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

Post by CPLX » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 5:37 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #132

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…

This is kind of true about all of Tech. Much of the crowd here isn’t very smart. They simply happened to be at the right place at the right time, ie a time where “software was eating the world” and also the iPhone/Android took over. Finally, the success of the actual smart people in Tech (Google, Apple, Amazon, FB) who are largely pre-iPhone companies, meant that there was a lot of venture money flowing around, when…

Post by LMYahooTFY » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 5:41 AM UTC

adeon wrote: post #197

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a sad amount of dog piling for HN. I know dozens of students who attended and turned their lives around because of the program. I see Lambda Alumni on every page of LinkedIn job boards. I'm sure some people had a bad time, but all of the ISA issues GP stated are clearly stated in the contract, and these calls for "jail time" are absurd. People clearly know almost nothing about the program, or its success rate. D…

If 90% of students have a good experience but the 10% of students have a similar experiences to the poster there, then I still think Lambda is another ethical disaster of a start-up. "It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 5:48 AM UTC

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…

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 5:58 AM UTC

teeray wrote: post #181

dragonwriter wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by ji_zai » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 6:03 AM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #169

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.