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CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

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Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#161

Post by ec109685 »

jdp23 wrote: post #138

Paul Graham, 2020: "Lambda School will teach you programming faster than most colleges. And it not only works well remotely, but was designed to from the start." [1] Paul Graham, 2022: "Of 1277 students who graduated from Lambda School in 2020 and sought jobs, 950 got them, for a placement rate of 74.8%. (Lambda's weirdly dedicated haters will be happy to hear that these numbers were audited by an accounting firm.)"…

The “who sought jobs” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Need to know number of people who started program and number of people who got jobs at the end.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#162

Post by tbrownaw »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #117
imzadi wrote: post #66

I 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 fail to understand how you can mess up basic things like

Hiring people who have experience and know what they're doing isn't very revolutionary or disruptive.

Plus it can be hard to evaluate competence in a field you don't know that well yourself.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#163

Post by reducesuffering »

homefree wrote: post #107
martythemaniak wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCs would improve their public image if they took the occasional L.

I thought the idea behind lambda was good I was a lot more surprised by PG's strong support for Mighty which seemed a lot more bizarre. Though his recent tweets wrt Israel have been the most disappointing for me.

Lambda School and Mighty having the biggest PG cheerleading support of anything else kind of seals the deal. You can be great at something for awhile but youll always lose the zeitgeist eventually.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#164

Post by __float »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #89
petsormeat wrote: post #17

It's disappointing that California's Bureau for Private and Post-Secondary Education (BPPE) continued to approve this boot camp. I thought the rationale for creating the bureau was to discourage scams in job training.

Reminder: California passed a minimum wage law for fast food workers that exempts places that make their own bread (ahem, totally unrelated coincidence: Panera which bakes their own bread is a big donor to CA's governor). https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-c...

How is that related to coding bootcamps? Is it just a general dig in the direction of anything Caliornian?

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#165

Post by mathattack »

He seems like someone who fell in love with the persona of being an entrepreneur rather than someone committed to their students and the work.

I’m surprised they survived their first brush with the law. Can they possibly survive this? Looks like the persona is still active and in denial.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#166

Post by abdullahkhalids »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #135
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not surprising. Was the founder technical? Have any insight about education?

He didn't need insights about education. Just needed to hire 5-10 profs with significant industry experience and ask them to create a curriculum. But from the stories it seemed like a bunch of amateurs were playing the move-fast-break-things game.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#167

Post by internetter »

g-w1 wrote: post #130

The 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! [1]: https://www.recurse.com/

RC is not a bootcamp: https://www.recurse.com/not-a-bootcamp, so it's not at all comparable to this program

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#168

Post by [deleted] »

janalsncm wrote: post #128

Didn’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.

[deleted]

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#169

Post by paulddraper »

ji_zai wrote: post #155

I believe the underlying cause is that the pay-to-learn model itself is not feasible because the value of a good teacher's time cannot be compensated without charging students and ridiculously high fee, and a student can't justify a high fee when the outcomes aren't guaranteed. Colleges have worked in the past because the outcomes were more or less guaranteed (i.e. if you got good grades and graduated, you would very…

That, plus there is an extremely strong negative select for coding bootcamps.

Your local community college could have the best program ever, but they won't beat Ivy League grads, purely because of the inputs.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#170

Post by wbl »

nickff wrote: post #37
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any you’d like to highlight that come anywhere close to “we picked a sample size of one student” or “no finance charge means $4k finance charge”?

Colleges do tend to be a bit more careful, but they often publish hiring numbers based on graduates rather than students, when advertising. This is deceptive, because they never mention their completion rates (which are often around 50%), and significantly impacts the calculus.

The completion rates are listed online and have a standardized definition from the government.
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