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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Everyone still has to jump through the Leetcode/whiteboard/design hoops to get in the door. My impression from working with bootcamp grads is that they are well-prepared for this trial, better than CS grads. The bootcamps don't teach them any theory that will "never" be used on the job.
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.
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.
The discrimination against different learning styles is a bit off-putting. Just because some folks can just read and self learn everything doesn't mean everyone can. It also doesn't mean those people aren't capable.
I am not a parent, but I've definitely found as I've gotten older it's harder to self learn sometimes. Having structure and some guidance can make a world of difference.
A good example I had not too long ago was having to go back into Java, something I hadn't written in many many years. Syntactically, I could write basic logic. But I didn't have any feel for how a project should be structured, what sort of libraries exist, and a lot of other things I know implicitly from languages I am working with regularly. I had a friend (who actually happened to be a bootcamp teacher in a previous life) spend a couple hours with me just going through the basics over a screenshare/voice chat. I picked up more in those 2-3 hours than I did in previous 2-3 weeks because I had someone who knew what they were doing, could answer questions, could anticipate what I might be thinking next and could guide me.
A good teacher can be infinitely helpful to learning something, even for someone experienced (I've been writing code for over two decades now). I can't imagine how much more helpful a good teacher could be for someone who is just trying to start learning. We shouldn't be discouraging this style of learning, we should be seeing how to make programming accessible to everyone interested in learning.
I hear you.
I'm self taught.
I was always the go to guy when there was a problem.
I had no one I could ask.
Teachers asked me.
But no one hired me.
So I became self employed.
I wonder how much better I would've done if I actually went studying and had a mentor.
But I was always on the frontier, always.
I also fixed so many bad student projects, aka where someone would hire a student for cheap and the student would abandon the project and I had to step in to finish it.
Ah well it is what it is.
Nowadays I feel like an outsider, probably because I am. Still being self employed but my projects crashed and income is way below sustainable.
So either create something new, but I'm getting old and tired and bored, or find a job, but I'm too used to the comfort of working when I feel like it and not being on a clock.
Anyhow I digress and if I had a proper teacher in my young years, how much better could I have done. I'd imagine an increased learning speed of factor at least 5 if not 10. Also not studying means not knowing the language e.g. log(o) or w/e. I never knew what "scalar" meant when I read it, but I knew without having a label "scalar". etc etc
I prided myself on being self taught but once I went to a bootcamp and learned RoR in just 3 months from zero to working products.. it blew my mind how much having a good teacher around for 5 hours or so can do for you. Previously I taught myself js and it took 3 years to become decent at it. Teacher was able fill in the holes, give watch out tips, inform about parts to skip for now, show the big picture and keep momentum going.
I was a decent programmer before my first job but doing something every day for 8 hours is a completely different experience. You don't have this "luxury" in your free time. The moment things stop being interesting or become too difficult you just stop and give up.
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.
My own experience disagrees. I'm a self-taught engineer (on Python even) and I did have recruiters finding me and passing on my resume when I was first entering the job market ten years ago, and I had hiring managers giving me the shot at the screening (which I passed). I've had a pretty smooth career since then.
The industry has changed in the last decade. There’s enough college (and yes, boot camp) grads, and enough scam artists wasting hiring manager’s time, that someone with no history will need some kind of “in”.
The QA route - the modern version of the oft vaunted “start in the mail room and work hard” position - is mostly gone too.
Depends on the company and how they hire. Yeah, there are many companies that won't even consider you, but that leaves a lot of excellent candidates for others. Our lead developer joined around 6 years ago as a junior with zero prior experience outside his own side projects. (Which isn't to say it would be normal to go from zero to lead in that time period, but to underline how exceptional he is given he was able to do so.) Many of our other top developers over the years have had similarly non-standard backgrounds. Our screening process is definitely unconventional though; I barely consider resumes until well into the process.
I think if you're legitimately smart and dedicated, and put the time in to build knowledge, you'll be able to get a start somewhere. And once you have real work experience, the credential becomes less and less relevant.
FWIW I do find there's value in actual comp sci and software engineering degrees, and I will give those some amount of weight. But as far as bootcamps, if two candidates demonstrate the same level of skill, knowledge, dedication, etc., it makes zero difference to me if one has a boot camp and the other is self taught.
This is an amazing story and I’m glad you’re open to juniors that are from unconventional backgrounds. But you must recognize you’re an exception; my point still stands that odds are garbage for self-teaching and it’s not as easy as flippantly saying “well, just self-educate then!”
