BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/bloomtech-previously-lambda-school-cuts-half-of-staff/

by lxm • 4 years ago

295 297 4 years ago

btheshoe• 4 years ago

makes sense, considering that the current economic climate in the tech industry will impact bootcamp grads the most.

vcsmjk• 4 years ago

Glad to see this, Lambda School is extremely scummy. Can’t be bothered to operate legally, and lied about it: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1211717254712135680?lan...

I really think that the law should be changed so that doing stuff like that would have been a prison term for the CEO (Allred).

avalys• 4 years ago

A prison term for not registering with some bureaucratic state agency? Why?

The “California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education”? This is indistinguishable from parody.

sandofsky6• 4 years ago

The BPPE was formed because California was the world capital of diploma-mills in the 80's. It falls under consumer protection, similar to how California has a special bureau that punishes scummy "extended warranty" companies.

The reason you register is so the state can periodically check your marketing material and field students complaints. For example, Lambda School lied about how many students get jobs, and it would have been real nice for the agency to have stepped in before the lawsuits, which are still in litigation.

rrss• 4 years ago

Why is it unreasonable to have people in a government agency to address fraudulent colleges and stuff?

Do you feel the same way about the bureau of consumer protection in the US FTC?

swang720• 4 years ago

I'm actually glad there's a state department for this. Fraudulent private colleges are a _real_ problem.

SamReidHughes• 4 years ago

Ah yes, prison for trying to teach something useful across a zillion regulatory domains, sinecures for administrators at “real” universities while students rack up piles of debt for English degrees.

ramraj07• 4 years ago

Just because one route is rotten doesn’t validate alternate scummy routes. Cops are rotten so drug dealers are good? Lol.

austenallred36• 4 years ago

This is fundamentally not what happened and a prison term for this would be insane (even California's BPPE would agree with that).

Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we weren't offering in-person classes (this was somewhat rare back in 2017 - certainly more rare than now). The BPPE sent us a letter that said we needed to register and we did so and began working with the BPPE instantly. We never ever lied about that fact, and there was no attempt to avoid regulation in any way.

ec1096854• 4 years ago

https://applieddivinitystudies.com/lambda-lies/

He also lied about having an auditor verify their placement rates. Caught asking Bookface for an auditor reference while proclaiming it was audited.

austenallred36• 4 years ago

No, that is not true. We never claimed to have an audited report until we actually had an audited report.

I asked if there was an auditor who would verify them after the fact to show that they were accurate, but we had had never claimed they were audited at that point.

Unfortunately auditors doing that is a months-long process, so we could only have them audit subsequent reports (which they have done).

Varauk• 4 years ago

employees will get normal pay and medical benefits until January 31, 2023 and are “expected to work” through that period.

So severance but they have to keep working too? Seems rough. Hard to imagine anyone in that situation would focus on working for their soon-to-be former employer.

willcipriano• 4 years ago

Immigration status dodge? Say you "expect them to work", but don't enforce it, so they aren't technically unemployed and the H1B clock doesn't start ticking right away?

Maybe trying to game unemployment insurance rates? If someone is employed they can't go on unemployment, hopefully in two months some of them find something new driving down your costs compared to firing them and having them apply right away?

It's a pipe dream if they think anyone laid off will be putting any effort in.

pkaye• 4 years ago

The WARN act requires 60 days of notification before a mass layoff. So the company can choose to either notify employees 60 days before layoff or pay 60 days of severance pay and layoff immediately.

wheels• 4 years ago

That's actually very common in a lot of countries. I think the US is the outlier in the expectation that notice and stopping of work are concurrent. Same with quitting a job. In Germany it's normal to give 3 months notice before quitting.

kawsper• 4 years ago

In europe it's normal to keep working after employer-side contract terminations.

In Denmark, depending on how long you've been with the company your employers contract termination notice period can be anywhere between 1 month (after 5 months with the company) to 6 months (after more than 8 years and 6 months with the company).

Also, most commonly, if the employee is the one terminating the contract, the notice period is 1 month (although it can be negotiated higher for key employees).

It is understood that your motivation will plummet when you're terminated, but you're still expected to maintain your responsibilites, and eventually, hand over your obligations. But you're also allowed to go to interviews during and if you get a new job your own 1 month termination warning will count.

I've experienced that some employers will offer garden leave to the affected employees, as in they don't have to work or show up daily, but they will hand over responsibilites immediately and be available if there's any questions.

austenallred36• 4 years ago

This actually isn't true.

There are a few edge cases where folks will be working through that period and contract with us afterwards in different/new roles, but impacted employees are not expected to work with us during that period.

awb• 4 years ago

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 a great experience.

kodah3• 4 years ago

I've met some people with physics and accounting degrees who took boot camps and had success, but the people I've seen succeed were already problem solvers and math-aware. They just needed to know the language and routines.

On the other hand, I dropped out of school and have been programming for a majority of my life. I was never accused of being incompetent or underperforming, but there was a point in my career where I was not going to progress without deeper math skills. That said, it only takes a couple years to learn.

da01• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate on how/where you got your deeper math skills?

tjvc• 4 years ago

I'd be interested to hear more about this, as someone potentially in a similar position. What kinds of problems did you come up against where you felt your math skills were a limiting factor? What branches of math did you focus on learning?

jurassic4• 4 years ago

I was a bootcamp grad in 2013. Myself and my classmates are now mostly filling Staff+ roles, many working in FAANG level companies. So, yes, many people have hired bootcampers and had a good experience.

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

I have heard that early classes from bootcamps tend to have great people, while the later classes are both more "dillute" in terms of raw talent and more starved of instruction time (as the bootcamp pinches pennies to make a profit).

I have worked with bootcamp grads who are amazing engineers and ones who are terrible, same with ivy league CS grads.

ed25519FUUU2• 4 years ago

Filling out staff roles at FANG? Not at the FANG company I work at. I’ve never met a single boot camp person, and absolutely zero staff engineers are boot camp grads that I know of, unless they scrubbed it from their LinkedIn and never talk about it.

emptysea• 4 years ago

Hit or miss really. Like anyone hiring is difficult but I wouldn't shy away from hiring someone with a bootcamp experience

Klonoar• 4 years ago

The companies who have hired them successfully (that I know of) tend to understand two critical things:

- You have to have an environment where they can learn - You have to have staff who can actually mentor them up

If you don't have either of those (which many startups don't, just due to not simply having the time/bandwidth) then hiring them can be detrimental.

