I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to... Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA.
I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.
Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it. Others organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small support network of people in a similar position. I completely understand that not everyone has the time for that.
I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the quality of the teaching. The first was the initial pool they advertised too. I think I saw the post on Hacker News before everywhere else. I'd wonder if you're more selective from already technical people at the beginning and then sorta widening the net as time goes on to include more people if you could get initial big numbers push followed by more ok numbers.
The instructors I met were all great. I think a lot of that flack went more towards later cohorts or alternative program from the main full webstack track.
Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached the bootcamp with the mindset that they already knew they had technical interest and ability, and wanted direction on building marketable skills.
Do you think greater selectivity applicants would increase the success rate? I had thought the ISA model would incentivize this, but when I learned lambda was selling ISAs that seemed like it removed this incentive.
This is generally true but not always. As you can imagine we have loads of data on this.
If you only selected students who had been tinkering with writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who we have seen become software engineers.
The only way we've found that does it well is to have people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy it. That's why we now have multiple free classes, have a free dropout period once you're in the school, and even have a three-week free trial of the school itself.
The notion that financing ISAs removed the incentives isn't really accurate.
First, most of the time ISAs are financed it's in the form of a loan you have to pay back with interest with an ISA and its repayments as collateral, or it's a sale to a neutral SPV with recourse in the case repayments don't hit a certain threshold.
In the rare instance (we've never done that) schools have been able to sell ISAs full stop, it's been at extreme discounts or based on discounted predicted likelihoods of future revenue, and if those ISAs don't repay the buyers bail and the school trying to sell them is out of business.
Edit: It's too late to edit my comment, but I noticed an error we have sold ISAs with minimal recourse not at enrollment, but at the point of _graduation_; we would sell half at an extreme discount at graduation (based on likelihood of being hired) and keep half on our books.
They had a prebootcamp with a free course that taught the basics. Some people cheat through that though and didn't quite process that... you can't really pull that off through the whole program?
I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed, I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint.
For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The selling ISAs thing was a bit weird when I learned about. I honestly kinda wonder about the actuarial calcs of it all.
Honestly I was a little surprised at the cheating too. I think I was a little naive in the beginning that if you actually wanted a job you would understand that you would have to be able to write code. But some folks are in a school mentality that if you get a grade/diploma you're good, regardless of whether you understand the things required to go into that.
Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions, I can assure you doing interviews is possibly the worst.
As far as ISAs go, it all comes out in the wash. If you create a pool of ISAs and students don't get hired you may have more ISAs but the average ISA is worth less, so the only thing that matters is whether each individual student gets hired. There's no financial wizardry that can let you sell $1 for $2 in the long-run.
Yeah that's fair enough. I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats. It was pretty easy to sus out who actually knew enough to keep going. I don't fault Lambda for that, it's just the reality of any educational goal line.
For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure that there's a better process now.
Sure, not a problem. Most programmers do, probably.
However, I've seen students use Stack Overflow and other resources as a source of "program stamps":
- They enter their problem in an Internet search engine.
- Click on the first result with code in it.
- "Stamp it" on their own code: I.e., copy/paste it.
- Using editor/compiler, find any issues by trial and error and fix them so the editor/compiler doesn't complain anymore.
They might try a simple example or two to see if it works. And that's it.
There's not much reflection on their final solution, or on the bits they copy/paste. They don't seem to understand their solution, nor care about that or their problem solving process. They put in effort, they expect a passing grade.
> Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it.
Is this a knock on Lambda School, though?
You can go to MIT but if you never apply your learnings you won't be a good engineer.
Going through the motions of a CS degree is probably sufficient to land a decent job if you're getting good grades, not cheating, and you get an internship (or similar).
At least from what I've heard of bootcamps, you need to really go above and beyond to have similar chances with that route.
Not ironically at all! If someone expects to attend programming classes (or any classes for that matter), not do any extra work and as a result to become a programmer, that someone will have a rude awakening. Or as one of my university professors said "Attempt to learn this subject by just listening these classes is equivalent to attemting to become a gymnast by watching Olympics on TV".
If you go on the HN Algolia, there are a lot of posts from students and people involved with Lambda over the years that might paint a clearer picture of what kind of dysfunction was taking place at the company.
I don't think the assertion that "lambda grads weren't able to get good jobs" is true.
Obviously not every single student has been hired, but our hiring rates have always been pretty good (they're better now than they were in the past), and thousands of BloomTech (we had to change our name because of a trademark lawsuit) grads have increased their lifetime earnings by billions of dollars, and work at nearly every major company you can think of.
You can see our 2021 audited outcomes report here with all of the data https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report. (Note: 2021 outcomes report is very recent as you have to get students graduated, give them time to get placed, etc.)
Some of it I'm thrilled about, some of it shows us where we have more work to do (or need to do better in admissions - candidly it's always a difficult balance between giving folks chance and certainty of those folks' outcomes.)
High level:
90% of those who are job seeking got hired.
Our median hired grad increased their income by $27,500 (and that's just their first job - obviously software/data science salaries shoot up quickly after a first job).
About half of our students have degrees, and half do not.
This comment got me interested, so I dived deeper into the report [0].
Learners are divided into three groups: graduated (59%), still enrolled (5%), and withdrawn (36%). Graduated learners are further divided into two groups: job seeking (63%: ~37% of all learners) and non-job seeking (37%: ~22% of all learners). Here's the definition of “non-job seeking”:
“A BloomTech graduate who has been unresponsive to outreach, has explicitly indicated they are not pursuing a technical role, or has explicitly indicated they have paused their job search.”
When we apply the base rate to the 90% rate, we conclude that 33% of those who attend the program (learners) got hired.
I see, that’s … extremely unimpressive especially if you take the median salary increase from above. And I think maybe we should take everything else this guy is saying as potentially dishonest. Not including people who stopped trying to get a job is just an absurd way to do this calculation. Imagine a clinical trial that just ignores everyone who disconues due to adverse events. These stats seem borderline predatory
We should do a better job of getting more granular on that piece, because it really does matter, but the above isn't the right way to do that math to answer the question prospective students have, and is misleading in the opposite direction. The outcomes report is directed at prospective students who want to understand what will happen to them if they attend the school and look for a job.
You have to remember that (for this outcomes report) nearly every student uses an ISA under which no one is required to pay us unless/until they get a job using the skills they learned. There are a number of people who attend never intending to switch careers, a (large) number who ghost us the day after graduation, and a (large) number who get a job but don't tell us until we get tax returns (so we learn they were hired only after this outcomes report).
Our team works their asses off to work with these students, and is doing everything they possibly can. Slacks, calls, texts, emails, some of which are auto-generated from me personally, and in some cases even physical mail, to try to get them to work with us. If they respond _in any way at all_ with anything other than something that equates to, "I don't want a tech job" they are job-seeking in the outcomes report. We have built tooling to make applying to jobs easier, we find jobs that you should apply to for you, have an outreach generator where our team will write emails to hiring managers for you, and more recently even what we call "job search takeover" where we work with students on resume/portfolio/job criteria in advance, and we will actually do all of the work to fill up your calendar with interviews.
Students who look for a job in any way whatsoever get hired at a very high rate. In my view, if you're a prospective student, that's the information you actually want to understand. The fact that there are a number of students students (most of whom are using ISAs) who never intend to look for a job or don't look for a job is a fair indictment of our business model, but not a fair indictment of the quality of the school or the likelihood of getting hired.
So how should we treat that in an outcomes report? If you're a prospective learner do you want to know about the hiring rate of the people who ghost us or don't intend to look for a job, or do you want to know the hiring rate of people who map to the profile of what you expect to do?
If anyone has ideas of a better way to slice that data to convey the best information to a prospective learner, I would love to hear it.
I know someone who went through the Lambda/BloomTech bootcamp. Although they weren't able to transition to a new role, the experience helped them start to code in their job at the time. And iirc, because he didn't land a swe role, he didn't have to pay Lambda based on the ISA.
Where _would_ you encourage people to go for similar purpose with higher quality? Are there any particular bootcamps/online schools you think are good?
Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field, so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so (without spending 4 years on college again).
I do not have this knowledge. There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?
My general advice is to get some one to try https://www.theodinproject.com/ as it's free. If they try it for a bit and find they don't like it, no harm they can just stop. If they want to continue after a bit and still want to go a boot camp they're more likely to succeed at any of them.
It's certainly true that BloomTech isn't for everyone, and that not everyone will want to become a software engineer. We try to filter for that, but it's tough.
A lot of people like the idea of making software engineering salaries, but don't particularly like building software. Then there are others that fall in love. We haven't found a great way to predict other than having people try it out.
> There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?
I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools for y" lists, etc.
CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6 months).
A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest employment rates were relatively low-profile schools teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.
I love the idea of CIRR but it is largely a failed institution. Their measures have changed dramatically over the years (the last CIRR event anyone at BloomTech attended resulted in the notion that anyone who adds anything new on LinkedIn could be considered "hired," even if it was a portfolio project or self-employment), and are used very differently from school to school, resulting in every major school I know of stopping to work with them.
For example, we used them for our first outcomes report and paid extra to have them "verify" our outcomes report, but they literally never opened the Google Drive file we sent them.
I think it was a great idea set up by well meaning people, but the self-governing aspect and comparisons created ended up in weird incentives that resulted in it falling apart.
The review sites are perhaps marginally better, but the positivity of reviews are almost 100% correlated with how hard schools work to farm for positive reviews, and their business model is selling leads to the schools, so the incentive isn't for objectivity there either.
Honestly the best way, though it requires more work, is to find a handful of recent grads on LinkedIn and ask them about their experience.
Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original post :)
The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.
Thank you for pulling these up. I am in fact talking about both of these (admitted in my head I had mixed them into one site). I know at one point Course Report was flooded by Lambda Students as they were encouraged to leave positive reviews.
Definitely App Academy Open. App Academy is one of the original bootcamps and they have solid curriculum. They have their entire course for free online
Not OP, but I did go to a bootcamp but didn't get much from it. I learned a lot more from Udemy courses.
I would recommend that if your friends are serious about getting into coding, ask them to take a few React basics courses (just go by the most popular ones on Udemy).
I found that overloading beginners with theory doesn't really work. Getting them to build something and figure out the why of it works better - at least that was my experience. I learned about, say, json webtokens way before I used them, but it wasn't until I built an app of my own with account authentication feature that I figured out what JWTs actually were.
With all the recent layoffs, this might not be the best time to do a coding bootcamp. Not as many companies are hiring, and you'll be competing with people with better credentials and more experience.
A lot can also change in a year, so take this with a grain of salt.
It's a self-paced online curriculum that generally takes 1.5 - 2 years to get through, with an optional 4-month "Capstone" intensive after graduating the core curriculum. Progressing out of each course in the curriculum involves having to pass rigorous, easily failable, assessments; you just can't progress until you've cleared a pretty high bar of knowledge in each domain. There is a good mix of live interview assessments, written assessments, and coding projects.
The job placement statistics are staggering in comparison to the 'quicker' options -- as they should be given the time investment involved. I'm unaware of any institution that has had more success in placing students in high-quality software development positions.
Disclosure: I've been studying for about 14 months now using the Launch School curriculum.
The thing about self paced programs is that a lot of people will not do anything unless they're poked/pressured into making progress (e.g. via deadlines). Now you shouldn't have to be heldback by non-self-motivated persons, but of course the success rate will be higher because it filters out those people.
I was doing help desk, but I was pretty plugged into tech news. I was on hacker news and saw the initial post here by Austin himself. It seemed like a good idea and much better then what I was doing in the time. I was frugal and had expenses saved up to go a year at it. At the time I knew YC was involved and I think it did lend an air of legitimacy to a super new concept.
Honestly, not much. I'm one of the success stories. I think I was just early enough to have small classes and knew enough basic html and programming concepts from doing IT work to have the bootcamp
work for me. I was also incredibly lucky the company that hired me had a program where they took on essentially fresh college grads and boot camp grads, and funneled them into Junior positions with a project before you were assigned a team. It took me a lot of interviews before I actually got a job.
1. Scale. When you're self taught you can make decisions that only really impact yourself. Or maybe 3-4 other people for some of the projects. The company that I walked into has two monoliths (front end, and backend), and working in a code base that's 5 gigs files is a lot different. There's so many files. My editor is now slow. There's no way for me to understand the details of the entire codebase. Badly documented internal libraries are all over the place. This isn't what a bootcamp or self made codebase looks like for a beginner normally.
2. Specific practical stuff. I had been coding JS mostly on Linux. I had to learn PHP on Mac OS. I had never used either. And a number of other tools connected to the build process that are internal to this company.
By not dropping you straight into a team you can also control where you landed a bit. People who didn't like UI stuff ended up a deeper backend team, people who prefer ui ended up more towards the front end. Almost everyone in the group I cam with (17 people) had to learn PHP. When you have 16 other people learning the same stuff at the same time, you start to work together and organize into groups. We begin producing our own docs for the project and other helpful things.
My brother went to Lambda school 2019-2020. Would not recommend. They had recent grads that had just completed Lambda the previous year teaching the new students and most of them had just a vague grasp on the content matter. So many inaccuracies and bad practices taught. The only good thing about it was that it was structured and you were coding each day for 5-8hrs so if you weren't the most self-motivated person, you were held accountable. But again, a lot of it was taught badly or inaccurately, so unless you spent a lot of time doing outside research on your own, you weren't learning much. If you do have self-motivation, you don't need Lambda or BloomTech. After graduation, there was no follow up of any kind. So overall, pretty disappointing.
Same type as those that run uni's. This is all about maximum profits, the original mission was lost long ago. Now it is about sustaining the org for the paychecks of admins.
I guess that sounds a lot like a community college to me, but maybe faster and better.
Can non-self motivated people succeed if they go to say an Ivy League? I didn’t, so it’s a sincere curiosity for me. Would Zuckerberg have ended up bagging groceries if he went to a community college rather than Harvard?
Community colleges deliver a reasonably good quality of education at a very modest price point. They do accept basically anyone who shows up and unfortunately a lot of people are just not that motivated or are not adequately prepared for college level work. That said, if you show up and do the work you can easily get an associates degree and spin that into a career or transfer into a 4 year university. In California I believe that community college transfers generally have a higher graduation rate from 4 year schools than their their freshman admit peers. I have known many people who went to community college who are doing fine. I'm sure Zuckerberg would have been just fine with a community college curriculum (he might not be a billionaire but he could easily achieve a pleasant middle class lifestyle).
Former CC student, yep. The folks who do the transfer program are extremely motivated. A lot of them had shitty jobs beforehand. Far better students than the average 4-year university student I'd work with when I transferred. The quality of education was great and the teachers were wonderful people. Class sizes were usually small and it was easy to get a lot of 1:1 time with the profs.
Cost is more expensive than a code school but not absurd like the first two years of university. My alma mater (is that a thing?) is now $46 a credit, up from about $35 when I attended.
Only the CC credits are cheaper, yeah. But factoring in the other 2 years of undergrad and it's much more expensive than a bootcamp. Still far, far cheaper than 4+ full years of undergrad, though!
If I am interpreting the parent's comment correctly, he's referring to TAs (we called them "team leads") not instructors. Based on the context of the comment I'm assuming that this was a time when we had a TA for every 8 students on top of a layering of instructors for each cohort, and indeed the TAs would do a lot of the 1:1 interaction. There has never been a time we didn't have qualified instructors, though I would readily admit the quality of our instructors has improved over time as we got better at instructional design and hiring.
This is nothing like community college. Community colleges are held to some reasonable level of accountability. It's unlikely that they are going to be leading edge, or trendy, but you know that people learning some critical skills to a reasonable level.
Lambda School and other tech education programs start out well with VC money but it's not sustainable because there is no money in it. This is something that can be reasoned about a priori because you can see the budget focus of community colleges. Tech doesn't change the fundamentals, but the illusion can be sustained in the good times.
to become zuckerberg you need to be smart, industrious and have luck on your side. If he went to CC, he would still make his way to upper middle class life no doubt but maybe not a billionare.
I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class.
None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great experience.
I hire them and give them a task somewhere between support engineer that executes well documented code snippets in run books and junior engineer that does very basic CRUD web app development. Making internal dashboards for the customer success team, etc.
Give them about 32 hours of work a week and 8 hours of tutorials on other things. Build them up from there.
I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow. Because the ugly truth is a lot of the bootcampers hit a plateau. I have had a couple push through to my bar for senior, but most cap out in my mid range.
During the shortage the ability to hire and get solid mids out of 65% of them was a net positive. Right now though it is less important given the talent coming into the market.
> I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow.
I've had similar problems. We've had some bootcamp grads who were good to work with and acknowledged that they were still very junior. We've also had some bootcamp grads who felt entitled to mid-range to senior compensation after their first year, while still getting their bearings on basic developer work. It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp after a couple years in the industry.
> It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp after a couple years in the industry.
I dunno, I think what you have right there is pretty good explanation wise, haha.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were able to in the 2020 to early 2022 job market. Today’s market will be a good litmus test to see if people with surface-level knowledge and limited experience can land $200k+ a year jobs in tech.
Activity is the signal. Self taught but goes to a ton of meetups. Enrolled in one of the legit online master's programs, etc. Ofttimes bootcamps can appear on these resumes. Someone did a bootcamp, realized it wasn't enough and kept growing in a manner.
People who treat the bootcamp as the terminal level of knowledge plateau.
Can't the same be said for University? I know lots of classmates who didn't do anything outside of what's mandatory. They wouldn't have a GitHub account if they weren't forced to in a class for example.
I recently advertised a role and had over 2000 applicants (yes, really). The vast majority of applicants went through bootcamps. Personally, I'm fine with that, heck, I'm Head of Engineering and I'm a university drop-out i.e. didn't even complete a course!
One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github (though, yes, you should include those).
I’ve noticed that a lot of bootcamp grads are, in fact, legitimately hired by their bootcamps - just not to write code. They are often brought on term by term as TAs until they find work.
I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the bootcamps, a way to pad their “successfully employed” rates while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault the candidates for putting those experiences in their resume. They need that money to keep their job searches going, and recruiters are always biasing against gaps on the resume.
If you’re being paid by them for any reason, put it on your resume. (And if you’re not…move it to the education section, where it belongs.)
Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates. So all you're really doing is highlighting the fact you went through a lower quality bootcamp. There's so many bootcamps I don't know which ones are legitimate and which are scams. Without that signal on the candidate's CV, I'd have no idea where the one the candidate has been through ranks. However, to me that's a clear indication that the bootcamp (or perhaps the candidate) are dodgy.
If the vast majority of applicants from one bootcamp claim to be employed by them then I can see why you would be suspicious, but I’d be hesitant to throw out all bootcamp grads who say they’ve been employed by their bootcamp.
There might be perfectly legitimate reasons to be employed. Maybe they were aiding instruction of earlier students as they got more experience, akin to a tutor or teaching assistant in colleges. Maybe they took a temporary job because they were unable to find a job right out of bootcamp, and the reasons for not being able to get a job don’t necessarily have to be negative (e.g. they had familial commitments).
Getting a job from a bootcamp is already hard and it wouldn’t quite sit right with me to reject someone outright for something that could be explainable. Perhaps if you are drowning in applicants then you are forced to be harsher out of practicality, but even then surely there’s a better filter then someone reporting what is ostensibly an experience applicable to job they’re pursuing.
> Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates
If you make this the metric to evaluate on, you're going to end up with the Ivy League scenario where bootcamps only admit people who would have succeeded anyway.
The POINT of education is to give people a chance to succeed who were likely to fail without it, and you have to accept a failure rate for that to work.
> One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp.
I've seen this, too. At some point, everyone coming out of certain bootcamps was an "instructor" rather than just a graduate. I suspect one of them is running a scheme to have their own grads teach their own classes for reduced tuition.
I second the cover letter section. GitHub goes a long way, but it needs something unique. I know exactly what projects are taught at local bootcamps because they're in every single bootcamp grad's GitHub profile. Show me something you worked on by yourself.
You could probably message 3 random engineers at random companies and invite them to coffee and it'd be a better return on time invested for your career than writing cover letters. I'm not sure why you'd want to read 500 cover letters as opposed to reviewing 500 CVs.
And why on earth did you keep the job posting open to accumulate 2000+ applicants? Legal reasons?
I’m coming from the other side of things. I was a non-programmer with a programming passion that used programming as a part of my work voluntarily, but didn’t know the first thing about the kind of programming that companies hire for.
I took a coding boot camp when I decided to leave academia to join industry, and it was a useful primer on the “in” technologies that folks would be hiring for, and of the “style” of code that was fashionable at the time. I would not have hired any of my classmates (well, I might have hired one as a junior), but the bootcamp did what I needed it to do, exposing me to the “culture” of programming at tech companies.
