Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandofsky | Hacker News Reader

> as far as I know, Lambda/Bloom actually delivers on their goal of improving their student's employment prospects

The root problem seems to be that most students don't end up finding jobs.

According to leaks, only 27% of graduates ended up making over $50k, which is the threshold where they had to pay back the company. Each student costs the company $13k, with $2,500 in CAC alone. At the time, the ISAs maxed out at $30k, which you'd hit way below the FAANG scale of wages.

https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucra...

Let's say you have a cohort of 100 students. It costs $1.3m to train them. 73 pay back $0. Even if the remaining 27 end up in FAANG jobs, you only make back $810k.

View on HN

And from what I can tell, the root of the most-students-don't-find-jobs problem is that as much as people love to promote coding as being something for everyone, the reality is that it is not. It is actually really hard to become (and stay) a good software engineer. You have to really want it AND work really hard at it. And a lot of the people attracted to these ISA bootcamps are people who don't like their current career/job/trajectory and have heard that software pays well, and maybe they've done some Hello World tutorials that give you a bit of a rush but don't scratch the surface of what this career actually entails. Then when these people get 2 months in the bootcamp they realize that software engineering is difficult, and requires possibly more strenuous mental work than they've ever done before, but now they're on the hook and it's not easy to reverse course, so they finish the bootcamp with a half-hearted desire and poor-to-mediocre skills that hundreds of thousands of other wannabe devs from all over the world already have, and then they get smacked in the face with 6 rounds of technical interviews that they can't pass. It's not a good scenario.

The root problem is that in my experience completing a bootcamp tends to be a reliable signal to identifying bad hires (when it comes to software engineering). I have interviewed quite a few from different bootcamps, I've hired a few of them and so far the results have been very poor. The only good hire from a bootcamp I've had, I hired in a project manager role where she shines, she's honestly not able to code but she understands enough that she's an effective manager and has great interpersonal skills. Great hire but not a good testament to a bootcamp.

How would you recommend this problem be addressed and fixed?

I don't know if I buy the whole, "A four year degree at Stanford and 12 years of mathematics from age 6-18 is the only way to produce a successful software engineer." I know you're not making that claim explicitly, but it feels like an implicit claim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com