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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

#321

Post by FireBeyond »

syntaxing wrote: post #19
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.

Aha that’s a gem, it’s like that crypto company listed “audited by ”. They do not mention they failed the audit, but they “did” get audited.

Or Tether. "We realize - but hope you don't - that 'financial attestations' do not remotely resemble 'audits', but we're going to call this financial attestation an audit". And "If you don't fall for the first, we're going to tell you that we have had audits done but we won't release them because they're in Mandarin Chinese."

I wish I was kidding.

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

#322

Post by FireBeyond »

ultrarunner wrote: post #45
threeseed wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He seems to be the king of technically. "For a few months in 2013, Allred camped out of his car while in Silicon Valley, and frequently describes this period as having been homeless. However, a deleted post on his blog titled 'Voluntarily Homeless in Silicon Valley' explains that he lived out of a car by choice."

I have a friend who is adamant that he lives out of his truck by choice, but it's hard to call it a choice when there's only one option. I wouldn't hold his feet to the fire if he later admitted he was in a rough spot (our friend group is all very clear on this situation). I had put Allred entirely out of my mind for a while, but I seem to recall his "homelessness" was characterized more by image than by practicality…

I had this same debate here a few months ago, about people living out of their truck/van in Seattle, and the "choice" of it. There was more than one person that could (or would) not see the distinction. "I've seen plenty of social media and YT videos talking about how much they enjoy the experience".

Uhh, when people talk of living out of a vehicle in the context of homelessness, they're talking about people parked in the back corner of a Walmart lot with their laundry and many earthly possessions beside them, not social media creators making YouTube videos for "#vanlife".

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

#324

Post by dmoy »

kortilla wrote: post #306
a_random_canuck wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

> It’s funny you mentioned physics because really smart physicists would frequently spew all kinds of stupidity

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/

Not all physicists. Some are pretty chill. In fact a physicist I worked with was the one who clued me in to the whole "lots of physicists think they know everything" joke/not-a-joke thing, he thought the whole situation was very funny.

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

#325

Post by LMYahooTFY »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #300
outop wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure all the ISA issues are clearly stated in the contract, or whether they were clearly stated in all the contacts, before they started to get into trouble. But they clearly lied about much of this stuff in the headline publicity. Lying prominently and 'clarifying' the lies in the small print is obviously still fraud. Doing fraud and saying 'but the majority of the people we defrauded still had an overall po…

Can you point out the lies? I'm genuinely trying to find them, and the CFPB article does not provide any evidence other than a few marketing quotes. I'm very sure all the ISA issues are clearly stated in the contract. Everything is very clear about the fact that you will pay a minimum of $17-18k, and a max of $30k as a percentage of your monthly income. It was very clear that missing a payment would incur the entire…

[flagged]

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

#326

Post by peripitea »

not_wyoming wrote: post #281
solardev wrote: post #10

Are there any legit income-sharing schools of this type, tech or otherwise? Done fairly, it sounds like an interesting alternative to upfront tuition. On the surface it doesn't seem like a bad model, but of course it could be twisted to evil ends. From the article: > The loans carry substantial risk, as a single missed payment triggers a default and the remainder of the $30,000 “cap” becomes due immediately. > Studen…

Yes. Most states have a system where students attend school, receive an education, and pay the school back using a portion of their income after graduation. They're often referred to as "public schools", and ISAs are often called "taxes".

Those schools still charge you $50k and take 4 years of your time, so I'm not sure how that comparison makes sense, particularly for working folks looking to uplevel their skills.

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

#327

Post by peripitea »

benced wrote: post #318

I 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.

Yeah it's really hard in both this article and the comments to tell what was actually problematic and what wasn't. A lot of people seem to think ISAs are fundamentally problematic but none of their arguments seem compelling to me. It's not even really clear to me that they did/didn't deliver value. I'm assuming some of this is true, but hard to tell how much -- the CFPB isn't really giving sufficient details to know how much of what they're saying is true in spirit vs legally true political posturing. Regardless, I'll be cautioning anyone who asks me for bootcamp recommendations and is considering BloomTech.

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

#328

Post by ipqk »

sandofsky wrote: post #98
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...

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

> Thanks to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Christine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Elon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this.

Such great company he keeps.

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

#329

Post by mistrial9 »

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.

speaking of age - raise a glass to the few thousand over-forty people who were categorically rejected from the rank and file of so many Y-companies

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

#330

Post by imzadi »

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.

That's how it was sold to us. Literally, the recruiter's exact words were "we don't succeed unless you succeed." In reality, they just kept taking in more and more students. When you have your students doing peer reviews and self-reviews, there not a lot of added cost for having more students. So cohorts went from 8 - 10 students to 30+ students. They also bundled ISAs and sold them off without telling the students they were doing it. So "we don't succeed unless you succeed" was patently false. They were getting their money up front regardless.
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