Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by seanhandley | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

seanhandley

Ridiculous.

Any tech company worth its salt will do technical evaluations of candidates, regardless of their education.

So what advantage does state regulation give, besides putting money in officials' pockets?

View on HN

Stopping people from being ripped off. I am waiting to see if there were registered complains about these schools.

I realize you're not saying anything about the effectiveness, but regulation hasn't seemed to stop diploma mills.

You realize that there's an ongoing crusade against diploma mills, right?

I do. I'd rather fix that before we try to "fix" dev bootcamps.

Is it your contention that we should never try to solve one crime if another one is ongoing?

Update from usatoday http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/01/31/california-com... "

> He added, however, that the stern language in the cease-and-desist letters was designed primarily to get the operators' attention and that it was unlikely the bureau would be moving to shut them down as long as they made a good-faith effort to come into compliance.

> "We are trying to get them to become licensed," Heimerich said, adding that the agency has not received any complaints about the boot camps and learned about them from a staff investigator who saw them mentioned on a technology blog. "So if they are doing that, they fall to the bottom or close to the bottom of our enforcement priorities because there are many more serious threats to student consumers."

You don't believe the state has a legitimate interest in making sure that schools actually teach what they claim to?

You don't believe the state has a legitimate interest in making sure that schools actually teach what they claim to?

No. Caveat emptor. The State should only get involved in the case of outright fraud - you pay your money, and they don't actually run the class, or the class is taught by a 6th grader or something.

Outside of that, we should just let the market operate. Firms that don't deliver on their promises won't be around long.

Absolutely. Bright people are who I would hire. And bright people don't need state regulation.

Caveat emptor.

> No. Caveat emptor. The State should only get involved in the case of outright fraud - you pay your money, and they don't actually run the class, or the class is taught by a 6th grader or something.

This sounds frighteningly arbitrary. So if I pay for a class that will teach me to be a programmer and I get a class that has no realistic hope of accomplishing that, it's caveat emptor, while if I'm in exactly the same situation but the teacher is a sixth grader, caveat emptor doesn't apply? How do we determine when a case of ripping people off is excused by caveat emptor?

I think the problem is with the claims these programs are making, not the expectations the students have.

If I decide to go to a traditional non-profit university to study, say, paleontology, and I actually expect to get a job digging up dinosaur bones, that is my own problem. The state shouldn't step in and start slapping the University's hand unless the University was falsely advertising high placement rates after graduation.

Slapping down educational institutions for the unrealistic employment expectations of their students will end poorly. The best that we should do is make sure the schools aren't lying to anybody.

I think it has to go further than that. For example, if a school makes no claims of employability, but they do claim that a class will teach a skill and then (as in mindcrime's example) it turns out that the professor is ten years old and spends the whole class time playing League of Legends, surely that's fraud too.

I would expect that would be bog-standard fraud (I suspect that most of the actionable concerns are).

I mean like, if a paintball arena claims to let you play paintball, then after you pay them they hand you some water pistols and tell you to have fun, that is surely fraud. I doubt we'd need to have any sort of special regulation to tackle that sort of issue.

Sure, fraud is fraud, and that's the idea behind "rule of law". If someone defrauds you, you have a claim against them to be compensated accordingly. But that's orthogonal to the idea of having The State decide, a priori, who is and who isn't allowed to do business.

You realize this is precisely the mandate of BPPE, the agency in question, right? They're a consumer fraud agency, part of the California Department of Consumer Affairs, and their rules include such nefarious things as...

"The institution shall employ administrative personnel who have the expertise to ensure the achievement of the institution's mission and objectives and the operation of the educational programs."

"An institution shall not promise or guarantee employment, or otherwise overstate the availability of jobs upon graduation."

You can read them for yourself: http://www.bppe.ca.gov/enforcement/institution_minreq.shtml

But also, it's an agency that's existed only since 2010.

Looking through your link, I see 16000 words of new paperwork, inflexible mandates, silly gotchas that could trip up a small organization, and redundancies. (False claims and advertising are already illegal.)

I had a long reply to your deleted comment. In its absence I'll note that another cost of the BPPE's discretionary regulatory power here is a chilling of speech by knowledgeable operators, who now can't risk angering the regulators or sharing information that could increase later compliance burdens.

Is this a rhetorical question or do you actually want to know? The way you've phrased the question makes it seem like you've already decided what your opinion is.

BPPE requires programs like these to assess $0.50 per $1,000 charged to students who are California residents. These assessments go into a state-wide "Student Tuition Recovery Fund," which is used to mitigate economic harm to the student in a variety of situations where the school might refuse or be unable to, e.g., the school closes mid-class. See http://www.bppe.ca.gov/lawsregs/regs.shtml#76020 for the full list.

Programs like this charge students $10k-$20k, so we're talking $5-$10 assessed per student. This is like a very lightweight version of a surety bond.

There are other fixed and variable costs related to complying, but (AFAIK) this is the only money that flows into the state's pockets.

Is this a rhetorical question?

There's a delicious irony in the phrasing of that!

Yes, I really do want to know. Though I am a biased listener as my confidence in the motives of state officials is not high and I'm not a great believer in set curriculums or standardised testing.

I know when I'm in the presence of a strong educator and I'd rather just spend time with them, talking and listening to what they have to say.

You can get the details on tech by RTFM - it's the direction, the opinion, the experience and talent that is valuable to be around.

I meet university graduates on a regular basis that have come through regulated programmes of education and paid plenty of money -- no, sorry, borrowed plenty of money -- to gain an accredited degree.

I wholly believe in the quality of the subject matter in the books they read and written on the board in the lectures they maybe attended.

Whether it absorbed, was digested and can now be readily applied is a different matter entirely. Regulation is not a guarantee of quality and if people want to sign up for code schools then good luck to them - they're the buyer so "caveat emptor" and let them assess whether the code school is providing what it has promised.

Bright people are who I would hire. And bright people don't need state regulation.

The state is not even notionally regulating for the benefit of tech companies, but for the benefit of consumers, so raising the fact that tech companies will do evaluations is a complete non sequitur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com