pg in 2019: > Lambda School will go on growing and transform education. Few will remember having been part of the jeering mob. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20lambda&src=typed...
now do coinbase!
CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
91–100 of 384 posts
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think they should have listed “draft an arbitration claim,” on their enrollment prerequisites?
> Do you think they should have listed “draft an arbitration claim,” on their enrollment prerequisites? Unless you’re a total numpty, you can learn online how to draft an arb claim. And even if you are a numpty, you should be be to find—in a half-decent cohort—someone who can do this. The issue is rarely ability. It’s learned helplessness in the face of the legal system. The anxiety, not ability, is the limiting fact…
The company targeted the poor, single mothers, reformed convicts, and other disadvantaged groups. They tend to lack the free time or guidance to navigate these situations. If this work is trivial to you, I am happy to connect you with them to provide your services.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not both?
Because of diffusion of responsibility, wherein the person taking the fall was only one of perhaps three dozen individuals who collaborated to make the relevant business decisions. If you to set the precedent of consolidating the consequences and doling them out to the relevant executive officer you’ll end up with c-suite executives around the country throwing their personal and corporate influence into getting that…
How doed charging executives in addition to fining a company an amount that puts the card company into unresolvable bankruptcy lead to "diffusion of responsibility"?
Yeah, rich CEOs and investors are opposed to taking any responsibility for their actions, but that doesn't we shouldn't try to hold them responsible.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#94Allred is a huge scumbag and PG was a big shill for Lambda. Don't see any mention of this from either of them Twitter, how curious
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#95Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#96Am I crazy, or do fines never come close to matching damages? Or jailtime? I'm constantly seeing rulings or indictments where an article says "defendant faces $1500 in fines or two years jail time", as if those are in any way equivalent. Were all the fine quantities written up in 1875 and just never got updated? In this case, defendants are accused of conning "at least 11,000 income share loans" "carrying an average…
Generally, yes fines are a fraction of damages; fines are meant to deter, and are paid to a regulator not the damaged party. Payout from a lawsuit is meant to capture damages, and pay to the damaged party directly.
In this case, the 'stick' is that CFPB is preventing the company from issuing new loans, de facto forcing them to cease operation. (Or I guess charge regular tuition, like a normal school?) That's a pretty big deal.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#97Are there any legit income-sharing schools of this type, tech or otherwise? Done fairly, it sounds like an interesting alternative to upfront tuition. On the surface it doesn't seem like a bad model, but of course it could be twisted to evil ends. From the article: > The loans carry substantial risk, as a single missed payment triggers a default and the remainder of the $30,000 “cap” becomes due immediately. > Studen…
> Are there any legit income-sharing schools of this type, tech or otherwise? Done fairly, it sounds like an interesting alternative to upfront tuition.
investing in startups is kindof like betting on the future potential of founders, though it's tied to a business idea.
Upstart started as a personal loan for students and expanded to other financial services, it went public recently. They innovated by doing the regular thing (student loans) better than the competition, rather than trying to be both the lender and the school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart_Holdings
> but of course it could be twisted to evil ends.
My speculation is that this was a 'road to {} paved with good intentions.' Just like most startup products face challenges in the real world, it sounds like the Lambda School tried everything they could to get high job placement rates, but weren't able to deliver at scale.
Then, as their early placement % dropped, they just didn't change the numbers in their marketing materials. After a certain point their early hopes and reality diverged enough to constitute fraud in the eyes of the CFPB
Anecdotally, we get a lot of applications for any software job posting, and I discard most of the resumes of recent bootcamp graduates. It's nothing against bootcamps, it's just a signal that the person is a junior engineer. And in the cases we have hired people with less work experience for junior roles, we've had a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in our interview process talking to people who completed traditional education (even if it was not directly a CS program) and have enough of those applicants as-is.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#98pg in 2019: > Lambda School will go on growing and transform education. Few will remember having been part of the jeering mob. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20lambda&src=typed...
In January 2020, as news broke about Lambda School's scummy behavior, Graham gave Austen a pep talk which he later expanded into the essay, "Haters." It has aged like a fine milk. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#99I attended Lambda when it was first starting out. I think I was in the third or fourth cohort. At the time, the sell was that you didn't have to pay anything unless you got a job using the skills you learned from them. I was pretty naïve, I guess. Things seemed fine in the beginning. The instructors were good, and I liked that there were actual live classes. Things degraded very quickly. They kept changing the format…
Please contact the CFPB, it is worth your trouble. Everyone's blood should be boiling reading TFA, such as:
> Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#100Are there any legit income-sharing schools of this type, tech or otherwise? Done fairly, it sounds like an interesting alternative to upfront tuition. On the surface it doesn't seem like a bad model, but of course it could be twisted to evil ends. From the article: > The loans carry substantial risk, as a single missed payment triggers a default and the remainder of the $30,000 “cap” becomes due immediately. > Studen…
The math ends up wildly unfavorable unless you are EXTREMELY confident in your teaching/transformation abilities. If you look good on paper before the school then you don't need it and won't be motivated to share your income. So the applicant pool reduces itself to those who on-paper don't have great chances. So you need to cause a really big delta in the ability of those people to make good money in the industry for…
I remember the marketing for App Academy was that we all would be self-taught, but then the actual makeup of the cohort were people who had prior programming experience (CS all through high school and as a hobby, but studied linguistics in college and regretted it; a designer who had done some JS and couldn’t pass leetcode interviews despite having current frontend skills, etc.)
I think the problem they’ve run into is that there are only so many of those types to go around, and you have to stay small or really tackle the problem of transforming someone in 12 weeks eventually. That’s a different and much harder ask.