So to answer your question: I know a few, but these companies that can do it are few and far between, and that's the dirty secret here unfortunately. The schools themselves seem to select for "can we place this person here and get our money" rather than necessarily where they can grow.

ucm_edge2• 4 years ago

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 lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow. Because the ugly truth is a lot of the bootcampers hit a plateau. I have had a couple push through to my bar for senior, but most cap out in my mid range.

During the shortage the ability to hire and get solid mids out of 65% of them was a net positive. Right now though it is less important given the talent coming into the market.

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow.

I've had similar problems. We've had some bootcamp grads who were good to work with and acknowledged that they were still very junior. We've also had some bootcamp grads who felt entitled to mid-range to senior compensation after their first year, while still getting their bearings on basic developer work. It's hard to explain that, no, I will not give them a raise to match what we're paying people with 5+ years of experience after their bootcamp promised them $200K comp after a couple years in the industry.

mritchie712• 4 years ago

Do you build those apps from scratch? Or are you using something like Retool?

disruptthelaw• 4 years ago

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

duxup• 4 years ago

I changed careers with a bootcamp. I’d say about 20% of the class was “hire-able”. But everyone “graduated”.

A number of us has made good careers of it, but yeah the largest % were not capable. It was so bad it made the camp pretty painful at times.

After graduating I was worried about walking into a skeptical audience after they encountered some of my classmates….

whoIsYou• 4 years ago

I was a bootcamp grad that was hired for a junior level role (5 years ago)

It was rough at first but I had a chip on my shoulder and voluntarily worked 10-11 hours a days for 2 years straight to make up the time difference and learn all the things I needed to learn

I was a good hire (and was also bored AF living in Ohio)

1123581321• 4 years ago

Yes. One of our best mid-level developers finished a boot camp in 2020. Excellent mix of coding and communications skills.

FigurativeVoid• 4 years ago

I’m very biased because I went to a bootcamp. However, it was very focused on placement and had good access to roles. I felt more than qualified for an entry level role, and completed progressively more serious projects.

I had a few friends wash out of their tech jobs, and we certainly had some people that were never very good. Most of us were good enough for and entry role, and a few of us were slightly overqualified.

I’m now at a really great and highly technical company.

Some of these programs have serious problems. I think the ones with ISAs are the worst offenders.

ajhurliman• 4 years ago

The range of quality is extremely high in bootcamps. I've interviewed many bootcamp grads the median quality is pretty low. However, I went through a bootcamp (Code Fellows in Seattle) and almost my entire cohort went on to eventually join a FAANG, technical co-founder, or something fairly prestigious.

The curriculum, the teaching style, and the aptitude/ drive of the cohort matters a lot.

dghlsakjg2• 4 years ago

Fellow bootcamp grad here.

This is what drives me nuts. My bootcamp has a legitimately high placement rate (90% hired as SWE or dev within 90 days), that is audited externally, but somehow it is in the same category as something that takes 1/4 the time with a legitimately terrible curriculum.

There needs to be some better differentiator for vocational training.

jollofricepeas• 4 years ago

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 with strong representation at FAANG and other “good” tech companies.

Can’t speak for the other camps besides saying I cant think who made it through our apprentice code day.

jfarmer• 4 years ago

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.

ativzzz• 4 years ago

I graduated from a bootcamp 6-7 years ago and had several offers for entry level positions from smaller companies I wanted to work at - that said I have a degree in math and have taken several coding classes and have done some self learning projects already so I was ahead of the pack and went overboard on all of our projects. Like some of the others have said, maybe 20-30% were employable out of the bootcamp

Benjamin_Dobell2• 4 years ago

I recently advertised a role and had over 2000 applicants (yes, really). The vast majority of applicants went through bootcamps. Personally, I'm fine with that, heck, I'm Head of Engineering and I'm a university drop-out i.e. didn't even complete a course!

One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github (though, yes, you should include those).

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp.

I've seen this, too. At some point, everyone coming out of certain bootcamps was an "instructor" rather than just a graduate. I suspect one of them is running a scheme to have their own grads teach their own classes for reduced tuition.

I second the cover letter section. GitHub goes a long way, but it needs something unique. I know exactly what projects are taught at local bootcamps because they're in every single bootcamp grad's GitHub profile. Show me something you worked on by yourself.

sbisker• 4 years ago

I’ve noticed that a lot of bootcamp grads are, in fact, legitimately hired by their bootcamps - just not to write code. They are often brought on term by term as TAs until they find work.

I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the bootcamps, a way to pad their “successfully employed” rates while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault the candidates for putting those experiences in their resume. They need that money to keep their job searches going, and recruiters are always biasing against gaps on the resume.

If you’re being paid by them for any reason, put it on your resume. (And if you’re not…move it to the education section, where it belongs.)

philliphaydon• 4 years ago

Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters!

I just throw the cover letters in the bin...

vsareto• 4 years ago

You could probably message 3 random engineers at random companies and invite them to coffee and it'd be a better return on time invested for your career than writing cover letters. I'm not sure why you'd want to read 500 cover letters as opposed to reviewing 500 CVs.

And why on earth did you keep the job posting open to accumulate 2000+ applicants? Legal reasons?

noodle• 4 years ago

I've hired quite a few, and generally speaking they've all turned out great. Having said that, the volume of resumes that come in to the ones that I've actually hired is vast. Myself and my recruiters have probably sifted through 10,000 bootcamp resumes per 1 hire. You have to be ruthless about who you actually talk to.

Another tip would be, don't interview a bootcamp grad for mid-level jobs.

IggleSniggle2• 4 years ago

I’m coming from the other side of things. I was a non-programmer with a programming passion that used programming as a part of my work voluntarily, but didn’t know the first thing about the kind of programming that companies hire for.

I took a coding boot camp when I decided to leave academia to join industry, and it was a useful primer on the “in” technologies that folks would be hiring for, and of the “style” of code that was fashionable at the time. I would not have hired any of my classmates (well, I might have hired one as a junior), but the bootcamp did what I needed it to do, exposing me to the “culture” of programming at tech companies.

I was hired as a mid-level and quickly progressed to senior at a large global tech company. I have been at a few different tech companies now and haven’t run into any major challenges or problems, and have only received positive feedback from my peers and managers.

