12 ms·

General Assembly sells to Adecco for $413M

159 points by sethbannon 9y ago

noelwelsh 9y ago
"Over time, General Assembly became less of a consumer facing business and transitioned into one that was serving primarily business clients — which means access to Adecco Group’s over 100,000 businesses is a big boon to the company’s continued expansion plans." I thought this was interesting. Anyone know more about the services General Assembly was offering to businesses? I guess there is more money and less risk associated with this market. Going after the public / the bootcamp model means you run into accreditation laws surrounding educational institutions and you have to do more work (e.g. tracking placement rates).
- briandear 9y ago
  One thing they do is serve as a recruiting agency as well. I was an instructor there for awhile and that was part of the business. But that was back in circa 2012 and I wasn’t exposed much to their actual sales/b2b efforts. GA is a great org — they also did a lot of (job training) work with returning military vets as well. GA has gotten a lot of people into the tech world. Their courses aren’t all-encompassing, but their web dev courses are good enough to get junior devs off to a good start. I wish I had them when I got started! Their current Project Management courses look pretty solid as well. Highly recommended (but I have an admitted bias of course.)
- snakeboy 9y ago
  I know Booz Allen Hamilton launched a company-wide initiative with General Assembly for a data science course [1]. From my limited understanding of the content, I believe it is aimed at providing a very rudimentary introduction to the field for the more businessy/consultant types. And to demonstrate that BAH is "data-driven". [1] https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/thought-leadership/accelerating-data-science.html https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/thought-leadership/accel...
  - madengr 9y ago
    BAH is a leech on the federal government. I’m not even sure what they do, other than sucking $M in project management costs while providing nothing.
    - geofft 9y ago
      I support this - it's money that's not going to the military. Every government contract signed, every middle manager given a raise, signifies, in a final sense, a theft from those who would bomb and are not armed, those who would kill and have no weapons.
- mseebach 9y ago
  It seems super-valuable for something like GA to get pulled into a classic vocational-training style setup. Adecco seems very well suited to place a large number of entry-level programmers, including on the receiving side, to help business structure teams around getting value out of such employees.
- abakker 9y ago
  Never underestimate that people just take the classes there and expense them. I signed up for GA in order to evaluate multiple classes on Design Thinking - not because I needed to learn that material from a class, but because I needed to prove I had taken a class to be eligible for an internal certificate within my company that qualified me to work on a certain kind of project. I ended up taking a different class (from codecademy), but GA was attractive because it was relatively inexpensive and the classes seemed to be pretty short, which would have helped. My codecademy course in data analysis seems to be a lot more work, but also a lot more useful.
- s3r3nity 9y ago
  I worked for a company that was running a pilot with them for a few years to train internal candidates who wanted to go into Software Engineering, almost as a way to 1) outsource employee development 2) satisfy the need to hire lots of devs faster than recruiting could hire them 3) bring down the cost of hiring devs overall. I left before seeing the results of the pilot, but I remember folks saying that it definitely opened up doors to those looking to switch careers, but that it's a slow process: it takes a lot of time and practice to get to even an entry level engineering position, especially when it's a part-time course. Overall I like the idea of democratizing education and lowering the barrier people who want to get into the industry; plus, it definitely seems like a solution to the supply/demand problem for devs for companies, so I expect the trend of bootcamp/business partnerships to continue.
- shawndrost 9y ago
