despite the block, I said: "Your students publish their homework to GitHub. Half a cohort failed to grasp memory management, but you rubber stamped them through the program.
You even hired one of those students to be a section lead, to teach other students."
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1270761157595262976
"I am not publicly linking to the students who struggled with it, because it’s not their fault. But I did share the GitHub projects with two senior iOS developers I trust, and they agreed these students didn’t get it."
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1270761955976859650
So to answer your challenge: memory management. I have sign-off from two senior, ex-Apple iOS devs. Please wire that money to the National Student Legal Defense Network, who seems to be handling that lawsuit against you.
> I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge.
It's interesting that you think this is all about you.
This is certainly a problem domain that needs to be solved imo so I'm rooting for Bloom unless they really prove to be harmful. We need better pipelines for people with talent and motivation to climb the social ladder and learn new skills outside of traditional academia.
So thank you
There are different ways to measure placement percentages.
* You can measure percentage of enrolled students who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of graduates who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr within six months of graduation.
Those are all different placement rates.
Say 100 students enroll, 80 graduate, 60 get hired.
Investors would want to know what percent of students get hired (because you outlay costs for 100 students and get repaid for 60). The answer is 60/100 = 60%.
Student outcomes reports say what percentage of graduates get hired. So you say 60/80 = 75%.
Those numbers are different. They are also both completely correct.
People: "X% found jobs."
A lot of folks seem to be asking if Lambda's claims of "X% placed" mapped to "X% found a job at a software company." Yes or no?
edit: I just noticed that your answer started with "No". Thanks.
But you do you, I guess.
At any rate enough people have been made aware of your lies that the harm you can continue doing is limited.
It costs us a lot of money to offer those services, and I think that program _almost_ covers its own costs, but has been a big winner.
The purpose is to create a relationship that helps learners get hired, and it's been succesful.
Is there a place where we can view your graduates? Not at this time.
Meta comment: It's intersting to see how many comments on any Bloomtech/Lambda post are very knee-jerk in nature, mostly negative some positive. And to be clear, I'd say most are thoughtful. The thing that strikes me is that I can't tell if this is normal HN tenor for a tech story or if it's just because I have opinions on the subject. The only other stories witg comments that strike me as remotely similar are those dealing with privacy.
So an ask, if Bloomtech is something you don't care about, neither positively nor negatively, do you find the comments for this article of average "pitch"?
Note that I am not saying that HN is now less neutral--it may be that the current level of optimism vs. cynicism maps better to reality.
That said, I think more optimism is generally better (for motivating action) if you want to start a new business or build a new technology; more realism is generally better if you want to go down an established path or join a venture purely as an employee; and more cynicism is better if you want to be a rabid online commentator (joke!).
The largest companies on the planet, that the majority of us here earn a living from, directly or indirectly, are essentially data gathering advertising companies. I feel like the lack of optimism is justified.
Unfortunately even then a boot campers “experience” is quite limited but many come out of their program believing they are equals to more experienced mid/senior level programmers which results in those in the industry having animosity to those individuals. I think this explains the general “negative tone” you see in this comment section.
Are boot camps bad? No, I think they are quite useful but I think we need to acknowledge that they really only effectively create a pipeline of junior developers and replace the need for corporations to have internal education/training programs.
It seems the core of your argument is not that they are inexperienced, but rather that the bootcamps somehow convince them they are not and this leads to friction in the positions they seek and the expectations around the work they're capable of accomplishing.
Yes, I personally believe that the animosity isn’t usually targeted at the fact that boot camp grads went through boot camp. Hell, programmers are most commonly self taught using free online resources for the majority of topics. My impression is because the boot camp is sold as a “get programming experience quick scheme” that most candidates would still be entry level after their program but are led to believe they are more senior.
I think it's worse than average - lots of strong opinions being bandied about. If I had to make up a score it's somewhere slightly above Google shutting down Stadia and significantly below FB / Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I recently saw a mention of a programming fellowship program on HN that I thought sounded really interesting. It was for experienced programmers, I believe mostly virtual, and was free-or-cheap. The idea behind it was to give programmers excited about programming a space to explore new ideas. I've been unable to find it since - Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658640809197569?lang...
