Single mom sues coding boot camp over job placement rates

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/single-mom-sues-coding-boot-camp-over-job-placement-rates-195151315.html

by akanet • 4 years ago

97 112 4 years ago

finance.yahoo.com

yakak• 4 years ago

I don't really get the claim about misrepresenting their financial incentives.. Is there a lender in the middle that pays the school a lesser amount and assumes the risk? I can't imagine they qualify for a federal educational loan guarantee.

akanet2• 4 years ago

in my first story[1] on lambda school, my point about misrepresented financial incentives was about, fundamentally, lambda selling off its ISAs to a hedge fund. in this case, the school managed to recoup income on a students irrespective of whether they found the job.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

ceeplusplus• 4 years ago

Generally these ISAs get securitized, so the risk shifts off the school's books and the school just gets paid the cut for originating the security.

That being said bootcamps (or really school in general) are not a magic bullet that automatically gets you a job. Even a bachelor's in CS might not get you the skills needed to become a web developer. The core point of a real degree is it teaches you how to learn and instills basic principles that apply generally to any field. But you still need to put in the effort to learn domain specific things.

akanet2• 4 years ago

btw, this story is notable in that, unlike the other cases brought by the NSLDN, this student opted out of the arbitration clause in her ISA and can therefore sue in civil court. This confers numerous advantages, including being able to compel discovery.

kodah• 4 years ago

I was reminded by someone at my company that by opting out of my companies arbitration clause I can also be sued directly by a multi billion dollar corporation. I'm not a fan of arbitration clauses, but even having the opportunity to sue is not tipping the scales much.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

That doesn't sound like a great excuse for an arbitration clause. Unless you're in a position to alter the contract, the terms of arbitration are chosen by your employer. They wouldn't set themselves up for failure by handing out too many protections by adding an arbitration clause; if the company doesn't benefit, they would avoid the clause.

I don't know the terms of your clause, but I haven't heard of any arbitration clause that's beneficial to the party not writing up the contract.

qiskit• 4 years ago

Community colleges should really be filling this role not for-profit vultures preying on the poor and the desperate. Can't community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp equivalent?

Does the $30K income sharing agreement mean that she has to pay $30K to the school once she starts working? And if that's after tax, then doesn't it mean she'll have to make around $50K to have $30K in after-tax income to pay back the school?

ipnon5• 4 years ago

Hot take: All of the information in boot camps is available online for free, and people who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn have a harder time breaking into the industry. Any programming job requires solving new problems everyday. People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb.

gh02t• 4 years ago

Isn't the actual material covered in these camps secondary? What people want is a certificate to put on their resume and some help with networking/placement. I mean I also think these programs are just as ripe for shady dealings as places like ITT Tech, but that's why people are paying into them.

sshine• 4 years ago

There's also the people who just need a bit of guidance before they can improvise.

They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and "can only repeat from memory".

mindvirus• 4 years ago

If you want to learn pretty much anything the information is there, but it's not curated, and you don't have the support of a guide. Especially if you're new to the field, you don't necessarily know how to even ask the right questions about where to start or how to get unstuck.

To make an analogy, if you were learning to exercise for the first time, the information is out there, but there's a ton of bad and conflicting information out there too, and if you're not careful you'll make no progress or even get hurt. So it makes sense to hire a trainer or learn from friends, especially in the beginning.

blowski• 4 years ago

In my teens and early 20s, I had all the time in the world to experiment. As a middle-aged father, I get very few hours to learn, and so have to use them efficiently. Being spoon-fed helps a lot with that. It's an especially acute problem given how much junk info exists on the internet.

If you can afford the time to spend a whole day learning how to solve the problem yourself, it's probably the best way to learn. But if we restrict the industry to those who can afford that time, we'll be poorer for it. Many people can be good developers despite going through a different learning path.

SamoyedFurFluff2• 4 years ago

I disagree with this hot take and I’m a hiring manager. I know for a fact recruiters aren’t going to be forwarding resumes from single moms who self-teach learn python the hard way purely because there’s no job experience or credential, even a shitty one. They won’t even give her a time of day to send a seedy LinkedIn message. Resumes like that will be sorted out even if she might be brilliant, intelligent, and just needs a chance.