  I am a cofounder at Hack Reactor. B2B is our fastest-growing business unit, and this is true for most bootcamps that do B2B. Mostly this is corp training that happens onsite. For example, Company X has 3000 desktop or Java engineers that need to learn JS/web/data science/whatever. GA (and a few others) also has a suite of non-classroom products, which you might see as closer to Lynda or Udacity.
- jchallis 9y ago
  I took their product management course as part of our corporate development. I felt that GA did a very good job in highlighting frameworks and methodologies that made me a sufficiently better product manager to justify the investment.
- bluewhales 9y ago
  I taught the web development immersive for a while. They offer private, on-site, tailored WDI cohorts to businesses. They've also built a cybersecurity course for a client, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I don't know about. In New York, at least, it was not accredited but it was...registered, I guess? with the state. I had to get a teachers' license.
realmike33 9y ago
Is it just me or did they sell for pretty cheap? Congrats either way!
- noelwelsh 9y ago
  The article said they had revenue of 100M. Training generally doesn't lead to recurring revenue, so a huge multiplier is not justified. Doesn't seem too cheap to me.
  - moorhosj 9y ago
    B2B training should be recurring, large companies hire new classes of entry-level workers every year.
    - mbesto 9y ago
      But that's not as "sticky" as software. If you decide to cut costs next year on training because its non-essential, the revenue gets slashed. If I still need to procure stuff, I'm not going to shut off my procurement software to cut costs.
      - nl 9y ago
        It also costs more to do (even partially) in-person training than to sell SAAS software.
      - moorhosj 9y ago
        On the flip-side, if cost-cutting becomes important, a company may decide to invest in current employees skills in lieu of hiring new external employees. Any software that isn't mission-critical faces high risk in a cost-cutting environment.
    - doyoulikeworms 9y ago
      My take on it is that B2B customers are difficult and expensive to acquire and Adecco has a relationship with 100,000 leads. Seems like a good acquisition to me.
Bobbleoxs 9y ago
It seems cheap to me. I did some digital marketing course there. The classes are more on the basic side but certainly a good intro for some basics in programming and digital business.
nl 9y ago
Note that this isn't cheap because training doesn't scale like software businesses. That means the revenue multiple is lower than for a software company.
- bertil 9y ago
  I feel like we have not cracked the code on how to use software to automate teaching yet. Not sure why: NLP, complex representation of understanding, dynamic edition of video content, monitoring someone’s attention… All those are there and have been for a while.
  - turdnagel 9y ago
    We don’t yet have a substitute for asking complex questions about the source material.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I feel we barely have a notion on how to teach other humans how to teach, let alone a computer.
  - dna_polymerase 9y ago
    Yes, all those parts are there, and some of them have been around for decades, but adding these parts and building a teaching AI will be more complex, and I really think that if we are ready to build it we won't need to train humans that much anymore.
  - nl 9y ago
    Pedagogical understanding is pretty good (given enough effort in a particular field). But NLP's accuracy isn't high enough for anything more than basic tasks. It's just not good enough at understanding mistakes, or giving well calibrated probabilities of complex meanings given a context. (I work in NLP professionally, and I've worked in the education space previously).
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    As a former teacher, I find this very amusing. There's a lot more to it than uploading raw info into receptive brains. As a current software engineer, I think it's probably a lot more likely we'll automate parts of my current career.
jacquesm 9y ago
4 times revenues is pretty good for a company like that. Lots of physical presence required, a ton of handholding so it doesn't scale nearly as well as your typical 'SaaS' or other software company. Well executed and well negotiated.
- wslh 9y ago