If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential. I think it helped that I had a number of usable “products” that I had made over the course of my career as a solo programmer that didn’t really fit any mold. I also think it helped that I didn’t have any trouble with basic algorithm brain teasers, finding them sort of fun at the time I was interviewing. I’ve never tried leetcode but I suspect I’ve only seen leetcode “easies.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do any of that for any of my subsequent jobs as I don’t think I’d have the patience for it anymore.

selfmodruntime2• 4 years ago

If I were evaluating who I was then as a potential hire today, I’d probably consider me a risky hire with unknown potential

You would be wrong. The most important indicator the hiring manager saw in you is that you worked in academia. Hiring someone who worked in academia and also learned to code on the side is a lot different than hiring a middle aged soccer mom whose MLM scheme didn't work out. Both may have a 3 month bootcamp under their belt, but one has an entirely different work ethic.

Tade0• 4 years ago

I'm coming from the other side of things. I was a non-programmer with a programming passion that used programming as a part of my work voluntarily

I would love to ask why didn't you pursue programming in the first place, but last time I did that the person explained to me that they have a complex, chronic, hard to diagnose rare digestive tract disease and they went to study nutritional science specifically so that they could at least figure out what to eat to not makes things worse.

andrew_gs• 4 years ago

I hired a bootcamp grad and she's doing well. She did already have a mechanical engineer degree though and did program as part of that degree and so has a good mindset for solving problems. I hired her explicitly as a junior role though, I can't imagine hiring a bootcamp grad into a mid-level role directly - that would seem to be setting them up to fail?

lr4444lr• 4 years ago

Nope, that was also my experience. They either fell apart when asked to do a programming problem that required coming up with a data structure on their own (not one right answer, but not given to them) or on simple programming challenges when asked to adjust for a rule change.

xapata• 4 years ago

hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great experience.

Yes, but most interview candidates from bootcamps couldn't pass the tech screen, and most of the hires were mediocre. One was stellar.

wittycardio4• 4 years ago

Bootcamps are scams stealing money from the clueless.

benbjohnson• 4 years ago

I've hired 2 bootcamp grads from Turing in Denver. They were great and have both gone on to senior roles.

I mentored another woman in a bootcamp about ten years ago and she later went on to be a senior engineer at HashiCorp. She then got a PhD in Mathematics and eventually got into an academic role in cryptography/security/privacy.

I only have a high school diploma and I've had a successful 20+ year career in software. Honestly, there are people that are driven that go through all sorts of education pathways. I don't see a bootcamp certification being a strong signal towards success or failure. It's just a tool that folks can use.

tndl• 4 years ago

Was also going to comment about Turing school. I've worked with Turing school grads who were really strong, as well as Galvanize/gSchool grads from the period when Turning and Galvanize were still the same thing. I think Turing School's non-profit (not for profit?) status affects its practices a lot, as I know it has smaller cohort sizes and pretty rigorous entry requirements.

In my mind, code bootcamps are just like anything else in the realm of professional education - there's a ton of scammy and low quality stuff out there, but there are genuine upsides to the format and some people are served really well and come out as strong engineers.

carabiner• 4 years ago

It's like asking, has anyone had success hiring college grads? My data science bootcamp had actual Harvard and MIT degree holders (bachelor's, I don't mean their extension / online certificate programs). I guarantee you they had much better experience getting their resumes seen than the guys with no degrees. I'm in another bootcamp-esque program for SWE's and some participants have joined Google, but most have joined random second-tier companies or startups.

hackitup7• 4 years ago

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.

sokoloff• 4 years ago

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

rchaud2• 4 years ago

That's a very rare exception: the mid-career professional that has already coded in a professional setting, and used the bootcamp to figure out how to market himself for SE roles.

Most bootcamp students will be young and not know the rules of the game, or the cultural signifiers that make them look 'employable'.

hysan• 4 years ago

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads?

Yes and no, because it depends on your expectations. At the last company I worked at, I made sure to have a chat with management to understand what they were looking for before I did my round in the interview loop. I also advised on what potential questions to probe with since I had some insight having worked as a lead instructor at a bootcamp. Sometimes that meant I would thumbs down an otherwise promising bootcamp candidate because they were weaker on say, the frontend when we needed a frontend junior dev. Our VP of Eng had already understood that and we batted way above average… at first.

Then C-level management took that as a sign that all we needed was juniors and cut the budget for hiring mid+ roles in the then hot hiring market. After a long dry spell (rejected offers), we relented and hired more bootcamp grads into junior roles. That eventually flipped the ratio of juniors to non-juniors which will never go well because you end up with an environment that can’t support their growth. On top of that, C-level management expected that more staff == immediate improvements on velocity and were vocally disappointed when we slowed down. We expected it and tried communicating it - ramping juniors sucks up time, they won’t be a net positive until waaaay later, but of course, they knew better.

Looking back on that experience, I learned a lot about the importance of managing upwards and setting very very clear expectations. Because that’s where I see a lot of these hiring situations go wrong. You need to make an honest assessment of both what qualities you need in a junior and of your own environment to know if they work for your company, bootcamp or otherwise.

SystemOut• 4 years ago

Yeah, we found an amazing engineer through one of the bootcamp programs. It might have helped that she had a math degree and so she probably started with an analytical approach but either way, she did really well. This was in a rapidly growing enterprise software company with rigorous reviews.

There was definitely some bias against it in a few corners of our group but by and large, most didn't care. Ironically, the guy on the team that didn't like her because she came from a coding bootcamp (he had a CS degree) was by far my worst performer.

MikePlacid• 4 years ago

It might have helped that she had a math degree

May be that’s my own biases speaking (and my degree), but I’ve spent all my professional life in a firm belief that a math degree is way more preferential than a CS degree for an SWE job. Like you should hire a CS graduate only when there is no math graduates willing to take the job (but we never had a shortage of those feeding on the Moscow State).

If forced to rationalize this belief, I would say that CS is just a subset of math, and not that intellectually challenging actually, so a person that has chosen a CS course over a math one has voluntarily agreed to narrow his intellectual perspective in order to possibly get a better pay in the future.

(Hides quickly).

AceJohnny22• 4 years ago

My partner went to Makersquare (since bought & rebranded Hack Reactor).

They joined a successful small e-commerce site (Javascript), then a few years later joined Loon (Google X) (Python), and sensing the wind switched to another Google X project before Loon shut down.

They're doing pretty well, if I say so myself.

eastbayjake• 4 years ago

My partner went to Makersquare (since bought & rebranded Hack Reactor)

Which in 2018 was bought and integrated into Galvanize!

jraines• 4 years ago

I have hired them and taught a class. Rule of thumb if you can find they were top 1 to 3 in the class they’re probably a good if not great junior dev candidate.