I was hired as a mid-level and quickly progressed to senior at a large global tech company. I have been at a few different tech companies now and haven’t run into any major challenges or problems, and have only received positive feedback from my peers and managers.
If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential. I think it helped that I had a number of usable “products” that I had made over the course of my career as a solo programmer that didn’t really fit any mold. I also think it helped that I didn’t have any trouble with basic algorithm brain teasers, finding them sort of fun at the time I was interviewing. I’ve never tried leetcode but I suspect I’ve only seen leetcode “easies.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do any of that for any of my subsequent jobs as I don’t think I’d have the patience for it anymore.
> If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential
You would be wrong. The most important indicator the hiring manager saw in you is that you worked in academia. Hiring someone who worked in academia and also learned to code on the side is a lot different than hiring a middle aged soccer mom whose MLM scheme didn't work out. Both may have a 3 month bootcamp under their belt, but one has an entirely different work ethic.
That specific example seems sorta yikes opinion for somebody with hiring power. Aren't people who get targeted by MLMs victims? More importantly, what does that say about how hard they work? Or being a mom?
It‘s a stereotype for the sake of a stereotype. I don‘t think anyone identifies with such a narrow unrealistic stereotype, so there is no point in arguing for an entirely hypothetical marginalized group.
By the way, hiring is all about judging people‘s past work, and I‘m sorry to pop your bubble if you think past MLM work or having large gaps in your employment history doesn‘t reflect bad on anyone.
> I'm coming from the other side of things. I was a non-programmer with a programming passion that used programming as a part of my work voluntarily
I would love to ask why didn't you pursue programming in the first place, but last time I did that the person explained to me that they have a complex, chronic, hard to diagnose rare digestive tract disease and they went to study nutritional science specifically so that they could at least figure out what to eat to not makes things worse.
Honestly, I thought there was more glory AND autonomy in academia than in "industry." I came from a family that valued education and learning and monastic-like traditions over things like money or productivity. With the way my blinders had been fashioned, it simply didn't occur to me until later in my life that doing "problem solving for hire" was a viable life-path, and that software as a pursuit in and of itself offered me everything academia offered me and more.
I have a couple of bootcamp grads who are good. Thing is, I’m 99% sure they’d have been good without the bootcamp time as well.*
Overall, I’ve had a terrible experience with the bootcamp “mills” that cram people though dozens in a batch and where all of them have some bullshit story about how they did customer interviews and then built an inventory manager or CRM or e-commerce site for this (made-up) business. The story rhymes with a story that would be relevant but it’s 100% veneer with no backer.
They’ll have a GitHub link on their resume. On it, you can see the same code as 5 other applicants. All the green days are clustered together and all stop abruptly at the same time as each other.
Those candidates are what a lot of people think of when they think bootcamp.
tl;dr: bad bootcamps are bad. I don't think I've ever crossed paths with a Lambda School/BloomTech grad to have an opinion on their program.
That's a very rare exception: the mid-career professional that has already coded in a professional setting, and used the bootcamp to figure out how to market himself for SE roles.
Most bootcamp students will be young and not know the rules of the game, or the cultural signifiers that make them look 'employable'.
The companies who have hired them successfully (that I know of) tend to understand two critical things:
- You have to have an environment where they can learn
- You have to have staff who can actually mentor them up
If you don't have either of those (which many startups don't, just due to not simply having the time/bandwidth) then hiring them can be detrimental.
So to answer your question: I know a few, but these companies that can do it are few and far between, and that's the dirty secret here unfortunately. The schools themselves seem to select for "can we place this person here and get our money" rather than necessarily where they can grow.
I've met some people with physics and accounting degrees who took boot camps and had success, but the people I've seen succeed were already problem solvers and math-aware. They just needed to know the language and routines.
On the other hand, I dropped out of school and have been programming for a majority of my life. I was never accused of being incompetent or underperforming, but there was a point in my career where I was not going to progress without deeper math skills. That said, it only takes a couple years to learn.
Books. A lot of people gave me books, many college-level books are free on the internet in PDF form. I also had to read back through algebra and calculus to pick up on some concepts I had forgotten. Earlier in my search I used Udemy and Khan Academy. There's good courses on both but they really only get you so far, imo.
I'd be interested to hear more about this, as someone potentially in a similar position. What kinds of problems did you come up against where you felt your math skills were a limiting factor? What branches of math did you focus on learning?
Well, I've worked in cryptography orchestration (not actual cryptography, but I needed to understand how it worked from a basic POV) and in reliability engineering which is very stats heavy. Both of those became limited as I got more senior. For instance, a lot of problems can be identified by bucketing them in distributions - I didn't even really know or understand the math for representing a distribution. The long tail of where I actually used that was in a program that I used to create mock data for a set of devices my company was working on that simulated real household resource usage. These same math skills also became problematic as I started to need to learn/understand better applications of algorithms and data structures. There's a lot of assumptions baked in to things like asymptotics that you won't get without a background in math as well. You can certainly memorize certain things, but that has diminishing returns imo. I think I answered the last part above, but I refresh algebra and calculus. I read a stats book, took a Discreet course on Udemy, and read a lot on DS&A. I think that covers it. Took me about 3-4 years to chew through most of what I learned in my spare time.
I've hired 2 bootcamp grads from Turing in Denver. They were great and have both gone on to senior roles.
I mentored another woman in a bootcamp about ten years ago and she later went on to be a senior engineer at HashiCorp. She then got a PhD in Mathematics and eventually got into an academic role in cryptography/security/privacy.
I only have a high school diploma and I've had a successful 20+ year career in software. Honestly, there are people that are driven that go through all sorts of education pathways. I don't see a bootcamp certification being a strong signal towards success or failure. It's just a tool that folks can use.
Was also going to comment about Turing school. I've worked with Turing school grads who were really strong, as well as Galvanize/gSchool grads from the period when Turning and Galvanize were still the same thing. I think Turing School's non-profit (not for profit?) status affects its practices a lot, as I know it has smaller cohort sizes and pretty rigorous entry requirements.
In my mind, code bootcamps are just like anything else in the realm of professional education - there's a ton of scammy and low quality stuff out there, but there are genuine upsides to the format and some people are served really well and come out as strong engineers.
Yes and no, because it depends on your expectations. At the last company I worked at, I made sure to have a chat with management to understand what they were looking for before I did my round in the interview loop. I also advised on what potential questions to probe with since I had some insight having worked as a lead instructor at a bootcamp. Sometimes that meant I would thumbs down an otherwise promising bootcamp candidate because they were weaker on say, the frontend when we needed a frontend junior dev. Our VP of Eng had already understood that and we batted way above average… at first.
Then C-level management took that as a sign that all we needed was juniors and cut the budget for hiring mid+ roles in the then hot hiring market. After a long dry spell (rejected offers), we relented and hired more bootcamp grads into junior roles. That eventually flipped the ratio of juniors to non-juniors which will never go well because you end up with an environment that can’t support their growth. On top of that, C-level management expected that more staff == immediate improvements on velocity and were vocally disappointed when we slowed down. We expected it and tried communicating it - ramping juniors sucks up time, they won’t be a net positive until waaaay later, but of course, they knew better.
Looking back on that experience, I learned a lot about the importance of managing upwards and setting very very clear expectations. Because that’s where I see a lot of these hiring situations go wrong. You need to make an honest assessment of both what qualities you need in a junior and of your own environment to know if they work for your company, bootcamp or otherwise.
The range of quality is extremely high in bootcamps. I've interviewed many bootcamp grads the median quality is pretty low. However, I went through a bootcamp (Code Fellows in Seattle) and almost my entire cohort went on to eventually join a FAANG, technical co-founder, or something fairly prestigious.
The curriculum, the teaching style, and the aptitude/ drive of the cohort matters a lot.
This is what drives me nuts. My bootcamp has a legitimately high placement rate (90% hired as SWE or dev within 90 days), that is audited externally, but somehow it is in the same category as something that takes 1/4 the time with a legitimately terrible curriculum.
There needs to be some better differentiator for vocational training.
I'm really interested in your last sentence there -
Something that I learned before I converted fully to SWE is that most other domains of engineering have this class of job I'll call a "tech." In the hardware world they're electricians, or electronics lab techs, in mechanical they're mechanics, and in the other domains you'll call them lab techs or factory techs.
It's a highly technical role with a different entry point that has a harder path to a higher tier of compensation, but also contains a pathway to management and more integration at an organizational level (similar to technical vs management tracks for engineers).
What's different is that domains outside SWE have pretty well-defined ways for people to enter into the "tech" position. Vocational training, like through trade schools, community colleges, the military, etc. We do not have that in software, yet.
Bootcamps are like an experiment into the vocational training to develop a "tech" for software development. Our industry is still very young, so we haven't found a way to define the roles for people that go through that training, and people don't know how it fits in or what the job responsibilities/management should look like yet. I think the model of treating a bootcamp grad like a potential junior engineer is wrong - it's really a separate track for career development.
I’ve hired quite a few mostly from the old DevBootcamp before it was acquired by Kaplan and spun down.
Like most companies, we hired them into our apprenticeship program and then they worked their way up from there.
Most of them now are senior engineers or moved into management across the globe.
I’d say DevBootcamp seems to have put out some of the strongest students and they’ve done extremely well for themselves with strong representation at FAANG and other “good” tech companies.
Can’t speak for the other camps besides saying I cant think who made it through our apprentice code day.
I graduated from a bootcamp 6-7 years ago and had several offers for entry level positions from smaller companies I wanted to work at - that said I have a degree in math and have taken several coding classes and have done some self learning projects already so I was ahead of the pack and went overboard on all of our projects. Like some of the others have said, maybe 20-30% were employable out of the bootcamp
It's like asking, has anyone had success hiring college grads? My data science bootcamp had actual Harvard and MIT degree holders (bachelor's, I don't mean their extension / online certificate programs). I guarantee you they had much better experience getting their resumes seen than the guys with no degrees. I'm in another bootcamp-esque program for SWE's and some participants have joined Google, but most have joined random second-tier companies or startups.
I hired a bootcamp grad and she's doing well. She did already have a mechanical engineer degree though and did program as part of that degree and so has a good mindset for solving problems. I hired her explicitly as a junior role though, I can't imagine hiring a bootcamp grad into a mid-level role directly - that would seem to be setting them up to fail?
Yeah, we found an amazing engineer through one of the bootcamp programs. It might have helped that she had a math degree and so she probably started with an analytical approach but either way, she did really well. This was in a rapidly growing enterprise software company with rigorous reviews.
There was definitely some bias against it in a few corners of our group but by and large, most didn't care. Ironically, the guy on the team that didn't like her because she came from a coding bootcamp (he had a CS degree) was by far my worst performer.
May be that’s my own biases speaking (and my degree), but I’ve spent all my professional life in a firm belief that a math degree is way more preferential than a CS degree for an SWE job. Like you should hire a CS graduate only when there is no math graduates willing to take the job (but we never had a shortage of those feeding on the Moscow State).
If forced to rationalize this belief, I would say that CS is just a subset of math, and not that intellectually challenging actually, so a person that has chosen a CS course over a math one has voluntarily agreed to narrow his intellectual perspective in order to possibly get a better pay in the future.
I was a bootcamp grad that was hired for a junior level role (5 years ago)
It was rough at first but I had a chip on my shoulder and voluntarily worked 10-11 hours a days for 2 years straight to make up the time difference and learn all the things I needed to learn
I was a good hire (and was also bored AF living in Ohio)
I was a bootcamp grad in 2013. Myself and my classmates are now mostly filling Staff+ roles, many working in FAANG level companies. So, yes, many people have hired bootcampers and had a good experience.
I have heard that early classes from bootcamps tend to have great people, while the later classes are both more "dillute" in terms of raw talent and more starved of instruction time (as the bootcamp pinches pennies to make a profit).
I have worked with bootcamp grads who are amazing engineers and ones who are terrible, same with ivy league CS grads.
I do think there was a bit of a gold rush with fly-by-night programs popping up everywhere; as a result the quality bar for bootcamp grads has probably shifted down on average, but I expect there are still some very talented trying to jumpstart a new career this way.
Early movers in the space like DevBootcamp and App Academy were able to be quite selective about who they took, often picking primarily non-CS grads from elite universities looking to redeploy high levels of baseline intelligence and communication skills into a more lucrative field than whatever they studied at university. That was definitely my motivation once I realized I might never afford a middle-class lifestyle (e.g. homeownership, children) if I kept going in the scientific field I trained for.
Filling out staff roles at FANG? Not at the FANG company I work at. I’ve never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk about it.
> I’ve never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk about it.
This comment has the same energy as the person I once worked with who told me (a lesbian) with total confidence that they'd never met a gay person before. Just because you aren't aware doesn't mean it's not happening all around you.
It's very common for graduates to not talk about it, precisely because of the attitudes you see in these comments. It's easily left off LinkedIn because the experience only lasts a few months. And after you've had some success at the first job, it's not relevant anyway.
How many people do you know in the industry without CS degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps, whether they cop to it or not.
I considered it a shameful secret for years, and it's only now as I approach my tenth anniversary in the industry that I've become more open about it -- I'm confident my work now speaks for itself.
I'm skeptical of that claim as well. I happen to have a roster of product and engineering employees at a FAANG company.
It doesn't include any information about their education but what I can do is pick a selection of the staff level engineers at random and look them up on LinkedIn.
Here's the highest level of education attained by the first 50 I looked at:
7 had a PhD in Computer Science
1 had a PhD in Physics
1 PhD in Electrical Engineering
12 had a master's degree in Computer Science
1 had a master's degree in Computer Engineering
1 had a master's degree in Information Management
13 had a bachelor's degree in Computer Science
1 had a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering
1 had a bachelor's degree in Information Technology
6 did not list any educational experience
6 I could not find on LinkedIn
I did not see any that mentioned a coding bootcamp explicitly.
My claim was not that all or even most Staff engineers at prominent companies come from bootcamp backgrounds but that bootcampers can and have achieved this level of success. My bootcamp cohort was over 9 years ago... anybody who didn't wash out in the very early days has had plenty of time to grow and make significant contributions. Not sure why people find this surprising.
I personally know people from my one bootcamp that have worked at Google and Apple. That’s without having looked to see if there are others I don’t know.
People tend to play down their bootcamp experiences because of stigma associated with it. It’s possible that there are bootcamp grads that don’t mention it because a lot of people think lesser of them.
I think the point of contention is with "Staff+" roles. I'm at a Big Tech company and we've seen lots of success with bootcampers, but I've noticed many of them hit a wall around Senior or Staff. Though I worked with an engineer who was super intelligent and a blast to work with and she is now a Staff engineer and was from a bootcamp. (At the time we were smaller and didn't really have any Staff level roles.) We've also had several bootcamp engineers move onto other Big Tech/FAANG companies so I have no idea what they're up to there.
I can see why folks might want to hide their bootcamp path if they already have past non-bootcamp experience they can point to. In all fairness, most engineers, whether top-10 CS school or bootcamper, tend to hit a wall around Senior or Staff. Without knowing the true denominator of bootcampers we've hired, I can't properly answer the question of whether bootcampers tend to do better, the same, or worse at these levels than average.
Everyone I worked with had a undergrad is CS/math/engineering and plenty had masters / PhDs. That's generally what the profile of devs at faang looks like. I'm sure there are some people who have different backgrounds but it's not common.
> How many people do you know in the industry without CS degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps, whether they cop to it or not.
People without CS degrees or degrees at all are fairly common, including at staff level and above. Many of these people have been in the industry since before bootcamps became a thing.
Previous comment showing a sample of 50 staff engineers shows only 1/50 having a non CS or CS adjacent degree and only 6 didn't show any degree. So idk if I would call that 'fairly common'.
I’m very biased because I went to a bootcamp. However, it was very focused on placement and had good access to roles. I felt more than qualified for an entry level role, and completed progressively more serious projects.
I had a few friends wash out of their tech jobs, and we certainly had some people that were never very good. Most of us were good enough for and entry role, and a few of us were slightly overqualified.
I’m now at a really great and highly technical company.
Some of these programs have serious problems. I think the ones with ISAs are the worst offenders.
I've hired quite a few, and generally speaking they've all turned out great. Having said that, the volume of resumes that come in to the ones that I've actually hired is vast. Myself and my recruiters have probably sifted through 10,000 bootcamp resumes per 1 hire. You have to be ruthless about who you actually talk to.
Another tip would be, don't interview a bootcamp grad for mid-level jobs.
Nope, that was also my experience. They either fell apart when asked to do a programming problem that required coming up with a data structure on their own (not one right answer, but not given to them) or on simple programming challenges when asked to adjust for a rule change.
I have hired them and taught a class. Rule of thumb if you can find they were top 1 to 3 in the class they’re probably a good if not great junior dev candidate.
My golden 2 pieces of advice to bootcamp grads:
Don’t use the resume template the bootcamp gives you. If 2/3 of your resume is “software projects” you’re probably getting screened out at this point even if you’re actually good, it’s a tell.
Second, since you’ll still need to include one or two, spend time polishing the heck out of them and make sure they are online and working! Best if they’re not a microblog, recipe/beer picker, or pokedex. Do the same polishing for your personal site. If it looks like crap you’re probably getting screened out on this, too.
bootcamp grads not being immediately good when hired makes sense in the context that even CS majors with at least 4 years of coding experience generally suck when they start. What could you possibly expect from somebody with 3-6 months experience?
bootcamp grads make more sense to be brought on as some sort of intern level hire with similar expectations
I have, and through many years of training (and more importantly, tons of hard work + raw talent on their part) have watched a few become very senior engineers / senior leaders in engineering management. This was years ago and they were from one of the bootcamps that only gets paid if you get a job as a software engineer.
My partner went to Makersquare (since bought & rebranded Hack Reactor).
They joined a successful small e-commerce site (Javascript), then a few years later joined Loon (Google X) (Python), and sensing the wind switched to another Google X project before Loon shut down.
The interesting thing is that much of the value of a diploma/certification is in the "brand" backing it.
In any case, I don't think my partner was counting on the value of the Makersquare brand as anything other than getting their foot in the industry, so that's done and gone.
I've hired Code Louisville [1] graduates across multiple roles now. This is a totally free program in Louisville, KY and does a great job of getting people setup for a new career. CL grads are all over the Louisville area doing amazing work.
Of course, all these programs are what you make of them. The best graduates are people that were really invested in learning and took advantage of the curriculum and mentors. For those that put in the work, they come out punching way above their years of experience.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban that sort of account, regardless of ideology, because this is the opposite of the curious conversation HN exists for.
Not sure what to make of this, but Austen, who is normally a prolific tweeter, hasn't tweeted about this yet [0].
I have gotten used to CEOs tweeting apologetic stuff when this happens. Perhaps this is norm should be bucked? I don't know. I just note that Austen is going against the grain.
EDIT: missed this: "In a now-deleted tweet posted earlier today, Allred quoted a prior statement of gratitude for employees pushing through the work despite being attacked from all sides, adding “even more so today.”
* They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits
No we did not.
We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get paid vs. how much we spend. The other is (hired students/graduated students), which we share with prospective students because that's what they want to understand and what every school shares.
Those were both called "placement" in different contexts to different people, but the numbers that we report externally are always hired students/graduated students (and even that isn't simple, as there are many different definitions of "hired," and different cohorts of students who are job searching or not, and various time lags around when we learn a student is hired or not), but this is not unique to us as a school. (Though an ISA incentivizing people to _not_ tell us when they are hired until tax returns are do perhaps is a little bit unique to us.)
* They dodged California regulators then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
Neither of those things are true. Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we didn't operate physical classrooms (this was a somewhat novel concept in 2017). They reasoned that if the BPPE were going to claim that online schools would need to register in every state there was a student, that the claim would be if you have a single student who attends online classes from a state you have to register as a school in that state. Correspondingly, teaching anything on the Internet would require you to register separately and abide by varying regulations with every state educational body in the United States. The BPPE said they were going to regulate online schools, and sent us a letter with a threat to fine us. We immediately submitted our registration, and the registration approval process took just over a year, and the BPPE reduced the fine to a minimum level. There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
Now we have a very large legal team, and are regulated separately and uniquely in every state in the US, often using laws that don't contemplate virtual classrooms or online learning in any way, and that's just to exist as a school in the first place. It's a complete nightmare that needs reform, and the vast, vast majority of schools are simply below the radar enough that they don't get fined, but it's incredibly difficult and expensive in the United States simply to be in compliance with each state where you might have as few as one or two students.
