> He says the only exemptions are for courses than cost less than $2,500, programs affiliated with accredited schools, and certain religious education programs.
Well then, problem solved: turn the buildings into Pastafarian temples and the act of coding into religious service - should be more or less the same as Scientology is doing already.
What exactly are they trying to license these bootcamps as? They are basically job placement agencies with training included, right?
This is a bit off topic, but the prices that they command seem ludicrous. $1k a week or so, for most of them. I know that a person attending stands to get a high paying job, but 10k seems like a lot.
I said it seems ludicrous. It just tastes bad, but since you asked, I decided to approximate the cost per unit/hour, and it actually costs about the same as California's public community colleges, so I guess this isn't crazy.
All the same, California's community college prices are kind of out of hand if you ask me, but since you asked, I guess I take it back, but lacking any actual accreditation or guarantee, it's unclear how valuable such programs are in the long run.
But anyway this is not the issue, if you pay to learn something so what? What does it haves to be regulated? Is not like food where you may get intoxicated if its bad, is not like cars where you may kill someone if you don't know how to drive; if you need to certify the quality of your employees you can always ask for a college degree and that's it, doesn't mean that everyone haves to ask for it.
I know you were trying to make a point, but actually, I got a job my the summer before my Junior year working in a lab on campus. The school had great resources to match people with interesting on-campus positions that aligned with their major. I ended up working at the lab after graduating for several years.
> if you pay to learn so what?
I agree.
> Why does it have to be regulated?
I'm curious to know as well. Certainly there are reasons to regulate, if there is some existing system and these schools somehow violate existing policies. It's not clear why they need to be licensed.
> Is not like food ...
Regulation happens for more reasons than just personal harm. Obviously some argue that it shouldn't, even if it does cause harm :)
> like cars ...
A big reason for regulation isn't safety, it's taxation, which helps pay for things like roads and maintenance.
I worked before and after having a college degree. Simply not including it on my resume worked fine, and as long as my resume was filled with all the things I knew/was skilled at, my degree or lack of only came up as an afterthought. So I agree with you on the last point.
Quoting from the article, "it would be relatively easy for a fly-by-night operation to advertise a developer bootcamp, collect tuition, and then provide low-quality education — or skip town before the courses were even set to begin. Even if the current crop of hacker boot camps are perfectly ethical, there’s no guaranteeing the integrity of future entrants into the market."
Your own statement reflects undue optimism. Who says that 1) you actually make it to week 65, that 2) you get a job, and 3) it's not a ringer job paying sub-market rates from a firm which pays recruitment fees to the school?
Markets equilibrate slowly with asymmetric information, which is the case with schools. Regulations done right can prevent malicious people from taking advantage of a temporal lag.
> Quoting from the article, "it would be relatively easy for a fly-by-night operation to advertise a developer bootcamp, collect tuition, and then provide low-quality education — or skip town before the courses were even set to begin."
That's why these bootcamps only charge students after they complete the course and get an industry job.
Quoting that Fast Company article: "With the support of his wife, he sold his 2004 Volvo for the amount of tuition, and his family of four in the suburbs made do as a one-car household."
Quoting http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/faq : Tuition is $15,000. If you receive and accept a full-time job offer from one of the companies in our network then we will refund $3,000 of your tuition. If the program doesn't meet your expectations in the first 2 weeks, we'll give you your money back (less your down payment).
Yes, there are some which do as you suggest. Quoting http://www.appacademy.io/#p-program : App Academy does not charge any tuition. Instead, you pay us a placement fee only if you find a job as a developer after the program. In that case, the fee is 18% of your first year salary, payable over the first 6 months after you start working.
Agreed. And I never said we did. I said that markets with a high degree of asymmetric information and long equilibration times need good regulation to prevent likely but culturally unacceptable practices.
It's a long history of fraud in human history; education is not a special case.
>there’s no guaranteeing the integrity of future entrants into the market.
There is no guarantee in any market; you survive by the product you provide, you can sell food that tastes bad (but is not rotten) and then change the name of it any amount of times you want, but without appealing to the market you just end up broke.
Is the same way here; if you don't even give the classes that's a scam and if it happens to you then you sue them; if they are "low-quality" you just give everyone involved bad reviews and go on with your life.
Walmart sells millions of very "low-quality" stuff, but people knows that "you get what you pay for", but even if they suddenly increased the prices on their low-quality stuff they would still be legal. Why is different with education?
You need another ">" in the ">" above - I quoted someone else. I was pointing out that the article already covered some of the reasons for regulation, which means the previous poster (that is, you) didn't actually understand the article and its references. I gave one quote. There are others. I've repeated a couple more below.
I myself wouldn't use the word guarantee this way, as you rightly point out, but to be fair, it's part of a hypothetical.
It looks like you didn't understand the last part of my response. It takes time for a feedback mechanism to operate, and in some fields that asymmetric information and time lag can be exploited in ways that are well known, generally considered unethical, and more easily addressed through regulation than lawsuits.
The article even gives examples; of companies which "make bold claims about alumni making six figure salaries upon graduation" but omit that that is a rarity, and "boast of high placement rates" but omit to say that "many students either quit or are kicked out, which inflates placement numbers."
These are obvious cases of information asymmetry, and the companies aren't even lying, so what is there to sue about? Misleading advertising?
Plus, it's disproportionally likely that students will not have the resources to make a legal challenge on their own, or that a lawsuit would be effective. It would require a class action lawsuit, which is more complicated, more expensive, and it's more likely that the school would declare bankruptcy, and the organizers start another school. (Just like some West Virginia water polluting company I've heard about.)
Wal*Mart and the goods they sell are subject to a lot of regulation. I don't understand your point.
Everyone else makes false claims and get away with it; fox news does it all the time, and they get paid for it (commercials)
>It looks like you didn't understand the last part of my response. It takes time for a feedback mechanism to operate, and in some fields that asymmetric information and time lag can be exploited in ways that are well known, generally considered unethical.
That seems to imply that value at some point is completely established and that couldn't farther from the true; this is the same world where you can legally sell dog-haircuts for thousands of dollars, doesn't mean it is a scam or that we have to create a government regulation for dog fashion standards.
About walmart: No they are not; clothes lost their color and integrity pretty quickly; their towels stain everything, etc. Just read their reviews... pretty much anywhere.
