Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

Another anecdote:

I did Dev Bootcamp in NYC in 2015, during what was probably the golden age for these bootcamps. I had a very very good experience, as did about 80% of the people who went through it at that time. The program was hemorrhaging money and was shut down in 2017.

The cost was about 12k for 9 weeks onsite in a big office they rented in downtown Manhattan. Every 3 weeks they had a new cohort, with about 15 students. You could repeat a 3 week section up to 2 times for no extra cost. I got an airbnb in Brooklyn and took the train in. The curriculum was focused on Ruby on Rails, with Javascript in the last 3 weeks.

We had about 5 or so instructors who had real working experience as web developers (so about 1 instructor to every 10 people or so). The instructors were all in their 30s or 40s and were passionate about teaching and had a decent amount of industry experience. They were all sick of doing engineering and enjoyed teaching so were basically taking a break from engineering jobs. We also had a counselor, two administrators, the head of the program, a full time recruiter, and a yoga teacher who came in three times a week.

If you didn't make it through the program for whatever reason, they would refund whatever time you had remaining. If you didn't make it through the first 3 weeks they would refund you 100%. About 1/5 of the people were clearly not cut out for it, about 2/5ths were capable but didn't have much aptitude for coding, and the other 2/5ths learned stuff very fast.

The 4/5ths all managed to get entry level jobs eventually. The people on the low end of that 4/5ths sometimes fizzled out pretty quickly or ended up with support jobs. I know some of them who ended up having pretty good careers as support engineers, making over 100k within a couple of years I am guessing. We all felt sorry for the 1/5th of the people who were just not cut out for it at all. Some of them left but occasionally one would graduate which was a shame because they really had no chance of being successful. There were also people who were not very good but managed to get entry level coding jobs, but I think it was a struggle for them and they eventually left the industry afaik.

Everyone had to really hustle for an entry level job but it was definitely doable. I came out being able to create full stack apps, knew how to build a front end with Angular (very poorly obviously but still) and with a decent enough understanding of how Javascript worked.

The bootcamp had a decent network. It took me about 2 months to get a job making 75k, which I got through a friend at the bootcamp. I managed to get interviews at about 6 or so places leading up to that, but had no idea what I was doing on those interviews. Most of the interviews I think I got from the recruiter at the bootcamp, including one at Bloomberg which would have netted me a pretty big starting salary. About a month into my job my boss remarked to me that I probably would have taken far less than 75k and we laughed about it.

One year later I was making 140k, and today I am making about 70% more than that so yeah, pretty good ROI. I felt like I learned about as much as possible as I could have in this short period. I kept learning stuff afterwards until getting a job, and continued to be interested in learning for years.

I am sure there is still a good business model here. The price I paid seemed like a lot at the time but in retrospect it was absurdly low. I make as much as a doctor now. The race to the bottom some of these businesses are engaging in seems like an awful approach because it is a zero sum game making it into the industry. The rewards are such that if you could get people there with a decent success rate the value of the program would be a lot higher than 12 or even 30k.

Your social security benefits are calculated based on your 35 highest income years; which includes 0 income years. The guy quit in 2001 in his 40s-50s, so he may only have 20 years of income for SSA benefits.

That said, the formula is a political choice just as the UBI benefits are a political choice. We could give everyone the same SSA benefits regardless of prior income and index the amounts to age instead. UBI and SSA could be the same administration with lower amounts for younger people and higher amounts for retirees.

https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...

yes definitely. i applied to a place where my previous career (finance) could potentially help (ended up not being used at all lol).

BUT i did get a 120k-150k offers elsewhere (ranging from adtech to music), and had friends join FB/Google out of bootcamp and thats easily six figures

being in NYC helps. the low end was like 90k.

Huh is C0D3 brand new? I've been going through full stack open but this is the first time I'm hearing about the other one.

In my very honest opinion, pg's essays, with some brilliant exceptions, are at the level of analysis that would be considered exceptional for a middle school student, average for a high school student, and "why are you wasting my time with platitudes" for a grad student.

But when I published my essays, I have 5 readers including my mother, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.