My golden 2 pieces of advice to bootcamp grads:

Don’t use the resume template the bootcamp gives you. If 2/3 of your resume is “software projects” you’re probably getting screened out at this point even if you’re actually good, it’s a tell.

Second, since you’ll still need to include one or two, spend time polishing the heck out of them and make sure they are online and working! Best if they’re not a microblog, recipe/beer picker, or pokedex. Do the same polishing for your personal site. If it looks like crap you’re probably getting screened out on this, too.

ren_engineer• 4 years ago

bootcamp grads not being immediately good when hired makes sense in the context that even CS majors with at least 4 years of coding experience generally suck when they start. What could you possibly expect from somebody with 3-6 months experience?

bootcamp grads make more sense to be brought on as some sort of intern level hire with similar expectations

mhensley• 4 years ago

I've hired Code Louisville [1] graduates across multiple roles now. This is a totally free program in Louisville, KY and does a great job of getting people setup for a new career. CL grads are all over the Louisville area doing amazing work.

Of course, all these programs are what you make of them. The best graduates are people that were really invested in learning and took advantage of the curriculum and mentors. For those that put in the work, they come out punching way above their years of experience.

1: https://www.codelouisville.org/

adam_arthur• 4 years ago

One of my best new hires is a bootcamp grad with 0 real world experience. But he's a huge outlier, very self motivated, hardworking.

Personality type tends to trump experience. Unless of course you need a specialist to hit the ground running out of the gate.

In general, I have not hired many bootcamp grads over the years. They tend to present as very non-technical in most cases

babelfish2• 4 years ago

Perhaps irrelevant to the thread at hand, but as I see other commenters mentioning programming fellowships I'll ask here:

I recently saw a mention of a programming fellowship program on HN that I thought sounded really interesting. It was for experienced programmers, I believe mostly virtual, and was free-or-cheap. The idea behind it was to give programmers excited about programming a space to explore new ideas. I've been unable to find it since - Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

cyberbanjo• 4 years ago

Recurse Center?

https://www.recurse.com/

gregsadetsky• 4 years ago

https://www.recurse.com/ ?

babelfish2• 4 years ago

Definitely it, thank you!

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 4 years ago

Have any ISA bootcamps become sustainable, or even better, led to VC-grade returns so far? It seems like a model that hasn't proven its ability to scale, but I'd be happy to see some counter-examples.

throwaway27293• 4 years ago

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

mikeyouse• 4 years ago

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.

austenallred36• 4 years ago

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.

wittycardio4• 4 years ago

Absolute dirtbag

austenallred36• 4 years ago

I wouldn't say I was cheering; I was simply acknowledging that, though difficult, Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in, and I am skeptical of claims that Twitter will cease to function as they go from 8,000 employees to whatever the new number is (2,500 seems to be the latest)?

There's certainly internal knowledge that is lost in a transition of that kind, but the amount of money Twitter was burning makes no sense, and while reducing numbers of engineers is risky (and complex systems require more engineers than most people assume), I completely believe that Twitter will be able to sustain the technical operations and move quickly in shipping product with a mere 2,000 engineers.

runako2• 4 years ago

[I am explicitly not weighing in on whether this gambit will work or not. Could go either way, there is a lot of luck involved in business.]

Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in

This doesn't make any sense given that Twitter's revenue per employee (RPE) was roughly double that of well-run companies like Oracle or SAP and in the ballpark of EA and Adobe. This metric is a red herring currently being used to trim workforces. Which, that's the game and this is where we are in the cycle. But the ratio of revenue:employee doesn't tell the story here.

Granted cost structures and business models are different across these firms, and Twitter likely could have cut some staff (they all likely will in coming months now that it is timely to do so). But that's exactly the point here: the Twitter ratio between employees and revenue works fine at other companies, and has done so for a long time. Expedia has built a sustainable business with a lower RPE than Twitter, and it is similarly a pure-play Internet company. From a strictly financial perspective, it's equally likely that there were other levers that could have equally been tuned to fix Twitter's persistent problems.

IMHO the bigger problem was they are tooled as a high-growth company, but they were not growing fast. Even a modest bit of consistent growth, say 15% y/o/y, sustained for years, would likely have ameliorated their problems. Perhaps they have a large fixed cost to running Twitter, and they simply have not scaled the business enough to make it worthwhile yet -- could they double their business from the pre-acquisition base while only increasing staff 25%? That would be a good business! But I would guess the fundamental issue was that they are tooled for hypergrowth that is likely not on the radar.

Big staff cuts, modest (but smaller) revenue drops, then aiming to grow at a slower, sustainable pace is pretty stock PE stuff (although they typically try to pay at or below market instead of much higher than market). Can only assume people who see this as genius have never observed PE work.

7sidedmarble• 4 years ago

It was the way the layoffs were conducted which was the objectionable part. Not even taking a week to assess means it was just haphazard.

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

Twitter certainly has too many employees for the amount of revenue they're bringing in

Twitter was profitable (pre-Musk acquisition, and ignoring a one-time lawsuit settlement that wasn't an ongoing expense); it objectively did not have too much headcount (or other recurring expenses) for its revenue, prior to the added expense burden of debt service costs it was saddled with by Musk as part of the acquisition.

Their recent failure to properly execute payroll in some European jurisdictions, and the fact that they apparently no longer have sufficient account managers to even stay in contact with major advertisers at a time when they are trying desperately to actively manage those relationships and maintain them despite the distrust the takeover has engendered seem to be signs that the cuts were to deep on the non-technical side for the operation that Twitter is trying to run; I don’t see any real analytical reason to reject that the same is true on technical side.

(And that’s before considering that the reductions also seem likely to have broken both contract and, in many jurisdictions, labor laws, and legal costs associated with that are starting to mount, with at least one case already lost.)

filmgirlcw2• 4 years ago

You were cheering. You’re still cheering. And you’re doing it while you’ve had continuous layoffs of your own staff that have put everyone who works for you, or anyone unfortunate enough to be part of your predatory boot camps, in jeopardy.

I don’t take any joy or schadenfreude from your failures. Real people’s lives are involved and it genuinely makes me sad.

But glass houses dude. Glass houses. Maybe when you’re own company is falling apart, you should refrain from publicly commenting on someone else’s.

dzader6• 4 years ago

calling Austen a CEO is like calling Bernie Madoff an investor. sure maybe it's 'technically' true, but they're both just clueless scammers looking to make a buck.

setgree• 4 years ago

Not sure what to make of this, but Austen, who is normally a prolific tweeter, hasn't tweeted about this yet [0].