I don't understand. Are you arguing that Fox News should be regulated? I'm not. There's no large information asymmetry there, as surely those who can pay $10,000+ for an advertisement know what they are getting into. (You as the viewer are not the customer.)
Or are you arguing that nothing should be regulated?
If the clothes you bought from Wal-Mart violated consumer protection regulations, then sue them. If you think there should be laws in place, then talk to your legislative representatives.
(Edit: Wal-Mart is subject to OSHA, the FSA issues food product regulations, its money order business is regulated by the FDIC, and so on. You confuse, I think, "some regulation" with "completely regulated.")
There's a long history behind the reason for regulations, stretching back to the muck racking journalism of the 1800s. Do you disagree with all of it?
And I really don't understand your "dog fashion standards" issue. Where's the information asymmetry? Where's the time lag which can be exploited by unscrupulous dog hair dressers?
The lag doesn't matter, the value of anything depends on how much the sellers can charge for it and still be able to sell it.
This regulation or no regulation? It would be like asking if I like women with big eyes or women with no eyes; of course there is a middle ground but this is erring on the wrong side by a lot.
If you are truly paying 100k for a 4 year (120 weeks) university education, then it works out to be $833 per week. My education at an in-state university cost far less than that. Claiming that "bootcamps" are superior in value or rigor is mendacious.
Anyone actually successfully attended this boot camps and got a job offer for their coding skills? Specially for someone who never had any prior coding knowledge.
I don't know why but this just smells like scam to me.
Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?
I was in a Dev Bootcamp cohort of 10 students. All of us found jobs within 3 months of completing the program. Companies are looking to fill junior roles.
Have any of the people moved on to more senior roles?
I guess I am curious how this kind of bootcamp can prep someone to continue to grow/learn once in the office. Companies are always looking to fill junior roles until the economy hits a downturn.
I've worked with people that went through code bootcamps. It's anecdotal, but even after 1 year+ spent working as a programmer lots of hand-holding still involved. More so than a typical "junior" hire that went through uni + internships.
I was originally keen on the idea of bootcamp hires because I've tutored a good number of people over the years but I'm beginning to see that it's closer to O'Reilly Cookbooks than SICP.
Edit: To be more topical, while I'm generally irritated by anything that could be perceived as nanny-state brigading I have a hard time working up any froth on behalf the bootcamps after the experiences I've had with their students.
Possible biases: didn't go to uni, self-taught programmer, some class-based baggage.
Boot camp devs who have never coded before attending boot camp are more likely to work for a significantly lower level of compensation than those who have experience.
As someone who runs a software business I can't even begin to imagine to hire someone who has only 3 months programming experience. Even if it was a super low paid position - it still would be wasted money.
I guess companies in the valley are becoming really desperate - or they build trivial products where someone with almost no programming experience can productively fill a role.
I just completed a dev camp in november and the answer is yes. 80% of my class had positions as devs within two months of finishing. Our best student (who had taught himself a little code before) was hired within a week.
Not saying all the schools are good. (some look slightly sketchy to me)
"Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?"
An odd premise, its like asking why a company would hire someone straight out of college.
Companies hire from devcamps because the good ones are taught by people who work in the industry and know what they would want a colleague to know, furthermore they ask the potential employers what they are looking for and teach that in a hands-on environment.
Not an odd premise at all. In a startup context, I won't even hire people with a fresh CS degree unless they have something else (personal projects, significant open source effort, real work experience) that convinces me they won't be a liability in a production context.
I'd love to find out who's hiring these people, and how satisfied they are with the results. The two conditions where I can imagine hiring somebody with ~3 months total coding experience are A) when it's mainly a filter for ability to learn, and I expect to invest a lot of time getting them to the level of a production coder and then supervising their work, or B) a situation where output quality doesn't really matter.
I'm hoping all those people end up in situations like A. But there are definitely things that fit B. Back in Bubble 1.0 there were people selling themselves as an "HTML programmer". And there were consulting shops billing total idiots [1] out at $1500/day plus expenses. Your developers don't have to be very good if your sales guys are great and you have at least one solid technical person to put out fires and impress clients.
There is a third possibility - the company hires the person but makes no investment and they can either quickly come up to speed on their own or they're canned. Seems like very few companies want to make any sort of investment in their people.
Good point. I think that's still case B, though. Somebody with no experience running around in production code will probably make a terrible mess unless carefully mentored and supervised.
A person who came straight out of college is likely to have at-least 2-4 years worth of programming experience as opposed to someone who attended a bootcamp for a few months.
I am still not convinced that this is anything more than a scam. Unless you are exceptionally brilliant at learning new language, no matter how much you push yourself, you will be barely good enough to even know the rudimentary concept of programming in 2-3 months.
To me the best way to learning programming is to make fuckton worth of crude programs and then make insanely silly and sometimes good mistakes in the process and then try to figure out how to fix those mistakes by yourself (or at least with some help).
2-3 months is barely enough time to understand _WELL_ rudimentary concepts of programming let alone learn from your mistakes.
If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything one way or another. If you already know one programming language, learning a new language should be fairly easier than for someone who have never programmed in his life.
>> If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything one way or another
I have to disagree here. If you taught yourself enough for what you needed at the time and never knew any other programmers then you face a huge impediment to learning. Every time you hit a wall where you know how to describe the problem to a human but not to google or stack overflow you can spend hours (notice I didn't say waste) hunting down what is the proper way to describe the problem. While this can be extremely educational in the broad sense it can be slow in terms of actual progress towards being a better programmer since the overhead associated with troubleshooting/debugging is multiplied when it is most costly.
Also, if you're spending 12+ hours a day writing code on average (in my program we did) for 12 hours a week, then you're putting in a hair over a thousand hours of coding time. Assuming a 12 week semester, 2 semesters a year, and 4 years this comes out to about 10 hours per week of actual coding. This clearly isn't the best student in a 4 year program's work schedule, but it's not unrealistic for an undergrad. It takes time to get situated with a given problem and into writing code, but if you're essentially on a 12 week coding binge where you take breaks to sleep and eat then that context switching overhead is reduced. The productive hours of a 12 week bootcamp may seriously outpace the hypothetical student who spends that raw time over 4 years.
How many people are going to these bootcamps with zero experience? From the colleagues and friends that I know who have attended them all are programmers by trade. All of them have many years in the industry. They go to get training in new languages and patterns and work is paying for it.