Beyond that fact, entirely online school where students don't pay unless/until they're hired is a round peg that doesn't fit into the square holes of existing financial regulation either.
* They launched an unpaid intern program, which created backlash int he tech community.
Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
* They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that got them into even more legal trouble
This is another misconception, but we were actually in the wrong here. Because an ISA isn't a traditional student loan, if a student doesn't get a job the ISA immediately goes away after a five year deferment period. We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause. We happily did so, but that clause didn't harm anyone.
> We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true, but don't care. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), the other (hired students/graduated students)
"86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Let's run the math on current outcomes, which I believe you've called, "the best they've ever been." 994 students graduated and 453 got a job making $50k or more. We're already at 45%, and that's before narrowing it down to, "within six months."
You may try to argue, "Not all of those 994 students count as 'job seeking,'" as if it's totally normal that 32% of graduates give up looking for jobs. That's moot. There was no fine print.
Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
> There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
They told you to cease operation. You didn't. After the BPPE news came to light, you told students that no school has ever been shut down for continuing to operate.
One point of the lawsuits are the students who felt they should have been told about the whole BPPE situation before signing up. I get why you didn't want them to know, because according to the law, the ISAs issued before you were in compliance are invalid. Yet you're still trying to collect, which I'd say very much impacts students.
> Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
Within hours of the tech community calling you out on this, you apologized. Then you deleted the apology. I find it amazing that your strategy is to just pretend none of that happened.
> We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause.
Your contract said: "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code."
It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Oh boy, you keep taking all sorts of things out of context and comparing all sorts of things that don't make any sense to each other.
A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
> Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021.
The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us.
> When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
> It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict).
> After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested.
The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up.
I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies.
OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so.
I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.
Just wanted to say you have done a good job explaining here. Unfortunately people love to concentrate on negative outcomes without thinking about the positive. On balance the few, arguably "bad" things Lamda has done seem to be hugely outweighed by the positive.
i was going to sit this one out, but i want to +1 the above with more than just an upvote. Austen seems to be arguing and explaining all the happenings in good faith with someone who appears to be hell-bent on "catching" him with something by misconstruing things.
i have never understood why Lambda/Bloomtech has so many haters but the other commenter here appears to me to be in that camp.
Austen is a terrible person and has been caught lying dozens of times and always hides behind the "we're just good people trying to help others" line to distract from the fact he and the rest of the lambda school staff (which is just all of the un-hired grads so they can boost their already pathetic placement rates) are scammers and frauds.
Calling someone a terrible person, liar, scammer and fraud with little evidence is not a good look. Even if all your points are true (Austen has refuted at least a few), "terrible person" is a huge stretch.
> I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
You keep running in circles around a very simple statement that was on the front page of your website: "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Just tell me how you got to 86%, because that's wildly inconsistent with years of outcomes data, in addition to the leaks.
> This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
I'm sorry, did you just lie to my face, say, "This is fair" and try move on?
I'll be honest, I can't follow the story you're trying to tell. It sounds way more complex than what everyone watched unfold.
Your FAQ at launch clearly says it's unpaid. You had a product manager on Hacker News trying to defend the program while all the commenters explained, "This is an unpaid intern program and probably illegal." He even tried the same, "Well our lawyers said it was ok." After the Twitter backlash, you tweeted and deleted an apology, and then started acting like none of that stuff happened.
As for "no student ever did any unpaid work," didn't you pilot the program for months before publicly announcing it? (This is a rhetorical question. At this point I lack faith you'll tell the truth.)
>> > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
> Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement
Let me get this straight. You're saying, "There's no legal precedent, but hey, it might be true? So we threw it in!"
> OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing
You blocked me, making it impossible to reply.
> and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
Despite the block, I said: "Your students publish their homework to GitHub. Half a cohort failed to grasp memory management, but you rubber stamped them through the program.
You even hired one of those students to be a section lead, to teach other students."
"I am not publicly linking to the students who struggled with it, because it’s not their fault. But I did share the GitHub projects with two senior iOS developers I trust, and they agreed these students didn’t get it."
So to answer your challenge: memory management. I have sign-off from two senior, ex-Apple iOS devs. Please wire that money to the National Student Legal Defense Network, who seems to be handling that lawsuit against you.
> I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge.
It's interesting that you think this is all about you.
I said, "After looking through Lambda School’s curriculum, I’d say students are going to struggle with very basic questions you’ll get on first phone screens," and "Out of ten student projects available, five should have failed."
Yes, you had a page in the curriculum on memory management. You also rubber-stamped through people who didn't understand it, and even contracted one of those people to not-help other students on the topic.
Anyone can link someone to a page about a topic and say it's covered, but the difference between a Udemy course and $30k worth of training is the expectation that someone will actually look at homework.
Anyway, the reason you won't explain the 86% placement number claim is that it was true for one cohort in 2018. That's why you only submitted a single report to CIRR. At scale, the number has always been somewhere between 30% and 50%, but that's easier to obfuscate by coming up with your own methodology.
There's a strong parallel with the time you claimed 100% of your UX cohort was hired, without disclosing that only one student graduated. You said it's ok because you tweeted, "VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE."
And I'm sure you'll argue you didn't lie moments ago about the Fellows program due to what the word "launched" should mean. You have shown a pattern of deflecting the substance of criticism by focusing on technicalities.
Maybe this worked out for you in a different life. I suspect you've gathered so many critics, you're "attacked at all sides," because you're now among engineers. They just take your data, plug it into a spreadsheet, and let the facts speak for themselves.
But I don't think this had to be. There's an alternate timeline where you did a mea culpa, cut out the shenanigans, and the tech community washed the bad taste out of its mouth. This could have been an incredible reception arc. Instead, Paul Graham enabled you with that whole "haters" pep talk, and things went downhill from there. So it goes.
Don't really know the situation too well but I really appreciate these explanations. I think what people often misunderstand about Bloom and other bootcamps is
1) education is really really hard in general and software engineering is a really hard topic. I'd argue the default is most won't succeed.
2) Bootcamps like this are fighting an uphill battle because of selection bias. If you're applying to a bootcamp like this it's probably because you couldn't get into a college or you did but dropped out or don't have the money, etc. People think it's bizarre when 30% of grads stop looking for a job but it makes sense. These are people from all walks of life with different constraints than the average student.
3) Regulatory schemes in general is batshit crazy in the US. Messing up here and there is not always indicative of malintent, especially for a startup.
This is certainly a problem domain that needs to be solved imo so I'm rooting for Bloom unless they really prove to be harmful. We need better pipelines for people with talent and motivation to climb the social ladder and learn new skills outside of traditional academia.
Austen, I bet it takes you a ton of time to write all this up and I want you to know it's appreciated. It's really insightful to see your perspective and insight on all these topics.
There are different ways to measure placement percentages.
* You can measure percentage of enrolled students who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of graduates who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr within six months of graduation.
Those are all different placement rates.
Say 100 students enroll, 80 graduate, 60 get hired.
Investors would want to know what percent of students get hired (because you outlay costs for 100 students and get repaid for 60). The answer is 60/100 = 60%.
Student outcomes reports say what percentage of graduates get hired. So you say 60/80 = 75%.
Those numbers are different. They are also both completely correct.
If I were your lawyer I would advise you to delete this comment as it would likely be used against you in court as proof of your pattern of misrepresentations.
But you do you, I guess.
At any rate enough people have been made aware of your lies that the harm you can continue doing is limited.
You can surely see they are helping a lot of people, in addition to what you believe on the negative side of things. Not trying to be snippy or offer a trick question, but genuinely, what do you get out of this? Surely it's not worth your time. Even if he is the biggest scammer on the planet you are probably better off spending your time on constructive things.
Nice try. The same question applies to you, since you’ve jumped from one comment thread to another defending a sketchy business in the midst of a downfall.
Is that how we now treat execs who bother to come directly address criticism aimed at their companies on HN?
This is one the few places on the web that happens. You can still disagree with him if you want, but coming here to talk with us directly is respectable IMO. Focus on the arguments and not ad hominem.
- Employment stats. The fact that you use the same term to mean different things to different people is prima facie evidence of an intent to misrepresent.
- Requirement to register with the BPPE. A physical classroom has not been a threshold requirement for registration with the BPPE since at least 2009. The relevant statutes are available online. Also note that online classrooms were not "novel" in 2017 as you claim, so that's an additional misrepresentation. If you claim that your lawyer advised you contrary to the explicit written language of the relevant statutes, you would have clear grounds to sue them for malpractice, and even if you chose not to sue them, the Bar would be interested in disciplining them.
- Claim of unique regulation burden. No, you're dealing with the same regulations that apply to all private schools in the jurisdictions in which they operate.
- ISA. It was found to be illegal. By itself it could be innocuous, but combined with the other deliberate misrepresentations there is evidence of exploitative intent.
And that's just your statements on HN. Don't get people started on the misrepresentations you've made elsewhere.
What is meant by "this is fair" if not a tacit admission that you lied about launching an unpaid intern program?
If you define a lie as any stated falsehood that you have not tried to explain away, then of course we will not be able to find one that satisfies — you've made sure of it!
It's the same method you use to reach your "86% making over $50k within 6 months" number.
But "less" doesn't mean "not", and if we allow "you're such a scumbag liar" then we might as well not have any guidelines at all. Please don't post like this again.
Hmm, it is interesting to me that sometimes when clear evidence conflicts with an existing mental model it’s easier to create imaginary evidence than to adjust the mental model.
lol completely agree. there is ample clear evidence you're a scumbag liar yet you continue to create imaginary evidence that you're actually a good person.
When we were a much smaller company I would take a lot of time to respond to communicate with folks directly, and I learned a lot from it, and think everyone benefited from that level of direct communication.
As we got bigger we got an expensive PR firm who built a big wall around me and put everything I said through review 8 times to massage it for _just the right tone_. There are too many other variables to know whether that was the right move or not, but it always felt wrong to me.
I now regard that as a mistake, as I do many other "big company" things we did. (Broadly, my mental model for success was that we needed to grow up and become a "big company." Now I'm of the opinion that to be a successful company should actively fight against everything that feels "big company." Fewer meetings, more focus on the little details, etc.)
So I don't know that it will work, but I'm intentionally carving out time to keep my ear to the ground and be responsive directly.
This seems unnecessarily aggressive as a general comment. Part of what makes HN interesting is the CEO's (and other high profile individuals at least in the tech industry) that sometimes comment. Certainly I think a CEO should have the time to write something on HN.
That's not a charge to attend career fairs; our partner companies pay us for white glove recruiting services, advanced access to grads, and for us to find and deliver unique sourcing criteria from our student body.
It costs us a lot of money to offer those services, and I think that program _almost_ covers its own costs, but has been a big winner.
The purpose is to create a relationship that helps learners get hired, and it's been succesful.
“Career fairs” as such haven’t been very successful for us, so we don’t run them, but it’s not because we charge for them. There are other mechanisms to meet grads (and our most successful connections are 1:1, not many:many) but until recently when we had some major hiring partners come in for our backend program most of our grads were hired by companies that don’t pay anything.
Bias declaration: I'm a hired Bloomtech grad, so overall a satisfied customer/student.
Meta comment: It's intersting to see how many comments on any Bloomtech/Lambda post are very knee-jerk in nature, mostly negative some positive. And to be clear, I'd say most are thoughtful. The thing that strikes me is that I can't tell if this is normal HN tenor for a tech story or if it's just because I have opinions on the subject. The only other stories witg comments that strike me as remotely similar are those dealing with privacy.
So an ask, if Bloomtech is something you don't care about, neither positively nor negatively, do you find the comments for this article of average "pitch"?
Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less optimistic. The tone of the comments here are not significantly different from many other topics.
Note that I am not saying that HN is now less neutral--it may be that the current level of optimism vs. cynicism maps better to reality.
That said, I think more optimism is generally better (for motivating action) if you want to start a new business or build a new technology; more realism is generally better if you want to go down an established path or join a venture purely as an employee; and more cynicism is better if you want to be a rabid online commentator (joke!).
>Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less optimistic.
The largest companies on the planet, that the majority of us here earn a living from, directly or indirectly, are essentially data gathering advertising companies. I feel like the lack of optimism is justified.
Yes and perhaps your bias clouds your perception or desires a more positive reception of your “alma mater”. Boot camps generally illicit a negative reaction from experienced programmers. Primarily because their primary stated goal is to give a “student” enough experience in an extremely compressed amount of time for them to enter the workforce as productive developers. The issue is that experience, by definition, can only be gained over time and with diverse trials and tribulations. Only the most motivated bootcampers can achieve this during their program by supplementing with copious amounts of self-learning.
Unfortunately even then a boot campers “experience” is quite limited but many come out of their program believing they are equals to more experienced mid/senior level programmers which results in those in the industry having animosity to those individuals. I think this explains the general “negative tone” you see in this comment section.
Are boot camps bad? No, I think they are quite useful but I think we need to acknowledge that they really only effectively create a pipeline of junior developers and replace the need for corporations to have internal education/training programs.
The experience argument seems thin: new grads have a similar issue, and yet companies have hiring programs targeting these individuals, sometimes aggressively.
It seems the core of your argument is not that they are inexperienced, but rather that the bootcamps somehow convince them they are not and this leads to friction in the positions they seek and the expectations around the work they're capable of accomplishing.
Comparing to new grads is a strawman argument, I didn’t make that comparison in my orginal comment. I would argue new grads can have the same or more experience (courses, assignments & internships) yet they would still be treated as entry level when entering the industry. Regardless, I wouldn’t classify either cohort as being particularly experienced. Educated? Trained? Practiced? Sure. Not experienced. To make a bad analogy, take a soldier from a 2 year training bootcamp and put them shoulder to shoulder with a 1 year combat veteran and you will see a significant discrepancy in the majority of cases.
Yes, I personally believe that the animosity isn’t usually targeted at the fact that boot camp grads went through boot camp. Hell, programmers are most commonly self taught using free online resources for the majority of topics. My impression is because the boot camp is sold as a “get programming experience quick scheme” that most candidates would still be entry level after their program but are led to believe they are more senior.
Neutral observer, don't particularly care about lambda.
I think it's worse than average - lots of strong opinions being bandied about. If I had to make up a score it's somewhere slightly above Google shutting down Stadia and significantly below FB / Cambridge Analytica scandal.
It's not a normal HN tenor there is not a HN hivemind. Why is everyone trying to make themselves special by posting the same shit everytime there are comments with different views than their own. You are just biased.
The comments seem of average pitch to me. I did have to scroll to the bottom to see the more inflammatory ones, but even with those it matches what you get on any exciting topic. Ask devs what they think of golang and you almost get the same!
HN really hates the idea of coding bootcamps for some reason. I think it's because the median HN person is pretty independent, libertarian, self-taught, etc and can't imagine any other model working for people.
Perhaps irrelevant to the thread at hand, but as I see other commenters mentioning programming fellowships I'll ask here:
I recently saw a mention of a programming fellowship program on HN that I thought sounded really interesting. It was for experienced programmers, I believe mostly virtual, and was free-or-cheap. The idea behind it was to give programmers excited about programming a space to explore new ideas. I've been unable to find it since - Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Vincent Woo who sold CoderPad also did some investigative journalism on Lambda School / BloomTech showing that they didn't really place as many people as they claimed they did and that generally the company had some internal dysfunction.
Lambda School always looked as a scam to me. I mean, $20k+ for a "bootcamp" and couple of courses is crazy expensive. It's like they designed this program to squeeze all the money from people who can not afford ridiculous tuition fees in the US by giving them hope they will progress faster if they pay them instead of self educating or taking much cheaper competitor's offers.
Udacity has very similar thing with curriculum for various positions, 1:1 mentoring, interview prep etc. for a fraction of BloomTech price, like 1/10 or even 1/20. Which I still consider expensive, since cost of digital goods are close to 0 to replicate and deliver to more people. Point I make here is they can earn more by delivering $100 program to 1m of students or even 1/5 of that, than delivering $1.2k program to 10k students or $20k program to 1k students.
The BPPE was formed because California was the world capital of diploma-mills in the 80's. It falls under consumer protection, similar to how California has a special bureau that punishes scummy "extended warranty" companies.
The reason you register is so the state can periodically check your marketing material and field students complaints. For example, Lambda School lied about how many students get jobs, and it would have been real nice for the agency to have stepped in before the lawsuits, which are still in litigation.
It's not about the importance of the act of filing paperwork, it's the fraud of lying to customers that you are following the law and then taking their money. For what it's worth, I don't think prison would help. But maybe some non-dischargable liabilities and a ban from being a corporate officer would.
If you were actually to commit fraud regulators can come for you whether you register or not. The act of registration is simply to make it easier to tell regulators what is happening.
This is fundamentally not what happened and a prison term for this would be insane (even California's BPPE would agree with that).
Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we weren't offering in-person classes (this was somewhat rare back in 2017 - certainly more rare than now). The BPPE sent us a letter that said we needed to register and we did so and began working with the BPPE instantly. We never ever lied about that fact, and there was no attempt to avoid regulation in any way.
Ah yes, prison for trying to teach something useful across a zillion regulatory domains, sinecures for administrators at “real” universities while students rack up piles of debt for English degrees.
No, that is not true. We never claimed to have an audited report until we actually had an audited report.
I asked if there was an auditor who would verify them after the fact to show that they were accurate, but we had had never claimed they were audited at that point.
Unfortunately auditors doing that is a months-long process, so we could only have them audit subsequent reports (which they have done).
Where you get the statistics that shows real value to coding camp, despite a lack of tech passion is when you teach modern data science tools to "domain users" currently stuck within the limitations of excel(The only successful low code platform in the market), or web skills to existing content managers, but that is a much smaller market then trying to push the vision of easy money to youngsters still trying to break into the job market as something other then baristas or line cooks.
And the companies that chased the market for youngsters without any real passion or plan is now running out of customers due both the the fact credit is now tight and that the publics infatuation with the tech industries is waning. And from the looks of it BloomTech looks to definitely target the market for youngster as their primary revenue stream.
SQL is definitely where the curriculum should start. and Jupyter(or in reality pandas and matplotlib) is definitely not too advanced unless you make it so by talking machine learning and complex statistical modelling.
What gets used in the organizations that do try and exit excel is typically batch jobs written in either python(pandas) or powershell taking data from one or more databases for display in a reporting framework like tableau.
no code is im my view basically a myth when we start dealing with systems more complex then what the average high school student can create as a spreadsheet, as the effort in learning the low code platforms idiosyncrasies are similar to those needed to use an modern scripting language.
> employees will get normal pay and medical benefits until January 31, 2023 and are “expected to work” through that period.
So severance but they have to keep working too? Seems rough. Hard to imagine anyone in that situation would focus on working for their soon-to-be former employer.
In europe it's normal to keep working after employer-side contract terminations.
In Denmark, depending on how long you've been with the company your employers contract termination notice period can be anywhere between 1 month (after 5 months with the company) to 6 months (after more than 8 years and 6 months with the company).
Also, most commonly, if the employee is the one terminating the contract, the notice period is 1 month (although it can be negotiated higher for key employees).
It is understood that your motivation will plummet when you're terminated, but you're still expected to maintain your responsibilites, and eventually, hand over your obligations. But you're also allowed to go to interviews during and if you get a new job your own 1 month termination warning will count.
I've experienced that some employers will offer garden leave to the affected employees, as in they don't have to work or show up daily, but they will hand over responsibilites immediately and be available if there's any questions.
There are a few edge cases where folks will be working through that period and contract with us afterwards in different/new roles, but impacted employees are not expected to work with us during that period.
Immigration status dodge? Say you "expect them to work", but don't enforce it, so they aren't technically unemployed and the H1B clock doesn't start ticking right away?
Maybe trying to game unemployment insurance rates? If someone is employed they can't go on unemployment, hopefully in two months some of them find something new driving down your costs compared to firing them and having them apply right away?
It's a pipe dream if they think anyone laid off will be putting any effort in.
The WARN act requires 60 days of notification before a mass layoff. So the company can choose to either notify employees 60 days before layoff or pay 60 days of severance pay and layoff immediately.
That's actually very common in a lot of countries. I think the US is the outlier in the expectation that notice and stopping of work are concurrent. Same with quitting a job. In Germany it's normal to give 3 months notice before quitting.
Have any ISA bootcamps become sustainable, or even better, led to VC-grade returns so far? It seems like a model that hasn't proven its ability to scale, but I'd be happy to see some counter-examples.
I've always been conflicted about this company. The marketing/news is always controversial(ISA, outcomes, lawsuits, etc), but clever in terms of media manipulation(more eyes on it to their service). The service is noble and good to fill the demand and change people's lives.