  I don't think it is that good taking into account that $ 120 million were invested in GA. Investors look for bigger multipliers.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Investors are usually pretty savvy of what they invest in and I'm fairly sure they knew that they weren't going to see much more than 3 x revenues on this deal. And depending on how early they entered their multiples may have been a lot higher (with correspondingly longer times before their payday came). The last round in 2015 was 70 million, that's a pretty good pay-off for 3 years, the one before that was 35 million in 2014, still a very good ROI. Investors look for bigger multipliers when the risks are higher, a company like this is as start-up investments come reasonably low risk, it is essentially a middle ground between a consultancy business and a scalable proposition and as a result of that the returns are also in the middle. Investors looking for bigger multipliers would have to be content with taking bigger risks as well.
    - alehul 9y ago
      The $70m round in 2015 was likely for 10-20% equity, meaning a valuation between 350m and 700m. With that in mind, it's virtually no gain or possibly a loss. The article actually mentioned a latest valuation iirc that said the last round investors had ~no positive return. I agree with the evaluation of risk, though.
      - verelo 9y ago
        Sometimes you’ve got to double down to see the initial investment pay off. Depends who was in on the round, but a good investor who follows through to help get the outcome is a special kind of partner.
knuththetruth 9y ago
I hope this doesn’t result in some form of debt peonage temp work, but having worked some Adecco jobs when I was younger, I wouldn’t put it past them. In my experience, they were mostly recruiting for jobs in really toxic workplaces that couldn’t otherwise attract talent, and that were described as “temp-to-hire,” but that never worked out that way. They would get rid of people once they had pushed them to the limit of contracting laws or if you in anyway complained about/reported anything at your job site. I could easily see this devolving into some kind of debt-based H1B system, where they drastically overprice a bootcamp education that they give for “free” to desperate jobseekers, and then use to lock them into underpaid roles at bad workplaces that can’t recruit technical talent without this kind of predatory leverage.
acjohnson55 9y ago
Is it safe to say the bootcamp boom is over? For a while, it seemed like everyone and their cousin was starting a bootcamp, trying to cash in on the gold rush. Now, most of the biggest ones I know of (GA, Flatiron, Dev Bootcamp (RIP)) have been gobbled up.
- jacobwal 9y ago
  Seems like it. But you have some new models - like Lambda School - that are showing a lot of promise
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Co-founder of Lambda School here. The problem with the bootcamp gold rush is and has always been the business model. You have a few major variables: 1. How much can a person pay you? 2. How many people can you fit in a classroom? 3. How long can the classes be while still maintaining a profit margin? Based on those constraints bootcamps try to teach as much as possible. Within those constraints bootcamps found one model that worked and cloned it hundreds of times: A bunch of people in a classroom for 12 weeks paying $10-15k each. Some will try to chop off a couple weeks, some charge $18k instead of $10k, but it's fundamentally the same. Every single bootcamp recognizes that this is not a great way to train engineers. 12 weeks simply isn't enough. But there's enough of a shortage or engineering talent that bootcamps could get away with it for a while. Sure, in an ideal world you would actually train the students based on what they need to make hiring companies happy, but change any of the variables in the above equation and the whole business model falls apart. If you want to make the classes 2x the length you'd have to charge 2x the price, and can you get large numbers of people to pay $25-40k out of pocket? Not a chance. We had to really start from first principles, and start with a new business model, which changes everything else. The main thing we wanted was incentives aligned with our students; so we started from, "What if we didn't get paid unless students get a job?" That forced us to change everything else. I actually thought it might not be possible for a while. I don't consider Lambda School to be a code bootcamp. We're six or seven months long full-time, which is 2.5x the length of a code bootcamp, plus a month of pre-course work. A few graduates have applied to Lambda School after