But if these camps are letting just about anyone in I would have a problem with that. You have to have a solid foundation in the basic of CS at least.
>If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly
As someone in this group, I'd have to disagree with you.
I work in a life sci research setting, and am usually the only person with any programming knowledge or experience whatsoever. In research, "it works," is generally the only quality control placed on bespoke software. I'm capable of writing working programs to perform simple tasks & do on a regular basis, but I could not begin to write a large web application using best industry practices. I've also never spoken at length with other programmers regarding the problems I'm facing, and as such, I would have a significant degree of difficulty discussing conceptual frameworks with a team.
Having spoken to a few people who attended these schools, it seems that they have a thing or two to teach someone like me.
Perhaps it's not worth $10k, but I think that's a separate argument.
Yes. I taught myself initially and was writing lots of small utility scripts. Towards the end of the bootcamp I attended I got a call to update one of the things I had written before. The difference between before and after was enormous. When you're teaching yourself for practical purposes it is very easy to achieve "working" code that would be totally unacceptable in an environment where the code was the primary driver of value. Additionally, if you're the only programmer in your office/program, it is very hard to progress since you must be the creator of your own curriculum. It's a good exercise and self-education is an important skill, but it's hardly the most effective way to learn.
Depends on what you consider prior coding knowledge. I went to one of the bootcamps. The people who spent substantial time learning on their own but had no formal CS background had little trouble landing full time jobs at the end of the program. Those with less experience had a harder time and tended to land internships, but everyone who finished the program landed a job within 3 months. The people who really did come in with zero knowledge ended up getting kicked out of the program.
To your last question - why would a company ever hire a less experienced person? Everyone in the valley wants experienced developers but they seem to be in short supply these days. The best of the recruits from these bootcamps are making substantial contributions at their respective companies within a couple months on the job. In this hiring environment, there is value in taking a flyer on a less experienced but highly motivated candidate.
I finished one a few weeks ago and had a lot of callbacks and several interviews within a week. I ended up taking my first offer since I liked that company the best out of the ones I had applied to, but there were two other companies who were moving towards an offer.
You can learn a lot by coding for 12+ hours a day for 12 weeks in an environment with a) more experienced people readily available, and b) other students working on the same or similar problems. I had been teaching myself for about two years prior to attending, and having other people to talk about coding with (SO does not count in the sense I'm referring to) was a huge help. The staff were also pretty legit.
I don't think that people will generally choose a bootcamp grad over someone with multiple years of coding experience, but that is primarily because they're not competing for the same jobs. I think as a bootcamp alum you're competing initially against recent CS grads.
Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?
Because the market rates for Bob who just finished a boot camp and Cindy who has years of coding experience are very different numbers. (I also expect the market clearing price for Bob and Dave, who recently graduated Stanford CS but has no professional experience, are also different.)
Concrete example: the going rate for 3-5 years of Rails experience in the Valley is creeping above $140,000 right now. I'm willing to bet you can get many bootcampers to agree to work for $80k. If you're willing to put them on a team with experienced Rails programmers and mentor them a bit, that's a heck of a lot more bang for you buck for e.g. just wiring up actions and views. You probably won't have them rearchitect a payment processor's queuing systems by themselves over the weekend while live transactions are flying over the wire but, hey, that's not a requirement for most Rails work (by count or by weight).
Does this exploit Bob? Well, if we assume that prior to the coding camp Bob was a generic young liberal arts graduate, Bob's employment prospects in 2014 are a) not that great and b) likely offer a salary in the $30k a year range. $10k plus a few months of work plus opportunity cost strikes me as "More than possibly worth it" to secure an $80k a year job and the career trajectory that programmers have as opposed to the one that e.g. baristas or office managers have.
The problem with the bootcamps is that coding is now seen as a desirable and profitable career and the bootcamps are a lightning rod for people who want a good career but don't have the right temperament for professional programming.
In theory a good bootcamp should accelerate your learning and give you a strong multiple over what you'd learn fighting your way through online resources. In practice, someone who does the latter is a much stronger signal to me as a hiring manager. In a way it reminds me of my experiences trying to work with outsourced teams in India 10 years ago where it was obvious that many of the programmers were there were simply clock-punchers encouraged to enter the field by their parents and saw programming more as a rote exercise of finding the right recipe rather than as a craft to be mastered through deep mental engagement.
Exactly my sentiment. To me, coding is a highly skilled knowledge that is acquired through experience and practice. Doesn't matter how many 12 hour session (thats a stupendous amount of time coding per day for an experienced programmer) you have had in 3 months, I can't even imagine a person being job ready in three months. Unless that person is exceptionally talented and has prior programming experience.
Empirically, you're wrong. Several of my friends have hired bootcampers to great success. Therefore, it definitely works for at least some of the graduates.
Companies, particularly startups, need warm bodies in order to get investment and/or sell their company. If those bodies also happen to make a great product, all the better. If someone doesn't have the background, they can be made out as prodigies. As long as there is something resembling a product, x number of developers, and maybe some patents, certain types of investors don't seem to care. Developers are self taught by necessity. Someone decided to conflate this with the idea that self teaching doesn't really take any time at all. People who invest money don't study development so believe a six week course is all it takes, and sometimes it is if the product is a flashy but basic startup showpiece app.
In my opinion this is the market that boot camps are preparing people for.
I attended one of these bootcamps with zero coding skills (I waitressed & had two jobs before I attended) and had major difficulty finding a job as I learned a ton of incorrect information.
It took me almost a year, until I found an unpaid internship, followed by another company who hired me because they found I had potential. I learned way more from working with companies who took more time to help me develop my skills than the main instructor at the school I attended. It was both embarrassing and frustrating to find that I was neglected to the point of learning false methods. Not to mention that the main instructor spouts so many prejudices against software practices/languages (TDD, Ruby, etc.) that it could influence a person against marketable skills that are actually fairly valuable.
The thing that's made me hirable to companies is my determination to learn, and my ability to learn. Books, projects, internships or positions at companies with CTOs who are willing to take the time to say, "Hey, you don't know this. Learn it." is what will get you far, not a coding Bootcamp, in my opinion.
Alternatively, if you want to be making 6 figures, the school's networks are amazing and they will definitely hook you up with jobs. I didn't get the chance to use the network too much, but I know that others have landed jobs immediately, and with great companies.
