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Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

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Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#151
post #6

"Between January and June 2017, Flatiron claimed that 98.5% of its students received employment less than 180 days after graduation and that Flatiron graduates had an average salary of $74,447. However, Flatiron did not disclose clearly and conspicuously that the 98.5% employment rate included not only full time salaried employees but also apprentices, contract employees and self-employed freelance workers, some who…

You're assuming bootcamps have been valuable. They haven't. They're complete garbage.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#152
post #136

Why are students willing to pay so much to for-profit coding boot camps? In many areas you can learn the same skills from community colleges and university extensions for far lower tuition. For example in the Bay Area the UCSC Extension has a good reputation and offers several certificate programs in software development. https://www.ucsc-extension.edu/certificate-program/software-...

Hi! I paid $18k to attend Hack Reactor in 2015 because:

1. I got to write code in an environment alongside other equally motivated peers, because let's face it: An $18k commitment is more difficult to let go of than a few credits at a community college

2. Our focus was on writing code and doing things that professional software engineers did, not satisficing or cheating our way towards a letter or percentage grade

My tuition also mostly paid for itself with the +$15k they helped me negotiate with my first job.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#154

I'm not the biggest job-hopper, but I've worked at 3 companies in the last 5 years in the NYC area, and have never once worked with, known anyone who's once worked with, or knew a hiring manager who would even consider someone whose only significant background in software was a coding bootcamp. For those who've experienced it, are they hired out of desperation into firms that need manpower and have enough more senior…

All of the last 3 companies I've worked at in NYC (Percolate, Etsy, and a seed stage startup) have hired multiple engineers straight out of bootcamps. They often were hired into junior roles but if they proved themselves, they would advance. Bootcamp grads are hungry, they're usually taught how to code collaboratively and how to push code to production (skills that are usually less emphasized in CS curriculum). Bootc…

I specifically seek out Bootcamp grads. I once hired a CS grad 3 years ago that didn't have even basic Git/Github skills, had never used CI, among other things. He could algorithm with the best of them, but the last time I had to actually write a binary search tree was at a coding interview. Yet optimizing ActiveRecord queries or tweaking Varnish configurations -- that's something I deal with regularly.

Obviously not all CS grads are clueless, but unless they spend some time independently learning something beyond the college curriculum, they're often worthless when they start their first job. A bootcamp person (I've hired from General Assembly in NYC,) can generally build a complete CRUD app without much help, including deploying it to AWS or Heroku, using SCM correctly and ensuring it's covered with tests.

Of course, everyone's business has different needs. If I were working with SPARK or Ada on ultra-critical systems, at the entry level, I'd definitely prefer the CS grad, but for general web applications, the bootcamp grad often hits the ground running.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#155
post #6

"Between January and June 2017, Flatiron claimed that 98.5% of its students received employment less than 180 days after graduation and that Flatiron graduates had an average salary of $74,447. However, Flatiron did not disclose clearly and conspicuously that the 98.5% employment rate included not only full time salaried employees but also apprentices, contract employees and self-employed freelance workers, some who…

58% of classroom graduates making $74,447 average seems better than most universities out there. Too bad they had to lie about it.

[deleted]

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#156
post #35

Duke Law School maintains a 100% post-graduation employment rate by ... paying its otherwise jobless graduates at the exact moment the statistics are counted. https://abovethelaw.com/2010/06/the-secret-to-100-employed-a...

Many coding schools also hire graduates as teaching assistants.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#157
post #35

Duke Law School maintains a 100% post-graduation employment rate by ... paying its otherwise jobless graduates at the exact moment the statistics are counted. https://abovethelaw.com/2010/06/the-secret-to-100-employed-a...

Many coding schools also hire graduates as teaching assistants.

At the bootcamp I went to, this was below "get a job at Google" and above "get a job at a generic start-up" in desirability. It both paid well and providing excellent networking opportunities.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#158
post #128

I was a student at Hack Reactor Remote. They were supposed to be one of the best bootcamps. I don't know how they do it, but I feel like their stats are completely false. Most of the members in my cohort are still unemployed and they provide little guidance. They might have been good 5 years ago, but it seems times have changed.

Do you feel qualified after your bootcamp experience? I think there will always be those with a developer mindset, and even already writing code, that join a bootcamp, and those will be the ones capable of getting hired and being productive. I feel that the bootcamps leverage that to pitch to another group: those who haven't coded before, and want some of that good cheddar. In the end they aren't really ready to professionally exercise those skills without significant hand-holding, which most employers aren't interested in. (Though some may be interested in growing developers with novice-level skills at a beginning salary at 1/2 or less of the typical junior-level)

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#159
post #39

A while back, Zed Shaw was claiming to have some bootcamp takedown in the works based on dirt from students and insiders. But then nothing ever came of it. Not sure if he was afraid of getting sued or it was just posturing.

This is the same Zed Shaw who believes Python 3 isn't Turing-complete because it's not compatible with Python 2? Why should anyone take him seriously?

Never heard about that. Maybe it was all bluster then to promote his own stuff over bootcamps.
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