It's hard to use the words morally wrong and noble goals in the same sentence though given it's a contradiction.
Not all were bootcamp grads; a lot went to traditional 4-year colleges. One guy said that in his bootcamp, several of the students had a job offer before they even finished.
Things may be different now, a few years later, but we tend to underestimate how many regular old businesses need a web site and some kind of analytics. They don't pay like FAANG companies and they can't hire the sort of people who'd work there.
Edit: I should have mentioned that one of Operation Code's signal achievements was to make code schools eligible for GI Bill money. I found, in asking vets why they enlisted, that "paying for college when you get out" is a big, big motivator. There are some who study remotely while they're still in.
I've been on the fence on going to a bootcamp for years, since the dev bootcamp days because I don't feel I could complete a CS degree given all that math. I've also been in various FAANG companies the past 5 years and while not in a dev/swe role I have picked up some things as I go. The front end and user interfaces is something I've been interested for a while so I think I may pivot to front end dev or some kind of automation engineer for UI testing. Are there any release engineers here?
If you are motivated you can learn everything that’s in a boot camp on your own. However, going through a boot camp successfully is a good signal during hiring that you have some experience in programming in relavent technology. It’s much harder to signal your experience when it’s all self taught. Whether it’s good value for the money depends on your own circumstances.
That's a fair point. From what I've seen it really comes down to the hours you put in outside of class and your own side projects. Being able to speak the language, walk through the stack you used and why, issues you ran into and how you overcame them.
Wtf. This is not how layoffs work. “ Employees were called into an All Hands meeting this morning in which BloomTech CEO Austen Allred notified staff of the impending layoffs. After the meeting, those impacted were notified via e-mail. According to documents seen by TechCrunch, employees will get normal pay and medical benefits until January 31, 2023 and are “expected to work” through that period. Those laid off were also offered optional time with managers to talk.”
If you lay me off you give me severance and I say adieu. I need that time to find other work. What kind of dystopian BS is this?
This is literally how they should works as directed by federal WARN act. Usually corporations just cut ties and pay out at least 60 days tho because it’s easier for both parties and you can get some concessions from employees like a gag clause
That’s the bit that makes no sense though. A lay off means I get to fuck off. Bye. You cut ties with me. Pay me what I’m owed and then leave me be to find new work. Do not expect me to work knowing I’m being let go.
I wouldn't say I was cheering; I was simply acknowledging that, though difficult, Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in, and I am skeptical of claims that Twitter will cease to function as they go from 8,000 employees to whatever the new number is (2,500 seems to be the latest)?
There's certainly internal knowledge that is lost in a transition of that kind, but the amount of money Twitter was burning makes no sense, and while reducing numbers of engineers is risky (and complex systems require more engineers than most people assume), I completely believe that Twitter will be able to sustain the technical operations and move quickly in shipping product with a mere 2,000 engineers.
> Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in
Twitter was profitable (pre-Musk acquisition, and ignoring a one-time lawsuit settlement that wasn't an ongoing expense); it objectively did not have too much headcount (or other recurring expenses) for its revenue, prior to the added expense burden of debt service costs it was saddled with by Musk as part of the acquisition.
Their recent failure to properly execute payroll in some European jurisdictions, and the fact that they apparently no longer have sufficient account managers to even stay in contact with major advertisers at a time when they are trying desperately to actively manage those relationships and maintain them despite the distrust the takeover has engendered seem to be signs that the cuts were to deep on the non-technical side for the operation that Twitter is trying to run; I don’t see any real analytical reason to reject that the same is true on technical side.
(And that’s before considering that the reductions also seem likely to have broken both contract and, in many jurisdictions, labor laws, and legal costs associated with that are starting to mount, with at least one case already lost.)
You were cheering. You’re still cheering. And you’re doing it while you’ve had continuous layoffs of your own staff that have put everyone who works for you, or anyone unfortunate enough to be part of your predatory boot camps, in jeopardy.
I don’t take any joy or schadenfreude from your failures. Real people’s lives are involved and it genuinely makes me sad.
But glass houses dude. Glass houses. Maybe when you’re own company is falling apart, you should refrain from publicly commenting on someone else’s.
I was not cheering, and my opinion is consistent; as money becomes much tighter companies have to rightsize themselves to the amount of revenue coming in. This is true across Silicon Valley and it is true of us.
Why do you need to comment at all, I guess is my question. Why not spend the time trying to run your own business rather than callously argueing how over-staffed Twitter was. Why does that matter to you? You don’t work there. You aren’t one of Elon’s investors. Why not just keep your thoughts to yourself, the day 3700 people lost their jobs, instead of pontificating about how a company needs to rightsize itself? Especially when you had to know you were weeks away from laying off half your remaining staff.
Someone else mentioned you need to spend less time online and you argued that you’re not that online and that the dopamine rush is worth it for you. Fine. Deal with it in therapy. But know that it looks incredibly tone deaf that the day you lay off half your staff (and the day after), you’ve spent hours debating yourself and justifying your actions on HN and shitposting on Twitter.
[I am explicitly not weighing in on whether this gambit will work or not. Could go either way, there is a lot of luck involved in business.]
> Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in
This doesn't make any sense given that Twitter's revenue per employee (RPE) was roughly double that of well-run companies like Oracle or SAP and in the ballpark of EA and Adobe. This metric is a red herring currently being used to trim workforces. Which, that's the game and this is where we are in the cycle. But the ratio of revenue:employee doesn't tell the story here.
Granted cost structures and business models are different across these firms, and Twitter likely could have cut some staff (they all likely will in coming months now that it is timely to do so). But that's exactly the point here: the Twitter ratio between employees and revenue works fine at other companies, and has done so for a long time. Expedia has built a sustainable business with a lower RPE than Twitter, and it is similarly a pure-play Internet company. From a strictly financial perspective, it's equally likely that there were other levers that could have equally been tuned to fix Twitter's persistent problems.
IMHO the bigger problem was they are tooled as a high-growth company, but they were not growing fast. Even a modest bit of consistent growth, say 15% y/o/y, sustained for years, would likely have ameliorated their problems. Perhaps they have a large fixed cost to running Twitter, and they simply have not scaled the business enough to make it worthwhile yet -- could they double their business from the pre-acquisition base while only increasing staff 25%? That would be a good business! But I would guess the fundamental issue was that they are tooled for hypergrowth that is likely not on the radar.
Big staff cuts, modest (but smaller) revenue drops, then aiming to grow at a slower, sustainable pace is pretty stock PE stuff (although they typically try to pay at or below market instead of much higher than market). Can only assume people who see this as genius have never observed PE work.
Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven and would have lost money the quarter ahead of Musk's takeover had they not sold MoPub. Even before Musk took over they had planned on a 25% headcount reduction.
Their revenue per employee pales in comparison to other companies of its ilk, and I think we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies :)
> Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven
This also fits the model where they have a large relatively fixed cost base to operate, but could reap profits if they reached a larger elusive size. Again -- my hypothesis is they are tooled for hyper growth and the business has not been able to deliver that. Giving up on high growth and cutting to profitability is part of the stock PE playbook and definitely makes sense in the absence of strategies for generating massive growth.
> we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies
Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that they have operated for decades in competitive industries while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run companies as poorly. :-)
> Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that they have operated for decades in competitive industries while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run companies as poorly. :-)
Very true, but Twitter has lightning in a bottle captured the way few other companies do.
Went "unempathetic" mode. He didn't have to do what he did and in the way he did. You were cheering for him instilling fear in the remaining employees.
Not aware of that but he always seemed like the kind of CEO who would benefit from a lot less time on social media trying to be a thought leader and a lot more time working on the company.
Hmm, perhaps. I actually don't spend as much time on social as it would seem. It takes very little time to dash off a tweet. It's almost like a background process that runs in my mind, and it helps me think through things and shave the edges off of my thinking.
There's also probably a dopamine hit that I get from it that I'm not as aware of being a driving indicator, but I don't believe it negatively impacts my ability to run the company.
calling Austen a CEO is like calling Bernie Madoff an investor. sure maybe it's 'technically' true, but they're both just clueless scammers looking to make a buck.
This one's a head-scratcher. Presumably in a downturn people want to upskill or change careers so demand would go up for a program like this? Though I do think it is far too expensive for what you get.
I agree that the percentage they take is predatory. However I have a junior we hired right out of lambda school who was not in a position to go back to college even if they could have gotten loans. He now makes six figures and has a career he doesn’t hate.
The elitism of keeping knowledge in overpriced institutions is what needs to die. I know dudes who work construction that have deep math skills, but believe themselves idiots because schools don’t meet them half way or peak their curiosity and thus they did poorly.
The overpriced part is the problem, not college itself.
40 years ago anyone could complete a 4-year degree at nearly any college with grants and a part-time minimum wage job working 10/hrs a week.
Today you could only do the same if that job paid $70/hr.
The reason? Reagan and his racist republicans hated that college was a leveling playing field. They wanted to put a financial gate in front of college that only white upper middle class/rich students could navigate.
Unfortunately, it went too far and it’s now even too expensive for anyone but the most wealthy people.
We need to go back to subsidizing public college so anyone can work a part-time job with federal grants to complete a 4-year degree while affirming minimal grades along the way.
I disagree here. Unified courses work for only a percentage of people, a lot of (most?) people find it boring. These are the people we are failing. We teach math, history you name it in such a mundane way that even I (who is obsessed with math and history) did poorly in the day to day (but passed because I’m a good test taker.)
I wasn’t arguing about curriculum though if I were I’d suggest the reason college starts with basic skills is to allow students to learn how to manage themselves.
Once they garner that foundation, learning new skills has a known pattern.
But as importantly, the entire experience of a four year college helps our children grow into responsible adults, learn about peers they weren’t forced to go to school with, and learn to think on their own.
If our kids fail at any given step, there are plenty of adjustments to be made in this process. And that too is a critical life lesson.
Why anyone would give money to this guy is beyond me. Hey, we fucked up our reputation so bad, instead of making good on it, let’s change our name to a shitty Silicon Valley-esque one. It’s a shame nothing will happen to Austen after all the people he’s hurt.
Sorry about the phrasing of my comment, reading it now it comes off as snarky.
I ask because before I attended, I read many posts by people who left Lambda with a bad taste and that put me off from attending. But I did, and now I could play in an ad copy. But that's my data point.
I'd like to talk to someone who had a bad time with Lambda, in a non combat context, because we clearly had vastly different outcomes and I clearly I'm missing or misunderstanding some important context.
If I may comment on the abstract: I don’t get these bootcamps. I’ve been programming for 30 years and I still feel like there’s another 60% of the craft to learn. More data structures, algorithms, functional strategies, large system architecture, read/write fanning, I’m just getting into websockets now. The list goes on.
These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?
In that field, it seems typical to have both engineers and technicians working on projects. Engineers are responsible for design, and have degrees; Technicians do assembly and maintenance, and only need on-the-job training.
I’ve often wondered what our industry would look like if we adopted a similar distinction. In which case, bootcamp graduates would be a natural fit for a technician role.
The difference is that mechanical engineers need math to understand what they are doing. Engineers are essentially applied mathematicians. They are responsible for design because you cannot design without math.
For software development, you don't need math. This may change when data science is taken more serious and companies have to guarantee the quality of the derived knowledge. So it's the other way round. When our industry changes, we will adopt a similar distinction.
Software doesn't need math because testing is enough.
Unlike physical objects, it doesn't cost much to test software, especially because reproduction is almost free. Additionally, with SaaS, software doesn't run unsupervised and thus there is constant testing. In that environment software can almost always be adjusted and reproduced when there are problems.
If your point is one must understand 100% of computing before being hired as a software engineer none of us would ever be hired.
You can produce value long before you understand everything there is to know, of course, and a lot of being a software engineer is being able to problem solve on the job.
BloomTech exists to help people get to the point they can do that and create value. No school can pretend to teach everything there possibly could be to know about how software works.
I can't speak for other code bootcamps, but BloomTech is at 960+ hours for our shortest program, and considerably longer for our longer ones. And it's really hard, intentionally.
That's an absolute minimum six months full-time (and a lot of students spen dmore than 40 hours/week) with no breaks; longer hour for hour than the time in a CS degree spent on software-related topics (though those vary far more widely than most of us like to pretend).
If you eliminate context switching, have the right tooling and instruction, yeah you aren't coming out the other side a principal engineer, but you can certainly build stuff, contribute to code the right way on teams, understand data structures and algorithms enough to make stuff performant, problem solve and build a whole lot of stuff and a lot of value.
That's enough to start getting paid, and 30 years later you can continue to marvel at how you're still just scratching the surface.
> BloomTech is at 960+ hours for our shortest program
I helped run a large school for 6 years with 4,000 students/year who took an 850 hour program. Sad to say that amount of training isn't necessarily as much as it sounds.
To do the frontend work with more recent tech like websockets that you're just now learning about.
In all seriousness, considering the amount of bootcamp grads now at all (yes all) levels of the industry, this is an out of touch take. They're getting hired to work hard at entry level software engineering jobs, and most of them quickly move beyond that.
I'll grant that possibility. Also, my anecdata isn't an objective truth right? But I can only judge by what I know and have seen. I wouldn't hire myself at my 2 year mark, all I could produce then by my standards now is a bunch of code I'd have to fix. I've had the same experience with junior developers I've hired.
Maybe these bootcamp grads are great, I haven't hired them because of the issue I raised so I don't actually know.
Graduated from a boot camp in 2014 and I can confidently say I did not learn a ton(3 months 5 days a week) but it did reinforce my desire that I wanted to be in the field and that I wanted to learn more. In some ways the whole thing is a money grab, but when I went in to my first job interview after the bootcamp(which wasn't even a junior dev role, it was a bit lower on the rung), they gave 0 craps about my 4 year undergrad degree and we instead had a lengthy conversation about my bootcamp experience(I did end up getting that job).
People hire junior devs everyday. These people are at least a prepared as most of the folks coming out of CS programs. And are definitely more prepared than I was.
I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to... Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA.
I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.
Somewhat tangential: Lambda School sounds so much better to me than Bloomtech. Any idea why they changed it?
Because of a trademark lawsuit https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/4:2019cv...
I thought it was PR white washing - https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/16/lambda-school-rebrand-bloo...
No, the fact that it was a trademark lawsuit is a matter of public record. https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/4:2019cv...
There was a trademark issue with another company I think.
Agree 100%
Why weren't lambda grads able to get good jobs? I think that was the main controversy. Was it the instruction or what went wrong there?
Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it. Others organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small support network of people in a similar position. I completely understand that not everyone has the time for that.
I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the quality of the teaching. The first was the initial pool they advertised too. I think I saw the post on Hacker News before everywhere else. I'd wonder if you're more selective from already technical people at the beginning and then sorta widening the net as time goes on to include more people if you could get initial big numbers push followed by more ok numbers.
The instructors I met were all great. I think a lot of that flack went more towards later cohorts or alternative program from the main full webstack track.
Did lambda school have any sort of assessment before accepting students? This really resonates with my observations. The people who got the most out of software bootcamps were those that had tinkered with video game modding, WordPress, etc. and had done some self-learning of coding before going to a bootcamp. In other words, people who knew they liked hacking on tech and had a basic ability to code. They approached the bootcamp with the mindset that they already knew they had technical interest and ability, and wanted direction on building marketable skills.
Do you think greater selectivity applicants would increase the success rate? I had thought the ISA model would incentivize this, but when I learned lambda was selling ISAs that seemed like it removed this incentive.
This is generally true but not always. As you can imagine we have loads of data on this.
If you only selected students who had been tinkering with writing code for 10 years certainly you'd be successful in doing so, but you'd also eliminate ~90% of those who we have seen become software engineers.
The only way we've found that does it well is to have people actually start writing code and see if they enjoy it. That's why we now have multiple free classes, have a free dropout period once you're in the school, and even have a three-week free trial of the school itself.
The notion that financing ISAs removed the incentives isn't really accurate.
First, most of the time ISAs are financed it's in the form of a loan you have to pay back with interest with an ISA and its repayments as collateral, or it's a sale to a neutral SPV with recourse in the case repayments don't hit a certain threshold.
In the rare instance (we've never done that) schools have been able to sell ISAs full stop, it's been at extreme discounts or based on discounted predicted likelihoods of future revenue, and if those ISAs don't repay the buyers bail and the school trying to sell them is out of business.
Edit: It's too late to edit my comment, but I noticed an error we have sold ISAs with minimal recourse not at enrollment, but at the point of _graduation_; we would sell half at an extreme discount at graduation (based on likelihood of being hired) and keep half on our books.
They had a prebootcamp with a free course that taught the basics. Some people cheat through that though and didn't quite process that... you can't really pull that off through the whole program?
I totally saw people who had never coded before succeed, I'm not sure I could pick out in an interview who would do well and who wouldn't. It's a marathon not a sprint.
For the selectivity thing... I'm really not sure. The selling ISAs thing was a bit weird when I learned about. I honestly kinda wonder about the actuarial calcs of it all.
Honestly I was a little surprised at the cheating too. I think I was a little naive in the beginning that if you actually wanted a job you would understand that you would have to be able to write code. But some folks are in a school mentality that if you get a grade/diploma you're good, regardless of whether you understand the things required to go into that.
Having tried a number of different ways to do admissions, I can assure you doing interviews is possibly the worst.
As far as ISAs go, it all comes out in the wash. If you create a pool of ISAs and students don't get hired you may have more ISAs but the average ISA is worth less, so the only thing that matters is whether each individual student gets hired. There's no financial wizardry that can let you sell $1 for $2 in the long-run.
Yeah that's fair enough. I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats. It was pretty easy to sus out who actually knew enough to keep going. I don't fault Lambda for that, it's just the reality of any educational goal line.
For the interview thing, that's just what you were doing at the time. At the rate you were iterating, I'm sure that there's a better process now.
> I don't think the people cheating ever got far enough to actually effect job stats.
Yeah, some do a remarkably good job of cheating and would get into hiring stats for sure, but I think we've almost entirely cut that out now.
Funny how some people think that "programming though Stack Overflow" will keep working after you progress to a certain level
School mentality (and I might add: grifter mentality as well)
I’m Senior Staff and still have to use Stack Overflow regularly!
Sure, not a problem. Most programmers do, probably.
However, I've seen students use Stack Overflow and other resources as a source of "program stamps":
- They enter their problem in an Internet search engine.
- Click on the first result with code in it.
- "Stamp it" on their own code: I.e., copy/paste it.
- Using editor/compiler, find any issues by trial and error and fix them so the editor/compiler doesn't complain anymore.
They might try a simple example or two to see if it works. And that's it.
There's not much reflection on their final solution, or on the bits they copy/paste. They don't seem to understand their solution, nor care about that or their problem solving process. They put in effort, they expect a passing grade.
> Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it.
Is this a knock on Lambda School, though?
You can go to MIT but if you never apply your learnings you won't be a good engineer.
Going through the motions of a CS degree is probably sufficient to land a decent job if you're getting good grades, not cheating, and you get an internship (or similar).
At least from what I've heard of bootcamps, you need to really go above and beyond to have similar chances with that route.
Well there are many many students at schools with CS programs who never get internships (because they don't apply or have an empty resume).
> Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes.
Ironically this is not that different from my university experience.
Not ironically at all! If someone expects to attend programming classes (or any classes for that matter), not do any extra work and as a result to become a programmer, that someone will have a rude awakening. Or as one of my university professors said "Attempt to learn this subject by just listening these classes is equivalent to attemting to become a gymnast by watching Olympics on TV".
Mine too actually.
"They were taking what they learned and applying it."
Am I missing something, surely this is exactly what you should be doing?
If you go on the HN Algolia, there are a lot of posts from students and people involved with Lambda over the years that might paint a clearer picture of what kind of dysfunction was taking place at the company.
I don't think the assertion that "lambda grads weren't able to get good jobs" is true.
Obviously not every single student has been hired, but our hiring rates have always been pretty good (they're better now than they were in the past), and thousands of BloomTech (we had to change our name because of a trademark lawsuit) grads have increased their lifetime earnings by billions of dollars, and work at nearly every major company you can think of.
What are the hiring rates and the average and median improvements in salary?
You can see our 2021 audited outcomes report here with all of the data https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report. (Note: 2021 outcomes report is very recent as you have to get students graduated, give them time to get placed, etc.)
Some of it I'm thrilled about, some of it shows us where we have more work to do (or need to do better in admissions - candidly it's always a difficult balance between giving folks chance and certainty of those folks' outcomes.)
High level:
90% of those who are job seeking got hired.
Our median hired grad increased their income by $27,500 (and that's just their first job - obviously software/data science salaries shoot up quickly after a first job).