I would say, if you have a ton of money, want the connections, and you're fairly technical already (ie. you know how to do some coding), this is for you. Otherwise you are absolutely capable of learning to code and find a job on your own. There are billions of resources online and at meet-ups that will give you a similar curriculum, basically for free or very little.
To answer the 'Why would any one hire you?" -- They won't unless they really like you & your potential to grow.
I'm also wary of boot camps but this is definitely not the way; if you want to pay for something you pay for something. They are not pretending to be a college, they are not pretending to be a substitute for it.
The only scam here is this part of the USA law, is scamming people into believing that everything needs to be regulated or otherwise it's evil.
Modest regulation of the education industry is entirely necessary. It has a long history of trouble, from low-quality schools to out-and-out scams. Students by definition aren't able to directly evaluate the educational experience up front; if they could, they wouldn't need the classes. Plus, with high prices and long feedback cycles, there's a large amount of value at risk, and market mechanisms don't work particularly well.
Even if the current crop of boot camps is all awesome, it's an ideal model for a scam. With new ones popping up all the time, anybody with more greed than sense could open up a well-marketed school, make some great promises, collect a couple hundred thousand dollars, give some half-assed classes, and shut it all down again before the first bad Yelp reviews come in. And then they could do it again with a different name instantly.
Yes, in theory. Here the only ones with more greed than sense are the ones behind the enforcement of bankrupting-expensive-regulations.
If you really care that much you just need someone that knows the subject to go the classes and see for themselves if everything is being taught good enough. You don't need to inject a bureaucratic debt in their finances in the name of "regulations".
> They’re usually staffed by professional coders, not licensed teachers. Many of the teachers are volunteers — even though the schools are usually private companies, not non-profit organizations. And many schools are backed by investments from big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
I was very surprised to read this. Volunteering can be appropriate if you're helping the less fortunate, or if you're sharing with your peers; but if you volunteer for a for-profit organization, you're devaluing your own skills while enriching those who are already rich. It's not just self-damaging, but socially regressive too.
There is a substantial difference between freely sharing knowledge to any inquiring mind, and sharing knowledge with only those people who have paid gobs of money, while receiving none yourself.
I'd also like to know how many is "many". It would seem... odd... for there to be a substantial number of them (although I could imagine a few edge cases, I guess).
The difference between running your own tutoring business and volunteering for a hacker school is that N dollars go into the school's pocket, instead of yours. Why would society care about that difference?
There must be a reason why people volunteer to do something. People wouldn't volunteer unless they thought it's good for them too. If it makes harder for someone to compete - great. Compete better.
I don't know much about bootcamps, but there's a lot of hand-wringing in the UK about people working for free ("unpaid internships") in newspapers, high arts, TV and politics. Because it ends up that you can't get into those industries without spending a year working for free, and the only people who can afford to spend a year working for free are people with rich parents, so newspapers, high art, tv and politics end up dominated by the rich.
Admittedly, in the SV programming climate this is not currently much of an issue.
For-profits can also run afoul of the Fair Labor Standards [1] act if volunteers are acting in roles similar to paid employees or if they are being trained/evaluated similar to employees.
It's nice to see that some people are so eager to tell others where they are allowed to volunteer now. A whole new level, I'd say. Minimum wage is not enough of a burden to prevent those willing to work from getting jobs because nobody would hire them at their current skill level for that amount of money. Now it's "you can't volunteer here".
Oftentimes, volunteering is just an excuse for the companies to use unpaid workforce (students, fresh graduates, ... i.e. people that don't have enough leverage on the job market to actually get a real paying job). If it is made illegal, then companies will always have to pay for work done that is useful to them.
So we should rob these people of one of the ways in which they can gain actual experience and make themselves salaried employees? The government should IMNSHO only concern themselves with one thing: is it consensual or not? If it is, they should back off and leave people alone.
So what? Why is lowering wages a bad thing? If the wages are lower across the industry, it means consumers get lower prices. You're totally ignoring the consumer side of the equation.
So really, any regulation has another side. It benefits one group of people, while robbing another group, which is less vocal and less identifiable and thus is less likely to be remembered in this case at all.
> If the wages are lower across the industry, it means consumers get lower prices. You're totally ignoring the consumer side of the equation.
You're totally ignoring the most probable outcome - reductions in costs lead to higher dividends paid to shareholders. Consumers continue paying the same price.
You're both arguing about something irrelevant. Whether low wages result in lower prices or higher dividends doesn't matter. The point is that a worker and an employer have decided on what each believes is a mutually beneficial relationship. Unless someone is forcing them at gunpoint, we should respect their free decisions.
You implied that employers always have the power in the relationship. I'm pointing out that it can go either way. Obviously people working for free must be in a weak negotiating position.
Even still, nobody's forcing them at gunpoint. Presumably they chose a an unpaid graphic design internship because they value the experience. They could have chosen to work elsewhere for pay. As long as they are not being forced, are not being deceived, and are choosing according to their own priorities, it's their decision.
> So what? Why is lowering wages a bad thing? If the wages are lower across the industry, it means consumers get lower prices. You're totally ignoring the consumer side of the equation.
This is incredibly naive. There are many good reasons for deregulation, but propagating arguments like this just gives libertarianism a bad name.
Are you sure that robbing is the word you are looking for? Talk about entitlement. I guess I'm robbing the taxi businesses by picking up my wife from the airport too.
> Are you sure that robbing is the word you are looking for?
Your choice of word, mate, not mine. If you want to talk about entitlement, lead on.
Free labour will always out-compete paid labour, and the more free labour in the market, the lower wages get, so the point I raise is valid - they gain their experience at the overall expense of the rest of the developer community.
In general, usage of unpaid interns damages the social contract between employer and employee - fair wages for fair work. Look at what has happened in other industries where wages have been driven down - America's regional airline pilots are paid ludicrously low wages despite the rather important role they have, with flow-on effects that speculatively affect safety.
I have a feeling I've struck the libertarians of HN, in which case, this discussion is probably for naught.