I don’t think I’m an exception. But to the extent that I am, I think it has more to do with people believing that they need a CS degree. They believe they need one, people tell them they need one, so they get one. I didn’t go to college, and I can’t specifically recall that fact ever even coming up.
Curious how you folks screen resumes without education background on them. Do you check out GitHub profiles in detail? That seems incredibly time-intensive.
We haven't been able to get our interviewers do that consistently, and a lot of our self-taught hires report that basically no one in the past has ever grilled them about their personal projects, and that we were the first company to do so.
We include a fizzbuzz-style coding question in the job posting itself, and ask people to include an answer with their application. 90%+ don't bother (the ones who are just spamming resumes) and can be immediately ignored. Of the remainder, at least half can be cut pretty easily based on their submission. Usually the remainder make one of a set of minor mistakes, or if not, there are several ways to approach the problem, so either way there's something straightforward I can write back to ask. Usually manage to whittle the list down a bit further based on those conversations, and usually then I'll look at resumes.
> Resumes like that will be sorted out even if she might be brilliant, intelligent, and just needs a chance.
That sounds like exactly the core of the broken hiring processes. Shouldn't a good hiring manager try to create a process that finds these brilliant, intelligent candidates?
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. I worked without effective teaching for the first five years of my career, and I was okay at my job. But I learned more in the first six months with solid feedback from skilled developers than I had in five years of stumbling around on my own.
There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself, especially how to make code that is easy for other people to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively. People who focus on teaching themselves are doing themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a disservice.
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.
Exploitative education has been around for decades - I'm just bemused how it manages to survive in IT. And I do blame 'IT' for not snuffing it out.
With a computer and an internet connection, there's more education available for free than any one person could ever need.
I'm non-technical, but can't see why anybody couldn't take the skills and say contribute to a open source project to build a CV that could be taken seriously, for no expenditure.
It is insecurity. Some people aren't that self directing and can't navigate the quantity of information with confidence.
These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence.
Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.
I find it varies a lot by bootcamp. It seems like the ones coming out of the Ruby community frequently have better pedagogy & more realistic expectations than the ones teaching React & pretending that's all there is to software engineering.
React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.
As a former bootcamp tutor, senior dev, startup founder and now employer of a former student, the inflated sense of self worth is there but I think it's overstated or overemphasised.
I would say ~30% of my students had some form of higher than realistic expectations of where they would when they finished the course. I made a point of beating that out of them.
But there were very few, maybe only 5% people that really fit your description. But I can remember them very clearly whereas the middle std dev of students I wouldn't recall much of them.
I don't think it is selection bias. I keep notes on every interview I conduct, and went back reviewing the bootcamper grads recently.
I would say close to 60% were unsuitable for even junior positions. Their arrogance made them dangerous, and they knew just enough to cause problems.
You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Sadly, the people who end up losing out are the people coming out of the other end.
It is also a sad fact, that often, regardless of bootcamper incompetence, you can find a more incompetent manager willing to hire that person and validate their skewed world view.
As you can tell, i'm tired of it. At least uni grads from CS courses know enough to know they know very little.
We all know the tech hiring process is broken and bad at picking performant individuals.
In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits.
In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded.
Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two).
I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.
"Just pick the cream off the top, even though you're supposed to be their instructor."
Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.
Sorry, can you explain the conflict here and who or what it's conflicting with? I don't think you've thought this out or thought about it from the point of view of the students.
Your recommendation was to teach a bootcamp to find applicants. This, in my mind, reads like a combined internship / interview that the applicant pays the potential employer to partake in.
OK, that's not what I intended. Teaching a bootcamp is pretty full on commitment so using it solely as a hiring funnel would see you ousted via feedback scores pretty quickly if you weren't delivering on the learning aspect.
The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing.
The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written.
The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.
>You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can.
Not a bootcamper but I think this isn't true. If you put in the effort and you're moderately intelligent you can speedrun pretty much any career in terms of knowledge.
However I do think there's a negative selection bias in the people that end up doing the bootcamps. They're not the self taught people that can teach themselves x in a few weeks. These people don't go to bootcamps, because they already taught themselves x and don't see the purpose in doing a bootcamp for a lot of money that teaches them x and doesn't give them a useful certificate.
The main benefit I see in the classical university track is that you gain more breadth of knowledge. And while you may not need most of it, it often helps in problem solving to know that some things "exist". Just so you can Google the details when you're faced with a similar problem.
