Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that make student loans? Slavery?
Loans are a payment. These were a percentage of earnings. They are very different.
Okay, so what's an income based repayment plan for a loan?
Fast Crimes at Lambda School
141–150 of 354 posts
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#142I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our school who were talented enough to understand computer science and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why? Because those students were already absorbed by the established traditional universities.
I have a similar view and am skeptical of bootcamp claims that they can get anybody a job with X weeks of training. I'm reminded of the ending of Ratatouille when the critic figures out that the motto "Anyone can cook" means "Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere". I'm personally biased, but I feel like one bootcamp program that got this right (for a while) was Insight Data…
Apparently when the pandemic hit Insight pivoted into a remote model with ISAs, then stopped accepting new cohorts.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Insight-data-science-scam-dur...
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#143I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our school who were talented enough to understand computer science and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why? Because those students were already absorbed by the established traditional universities.
Yeah my impression is that there are a decent number of people who are probably smart enough to learn to program, at least in an "easy" language like Python, but it's just too boring for the average person.
I think law is similar. Do you really need to be super smart to be a lawyer? Probably not. But you do have to be vaguely interested in reading legal texts and... Jesus no thanks.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our cohort was 23. 2 people basically scammed AppAcademy by not finding a job for two years but did find jobs after that and didn't have to pay their ISA. Everyone else did find jobs within about 3 months. All but three have moved into senior roles. Of those three, one prefers just being an IC and two moved into product management. I don't know how things are lately but given sentiment I hear about hiring from bootca…
Took a risk hiring out of App academy once. Guy had gone through hundreds of interviews and just bombed on all of them. I know why, he just sucked at interviews and exudes a Morty's dad kind of vibe. Perfectly fine programmer, it turned out.
Is his name Tom? :D
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#145I'm reminded of a company I've crossed paths with in the past. It's the same people each time, but when they get found out they tear down the old company and erect a new one with the same business model under a new name. At first it was called Unbounded Solutions, then it was called BrighterBrain, and now it's called EnhanceIT.
Their whole deal is, they will offer you a "free" crash course in mobile development (or whatever the new hotness du jour is, these days I'm sure they have AI offerings). I believe the course lasts two months, after which they will prepare a fake résumé for you, apply for contract positions in your name, and have call-center people in India do the phone interviews on your behalf, pretending to be you. You are also coached in how to lie about your experience for the in-person interview. You are obligated to work for two years at wherever they place you (could be one place or many places, I guess). If you do not agree to all of this, you will be assessed a $20,000 charge for your "free" training and billed for such.
The principal in all three companies is Vikram Thadani. He's been running this scam in some form or another since the early 2010s.
Their current site: https://www.enhanceit.com
Old blog post about someone who got skeeved out applying to work for them when they were BrighterBrain:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150308193650/http://shifttohap...
More recent Reddit post about the same shit going on under the EnhanceIT name:
https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/v63p2t/enha...
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that make student loans? Slavery?
Loans are a payment. These were a percentage of earnings. They are very different.
I believe they're capped to a maximum time and fixed amount, so it's like a loan where the payments depend on your revenue no? And if you don't reach the max amount during the max time you end up paying less.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#147The government student loan system in England effectively uses an income sharing agreement: with the most recent version, you pay 9% of your income over £25,000/year and if you haven’t finished paying it back within 40 years, it gets forgiven. This scheme doesn’t pay for itself though. (it costs the government money).
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…
You underscore the same thing I noticed as well: To have a decent career as a software engineer you need to be a tenacious problem solver. Even the not-so-great devs are tenacious. There are tons of smart, hard-working people who have a mentality of "You should be able to do everything correctly and have it work correctly the first time, or maybe on the second try with some minor adjustments". And I think these peopl…
I think you’ve also gotta be comfortable being in a pretty dark place a lot of the time.
It’s like being a plumber if your tools did surprising things or simply broke and required repair regularly, you had to learn totally new (and usually not any better) tools every year or two, and you did the actual work with a crappy remote-control robot, mostly crammed into dark spaces, with no schematics or plan or even ability to personally see the outline of the general area you’re working in and lights that only illuminate about 2 feet ahead.
Lots of the time all your shit you need to do the other shit is broken or is lying to you, and you’re also in some awful little mess that you can’t be sure there’s any real way out of because you can’t goddamn see anything.
“Ok time for standup!” now try not to slip and say “fuck everything, I hate life, all of this is bullshit and I’m pretty sure we don’t even need to be doing it. No blockers.” Keep on your mask that presents you as employably-stable.
It kinda fucking sucks. I get why people don’t want to do it.
[edit] oh and it’s that plus all the usual offices-suck dehumanizing , quietly degrading, pointless-feeling, politically- and ethically-nasty (cf Moral Mazes), boring shit that people’ve complained about in much the same way since the 50s or so (e.g. Yates’ Revolutionary Road)
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad to hear that it was a positive experience for you! Do you think you know what % of your peers ended up working in tech off the top of your head?
just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a lifechanger. i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the…
I was a bootcamp instructor at a place. This had been my experience too with classes and how I selected TAs.
I had no control over student selection. The bootcamp school accepted everyone. I told them not to, they didn’t care.
Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School
#150AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly successful. There have been situations where they've deemed certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started. I have first hand experience with their progr…
> ...a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started.
I can attest to this. AppAcademy essentially gave me free interview prep with many rounds of technical interviews resulting in me landing a role before the admissions process even concluded.