About half of our students have degrees, and half do not.
This comment got me interested, so I dived deeper into the report [0].
Learners are divided into three groups: graduated (59%), still enrolled (5%), and withdrawn (36%). Graduated learners are further divided into two groups: job seeking (63%: ~37% of all learners) and non-job seeking (37%: ~22% of all learners). Here's the definition of “non-job seeking”:
“A BloomTech graduate who has been unresponsive to outreach, has explicitly indicated they are not pursuing a technical role, or has explicitly indicated they have paused their job search.”
When we apply the base rate to the 90% rate, we conclude that 33% of those who attend the program (learners) got hired.
[0] https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report
I see, that’s … extremely unimpressive especially if you take the median salary increase from above. And I think maybe we should take everything else this guy is saying as potentially dishonest. Not including people who stopped trying to get a job is just an absurd way to do this calculation. Imagine a clinical trial that just ignores everyone who disconues due to adverse events. These stats seem borderline predatory
It's largely unregulated. Institutions formally registered as colleges and universities have more stringent disclosure requirements.
It's extremely, extremely regulated!
That controversy has been rightly following Lambda around for a few years now.
It's amazing, if you pre-filter all the non-successful outcomes, the success rate raises tremendously...
We should do a better job of getting more granular on that piece, because it really does matter, but the above isn't the right way to do that math to answer the question prospective students have, and is misleading in the opposite direction. The outcomes report is directed at prospective students who want to understand what will happen to them if they attend the school and look for a job.
You have to remember that (for this outcomes report) nearly every student uses an ISA under which no one is required to pay us unless/until they get a job using the skills they learned. There are a number of people who attend never intending to switch careers, a (large) number who ghost us the day after graduation, and a (large) number who get a job but don't tell us until we get tax returns (so we learn they were hired only after this outcomes report).
Our team works their asses off to work with these students, and is doing everything they possibly can. Slacks, calls, texts, emails, some of which are auto-generated from me personally, and in some cases even physical mail, to try to get them to work with us. If they respond _in any way at all_ with anything other than something that equates to, "I don't want a tech job" they are job-seeking in the outcomes report. We have built tooling to make applying to jobs easier, we find jobs that you should apply to for you, have an outreach generator where our team will write emails to hiring managers for you, and more recently even what we call "job search takeover" where we work with students on resume/portfolio/job criteria in advance, and we will actually do all of the work to fill up your calendar with interviews.
Students who look for a job in any way whatsoever get hired at a very high rate. In my view, if you're a prospective student, that's the information you actually want to understand. The fact that there are a number of students students (most of whom are using ISAs) who never intend to look for a job or don't look for a job is a fair indictment of our business model, but not a fair indictment of the quality of the school or the likelihood of getting hired.
So how should we treat that in an outcomes report? If you're a prospective learner do you want to know about the hiring rate of the people who ghost us or don't intend to look for a job, or do you want to know the hiring rate of people who map to the profile of what you expect to do?
If anyone has ideas of a better way to slice that data to convey the best information to a prospective learner, I would love to hear it.
Like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/xjbpfo/oc_...
I think presenting this data using the "funnel visualisation" is the most informative way of doing it.
I wouldn't count the withdrawn and still enrolled in that calculation, though.
If you go by graduated learners, it's 56%.
The gold is always under the shit.
Hey so I’m not your marketer, but my 2 cents is to revamp that page to read more like a “proof of performance report” i.e. remove the fluff.
The selling on the entire page makes it feel untrustworthy, which is the exact opposite of the intent.
There were for sure people I knew who got good positions in companies. I don't mean to imply otherwise.
I know someone who went through the Lambda/BloomTech bootcamp. Although they weren't able to transition to a new role, the experience helped them start to code in their job at the time. And iirc, because he didn't land a swe role, he didn't have to pay Lambda based on the ISA.
Or why were they? What percentage number is to be considered a success here? I don't have the faintest idea.
Where _would_ you encourage people to go for similar purpose with higher quality? Are there any particular bootcamps/online schools you think are good?
Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field, so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so (without spending 4 years on college again).
I do not have this knowledge. There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?
My general advice is to get some one to try https://www.theodinproject.com/ as it's free. If they try it for a bit and find they don't like it, no harm they can just stop. If they want to continue after a bit and still want to go a boot camp they're more likely to succeed at any of them.
It's certainly true that BloomTech isn't for everyone, and that not everyone will want to become a software engineer. We try to filter for that, but it's tough.
Now we have a free trial (https://www.bloomtech.com/risk-free-trial) that everyone can try out for three weeks without even signing any documents.
A lot of people like the idea of making software engineering salaries, but don't particularly like building software. Then there are others that fall in love. We haven't found a great way to predict other than having people try it out.
> There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?
I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools for y" lists, etc.
CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6 months).
A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest employment rates were relatively low-profile schools teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.
[1] https://cirr.org/
[2] https://www.coursereport.com/
I love the idea of CIRR but it is largely a failed institution. Their measures have changed dramatically over the years (the last CIRR event anyone at BloomTech attended resulted in the notion that anyone who adds anything new on LinkedIn could be considered "hired," even if it was a portfolio project or self-employment), and are used very differently from school to school, resulting in every major school I know of stopping to work with them.
For example, we used them for our first outcomes report and paid extra to have them "verify" our outcomes report, but they literally never opened the Google Drive file we sent them.
I think it was a great idea set up by well meaning people, but the self-governing aspect and comparisons created ended up in weird incentives that resulted in it falling apart.
The review sites are perhaps marginally better, but the positivity of reviews are almost 100% correlated with how hard schools work to farm for positive reviews, and their business model is selling leads to the schools, so the incentive isn't for objectivity there either.
Honestly the best way, though it requires more work, is to find a handful of recent grads on LinkedIn and ask them about their experience.
Ah, OK. Now I wish it wasn't too late to edit my original post :)
The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.
Thank you for pulling these up. I am in fact talking about both of these (admitted in my head I had mixed them into one site). I know at one point Course Report was flooded by Lambda Students as they were encouraged to leave positive reviews.
Definitely App Academy Open. App Academy is one of the original bootcamps and they have solid curriculum. They have their entire course for free online
https://www.appacademy.io/course/app-academy-open
Not OP, but I did go to a bootcamp but didn't get much from it. I learned a lot more from Udemy courses.
I would recommend that if your friends are serious about getting into coding, ask them to take a few React basics courses (just go by the most popular ones on Udemy).
I found that overloading beginners with theory doesn't really work. Getting them to build something and figure out the why of it works better - at least that was my experience. I learned about, say, json webtokens way before I used them, but it wasn't until I built an app of my own with account authentication feature that I figured out what JWTs actually were.
With all the recent layoffs, this might not be the best time to do a coding bootcamp. Not as many companies are hiring, and you'll be competing with people with better credentials and more experience.
A lot can also change in a year, so take this with a grain of salt.
Launch School is an incredible option: https://launchschool.com/
It's a self-paced online curriculum that generally takes 1.5 - 2 years to get through, with an optional 4-month "Capstone" intensive after graduating the core curriculum. Progressing out of each course in the curriculum involves having to pass rigorous, easily failable, assessments; you just can't progress until you've cleared a pretty high bar of knowledge in each domain. There is a good mix of live interview assessments, written assessments, and coding projects.
The job placement statistics are staggering in comparison to the 'quicker' options -- as they should be given the time investment involved. I'm unaware of any institution that has had more success in placing students in high-quality software development positions.
Disclosure: I've been studying for about 14 months now using the Launch School curriculum.
The thing about self paced programs is that a lot of people will not do anything unless they're poked/pressured into making progress (e.g. via deadlines). Now you shouldn't have to be heldback by non-self-motivated persons, but of course the success rate will be higher because it filters out those people.
Community colleges are cheap, supported by federal grants, and deliver proper education.
There are no shortcuts unless you’re self-motivated/have a knack and can use online resources to learn (of which there are many).
Turing School is the only one I recommend. I personally know four people who got into software careers through their full-time programs.
> AMA.
Were you aware of YC before attending Lambda (ie, did the association lend credibility to Lambda) or did you find YC after attending?
I was doing help desk, but I was pretty plugged into tech news. I was on hacker news and saw the initial post here by Austin himself. It seemed like a good idea and much better then what I was doing in the time. I was frugal and had expenses saved up to go a year at it. At the time I knew YC was involved and I think it did lend an air of legitimacy to a super new concept.
Not OP but I also attended a part time Lambda School cohort around 5 years ago and the YC association was huge for me.
What do you wish they could have done differently?
Honestly, not much. I'm one of the success stories. I think I was just early enough to have small classes and knew enough basic html and programming concepts from doing IT work to have the bootcamp work for me. I was also incredibly lucky the company that hired me had a program where they took on essentially fresh college grads and boot camp grads, and funneled them into Junior positions with a project before you were assigned a team. It took me a lot of interviews before I actually got a job.
What do you think you learned at the company thru the early project and junior work that you didn't get from Lambda?
This is a really good question.
1. Scale. When you're self taught you can make decisions that only really impact yourself. Or maybe 3-4 other people for some of the projects. The company that I walked into has two monoliths (front end, and backend), and working in a code base that's 5 gigs files is a lot different. There's so many files. My editor is now slow. There's no way for me to understand the details of the entire codebase. Badly documented internal libraries are all over the place. This isn't what a bootcamp or self made codebase looks like for a beginner normally.
2. Specific practical stuff. I had been coding JS mostly on Linux. I had to learn PHP on Mac OS. I had never used either. And a number of other tools connected to the build process that are internal to this company.
By not dropping you straight into a team you can also control where you landed a bit. People who didn't like UI stuff ended up a deeper backend team, people who prefer ui ended up more towards the front end. Almost everyone in the group I cam with (17 people) had to learn PHP. When you have 16 other people learning the same stuff at the same time, you start to work together and organize into groups. We begin producing our own docs for the project and other helpful things.
My brother went to Lambda school 2019-2020. Would not recommend. They had recent grads that had just completed Lambda the previous year teaching the new students and most of them had just a vague grasp on the content matter. So many inaccuracies and bad practices taught. The only good thing about it was that it was structured and you were coding each day for 5-8hrs so if you weren't the most self-motivated person, you were held accountable. But again, a lot of it was taught badly or inaccurately, so unless you spent a lot of time doing outside research on your own, you weren't learning much. If you do have self-motivation, you don't need Lambda or BloomTech. After graduation, there was no follow up of any kind. So overall, pretty disappointing.
Before I read this article, I was on the fence and didn’t know much about lambda tech.
Now after reading https://mobile.twitter.com/fulligin/status/14526586408091975..., I’m much more negative.
The CEO seems like a con-man who has conned himself. The worrying part is that some commenters seem to be falling for the lies he’s telling himself.
Same type as those that run uni's. This is all about maximum profits, the original mission was lost long ago. Now it is about sustaining the org for the paychecks of admins.
I guess that sounds a lot like a community college to me, but maybe faster and better.
Can non-self motivated people succeed if they go to say an Ivy League? I didn’t, so it’s a sincere curiosity for me. Would Zuckerberg have ended up bagging groceries if he went to a community college rather than Harvard?
Community colleges deliver a reasonably good quality of education at a very modest price point. They do accept basically anyone who shows up and unfortunately a lot of people are just not that motivated or are not adequately prepared for college level work. That said, if you show up and do the work you can easily get an associates degree and spin that into a career or transfer into a 4 year university. In California I believe that community college transfers generally have a higher graduation rate from 4 year schools than their their freshman admit peers. I have known many people who went to community college who are doing fine. I'm sure Zuckerberg would have been just fine with a community college curriculum (he might not be a billionaire but he could easily achieve a pleasant middle class lifestyle).
Former CC student, yep. The folks who do the transfer program are extremely motivated. A lot of them had shitty jobs beforehand. Far better students than the average 4-year university student I'd work with when I transferred. The quality of education was great and the teachers were wonderful people. Class sizes were usually small and it was easy to get a lot of 1:1 time with the profs.
Cost is more expensive than a code school but not absurd like the first two years of university. My alma mater (is that a thing?) is now $46 a credit, up from about $35 when I attended.
Idk about cost, DevBootCamp was about 11k in 2014.
Only the CC credits are cheaper, yeah. But factoring in the other 2 years of undergrad and it's much more expensive than a bootcamp. Still far, far cheaper than 4+ full years of undergrad, though!
My understanding of community colleges is that they generally make a sincere effort to have qualified instructors with a good grasp of the materials.
If I am interpreting the parent's comment correctly, he's referring to TAs (we called them "team leads") not instructors. Based on the context of the comment I'm assuming that this was a time when we had a TA for every 8 students on top of a layering of instructors for each cohort, and indeed the TAs would do a lot of the 1:1 interaction. There has never been a time we didn't have qualified instructors, though I would readily admit the quality of our instructors has improved over time as we got better at instructional design and hiring.
This is nothing like community college. Community colleges are held to some reasonable level of accountability. It's unlikely that they are going to be leading edge, or trendy, but you know that people learning some critical skills to a reasonable level.
Lambda School and other tech education programs start out well with VC money but it's not sustainable because there is no money in it. This is something that can be reasoned about a priori because you can see the budget focus of community colleges. Tech doesn't change the fundamentals, but the illusion can be sustained in the good times.
Great talent is lost as a result of missing resources and connection and thus opportunities.
to become zuckerberg you need to be smart, industrious and have luck on your side. If he went to CC, he would still make his way to upper middle class life no doubt but maybe not a billionare.
Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads?
I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class.
None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great experience.
I hire them and give them a task somewhere between support engineer that executes well documented code snippets in run books and junior engineer that does very basic CRUD web app development. Making internal dashboards for the customer success team, etc.
Give them about 32 hours of work a week and 8 hours of tutorials on other things. Build them up from there.
I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow. Because the ugly truth is a lot of the bootcampers hit a plateau. I have had a couple push through to my bar for senior, but most cap out in my mid range.
During the shortage the ability to hire and get solid mids out of 65% of them was a net positive. Right now though it is less important given the talent coming into the market.
> I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow.
I've had similar problems. We've had some bootcamp grads who were good to work with and acknowledged that they were still very junior. We've also had some bootcamp grads who felt entitled to mid-range to senior compensation after their first year, while still getting their bearings on basic developer work. It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp after a couple years in the industry.
Their bootcamp should have added the caveat: at a FAANG
> It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp after a couple years in the industry.
I dunno, I think what you have right there is pretty good explanation wise, haha.
Are they able to go elsewhere and find better pay?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were able to in the 2020 to early 2022 job market. Today’s market will be a good litmus test to see if people with surface-level knowledge and limited experience can land $200k+ a year jobs in tech.
Have you observed any other path for new want-to-be developers other than boot camps that tends to yield better outcomes ?
Activity is the signal. Self taught but goes to a ton of meetups. Enrolled in one of the legit online master's programs, etc. Ofttimes bootcamps can appear on these resumes. Someone did a bootcamp, realized it wasn't enough and kept growing in a manner.
People who treat the bootcamp as the terminal level of knowledge plateau.
Can't the same be said for University? I know lots of classmates who didn't do anything outside of what's mandatory. They wouldn't have a GitHub account if they weren't forced to in a class for example.
Not the person you are asking, but I'd say a genuine interest in the field.
A couple of simple hobby projects and participation in meetups and chats can give both faster ramp-up (beyond very basic) and solid job leads. My 2c.
Do you build those apps from scratch? Or are you using something like Retool?
I recently advertised a role and had over 2000 applicants (yes, really). The vast majority of applicants went through bootcamps. Personally, I'm fine with that, heck, I'm Head of Engineering and I'm a university drop-out i.e. didn't even complete a course!
One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github (though, yes, you should include those).
I’ve noticed that a lot of bootcamp grads are, in fact, legitimately hired by their bootcamps - just not to write code. They are often brought on term by term as TAs until they find work.
I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the bootcamps, a way to pad their “successfully employed” rates while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault the candidates for putting those experiences in their resume. They need that money to keep their job searches going, and recruiters are always biasing against gaps on the resume.
If you’re being paid by them for any reason, put it on your resume. (And if you’re not…move it to the education section, where it belongs.)
Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates. So all you're really doing is highlighting the fact you went through a lower quality bootcamp. There's so many bootcamps I don't know which ones are legitimate and which are scams. Without that signal on the candidate's CV, I'd have no idea where the one the candidate has been through ranks. However, to me that's a clear indication that the bootcamp (or perhaps the candidate) are dodgy.
If the vast majority of applicants from one bootcamp claim to be employed by them then I can see why you would be suspicious, but I’d be hesitant to throw out all bootcamp grads who say they’ve been employed by their bootcamp.
There might be perfectly legitimate reasons to be employed. Maybe they were aiding instruction of earlier students as they got more experience, akin to a tutor or teaching assistant in colleges. Maybe they took a temporary job because they were unable to find a job right out of bootcamp, and the reasons for not being able to get a job don’t necessarily have to be negative (e.g. they had familial commitments).
Getting a job from a bootcamp is already hard and it wouldn’t quite sit right with me to reject someone outright for something that could be explainable. Perhaps if you are drowning in applicants then you are forced to be harsher out of practicality, but even then surely there’s a better filter then someone reporting what is ostensibly an experience applicable to job they’re pursuing.
> Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates
If you make this the metric to evaluate on, you're going to end up with the Ivy League scenario where bootcamps only admit people who would have succeeded anyway.
The POINT of education is to give people a chance to succeed who were likely to fail without it, and you have to accept a failure rate for that to work.
> One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp.
I've seen this, too. At some point, everyone coming out of certain bootcamps was an "instructor" rather than just a graduate. I suspect one of them is running a scheme to have their own grads teach their own classes for reduced tuition.
I second the cover letter section. GitHub goes a long way, but it needs something unique. I know exactly what projects are taught at local bootcamps because they're in every single bootcamp grad's GitHub profile. Show me something you worked on by yourself.
You could probably message 3 random engineers at random companies and invite them to coffee and it'd be a better return on time invested for your career than writing cover letters. I'm not sure why you'd want to read 500 cover letters as opposed to reviewing 500 CVs.
And why on earth did you keep the job posting open to accumulate 2000+ applicants? Legal reasons?
> Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters!
I just throw the cover letters in the bin...
Yep, a lot of companies would bin them for unconscious bias reasons too.
That seems like a odd reason. Are they also tossing the resumes in the bin for potential bias?
I’m coming from the other side of things. I was a non-programmer with a programming passion that used programming as a part of my work voluntarily, but didn’t know the first thing about the kind of programming that companies hire for.
I took a coding boot camp when I decided to leave academia to join industry, and it was a useful primer on the “in” technologies that folks would be hiring for, and of the “style” of code that was fashionable at the time. I would not have hired any of my classmates (well, I might have hired one as a junior), but the bootcamp did what I needed it to do, exposing me to the “culture” of programming at tech companies.
I was hired as a mid-level and quickly progressed to senior at a large global tech company. I have been at a few different tech companies now and haven’t run into any major challenges or problems, and have only received positive feedback from my peers and managers.
If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential. I think it helped that I had a number of usable “products” that I had made over the course of my career as a solo programmer that didn’t really fit any mold. I also think it helped that I didn’t have any trouble with basic algorithm brain teasers, finding them sort of fun at the time I was interviewing. I’ve never tried leetcode but I suspect I’ve only seen leetcode “easies.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do any of that for any of my subsequent jobs as I don’t think I’d have the patience for it anymore.
> If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential
You would be wrong. The most important indicator the hiring manager saw in you is that you worked in academia. Hiring someone who worked in academia and also learned to code on the side is a lot different than hiring a middle aged soccer mom whose MLM scheme didn't work out. Both may have a 3 month bootcamp under their belt, but one has an entirely different work ethic.
That specific example seems sorta yikes opinion for somebody with hiring power. Aren't people who get targeted by MLMs victims? More importantly, what does that say about how hard they work? Or being a mom?
It‘s a stereotype for the sake of a stereotype. I don‘t think anyone identifies with such a narrow unrealistic stereotype, so there is no point in arguing for an entirely hypothetical marginalized group.
By the way, hiring is all about judging people‘s past work, and I‘m sorry to pop your bubble if you think past MLM work or having large gaps in your employment history doesn‘t reflect bad on anyone.
> I'm coming from the other side of things. I was a non-programmer with a programming passion that used programming as a part of my work voluntarily
I would love to ask why didn't you pursue programming in the first place, but last time I did that the person explained to me that they have a complex, chronic, hard to diagnose rare digestive tract disease and they went to study nutritional science specifically so that they could at least figure out what to eat to not makes things worse.