The other benefit is of course the signaling value. Bootcamps don't have much of it.
Perhaps, but efficacy is knowledge combined with experience. Experience requires time, diverse challenges, mistakes and so on.
Many bootcampers (and low-level developers generally) seem to think you can jump ahead to being senior/lead without actually gaining the experience, making the mistakes and learning the lessons first-hand.
Sadly, there's plenty of crap low-level companies that will hire them too.
Oh, ok, I thought you were talking about the knowledge part, because most university students come without useful experience, too. But no, obviously nobody should be in a lead position directly after college or bootcamp, except maybe if they had a lot of experience prior and this was only some qualification "on top".
That describes someone I know down to a T. Bootcamp graduate, can barely code, but claims he's aced every interview and blames the graphic designers and business suits when he doesn't get an offer.
He also expects to be paid like a senior with only 2 years of experience.
He has been fired from every coding job he's had, due to difficulties working with others. In a nutshell, he's convinced that he knows more than everyone else. (For example, he once spent 3 hours arguing with a guy who builds rocket systems at JPL about which of them knows more about rockets.)
Him and others like him have soured a lot of LA tech companies on hiring boot camp graduates.
No. I was aware during my CS undergrad that I wasn't learning how to be a software engineer. I was learning the theories of computation from professional computer scientists. There were plenty of warnings on HN and the rest of the Web that internships, side projects, and Leetcode grinding would be required to land a job. A CS degree does not guarantee a job.
And yet everything I learned in my CS degree could have been done on my own time without paying a massive amount of tuition. That doesn't make the degree worthless. Same can be said for bootcamps.
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.
IME best predictor of "success" is the prestige/brand of the candidates have before they entered the program. It's based on candidate selection, not ability. But with the VC model there is pressure to grow, so they lower the bar and accept people who aren't transitioning from prestige background; PHD's/name brand schools or companies... and shocker they struggle to find a job.
They are scams because they juke the stats. They hire their own graduates to up placement rates & deceptively determine there own exclusion criteria to remove data of people who didn't get placed.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Goes both ways, mate. I've always been shocked by (even very experienced) CompSci guys' absolute inability to create a simple state machine. Keep shit orthogonal, guys!
Same thing, but to a lesser extent, when it comes to timing constraints.
Exactly, I did a bit of work in a jet engine test cell as an asside to my main coding duties. The elec eng that I worked under had state machines and labview as far as the eye could see. I wouldn't put myself in a situation where I was relied upon for designing anything. But debugging / technician duties I was fine, hook an oscilloscope up to that engine? Help with thermocouple calibration? No problems.
One thing I will mention though, I've always found elec engineers to have a higher work rate that software devs. Always.
Lol, world's lamest club. Ask one of those super well-rounded Comp Sci guys to write a join query in SQL or create a pleasant user interface or build a modestly robust CI pipeline and see what happens.
This is a weird generalization, I know lots of CS grads who can do those things and have done them professionally. Are you actually suggesting that CS grads can’t write sql queries due to their education?
But you didn't think it was weird that "aunty_helen" above me claimed "the club" of all Comp Sci grads are smarter and more well-rounded than all other practitioners?
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.
Cost effective use of time is also important thing. That is spending the couple hours to actually researching subject before engaging in relatively long and expensive undertaking. Maybe it is just my engineer mindset to actually first evaluate and do some basic research.
>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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
Even limiting the college discussion to technology, most CS students will be discovering their interests and talents during that time, dabbling in different languages, not just learning one curated stack. (Every developer will shift language focus at some point in their career; discovering the how and why is important) Many may take on internships.
That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold.
That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold.
This is fair. And I’d argue for a 2-year degree here. Or, employer-run apprenticeships. The for-profit boot camp, like much of the for-profit college industry, is mostly just an awful industry that shouldn’t exist.
Somebody who builds basic CRUD business applications over and over. Not everybody is building the next Google or Uber or solving complex technical problems.
I don't know what coding jobs you've had by mine have all been > than 75% writing code, reading code, reviewing code, talking about what code we should write, talking about how to organize the code, supervising someone else writing code, etc...
There is the part where you talk to someone to figure out what you need to code. And that parts important but defense wasn't taught at my university.
to learn & investigate, communicate
I did not take a learning and investigation course in my CS program, not did I take a communication course.
design systems
Are there good books that teach you how to design systems in general? How to build a good chat app, vs EMR app vs a good embedded code is completely different. So every book or article I've seen on design is so abstract to be useless, or very focused on a subdomain.
