quelle surprise! Most of these programs are a joke. I remember when Tech Square Labs in Atlanta did a program to "help" inner city black kids. I went down to t

quelle surprise! Most of these programs are a joke. I remember when Tech Square Labs in Atlanta did a program to "help" inner city black kids. I went down to talk to them and get more information. For one year of this program they were charging the sponsors $57K. That is more than the tuition at many private schools. But it gets better. They had The Iron Yard (which is now closed) doing the course material so I had a chat with the people teaching the courses etc.. It was very apparent they had no idea what they were doing. The supposedly "disadvantaged" founders of this did not even understand the kinds of things they kids in the program actually were going through, such as having a lack of financial literacy or even a bank account at times. I'm white but live in a disadvantaged neighborhood and knew this because I don't live in the rich bubble that these "disadvantaged" founders did. When the political climate was right they were bilking the tax payers for this program with funding from the city of Atlanta, the feds etc., but after 2016 the funding went away, as did the founders profits. There have been many programs like this one in Atlanta and the one for the people in Appalachia. I'm all for bringing people who do have the aptitude to the industry. That said, not everybody has the aptitude to be a developer, in the same way that not everybody has the aptitude to be a prize winning author, language guru, doctor, top athlete etc.. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. The coding bootcamp industrial complex appears to be a movement of grifters from a non tech background trying to make a quick buck and flood the market with cheap labor. In the end most of the students were poorer than they would have been in an accredited program, without training that would actually get them a job and as an industry we've had to deal with the fallout from it. I'm saying all of this as someone who actively supports one of these, but the one I support is run by computer science majors, who grew up poor, have made enormous personal sacrifices to run the program and targets people who truly have no option to go to the university and do it for far less than what the grifter orgs were doing it for. Truth be told, "learn to code" is not the way to economic prosperity. