Single mom sues coding boot camp over job placement rates
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Does the $30K income sharing agreement mean that she has to pay $30K to the school once she starts working? And if that's after tax, then doesn't it mean she'll have to make around $50K to have $30K in after-tax income to pay back the school?
They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and "can only repeat from memory".
To make an analogy, if you were learning to exercise for the first time, the information is out there, but there's a ton of bad and conflicting information out there too, and if you're not careful you'll make no progress or even get hurt. So it makes sense to hire a trainer or learn from friends, especially in the beginning.
If you can afford the time to spend a whole day learning how to solve the problem yourself, it's probably the best way to learn. But if we restrict the industry to those who can afford that time, we'll be poorer for it. Many people can be good developers despite going through a different learning path.
I am not a parent, but I've definitely found as I've gotten older it's harder to self learn sometimes. Having structure and some guidance can make a world of difference.
A good example I had not too long ago was having to go back into Java, something I hadn't written in many many years. Syntactically, I could write basic logic. But I didn't have any feel for how a project should be structured, what sort of libraries exist, and a lot of other things I know implicitly from languages I am working with regularly. I had a friend (who actually happened to be a bootcamp teacher in a previous life) spend a couple hours with me just going through the basics over a screenshare/voice chat. I picked up more in those 2-3 hours than I did in previous 2-3 weeks because I had someone who knew what they were doing, could answer questions, could anticipate what I might be thinking next and could guide me.
A good teacher can be infinitely helpful to learning something, even for someone experienced (I've been writing code for over two decades now). I can't imagine how much more helpful a good teacher could be for someone who is just trying to start learning. We shouldn't be discouraging this style of learning, we should be seeing how to make programming accessible to everyone interested in learning.
At least boot camps I know do job placement as well as the camp itself. An entirely self taught person has all the chips stacked against them.
The QA route - the modern version of the oft vaunted “start in the mail room and work hard” position - is mostly gone too.
I think if you're legitimately smart and dedicated, and put the time in to build knowledge, you'll be able to get a start somewhere. And once you have real work experience, the credential becomes less and less relevant.
FWIW I do find there's value in actual comp sci and software engineering degrees, and I will give those some amount of weight. But as far as bootcamps, if two candidates demonstrate the same level of skill, knowledge, dedication, etc., it makes zero difference to me if one has a boot camp and the other is self taught.
We haven't been able to get our interviewers do that consistently, and a lot of our self-taught hires report that basically no one in the past has ever grilled them about their personal projects, and that we were the first company to do so.
That sounds like exactly the core of the broken hiring processes. Shouldn't a good hiring manager try to create a process that finds these brilliant, intelligent candidates?
Problem 1: it's too easy to apply to jobs. Unqualified people blast resumes at you. If each resume takes you 2-3 minutes for a fast discard, and 15+ minutes to really look at, but only a handful of seconds for someone to send to you...
Problem 2: interviews aren't all that useful, and junior people don't have a track record to rely on. When I hire someone, I'm investing piles of senior eng time onboarding, etc. A bootcamp is a useful filter for candidate being worth the effort (time, $, opportunity cost) to hire and train.
To quote you,
> People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb
A bootcamp -- much like a college degree -- shows drive, motivation, and the ability to execute over time. Is this exclusive to bootcamp or college graduates? Absolutely not, and I've hired people with neither. But again, hiring is very time expensive.
Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.
There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself, especially how to make code that is easy for other people to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively. People who focus on teaching themselves are doing themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a disservice.
Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's perverse incentives:
- Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an engineers learning curve looks like.
This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find the above to be true. They're not students, they're customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale.
I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.
These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence.
Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.
React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.
My company has a react team somewhere, but not ruby...
The clear implication is that you finish the bootcamp and you will be on top of the world.
I would say ~30% of my students had some form of higher than realistic expectations of where they would when they finished the course. I made a point of beating that out of them.
But there were very few, maybe only 5% people that really fit your description. But I can remember them very clearly whereas the middle std dev of students I wouldn't recall much of them.
I would say close to 60% were unsuitable for even junior positions. Their arrogance made them dangerous, and they knew just enough to cause problems.
You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Sadly, the people who end up losing out are the people coming out of the other end.
It is also a sad fact, that often, regardless of bootcamper incompetence, you can find a more incompetent manager willing to hire that person and validate their skewed world view.
As you can tell, i'm tired of it. At least uni grads from CS courses know enough to know they know very little.
In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits.
In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded.
Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two).
I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.
Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.
The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing.
The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written.
The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.
Not a bootcamper but I think this isn't true. If you put in the effort and you're moderately intelligent you can speedrun pretty much any career in terms of knowledge.
However I do think there's a negative selection bias in the people that end up doing the bootcamps. They're not the self taught people that can teach themselves x in a few weeks. These people don't go to bootcamps, because they already taught themselves x and don't see the purpose in doing a bootcamp for a lot of money that teaches them x and doesn't give them a useful certificate.
The main benefit I see in the classical university track is that you gain more breadth of knowledge. And while you may not need most of it, it often helps in problem solving to know that some things "exist". Just so you can Google the details when you're faced with a similar problem.