At least boot camps I know do job placement as well as the camp itself. An entirely self taught person has all the chips stacked against them.

psyc2• 4 years ago

I’d say I have always been conspicuously amazing at learning in isolation, from written text alone. However, it is still the case that I learn even better in a room with other people and some direction. So I can understand why it helps people. Also, it’s a kind of credential.

x0x0• 4 years ago

I've hired plenty of engineers; most hiring managers know that.

Problem 1: it's too easy to apply to jobs. Unqualified people blast resumes at you. If each resume takes you 2-3 minutes for a fast discard, and 15+ minutes to really look at, but only a handful of seconds for someone to send to you...

Problem 2: interviews aren't all that useful, and junior people don't have a track record to rely on. When I hire someone, I'm investing piles of senior eng time onboarding, etc. A bootcamp is a useful filter for candidate being worth the effort (time, $, opportunity cost) to hire and train.

To quote you,

People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb

A bootcamp -- much like a college degree -- shows drive, motivation, and the ability to execute over time. Is this exclusive to bootcamp or college graduates? Absolutely not, and I've hired people with neither. But again, hiring is very time expensive.

warent• 4 years ago

Being an autodidact is not a requirement for being smart enough to become an engineer. Some of the most brilliant people I know happen to have a very hard time with self-teaching.

Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.

sirsinsalot4• 4 years ago

I'm a hiring manager and coder. This last 12 months alone, i've interviewed 100+ engineers.

Bootcampers have these common problems, caused by the bootcamp's perverse incentives:

- Inflated sense of self worth. Often, they expect to be senior in 2 years, and consider themselves "experts" after leaving the bootcamp. - Inflated entitlement, making placing them within teams difficult. - Inflated sense of what the job market is like, how hard you have to work, and what an engineers learning curve looks like.

This is a generalisation, and there are outliers, but I find the above to be true. They're not students, they're customers, and they're lied to in order to make a sale.

I'm self taught, no qualifications; I have no objection to self-learning ... but the bootcamps do real damage.

paxys2• 4 years ago

Would you apply the same logic to a 4-year bachelor's degree?

roguecoder5• 4 years ago

The most important thing about bootcamps, and the reason the best ones produce people who are better-prepared than many CS programs, is because they provide real feedback from skilled coders on the code individual developers are producing.

You can no more replace bootcamps with internet websites than you can replace teachers with books: people need interactive experiences built on sound pedagogy to learn most effectively.

The reason the VC-funded bootcamps are scams is because they call what they do teaching without having any foundations in pedagogy or instruction and using un-qualified recent students as the only "instructors" looking at students' code.

ravenstine• 4 years ago

As someone who went to a coding bootcamp (Dev Bootcamp), I have to agree.

Most of what I got out of doing the bootcamp was being surrounded by other coders, collaborating on stuff in person, and being exposed to the bay area tech scene.

I don't regret going and I had some really great times there, but if today someone asked me if they should go to a bootcamp, I would suggest recreating that experience themselves at a fraction of the price.

Here's what I would suggest:

- Take online courses and use Stack Overflow. Everything that's available for cheap or free is better than anything I was taught at bootcamp.

- If you can, move to somewhere that has some semblance of a tech scene, and find the smallest, cheapest cubby hole to live in so you don't have to worry so much about paying rent. At most, have a part time job that won't interfere with your studies, but even better if you don't need to work.

- Go to tech meetups, mixers, etc. Start networking ASAP. Meet other coders. Do presentations, no matter how novice the topic.

- Start blogging about what you're learning.

- Have some project to show for your effort to your potential first employers. Doesn't matter how dumb and impractical it is. I attribute part of my initial success to hammering out a live chat with playlist and rewind control on top of YouTube years before YouTube implemented that themselves.

- Practice working your butt off. If you really want to achieve your goal, you'll stay up late to solve problems when it's necessary.

- Make sure you're having fun at every step of the way and don't let people distract you.

There, I may have just saved you thousands of dollars. Potentially that can all be done for free depending on where you're situated geographically or how much money you're sitting on.

If you know what a shell script is, you probably don't need a bootcamp. That said, if you are completely clueless to tech, maybe a bootcamp would be a good thing. Depending on the bootcamp, of course.

BizarroLand• 4 years ago

I'll give you props for having a divisive opinion that you were able to state without vitriol, but the real thing that schooling brings is structure.

All of the information in the world is available in the library, but no one will ever memorize every book in it. The internet has a trillion libraries worth of information, but no one can absorb enough of it without structure and guidance to make something useful out of it.

