261–270 of 412 posts
This is exactly why I started building https://qvault.io over a year ago. Boot camps are full of shit, they aren't teaching all they need to. We need an alternative to college that isn't expensive and based on exaggerations and lies.
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I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that the United States provides such a poor safety net for those with health issues that one person's failing health destroys the economic potential of one or more people around them. From a sheer utilitarian perspective, healthcare and safety nets are positive ROI. Imagine the job-producing startups that don't exist because "how do you pay for insurance?"
It's worse than just lost startup opportunities. I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation. Long term care is needed by a lot of folks over the age of 65 (~70% of adults age 65 will require at least partial long term care). Even "reasonably cheap" care (in my experience, roughly the same quality…
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It's worse than just lost startup opportunities. I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation. Long term care is needed by a lot of folks over the age of 65 (~70% of adults age 65 will require at least partial long term care). Even "reasonably cheap" care (in my experience, roughly the same quality…
To be fair, long-term care is not just an opportunity to accidentally (from the perspective of the holder, not the system) get rid of one’s accumulated wealth, it is often the motivation for intentionally doing so prematurely, in order to qualify for Medicaid (which pays for the majority of long-term care in the US.) OTOH, for people who don’t have the knowledge or professional advice to do this (which, of course, co…
Families should take care of their own. If nobody is willing to do that for you, you probably aren't deserving.
The problem with any education is how do you figure out the actual value added? We all know that kid who would learn stuff regardless of what environment he was put in, and his opposite. And then probably a fair few in the middle where the environment actually matters. When you're looking at outcomes, how do you know which school is worth paying for? I'm facing this issue myself right now for my primary school kids.…
Answer: with a randomised controlled trial. That is, the school randomly rejects a number of applicants who meet the enrolment criteria, then it follows up after 5 years to see if the accepted students are significantly better off than the rejected candidates (eg. in terms of income).
Austen Allred, the CEO of Lambda School, has already floated such an idea: "I’d love to eventually do an impact study that statistically shows how much more attendees of Lambda School make over the course of their lifetimes." https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1433260773040693257
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Every time I’ve seen a company bought by private equity, it spells the beginning of the end. The strategy always seems to milk every last drop of cash from the business, without any long term sustainable plan. As an anecdotal case, I visited Sea World over the summer and half the concessions and shows were closed. It was still expensive and crowded and and there were service bottlenecks everywhere. Long lines for a b…
Beginning of the end happened before that because most healthy companies don’t need private equity unless they need a lot of cash for an expansion. Part of the reason they got in that position is that they were charging to little to make money. It only follows that prices will go up and probably service down as the company stressed customer service in the hopes of attracting better future capital.
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Same story in most western countries by now, stumble once and you're fucked for life. And to add insult to injury, people will rather think you deserve it than face the fact that we're all in the same stinking boat.
Not working for twenty years (in the prime time for earning money) is not "stumbling once".
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One huge mistake I think a lot (but not all of) the bootcamps are making is taking the easy route of simply using JavaScript to teach both frontend and backend. JavaScript is a TERRIBLE first programming language. I usually have to spend 2-3 sessions per mentee explaining the idiosyncrasies of JavaScript, where some of the OOP concepts actually come from, and how things work in other languages to put into context the…
My experience is quite different: I used to love to teach introductory courses using JS. Using an omnipresent and familiar tool like the browser as the IDE and the super-powerful debug system integrated on it is a big plus for newbies. Also, the language has clear defects, but they irritate much more the experienced folks than the rookies (that are not so surprised when encountering inconsistencies). Oh, and I have a…
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Interestingly enough, all of these comments could have been said about my experience at $BOOTCAMP that I attended and then was later hired at as a mentor. The degradation of quality from the removal of human presence is a common narrative, and the students react to it so much more than management ever realizes. > at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metr…
Every time I’ve seen a company bought by private equity, it spells the beginning of the end. The strategy always seems to milk every last drop of cash from the business, without any long term sustainable plan. As an anecdotal case, I visited Sea World over the summer and half the concessions and shows were closed. It was still expensive and crowded and and there were service bottlenecks everywhere. Long lines for a b…
I think there is a double standard applied to educational reformers like MOOCs, bootcamps, and video courses. Education largely does not work for most people who enrol. Most college students do not finish, and something like a third of university students do not either. And even among those students who receive the credential, many are probably able to slide through without actually learning much. Anecdotally I think…
You can’t compare uni and bootcamps because they’re a false equivalency as someone else pointed out. The sole purpose of a bootcamp is to get a job afterwards. That’s why they market their job placement rates so much. Uni, video courses, and MOOCs are for education. Not everyone uses them to get a job, so job placement for a video course or uni compared to bootcamp doesn’t give you much info. Anecdote: I did a self-p…
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Every time I’ve seen a company bought by private equity, it spells the beginning of the end. The strategy always seems to milk every last drop of cash from the business, without any long term sustainable plan. As an anecdotal case, I visited Sea World over the summer and half the concessions and shows were closed. It was still expensive and crowded and and there were service bottlenecks everywhere. Long lines for a b…
It's an issue in market information where regulation can't really work [1]. Vendors have a brand. They establish the value of the brand such that purchasers have a signal that they aren't going to be ripped off. For example you can be pretty sure coca-cola isn't going to cut costs to the point where they don't care about putting poison in the bottle - and you don't need regulation to know they won't do it. Zeus-Cola?…
I suspect we're politically rather opposed, as I see this as a consequence of capitalism putting a price tag on everything, and something that regulation is appropriate for (some way of forcing brands to publicise when they've changed something, so that customers can know whether a review they read still applies, although the details of how to do that would be difficult). Indeed I'd argue that the only reason customers can trust a brand like Coca-Cola is strong regulation in the form of trademark law.