The other benefit is of course the signaling value. Bootcamps don't have much of it.
Perhaps, but efficacy is knowledge combined with experience. Experience requires time, diverse challenges, mistakes and so on.
Many bootcampers (and low-level developers generally) seem to think you can jump ahead to being senior/lead without actually gaining the experience, making the mistakes and learning the lessons first-hand.
Sadly, there's plenty of crap low-level companies that will hire them too.
He has been fired from every coding job he's had, due to difficulties working with others. In a nutshell, he's convinced that he knows more than everyone else. (For example, he once spent 3 hours arguing with a guy who builds rocket systems at JPL about which of them knows more about rockets.)
Him and others like him have soured a lot of LA tech companies on hiring boot camp graduates.
How do people continue to get by with such little insight.
You can no more replace bootcamps with internet websites than you can replace teachers with books: people need interactive experiences built on sound pedagogy to learn most effectively.
The reason the VC-funded bootcamps are scams is because they call what they do teaching without having any foundations in pedagogy or instruction and using un-qualified recent students as the only "instructors" looking at students' code.
They are scams because they juke the stats. They hire their own graduates to up placement rates & deceptively determine there own exclusion criteria to remove data of people who didn't get placed.
Most of what I got out of doing the bootcamp was being surrounded by other coders, collaborating on stuff in person, and being exposed to the bay area tech scene.
I don't regret going and I had some really great times there, but if today someone asked me if they should go to a bootcamp, I would suggest recreating that experience themselves at a fraction of the price.
Here's what I would suggest:
- Take online courses and use Stack Overflow. Everything that's available for cheap or free is better than anything I was taught at bootcamp.
- If you can, move to somewhere that has some semblance of a tech scene, and find the smallest, cheapest cubby hole to live in so you don't have to worry so much about paying rent. At most, have a part time job that won't interfere with your studies, but even better if you don't need to work.
- Go to tech meetups, mixers, etc. Start networking ASAP. Meet other coders. Do presentations, no matter how novice the topic.
- Start blogging about what you're learning.
- Have some project to show for your effort to your potential first employers. Doesn't matter how dumb and impractical it is. I attribute part of my initial success to hammering out a live chat with playlist and rewind control on top of YouTube years before YouTube implemented that themselves.
- Practice working your butt off. If you really want to achieve your goal, you'll stay up late to solve problems when it's necessary.
- Make sure you're having fun at every step of the way and don't let people distract you.
There, I may have just saved you thousands of dollars. Potentially that can all be done for free depending on where you're situated geographically or how much money you're sitting on.
If you know what a shell script is, you probably don't need a bootcamp. That said, if you are completely clueless to tech, maybe a bootcamp would be a good thing. Depending on the bootcamp, of course.
All of the information in the world is available in the library, but no one will ever memorize every book in it. The internet has a trillion libraries worth of information, but no one can absorb enough of it without structure and guidance to make something useful out of it.
Schools start everyone at the same starting point and guide them through to the same end point, so that companies can rest assured that the lowest graduate of their school is at a specific minimum competency level. Without the school structure, most people would Dunning-Kruger themselves into thinking that they are either vastly better or immensely worse than they actually are.
Years of experience can make you a competent individual in the subject but even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng.
It's possible to pick up on this if you're 'in the club,' it's impossible to notice it if you're not.
Goes both ways, mate. I've always been shocked by (even very experienced) CompSci guys' absolute inability to create a simple state machine. Keep shit orthogonal, guys!
Same thing, but to a lesser extent, when it comes to timing constraints.
One thing I will mention though, I've always found elec engineers to have a higher work rate that software devs. Always.
The boot camps are wrong in teaching rotary, where they might benefit from selective regiments.
Learn to learn as I've heard it put.
Don't be condescending. People switching careers don't know all the information is already online. That's what makes predatory boot camps that much worse.
I wish there were more opportunities for pure UX CSS jobs, without the complexity of frontend coding. Just make pretty themes and charge for that. A gentler learning curve than HTML JS React Node Express SQL and on and on and on.
Longstanding experience is that tone is set at the top (i.e. the President and Dean), consequently the level of teaching is much more dependent on the leadership than on the money.
My friend learned more about coding from 4 months of FlatIron than I learned going to a prestigious state school for 4 years.
I hope you came away from your 4 years with the tools to learn & investigate, communicate, design systems, all with a heaping side of general education you might not have otherwise obtained. Not to mention a background in OS, database, programming languages, etc that there’s no possible way to cover in a boot camp. If none of that happened, then you did get ripped off.
Most four year degrees shouldn’t be viewed as jobs programs. Yes, they’ve effectively become that, but that’s a mistake, IMO. Exceptions would be true professional programs (engineering leading to a PE, nursing, etc).
That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold.
This is fair. And I’d argue for a 2-year degree here. Or, employer-run apprenticeships. The for-profit boot camp, like much of the for-profit college industry, is mostly just an awful industry that shouldn’t exist.