Udacity has very similar thing with curriculum for various positions, 1:1 mentoring, interview prep etc. for a fraction of BloomTech price, like 1/10 or even 1/20. Which I still consider expensive, since cost of digital goods are close to 0 to replicate and deliver to more people. Point I make here is they can earn more by delivering $100 program to 1m of students or even 1/5 of that, than delivering $1.2k program to 10k students or $20k program to 1k students.
I really think that the law should be changed so that doing stuff like that would have been a prison term for the CEO (Allred).
The “California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education”? This is indistinguishable from parody.
The reason you register is so the state can periodically check your marketing material and field students complaints. For example, Lambda School lied about how many students get jobs, and it would have been real nice for the agency to have stepped in before the lawsuits, which are still in litigation.
Do you feel the same way about the bureau of consumer protection in the US FTC?
Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we weren't offering in-person classes (this was somewhat rare back in 2017 - certainly more rare than now). The BPPE sent us a letter that said we needed to register and we did so and began working with the BPPE instantly. We never ever lied about that fact, and there was no attempt to avoid regulation in any way.
He also lied about having an auditor verify their placement rates. Caught asking Bookface for an auditor reference while proclaiming it was audited.
I asked if there was an auditor who would verify them after the fact to show that they were accurate, but we had had never claimed they were audited at that point.
Unfortunately auditors doing that is a months-long process, so we could only have them audit subsequent reports (which they have done).
And the companies that chased the market for youngsters without any real passion or plan is now running out of customers due both the the fact credit is now tight and that the publics infatuation with the tech industries is waning. And from the looks of it BloomTech looks to definitely target the market for youngster as their primary revenue stream.
What kind of curriculum do you think is best for these folks coming from excel or the other BI tools?
Is python jupyter too advanced?
It feels like we’re still early in the tooling for “no code”.
What gets used in the organizations that do try and exit excel is typically batch jobs written in either python(pandas) or powershell taking data from one or more databases for display in a reporting framework like tableau.
no code is im my view basically a myth when we start dealing with systems more complex then what the average high school student can create as a spreadsheet, as the effort in learning the low code platforms idiosyncrasies are similar to those needed to use an modern scripting language.
So severance but they have to keep working too? Seems rough. Hard to imagine anyone in that situation would focus on working for their soon-to-be former employer.
In Denmark, depending on how long you've been with the company your employers contract termination notice period can be anywhere between 1 month (after 5 months with the company) to 6 months (after more than 8 years and 6 months with the company).
Also, most commonly, if the employee is the one terminating the contract, the notice period is 1 month (although it can be negotiated higher for key employees).
It is understood that your motivation will plummet when you're terminated, but you're still expected to maintain your responsibilites, and eventually, hand over your obligations. But you're also allowed to go to interviews during and if you get a new job your own 1 month termination warning will count.
I've experienced that some employers will offer garden leave to the affected employees, as in they don't have to work or show up daily, but they will hand over responsibilites immediately and be available if there's any questions.
There are a few edge cases where folks will be working through that period and contract with us afterwards in different/new roles, but impacted employees are not expected to work with us during that period.
Maybe trying to game unemployment insurance rates? If someone is employed they can't go on unemployment, hopefully in two months some of them find something new driving down your costs compared to firing them and having them apply right away?
It's a pipe dream if they think anyone laid off will be putting any effort in.
The press coverage has been insane especially if you think about all the problems universities have.
It's hard to use the words morally wrong and noble goals in the same sentence though given it's a contradiction.
Layoffs suck regardless though.
https://operationcode.org/podcast
Not all were bootcamp grads; a lot went to traditional 4-year colleges. One guy said that in his bootcamp, several of the students had a job offer before they even finished.
Things may be different now, a few years later, but we tend to underestimate how many regular old businesses need a web site and some kind of analytics. They don't pay like FAANG companies and they can't hire the sort of people who'd work there.
Edit: I should have mentioned that one of Operation Code's signal achievements was to make code schools eligible for GI Bill money. I found, in asking vets why they enlisted, that "paying for college when you get out" is a big, big motivator. There are some who study remotely while they're still in.