Well, I actually used the word for people who are being or could be actively forced to stop volunteering, so I think the word was entirely appropriate in that context. I understand that people perhaps feel trapped or exploited in a very limited number of industries because the competition for the jobs are so fierce. But like I said in reply to someone else, someone can make the case that open source contributors are being exploited since they are essentially working for free, and there are companies making use of their work without contributing back. Professional programmers, one could argue, is therefore making less money or loosing out on a lot of business. But you know what? It was the open source contributor's choice under which terms he or she would release the software. I like treating other people like adults, and not thinking that I know what is best for them. As long as no one is being coerced I don't see why the government of all people (who operate from the barrel of a gun, or at the very least the very real promise of violence if you don't comply) should intervene.
If everyone picked up their friends and family from the airport, there would be no more business for those who make a living transporting people to and from the airport. Even if it came to that, should we enact laws to protect the businesses? I would argue no. Why? Because it is no one's business but mine and those I pick up.
Couldn't you argue by that same logic that price fixing between companies is perfectly legitimate, since there is no direct coercion on the buyer to consume these products? Just because there is no direct coercion doesn't mean the situation is mutually beneficial. The situation is only beneficial to companies, the workers simply don't have a choice since they need some form of experience to get a paid job.
By working for free, they're trading work for something they value - experience, perhaps. Unless the market is being manipulated by collusion or regulation, their choice of what to charge for their work is as valid as yours.
It's really easy to exploit people when there isn't regulation of this...and even when there is.
For example, creative jobs in NYC. There's tons of illegal, unpaid internships and tons of companies who don't want to pay. I know several animators working in the industry there and often it takes them 6 months after a project to get paid and frequently studios try not to pay. I know a couple of people who have worked in the industry for 6 or more years and never been able to get a paying job.
Imagine working in an industry pulling 60+ hour weeks for 6 years and never getting paid for your work...and that's after being saddled with 200k in loan debt from an art school. There are so many people in that area willing to work for free and are used to it that it's difficult to find long-term paying work.
It's tough, I know. But it's no different from other artsy endeavours. People bust their ass for free playing music, and very few of them actually make a living. It may sound harsh, but it's not a human right to make a living doing music, painting, or anything really.
If someone is profiting directly from your labor, you deserve to be paid. It's not okay to have an industry structured to exploit your labor. You shouldn't be forced into a choice between "work, don't eat" and "don't work, don't eat".
There's a vast chasm of difference between "right to work" and "right to be paid for your work".
Just because it's "artsy" doesn't make it more okay.
How are we to define exploitation anyway? Because to involve government is a pretty big deal. Government operates with violence or the promise of violence if you don't comply, and that is a very big deal in my opinion. Of course, if someone is being tricked or coerced, the government should absolutely step in. But when we are talking about informed consent between adults? I don't think so. I'm sure there are people out there who think writing open source is exploitation, and that people who write open source are being exploited (since they are working for free most of the time) by companies who don't contribute back. But should we enact laws to "protect" people in open source? I don't think so.
Because after all, open source gives us software for "free". Much of this software would otherwise have to be written commercially, so one can make the case that people who write software for a living deserve to be protected from this open source nonsense.
> The government should IMNSHO only concern themselves with one thing: is it consensual or not?
I agree, except I would also add that companies shouldn't be allowed to conspire about wages. If they must compete, the ones that pay the most (or offer the most valuable experience) will get the best interns and all will be well.
People may have reasons for volunteering different than those that occurred to you when you wrote the above. The idea that a person who volunteers on behalf of a for-profit organization necessarily damages himself is wrong.
This is terrible news. California is full of people who are structurally unemployed due to technological incompetence. The vast majority of "licensed teachers" know nothing about coding. Why obstruct hackers who teach valuable skills to others?
> California is full of people who are structurally unemployed
Do you have a cite for that? Nationwide there's very little evidence of structural unemployment, and I'd be surprised to find that California (which is a state people tend to be interested in living in) has an unusual problem with finding skilled workers.
"it would be relatively easy for a fly-by-night operation to advertise a developer bootcamp, collect tuition, and then provide low-quality education — or skip town before the courses were even set to begin"
These bootcamps don't charge students until after they complete the course and get an industry job.
So there will be rise of "traditional" underground ones.)
In some sense "legal" hacker conferences sponsored by MS and Cisco is utter nonsense. Strong disliking of cargo cults, bandwagon and peer effects of brainwashed mediocrity is a part of so-called hacker culture.)
When the story first hit Venture Beat I stuck to reading what the BPPE actually said, and then I checked out the website to try and dig up the regulations.
Unless someone has information I haven't been able to dig up "crack down" just means that they've been requested to comply. BPPE decided that these sorts of programs are under their purview and so they need to cough up some amount of cash and submit some paperwork.
Quotations in the Venture Beat article very clearly state BPPE are not going after them, just notifying them of their need to comply under California law.
So much polemic either on government regulation or on the merits of these programs. BPPE places schools into either "approved" or "accredited" categories. These programs need only be approved. As far as I can tell BPPE is fairly minimal in its requirements basically ensuring the schools are real things and not diploma mills.
This isn't anywhere as much of a crackdown as CPUC making it harder for ride-shares (for a bit). Discussion of the programs makes sense, but in the context of an imagined witch hunt it just seems strange.
So I suppose this thread is just as good a place as any to ask the following question, which I've been curious about for a while now:
What, in your opinion, is the highest quality coding boot camp and why? Follow-up: what should a person who qualifies for one of these schools be looking for?
There's a program like that here in Portland that makes claims on its website about Rails developers being able to immediately earn upwards of $80k a year. Maybe in the Bay Area, but definitely not in Portland. And they charge up front, no placement guarantees.
This isn't going to help the industry. The Internet is changing the way we learn and software development is at the edge of the trend. Software lends itself to this in part because its a meritocracy in which competence is easy to recognize independent of accredited degrees, and because the tools change so fast traditional institutions have trouble keeping up.
Its extremely unlikely regulation can do as good a job as the default market forces in identifying quality programs, and it will likely put a huge damper on people trying to do innovative things with technical education in the state.
disclaimer: I run a one year 'developer bootcamp' in rural india - http://jaaga.in/study
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadWell then, problem solved: turn the buildings into Pastafarian temples and the act of coding into religious service - should be more or less the same as Scientology is doing already.
I'd recommend against embracing Pastafarianism for this. The last thing that the industry needs is legions of spaghetti coders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k0JEc0arOQ
This is a bit off topic, but the prices that they command seem ludicrous. $1k a week or so, for most of them. I know that a person attending stands to get a high paying job, but 10k seems like a lot.
