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Comment by DetroitThrow | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad to hear that it was a positive experience for you! Do you think you know what % of your peers ended up working in tech off the top of your head?

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just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a lifechanger.

i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the bathwater when changing careers and reskilling people is an inherently messy process that obviously the bootcamp cannot totally control even if were run perfectly, which lambda definitely was not. it just turns off a lot of people like me who actually could potentially change their lives for the better if they were presented simple facts without the extremes of hype or hyperbole.

p.s. for sibling comment - yes it is -normal- for good students to be offered another term as TAs for the next class. this was considered an honor and actually was fairly competitive and i think helped them be really good by the time they got into the job search. TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy.

Lambda/Austen certainly were capable of controlling whether or not they lied to prospective students about their job placement statistics.

I was a bootcamp instructor at a place. This had been my experience too with classes and how I selected TAs.

I had no control over student selection. The bootcamp school accepted everyone. I told them not to, they didn’t care.

"TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy."

Lol. TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job.

like i said i cant speak for lambda school, but at my bootcamp the TAs were the best of us, not the "ones who can't find a job". and at my (fairly prestigious, hopefully not non-legit) university, TAs were very often upperclassmen and sometimes sophomores that -just- completed the previous class.

> TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job.

So they're... graduates who can't find a job? I'm not sure you're making the point you're trying to make here.

Perhaps you aren't familiar with the term. Graduate Student = someone enrolled in a Masters Program, Post doc, PHD program, etc.

This is quite different from a using a recent Bootcamp grad, likely without any industry experience, as a TA in a Software Dev Bootcamp. Especially because the main purpose of this is just to inflate job placement statistics.

> Perhaps you aren't familiar with the term. Graduate Student = someone enrolled in a Masters Program, Post doc, PHD program, etc.

I'm familiar, thanks.

Why is someone who graduated last year and went into a Master's program different from someone who graduated last year and became a bootcamp TA?

Typically, getting into a graduate program is difficult and has an additional bar past graduation, and unless you are a great student you only TA entry level classes you have to master very well anyways. Especially in CS, graduate student is a paid job, too.

This whole conversation seems moot considering Lambda did away with paid TAs and instead had students filling in the role without pay.

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