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Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree here. This is a far better way of expressing what I was trying to get at :)

[Edit: Doh! Sorry @king_magic, I did totally reply to Rosie and not you! I'll leave the comment in-tact since other than the first paragraph I'm making (or maybe belaboring) still-relevant points]

I'm sorry, but it's hard for me to believe that we're well aligned on this yet. Precisely because your marketing pitch is "Are you looking to increase your job prospects, or earn a higher salary?" (verbatim).

Presumably your funnel is filling up with people who want to make more money (as a relatively primary motivation). That maybe sounds right if you're training sales people. For this industry (and frankly trade education as a whole), I think it's going to lead to quite a bit of disappointment. An average student of yours could almost certainly have more predictable and successful access to a similar (maybe higher, lifetime) level of income by training as a nurse.

The promise of trade education should be that you go through, do well, and have a great chance to get hired at the end. The issue I have is that it seems like the code-camps are playing both sides here.. implying that's going to happen, while having to admit under inspection that it's basically not, ever happening.

I'm actually really impressed with our student base in regard to your assumptions because they were ours as well. I noted this in a comment above, but many of our students are not (or at least claim not to be) doing our courses to "make more money". At least not on the code side. Our UX Design students often are experience designers who are upgrading by adding to their tool kit, but that's a different category.

A lot of our students are people looking to start coding to develop a new lifestyle. Or simply to move into an industry that's more exciting. A LOT of our students are literally planning on taking an absolutely massive pay cut to leave industries like Finance to do work for dirt-pay first as a freelancer and then maybe a junior position at a small startup. They just want to get in on the hyped growing industry, and hoping that development is a good path for them. Some of them find out quickly that it isn't right for them, but some of them get more excited by the day and make the leap.

Anyway, the problems you have with the bootcamp industry are problems we have as well, but defining the dream versus the mission for each individual looking for answers is tough. One of the reasons we love discussions like this. :-)

They don't need an expensive boot camp to develop a lifestyle or hobby. They can access a ton of free and inexpensive resources for that.

They might want to consider that there are a lot of people out there who could change their life by getting some additional skills. Why do you assume that everyone is not capable just because they did not major in CS in college? Whether it is monetarily or otherwise, there are a lot of reasons. There is nothing wrong with dangling a bump in pay as the potential outcome of gaining new skills. Your nurse analogy might as well be that of training to be a doctor instead of being a programmer or nurse.

I should back up and qualify my thoughts on this a bit more. I do not support some blanket idea that "trade schools" are a good idea or that they can help. I do support the idea that good skills education can help. I also support the idea that certain "trade schools" are better than others. The same is true of classes whether they are brick and mortar classes or MOOCs.

@famousactress, I think you and I are definitely aligned. I think you thought RosieA replied instead of me?

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