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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

#181

Post by teeray »

dragonwriter wrote: post #131
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the corporate death penalty This is a silly idea lobbyists love because it sidesteps the actual corporate-destruction mechanism: liquidation to pay massive fines, license revocation and/or personal liability for senior management. Consider even the penalties here, which effectively ban Allred and Lambda from doing business. If you corporate death’d them, the contracts and assets would still exist. Allred would be u…

> If you corporate death’d them, the contracts and assets would still exist. Allred would be unpunished. Everything would go back to shareholders who were presumably fine with the status quo, and would be fine putting them into a new entity that Allred could manage. This is wrong for a variety of reasons: (1) The corporate death penalty is proposed as an additional remedy, not an alternative remedy, to personal liabi…

I’d go so far as to say that the officers should be barred from working in the same industry for a couple of years. Long enough that whatever edge they had is eroded by time. It might be extreme, but adding a “curse” aspect to officers’ careers would act as an additional deterrent.

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

#183

Post by robocat »

CPLX wrote: post #105
sandofsky wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The more we see the legacy of PG’s various protégés and “thought leadership” out in the world the more I start to think Jessica Livingston might have been responsible for much more of YC’s successful trajectory than people realized at the time.

PG writes about her influence here, and why she avoids the spotlight:

https://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html

He also seems to give some credit to Jessica for choosing to back the Reddit founders:

  we thought that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected [them].
Edit: she gets mentioned here too: https://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html

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

#184

Post by jcryzu »

wtf92345923 wrote: post #20

Am 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…

It was a hell of a con!

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

#185

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #178
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO in that case would be culpable for culturing a culture of criminality. The buck stops at the top.

I mean, I agree with the sentiment but good luck codifying that in a law that won’t be abused to convict innocent people who were convenient patsies while letting guilty ones walk free due to the “subjective” nature.

Sarbanes Oxley already codifies corporate officer responsibility into law, so there's a pretty clear precedent.

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

#187

Post by hackerlight »

thiscatis wrote: post #75
hanniabu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Not just pg, also the stripe founders have been fawning over Austen. They all knew it was a predatory “school” but backed it anyway.

The peons and peasants with their pesky "anecdotes" don't morally matter to these elite club members. Never believe they're on your side although they're good at making it look like they are.

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

#188

Post by noufalibrahim »

homefree wrote: post #102
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…

This is pretty messed up - I liked the idea of incentive aligned ISAs (and actually teaching a skill that universities mostly don't), but it still requires someone of good character making decisions ultimately.

Yes. The ISA was a good idea. It aligned the incentives of the company with the vocational success of the students. There are several clones of this in India. I assumed that the rest of the details (like curriculum etc.) would fall into place and the thing would be atleast a moderate sustainable success.

I think that's it's the pressure to grow and become a "unicorn" that seems to encourage these kinds of ugly compromises and behaviour. That kind of thing can be just annoying if the company was some kind of social media thing but when you get involved in something as important as education which can have a huge impact on a persons life, you have to be responsible about it. But that doesn't really help the valuations.

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

#189

Post by hackerlight » 

  > 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.
This is shameful behavior. And to think prominent people were propping him up after so many stories had already come out, all in the name of not cowing to the mob. They all have figurative blood on their hands, and I already know they won't be apologizing to the affected people.

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

#190

Post by noufalibrahim »

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/

The "no curriculum" style automatically filters for a certain kind of self learning high achieving student. This is a reasonably guarantee of success and also limits the scale of the operation.

Lambda School is more of an attempt to train the average guy who wants to increase his earning ability. He doesn't have the time or patience to "work on cool things" in the hope of "learning a lot" which is loosely correlated to finding a good job.

They cater to different crowds and solve somewhat different problems.

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