All the same, California's community college prices are kind of out of hand if you ask me, but since you asked, I guess I take it back, but lacking any actual accreditation or guarantee, it's unclear how valuable such programs are in the long run.
That said, I didn't realize that some (many?) boot camps were using volunteers as instructors. Who would volunteer for such a thing?
But anyway this is not the issue, if you pay to learn something so what? What does it haves to be regulated? Is not like food where you may get intoxicated if its bad, is not like cars where you may kill someone if you don't know how to drive; if you need to certify the quality of your employees you can always ask for a college degree and that's it, doesn't mean that everyone haves to ask for it.
> if you pay to learn so what?
I agree.
> Why does it have to be regulated?
I'm curious to know as well. Certainly there are reasons to regulate, if there is some existing system and these schools somehow violate existing policies. It's not clear why they need to be licensed.
> Is not like food ...
Regulation happens for more reasons than just personal harm. Obviously some argue that it shouldn't, even if it does cause harm :)
> like cars ...
A big reason for regulation isn't safety, it's taxation, which helps pay for things like roads and maintenance.
I worked before and after having a college degree. Simply not including it on my resume worked fine, and as long as my resume was filled with all the things I knew/was skilled at, my degree or lack of only came up as an afterthought. So I agree with you on the last point.
Quoting from the article, "it would be relatively easy for a fly-by-night operation to advertise a developer bootcamp, collect tuition, and then provide low-quality education — or skip town before the courses were even set to begin. Even if the current crop of hacker boot camps are perfectly ethical, there’s no guaranteeing the integrity of future entrants into the market."
Your own statement reflects undue optimism. Who says that 1) you actually make it to week 65, that 2) you get a job, and 3) it's not a ringer job paying sub-market rates from a firm which pays recruitment fees to the school?
The article links to http://www.fastcompany.com/3023456/become-an-ios-developer-i... , which goes into some details about the negatives. And positives.
Markets equilibrate slowly with asymmetric information, which is the case with schools. Regulations done right can prevent malicious people from taking advantage of a temporal lag.
That's why these bootcamps only charge students after they complete the course and get an industry job.
Quoting that Fast Company article: "With the support of his wife, he sold his 2004 Volvo for the amount of tuition, and his family of four in the suburbs made do as a one-car household."
Quoting http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/faq : Tuition is $15,000. If you receive and accept a full-time job offer from one of the companies in our network then we will refund $3,000 of your tuition. If the program doesn't meet your expectations in the first 2 weeks, we'll give you your money back (less your down payment).
Yes, there are some which do as you suggest. Quoting http://www.appacademy.io/#p-program : App Academy does not charge any tuition. Instead, you pay us a placement fee only if you find a job as a developer after the program. In that case, the fee is 18% of your first year salary, payable over the first 6 months after you start working.
But certainly not all do as you believe they do.
>there’s no guaranteeing the integrity of future entrants into the market.
There is no guarantee in any market; you survive by the product you provide, you can sell food that tastes bad (but is not rotten) and then change the name of it any amount of times you want, but without appealing to the market you just end up broke.
Is the same way here; if you don't even give the classes that's a scam and if it happens to you then you sue them; if they are "low-quality" you just give everyone involved bad reviews and go on with your life.
Walmart sells millions of very "low-quality" stuff, but people knows that "you get what you pay for", but even if they suddenly increased the prices on their low-quality stuff they would still be legal. Why is different with education?
I myself wouldn't use the word guarantee this way, as you rightly point out, but to be fair, it's part of a hypothetical.
It looks like you didn't understand the last part of my response. It takes time for a feedback mechanism to operate, and in some fields that asymmetric information and time lag can be exploited in ways that are well known, generally considered unethical, and more easily addressed through regulation than lawsuits.
The article even gives examples; of companies which "make bold claims about alumni making six figure salaries upon graduation" but omit that that is a rarity, and "boast of high placement rates" but omit to say that "many students either quit or are kicked out, which inflates placement numbers."
These are obvious cases of information asymmetry, and the companies aren't even lying, so what is there to sue about? Misleading advertising?
Plus, it's disproportionally likely that students will not have the resources to make a legal challenge on their own, or that a lawsuit would be effective. It would require a class action lawsuit, which is more complicated, more expensive, and it's more likely that the school would declare bankruptcy, and the organizers start another school. (Just like some West Virginia water polluting company I've heard about.)
Wal*Mart and the goods they sell are subject to a lot of regulation. I don't understand your point.
>It looks like you didn't understand the last part of my response. It takes time for a feedback mechanism to operate, and in some fields that asymmetric information and time lag can be exploited in ways that are well known, generally considered unethical.
That seems to imply that value at some point is completely established and that couldn't farther from the true; this is the same world where you can legally sell dog-haircuts for thousands of dollars, doesn't mean it is a scam or that we have to create a government regulation for dog fashion standards.
About walmart: No they are not; clothes lost their color and integrity pretty quickly; their towels stain everything, etc. Just read their reviews... pretty much anywhere.
Or are you arguing that nothing should be regulated?
If the clothes you bought from Wal-Mart violated consumer protection regulations, then sue them. If you think there should be laws in place, then talk to your legislative representatives.
(Edit: Wal-Mart is subject to OSHA, the FSA issues food product regulations, its money order business is regulated by the FDIC, and so on. You confuse, I think, "some regulation" with "completely regulated.")
There's a long history behind the reason for regulations, stretching back to the muck racking journalism of the 1800s. Do you disagree with all of it?
And I really don't understand your "dog fashion standards" issue. Where's the information asymmetry? Where's the time lag which can be exploited by unscrupulous dog hair dressers?
This regulation or no regulation? It would be like asking if I like women with big eyes or women with no eyes; of course there is a middle ground but this is erring on the wrong side by a lot.
I don't know why but this just smells like scam to me.
Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?
I guess I am curious how this kind of bootcamp can prep someone to continue to grow/learn once in the office. Companies are always looking to fill junior roles until the economy hits a downturn.
I was originally keen on the idea of bootcamp hires because I've tutored a good number of people over the years but I'm beginning to see that it's closer to O'Reilly Cookbooks than SICP.
Edit: To be more topical, while I'm generally irritated by anything that could be perceived as nanny-state brigading I have a hard time working up any froth on behalf the bootcamps after the experiences I've had with their students.