If you lay me off you give me severance and I say adieu. I need that time to find other work. What kind of dystopian BS is this?
That’s the bit that makes no sense though. A lay off means I get to fuck off. Bye. You cut ties with me. Pay me what I’m owed and then leave me be to find new work. Do not expect me to work knowing I’m being let go.
There's certainly internal knowledge that is lost in a transition of that kind, but the amount of money Twitter was burning makes no sense, and while reducing numbers of engineers is risky (and complex systems require more engineers than most people assume), I completely believe that Twitter will be able to sustain the technical operations and move quickly in shipping product with a mere 2,000 engineers.
Twitter was profitable (pre-Musk acquisition, and ignoring a one-time lawsuit settlement that wasn't an ongoing expense); it objectively did not have too much headcount (or other recurring expenses) for its revenue, prior to the added expense burden of debt service costs it was saddled with by Musk as part of the acquisition.
Their recent failure to properly execute payroll in some European jurisdictions, and the fact that they apparently no longer have sufficient account managers to even stay in contact with major advertisers at a time when they are trying desperately to actively manage those relationships and maintain them despite the distrust the takeover has engendered seem to be signs that the cuts were to deep on the non-technical side for the operation that Twitter is trying to run; I don’t see any real analytical reason to reject that the same is true on technical side.
(And that’s before considering that the reductions also seem likely to have broken both contract and, in many jurisdictions, labor laws, and legal costs associated with that are starting to mount, with at least one case already lost.)
I don’t take any joy or schadenfreude from your failures. Real people’s lives are involved and it genuinely makes me sad.
But glass houses dude. Glass houses. Maybe when you’re own company is falling apart, you should refrain from publicly commenting on someone else’s.
https://twitter.com/austen/status/1588336949403611136?s=46&t...
Someone else mentioned you need to spend less time online and you argued that you’re not that online and that the dopamine rush is worth it for you. Fine. Deal with it in therapy. But know that it looks incredibly tone deaf that the day you lay off half your staff (and the day after), you’ve spent hours debating yourself and justifying your actions on HN and shitposting on Twitter.
Have some fucking tact.
> Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in
This doesn't make any sense given that Twitter's revenue per employee (RPE) was roughly double that of well-run companies like Oracle or SAP and in the ballpark of EA and Adobe. This metric is a red herring currently being used to trim workforces. Which, that's the game and this is where we are in the cycle. But the ratio of revenue:employee doesn't tell the story here.
Granted cost structures and business models are different across these firms, and Twitter likely could have cut some staff (they all likely will in coming months now that it is timely to do so). But that's exactly the point here: the Twitter ratio between employees and revenue works fine at other companies, and has done so for a long time. Expedia has built a sustainable business with a lower RPE than Twitter, and it is similarly a pure-play Internet company. From a strictly financial perspective, it's equally likely that there were other levers that could have equally been tuned to fix Twitter's persistent problems.
IMHO the bigger problem was they are tooled as a high-growth company, but they were not growing fast. Even a modest bit of consistent growth, say 15% y/o/y, sustained for years, would likely have ameliorated their problems. Perhaps they have a large fixed cost to running Twitter, and they simply have not scaled the business enough to make it worthwhile yet -- could they double their business from the pre-acquisition base while only increasing staff 25%? That would be a good business! But I would guess the fundamental issue was that they are tooled for hypergrowth that is likely not on the radar.
Big staff cuts, modest (but smaller) revenue drops, then aiming to grow at a slower, sustainable pace is pretty stock PE stuff (although they typically try to pay at or below market instead of much higher than market). Can only assume people who see this as genius have never observed PE work.
Their revenue per employee pales in comparison to other companies of its ilk, and I think we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies :)
This also fits the model where they have a large relatively fixed cost base to operate, but could reap profits if they reached a larger elusive size. Again -- my hypothesis is they are tooled for hyper growth and the business has not been able to deliver that. Giving up on high growth and cutting to profitability is part of the stock PE playbook and definitely makes sense in the absence of strategies for generating massive growth.