Honestly, I thought there was more glory AND autonomy in academia than in "industry." I came from a family that valued education and learning and monastic-like traditions over things like money or productivity. With the way my blinders had been fashioned, it simply didn't occur to me until later in my life that doing "problem solving for hire" was a viable life-path, and that software as a pursuit in and of itself offered me everything academia offered me and more.
I have a couple of bootcamp grads who are good. Thing is, I’m 99% sure they’d have been good without the bootcamp time as well.*
Overall, I’ve had a terrible experience with the bootcamp “mills” that cram people though dozens in a batch and where all of them have some bullshit story about how they did customer interviews and then built an inventory manager or CRM or e-commerce site for this (made-up) business. The story rhymes with a story that would be relevant but it’s 100% veneer with no backer.
They’ll have a GitHub link on their resume. On it, you can see the same code as 5 other applicants. All the green days are clustered together and all stop abruptly at the same time as each other.
Those candidates are what a lot of people think of when they think bootcamp.
tl;dr: bad bootcamps are bad. I don't think I've ever crossed paths with a Lambda School/BloomTech grad to have an opinion on their program.
* this is the type of bootcamp experience that reads to me like the rare positive exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33826116
That's a very rare exception: the mid-career professional that has already coded in a professional setting, and used the bootcamp to figure out how to market himself for SE roles.
Most bootcamp students will be young and not know the rules of the game, or the cultural signifiers that make them look 'employable'.
The companies who have hired them successfully (that I know of) tend to understand two critical things:
- You have to have an environment where they can learn - You have to have staff who can actually mentor them up
If you don't have either of those (which many startups don't, just due to not simply having the time/bandwidth) then hiring them can be detrimental.
So to answer your question: I know a few, but these companies that can do it are few and far between, and that's the dirty secret here unfortunately. The schools themselves seem to select for "can we place this person here and get our money" rather than necessarily where they can grow.
I've met some people with physics and accounting degrees who took boot camps and had success, but the people I've seen succeed were already problem solvers and math-aware. They just needed to know the language and routines.
On the other hand, I dropped out of school and have been programming for a majority of my life. I was never accused of being incompetent or underperforming, but there was a point in my career where I was not going to progress without deeper math skills. That said, it only takes a couple years to learn.
Can you elaborate on how/where you got your deeper math skills?
Books. A lot of people gave me books, many college-level books are free on the internet in PDF form. I also had to read back through algebra and calculus to pick up on some concepts I had forgotten. Earlier in my search I used Udemy and Khan Academy. There's good courses on both but they really only get you so far, imo.
> many college-level books are free on the internet in PDF form
As are many of the college-level lecture notes, assignments, and answer keys.
I'd be interested to hear more about this, as someone potentially in a similar position. What kinds of problems did you come up against where you felt your math skills were a limiting factor? What branches of math did you focus on learning?
Well, I've worked in cryptography orchestration (not actual cryptography, but I needed to understand how it worked from a basic POV) and in reliability engineering which is very stats heavy. Both of those became limited as I got more senior. For instance, a lot of problems can be identified by bucketing them in distributions - I didn't even really know or understand the math for representing a distribution. The long tail of where I actually used that was in a program that I used to create mock data for a set of devices my company was working on that simulated real household resource usage. These same math skills also became problematic as I started to need to learn/understand better applications of algorithms and data structures. There's a lot of assumptions baked in to things like asymptotics that you won't get without a background in math as well. You can certainly memorize certain things, but that has diminishing returns imo. I think I answered the last part above, but I refresh algebra and calculus. I read a stats book, took a Discreet course on Udemy, and read a lot on DS&A. I think that covers it. Took me about 3-4 years to chew through most of what I learned in my spare time.
I've hired 2 bootcamp grads from Turing in Denver. They were great and have both gone on to senior roles.
I mentored another woman in a bootcamp about ten years ago and she later went on to be a senior engineer at HashiCorp. She then got a PhD in Mathematics and eventually got into an academic role in cryptography/security/privacy.
I only have a high school diploma and I've had a successful 20+ year career in software. Honestly, there are people that are driven that go through all sorts of education pathways. I don't see a bootcamp certification being a strong signal towards success or failure. It's just a tool that folks can use.
Was also going to comment about Turing school. I've worked with Turing school grads who were really strong, as well as Galvanize/gSchool grads from the period when Turning and Galvanize were still the same thing. I think Turing School's non-profit (not for profit?) status affects its practices a lot, as I know it has smaller cohort sizes and pretty rigorous entry requirements.
In my mind, code bootcamps are just like anything else in the realm of professional education - there's a ton of scammy and low quality stuff out there, but there are genuine upsides to the format and some people are served really well and come out as strong engineers.
I changed careers with a bootcamp. I’d say about 20% of the class was “hire-able”. But everyone “graduated”.
A number of us has made good careers of it, but yeah the largest % were not capable. It was so bad it made the camp pretty painful at times.
After graduating I was worried about walking into a skeptical audience after they encountered some of my classmates….
> Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads?
Yes and no, because it depends on your expectations. At the last company I worked at, I made sure to have a chat with management to understand what they were looking for before I did my round in the interview loop. I also advised on what potential questions to probe with since I had some insight having worked as a lead instructor at a bootcamp. Sometimes that meant I would thumbs down an otherwise promising bootcamp candidate because they were weaker on say, the frontend when we needed a frontend junior dev. Our VP of Eng had already understood that and we batted way above average… at first.
Then C-level management took that as a sign that all we needed was juniors and cut the budget for hiring mid+ roles in the then hot hiring market. After a long dry spell (rejected offers), we relented and hired more bootcamp grads into junior roles. That eventually flipped the ratio of juniors to non-juniors which will never go well because you end up with an environment that can’t support their growth. On top of that, C-level management expected that more staff == immediate improvements on velocity and were vocally disappointed when we slowed down. We expected it and tried communicating it - ramping juniors sucks up time, they won’t be a net positive until waaaay later, but of course, they knew better.
Looking back on that experience, I learned a lot about the importance of managing upwards and setting very very clear expectations. Because that’s where I see a lot of these hiring situations go wrong. You need to make an honest assessment of both what qualities you need in a junior and of your own environment to know if they work for your company, bootcamp or otherwise.
The range of quality is extremely high in bootcamps. I've interviewed many bootcamp grads the median quality is pretty low. However, I went through a bootcamp (Code Fellows in Seattle) and almost my entire cohort went on to eventually join a FAANG, technical co-founder, or something fairly prestigious.
The curriculum, the teaching style, and the aptitude/ drive of the cohort matters a lot.
Fellow bootcamp grad here.
This is what drives me nuts. My bootcamp has a legitimately high placement rate (90% hired as SWE or dev within 90 days), that is audited externally, but somehow it is in the same category as something that takes 1/4 the time with a legitimately terrible curriculum.
There needs to be some better differentiator for vocational training.
I'm really interested in your last sentence there -
Something that I learned before I converted fully to SWE is that most other domains of engineering have this class of job I'll call a "tech." In the hardware world they're electricians, or electronics lab techs, in mechanical they're mechanics, and in the other domains you'll call them lab techs or factory techs.
It's a highly technical role with a different entry point that has a harder path to a higher tier of compensation, but also contains a pathway to management and more integration at an organizational level (similar to technical vs management tracks for engineers).
What's different is that domains outside SWE have pretty well-defined ways for people to enter into the "tech" position. Vocational training, like through trade schools, community colleges, the military, etc. We do not have that in software, yet.
Bootcamps are like an experiment into the vocational training to develop a "tech" for software development. Our industry is still very young, so we haven't found a way to define the roles for people that go through that training, and people don't know how it fits in or what the job responsibilities/management should look like yet. I think the model of treating a bootcamp grad like a potential junior engineer is wrong - it's really a separate track for career development.
I’ve hired quite a few mostly from the old DevBootcamp before it was acquired by Kaplan and spun down.
Like most companies, we hired them into our apprenticeship program and then they worked their way up from there.
Most of them now are senior engineers or moved into management across the globe.
I’d say DevBootcamp seems to have put out some of the strongest students and they’ve done extremely well for themselves with strong representation at FAANG and other “good” tech companies.
Can’t speak for the other camps besides saying I cant think who made it through our apprentice code day.
Glad to hear our students worked out for you! We tried hard to give students a career, not just their first job.
Some of the other anecdotes in this thread are disheartening, for sure.
Flatiron, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright also had similar reputations early on. A very different landscape now.
I graduated from a bootcamp 6-7 years ago and had several offers for entry level positions from smaller companies I wanted to work at - that said I have a degree in math and have taken several coding classes and have done some self learning projects already so I was ahead of the pack and went overboard on all of our projects. Like some of the others have said, maybe 20-30% were employable out of the bootcamp
It's like asking, has anyone had success hiring college grads? My data science bootcamp had actual Harvard and MIT degree holders (bachelor's, I don't mean their extension / online certificate programs). I guarantee you they had much better experience getting their resumes seen than the guys with no degrees. I'm in another bootcamp-esque program for SWE's and some participants have joined Google, but most have joined random second-tier companies or startups.
I hired a bootcamp grad and she's doing well. She did already have a mechanical engineer degree though and did program as part of that degree and so has a good mindset for solving problems. I hired her explicitly as a junior role though, I can't imagine hiring a bootcamp grad into a mid-level role directly - that would seem to be setting them up to fail?
Yeah, we found an amazing engineer through one of the bootcamp programs. It might have helped that she had a math degree and so she probably started with an analytical approach but either way, she did really well. This was in a rapidly growing enterprise software company with rigorous reviews.
There was definitely some bias against it in a few corners of our group but by and large, most didn't care. Ironically, the guy on the team that didn't like her because she came from a coding bootcamp (he had a CS degree) was by far my worst performer.
> It might have helped that she had a math degree
May be that’s my own biases speaking (and my degree), but I’ve spent all my professional life in a firm belief that a math degree is way more preferential than a CS degree for an SWE job. Like you should hire a CS graduate only when there is no math graduates willing to take the job (but we never had a shortage of those feeding on the Moscow State).
If forced to rationalize this belief, I would say that CS is just a subset of math, and not that intellectually challenging actually, so a person that has chosen a CS course over a math one has voluntarily agreed to narrow his intellectual perspective in order to possibly get a better pay in the future.
(Hides quickly).
I was a bootcamp grad that was hired for a junior level role (5 years ago)
It was rough at first but I had a chip on my shoulder and voluntarily worked 10-11 hours a days for 2 years straight to make up the time difference and learn all the things I needed to learn
I was a good hire (and was also bored AF living in Ohio)
I was a bootcamp grad in 2013. Myself and my classmates are now mostly filling Staff+ roles, many working in FAANG level companies. So, yes, many people have hired bootcampers and had a good experience.
I have heard that early classes from bootcamps tend to have great people, while the later classes are both more "dillute" in terms of raw talent and more starved of instruction time (as the bootcamp pinches pennies to make a profit).
I have worked with bootcamp grads who are amazing engineers and ones who are terrible, same with ivy league CS grads.
I do think there was a bit of a gold rush with fly-by-night programs popping up everywhere; as a result the quality bar for bootcamp grads has probably shifted down on average, but I expect there are still some very talented trying to jumpstart a new career this way.
Early movers in the space like DevBootcamp and App Academy were able to be quite selective about who they took, often picking primarily non-CS grads from elite universities looking to redeploy high levels of baseline intelligence and communication skills into a more lucrative field than whatever they studied at university. That was definitely my motivation once I realized I might never afford a middle-class lifestyle (e.g. homeownership, children) if I kept going in the scientific field I trained for.
Filling out staff roles at FANG? Not at the FANG company I work at. I’ve never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk about it.
> I’ve never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk about it.
This comment has the same energy as the person I once worked with who told me (a lesbian) with total confidence that they'd never met a gay person before. Just because you aren't aware doesn't mean it's not happening all around you.
It's very common for graduates to not talk about it, precisely because of the attitudes you see in these comments. It's easily left off LinkedIn because the experience only lasts a few months. And after you've had some success at the first job, it's not relevant anyway.
How many people do you know in the industry without CS degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps, whether they cop to it or not.
I considered it a shameful secret for years, and it's only now as I approach my tenth anniversary in the industry that I've become more open about it -- I'm confident my work now speaks for itself.
I'm skeptical of that claim as well. I happen to have a roster of product and engineering employees at a FAANG company.
It doesn't include any information about their education but what I can do is pick a selection of the staff level engineers at random and look them up on LinkedIn.
Here's the highest level of education attained by the first 50 I looked at:
7 had a PhD in Computer Science
1 had a PhD in Physics
1 PhD in Electrical Engineering
12 had a master's degree in Computer Science
1 had a master's degree in Computer Engineering
1 had a master's degree in Information Management
13 had a bachelor's degree in Computer Science
1 had a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering
1 had a bachelor's degree in Information Technology
6 did not list any educational experience
6 I could not find on LinkedIn
I did not see any that mentioned a coding bootcamp explicitly.
My claim was not that all or even most Staff engineers at prominent companies come from bootcamp backgrounds but that bootcampers can and have achieved this level of success. My bootcamp cohort was over 9 years ago... anybody who didn't wash out in the very early days has had plenty of time to grow and make significant contributions. Not sure why people find this surprising.
Can also confirm worked at multiple faang never seen anyone with a bootcamp. Sorry to break it to you but It's pretty rare.
I personally know people from my one bootcamp that have worked at Google and Apple. That’s without having looked to see if there are others I don’t know.
People tend to play down their bootcamp experiences because of stigma associated with it. It’s possible that there are bootcamp grads that don’t mention it because a lot of people think lesser of them.
I think the point of contention is with "Staff+" roles. I'm at a Big Tech company and we've seen lots of success with bootcampers, but I've noticed many of them hit a wall around Senior or Staff. Though I worked with an engineer who was super intelligent and a blast to work with and she is now a Staff engineer and was from a bootcamp. (At the time we were smaller and didn't really have any Staff level roles.) We've also had several bootcamp engineers move onto other Big Tech/FAANG companies so I have no idea what they're up to there.
I can see why folks might want to hide their bootcamp path if they already have past non-bootcamp experience they can point to. In all fairness, most engineers, whether top-10 CS school or bootcamper, tend to hit a wall around Senior or Staff. Without knowing the true denominator of bootcampers we've hired, I can't properly answer the question of whether bootcampers tend to do better, the same, or worse at these levels than average.
Everyone I worked with had a undergrad is CS/math/engineering and plenty had masters / PhDs. That's generally what the profile of devs at faang looks like. I'm sure there are some people who have different backgrounds but it's not common.
> How many people do you know in the industry without CS degrees? A lot of those folks came in through bootcamps, whether they cop to it or not.
People without CS degrees or degrees at all are fairly common, including at staff level and above. Many of these people have been in the industry since before bootcamps became a thing.
Previous comment showing a sample of 50 staff engineers shows only 1/50 having a non CS or CS adjacent degree and only 6 didn't show any degree. So idk if I would call that 'fairly common'.
I’m very biased because I went to a bootcamp. However, it was very focused on placement and had good access to roles. I felt more than qualified for an entry level role, and completed progressively more serious projects.
I had a few friends wash out of their tech jobs, and we certainly had some people that were never very good. Most of us were good enough for and entry role, and a few of us were slightly overqualified.
I’m now at a really great and highly technical company.
Some of these programs have serious problems. I think the ones with ISAs are the worst offenders.
I've hired quite a few, and generally speaking they've all turned out great. Having said that, the volume of resumes that come in to the ones that I've actually hired is vast. Myself and my recruiters have probably sifted through 10,000 bootcamp resumes per 1 hire. You have to be ruthless about who you actually talk to.
Another tip would be, don't interview a bootcamp grad for mid-level jobs.
Nope, that was also my experience. They either fell apart when asked to do a programming problem that required coming up with a data structure on their own (not one right answer, but not given to them) or on simple programming challenges when asked to adjust for a rule change.
I have hired them and taught a class. Rule of thumb if you can find they were top 1 to 3 in the class they’re probably a good if not great junior dev candidate.
My golden 2 pieces of advice to bootcamp grads:
Don’t use the resume template the bootcamp gives you. If 2/3 of your resume is “software projects” you’re probably getting screened out at this point even if you’re actually good, it’s a tell.
Second, since you’ll still need to include one or two, spend time polishing the heck out of them and make sure they are online and working! Best if they’re not a microblog, recipe/beer picker, or pokedex. Do the same polishing for your personal site. If it looks like crap you’re probably getting screened out on this, too.
> hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great experience.
Yes, but most interview candidates from bootcamps couldn't pass the tech screen, and most of the hires were mediocre. One was stellar.
One of my best new hires is a bootcamp grad with 0 real world experience. But he's a huge outlier, very self motivated, hardworking.
Personality type tends to trump experience. Unless of course you need a specialist to hit the ground running out of the gate.
In general, I have not hired many bootcamp grads over the years. They tend to present as very non-technical in most cases
bootcamp grads not being immediately good when hired makes sense in the context that even CS majors with at least 4 years of coding experience generally suck when they start. What could you possibly expect from somebody with 3-6 months experience?
bootcamp grads make more sense to be brought on as some sort of intern level hire with similar expectations
Hit or miss really. Like anyone hiring is difficult but I wouldn't shy away from hiring someone with a bootcamp experience
I have, and through many years of training (and more importantly, tons of hard work + raw talent on their part) have watched a few become very senior engineers / senior leaders in engineering management. This was years ago and they were from one of the bootcamps that only gets paid if you get a job as a software engineer.
My partner went to Makersquare (since bought & rebranded Hack Reactor).
They joined a successful small e-commerce site (Javascript), then a few years later joined Loon (Google X) (Python), and sensing the wind switched to another Google X project before Loon shut down.
They're doing pretty well, if I say so myself.
> My partner went to Makersquare (since bought & rebranded Hack Reactor)
Which in 2018 was bought and integrated into Galvanize!
lol I can't keep up!
The interesting thing is that much of the value of a diploma/certification is in the "brand" backing it.
In any case, I don't think my partner was counting on the value of the Makersquare brand as anything other than getting their foot in the industry, so that's done and gone.
Yes. One of our best mid-level developers finished a boot camp in 2020. Excellent mix of coding and communications skills.
Bootcamps are scams stealing money from the clueless.
I've hired Code Louisville [1] graduates across multiple roles now. This is a totally free program in Louisville, KY and does a great job of getting people setup for a new career. CL grads are all over the Louisville area doing amazing work.
Of course, all these programs are what you make of them. The best graduates are people that were really invested in learning and took advantage of the curriculum and mentors. For those that put in the work, they come out punching way above their years of experience.
1: https://www.codelouisville.org/
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban that sort of account, regardless of ideology, because this is the opposite of the curious conversation HN exists for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Not sure what to make of this, but Austen, who is normally a prolific tweeter, hasn't tweeted about this yet [0].
I have gotten used to CEOs tweeting apologetic stuff when this happens. Perhaps this is norm should be bucked? I don't know. I just note that Austen is going against the grain.
EDIT: missed this: "In a now-deleted tweet posted earlier today, Allred quoted a prior statement of gratitude for employees pushing through the work despite being attacked from all sides, adding “even more so today.”
[0] https://twitter.com/Austen
The "attacked by all sides" comment is quite bizarre. Every pain the company experienced was self-inflicted.
They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is a source of active lawsuits.
They dodged California regulators and then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
They launched an unpaid intern program, which created a backlash in the tech community.
They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that go them in even more legal trouble.
I could go on and on, but the recurring pattern is them doing something reprehensible and the "attack" is "getting caught."
* They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits
No we did not.
We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get paid vs. how much we spend. The other is (hired students/graduated students), which we share with prospective students because that's what they want to understand and what every school shares.
Those were both called "placement" in different contexts to different people, but the numbers that we report externally are always hired students/graduated students (and even that isn't simple, as there are many different definitions of "hired," and different cohorts of students who are job searching or not, and various time lags around when we learn a student is hired or not), but this is not unique to us as a school. (Though an ISA incentivizing people to _not_ tell us when they are hired until tax returns are do perhaps is a little bit unique to us.)
* They dodged California regulators then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
Neither of those things are true. Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we didn't operate physical classrooms (this was a somewhat novel concept in 2017). They reasoned that if the BPPE were going to claim that online schools would need to register in every state there was a student, that the claim would be if you have a single student who attends online classes from a state you have to register as a school in that state. Correspondingly, teaching anything on the Internet would require you to register separately and abide by varying regulations with every state educational body in the United States. The BPPE said they were going to regulate online schools, and sent us a letter with a threat to fine us. We immediately submitted our registration, and the registration approval process took just over a year, and the BPPE reduced the fine to a minimum level. There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
Now we have a very large legal team, and are regulated separately and uniquely in every state in the US, often using laws that don't contemplate virtual classrooms or online learning in any way, and that's just to exist as a school in the first place. It's a complete nightmare that needs reform, and the vast, vast majority of schools are simply below the radar enough that they don't get fined, but it's incredibly difficult and expensive in the United States simply to be in compliance with each state where you might have as few as one or two students.
