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BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

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Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#81

Post by austenallred »

mikeyouse wrote: post #22
throwaway2729 wrote: post #15

The CEO was cheering on when Musk laid off half the company. Not surprised.

Not aware of that but he always seemed like the kind of CEO who would benefit from a lot less time on social media trying to be a thought leader and a lot more time working on the company.

Hmm, perhaps. I actually don't spend as much time on social as it would seem. It takes very little time to dash off a tweet. It's almost like a background process that runs in my mind, and it helps me think through things and shave the edges off of my thinking.

There's also probably a dopamine hit that I get from it that I'm not as aware of being a driving indicator, but I don't believe it negatively impacts my ability to run the company.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#82

Post by hackitup7 »

awb wrote: post #6

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads? I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class. None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had…

I have, and through many years of training (and more importantly, tons of hard work + raw talent on their part) have watched a few become very senior engineers / senior leaders in engineering management. This was years ago and they were from one of the bootcamps that only gets paid if you get a job as a software engineer.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#84

Post by jfarmer »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #33
awb wrote: post #6

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads? I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class. None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had…

I’ve hired quite a few mostly from the old DevBootcamp before it was acquired by Kaplan and spun down. Like most companies, we hired them into our apprenticeship program and then they worked their way up from there. Most of them now are senior engineers or moved into management across the globe. I’d say DevBootcamp seems to have put out some of the strongest students and they’ve done extremely well for themselves wit…

Glad to hear our students worked out for you! We tried hard to give students a career, not just their first job.

Some of the other anecdotes in this thread are disheartening, for sure.

Flatiron, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright also had similar reputations early on. A very different landscape now.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#85

Post by austenallred »

onetimeusename wrote: post #58
MivLives wrote: post #52

I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to... Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA. I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.

Why weren't lambda grads able to get good jobs? I think that was the main controversy. Was it the instruction or what went wrong there?

I don't think the assertion that "lambda grads weren't able to get good jobs" is true.

Obviously not every single student has been hired, but our hiring rates have always been pretty good (they're better now than they were in the past), and thousands of BloomTech (we had to change our name because of a trademark lawsuit) grads have increased their lifetime earnings by billions of dollars, and work at nearly every major company you can think of.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#86

Post by disruptthelaw »

ucm_edge wrote: post #20
awb wrote: post #6

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads? I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class. None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had…

I hire them and give them a task somewhere between support engineer that executes well documented code snippets in run books and junior engineer that does very basic CRUD web app development. Making internal dashboards for the customer success team, etc. Give them about 32 hours of work a week and 8 hours of tutorials on other things. Build them up from there. I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lac…

Have you observed any other path for new want-to-be developers other than boot camps that tends to yield better outcomes ?

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#87

Post by ec109685 »

austenallred wrote: post #74
ec109685 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, lame they charge companies to attend Bloomtech career fairs: https://www.bloomtech.com/hire-from-bloomtech

That's not a charge to attend career fairs; our partner companies pay us for white glove recruiting services, advanced access to grads, and for us to find and deliver unique sourcing criteria from our student body. It costs us a lot of money to offer those services, and I think that program _almost_ covers its own costs, but has been a big winner. The purpose is to create a relationship that helps learners get hired,…

Sorry for misrepresenting. Are there free career fairs arranged by your school that companies can attend?

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#88

Post by snowypine »

onetimeusename wrote: post #58
MivLives wrote: post #52

I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to... Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA. I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.

Why weren't lambda grads able to get good jobs? I think that was the main controversy. Was it the instruction or what went wrong there?

I know someone who went through the Lambda/BloomTech bootcamp. Although they weren't able to transition to a new role, the experience helped them start to code in their job at the time. And iirc, because he didn't land a swe role, he didn't have to pay Lambda based on the ISA.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#89

Post by austenallred »

ec109685 wrote: post #87
austenallred wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a charge to attend career fairs; our partner companies pay us for white glove recruiting services, advanced access to grads, and for us to find and deliver unique sourcing criteria from our student body. It costs us a lot of money to offer those services, and I think that program _almost_ covers its own costs, but has been a big winner. The purpose is to create a relationship that helps learners get hired,…

Sorry for misrepresenting. Are there free career fairs arranged by your school that companies can attend?

“Career fairs” as such haven’t been very successful for us, so we don’t run them, but it’s not because we charge for them. There are other mechanisms to meet grads (and our most successful connections are 1:1, not many:many) but until recently when we had some major hiring partners come in for our backend program most of our grads were hired by companies that don’t pay anything.

Re: BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

#90

Post by sokoloff »

awb wrote: post #6

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads? I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class. None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had…

I have a couple of bootcamp grads who are good. Thing is, I’m 99% sure they’d have been good without the bootcamp time as well.*

Overall, I’ve had a terrible experience with the bootcamp “mills” that cram people though dozens in a batch and where all of them have some bullshit story about how they did customer interviews and then built an inventory manager or CRM or e-commerce site for this (made-up) business. The story rhymes with a story that would be relevant but it’s 100% veneer with no backer.

They’ll have a GitHub link on their resume. On it, you can see the same code as 5 other applicants. All the green days are clustered together and all stop abruptly at the same time as each other.

Those candidates are what a lot of people think of when they think bootcamp.

tl;dr: bad bootcamps are bad. I don't think I've ever crossed paths with a Lambda School/BloomTech grad to have an opinion on their program.

* this is the type of bootcamp experience that reads to me like the rare positive exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33826116

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