I have gotten used to CEOs tweeting apologetic stuff when this happens. Perhaps this is norm should be bucked? I don't know. I just note that Austen is going against the grain.

EDIT: missed this: "In a now-deleted tweet posted earlier today, Allred quoted a prior statement of gratitude for employees pushing through the work despite being attacked from all sides, adding “even more so today.”

[0] https://twitter.com/Austen

sandofsky6• 4 years ago

The "attacked by all sides" comment is quite bizarre. Every pain the company experienced was self-inflicted.

They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is a source of active lawsuits.

They dodged California regulators and then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.

They launched an unpaid intern program, which created a backlash in the tech community.

They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that go them in even more legal trouble.

I could go on and on, but the recurring pattern is them doing something reprehensible and the "attack" is "getting caught."

digianarchist• 4 years ago

Vincent Woo’s reporting is a must read if you’re considering any interaction with this company.

ec1096854• 4 years ago

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

austenallred36• 4 years ago

* They lied about how many students get jobs, which damaged their reputation and is the source of active lawsuits

No we did not.

We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get paid vs. how much we spend. The other is (hired students/graduated students), which we share with prospective students because that's what they want to understand and what every school shares.

Those were both called "placement" in different contexts to different people, but the numbers that we report externally are always hired students/graduated students (and even that isn't simple, as there are many different definitions of "hired," and different cohorts of students who are job searching or not, and various time lags around when we learn a student is hired or not), but this is not unique to us as a school. (Though an ISA incentivizing people to _not_ tell us when they are hired until tax returns are do perhaps is a little bit unique to us.)

* They dodged California regulators then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.

Neither of those things are true. Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we didn't operate physical classrooms (this was a somewhat novel concept in 2017). They reasoned that if the BPPE were going to claim that online schools would need to register in every state there was a student, that the claim would be if you have a single student who attends online classes from a state you have to register as a school in that state. Correspondingly, teaching anything on the Internet would require you to register separately and abide by varying regulations with every state educational body in the United States. The BPPE said they were going to regulate online schools, and sent us a letter with a threat to fine us. We immediately submitted our registration, and the registration approval process took just over a year, and the BPPE reduced the fine to a minimum level. There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.

Now we have a very large legal team, and are regulated separately and uniquely in every state in the US, often using laws that don't contemplate virtual classrooms or online learning in any way, and that's just to exist as a school in the first place. It's a complete nightmare that needs reform, and the vast, vast majority of schools are simply below the radar enough that they don't get fined, but it's incredibly difficult and expensive in the United States simply to be in compliance with each state where you might have as few as one or two students.

Beyond that fact, entirely online school where students don't pay unless/until they're hired is a round peg that doesn't fit into the square holes of existing financial regulation either.

* They launched an unpaid intern program, which created backlash int he tech community.

Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.

* They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that got them into even more legal trouble

This is another misconception, but we were actually in the wrong here. Because an ISA isn't a traditional student loan, if a student doesn't get a job the ISA immediately goes away after a five year deferment period. We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause. We happily did so, but that clause didn't harm anyone.

AlbertCory• 4 years ago

I interviewed a number of veterans & spouses for Operation Code:

https://operationcode.org/podcast

Not all were bootcamp grads; a lot went to traditional 4-year colleges. One guy said that in his bootcamp, several of the students had a job offer before they even finished.

Things may be different now, a few years later, but we tend to underestimate how many regular old businesses need a web site and some kind of analytics. They don't pay like FAANG companies and they can't hire the sort of people who'd work there.

Edit: I should have mentioned that one of Operation Code's signal achievements was to make code schools eligible for GI Bill money. I found, in asking vets why they enlisted, that "paying for college when you get out" is a big, big motivator. There are some who study remotely while they're still in.

MivLives11• 4 years ago

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.

malikNF• 4 years ago

What do you wish they could have done differently?

MivLives11• 4 years ago

Honestly, not much. I'm one of the success stories. I think I was just early enough to have small classes and knew enough basic html and programming concepts from doing IT work to have the bootcamp work for me. I was also incredibly lucky the company that hired me had a program where they took on essentially fresh college grads and boot camp grads, and funneled them into Junior positions with a project before you were assigned a team. It took me a lot of interviews before I actually got a job.

prescriptivist• 4 years ago

AMA.

Were you aware of YC before attending Lambda (ie, did the association lend credibility to Lambda) or did you find YC after attending?

Egrodo• 4 years ago

Not OP but I also attended a part time Lambda School cohort around 5 years ago and the YC association was huge for me.

MivLives11• 4 years ago

I was doing help desk, but I was pretty plugged into tech news. I was on hacker news and saw the initial post here by Austin himself. It seemed like a good idea and much better then what I was doing in the time. I was frugal and had expenses saved up to go a year at it. At the time I knew YC was involved and I think it did lend an air of legitimacy to a super new concept.

onetimeusename• 4 years ago

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?

heavyset_go• 4 years ago

If you go on the HN Algolia, there are a lot of posts from students and people involved with Lambda over the years that might paint a clearer picture of what kind of dysfunction was taking place at the company.

austenallred36• 4 years ago

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.

snowypine• 4 years ago

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.

MivLives11• 4 years ago

Most of the people I saw get successful were people were people doing like... extra stuff outside of the classes. They were taking what they learned and applying it. Others organized groups of people, and essentially formed a small support network of people in a similar position. I completely understand that not everyone has the time for that.

I think two things happened over Lambda's life span that effected the quality of the teaching. The first was the initial pool they advertised too. I think I saw the post on Hacker News before everywhere else. I'd wonder if you're more selective from already technical people at the beginning and then sorta widening the net as time goes on to include more people if you could get initial big numbers push followed by more ok numbers.

The instructors I met were all great. I think a lot of that flack went more towards later cohorts or alternative program from the main full webstack track.

jstummbillig• 4 years ago

Or why were they? What percentage number is to be considered a success here? I don't have the faintest idea.

kirillbobyrev• 4 years ago

Where _would_ you encourage people to go for similar purpose with higher quality? Are there any particular bootcamps/online schools you think are good?

Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field, so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so (without spending 4 years on college again).

MivLives11• 4 years ago

I do not have this knowledge. There used to be a site that categorized boot camps by results. Maybe try that?

My general advice is to get some one to try https://www.theodinproject.com/ as it's free. If they try it for a bit and find they don't like it, no harm they can just stop. If they want to continue after a bit and still want to go a boot camp they're more likely to succeed at any of them.

spaceman_2020• 4 years ago

Not OP, but I did go to a bootcamp but didn't get much from it. I learned a lot more from Udemy courses.

