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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

#231

Post by nusl »

bshanks wrote: post #230

I don't understand why an Income Sharing Agreement would be classified as loans. They seem more like equity than debt; the amount that students would pay depends on their future income, and can be arbitrarily small or large (right? or maybe I am misunderstanding the terms of these agreements). I had thought that debt is when you have to pay back at least the "principal" no matter what, and equity is when the financie…

You'd probably need to read the contract they make folk sign to get a real idea of why. It could be that the contract structures it like a loan.

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

#232

Post by ornornor »

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 doesn’t seem limited to that particular boot camp, sadly.

I’ve instructed at two boot camps (one in North America and one in Europe). It seems to be standard practice in the industry: inflating placement numbers, very low quality material/curriculum and course material, a kind of omertà where students fear speaking up, admitting students who clearly don’t have the skills and will drown in the course, stringing you along “it’ll get better you’ll see” until you pass the number of days where you can’t drop out without losing a significant chunk of money, counting the graduates cum instructors towards your graduate placement rate…

From my experience, boot camps are mostly scams. Maybe they will be a reckoning, it really sucks that the business model basically revolves around deception and taking thousands from people who want a career change.

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

#233

Post by pbhjpbhj »

bee_rider wrote: post #177
avarun wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their name change was unrelated to this. Somebody else owned a trademark for Lambda and sued them over it, so they were forced to change their name.

It should be impossible to own the trademark to a letter.

Letters in foreign languages seem capable of enough distinctiveness to be registered trademarks to me, like Alpha Security, Delta Airlines, Kappa clothing.

What's the problem you see here?

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

#234

Post by KnuthIsGod »

". The CFPB found that BloomTech and Allred falsely told students the school’s “income share” agreement contracts were not loans, when in fact the agreements were loans carrying an average finance charge of around $4,000. BloomTech and Allred lured prospective enrollees with inflated promises of job-placement rates as high as 86 percent, when the company’s internal metrics showed placement rates closer to 50 percent and in some cases as low as 30 percent. "

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

#235

Post by sensanaty »

If my math is correct, they scammed roughly $44M from ~11000 people... And the fine is somewhere around $150k? In what universe is that an acceptable punishment? Whoever is running the show here should be thrown to rot in jail for the next few years, not this love-tap they're getting.

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

#236

Post by weezin »

danso wrote: post #59

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...

This post is quite ironic.

https://x.com/paulg/status/1110677737558159360

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

#237

Post by ineedaj0b »

ryanSrich wrote: post #208
homefree wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah the Mighty situation is when I started to question PG's decision making. Obviously he's super successful and has helped companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars succeed and grow. But even Steph Curry has off nights. Mighty always sounded like a bad idea. But when I saw PG really making a big deal about it I followed Suhail on twitter because I just had to see what PG was going on about. From what was post…

Suhail was lying to himself constantly on his Twitter. He believed reality different. PG talked with Suhail and thought, well Suhail is posting publicly and telling those he knows and I know things are going well, so things are likely going well. Because who would lie that hard?

But that was Suhail, totally sure in his lie, smart enough to change the future, but dumb enough to not see his business sucked.

I don’t think it’s right to be hard on PG or Suhail. People fail and Suhail was very smart, smart enough to hold a fracturing vision together much longer than anyone thought. He looked like a guy trying really hard and probably was.

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

#238

Post by sensanaty »

sandofsky wrote: post #24
saadatq wrote: post #8

Unreal: > 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.

When confronted about this on Hacker News, Austen defended himself with: > I did say the hiring rate of a cohort of one student was 100%. And in the same tweet I said, in all caps BUT VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE. Odd how that doesn’t make the article, don’t you think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813371 Incidentally, it did make it into the article he's referring to, twice.

I could almost respect the hilarity of this defense if it weren't about him having scammed people for (in aggregates) millions

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

#239

Post by ack_inc »

sensanaty wrote: post #235

If my math is correct, they scammed roughly $44M from ~11000 people... And the fine is somewhere around $150k? In what universe is that an acceptable punishment? Whoever is running the show here should be thrown to rot in jail for the next few years, not this love-tap they're getting.

I'd say your math is wrong. Only a small % of the 11,000 people are going to agree they were scammed.

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

#240

Post by LunaSea »

davely wrote: post #173
ec109685 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google goes to great lengths to increase diversity: https://about.google/belonging/diversity-annual-report/2021/...

Not that you’re arguing for or against, but I thought I’d drop an interesting link to a 2020 McKinsey and Co study that shows more diverse companies generally outperform their peers. [1] Is there any wonder that Google and other (not exclusive to tech) companies desire this? [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...

Is that the same McKinsey that helped start opioid epidemic?
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