There is the part where you talk to someone to figure out what you need to code. And that parts important but defense wasn't taught at my university.
to learn & investigate, communicate
I did not take a learning and investigation course in my CS program, not did I take a communication course.
design systems
Are there good books that teach you how to design systems in general? How to build a good chat app, vs EMR app vs a good embedded code is completely different. So every book or article I've seen on design is so abstract to be useless, or very focused on a subdomain.
Not to mention a background in OS
Honestly this hasn't really ever come in handy. I'm sure someone can come up with a time or too it was helpful but I'd trade all my knowledge about OS's for better understanding of CSS.
database
Learned a little about databases from a 6 month course but equal or less than amount my friend learned from a boot camp.
programming languages
I had experience with a bunch of esoteric languages like Haskell, lisp, but I didn't know any language well. We didnt learn anything about JavaScript.
Things he learned that I didn't, how to use an ORM, how to build a web application, how to use libraries and frameworks, how to use ruby on rails, JavaScript, react, css.
Overall we learned a similar amount of useful stuff, but he did it in 4 months for 10k and it took me 4 years and 100k.
Why is it a mistake to view them as job applications? Maybe you want to take out 100k in debt to just learn interesting things about computers, but i did it because i wanted a career.
Traditional comp sci degrees are not set up like that at all. Yes, you'll learn to program. But your university might offer ONE class on web development, or mobile development, etc. Comp sci degrees are really math/theory degrees...not focused much in the way of practical software engineering skills.
Erm, maybe because what is being learned isn't something that can be absorbed in 1 semester?
Most community colleges do have tracks for this. Generally it's four semesters for an Associate's. You probably have core courses of: Programming 101 (Java or Python, generally); Programming 102; Computer Architecture/Assembly; Data Structures; and one of either Discrete Math or Calculus I.
That is way more than 40 hours a week for 14 weeks--and that's just the barest minimum to get someone up and running.
And note that this doesn't include any "vocational" training in the current Web Frameworks, Android/iOS, basic databases, etc.
> She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs
"Took out" of where? Her bank account? Why would she be in an income-share if she paid $30,000 up front?
> for any student’s ISA payments to be activated ... landed a role leveraging skills learned at Lambda School that pays $50K or more in salary.
She has not earned anything from being a web developer. So it would appear she doesn't owe Lambda anything. Are they suing her?
The crimes happened whether or not she paid them money, and any harm is enough harm to sue. If you spend your time, that is still something you spent. If the person you spent it on was committing fraud at the time, that's a crime.
But since you decided to be snarky, "crimes" are irrelevant here since it is a civil case between private parties.
I don't know the terms of your clause, but I haven't heard of any arbitration clause that's beneficial to the party not writing up the contract.
1. I'm surprised Bloom doesn't have an arbitration clause.
2. Bloom doesn't say what percentage of privates[a] get a job afterwards. I can't imagine any lawyer would put a guarantee in the contract.
3. Bloom fully refunds the tuition if you don't get a coder job in 365 days. Getting that education for free is a good deal, even if all you get is web dev code monkey 101. If you have 2 neurons to rub together you can extend that into learning other areas of programming. Although admittedly that's hard for a single mom, it's not Bloom's fault she's in that situation.
4. Were coder bootcamps so successful that the labor market is now well and truly saturated with juniors?
My estimation of the story is that the litigant is salty she didn't read the fine print and probably just isn't very talented. Learning how to program computers isn't an economic panacea, and it's hard. I got a CS degree and struggled to get a decent jobs for years. Maybe we'll see CS graduates sueing their universities if this litigation provails.
[a] Somehow graduate seems inappropriate terminology for a boot camp.
Rather than addressing their pedagogical failures, they decided to change their name, commit fraud & lie to potential students. Which opens them up to being sued, if only by students, like this woman, who opted out of the arbitration clause.
[1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
That being said bootcamps (or really school in general) are not a magic bullet that automatically gets you a job. Even a bachelor's in CS might not get you the skills needed to become a web developer. The core point of a real degree is it teaches you how to learn and instills basic principles that apply generally to any field. But you still need to put in the effort to learn domain specific things.
I recently heard, I think on Planet Money, that a lot of places are moving away from ISAs because they have too much trouble collecting on them. People who hit it big afterward end up having remorse that they signed the ISA and try to get out from under. A suspicious part of me wonders whether that's going on here.
To be clear, I'm not saying that these boot camps are generally a good idea. I've been unfavorable about them on here for a while. But, if you do transition into a technical role after going to one, that would seem to be a success story, even if the role isn't a programmer role.
Maybe I'm misreading something, but I would be interested in a fuller understanding of the circumstances that might be offered by a reading of the complaint, should anyone happen to find it.
- https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucrative-tech-coding-career-low-job-placement-2021-10
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017
- https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lvi6mz/lambda_school_is_consistently_deceptive/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qfjorv/lambda_school_promised_a_fast_and_cheap_path_to_a/
E.g., private schools tend to cater to the wealthy. But it's not generally true that highly privatized industries cater to the wealthy. Private schools cater to the wealthy because public schools exist, which makes it very difficult for a private school to compete at "lower price points".
High paying jobs are hard to get. They are meant to be earned and not something that will be handed over in a platter.