Not to mention a background in OS
Honestly this hasn't really ever come in handy. I'm sure someone can come up with a time or too it was helpful but I'd trade all my knowledge about OS's for better understanding of CSS.
database
Learned a little about databases from a 6 month course but equal or less than amount my friend learned from a boot camp.
programming languages
I had experience with a bunch of esoteric languages like Haskell, lisp, but I didn't know any language well. We didnt learn anything about JavaScript.
Things he learned that I didn't, how to use an ORM, how to build a web application, how to use libraries and frameworks, how to use ruby on rails, JavaScript, react, css.
Overall we learned a similar amount of useful stuff, but he did it in 4 months for 10k and it took me 4 years and 100k.
Why is it a mistake to view them as job applications? Maybe you want to take out 100k in debt to just learn interesting things about computers, but i did it because i wanted a career.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You have no idea what the circumstances were, her major life decisions are none of your business, plus it is entirely irrelevant to the lawsuit. For all you know the father died of something horrible and entirely out of their control, or maybe she isn't heterosexual, or there could be so many things. This comment seems short-sighted or flamebait, I cannot tell which.
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.
Which may be entirely justified, we don't know. But it also may be true that despite taking the class, she just wasn't good at being a web developer. We also don't know how many interviews she went on, or tried to, before giving up. A school with a 98% placement rate still concedes that 2% of it's graduates don't get hired.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] thread[1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
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.
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.
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?
They live on the spectrum of "independent self-learner" and "can only repeat from memory".
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.
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.
I am not a parent, but I've definitely found as I've gotten older it's harder to self learn sometimes. Having structure and some guidance can make a world of difference.
A good example I had not too long ago was having to go back into Java, something I hadn't written in many many years. Syntactically, I could write basic logic. But I didn't have any feel for how a project should be structured, what sort of libraries exist, and a lot of other things I know implicitly from languages I am working with regularly. I had a friend (who actually happened to be a bootcamp teacher in a previous life) spend a couple hours with me just going through the basics over a screenshare/voice chat. I picked up more in those 2-3 hours than I did in previous 2-3 weeks because I had someone who knew what they were doing, could answer questions, could anticipate what I might be thinking next and could guide me.
A good teacher can be infinitely helpful to learning something, even for someone experienced (I've been writing code for over two decades now). I can't imagine how much more helpful a good teacher could be for someone who is just trying to start learning. We shouldn't be discouraging this style of learning, we should be seeing how to make programming accessible to everyone interested in learning.
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.
The QA route - the modern version of the oft vaunted “start in the mail room and work hard” position - is mostly gone too.
I think if you're legitimately smart and dedicated, and put the time in to build knowledge, you'll be able to get a start somewhere. And once you have real work experience, the credential becomes less and less relevant.
FWIW I do find there's value in actual comp sci and software engineering degrees, and I will give those some amount of weight. But as far as bootcamps, if two candidates demonstrate the same level of skill, knowledge, dedication, etc., it makes zero difference to me if one has a boot camp and the other is self taught.
We haven't been able to get our interviewers do that consistently, and a lot of our self-taught hires report that basically no one in the past has ever grilled them about their personal projects, and that we were the first company to do so.
That sounds like exactly the core of the broken hiring processes. Shouldn't a good hiring manager try to create a process that finds these brilliant, intelligent candidates?
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.
Everyone has different learning styles. Also, being an autodidact myself, having mentorship earlier in my career still accelerated my learning and knowledge significantly.
There are also skills you basically can't teach yourself, especially how to make code that is easy for other people to collaborate on and how to teach others effectively. People who focus on teaching themselves are doing themselves & whoever has to read their code down the line a disservice.
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.
These people also tend to be learning for money/career, not fun. Fun-directed learning self generates its reward, so it is easier to do it with confidence.
Personally, the "promise of a job" marketing betrays the motivation of the students. Not that the motivation is bad, but it isn't how many self-directed learners get their kicks.
React is like Excel: highly structured & linear. People who are only experienced with React end up completely unprepared when they need to start creating their own abstractions.
My company has a react team somewhere, but not ruby...
The clear implication is that you finish the bootcamp and you will be on top of the world.
I would say ~30% of my students had some form of higher than realistic expectations of where they would when they finished the course. I made a point of beating that out of them.
But there were very few, maybe only 5% people that really fit your description. But I can remember them very clearly whereas the middle std dev of students I wouldn't recall much of them.