Possible biases: didn't go to uni, self-taught programmer, some class-based baggage.
I guess companies in the valley are becoming really desperate - or they build trivial products where someone with almost no programming experience can productively fill a role.
Not saying all the schools are good. (some look slightly sketchy to me)
"Why would a company hire you, who just finished a boot camp, as opposed to someone who have years of coding experience and knowledge?"
An odd premise, its like asking why a company would hire someone straight out of college.
Companies hire from devcamps because the good ones are taught by people who work in the industry and know what they would want a colleague to know, furthermore they ask the potential employers what they are looking for and teach that in a hands-on environment.
I'd love to find out who's hiring these people, and how satisfied they are with the results. The two conditions where I can imagine hiring somebody with ~3 months total coding experience are A) when it's mainly a filter for ability to learn, and I expect to invest a lot of time getting them to the level of a production coder and then supervising their work, or B) a situation where output quality doesn't really matter.
I'm hoping all those people end up in situations like A. But there are definitely things that fit B. Back in Bubble 1.0 there were people selling themselves as an "HTML programmer". And there were consulting shops billing total idiots [1] out at $1500/day plus expenses. Your developers don't have to be very good if your sales guys are great and you have at least one solid technical person to put out fires and impress clients.
[1] this kind of idiot: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-...
I am still not convinced that this is anything more than a scam. Unless you are exceptionally brilliant at learning new language, no matter how much you push yourself, you will be barely good enough to even know the rudimentary concept of programming in 2-3 months.
To me the best way to learning programming is to make fuckton worth of crude programs and then make insanely silly and sometimes good mistakes in the process and then try to figure out how to fix those mistakes by yourself (or at least with some help).
2-3 months is barely enough time to understand _WELL_ rudimentary concepts of programming let alone learn from your mistakes.
If you already have prior programming knowledge and know at least one programming language, joining this camp is silly and it doesn't prove anything one way or another. If you already know one programming language, learning a new language should be fairly easier than for someone who have never programmed in his life.
I have to disagree here. If you taught yourself enough for what you needed at the time and never knew any other programmers then you face a huge impediment to learning. Every time you hit a wall where you know how to describe the problem to a human but not to google or stack overflow you can spend hours (notice I didn't say waste) hunting down what is the proper way to describe the problem. While this can be extremely educational in the broad sense it can be slow in terms of actual progress towards being a better programmer since the overhead associated with troubleshooting/debugging is multiplied when it is most costly.
Also, if you're spending 12+ hours a day writing code on average (in my program we did) for 12 hours a week, then you're putting in a hair over a thousand hours of coding time. Assuming a 12 week semester, 2 semesters a year, and 4 years this comes out to about 10 hours per week of actual coding. This clearly isn't the best student in a 4 year program's work schedule, but it's not unrealistic for an undergrad. It takes time to get situated with a given problem and into writing code, but if you're essentially on a 12 week coding binge where you take breaks to sleep and eat then that context switching overhead is reduced. The productive hours of a 12 week bootcamp may seriously outpace the hypothetical student who spends that raw time over 4 years.
But if these camps are letting just about anyone in I would have a problem with that. You have to have a solid foundation in the basic of CS at least.
As someone in this group, I'd have to disagree with you.
I work in a life sci research setting, and am usually the only person with any programming knowledge or experience whatsoever. In research, "it works," is generally the only quality control placed on bespoke software. I'm capable of writing working programs to perform simple tasks & do on a regular basis, but I could not begin to write a large web application using best industry practices. I've also never spoken at length with other programmers regarding the problems I'm facing, and as such, I would have a significant degree of difficulty discussing conceptual frameworks with a team.
Having spoken to a few people who attended these schools, it seems that they have a thing or two to teach someone like me.
Perhaps it's not worth $10k, but I think that's a separate argument.
To your last question - why would a company ever hire a less experienced person? Everyone in the valley wants experienced developers but they seem to be in short supply these days. The best of the recruits from these bootcamps are making substantial contributions at their respective companies within a couple months on the job. In this hiring environment, there is value in taking a flyer on a less experienced but highly motivated candidate.
You can learn a lot by coding for 12+ hours a day for 12 weeks in an environment with a) more experienced people readily available, and b) other students working on the same or similar problems. I had been teaching myself for about two years prior to attending, and having other people to talk about coding with (SO does not count in the sense I'm referring to) was a huge help. The staff were also pretty legit.
I don't think that people will generally choose a bootcamp grad over someone with multiple years of coding experience, but that is primarily because they're not competing for the same jobs. I think as a bootcamp alum you're competing initially against recent CS grads.
Because the market rates for Bob who just finished a boot camp and Cindy who has years of coding experience are very different numbers. (I also expect the market clearing price for Bob and Dave, who recently graduated Stanford CS but has no professional experience, are also different.)
Concrete example: the going rate for 3-5 years of Rails experience in the Valley is creeping above $140,000 right now. I'm willing to bet you can get many bootcampers to agree to work for $80k. If you're willing to put them on a team with experienced Rails programmers and mentor them a bit, that's a heck of a lot more bang for you buck for e.g. just wiring up actions and views. You probably won't have them rearchitect a payment processor's queuing systems by themselves over the weekend while live transactions are flying over the wire but, hey, that's not a requirement for most Rails work (by count or by weight).
Does this exploit Bob? Well, if we assume that prior to the coding camp Bob was a generic young liberal arts graduate, Bob's employment prospects in 2014 are a) not that great and b) likely offer a salary in the $30k a year range. $10k plus a few months of work plus opportunity cost strikes me as "More than possibly worth it" to secure an $80k a year job and the career trajectory that programmers have as opposed to the one that e.g. baristas or office managers have.
In theory a good bootcamp should accelerate your learning and give you a strong multiple over what you'd learn fighting your way through online resources. In practice, someone who does the latter is a much stronger signal to me as a hiring manager. In a way it reminds me of my experiences trying to work with outsourced teams in India 10 years ago where it was obvious that many of the programmers were there were simply clock-punchers encouraged to enter the field by their parents and saw programming more as a rote exercise of finding the right recipe rather than as a craft to be mastered through deep mental engagement.
In my opinion this is the market that boot camps are preparing people for.