Beyond that fact, entirely online school where students don't pay unless/until they're hired is a round peg that doesn't fit into the square holes of existing financial regulation either.
* They launched an unpaid intern program, which created backlash int he tech community.
Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
* They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that got them into even more legal trouble
This is another misconception, but we were actually in the wrong here. Because an ISA isn't a traditional student loan, if a student doesn't get a job the ISA immediately goes away after a five year deferment period. We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause. We happily did so, but that clause didn't harm anyone.
> We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true, but don't care. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), the other (hired students/graduated students)
Your website, September 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190930144525/https://lambdasch...
"86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Let's run the math on current outcomes, which I believe you've called, "the best they've ever been." 994 students graduated and 453 got a job making $50k or more. We're already at 45%, and that's before narrowing it down to, "within six months."
You may try to argue, "Not all of those 994 students count as 'job seeking,'" as if it's totally normal that 32% of graduates give up looking for jobs. That's moot. There was no fine print.
Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
> There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
They told you to cease operation. You didn't. After the BPPE news came to light, you told students that no school has ever been shut down for continuing to operate.
One point of the lawsuits are the students who felt they should have been told about the whole BPPE situation before signing up. I get why you didn't want them to know, because according to the law, the ISAs issued before you were in compliance are invalid. Yet you're still trying to collect, which I'd say very much impacts students.
> Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid." https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1329116385629245440
Within hours of the tech community calling you out on this, you apologized. Then you deleted the apology. I find it amazing that your strategy is to just pretend none of that happened.
> We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause.
Your contract said: "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code."
It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/337/2021/04/CFP...
After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlem...
Oh boy, you keep taking all sorts of things out of context and comparing all sorts of things that don't make any sense to each other.
A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
> Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021.
The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us.
> When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
> It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict).
> After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested.
The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up.
I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies.
OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so.
I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.
Just wanted to say you have done a good job explaining here. Unfortunately people love to concentrate on negative outcomes without thinking about the positive. On balance the few, arguably "bad" things Lamda has done seem to be hugely outweighed by the positive.
i was going to sit this one out, but i want to +1 the above with more than just an upvote. Austen seems to be arguing and explaining all the happenings in good faith with someone who appears to be hell-bent on "catching" him with something by misconstruing things.
i have never understood why Lambda/Bloomtech has so many haters but the other commenter here appears to me to be in that camp.
Austen is a terrible person and has been caught lying dozens of times and always hides behind the "we're just good people trying to help others" line to distract from the fact he and the rest of the lambda school staff (which is just all of the un-hired grads so they can boost their already pathetic placement rates) are scammers and frauds.
Calling someone a terrible person, liar, scammer and fraud with little evidence is not a good look. Even if all your points are true (Austen has refuted at least a few), "terrible person" is a huge stretch.
no, it isn't. defrauding and taking advantage of vulnerable people looking to better their lives is the definition of a terrible person.
> I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
You keep running in circles around a very simple statement that was on the front page of your website: "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Just tell me how you got to 86%, because that's wildly inconsistent with years of outcomes data, in addition to the leaks.
> This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
I'm sorry, did you just lie to my face, say, "This is fair" and try move on?
I'll be honest, I can't follow the story you're trying to tell. It sounds way more complex than what everyone watched unfold.
Your FAQ at launch clearly says it's unpaid. You had a product manager on Hacker News trying to defend the program while all the commenters explained, "This is an unpaid intern program and probably illegal." He even tried the same, "Well our lawyers said it was ok." After the Twitter backlash, you tweeted and deleted an apology, and then started acting like none of that stuff happened.
As for "no student ever did any unpaid work," didn't you pilot the program for months before publicly announcing it? (This is a rhetorical question. At this point I lack faith you'll tell the truth.)
>> > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
> Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement
Let me get this straight. You're saying, "There's no legal precedent, but hey, it might be true? So we threw it in!"
> OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing
You blocked me, making it impossible to reply.
> and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
Despite the block, I said: "Your students publish their homework to GitHub. Half a cohort failed to grasp memory management, but you rubber stamped them through the program.
You even hired one of those students to be a section lead, to teach other students."
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1270761157595262976
"I am not publicly linking to the students who struggled with it, because it’s not their fault. But I did share the GitHub projects with two senior iOS developers I trust, and they agreed these students didn’t get it."
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1270761955976859650
So to answer your challenge: memory management. I have sign-off from two senior, ex-Apple iOS devs. Please wire that money to the National Student Legal Defense Network, who seems to be handling that lawsuit against you.
> I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge.
It's interesting that you think this is all about you.
Our iOS curriculum covered memory management extensively.
I said, "After looking through Lambda School’s curriculum, I’d say students are going to struggle with very basic questions you’ll get on first phone screens," and "Out of ten student projects available, five should have failed."
Yes, you had a page in the curriculum on memory management. You also rubber-stamped through people who didn't understand it, and even contracted one of those people to not-help other students on the topic.
Anyone can link someone to a page about a topic and say it's covered, but the difference between a Udemy course and $30k worth of training is the expectation that someone will actually look at homework.
Anyway, the reason you won't explain the 86% placement number claim is that it was true for one cohort in 2018. That's why you only submitted a single report to CIRR. At scale, the number has always been somewhere between 30% and 50%, but that's easier to obfuscate by coming up with your own methodology.
There's a strong parallel with the time you claimed 100% of your UX cohort was hired, without disclosing that only one student graduated. You said it's ok because you tweeted, "VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813371
And I'm sure you'll argue you didn't lie moments ago about the Fellows program due to what the word "launched" should mean. You have shown a pattern of deflecting the substance of criticism by focusing on technicalities.
Maybe this worked out for you in a different life. I suspect you've gathered so many critics, you're "attacked at all sides," because you're now among engineers. They just take your data, plug it into a spreadsheet, and let the facts speak for themselves.
https://applieddivinitystudies.com/lambda-lies/
But I don't think this had to be. There's an alternate timeline where you did a mea culpa, cut out the shenanigans, and the tech community washed the bad taste out of its mouth. This could have been an incredible reception arc. Instead, Paul Graham enabled you with that whole "haters" pep talk, and things went downhill from there. So it goes.
And what about the rest of the criticisms of your methodology?
Which ones?
The team that built our iOS curriculum is _literally_ the team that built the iOS curriculum at Apple. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebhicks).
Honestly at this point I’m getting back to work, I don’t think this conversation is fruitful.
It's been very fun watching this flailing get more and more desperate over the years on HN. Thank you for this!
Don't really know the situation too well but I really appreciate these explanations. I think what people often misunderstand about Bloom and other bootcamps is 1) education is really really hard in general and software engineering is a really hard topic. I'd argue the default is most won't succeed. 2) Bootcamps like this are fighting an uphill battle because of selection bias. If you're applying to a bootcamp like this it's probably because you couldn't get into a college or you did but dropped out or don't have the money, etc. People think it's bizarre when 30% of grads stop looking for a job but it makes sense. These are people from all walks of life with different constraints than the average student. 3) Regulatory schemes in general is batshit crazy in the US. Messing up here and there is not always indicative of malintent, especially for a startup.
This is certainly a problem domain that needs to be solved imo so I'm rooting for Bloom unless they really prove to be harmful. We need better pipelines for people with talent and motivation to climb the social ladder and learn new skills outside of traditional academia.
Austen, I bet it takes you a ton of time to write all this up and I want you to know it's appreciated. It's really insightful to see your perspective and insight on all these topics.
So thank you
tl;dr: The word "placement" was sometimes used to refer to students who graduated without a job offer.
No, perhaps I can be clearer.
There are different ways to measure placement percentages.
* You can measure percentage of enrolled students who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of graduates who get hired.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr.
* You can measure percentage of students who get hired making more than $50k/yr within six months of graduation.
Those are all different placement rates.
Say 100 students enroll, 80 graduate, 60 get hired.
Investors would want to know what percent of students get hired (because you outlay costs for 100 students and get repaid for 60). The answer is 60/100 = 60%.
Student outcomes reports say what percentage of graduates get hired. So you say 60/80 = 75%.
Those numbers are different. They are also both completely correct.
Lambda/Bloom: "X% were placed"
People: "X% found jobs."
A lot of folks seem to be asking if Lambda's claims of "X% placed" mapped to "X% found a job at a software company." Yes or no?
edit: I just noticed that your answer started with "No". Thanks.
If I were your lawyer I would advise you to delete this comment as it would likely be used against you in court as proof of your pattern of misrepresentations.
But you do you, I guess.
At any rate enough people have been made aware of your lies that the harm you can continue doing is limited.
I will happily defend everything I’ve said in a courtroom if necessary.
I will bet $1,000 to the charity of your choice that you will settle your personal lawsuit— the one on this very matter— before your day in court.
You can surely see they are helping a lot of people, in addition to what you believe on the negative side of things. Not trying to be snippy or offer a trick question, but genuinely, what do you get out of this? Surely it's not worth your time. Even if he is the biggest scammer on the planet you are probably better off spending your time on constructive things.
Nice try. The same question applies to you, since you’ve jumped from one comment thread to another defending a sketchy business in the midst of a downfall.
Fair point!
You have no idea how much I'm _yearning_ for a day in court. The problem is it costs millions of dollars to get to that point.
Is that how we now treat execs who bother to come directly address criticism aimed at their companies on HN?
This is one the few places on the web that happens. You can still disagree with him if you want, but coming here to talk with us directly is respectable IMO. Focus on the arguments and not ad hominem.
If he's going to lie, yes.
Feel free to point out where I lie
- Employment stats. The fact that you use the same term to mean different things to different people is prima facie evidence of an intent to misrepresent.
- Requirement to register with the BPPE. A physical classroom has not been a threshold requirement for registration with the BPPE since at least 2009. The relevant statutes are available online. Also note that online classrooms were not "novel" in 2017 as you claim, so that's an additional misrepresentation. If you claim that your lawyer advised you contrary to the explicit written language of the relevant statutes, you would have clear grounds to sue them for malpractice, and even if you chose not to sue them, the Bar would be interested in disciplining them.
- Claim of unique regulation burden. No, you're dealing with the same regulations that apply to all private schools in the jurisdictions in which they operate.
- ISA. It was found to be illegal. By itself it could be innocuous, but combined with the other deliberate misrepresentations there is evidence of exploitative intent.
And that's just your statements on HN. Don't get people started on the misrepresentations you've made elsewhere.
Okay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827631
What is meant by "this is fair" if not a tacit admission that you lied about launching an unpaid intern program?
If you define a lie as any stated falsehood that you have not tried to explain away, then of course we will not be able to find one that satisfies — you've made sure of it!
It's the same method you use to reach your "86% making over $50k within 6 months" number.
The fact that we changed our name because of a trademark lawsuit is a matter of public record https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/4:2019cv...
You can't attack others like this here, regardless of whom you're attacking. We ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To answer the obvious rejoinder: no, we don't do this because someone is a YC founder—it's actually the opposite. We moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is in the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
But "less" doesn't mean "not", and if we allow "you're such a scumbag liar" then we might as well not have any guidelines at all. Please don't post like this again.
Hmm, it is interesting to me that sometimes when clear evidence conflicts with an existing mental model it’s easier to create imaginary evidence than to adjust the mental model.
Literally every past comment of his is contentious or negative. Probably worth ignoring from here, clearly isn't acting in good faith on here.
lol completely agree. there is ample clear evidence you're a scumbag liar yet you continue to create imaginary evidence that you're actually a good person.
We're fully in the territory of conspiracy theories now
That's a totally fair question.
When we were a much smaller company I would take a lot of time to respond to communicate with folks directly, and I learned a lot from it, and think everyone benefited from that level of direct communication.
As we got bigger we got an expensive PR firm who built a big wall around me and put everything I said through review 8 times to massage it for _just the right tone_. There are too many other variables to know whether that was the right move or not, but it always felt wrong to me.
I now regard that as a mistake, as I do many other "big company" things we did. (Broadly, my mental model for success was that we needed to grow up and become a "big company." Now I'm of the opinion that to be a successful company should actively fight against everything that feels "big company." Fewer meetings, more focus on the little details, etc.)
So I don't know that it will work, but I'm intentionally carving out time to keep my ear to the ground and be responsive directly.
This seems unnecessarily aggressive as a general comment. Part of what makes HN interesting is the CEO's (and other high profile individuals at least in the tech industry) that sometimes comment. Certainly I think a CEO should have the time to write something on HN.
Vincent Woo’s reporting is a must read if you’re considering any interaction with this company.
Seconded. Vincent puts out good stuff!
https://twitter.com/fulligin
Also, lame they charge companies to attend Bloomtech career fairs: https://www.bloomtech.com/hire-from-bloomtech
That's not a charge to attend career fairs; our partner companies pay us for white glove recruiting services, advanced access to grads, and for us to find and deliver unique sourcing criteria from our student body.
It costs us a lot of money to offer those services, and I think that program _almost_ covers its own costs, but has been a big winner.
The purpose is to create a relationship that helps learners get hired, and it's been succesful.
Sorry for misrepresenting. Are there free career fairs arranged by your school that companies can attend?
“Career fairs” as such haven’t been very successful for us, so we don’t run them, but it’s not because we charge for them. There are other mechanisms to meet grads (and our most successful connections are 1:1, not many:many) but until recently when we had some major hiring partners come in for our backend program most of our grads were hired by companies that don’t pay anything.
Okay.
Is there a place where we can view your graduates? Not at this time.
Bias declaration: I'm a hired Bloomtech grad, so overall a satisfied customer/student.
Meta comment: It's intersting to see how many comments on any Bloomtech/Lambda post are very knee-jerk in nature, mostly negative some positive. And to be clear, I'd say most are thoughtful. The thing that strikes me is that I can't tell if this is normal HN tenor for a tech story or if it's just because I have opinions on the subject. The only other stories witg comments that strike me as remotely similar are those dealing with privacy.
So an ask, if Bloomtech is something you don't care about, neither positively nor negatively, do you find the comments for this article of average "pitch"?
Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less optimistic. The tone of the comments here are not significantly different from many other topics.
Note that I am not saying that HN is now less neutral--it may be that the current level of optimism vs. cynicism maps better to reality.
That said, I think more optimism is generally better (for motivating action) if you want to start a new business or build a new technology; more realism is generally better if you want to go down an established path or join a venture purely as an employee; and more cynicism is better if you want to be a rabid online commentator (joke!).
>Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less optimistic.
The largest companies on the planet, that the majority of us here earn a living from, directly or indirectly, are essentially data gathering advertising companies. I feel like the lack of optimism is justified.
Yes and perhaps your bias clouds your perception or desires a more positive reception of your “alma mater”. Boot camps generally illicit a negative reaction from experienced programmers. Primarily because their primary stated goal is to give a “student” enough experience in an extremely compressed amount of time for them to enter the workforce as productive developers. The issue is that experience, by definition, can only be gained over time and with diverse trials and tribulations. Only the most motivated bootcampers can achieve this during their program by supplementing with copious amounts of self-learning.
Unfortunately even then a boot campers “experience” is quite limited but many come out of their program believing they are equals to more experienced mid/senior level programmers which results in those in the industry having animosity to those individuals. I think this explains the general “negative tone” you see in this comment section.
Are boot camps bad? No, I think they are quite useful but I think we need to acknowledge that they really only effectively create a pipeline of junior developers and replace the need for corporations to have internal education/training programs.
The experience argument seems thin: new grads have a similar issue, and yet companies have hiring programs targeting these individuals, sometimes aggressively.
It seems the core of your argument is not that they are inexperienced, but rather that the bootcamps somehow convince them they are not and this leads to friction in the positions they seek and the expectations around the work they're capable of accomplishing.
Comparing to new grads is a strawman argument, I didn’t make that comparison in my orginal comment. I would argue new grads can have the same or more experience (courses, assignments & internships) yet they would still be treated as entry level when entering the industry. Regardless, I wouldn’t classify either cohort as being particularly experienced. Educated? Trained? Practiced? Sure. Not experienced. To make a bad analogy, take a soldier from a 2 year training bootcamp and put them shoulder to shoulder with a 1 year combat veteran and you will see a significant discrepancy in the majority of cases.
Yes, I personally believe that the animosity isn’t usually targeted at the fact that boot camp grads went through boot camp. Hell, programmers are most commonly self taught using free online resources for the majority of topics. My impression is because the boot camp is sold as a “get programming experience quick scheme” that most candidates would still be entry level after their program but are led to believe they are more senior.
Neutral observer, don't particularly care about lambda.
I think it's worse than average - lots of strong opinions being bandied about. If I had to make up a score it's somewhere slightly above Google shutting down Stadia and significantly below FB / Cambridge Analytica scandal.
It's not a normal HN tenor there is not a HN hivemind. Why is everyone trying to make themselves special by posting the same shit everytime there are comments with different views than their own. You are just biased.
The comments seem of average pitch to me. I did have to scroll to the bottom to see the more inflammatory ones, but even with those it matches what you get on any exciting topic. Ask devs what they think of golang and you almost get the same!
HN really hates the idea of coding bootcamps for some reason. I think it's because the median HN person is pretty independent, libertarian, self-taught, etc and can't imagine any other model working for people.
Perhaps irrelevant to the thread at hand, but as I see other commenters mentioning programming fellowships I'll ask here:
I recently saw a mention of a programming fellowship program on HN that I thought sounded really interesting. It was for experienced programmers, I believe mostly virtual, and was free-or-cheap. The idea behind it was to give programmers excited about programming a space to explore new ideas. I've been unable to find it since - Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
https://www.recurse.com/ ?
Definitely it, thank you!
Recurse Center?
https://www.recurse.com/
Vincent Woo who sold CoderPad also did some investigative journalism on Lambda School / BloomTech showing that they didn't really place as many people as they claimed they did and that generally the company had some internal dysfunction.
https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658640809197569?lang...
Lambda School always looked as a scam to me. I mean, $20k+ for a "bootcamp" and couple of courses is crazy expensive. It's like they designed this program to squeeze all the money from people who can not afford ridiculous tuition fees in the US by giving them hope they will progress faster if they pay them instead of self educating or taking much cheaper competitor's offers.
Udacity has very similar thing with curriculum for various positions, 1:1 mentoring, interview prep etc. for a fraction of BloomTech price, like 1/10 or even 1/20. Which I still consider expensive, since cost of digital goods are close to 0 to replicate and deliver to more people. Point I make here is they can earn more by delivering $100 program to 1m of students or even 1/5 of that, than delivering $1.2k program to 10k students or $20k program to 1k students.
it's a verified scam, your intuition was correct
Glad to see this, Lambda School is extremely scummy. Can’t be bothered to operate legally, and lied about it: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1211717254712135680?lan...
I really think that the law should be changed so that doing stuff like that would have been a prison term for the CEO (Allred).
A prison term for not registering with some bureaucratic state agency? Why?
The “California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education”? This is indistinguishable from parody.
The BPPE was formed because California was the world capital of diploma-mills in the 80's. It falls under consumer protection, similar to how California has a special bureau that punishes scummy "extended warranty" companies.
The reason you register is so the state can periodically check your marketing material and field students complaints. For example, Lambda School lied about how many students get jobs, and it would have been real nice for the agency to have stepped in before the lawsuits, which are still in litigation.
Why is it unreasonable to have people in a government agency to address fraudulent colleges and stuff?
Do you feel the same way about the bureau of consumer protection in the US FTC?
You don't have to register or get a license from the FTC to open a business. At least I hope you don't.
It's not about the importance of the act of filing paperwork, it's the fraud of lying to customers that you are following the law and then taking their money. For what it's worth, I don't think prison would help. But maybe some non-dischargable liabilities and a ban from being a corporate officer would.
If you were actually to commit fraud regulators can come for you whether you register or not. The act of registration is simply to make it easier to tell regulators what is happening.
I'm actually glad there's a state department for this. Fraudulent private colleges are a _real_ problem.
This is fundamentally not what happened and a prison term for this would be insane (even California's BPPE would agree with that).
Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we weren't offering in-person classes (this was somewhat rare back in 2017 - certainly more rare than now). The BPPE sent us a letter that said we needed to register and we did so and began working with the BPPE instantly. We never ever lied about that fact, and there was no attempt to avoid regulation in any way.