Schools start everyone at the same starting point and guide them through to the same end point, so that companies can rest assured that the lowest graduate of their school is at a specific minimum competency level. Without the school structure, most people would Dunning-Kruger themselves into thinking that they are either vastly better or immensely worse than they actually are.

aunty_helen6• 4 years ago

Hot take: there's a thing called unknown-unknowns and it's what separates people with a formal education in the field from everyone else.

Years of experience can make you a competent individual in the subject but even elec engineers who do a fair bit of coding aren't as well rounded as someone who has a degree in CompSci / Soft Eng.

It's possible to pick up on this if you're 'in the club,' it's impossible to notice it if you're not.

scollet• 4 years ago

Well that's the problem, is that the incentives for instruction are misaligned and the ramp to excellence are ill-defined.

The boot camps are wrong in teaching rotary, where they might benefit from selective regiments.

Learn to learn as I've heard it put.

ivanhoe• 4 years ago

You presume that one's time is free, which for many people, especially single moms, is simply not true. Time to spare is probably the single resource that they have the least of - so paying to save some time can mean a difference between being able to pull it, or simply not having a chance at all.

lkxijlewlf• 4 years ago

who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn

Don't be condescending. People switching careers don't know all the information is already online. That's what makes predatory boot camps that much worse.

mc4ndr3• 4 years ago

Yes, however spoon feeding provides focus. A poor newbie could spin their wheels for a long time traveling down the wrong coding avenues.

I wish there were more opportunities for pure UX CSS jobs, without the complexity of frontend coding. Just make pretty themes and charge for that. A gentler learning curve than HTML JS React Node Express SQL and on and on and on.

isitmadeofglass• 4 years ago

All information for any job or position is available online or in books. Why do people think coding is special in this regards?

gfxgirl• 4 years ago

My guess is the community college can't attract a teacher who knows the topics well and a bootcamp can. Note: I'm not saying all bootcamp teachers are good, nor am I saying community college teachers are bad. Rather I'm completely guessing that bootcamps pay teachers significantly more than community colleges and I'm making the assumption that would attract more talented teachers "on average".

HarryHirsch• 4 years ago

Longstanding experience is that tone is set at the top (i.e. the President and Dean), consequently the level of teaching is much more dependent on the leadership than on the money.

JamesBarney3• 4 years ago

Community colleges could probably do it for cheaper, but they probably wouldn't do it as well. Most colleges are really terrible as teaching relevant material.

My friend learned more about coding from 4 months of FlatIron than I learned going to a prestigious state school for 4 years.

alistairSH4• 4 years ago

But coding (literally coding) is a small fraction of a software engineers job.

I hope you came away from your 4 years with the tools to learn & investigate, communicate, design systems, all with a heaping side of general education you might not have otherwise obtained. Not to mention a background in OS, database, programming languages, etc that there’s no possible way to cover in a boot camp. If none of that happened, then you did get ripped off.

Most four year degrees shouldn’t be viewed as jobs programs. Yes, they’ve effectively become that, but that’s a mistake, IMO. Exceptions would be true professional programs (engineering leading to a PE, nursing, etc).

dcchambers• 4 years ago

FWIW, most community colleges/technical schools work directly with employers in their region to figure out what kinds of skills they are looking for and build their curriculums around that. They change much faster than 4-year schools. Their goal is to graduate people with practical skills that can get jobs quickly. For 2 year programming degrees, this usually means directly teaching popular frameworks and programming paradigms like MVC, APIs, or mobile app development. Those graduates won't be able to answer many questions about algorithms, compilers, or how Unix works, but they will be able to build a basic rails application or react website immediately.

Traditional comp sci degrees are not set up like that at all. Yes, you'll learn to program. But your university might offer ONE class on web development, or mobile development, etc. Comp sci degrees are really math/theory degrees...not focused much in the way of practical software engineering skills.

okaram• 4 years ago

They do ... but it is called an associates degree and takes 3-4 semesters. A one semester course is snake oil in most cases.

bdcravens3• 4 years ago

Keep in mind that a typical course is 3 hours (in class) per week, where a bootcamp is typically 30-40 hours in class. Perhaps the expectation is that the hours difference is offloaded into "home work" but you often need to do additional work in a bootcamp as well. That assumed, given a typical course load, a "semester" of bootcamp is roughly equivalent to 2-3 semesters of college work.

kixiQu• 4 years ago

If your local community college is lucky enough to have any CS at all, it may be packaged up with gen. ed. requirements (the bulk of an associate's) and designed for transfer to a 4 year college (see: https://www.clark.edu/academics/programs/dept/cse/ ). This is the opposite of the vocationally focused curriculum people want from bootcamps (whether one views bootcamps as delivering it or not).

wildrhythms• 4 years ago

Yup, this is how I first learned PHP, MySQL, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Java, C#... Great option for someone who is willing to learn, and can stay engaged the entire semester. My only advice is to make sure your community college is accredited, so if you want to transfer your credits to a 4-year school you can do so. Most community colleges have some transfer agreement within their respective state.

bsder• 4 years ago

Can't community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp equivalent?