I would recommend that if your friends are serious about getting into coding, ask them to take a few React basics courses (just go by the most popular ones on Udemy).

I found that overloading beginners with theory doesn't really work. Getting them to build something and figure out the why of it works better - at least that was my experience. I learned about, say, json webtokens way before I used them, but it wasn't until I built an app of my own with account authentication feature that I figured out what JWTs actually were.

hello_newman• 4 years ago

Definitely App Academy Open. App Academy is one of the original bootcamps and they have solid curriculum. They have their entire course for free online

https://www.appacademy.io/course/app-academy-open

mplewis2• 4 years ago

Turing School is the only one I recommend. I personally know four people who got into software careers through their full-time programs.

ChicagoDave4• 4 years ago

Community colleges are cheap, supported by federal grants, and deliver proper education.

There are no shortcuts unless you’re self-motivated/have a knack and can use online resources to learn (of which there are many).

dehrmann• 4 years ago

With all the recent layoffs, this might not be the best time to do a coding bootcamp. Not as many companies are hiring, and you'll be competing with people with better credentials and more experience.

A lot can also change in a year, so take this with a grain of salt.

elsif-maj• 4 years ago

Launch School is an incredible option: https://launchschool.com/

It's a self-paced online curriculum that generally takes 1.5 - 2 years to get through, with an optional 4-month "Capstone" intensive after graduating the core curriculum. Progressing out of each course in the curriculum involves having to pass rigorous, easily failable, assessments; you just can't progress until you've cleared a pretty high bar of knowledge in each domain. There is a good mix of live interview assessments, written assessments, and coding projects.

The job placement statistics are staggering in comparison to the 'quicker' options -- as they should be given the time investment involved. I'm unaware of any institution that has had more success in placing students in high-quality software development positions.

Disclosure: I've been studying for about 14 months now using the Launch School curriculum.

gniv• 4 years ago

Somewhat tangential: Lambda School sounds so much better to me than Bloomtech. Any idea why they changed it?

yunohn• 4 years ago

I thought it was PR white washing - https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/16/lambda-school-rebrand-bloo...

whiplash451• 4 years ago

Agree 100%

cocoflunchy• 4 years ago

There was a trademark issue with another company I think.

austenallred36• 4 years ago

Because of a trademark lawsuit https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/4:2019cv...

tschellenbach• 4 years ago

Teaching more people how to code is a very noble and worthy goal. I for one applaud the hard work the team at Lambda/Bloom does.

The press coverage has been insane especially if you think about all the problems universities have.

user39393825• 4 years ago

If I may comment on the abstract: I don’t get these bootcamps. I’ve been programming for 30 years and I still feel like there’s another 60% of the craft to learn. More data structures, algorithms, functional strategies, large system architecture, read/write fanning, I’m just getting into websockets now. The list goes on.

These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?

austenallred36• 4 years ago

If your point is one must understand 100% of computing before being hired as a software engineer none of us would ever be hired.

You can produce value long before you understand everything there is to know, of course, and a lot of being a software engineer is being able to problem solve on the job.

BloomTech exists to help people get to the point they can do that and create value. No school can pretend to teach everything there possibly could be to know about how software works.

user39393825• 4 years ago

My point isn’t to learn 100% but how about 5 or 10? The complexity of the work just doesn’t seem to match the duration of these programs.

gobias1234• 4 years ago

To do the frontend work with more recent tech like websockets that you're just now learning about.

In all seriousness, considering the amount of bootcamp grads now at all (yes all) levels of the industry, this is an out of touch take. They're getting hired to work hard at entry level software engineering jobs, and most of them quickly move beyond that.

user39393825• 4 years ago

this is an out of touch take

I'll grant that possibility. Also, my anecdata isn't an objective truth right? But I can only judge by what I know and have seen. I wouldn't hire myself at my 2 year mark, all I could produce then by my standards now is a bunch of code I'd have to fix. I've had the same experience with junior developers I've hired.

Maybe these bootcamp grads are great, I haven't hired them because of the issue I raised so I don't actually know.

lkrubner• 4 years ago

I've hired several developers straight out of dev boot camps and I've had good experiences with them. I wrote about that here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...

decohen• 4 years ago

Several of my relatives are Mechanical Engineers.

In that field, it seems typical to have both engineers and technicians working on projects. Engineers are responsible for design, and have degrees; Technicians do assembly and maintenance, and only need on-the-job training.

I’ve often wondered what our industry would look like if we adopted a similar distinction. In which case, bootcamp graduates would be a natural fit for a technician role.

ZephyrBlu2• 4 years ago

That's just gatekeeping based on having a degree.

s3000• 4 years ago

The difference is that mechanical engineers need math to understand what they are doing. Engineers are essentially applied mathematicians. They are responsible for design because you cannot design without math.

For software development, you don't need math. This may change when data science is taken more serious and companies have to guarantee the quality of the derived knowledge. So it's the other way round. When our industry changes, we will adopt a similar distinction.

Software doesn't need math because testing is enough. Unlike physical objects, it doesn't cost much to test software, especially because reproduction is almost free. Additionally, with SaaS, software doesn't run unsupervised and thus there is constant testing. In that environment software can almost always be adjusted and reproduced when there are problems.

JamesBarney• 4 years ago

People hire junior devs everyday. These people are at least a prepared as most of the folks coming out of CS programs. And are definitely more prepared than I was.

mym1990• 4 years ago

Graduated from a boot camp in 2014 and I can confidently say I did not learn a ton(3 months 5 days a week) but it did reinforce my desire that I wanted to be in the field and that I wanted to learn more. In some ways the whole thing is a money grab, but when I went in to my first job interview after the bootcamp(which wasn't even a junior dev role, it was a bit lower on the rung), they gave 0 craps about my 4 year undergrad degree and we instead had a lengthy conversation about my bootcamp experience(I did end up getting that job).

hancholo2• 4 years ago

I've been on the fence on going to a bootcamp for years, since the dev bootcamp days because I don't feel I could complete a CS degree given all that math. I've also been in various FAANG companies the past 5 years and while not in a dev/swe role I have picked up some things as I go. The front end and user interfaces is something I've been interested for a while so I think I may pivot to front end dev or some kind of automation engineer for UI testing. Are there any release engineers here?

lazypenguin3• 4 years ago

If you are motivated you can learn everything that’s in a boot camp on your own. However, going through a boot camp successfully is a good signal during hiring that you have some experience in programming in relavent technology. It’s much harder to signal your experience when it’s all self taught. Whether it’s good value for the money depends on your own circumstances.

hancholo2• 4 years ago

That's a fair point. From what I've seen it really comes down to the hours you put in outside of class and your own side projects. Being able to speak the language, walk through the stack you used and why, issues you ran into and how you overcame them.

mirzap• 4 years ago

Lambda School always looked as a scam to me. I mean, $20k+ for a "bootcamp" and couple of courses is crazy expensive. It's like they designed this program to squeeze all the money from people who can not afford ridiculous tuition fees in the US by giving them hope they will progress faster if they pay them instead of self educating or taking much cheaper competitor's offers.

