austen was one of paul g's favourite ceo
CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
311–320 of 384 posts
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
What tech companies do you allege have/had "minority" quotas to fill?
Thoughtworks wrote in an email to me that they were only considering non-male candidates because of their quotas. The idea, I suppose, is that I should be willing to change my gender if I'm really interested in joining.
If they had quotas, they were made up internally. But more likely they were just lying to you, or the person who sent the email was twisting the truth. I don't think anyone but you thought of the "maybe you should change gender" bit. They just didn't want to hire you, personally.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Candidly, that was pretty clear even decades ago when this was an obscure little place. PG, for example, didn’t realize that discriminating against people who have children might not be great until he himself had kids. He’s a mid dude with gross feet who came up with a wildly profitable business model (6% equity in as many promising founders as possible).
> He’s a mid dude with gross feet
Does he sell feet pics :) ?
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#314I 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…
where do you work now?
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#315I 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…
Please contact the CFPB, it is worth your trouble. Everyone's blood should be boiling reading TFA, such as: > 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.
Here is an HN thread I had with him [0]. He claimed that 90% of those who were job seeking got placed. The key point was the definition of “job seeking”, of course. I'm happy to hear that authorities took action.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#316Earlier 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...
This is also self-fulling. Investors that see this invest into more diverse companies, who in turn do better because they get more investment.
Write a convincing report saying "Companies with a Z in the name do better", and you'd see the same result.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a time about 5 years ago where tech companies were desperate to fill various minority quotas. The idea was those people were very valuable, there were very few applicants who were hotly contested by other tech companies, and lack of skills wouldn't matter - they'd learn on the job. In that world, the school only has to get the students to do a "hello world" in python and apply for the right jobs. Such a sch…
What tech companies do you allege have/had "minority" quotas to fill?
Plenty of recruitment teams get given targets. Just one 1 memo saying "hires that don't bring the company towards our diversity goals won't count for your metrics"...
(I have worked with 2 such recruitment teams).
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#318I don’t think the core model was crazy, you just have to actually deliver value. They didn’t and I’m glad they’re being punished for it.
So many people like to do fake work instead of real work, including people who scoff at fake work.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#319Good!
I was involved deeply in tech career volunteering several years back when this was called Lambda school.
Writing was on the wall about Lambda even then based on student feedback from a 100+ student multi year sample size in the orgs I helped.
Consistently students raised: ISAs coming to much larger payments than advertised. Constantly changing curriculum. The classic one for bootcamps - blind leading the blind with former students teaching the always changing curriculum, and juicing graduation employment stats. If I recall I even broke out the ol’ discounted cash flow math with students to actually sort out what the rate lambda was getting on these ISAs, and ya it was payday loans basically.
But, we saw justification after illogical justification about this setup. Former students employed by lambda getting aggressive. otherwise pretty well-meaning groups who had vendorized tech career support partnering with Lambda, despite seeing the same feedback as I did bc the company leads were in the same groups as I was.
Takeaways from all this if you or people you care about are trying to use these conduits to build a tech career and are evaluating options like Lambda vs a degree and so on:
- market can stay illogical, and same with its supporters, longer than when good, clear as day data about fraudulent (or more politely “very obscure and novel pedagogy approaches”) practices surfaces to counteract that narrative.
- people and orgs who have staked their future on that illogical/fraudulent market will roast their reputations in face of that evidence for much longer than you think or respect
- the feedback that matters should be the primary sources: the students that since 2019 or so started pointing out all these practices in bulk.
It is now 5 years later and who knows how many students who shredded their career goals by depending on schools like this.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#320I 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 y…
I'm surprised bootcamps are still around; I hear so little about them today. I figured they'd mostly closed shop considering the glut of layoffs, LLM fears, end of ZIRP etc.