Ah yes, prison for trying to teach something useful across a zillion regulatory domains, sinecures for administrators at “real” universities while students rack up piles of debt for English degrees.
Just because one route is rotten doesn’t validate alternate scummy routes. Cops are rotten so drug dealers are good? Lol.
https://applieddivinitystudies.com/lambda-lies/
He also lied about having an auditor verify their placement rates. Caught asking Bookface for an auditor reference while proclaiming it was audited.
No, that is not true. We never claimed to have an audited report until we actually had an audited report.
I asked if there was an auditor who would verify them after the fact to show that they were accurate, but we had had never claimed they were audited at that point.
Unfortunately auditors doing that is a months-long process, so we could only have them audit subsequent reports (which they have done).
Where you get the statistics that shows real value to coding camp, despite a lack of tech passion is when you teach modern data science tools to "domain users" currently stuck within the limitations of excel(The only successful low code platform in the market), or web skills to existing content managers, but that is a much smaller market then trying to push the vision of easy money to youngsters still trying to break into the job market as something other then baristas or line cooks.
And the companies that chased the market for youngsters without any real passion or plan is now running out of customers due both the the fact credit is now tight and that the publics infatuation with the tech industries is waning. And from the looks of it BloomTech looks to definitely target the market for youngster as their primary revenue stream.
This is excellent insight. In a previous role, on the side I ran an SQL training for the customer success team, and that was fun and beneficial.
What kind of curriculum do you think is best for these folks coming from excel or the other BI tools?
Is python jupyter too advanced?
It feels like we’re still early in the tooling for “no code”.
SQL is definitely where the curriculum should start. and Jupyter(or in reality pandas and matplotlib) is definitely not too advanced unless you make it so by talking machine learning and complex statistical modelling.
What gets used in the organizations that do try and exit excel is typically batch jobs written in either python(pandas) or powershell taking data from one or more databases for display in a reporting framework like tableau.
no code is im my view basically a myth when we start dealing with systems more complex then what the average high school student can create as a spreadsheet, as the effort in learning the low code platforms idiosyncrasies are similar to those needed to use an modern scripting language.
> employees will get normal pay and medical benefits until January 31, 2023 and are “expected to work” through that period.
So severance but they have to keep working too? Seems rough. Hard to imagine anyone in that situation would focus on working for their soon-to-be former employer.
In europe it's normal to keep working after employer-side contract terminations.
In Denmark, depending on how long you've been with the company your employers contract termination notice period can be anywhere between 1 month (after 5 months with the company) to 6 months (after more than 8 years and 6 months with the company).
Also, most commonly, if the employee is the one terminating the contract, the notice period is 1 month (although it can be negotiated higher for key employees).
It is understood that your motivation will plummet when you're terminated, but you're still expected to maintain your responsibilites, and eventually, hand over your obligations. But you're also allowed to go to interviews during and if you get a new job your own 1 month termination warning will count.
I've experienced that some employers will offer garden leave to the affected employees, as in they don't have to work or show up daily, but they will hand over responsibilites immediately and be available if there's any questions.
This actually isn't true.
There are a few edge cases where folks will be working through that period and contract with us afterwards in different/new roles, but impacted employees are not expected to work with us during that period.
Immigration status dodge? Say you "expect them to work", but don't enforce it, so they aren't technically unemployed and the H1B clock doesn't start ticking right away?
Maybe trying to game unemployment insurance rates? If someone is employed they can't go on unemployment, hopefully in two months some of them find something new driving down your costs compared to firing them and having them apply right away?
It's a pipe dream if they think anyone laid off will be putting any effort in.
The WARN act requires 60 days of notification before a mass layoff. So the company can choose to either notify employees 60 days before layoff or pay 60 days of severance pay and layoff immediately.
That's actually very common in a lot of countries. I think the US is the outlier in the expectation that notice and stopping of work are concurrent. Same with quitting a job. In Germany it's normal to give 3 months notice before quitting.
Teaching more people how to code is a very noble and worthy goal. I for one applaud the hard work the team at Lambda/Bloom does.
The press coverage has been insane especially if you think about all the problems universities have.
Have any ISA bootcamps become sustainable, or even better, led to VC-grade returns so far? It seems like a model that hasn't proven its ability to scale, but I'd be happy to see some counter-examples.
I've always been conflicted about this company. The marketing/news is always controversial(ISA, outcomes, lawsuits, etc), but clever in terms of media manipulation(more eyes on it to their service). The service is noble and good to fill the demand and change people's lives.
It's hard to use the words morally wrong and noble goals in the same sentence though given it's a contradiction.
Layoffs suck regardless though.
I interviewed a number of veterans & spouses for Operation Code:
https://operationcode.org/podcast
Not all were bootcamp grads; a lot went to traditional 4-year colleges. One guy said that in his bootcamp, several of the students had a job offer before they even finished.
Things may be different now, a few years later, but we tend to underestimate how many regular old businesses need a web site and some kind of analytics. They don't pay like FAANG companies and they can't hire the sort of people who'd work there.
Edit: I should have mentioned that one of Operation Code's signal achievements was to make code schools eligible for GI Bill money. I found, in asking vets why they enlisted, that "paying for college when you get out" is a big, big motivator. There are some who study remotely while they're still in.
I've been on the fence on going to a bootcamp for years, since the dev bootcamp days because I don't feel I could complete a CS degree given all that math. I've also been in various FAANG companies the past 5 years and while not in a dev/swe role I have picked up some things as I go. The front end and user interfaces is something I've been interested for a while so I think I may pivot to front end dev or some kind of automation engineer for UI testing. Are there any release engineers here?
If you are motivated you can learn everything that’s in a boot camp on your own. However, going through a boot camp successfully is a good signal during hiring that you have some experience in programming in relavent technology. It’s much harder to signal your experience when it’s all self taught. Whether it’s good value for the money depends on your own circumstances.
That's a fair point. From what I've seen it really comes down to the hours you put in outside of class and your own side projects. Being able to speak the language, walk through the stack you used and why, issues you ran into and how you overcame them.
Wtf. This is not how layoffs work. “ Employees were called into an All Hands meeting this morning in which BloomTech CEO Austen Allred notified staff of the impending layoffs. After the meeting, those impacted were notified via e-mail. According to documents seen by TechCrunch, employees will get normal pay and medical benefits until January 31, 2023 and are “expected to work” through that period. Those laid off were also offered optional time with managers to talk.”
If you lay me off you give me severance and I say adieu. I need that time to find other work. What kind of dystopian BS is this?
This is literally how they should works as directed by federal WARN act. Usually corporations just cut ties and pay out at least 60 days tho because it’s easier for both parties and you can get some concessions from employees like a gag clause
‘ are “expected to work” through that period.’
That’s the bit that makes no sense though. A lay off means I get to fuck off. Bye. You cut ties with me. Pay me what I’m owed and then leave me be to find new work. Do not expect me to work knowing I’m being let go.
The CEO was cheering on when Musk laid off half the company. Not surprised.
I wouldn't say I was cheering; I was simply acknowledging that, though difficult, Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in, and I am skeptical of claims that Twitter will cease to function as they go from 8,000 employees to whatever the new number is (2,500 seems to be the latest)?
There's certainly internal knowledge that is lost in a transition of that kind, but the amount of money Twitter was burning makes no sense, and while reducing numbers of engineers is risky (and complex systems require more engineers than most people assume), I completely believe that Twitter will be able to sustain the technical operations and move quickly in shipping product with a mere 2,000 engineers.
> Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in
Twitter was profitable (pre-Musk acquisition, and ignoring a one-time lawsuit settlement that wasn't an ongoing expense); it objectively did not have too much headcount (or other recurring expenses) for its revenue, prior to the added expense burden of debt service costs it was saddled with by Musk as part of the acquisition.
Their recent failure to properly execute payroll in some European jurisdictions, and the fact that they apparently no longer have sufficient account managers to even stay in contact with major advertisers at a time when they are trying desperately to actively manage those relationships and maintain them despite the distrust the takeover has engendered seem to be signs that the cuts were to deep on the non-technical side for the operation that Twitter is trying to run; I don’t see any real analytical reason to reject that the same is true on technical side.
(And that’s before considering that the reductions also seem likely to have broken both contract and, in many jurisdictions, labor laws, and legal costs associated with that are starting to mount, with at least one case already lost.)
You were cheering. You’re still cheering. And you’re doing it while you’ve had continuous layoffs of your own staff that have put everyone who works for you, or anyone unfortunate enough to be part of your predatory boot camps, in jeopardy.
I don’t take any joy or schadenfreude from your failures. Real people’s lives are involved and it genuinely makes me sad.
But glass houses dude. Glass houses. Maybe when you’re own company is falling apart, you should refrain from publicly commenting on someone else’s.
I was not cheering, and my opinion is consistent; as money becomes much tighter companies have to rightsize themselves to the amount of revenue coming in. This is true across Silicon Valley and it is true of us.
https://twitter.com/austen/status/1588336949403611136?s=46&t...
You had no empathy for the people getting laid off. The drama at Twitter was 'interesting' to you.
this is only true of shitty businesses built on scams and lies. company producing results don't need to.
Sadly that’s not true. Even the very best of companies try to grow and occasionally miss and have to shrink, or layoffs would be far more rare.
Why do you need to comment at all, I guess is my question. Why not spend the time trying to run your own business rather than callously argueing how over-staffed Twitter was. Why does that matter to you? You don’t work there. You aren’t one of Elon’s investors. Why not just keep your thoughts to yourself, the day 3700 people lost their jobs, instead of pontificating about how a company needs to rightsize itself? Especially when you had to know you were weeks away from laying off half your remaining staff.
Someone else mentioned you need to spend less time online and you argued that you’re not that online and that the dopamine rush is worth it for you. Fine. Deal with it in therapy. But know that it looks incredibly tone deaf that the day you lay off half your staff (and the day after), you’ve spent hours debating yourself and justifying your actions on HN and shitposting on Twitter.
Have some fucking tact.
[I am explicitly not weighing in on whether this gambit will work or not. Could go either way, there is a lot of luck involved in business.]
> Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in
This doesn't make any sense given that Twitter's revenue per employee (RPE) was roughly double that of well-run companies like Oracle or SAP and in the ballpark of EA and Adobe. This metric is a red herring currently being used to trim workforces. Which, that's the game and this is where we are in the cycle. But the ratio of revenue:employee doesn't tell the story here.
Granted cost structures and business models are different across these firms, and Twitter likely could have cut some staff (they all likely will in coming months now that it is timely to do so). But that's exactly the point here: the Twitter ratio between employees and revenue works fine at other companies, and has done so for a long time. Expedia has built a sustainable business with a lower RPE than Twitter, and it is similarly a pure-play Internet company. From a strictly financial perspective, it's equally likely that there were other levers that could have equally been tuned to fix Twitter's persistent problems.
IMHO the bigger problem was they are tooled as a high-growth company, but they were not growing fast. Even a modest bit of consistent growth, say 15% y/o/y, sustained for years, would likely have ameliorated their problems. Perhaps they have a large fixed cost to running Twitter, and they simply have not scaled the business enough to make it worthwhile yet -- could they double their business from the pre-acquisition base while only increasing staff 25%? That would be a good business! But I would guess the fundamental issue was that they are tooled for hypergrowth that is likely not on the radar.
Big staff cuts, modest (but smaller) revenue drops, then aiming to grow at a slower, sustainable pace is pretty stock PE stuff (although they typically try to pay at or below market instead of much higher than market). Can only assume people who see this as genius have never observed PE work.
Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven and would have lost money the quarter ahead of Musk's takeover had they not sold MoPub. Even before Musk took over they had planned on a 25% headcount reduction.
Their revenue per employee pales in comparison to other companies of its ilk, and I think we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies :)
> Twitter was continually on the cusp of breakeven
This also fits the model where they have a large relatively fixed cost base to operate, but could reap profits if they reached a larger elusive size. Again -- my hypothesis is they are tooled for hyper growth and the business has not been able to deliver that. Giving up on high growth and cutting to profitability is part of the stock PE playbook and definitely makes sense in the absence of strategies for generating massive growth.
> we would disagree whether SAP and Oracle are well-run companies
Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that they have operated for decades in competitive industries while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run companies as poorly. :-)
> Interesting perspective, I meant it in the sense that they have operated for decades in competitive industries while making oceans of real profit for shareholders over that period. Most of us would be fortunate to run companies as poorly. :-)
Very true, but Twitter has lightning in a bottle captured the way few other companies do.
It was the way the layoffs were conducted which was the objectionable part. Not even taking a week to assess means it was just haphazard.
That is fair.
Elon took an 8,000 person company and went full "move fast and break things" mode.
Went "unempathetic" mode. He didn't have to do what he did and in the way he did. You were cheering for him instilling fear in the remaining employees.
Not aware of that but he always seemed like the kind of CEO who would benefit from a lot less time on social media trying to be a thought leader and a lot more time working on the company.
Hmm, perhaps. I actually don't spend as much time on social as it would seem. It takes very little time to dash off a tweet. It's almost like a background process that runs in my mind, and it helps me think through things and shave the edges off of my thinking.
There's also probably a dopamine hit that I get from it that I'm not as aware of being a driving indicator, but I don't believe it negatively impacts my ability to run the company.
Dude, bragging about how little thought you put into your social media posts is really not a good look.
calling Austen a CEO is like calling Bernie Madoff an investor. sure maybe it's 'technically' true, but they're both just clueless scammers looking to make a buck.
Absolute dirtbag
No surprise, the founder was just on Twitter praising Elon for staff cutting and marveling at the amount of money saved.
makes sense, considering that the current economic climate in the tech industry will impact bootcamp grads the most.
This one's a head-scratcher. Presumably in a downturn people want to upskill or change careers so demand would go up for a program like this? Though I do think it is far too expensive for what you get.
Wasn't BloomTech replacing its staff with contractors from the some tech sweatshop for a year already?
Not sure what BloomTech gives folks over FreeCodeCamp? Accreditation? Career services?
The entire anti-college movement needs to die. This is a good step in that direction. LambdaSchool was an exploitative bad idea from the start.
I agree that the percentage they take is predatory. However I have a junior we hired right out of lambda school who was not in a position to go back to college even if they could have gotten loans. He now makes six figures and has a career he doesn’t hate.
The elitism of keeping knowledge in overpriced institutions is what needs to die. I know dudes who work construction that have deep math skills, but believe themselves idiots because schools don’t meet them half way or peak their curiosity and thus they did poorly.
The overpriced part is the problem, not college itself.
40 years ago anyone could complete a 4-year degree at nearly any college with grants and a part-time minimum wage job working 10/hrs a week.
Today you could only do the same if that job paid $70/hr.
The reason? Reagan and his racist republicans hated that college was a leveling playing field. They wanted to put a financial gate in front of college that only white upper middle class/rich students could navigate.
Unfortunately, it went too far and it’s now even too expensive for anyone but the most wealthy people.
We need to go back to subsidizing public college so anyone can work a part-time job with federal grants to complete a 4-year degree while affirming minimal grades along the way.
I disagree here. Unified courses work for only a percentage of people, a lot of (most?) people find it boring. These are the people we are failing. We teach math, history you name it in such a mundane way that even I (who is obsessed with math and history) did poorly in the day to day (but passed because I’m a good test taker.)
I wasn’t arguing about curriculum though if I were I’d suggest the reason college starts with basic skills is to allow students to learn how to manage themselves.
Once they garner that foundation, learning new skills has a known pattern.
But as importantly, the entire experience of a four year college helps our children grow into responsible adults, learn about peers they weren’t forced to go to school with, and learn to think on their own.
If our kids fail at any given step, there are plenty of adjustments to be made in this process. And that too is a critical life lesson.
Austen Allred is a fuckin' tool.
Ahh a rebrand is always a good sign /end-sarcasm.
Why anyone would give money to this guy is beyond me. Hey, we fucked up our reputation so bad, instead of making good on it, let’s change our name to a shitty Silicon Valley-esque one. It’s a shame nothing will happen to Austen after all the people he’s hurt.
Were you hurt?
no, but thousands of people who were simply trying to make a better life for themselves were grifted by Austen and his merry gang of con artists
Sorry about the phrasing of my comment, reading it now it comes off as snarky.
I ask because before I attended, I read many posts by people who left Lambda with a bad taste and that put me off from attending. But I did, and now I could play in an ad copy. But that's my data point.
I'd like to talk to someone who had a bad time with Lambda, in a non combat context, because we clearly had vastly different outcomes and I clearly I'm missing or misunderstanding some important context.
Bootcamp “grads”? I mean really? Folks, this is a scam.
If I may comment on the abstract: I don’t get these bootcamps. I’ve been programming for 30 years and I still feel like there’s another 60% of the craft to learn. More data structures, algorithms, functional strategies, large system architecture, read/write fanning, I’m just getting into websockets now. The list goes on.
These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?
Several of my relatives are Mechanical Engineers.
In that field, it seems typical to have both engineers and technicians working on projects. Engineers are responsible for design, and have degrees; Technicians do assembly and maintenance, and only need on-the-job training.
I’ve often wondered what our industry would look like if we adopted a similar distinction. In which case, bootcamp graduates would be a natural fit for a technician role.
The difference is that mechanical engineers need math to understand what they are doing. Engineers are essentially applied mathematicians. They are responsible for design because you cannot design without math.
For software development, you don't need math. This may change when data science is taken more serious and companies have to guarantee the quality of the derived knowledge. So it's the other way round. When our industry changes, we will adopt a similar distinction.
Software doesn't need math because testing is enough. Unlike physical objects, it doesn't cost much to test software, especially because reproduction is almost free. Additionally, with SaaS, software doesn't run unsupervised and thus there is constant testing. In that environment software can almost always be adjusted and reproduced when there are problems.
That's just gatekeeping based on having a degree.
If your point is one must understand 100% of computing before being hired as a software engineer none of us would ever be hired.
You can produce value long before you understand everything there is to know, of course, and a lot of being a software engineer is being able to problem solve on the job.
BloomTech exists to help people get to the point they can do that and create value. No school can pretend to teach everything there possibly could be to know about how software works.
My point isn’t to learn 100% but how about 5 or 10? The complexity of the work just doesn’t seem to match the duration of these programs.
I can't speak for other code bootcamps, but BloomTech is at 960+ hours for our shortest program, and considerably longer for our longer ones. And it's really hard, intentionally.
That's an absolute minimum six months full-time (and a lot of students spen dmore than 40 hours/week) with no breaks; longer hour for hour than the time in a CS degree spent on software-related topics (though those vary far more widely than most of us like to pretend).
If you eliminate context switching, have the right tooling and instruction, yeah you aren't coming out the other side a principal engineer, but you can certainly build stuff, contribute to code the right way on teams, understand data structures and algorithms enough to make stuff performant, problem solve and build a whole lot of stuff and a lot of value.
That's enough to start getting paid, and 30 years later you can continue to marvel at how you're still just scratching the surface.
That's kind of beautiful, actually.
> BloomTech is at 960+ hours for our shortest program
I helped run a large school for 6 years with 4,000 students/year who took an 850 hour program. Sad to say that amount of training isn't necessarily as much as it sounds.
850 actual hours, butt-in-seat and required, or 850 scheduled hours?
The rules are complex but feds require 90% attendance for clock hour programs receiving financial aid.
A lot of software jobs are collecting data from a source, doing something with that data, and then putting it somewhere. It’s just CRUD over and over.
To do the frontend work with more recent tech like websockets that you're just now learning about.
In all seriousness, considering the amount of bootcamp grads now at all (yes all) levels of the industry, this is an out of touch take. They're getting hired to work hard at entry level software engineering jobs, and most of them quickly move beyond that.
> this is an out of touch take
I'll grant that possibility. Also, my anecdata isn't an objective truth right? But I can only judge by what I know and have seen. I wouldn't hire myself at my 2 year mark, all I could produce then by my standards now is a bunch of code I'd have to fix. I've had the same experience with junior developers I've hired.
Maybe these bootcamp grads are great, I haven't hired them because of the issue I raised so I don't actually know.
I've hired several developers straight out of dev boot camps and I've had good experiences with them. I wrote about that here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...
Graduated from a boot camp in 2014 and I can confidently say I did not learn a ton(3 months 5 days a week) but it did reinforce my desire that I wanted to be in the field and that I wanted to learn more. In some ways the whole thing is a money grab, but when I went in to my first job interview after the bootcamp(which wasn't even a junior dev role, it was a bit lower on the rung), they gave 0 craps about my 4 year undergrad degree and we instead had a lengthy conversation about my bootcamp experience(I did end up getting that job).
People hire junior devs everyday. These people are at least a prepared as most of the folks coming out of CS programs. And are definitely more prepared than I was.