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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

The math ends up wildly unfavorable unless you are EXTREMELY confident in your teaching/transformation abilities.

If you look good on paper before the school then you don't need it and won't be motivated to share your income. So the applicant pool reduces itself to those who on-paper don't have great chances. So you need to cause a really big delta in the ability of those people to make good money in the industry for you to be able to get your cut.

And you're gonna pull that off in 6 to 9 months? I'm a big believer in a lot more people having potential to learn than currently have easy opportunities, but that's a hell of a timeline.

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I remember the marketing for App Academy was that we all would be self-taught, but then the actual makeup of the cohort were people who had prior programming experience (CS all through high school and as a hobby, but studied linguistics in college and regretted it; a designer who had done some JS and couldn’t pass leetcode interviews despite having current frontend skills, etc.)

I think the problem they’ve run into is that there are only so many of those types to go around, and you have to stay small or really tackle the problem of transforming someone in 12 weeks eventually. That’s a different and much harder ask.

Early a/A cohort attendee here.

They literally ensured their success by filtering for people who would already succeed no matter what. I don't have any misgivings about it because the curriculum did help me focus on some gaps in my understanding and build up a profile/portfolio that could land jobs.

It's still expensive and had that curriculum been open at the time I could have done the whole thing on my own and saved some money.

The social aspects of the program didn't end up really benefiting my career at all. The vast majority of my cohort had STEM degrees from prestigious places or were people who were programming since an early age like me. I had already had a long career in IT before I attended. 100% did get jobs, but 2 of the guys in our cohort struggled for a while -- though I think that was to get out of paying the ISA.

Yup. When the Bootcamp market flourished (early/mid devBootcamp days) and incredible results seemed common it was exactly for the reasons you mentioned. Many early attendees were folks who either had some previous technical experience or were very smart and proved in some other field but wanted to move into dev work.

Eventually the majority of those folks who were going to make the switch... Did. Then the average bootcamp graduate became someone who bought into the hype that anyone could learn to code. A lot of truck drivers, CS reps, and teachers applied. There nothing stopping those people from becoming great engineers. But they are going to have a more difficult time on average than the person who dabbled in coding for ten years while working as an engineer in another field and just needs a crash course to be proficient in web development.

Placement rates dropped significantly around that time.

Well, presumably there's some people who wouldn't be able to afford the upfront tuition?

But you're right, $30k (in the worst case) is a lot of money to pay for less than a year of bootcamp.

$30k is also enough to pay for a shitload of American state schools BS in Computer Science program. WTF That's about what I and my friends paid!

That includes room and board in an expensive dorm (it was part of the honors program I was in) and a meal plan with the school.

Or a masters in CS 1 year program from the Arizona State

Not necessarily, fresher or graduate trainee programs are this effectively.

Large companies especially conglomerates do this by hiring freshers and investing in their learning and benefit by paying a bit lesser than the market over the years .

Apprenticeship has also been successful economically at even a scale of one master/sole proprietor for centuries.

The key is to derive value while they learn, not split the learning and earning parts completely

Apprenticeships also take 3-4 years on average.

There was a time about 5 years ago where tech companies were desperate to fill various minority quotas. The idea was those people were very valuable, there were very few applicants who were hotly contested by other tech companies, and lack of skills wouldn't matter - they'd learn on the job.

In that world, the school only has to get the students to do a "hello world" in python and apply for the right jobs. Such a school is very cheap to run, and very lucrative as long as a decent proportion of students fit into the desirable categories.

The students themselves usually aren't aware how desirable their application is - and therefore believe the school is their route in rather than a few youtube tutorials and a direct application.

What tech companies do you allege have/had "minority" quotas to fill?

Google goes to great lengths to increase diversity: https://about.google/belonging/diversity-annual-report/2021/...

Not that you’re arguing for or against, but I thought I’d drop an interesting link to a 2020 McKinsey and Co study that shows more diverse companies generally outperform their peers. [1]

Is there any wonder that Google and other (not exclusive to tech) companies desire this?

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...

Is that the same McKinsey that helped start opioid epidemic?

This is also self-fulling. Investors that see this invest into more diverse companies, who in turn do better because they get more investment.

Write a convincing report saying "Companies with a Z in the name do better", and you'd see the same result.

There's quite a chasm between trying (and failing, but I digress) to increase diversity of the workforce and those imaginary quotas.

Thoughtworks wrote in an email to me that they were only considering non-male candidates because of their quotas. The idea, I suppose, is that I should be willing to change my gender if I'm really interested in joining.

Is that legal?

At least in the US, if this person received such an email they would be able to sue the company that sent it quite easily.

I spoke to a bunch of lawyers who all told me they hoped I found some lawyer who would do that. The EEOC decided that if a manager directs their reports (engineers) to advertise a position, then people apply to the position as directed by emailing the engineers, then the engineers say some stuff about gender quotas, that's fine, because the applicant didn't fill out some other form and the company disavows this recruitment process to the EEOC while using it to source candidates.

If they had quotas, they were made up internally. But more likely they were just lying to you, or the person who sent the email was twisting the truth. I don't think anyone but you thought of the "maybe you should change gender" bit. They just didn't want to hire you, personally.

Plenty of recruitment teams get given targets. Just one 1 memo saying "hires that don't bring the company towards our diversity goals won't count for your metrics"...

(I have worked with 2 such recruitment teams).

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