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Comment by celim307 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with knowledge know if this is isolated to lambda falling behind their peers, or the industry itself starting to turn away from hiring boot camp grads?

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Possibly related to the submission here from a few days ago: "Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices."[1]

Additionally, I found another story from a few months back with a lot of comments: "Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year."[2]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946972

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017

In my experience, the signal to noise ratio for bootcamp is very low.

You might get a diamond in the rough sometimes but it's so inefficient compared to a hiring pipeline from real schools. Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge. Contrast that with the signing bonuses you see negotiated at serious career fairs... That should give you an idea how much people trust Lambda's grads.

> Lambda now has a program where you can "try" one of their graduates for a few weeks free of charge.

Any idea how this works? It seems like it would be difficult to have such a program without running afoul of labor laws. Does Lambda have the equivalent of a temp staffing agency subsidiary to facilitate this program?

I am about to start with a company through the Fellowship program on Monday. There is a staffing agency that we are paid through. The pay isn't phenomenal, but it is a buck or two above a living wage for the state you reside in. If the company decides they like us and want to keep us on, then they reimburse Lambda for what they paid us during the Fellowship. We aren't locked into the Lambda pay rate if we are hired, and are encouraged to negotiate our offers. There is supposed to be an actual position open for hire in order for organizations to take advantage of the program, but obviously that could be exploited. I am cautiously optimistic, though.

Above a living wage means what exactly? Above minimum wage?

Above minimum, I believe. Last I heard the fellowship pays ~$15/hour

interesting, thanks

Good question. I didn't really pry into other's situations. I was told compensation was based on state, and I really only know my own extremely well. I will tell you Bernie Sanders would approve, and then some, but for my particular area of the state (where most of us live, figures) it is probably deficient by about 3 dollars.

When it was first announced, the students weren’t paid. There was massive outcry on Twitter and elsewhere that this was an illegal violation of labor laws so Austen changed his tune and said Lambda would pay the students minimum wage.

There are so many shady, obvious blunders like this when it comes to Lambda School

I think it is an industry moving away from boot camp grads. Almost all these boot camps focused on JavaScript and HTML/CSS.

None of them were really teaching Linux sysadmin, clustering, scaling, etc. The real world needs developers that understand more than just frontend development.

Surprise, surprise, you can't speedrun engineering skills.

“Learn Java and backend engineering in 6 weeks” isn’t going to cut it either.

There are no shortcuts to experience and aptitude.

There are plenty of bootcamp grad alumni from the ~2013 era that are now senior and staff level engineers. Any company that wants to be stuck up about university degrees is missing out on a lot of potentially strong contributors. The bootcampers I know haven't had any trouble getting hired.

Totally anecdotal from an employer perspective, but I haven't seen any companies turning away from bootcamp grads.

I've worked at coding bootcamps in the past... Most camps are closer to 50% job to not job ratio now. Most camps that have tried to scale quickly have failed. It's not easy to scale education.

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