Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

consumerfinance.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 384 posts

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

#301

Post by AlwaysRock »

dylan604 wrote: post #18
Twirrim wrote: post #5

This is the boot camp school formerly known as Lambda School, that came under a lot of fire in the past for these types of practices, and other issues. Previous trouble they've been in: https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlem... https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/13/lambda-school-lawsuits/

This is one of those situations lending support to the corporate death penalty. Allowing name changes like Worldcom, Spectrum, and so on to write off some liabilities while operating as if nothing happened.

I worked for a recruiting firm in the past (first job out of college) that changed its name every 5-8 years. After I'd been there 2ish years I finally got an answer WHY they did that. Basically, they would build up a bad reputation and the easiest way to get rid of it was to just change names. Most companies that disliked them wouldnt associated the old name with the new name.

Shockingly it worked. Some companies that would have never worked with "oldCompanyName" were happy clients of "newCompanyName".

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

#302

Post by bachmeier »

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.

> I liked the idea of incentive aligned ISAs

The problem is that incentives are definitely not aligned. Once the student signs the ISA, they can put significant resources into helping the student get the best possible job, or they can put nothing into it and take a big share of the income the student would have otherwise earned. Incentives are only aligned if the ISA is based on the additional income from going through the program, and there's no way to measure that.

I think what we've learned is that this can only work if there's an outside regulator, such as an accreditation body, preventing bootcamps from taking the parasitic approach.

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

#303

Post by local_person »

janalsncm wrote: post #133
next_xibalba wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting these together: "permanently bans BloomTech from all consumer-lending activities and bans Allred from any student-lending activities for ten years" "ordering BloomTech and Allred to cease collecting payments on income share loans for graduates who did not have a qualifying job, eliminate finance changes for certain agreements, and allow students the option to withdraw without penalty" This order seems like a…

> This order seems like a death sentence. Corporations aren’t people. Ordering a scammer to knock it off isn’t even close to being a serious penalty. Allred should be in prison.

[dead]

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

pge wrote: post #255
debo_ wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wish PG was right about this, but there are plenty of examples of frauds that were not conspicuous and took in lots of thoughtful people (Bernie Madoff being one of the most obvious and public examples).

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by AlwaysRock »

jimberlage wrote: post #100
majormajor wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

I remember the marketing for App Academy was that we all would be self-taught, but then the actual makeup of the cohort were people who had prior programming experience (CS all through high school and as a hobby, but studied linguistics in college and regretted it; a designer who had done some JS and couldn’t pass leetcode interviews despite having current frontend skills, etc.) I think the problem they’ve run into i…

Yup. When the Bootcamp market flourished (early/mid devBootcamp days) and incredible results seemed common it was exactly for the reasons you mentioned. Many early attendees were folks who either had some previous technical experience or were very smart and proved in some other field but wanted to move into dev work.

Eventually the majority of those folks who were going to make the switch... Did. Then the average bootcamp graduate became someone who bought into the hype that anyone could learn to code. A lot of truck drivers, CS reps, and teachers applied. There nothing stopping those people from becoming great engineers. But they are going to have a more difficult time on average than the person who dabbled in coding for ten years while working as an engineer in another field and just needs a crash course to be proficient in web development.

Placement rates dropped significantly around that time.

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

#306

Post by kortilla »

a_random_canuck wrote: post #143
addicted wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wouldn’t call most of those Amazon, FB, YouTube etc, people the actual smart people either. They’re mostly just lucky. What made Facebook or YouTube successful over any other competitor? Just luck that their design turned out to be the one people like more? They mistakenly think their success is due to how skilled or smart they are they think they’re hot shit and their thoughts are gold. But most of them are just l…

> The same is true for most software people. We think we’re super smart because we have logical thinking and understand a complicated thing that most people don’t, but then you can always get a good laugh reading the HN crowd try to talk smart on other subjects like physics / quantum mechanics.

Talking out your ass about subjects you don’t understand isn’t limit to software people. It’s funny you mentioned physics because really smart physicists would frequently spew all kinds of stupidity about software when I was in grad school.

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

#307

Post by wk_end »

smt88 wrote: post #206
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...

Pg is a clown and a grifter, like most VCs in Silicon Valley. Almost nothing he says (outside of his comments on programming) ages well.

Even his comments on programming are…questionable. He spent years hyping up Arc, his “hundred-year language”, and in the end it arrived as…Scheme with some shorthands?

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

#308

Post by spamizbad »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #204
ec109685 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he said SMALL SAMPLE in all caps /s https://x.com/austen/status/1780798598046990358?s=46

my dude Austen here cannot help but keep poasting through everything. Social media king.

Very online founders seems like a massive negative signal to me.

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

#309

Post by AlwaysRock »

Bootcamp outcomes reports are always bullshit. I used to work at a bootcamp and spent a few days digging into popular bootcamp outcome reports. Basically they all wittle down the qualifying students per graduating cohort until they have a good number.

Reasons to eliminate a student from your outcomes report: 1. Didnt finish the program 2. Didnt complete "career commitments" aka xx number of applications per week, x number of meetings with career counselors per week, responding to all emails from bootcamp within x days - for 6 months to 1+ year 3. Didnt pay tuition or missed a tuition payment 4. Had too many absences during the bootcamp 5. Received a job offer but turned it down 6. Accepted a job offer that wasnt tech related 7. Graduate just doesnt respond to outreach from bootcamp

The 30%-50% actual placement rate is pretty realistic. I later went through the same bootcamp I worked for and my graduating cohort was probably 30% to 40%.

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

#310

Post by imzadi »

bachmeier wrote: post #242
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…

> 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,…

We were constantly sold this idea "we don't succeed unless you succeed." It eventually became clear that they had no commitment to individual success at all. They went from having 8-10 people in a cohort to have 30+ people, and starting new cohorts every week. It also turned out that Lambda was bundling ISAs and selling them off, so they didn't have any specific investment in actual students.
Post reply on HN