Erm, maybe because what is being learned isn't something that can be absorbed in 1 semester?

Most community colleges do have tracks for this. Generally it's four semesters for an Associate's. You probably have core courses of: Programming 101 (Java or Python, generally); Programming 102; Computer Architecture/Assembly; Data Structures; and one of either Discrete Math or Calculus I.

That is way more than 40 hours a week for 14 weeks--and that's just the barest minimum to get someone up and running.

And note that this doesn't include any "vocational" training in the current Web Frameworks, Android/iOS, basic databases, etc.

ipnon5• 4 years ago

A few points:

1. I'm surprised Bloom doesn't have an arbitration clause.

2. Bloom doesn't say what percentage of privates[a] get a job afterwards. I can't imagine any lawyer would put a guarantee in the contract.

3. Bloom fully refunds the tuition if you don't get a coder job in 365 days. Getting that education for free is a good deal, even if all you get is web dev code monkey 101. If you have 2 neurons to rub together you can extend that into learning other areas of programming. Although admittedly that's hard for a single mom, it's not Bloom's fault she's in that situation.

4. Were coder bootcamps so successful that the labor market is now well and truly saturated with juniors?

My estimation of the story is that the litigant is salty she didn't read the fine print and probably just isn't very talented. Learning how to program computers isn't an economic panacea, and it's hard. I got a CS degree and struggled to get a decent jobs for years. Maybe we'll see CS graduates sueing their universities if this litigation provails.

[a] Somehow graduate seems inappropriate terminology for a boot camp.

roguecoder5• 4 years ago

On 4, the answer is no, but Lambda school in particular has developed a reputation at least in my circles for producing people who are less qualified than folks with no bootcamp or experience on their resume because it is not an effective program.

Rather than addressing their pedagogical failures, they decided to change their name, commit fraud & lie to potential students. Which opens them up to being sued, if only by students, like this woman, who opted out of the arbitration clause.

listenallyall5• 4 years ago

The article is entirely unclear about whether she paid anything to Lambda School, or whether she currently owes anything to them.

She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs

"Took out" of where? Her bank account? Why would she be in an income-share if she paid $30,000 up front?

for any student’s ISA payments to be activated ... landed a role leveraging skills learned at Lambda School that pays $50K or more in salary.

She has not earned anything from being a web developer. So it would appear she doesn't owe Lambda anything. Are they suing her?

ipnon5• 4 years ago

It seems like she took the ISA, then took out a personal loan to cover external expenses of taking the course. This is unfortunate, but it doesn't look like it's Bloom's fault.

threatofrain2• 4 years ago

The faults she's suing for would be deceptive business claims about placement rates, program strength, and the hiding of illegal behavior.

roguecoder5• 4 years ago

That's not how crimes work.

The crimes happened whether or not she paid them money, and any harm is enough harm to sue. If you spend your time, that is still something you spent. If the person you spent it on was committing fraud at the time, that's a crime.

listenallyall5• 4 years ago

What? I made no comment about fault or crime, all I commented on was that the article did a poor job of explaining the situation.

But since you decided to be snarky, "crimes" are irrelevant here since it is a civil case between private parties.

lucb1e• 4 years ago

What would be actually interesting, and core to the story, but is of course entirely omitted from the article, is the alleged and actual placement rate.

bdcravens3• 4 years ago

A long running problem with bootcamps is gaming placement rates by hiring graduates (often at salaries far below what their marketing suggests it possible). So any placement rates need to be quantified, since bootcamp students are interesting in become developers, not teachers.

cryptoaquinas• 4 years ago

Sounds like a hit piece against Bloom Institute/Lambda school orchestrated by failing university administrators.

