I graduated Lambda School and currently have been hired and work in a software position. I don't encourage people to go to... Bloomtech they're calling it now. AMA.

I was earlier in the life of Lambda. I got what I needed out of it but I watched a lot who didn't.

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

Has anyone had success hiring bootcamp grads?

I’ve interviewed dozens and their resume will say something like “Fellow at [bootcamp]” or “Instructor at [bootcamp]”, and it turns out they made a simple programming 101 app and taught a 1hr intro to JavaScript class.

None have ever passed an initial screening by me for mid level dev jobs, but I’m curious if anyone else has hired a bootcamp grad for a junior role and had a great experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layoffs suck regardless though.

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

https://operationcode.org/podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austen Allred is a fuckin' tool.

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

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

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

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

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