having paid another school $15k and haven't even been able to pass our prep work. I think we're on the _short_ end of what a solid engineering education should be. But we have enough time to teach true fundamentals, our students don't just write JavaScript, but also Python and C, they have an apprenticeship where they ship real projects that make real money on real teams, and they actually learn to think and write real code, not just pump out quick apps then struggle when confronted with anything new. We can be flexible on class size so long as we keep a good teacher:student ratios because we're entirely online (which, by the way, is actually a superior learning experience to offline). We can pick the best students regardless of financial ability because our pool of potential students isn't limited to people with 20k in their pockets that can move to San Francisco. We actually have _more_ support for students, because our instructors scale across classes when they're not teaching, and we can do some tricky financial stuff on the backend to make sure students are guaranteed a job before they pay. All of that combined lets us open up a promise, which is what really matters for students at the end of the day - attend for free until you get hired. I think we'll see massive consolidation in the bootcamp space in coming months, and it's already started (Dev Bootcamp, Iron Yard, Bloc, Viking Code School, and more have either been acquired or closed). That's very healthy, and frankly there are some sleazy bootcamps that only exist because of marketing. You could wipe the bottom 80% of bootcamps off the face of the earth and it would probably be a net positive for everyone. I think we'll get there in the next 3-4 years.
luckydata 9y ago
I witnessed the quality of education provided in the areas of design and product management and I wasn't impressed. To me GA felt like a predatory business that provided a very superficial veneer of legitimacy to extremely unqualified candidates. The good ones going in would be well served by the networking but people that didn't know anything about the field would crash and burn at their first contact with the reality of the industry. I'm not one of those people hung up on traditional college education, I got my degree mostly studying by myself and always found most of what my college offered useless, so I'm not coming from the angle of "you need an x year college degree for this...". I realize this is an harsh opinion but it's not cool to get north of $10k from people that need a job and tell them "we'll make you a designer in 3 months", that just doesn't happen.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  I think they are probably better viewed as a good option for part-time courses in technical disciplines for self-motivated people. At least as a potential applicant (have never taken a bootcamp) I didn't see them in the same light as Hack Reactor, for example.
- kitotik 9y ago
  Predatory indeed. I know of many people who were previously working service industry jobs, saved up the $10k for a GA course with the promise that they’ll be making $150k/yr in ~12 weeks. I’ve personally interviewed around 25 GA grads, and the result was pretty much the same with all of them - “great, you now know what you don’t know, and have about a year of self-directed learning followed by a year of on the job experience before being employable in a role above an internship. It’s actually pretty heartbreaking when you talk them and get a sense for how much they were oversold.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    I used to interview would-be students for Lambda School (we now have a team that does that), and we had many GA grads that couldn't even pass our code challenge we required to start. It wasn't outrageously hard stuff they were tripping up on, if you don't grasp closure or recursion or something that might be OK, but most couldn't code fizzbuzz. After having paid $10-15k in tuition and being trained for three months, I would at a minimum expect a student to be able to write a for loop.
dawhizkid 9y ago
Surprised it wasn't WeWork
liminal 9y ago
After watching someone go through their training, I'm not very impressed. They also enormously inflate their job placement statistics by giving graduates a difficult set of hoops to continually keep jumping through in order to be counted at all. For example, miss posting a blog one week, poof!, you're no longer counted in their placement statistics.

