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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly successful. There have been situations where they've deemed certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started.

I have first hand experience with their program, albeit 10 years ago, but I would largely say that almost no one who completed the program with me actually needed it and its benefits are largely a forcing function to get you to build a portfolio in a short amount of time and have a peer group to rely on. Everyone from my cohort is still working in industry today if they want to and all seem to be doing well.

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I hired out of app academy. It was fine -- they were super junior, but that was expected. All of them were successful in other industries and used app academy to retrain into software.

I suspect one of the problems with these programs is they're supply constrained; if you want to scale them, you're betting there's a lot of people with the requisite IQ, self control, motivation, ability to set and carry out long term goals, etc, that fell through the cracks both for college and an industry desperate for engineers. There definitely are some, but it sure doesn't seem like there's a VC-industry or public companies amount of these people.

The University of Phoenix started out the same: using high standards. It'd be great if you could carve those standards into stone to prevent some future person flooding the market with less qualified candidates.

> ...a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started.

I can attest to this. AppAcademy essentially gave me free interview prep with many rounds of technical interviews resulting in me landing a role before the admissions process even concluded.

> and its benefits are largely a forcing function to get you to build a portfolio in a short amount of time and have a peer group to rely on.

That is an incredibly valuable service to provide.

Yeah, but 27 percent of your first year's salary in value? I'm not sure. Again, I don't regret it, I just think everyone that went through it could have succeeded without it.

Universities don't do much more but they do ask for much more.

It's awesome to hear that there are more scrupulous alternatives. You say everyone is working in industry - if in a %, you mean to say like 100% of those who graduated with you work(ed) in tech afterwards, right?

Our cohort was 23. 2 people basically scammed AppAcademy by not finding a job for two years but did find jobs after that and didn't have to pay their ISA. Everyone else did find jobs within about 3 months. All but three have moved into senior roles. Of those three, one prefers just being an IC and two moved into product management.

I don't know how things are lately but given sentiment I hear about hiring from bootcamps, I imagine they haven't been able to hold up the high numbers that they had in their first few years. Would love to hear otherwise though. I still think the program is expensive for what it is, but I don't regret it at all.

My only regret was that I chose between changing careers and putting all my money in crypto at the time...back when Bitcoin was still in double digits. If I'd chosen differently I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Feels like not finding a job for two years isn’t really winning, unless the terms of the ISA were insane. Lost income for two years as a software developer, experience towards higher seniority and income, building a resume and portfolio…I don’t know, that seems like a losing scam for the scammers.

They did it intentionally because they didn't want to pay. They had plenty of backing from their families to do so. I agree with you but people who grift aren't usually making the most rational choices anyway.

The bootcamp's selection process is basically picking winners. I was nearly unique among my cohort for my background. It was overwhelmingly ivy grads and silver spoon kids.

They're selecting for people that can afford to move to one of the most expensive cities in the world without working for 6 months. I managed it only by saving enough to pay my rent ahead of time and living off of credit cards for the rest of my spending. I ate a lot of dollar pizza and 6/$1 dumplings that year.

Took a risk hiring out of App academy once. Guy had gone through hundreds of interviews and just bombed on all of them. I know why, he just sucked at interviews and exudes a Morty's dad kind of vibe. Perfectly fine programmer, it turned out.

Is his name Tom? :D

No. Tom's a genius. This guy was only a perfectly fine programmer.

Jerry, get a job!

Maybe you're being a little tongue-in-cheek about the crypto thing, but, assuming you are at least a little sincere: I think if you drop the benefit of hindsight and change the proposition to "changing careers to one that you are well suited to (apparently) which the market favors" vs "gambling your net worth with no backup plan", I think just about anyone would say you did the right thing.

Oh completely, but the power of "fuck you money" is a very real thing and I think I would still be doing this, albeit with a very different career trajectory.

I'm exactly the person that would live cheaply and work on open source full time if I could afford to.

I'm in the same boat as you, one of the classic stories of "I mined double digit numbers of Bitcoin in the early days when it was literally worthless"... eventually wiped the hard drive that held the wallet and sold the computer without a second thought.

I'll be kicking myself for life for that, but I also have to remind myself that if I had held onto those worthless coins worth fractions of a penny, I almost certainly would have cashed out well before they were at their peak value, and spent them on a pizza or some darknet weed or something else dumb. This at least helps me cope with knowing what could have been...

This was my experience of them as well.

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