I would say close to 60% were unsuitable for even junior positions. Their arrogance made them dangerous, and they knew just enough to cause problems.
You can't speedrun a career, and bootcamps sell a lie that you can. Sadly, the people who end up losing out are the people coming out of the other end.
It is also a sad fact, that often, regardless of bootcamper incompetence, you can find a more incompetent manager willing to hire that person and validate their skewed world view.
As you can tell, i'm tired of it. At least uni grads from CS courses know enough to know they know very little.
In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits.
In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded.
Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two).
I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.
Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.
The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing.
The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written.
The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.
Not a bootcamper but I think this isn't true. If you put in the effort and you're moderately intelligent you can speedrun pretty much any career in terms of knowledge.
However I do think there's a negative selection bias in the people that end up doing the bootcamps. They're not the self taught people that can teach themselves x in a few weeks. These people don't go to bootcamps, because they already taught themselves x and don't see the purpose in doing a bootcamp for a lot of money that teaches them x and doesn't give them a useful certificate.
The main benefit I see in the classical university track is that you gain more breadth of knowledge. And while you may not need most of it, it often helps in problem solving to know that some things "exist". Just so you can Google the details when you're faced with a similar problem.
The other benefit is of course the signaling value. Bootcamps don't have much of it.
Perhaps, but efficacy is knowledge combined with experience. Experience requires time, diverse challenges, mistakes and so on.
Many bootcampers (and low-level developers generally) seem to think you can jump ahead to being senior/lead without actually gaining the experience, making the mistakes and learning the lessons first-hand.
Sadly, there's plenty of crap low-level companies that will hire them too.
He has been fired from every coding job he's had, due to difficulties working with others. In a nutshell, he's convinced that he knows more than everyone else. (For example, he once spent 3 hours arguing with a guy who builds rocket systems at JPL about which of them knows more about rockets.)
Him and others like him have soured a lot of LA tech companies on hiring boot camp graduates.
How do people continue to get by with such little insight.
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.
They are scams because they juke the stats. They hire their own graduates to up placement rates & deceptively determine there own exclusion criteria to remove data of people who didn't get placed.
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.
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.
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.
Goes both ways, mate. I've always been shocked by (even very experienced) CompSci guys' absolute inability to create a simple state machine. Keep shit orthogonal, guys!
Same thing, but to a lesser extent, when it comes to timing constraints.
One thing I will mention though, I've always found elec engineers to have a higher work rate that software devs. Always.
The boot camps are wrong in teaching rotary, where they might benefit from selective regiments.
Learn to learn as I've heard it put.
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.
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.
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.
My friend learned more about coding from 4 months of FlatIron than I learned going to a prestigious state school for 4 years.
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).
That said, I think there's a place for essentially "assembly line" developers. However, the income and career trajectory will reflect that, and that's not the dream they are being sold.
This is fair. And I’d argue for a 2-year degree here. Or, employer-run apprenticeships. The for-profit boot camp, like much of the for-profit college industry, is mostly just an awful industry that shouldn’t exist.
There is the part where you talk to someone to figure out what you need to code. And that parts important but defense wasn't taught at my university.
to learn & investigate, communicate
I did not take a learning and investigation course in my CS program, not did I take a communication course.
design systems
Are there good books that teach you how to design systems in general? How to build a good chat app, vs EMR app vs a good embedded code is completely different. So every book or article I've seen on design is so abstract to be useless, or very focused on a subdomain.
Not to mention a background in OS
Honestly this hasn't really ever come in handy. I'm sure someone can come up with a time or too it was helpful but I'd trade all my knowledge about OS's for better understanding of CSS.
database
Learned a little about databases from a 6 month course but equal or less than amount my friend learned from a boot camp.
programming languages
I had experience with a bunch of esoteric languages like Haskell, lisp, but I didn't know any language well. We didnt learn anything about JavaScript.
Things he learned that I didn't, how to use an ORM, how to build a web application, how to use libraries and frameworks, how to use ruby on rails, JavaScript, react, css.
Overall we learned a similar amount of useful stuff, but he did it in 4 months for 10k and it took me 4 years and 100k.
Why is it a mistake to view them as job applications? Maybe you want to take out 100k in debt to just learn interesting things about computers, but i did it because i wanted a career.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
But since you decided to be snarky, "crimes" are irrelevant here since it is a civil case between private parties.
High paying jobs are hard to get. They are meant to be earned and not something that will be handed over in a platter.
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".
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.
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.