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CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
241–250 of 384 posts
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#242I 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…
> They promised career guidance, including having a career councilor, but I never got one. They kept telling my cohort we would get our councilors after this or that milestone, but when we got there they would move the goalpost again. The closest we got was a resume course that was not relevant to tech at all and a resume review by another student.
> They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.
This is similar to the bootcamp I saw up close. They promised placement help, making it sound as if they had a strong incentive to help students succeed, but in the end all they did was have someone comment on their resume.
Eventually the student got a low-paying job based on their previous education and the company took a big chunk of the income. The job was unrelated to the useless and poorly executed instruction, yet they still got the money, because they had a signed contract.
This is no better than the guys that make money on phishing attacks. Just a different form of scam.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#243Earlier 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.
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Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#244Earlier 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
From the footnotes: > There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud. I guess all those folks calling…
Graham also wrote Crazy New Ideas[1] in response to criticism of Mighty, in which he claimed that if "reasonable domain experts" propose an idea it can't be crazy.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#245pg 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...
It makes perfect sense when you remember pg is actually a dumb guy.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
The math ends up wildly unfavorable unless you are EXTREMELY confident in your teaching/transformation abilities. If you look good on paper before the school then you don't need it and won't be motivated to share your income. So the applicant pool reduces itself to those who on-paper don't have great chances. So you need to cause a really big delta in the ability of those people to make good money in the industry for…
Not necessarily, fresher or graduate trainee programs are this effectively. Large companies especially conglomerates do this by hiring freshers and investing in their learning and benefit by paying a bit lesser than the market over the years . Apprenticeship has also been successful economically at even a scale of one master/sole proprietor for centuries. The key is to derive value while they learn, not split the lea…
Apprenticeships also take 3-4 years on average.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#247The 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…
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Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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We should be going after all fraudsters.
Happiness with a degree is unrelated to fraudulent advertising and sketchy/deceptive contacts.
Most universities don't lie so blatantly about services provided to students or graduate job placement percentages.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#249Earlier 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.
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.
Pinpointing two duds among a sea of hits to smear Paul is... berserk.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read it and add it to this list: https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/references/
That looks like a biased source, concluding in the first sentence of its introduction that "pre-Dispute Arbitration agreements force people into a form of ‘Rustic Justice’ whose primary purpose to evade meaningful accountability for violations of contract or statutory rights" [1]. That said, I do know bank lobbying group who want to outlaw arbitration for unaccredited investors. Will pass this along. [1] https://arbi…
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