The homepage is still making false claims: https://www.bloomtech.com/
CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
121–130 of 384 posts
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#122Total fines are only 164k? Seems low if there are many more students with ISAs worth tens of thousands no? but didn’t get placed?
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#123Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#124I 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.
That should just be criminal fraud.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#125[deleted]
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#126It was almost an open scam, how are they fined 200gs, they made like 100 mill
Exactly this. If the CFPB claims are true and the settlement seems to suggest that BloomTech and Austen agree … then the penalty should include clawing back at least half of that 100M no?
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#127I 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…
I am high level member of a volunteer based org that does online workshops in the tech space, and does dozens of workshops in dozens of countries every year. I fail to understand how you can mess up basic things like having a predecided curriculum, good teachers, a fixed schedule, or providing quality outside class support. We do all of this on a shoestring budget. The stories I have heard about Lambda/BloomTech seem…
I think if your focus is on actually educating people, and you're willing to invest your resources in those people, you can do quite well. If your focus is on scaling and creating an appealing image to investors, the education part isn't so easy.
There's probably something to who you're attracting as well. If your pitch is "come work hard with us and we'll help you learn", you draw people who are ready to learn. If your pitch is "come take out a [loan we won't call a loan] with us and we'll make you a bunch of money", you draw a different set of people.
That's not even saying anything against the students of Lambda school. I believe one issue has been people joining to improve their economic outlook, while working a different job to continue paying bills. You have to be pretty thoughtful about how you work with people who have a tight schedule. You can't just throw your curriculum and your expectations up in the air any time you want, and expect all those people to "pivot" with you. But the focus always seemed to be more on the "success" of Lambda school than on the actual success of every student.
From all the stories that come out of Lambda school, it really feels like the classic predatory view of students. They're not so much learners as they are potential sources of money.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#128Didn’t know who this guy was but I followed him recently because he tweets a lot about Silicon Valley stuff. (He was suggested by Twitter.) Some of his tweets were a little, let’s say, not grounded in reality, but I’m not on Twitter to pick fights in my legal name. But I am not surprised he turned out to be a scammer.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#129pg 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...
Peter Gregory.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#130The Recurse Center[1] is the opposite of this. They don't take any of your income, they just help you find jobs and companies pay them to find cool people. And there is no curriculum. They believe that if people work on cool things they will learn a lot. I can't recommend it enough!