> we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies
Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that they have operated for decades in competitive industries while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run companies as poorly. :-)
Very true, but Twitter has lightning in a bottle captured the way few other companies do.
Elon took an 8,000 person company and went full "move fast and break things" mode.
There's also probably a dopamine hit that I get from it that I'm not as aware of being a driving indicator, but I don't believe it negatively impacts my ability to run the company.
The elitism of keeping knowledge in overpriced institutions is what needs to die. I know dudes who work construction that have deep math skills, but believe themselves idiots because schools don’t meet them half way or peak their curiosity and thus they did poorly.
40 years ago anyone could complete a 4-year degree at nearly any college with grants and a part-time minimum wage job working 10/hrs a week.
Today you could only do the same if that job paid $70/hr.
The reason? Reagan and his racist republicans hated that college was a leveling playing field. They wanted to put a financial gate in front of college that only white upper middle class/rich students could navigate.
Unfortunately, it went too far and it’s now even too expensive for anyone but the most wealthy people.
We need to go back to subsidizing public college so anyone can work a part-time job with federal grants to complete a 4-year degree while affirming minimal grades along the way.
Once they garner that foundation, learning new skills has a known pattern.
But as importantly, the entire experience of a four year college helps our children grow into responsible adults, learn about peers they weren’t forced to go to school with, and learn to think on their own.
If our kids fail at any given step, there are plenty of adjustments to be made in this process. And that too is a critical life lesson.
I ask because before I attended, I read many posts by people who left Lambda with a bad taste and that put me off from attending. But I did, and now I could play in an ad copy. But that's my data point.
I'd like to talk to someone who had a bad time with Lambda, in a non combat context, because we clearly had vastly different outcomes and I clearly I'm missing or misunderstanding some important context.
These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?
In that field, it seems typical to have both engineers and technicians working on projects. Engineers are responsible for design, and have degrees; Technicians do assembly and maintenance, and only need on-the-job training.
I’ve often wondered what our industry would look like if we adopted a similar distinction. In which case, bootcamp graduates would be a natural fit for a technician role.
For software development, you don't need math. This may change when data science is taken more serious and companies have to guarantee the quality of the derived knowledge. So it's the other way round. When our industry changes, we will adopt a similar distinction.
Software doesn't need math because testing is enough. Unlike physical objects, it doesn't cost much to test software, especially because reproduction is almost free. Additionally, with SaaS, software doesn't run unsupervised and thus there is constant testing. In that environment software can almost always be adjusted and reproduced when there are problems.
You can produce value long before you understand everything there is to know, of course, and a lot of being a software engineer is being able to problem solve on the job.
BloomTech exists to help people get to the point they can do that and create value. No school can pretend to teach everything there possibly could be to know about how software works.
That's an absolute minimum six months full-time (and a lot of students spen dmore than 40 hours/week) with no breaks; longer hour for hour than the time in a CS degree spent on software-related topics (though those vary far more widely than most of us like to pretend).
If you eliminate context switching, have the right tooling and instruction, yeah you aren't coming out the other side a principal engineer, but you can certainly build stuff, contribute to code the right way on teams, understand data structures and algorithms enough to make stuff performant, problem solve and build a whole lot of stuff and a lot of value.
That's enough to start getting paid, and 30 years later you can continue to marvel at how you're still just scratching the surface.
That's kind of beautiful, actually.
I helped run a large school for 6 years with 4,000 students/year who took an 850 hour program. Sad to say that amount of training isn't necessarily as much as it sounds.
In all seriousness, considering the amount of bootcamp grads now at all (yes all) levels of the industry, this is an out of touch take. They're getting hired to work hard at entry level software engineering jobs, and most of them quickly move beyond that.
I'll grant that possibility. Also, my anecdata isn't an objective truth right? But I can only judge by what I know and have seen. I wouldn't hire myself at my 2 year mark, all I could produce then by my standards now is a bunch of code I'd have to fix. I've had the same experience with junior developers I've hired.
Maybe these bootcamp grads are great, I haven't hired them because of the issue I raised so I don't actually know.
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...