High paying jobs are hard to get. They are meant to be earned and not something that will be handed over in a platter.

syngrog66• 4 years ago

one thing I love about programming computers is that its pure merit, has nothing to do with my gender, sexuality, race, marital status or parenting status. its orthogonal to all those things. the computer doesnt care, books dont care, etc. up to you when you sit down with them. anything is possible, just up to you

ausbah• 4 years ago

but does that matter? there are more important things such as access to computers & related resources at a young age, hiring for jobs that involve computers, etc. that are biased

xanaxagoras• 4 years ago

I couldn't agree more. I guess when you can't hack it and are literally told by employers that you do "not have the technical skills for the job" as this woman was, you can fall back on your gender, sexuality, race, marital or parenting status to make waves and garner sympathy from a society that increasingly values the right combination of these over merit.

threatofrain2• 4 years ago

But programming may involve culture fit, so maybe you are hypothetically comfortable working as an older person with 22 year olds, but the rest of the team might not feel the same way.

alistairSH4• 4 years ago

I suppose that’s true in some sense. But working in tech, you run into all those biases and prejudices just like anywhere else.

paulpauper• 4 years ago

For-profit colleges and coding bootcamps, which inflate success metrics and charge too much. The best argument yet against libertarianism, although a libertarian society would not require so much credentials though.

alecbz2• 4 years ago

COVID's a pretty good argument against libertarianism; I think this is a pretty ~weak one. Any time you have an industry that's largely non-private, the private parts of it are probably going to be weird.

E.g., private schools tend to cater to the wealthy. But it's not generally true that highly privatized industries cater to the wealthy. Private schools cater to the wealthy because public schools exist, which makes it very difficult for a private school to compete at "lower price points".

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 4 years ago

So I was looking for the text of the lawsuit, but the search turned up a person who closely matches the description of the plaintiff on LinkedIn (and not the lawsuit). I wish I could read the allegations because just going by her current and past employment, things look a little fishy.

I recently heard, I think on Planet Money, that a lot of places are moving away from ISAs because they have too much trouble collecting on them. People who hit it big afterward end up having remorse that they signed the ISA and try to get out from under. A suspicious part of me wonders whether that's going on here.

To be clear, I'm not saying that these boot camps are generally a good idea. I've been unfavorable about them on here for a while. But, if you do transition into a technical role after going to one, that would seem to be a success story, even if the role isn't a programmer role.

alecbz2• 4 years ago

The article mentions that they were in a technical role before the bootcamp as well.

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 4 years ago

That narrative is not obviously aligned with the employment history on LinkedIn. To be clear, that is also not my reading of the article. It says, "Bruner ended up going back to program management, a field she was working in prior to attending Lambda." But while her prior role might have had that label, it doesn't appear to have been particularly technical. It looks like it was more of an event planning and coordination role. Now she's in a technical program management role.

Maybe I'm misreading something, but I would be interested in a fuller understanding of the circumstances that might be offered by a reading of the complaint, should anyone happen to find it.

mrtranscendence• 4 years ago

Going by the LinkedIn profile, she was in program management, but it wasn’t a technical role; she was managing nurse practitioners.

legerdemain2• 4 years ago

Honestly, bootcampers are on average pretty bad, but the weakest hires tend to come from some of these so-called "elite" universities. Graduates come out of ivory tower CS programs with heads full of empty theory and zero practical knowledge or good judgment. I would bring on a self-taught or even a bootcamp grad ahead of someone whose resume just has a big-name university and a string of academic acronyms after their name.

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

For people assuming this is typical of bootcamps, there have been many discussions and articles alleging lambda school is deceptive, and a scam. Relevant links below:

  - https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucrative-tech-coding-career-low-job-placement-2021-10
  - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017  
  - https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lvi6mz/lambda_school_is_consistently_deceptive/  
  - https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qfjorv/lambda_school_promised_a_fast_and_cheap_path_to_a/

Generalizing the experience with Lambda school to other bootcamps is perhaps unfair

xyzzy21• 4 years ago

Good. 99% of coding boot camps are frauds making promises they can never keep and they know it. Most people can NOT code well ever. The economy can't possibly absorb having much more than 5% of the population being coders and that's unrealistically optimistic.

mattsuth• 4 years ago

I don’t know about the allegations of the lawsuit, but something feels off to me: She clearly (based on her LinkedIn and personal website) went from a non-technical role to a role at Microsoft that explicitly requires someone to know how to code.

Single mom sues coding boot camp over job placement rates

Related Stories