Udacity has very similar thing with curriculum for various positions, 1:1 mentoring, interview prep etc. for a fraction of BloomTech price, like 1/10 or even 1/20. Which I still consider expensive, since cost of digital goods are close to 0 to replicate and deliver to more people. Point I make here is they can earn more by delivering $100 program to 1m of students or even 1/5 of that, than delivering $1.2k program to 10k students or $20k program to 1k students.

dzader6• 4 years ago

it's a verified scam, your intuition was correct

throwaway5959• 4 years ago

Why anyone would give money to this guy is beyond me. Hey, we fucked up our reputation so bad, instead of making good on it, let’s change our name to a shitty Silicon Valley-esque one. It’s a shame nothing will happen to Austen after all the people he’s hurt.

j-bos3• 4 years ago

Were you hurt?

dzader6• 4 years ago

no, but thousands of people who were simply trying to make a better life for themselves were grifted by Austen and his merry gang of con artists

Stranger432• 4 years ago

Where you get the statistics that shows real value to coding camp, despite a lack of tech passion is when you teach modern data science tools to "domain users" currently stuck within the limitations of excel(The only successful low code platform in the market), or web skills to existing content managers, but that is a much smaller market then trying to push the vision of easy money to youngsters still trying to break into the job market as something other then baristas or line cooks.

And the companies that chased the market for youngsters without any real passion or plan is now running out of customers due both the the fact credit is now tight and that the publics infatuation with the tech industries is waning. And from the looks of it BloomTech looks to definitely target the market for youngster as their primary revenue stream.

miketery• 4 years ago

This is excellent insight. In a previous role, on the side I ran an SQL training for the customer success team, and that was fun and beneficial.

What kind of curriculum do you think is best for these folks coming from excel or the other BI tools?

Is python jupyter too advanced?

It feels like we’re still early in the tooling for “no code”.

Stranger432• 4 years ago

SQL is definitely where the curriculum should start. and Jupyter(or in reality pandas and matplotlib) is definitely not too advanced unless you make it so by talking machine learning and complex statistical modelling.

What gets used in the organizations that do try and exit excel is typically batch jobs written in either python(pandas) or powershell taking data from one or more databases for display in a reporting framework like tableau.

no code is im my view basically a myth when we start dealing with systems more complex then what the average high school student can create as a spreadsheet, as the effort in learning the low code platforms idiosyncrasies are similar to those needed to use an modern scripting language.

cercatrova• 4 years ago

Vincent Woo who sold CoderPad also did some investigative journalism on Lambda School / BloomTech showing that they didn't really place as many people as they claimed they did and that generally the company had some internal dysfunction.

https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1452658640809197569?lang...

yrgulation• 4 years ago

Bootcamp “grads”? I mean really? Folks, this is a scam.

bitL• 4 years ago

Wasn't BloomTech replacing its staff with contractors from the some tech sweatshop for a year already?

j-bos3• 4 years ago

Bias declaration: I'm a hired Bloomtech grad, so overall a satisfied customer/student.

Meta comment: It's intersting to see how many comments on any Bloomtech/Lambda post are very knee-jerk in nature, mostly negative some positive. And to be clear, I'd say most are thoughtful. The thing that strikes me is that I can't tell if this is normal HN tenor for a tech story or if it's just because I have opinions on the subject. The only other stories witg comments that strike me as remotely similar are those dealing with privacy.

So an ask, if Bloomtech is something you don't care about, neither positively nor negatively, do you find the comments for this article of average "pitch"?

lazypenguin3• 4 years ago

Yes and perhaps your bias clouds your perception or desires a more positive reception of your “alma mater”. Boot camps generally illicit a negative reaction from experienced programmers. Primarily because their primary stated goal is to give a “student” enough experience in an extremely compressed amount of time for them to enter the workforce as productive developers. The issue is that experience, by definition, can only be gained over time and with diverse trials and tribulations. Only the most motivated bootcampers can achieve this during their program by supplementing with copious amounts of self-learning.

Unfortunately even then a boot campers “experience” is quite limited but many come out of their program believing they are equals to more experienced mid/senior level programmers which results in those in the industry having animosity to those individuals. I think this explains the general “negative tone” you see in this comment section.

Are boot camps bad? No, I think they are quite useful but I think we need to acknowledge that they really only effectively create a pipeline of junior developers and replace the need for corporations to have internal education/training programs.

sidlls• 4 years ago

The experience argument seems thin: new grads have a similar issue, and yet companies have hiring programs targeting these individuals, sometimes aggressively.

It seems the core of your argument is not that they are inexperienced, but rather that the bootcamps somehow convince them they are not and this leads to friction in the positions they seek and the expectations around the work they're capable of accomplishing.

safog• 4 years ago

Neutral observer, don't particularly care about lambda.

I think it's worse than average - lots of strong opinions being bandied about. If I had to make up a score it's somewhere slightly above Google shutting down Stadia and significantly below FB / Cambridge Analytica scandal.

jdsleppy• 4 years ago

The comments seem of average pitch to me. I did have to scroll to the bottom to see the more inflammatory ones, but even with those it matches what you get on any exciting topic. Ask devs what they think of golang and you almost get the same!

dokein• 4 years ago

Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less optimistic. The tone of the comments here are not significantly different from many other topics.

Note that I am not saying that HN is now less neutral--it may be that the current level of optimism vs. cynicism maps better to reality.

That said, I think more optimism is generally better (for motivating action) if you want to start a new business or build a new technology; more realism is generally better if you want to go down an established path or join a venture purely as an employee; and more cynicism is better if you want to be a rabid online commentator (joke!).

itsoktocry• 4 years ago

Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less optimistic.

