from Hacker News

The high cost of a free coding bootcamp

by JakeWesorick on 2/11/20, 5:25 PM with 33 comments

• by alephnan on 2/11/20, 8:51 PM

  > Once, a student asked about the difference between JavaScript array methods, like push versus concat or forEach versus map, the team lead said they were interchangeable. (They are not.)

  Technically, push and concat can be augmented to achieve the same thing. Same with forEach and map. Might not be the best fitted screwdriver but it’ll still kinda work.

• by djsumdog on 2/11/20, 6:54 PM

  30k?! You are honestly better off taking two yeas of night courses at a community college, and it will probably cost you half of that for more classroom time.

  Bootcamp programs are really crap. Even in a traditional classroom setting, you only get out of it what you put in. I know CompSci majors who graduated only knowing Java and who were totally lost if they had to replace a ram chip in a computer. I knew others who would try new languages every semester and who probably still keep up with tech news in our industry.

  Boot camps are more of a filter to find people who are going to put in that effort anyway. You have to in order to be able to make it. But I feel they're also part of this hustle culture bullshit; you're better off taking your time and learning slowly (and more affordably) rather than trying to cram everything in to 12 to 24 weeks.

• by mosdl on 2/11/20, 7:32 PM

  Of 20 people I've interviewed who completed a coding bootcamp without prior CS education in the past year or so, I think 1 passed the phone screen (all front end). At this point I outright reject them because of the futility.

• by insomniacity on 2/11/20, 10:14 PM

  The article states that the ISA aligns Lambda with the student - but I thought I read that they generally sell off the ISA, meaning they no longer have that alignment....

• by frequentnapper on 2/11/20, 9:53 PM

  I am not going to hire anybody from a free coding bootcamp or a coding bootcamp for that matter. Seems like they turn out people who know how to hack things together based on shallow knowledge.

• by davidgerard on 2/12/20, 11:03 AM

  People calling out Lambda is what PG's "Haters" essay is about http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html

• by manfredo on 2/11/20, 6:55 PM

  The attempt to portray income share agreements as bad is very large stretch:

  > These ISAs are the bedrock of Lambda’s program. They allow the school to market itself as an “accessible” computer science education. But critics, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have warned that ISAs carry many of the pitfalls of traditional private student loans, “with the added danger of deceptive rhetoric and marketing that obscure their true nature.”

  Yeah, except for one massive pitfall that student loans have and ISAs don't: With ISAs you only start to pay once you actually start making money whereas student loans saddle graduates with debt regardless of their job prospects. If the graduates of the Lambda school don't land jobs then the school doesn't get paid. With traditional student loans, the school gets paid even if their graduates are unemployed.

  ISAs seem strictly better to me. It shifts the risk burden onto the school, and creates monetary incentives to improve the job prospects of graduates. By comparison, traditional loans put the risk burden on the student and because the university is paid upfront there is not as much incentive to better the job prospects of graduates.

• by crywank on 2/11/20, 8:36 PM

  Pull up a chair, DHH is going nuts on twitter about this rn