159 points by sethbannon 9y ago

"Over time, General Assembly became less of a consumer facing business and transitioned into one that was serving primarily business clients — which means access to Adecco Group’s over 100,000 businesses is a big boon to the company’s continued expansion plans." I thought this was interesting. Anyone know more about the services General Assembly was offering to businesses? I guess there is more money and less risk associated with this market. Going after the public / the bootcamp model means you run into accreditation laws surrounding educational institutions and you have to do more work (e.g. tracking placement rates).

briandear 9y ago
One thing they do is serve as a recruiting agency as well. I was an instructor there for awhile and that was part of the business. But that was back in circa 2012 and I wasn’t exposed much to their actual sales/b2b efforts. GA is a great org — they also did a lot of (job training) work with returning military vets as well. GA has gotten a lot of people into the tech world. Their courses aren’t all-encompassing, but their web dev courses are good enough to get junior devs off to a good start. I wish I had them when I got started! Their current Project Management courses look pretty solid as well. Highly recommended (but I have an admitted bias of course.)
snakeboy 9y ago
I know Booz Allen Hamilton launched a company-wide initiative with General Assembly for a data science course [1]. From my limited understanding of the content, I believe it is aimed at providing a very rudimentary introduction to the field for the more businessy/consultant types. And to demonstrate that BAH is "data-driven". [1] https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/thought-leadership/accelerating-data-science.html https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/thought-leadership/accel...
- madengr 9y ago
  BAH is a leech on the federal government. I’m not even sure what they do, other than sucking $M in project management costs while providing nothing.
  - geofft 9y ago
    I support this - it's money that's not going to the military. Every government contract signed, every middle manager given a raise, signifies, in a final sense, a theft from those who would bomb and are not armed, those who would kill and have no weapons.
mseebach 9y ago
It seems super-valuable for something like GA to get pulled into a classic vocational-training style setup. Adecco seems very well suited to place a large number of entry-level programmers, including on the receiving side, to help business structure teams around getting value out of such employees.
abakker 9y ago
Never underestimate that people just take the classes there and expense them. I signed up for GA in order to evaluate multiple classes on Design Thinking - not because I needed to learn that material from a class, but because I needed to prove I had taken a class to be eligible for an internal certificate within my company that qualified me to work on a certain kind of project. I ended up taking a different class (from codecademy), but GA was attractive because it was relatively inexpensive and the classes seemed to be pretty short, which would have helped. My codecademy course in data analysis seems to be a lot more work, but also a lot more useful.
s3r3nity 9y ago
I worked for a company that was running a pilot with them for a few years to train internal candidates who wanted to go into Software Engineering, almost as a way to 1) outsource employee development 2) satisfy the need to hire lots of devs faster than recruiting could hire them 3) bring down the cost of hiring devs overall. I left before seeing the results of the pilot, but I remember folks saying that it definitely opened up doors to those looking to switch careers, but that it's a slow process: it takes a lot of time and practice to get to even an entry level engineering position, especially when it's a part-time course. Overall I like the idea of democratizing education and lowering the barrier people who want to get into the industry; plus, it definitely seems like a solution to the supply/demand problem for devs for companies, so I expect the trend of bootcamp/business partnerships to continue.
shawndrost 9y ago
I am a cofounder at Hack Reactor. B2B is our fastest-growing business unit, and this is true for most bootcamps that do B2B. Mostly this is corp training that happens onsite. For example, Company X has 3000 desktop or Java engineers that need to learn JS/web/data science/whatever. GA (and a few others) also has a suite of non-classroom products, which you might see as closer to Lynda or Udacity.
jchallis 9y ago
I took their product management course as part of our corporate development. I felt that GA did a very good job in highlighting frameworks and methodologies that made me a sufficiently better product manager to justify the investment.
bluewhales 9y ago
I taught the web development immersive for a while. They offer private, on-site, tailored WDI cohorts to businesses. They've also built a cybersecurity course for a client, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I don't know about. In New York, at least, it was not accredited but it was...registered, I guess? with the state. I had to get a teachers' license.

realmike33 9y ago

Is it just me or did they sell for pretty cheap? Congrats either way!

noelwelsh 9y ago
The article said they had revenue of 100M. Training generally doesn't lead to recurring revenue, so a huge multiplier is not justified. Doesn't seem too cheap to me.
- moorhosj 9y ago
  B2B training should be recurring, large companies hire new classes of entry-level workers every year.
  - mbesto 9y ago
    But that's not as "sticky" as software. If you decide to cut costs next year on training because its non-essential, the revenue gets slashed. If I still need to procure stuff, I'm not going to shut off my procurement software to cut costs.
    - nl 9y ago
      It also costs more to do (even partially) in-person training than to sell SAAS software.
    - moorhosj 9y ago
      On the flip-side, if cost-cutting becomes important, a company may decide to invest in current employees skills in lieu of hiring new external employees. Any software that isn't mission-critical faces high risk in a cost-cutting environment.
  - doyoulikeworms 9y ago
    My take on it is that B2B customers are difficult and expensive to acquire and Adecco has a relationship with 100,000 leads. Seems like a good acquisition to me.

Bobbleoxs 9y ago

It seems cheap to me. I did some digital marketing course there. The classes are more on the basic side but certainly a good intro for some basics in programming and digital business.

nl 9y ago

Note that this isn't cheap because training doesn't scale like software businesses. That means the revenue multiple is lower than for a software company.

