Single mom sues coding boot camp over job placement rates (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Learn to learn as I've heard it put.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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).

{{citation needed}}

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.