Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 306 posts

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#61

Post by nathan-wailes »

busterarm wrote: post #31
skylark wrote: post #21

I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry. The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies. Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have…

Early Dev Bootcamp grads I know are pretty talented, but over the last couple years they seem to be the bootcamp of choice for people with less prior experience (that's a good thing) and less commitment to their own personal development & the industry (that's a bad thing). Those two things combined are a disaster.

Interesting...thanks for sharing that information.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#63

Post by nether »

goobynight wrote: post #17
foota wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that three thousand was over the last five years. So 6mm. I don't know much about it, but you could eat that up pretty easily it seems. Figure 300 students at a time, ten students an instructor, 100k per instructor, gives 3 million. Then there's rent and support staff.

Rent is certainly huge. These guys are renting prime time space in city centers.

I wonder if these posh locations are worth it. I'm sure it attracts some students, and there's some advantage in the proximity to hip startups also in city centers. But students are low income during the program and hardly have a chance to do anything outside the office, given the workload of these bootcamps.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#64

Post by nathan-wailes »

arikr wrote: post #11

If Dev Bootcamp was unprofitable, are other bootcamps also unprofitable, or was Dev Bootcamp an exception?

My guess is that the profitability of different bootcamps varies with the policies / niche that those bootcamps have adopted. It seems likely that all bootcamps have high operating expenses / lower margins than a pure software business may be capable of.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#65

Post by phillc73 »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #44
austenallred wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can m…

Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income? I smell a business opportunity.

That's how undergraduate University education works in Australia (at least it did when I attended. Perhaps someone younger than me can comment if things have changed in the last 20 years).

Effectively the government pays your undergraduate university fees. There is then an additional tax applied against your salary, after it reaches a certain threshold. This of course results in jokes that Arts graduates may as well be enjoying free tertiary education.

I think this is a much fairer system than being asked to pay upfront and perhaps taking out a student loan in order to pay fees. The Australian system allows any student with the ability and desire to attend University (it's not completely perfect, but it is much better).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aus...

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#66

Post by austenallred »

LrnByTeach wrote: post #60
sylvainkalache wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are doing this at Holberton since we announced in 2015. It's a 2-year program based in San Francisco, no upfront tuition but a percentage of students salary when they get a job. The program is also quite different from regular education, we have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and by collaborating with their classmates. Check us out https://www.holbertonschool.com/ It's indee…

The two business models seems interesting. How do you track students once program completes? how do you know where are they working. How does the legal binding works ? https://www.holbertonschool.com/ https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science

I can only speak for Lamdbda School, of course.

The original document is called an income share agreement (ISA). It's not a debt instrument or a loan, but is actually a legally binding "equity" stake in a student's future income under specific circumstances for a specific amount of time. Lambda, for example, takes a percentage of income for two years, only if they're working in a software-related field, and only if they're making above $50k/yr. We also cap the amount paid over the two years at $30k, regardless of how much a student is making. So, yes, if they don't get a good job, we never get paid. That only seems fair.

As for how it works practically:

In conjunction with the ISA, each student signs a 4506-T or 4506T-EZ (or any successor form) with the IRS, which effectively copies us on their taxes.

Students self-report their salary, and we adjust payments according to their reports, until year-end reconciliation, which happens around tax time. We get their taxes and double check that their self-reporting has been accurate, and adjust accordingly.

Should a student default, we have the same remedies that any other private lender would - we reserve the right to report to credit bureaus, we can sell the agreements to collections, etc.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#67

Post by brooklyn_ashey »

bovitclan wrote: post #43
austenallred wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can m…

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and themselves a great American tall tale. Becase if it isn't earned, if it isn't "merit" in any real sense, then what? Then does everyone have a right to opportunity? Yeikes. We don't have enough opportunity for that. Instead, we avoid facing these issues by focusing on "diversity" now... but only a certain very narrow definition of diversity, and only when we want to raise ourselves above others of merit for being so meritorious as to think of diversity. Then, we wonder if "diversity" has made us less competitive. The only answer here is money. Money. That's it.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#68

Post by wildmusings »

austenallred wrote: post #32
skylark wrote: post #21

I find bootcamps to be an interesting industry. The general perception is that they're learning institutions, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, bootcamps are technical recruitment agencies. Companies are realizing that smart, motivated people with no CS degree can still oftentimes excel in the majority of positions (primarily app development.) The problem is finding those people. Bootcamps have…

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can m…

Another part of the value of a university is that they factor in SAT scores heavily into admissions. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ.

Hiring based on IQ tests is illegal, but hiring mostly from certain universities is not.

Re: Dev Bootcamp Shutting Down

#69

Post by brooklyn_ashey »

austenallred wrote: post #45
GauntletWizard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income? I smell a business opportunity.

Haha. Yeah I'm the founder of https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science - a computer science academy that's free up-front and takes a percentage of salary for two years after you get a job. The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything . It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. Also…

but then one has to be affluent enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to do a mountain of pre-work and then get educated or re-educated, or for many in the USA, re-re-educated, and then one has to then afford to remain unemployed (bootcamps tend to go light on this part when recruiting) while looking for a place that wants to hire a bootcamp graduate.(hint: tough for diversity candidates here) These places are hard to find for many, even many who previously attended and paid for! an ivy school in a dying field. If this were such a wonderful model, and if we actually had a skills gap that needed filling, why aren't these hundreds of desperate and honorable tech employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? If there were such a clamour for those with basic tech skills, why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months and months? Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?
Post reply on HN