bertil 9y ago
I feel like we have not cracked the code on how to use software to automate teaching yet. Not sure why: NLP, complex representation of understanding, dynamic edition of video content, monitoring someone’s attention… All those are there and have been for a while.
- turdnagel 9y ago
  We don’t yet have a substitute for asking complex questions about the source material.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I feel we barely have a notion on how to teach other humans how to teach, let alone a computer.
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  Yes, all those parts are there, and some of them have been around for decades, but adding these parts and building a teaching AI will be more complex, and I really think that if we are ready to build it we won't need to train humans that much anymore.
- nl 9y ago
  Pedagogical understanding is pretty good (given enough effort in a particular field). But NLP's accuracy isn't high enough for anything more than basic tasks. It's just not good enough at understanding mistakes, or giving well calibrated probabilities of complex meanings given a context. (I work in NLP professionally, and I've worked in the education space previously).
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  As a former teacher, I find this very amusing. There's a lot more to it than uploading raw info into receptive brains. As a current software engineer, I think it's probably a lot more likely we'll automate parts of my current career.

jacquesm 9y ago

4 times revenues is pretty good for a company like that. Lots of physical presence required, a ton of handholding so it doesn't scale nearly as well as your typical 'SaaS' or other software company. Well executed and well negotiated.

wslh 9y ago
I don't think it is that good taking into account that $ 120 million were invested in GA. Investors look for bigger multipliers.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Investors are usually pretty savvy of what they invest in and I'm fairly sure they knew that they weren't going to see much more than 3 x revenues on this deal. And depending on how early they entered their multiples may have been a lot higher (with correspondingly longer times before their payday came). The last round in 2015 was 70 million, that's a pretty good pay-off for 3 years, the one before that was 35 million in 2014, still a very good ROI. Investors look for bigger multipliers when the risks are higher, a company like this is as start-up investments come reasonably low risk, it is essentially a middle ground between a consultancy business and a scalable proposition and as a result of that the returns are also in the middle. Investors looking for bigger multipliers would have to be content with taking bigger risks as well.
  - alehul 9y ago
    The $70m round in 2015 was likely for 10-20% equity, meaning a valuation between 350m and 700m. With that in mind, it's virtually no gain or possibly a loss. The article actually mentioned a latest valuation iirc that said the last round investors had ~no positive return. I agree with the evaluation of risk, though.
    - verelo 9y ago
      Sometimes you’ve got to double down to see the initial investment pay off. Depends who was in on the round, but a good investor who follows through to help get the outcome is a special kind of partner.

knuththetruth 9y ago

I hope this doesn’t result in some form of debt peonage temp work, but having worked some Adecco jobs when I was younger, I wouldn’t put it past them. In my experience, they were mostly recruiting for jobs in really toxic workplaces that couldn’t otherwise attract talent, and that were described as “temp-to-hire,” but that never worked out that way. They would get rid of people once they had pushed them to the limit of contracting laws or if you in anyway complained about/reported anything at your job site. I could easily see this devolving into some kind of debt-based H1B system, where they drastically overprice a bootcamp education that they give for “free” to desperate jobseekers, and then use to lock them into underpaid roles at bad workplaces that can’t recruit technical talent without this kind of predatory leverage.

acjohnson55 9y ago

Is it safe to say the bootcamp boom is over? For a while, it seemed like everyone and their cousin was starting a bootcamp, trying to cash in on the gold rush. Now, most of the biggest ones I know of (GA, Flatiron, Dev Bootcamp (RIP)) have been gobbled up.