The largest companies on the planet, that the majority of us here earn a living from, directly or indirectly, are essentially data gathering advertising companies. I feel like the lack of optimism is justified.

theCrowing• 4 years ago

It's not a normal HN tenor there is not a HN hivemind. Why is everyone trying to make themselves special by posting the same shit everytime there are comments with different views than their own. You are just biased.

chis• 4 years ago

HN really hates the idea of coding bootcamps for some reason. I think it's because the median HN person is pretty independent, libertarian, self-taught, etc and can't imagine any other model working for people.

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

I've always been conflicted about this company. The marketing/news is always controversial(ISA, outcomes, lawsuits, etc), but clever in terms of media manipulation(more eyes on it to their service). The service is noble and good to fill the demand and change people's lives.

It's hard to use the words morally wrong and noble goals in the same sentence though given it's a contradiction.

Layoffs suck regardless though.

segmondy• 4 years ago

No surprise, the founder was just on Twitter praising Elon for staff cutting and marveling at the amount of money saved.

adamsmith1432• 4 years ago

This one's a head-scratcher. Presumably in a downturn people want to upskill or change careers so demand would go up for a program like this? Though I do think it is far too expensive for what you get.

adoxyz• 4 years ago

My brother went to Lambda school 2019-2020. Would not recommend. They had recent grads that had just completed Lambda the previous year teaching the new students and most of them had just a vague grasp on the content matter. So many inaccuracies and bad practices taught. The only good thing about it was that it was structured and you were coding each day for 5-8hrs so if you weren't the most self-motivated person, you were held accountable. But again, a lot of it was taught badly or inaccurately, so unless you spent a lot of time doing outside research on your own, you weren't learning much. If you do have self-motivation, you don't need Lambda or BloomTech. After graduation, there was no follow up of any kind. So overall, pretty disappointing.

2devnull• 4 years ago

I guess that sounds a lot like a community college to me, but maybe faster and better.

Can non-self motivated people succeed if they go to say an Ivy League? I didn’t, so it’s a sincere curiosity for me. Would Zuckerberg have ended up bagging groceries if he went to a community college rather than Harvard?

Kalium• 4 years ago

My understanding of community colleges is that they generally make a sincere effort to have qualified instructors with a good grasp of the materials.

blululu• 4 years ago

Community colleges deliver a reasonably good quality of education at a very modest price point. They do accept basically anyone who shows up and unfortunately a lot of people are just not that motivated or are not adequately prepared for college level work. That said, if you show up and do the work you can easily get an associates degree and spin that into a career or transfer into a 4 year university. In California I believe that community college transfers generally have a higher graduation rate from 4 year schools than their their freshman admit peers. I have known many people who went to community college who are doing fine. I'm sure Zuckerberg would have been just fine with a community college curriculum (he might not be a billionaire but he could easily achieve a pleasant middle class lifestyle).

whatever1• 4 years ago

Great talent is lost as a result of missing resources and connection and thus opportunities.

zerkten• 4 years ago

This is nothing like community college. Community colleges are held to some reasonable level of accountability. It's unlikely that they are going to be leading edge, or trendy, but you know that people learning some critical skills to a reasonable level.

Lambda School and other tech education programs start out well with VC money but it's not sustainable because there is no money in it. This is something that can be reasoned about a priori because you can see the budget focus of community colleges. Tech doesn't change the fundamentals, but the illusion can be sustained in the good times.

strikelaserclaw• 4 years ago

to become zuckerberg you need to be smart, industrious and have luck on your side. If he went to CC, he would still make his way to upper middle class life no doubt but maybe not a billionare.

hitekker2• 4 years ago

Before I read this article, I was on the fence and didn’t know much about lambda tech.

Now after reading https://mobile.twitter.com/fulligin/status/14526586408091975..., I’m much more negative.

The CEO seems like a con-man who has conned himself. The worrying part is that some commenters seem to be falling for the lies he’s telling himself.

devwastaken• 4 years ago

Same type as those that run uni's. This is all about maximum profits, the original mission was lost long ago. Now it is about sustaining the org for the paychecks of admins.

gigatexal4• 4 years ago

Ahh a rebrand is always a good sign /end-sarcasm.

gigatexal4• 4 years ago

Wtf. This is not how layoffs work. “ Employees were called into an All Hands meeting this morning in which BloomTech CEO Austen Allred notified staff of the impending layoffs. After the meeting, those impacted were notified via e-mail. According to documents seen by TechCrunch, employees will get normal pay and medical benefits until January 31, 2023 and are “expected to work” through that period. Those laid off were also offered optional time with managers to talk.”

If you lay me off you give me severance and I say adieu. I need that time to find other work. What kind of dystopian BS is this?

dilyevsky• 4 years ago

This is literally how they should works as directed by federal WARN act. Usually corporations just cut ties and pay out at least 60 days tho because it’s easier for both parties and you can get some concessions from employees like a gag clause

gigatexal4• 4 years ago

‘ are “expected to work” through that period.’

That’s the bit that makes no sense though. A lay off means I get to fuck off. Bye. You cut ties with me. Pay me what I’m owed and then leave me be to find new work. Do not expect me to work knowing I’m being let go.

gigatexal4• 4 years ago

Not sure what BloomTech gives folks over FreeCodeCamp? Accreditation? Career services?

ChicagoDave4• 4 years ago

The entire anti-college movement needs to die. This is a good step in that direction. LambdaSchool was an exploitative bad idea from the start.

edgyquant2• 4 years ago

I agree that the percentage they take is predatory. However I have a junior we hired right out of lambda school who was not in a position to go back to college even if they could have gotten loans. He now makes six figures and has a career he doesn’t hate.

The elitism of keeping knowledge in overpriced institutions is what needs to die. I know dudes who work construction that have deep math skills, but believe themselves idiots because schools don’t meet them half way or peak their curiosity and thus they did poorly.

ChicagoDave4• 4 years ago

The overpriced part is the problem, not college itself.

40 years ago anyone could complete a 4-year degree at nearly any college with grants and a part-time minimum wage job working 10/hrs a week.

Today you could only do the same if that job paid $70/hr.

The reason? Reagan and his racist republicans hated that college was a leveling playing field. They wanted to put a financial gate in front of college that only white upper middle class/rich students could navigate.

Unfortunately, it went too far and it’s now even too expensive for anyone but the most wealthy people.

We need to go back to subsidizing public college so anyone can work a part-time job with federal grants to complete a 4-year degree while affirming minimal grades along the way.

kadomony• 4 years ago

Austen Allred is a fuckin' tool.

BloomTech, previously Lambda School, cuts half of staff

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