It took me almost a year, until I found an unpaid internship, followed by another company who hired me because they found I had potential. I learned way more from working with companies who took more time to help me develop my skills than the main instructor at the school I attended. It was both embarrassing and frustrating to find that I was neglected to the point of learning false methods. Not to mention that the main instructor spouts so many prejudices against software practices/languages (TDD, Ruby, etc.) that it could influence a person against marketable skills that are actually fairly valuable.
The thing that's made me hirable to companies is my determination to learn, and my ability to learn. Books, projects, internships or positions at companies with CTOs who are willing to take the time to say, "Hey, you don't know this. Learn it." is what will get you far, not a coding Bootcamp, in my opinion.
Alternatively, if you want to be making 6 figures, the school's networks are amazing and they will definitely hook you up with jobs. I didn't get the chance to use the network too much, but I know that others have landed jobs immediately, and with great companies.
I would say, if you have a ton of money, want the connections, and you're fairly technical already (ie. you know how to do some coding), this is for you. Otherwise you are absolutely capable of learning to code and find a job on your own. There are billions of resources online and at meet-ups that will give you a similar curriculum, basically for free or very little.
To answer the 'Why would any one hire you?" -- They won't unless they really like you & your potential to grow.
The only scam here is this part of the USA law, is scamming people into believing that everything needs to be regulated or otherwise it's evil.
Even if the current crop of boot camps is all awesome, it's an ideal model for a scam. With new ones popping up all the time, anybody with more greed than sense could open up a well-marketed school, make some great promises, collect a couple hundred thousand dollars, give some half-assed classes, and shut it all down again before the first bad Yelp reviews come in. And then they could do it again with a different name instantly.
And government regulators with no technical background would? Please tell me you're kidding.
If you really care that much you just need someone that knows the subject to go the classes and see for themselves if everything is being taught good enough. You don't need to inject a bureaucratic debt in their finances in the name of "regulations".
I was very surprised to read this. Volunteering can be appropriate if you're helping the less fortunate, or if you're sharing with your peers; but if you volunteer for a for-profit organization, you're devaluing your own skills while enriching those who are already rich. It's not just self-damaging, but socially regressive too.
Admittedly, in the SV programming climate this is not currently much of an issue.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act
By working for free, they're lowering the wages of everyone else in the software development field. Who is robbing who exactly?
So really, any regulation has another side. It benefits one group of people, while robbing another group, which is less vocal and less identifiable and thus is less likely to be remembered in this case at all.
You're totally ignoring the most probable outcome - reductions in costs lead to higher dividends paid to shareholders. Consumers continue paying the same price.
Now, employer - union, maybe.
Even still, nobody's forcing them at gunpoint. Presumably they chose a an unpaid graphic design internship because they value the experience. They could have chosen to work elsewhere for pay. As long as they are not being forced, are not being deceived, and are choosing according to their own priorities, it's their decision.
This is incredibly naive. There are many good reasons for deregulation, but propagating arguments like this just gives libertarianism a bad name.
Your choice of word, mate, not mine. If you want to talk about entitlement, lead on.
Free labour will always out-compete paid labour, and the more free labour in the market, the lower wages get, so the point I raise is valid - they gain their experience at the overall expense of the rest of the developer community.
In general, usage of unpaid interns damages the social contract between employer and employee - fair wages for fair work. Look at what has happened in other industries where wages have been driven down - America's regional airline pilots are paid ludicrously low wages despite the rather important role they have, with flow-on effects that speculatively affect safety.
I have a feeling I've struck the libertarians of HN, in which case, this discussion is probably for naught.
If everyone picked up their friends and family from the airport, there would be no more business for those who make a living transporting people to and from the airport. Even if it came to that, should we enact laws to protect the businesses? I would argue no. Why? Because it is no one's business but mine and those I pick up.
For example, creative jobs in NYC. There's tons of illegal, unpaid internships and tons of companies who don't want to pay. I know several animators working in the industry there and often it takes them 6 months after a project to get paid and frequently studios try not to pay. I know a couple of people who have worked in the industry for 6 or more years and never been able to get a paying job.
Imagine working in an industry pulling 60+ hour weeks for 6 years and never getting paid for your work...and that's after being saddled with 200k in loan debt from an art school. There are so many people in that area willing to work for free and are used to it that it's difficult to find long-term paying work.
There's a vast chasm of difference between "right to work" and "right to be paid for your work".
Just because it's "artsy" doesn't make it more okay.
Because after all, open source gives us software for "free". Much of this software would otherwise have to be written commercially, so one can make the case that people who write software for a living deserve to be protected from this open source nonsense.
It's highly probable that for-profit bootcamps using volunteers would be in violation of the long-existing law.
I agree, except I would also add that companies shouldn't be allowed to conspire about wages. If they must compete, the ones that pay the most (or offer the most valuable experience) will get the best interns and all will be well.
Do you have a cite for that? Nationwide there's very little evidence of structural unemployment, and I'd be surprised to find that California (which is a state people tend to be interested in living in) has an unusual problem with finding skilled workers.
These bootcamps don't charge students until after they complete the course and get an industry job.
In some sense "legal" hacker conferences sponsored by MS and Cisco is utter nonsense. Strong disliking of cargo cults, bandwagon and peer effects of brainwashed mediocrity is a part of so-called hacker culture.)
Unless someone has information I haven't been able to dig up "crack down" just means that they've been requested to comply. BPPE decided that these sorts of programs are under their purview and so they need to cough up some amount of cash and submit some paperwork.
Quotations in the Venture Beat article very clearly state BPPE are not going after them, just notifying them of their need to comply under California law.
So much polemic either on government regulation or on the merits of these programs. BPPE places schools into either "approved" or "accredited" categories. These programs need only be approved. As far as I can tell BPPE is fairly minimal in its requirements basically ensuring the schools are real things and not diploma mills.
This isn't anywhere as much of a crackdown as CPUC making it harder for ride-shares (for a bit). Discussion of the programs makes sense, but in the context of an imagined witch hunt it just seems strange.
What, in your opinion, is the highest quality coding boot camp and why? Follow-up: what should a person who qualifies for one of these schools be looking for?
I think the word "scam" applies here.
Its extremely unlikely regulation can do as good a job as the default market forces in identifying quality programs, and it will likely put a huge damper on people trying to do innovative things with technical education in the state.
disclaimer: I run a one year 'developer bootcamp' in rural india - http://jaaga.in/study