jacobwal 9y ago
Seems like it. But you have some new models - like Lambda School - that are showing a lot of promise
- austenallred 9y ago
  Co-founder of Lambda School here. The problem with the bootcamp gold rush is and has always been the business model. You have a few major variables: 1. How much can a person pay you? 2. How many people can you fit in a classroom? 3. How long can the classes be while still maintaining a profit margin? Based on those constraints bootcamps try to teach as much as possible. Within those constraints bootcamps found one model that worked and cloned it hundreds of times: A bunch of people in a classroom for 12 weeks paying $10-15k each. Some will try to chop off a couple weeks, some charge $18k instead of $10k, but it's fundamentally the same. Every single bootcamp recognizes that this is not a great way to train engineers. 12 weeks simply isn't enough. But there's enough of a shortage or engineering talent that bootcamps could get away with it for a while. Sure, in an ideal world you would actually train the students based on what they need to make hiring companies happy, but change any of the variables in the above equation and the whole business model falls apart. If you want to make the classes 2x the length you'd have to charge 2x the price, and can you get large numbers of people to pay $25-40k out of pocket? Not a chance. We had to really start from first principles, and start with a new business model, which changes everything else. The main thing we wanted was incentives aligned with our students; so we started from, "What if we didn't get paid unless students get a job?" That forced us to change everything else. I actually thought it might not be possible for a while. I don't consider Lambda School to be a code bootcamp. We're six or seven months long full-time, which is 2.5x the length of a code bootcamp, plus a month of pre-course work. A few graduates have applied to Lambda School after having paid another school $15k and haven't even been able to pass our prep work. I think we're on the _short_ end of what a solid engineering education should be. But we have enough time to teach true fundamentals, our students don't just write JavaScript, but also Python and C, they have an apprenticeship where they ship real projects that make real money on real teams, and they actually learn to think and write real code, not just pump out quick apps then struggle when confronted with anything new. We can be flexible on class size so long as we keep a good teacher:student ratios because we're entirely online (which, by the way, is actually a superior learning experience to offline). We can pick the best students regardless of financial ability because our pool of potential students isn't limited to people with 20k in their pockets that can move to San Francisco. We actually have _more_ support for students, because our instructors scale across classes when they're not teaching, and we can do some tricky financial stuff on the backend to make sure students are guaranteed a job before they pay. All of that combined lets us open up a promise, which is what really matters for students at the end of the day - attend for free until you get hired. I think we'll see massive consolidation in the bootcamp space in coming months, and it's already started (Dev Bootcamp, Iron Yard, Bloc, Viking Code School, and more have either been acquired or closed). That's very healthy, and frankly there are some sleazy bootcamps that only exist because of marketing. You could wipe the bottom 80% of bootcamps off the face of the earth and it would probably be a net positive for everyone. I think we'll get there in the next 3-4 years.

luckydata 9y ago

I witnessed the quality of education provided in the areas of design and product management and I wasn't impressed. To me GA felt like a predatory business that provided a very superficial veneer of legitimacy to extremely unqualified candidates. The good ones going in would be well served by the networking but people that didn't know anything about the field would crash and burn at their first contact with the reality of the industry. I'm not one of those people hung up on traditional college education, I got my degree mostly studying by myself and always found most of what my college offered useless, so I'm not coming from the angle of "you need an x year college degree for this...". I realize this is an harsh opinion but it's not cool to get north of $10k from people that need a job and tell them "we'll make you a designer in 3 months", that just doesn't happen.

dawhizkid 9y ago
I think they are probably better viewed as a good option for part-time courses in technical disciplines for self-motivated people. At least as a potential applicant (have never taken a bootcamp) I didn't see them in the same light as Hack Reactor, for example.
kitotik 9y ago
Predatory indeed. I know of many people who were previously working service industry jobs, saved up the $10k for a GA course with the promise that they’ll be making $150k/yr in ~12 weeks. I’ve personally interviewed around 25 GA grads, and the result was pretty much the same with all of them - “great, you now know what you don’t know, and have about a year of self-directed learning followed by a year of on the job experience before being employable in a role above an internship. It’s actually pretty heartbreaking when you talk them and get a sense for how much they were oversold.
- austenallred 9y ago
  I used to interview would-be students for Lambda School (we now have a team that does that), and we had many GA grads that couldn't even pass our code challenge we required to start. It wasn't outrageously hard stuff they were tripping up on, if you don't grasp closure or recursion or something that might be OK, but most couldn't code fizzbuzz. After having paid $10-15k in tuition and being trained for three months, I would at a minimum expect a student to be able to write a for loop.

dawhizkid 9y ago

Surprised it wasn't WeWork

liminal 9y ago

After watching someone go through their training, I'm not very impressed. They also enormously inflate their job placement statistics by giving graduates a difficult set of hoops to continually keep jumping through in order to be counted at all. For example, miss posting a blog one week, poof!, you're no longer counted in their placement statistics.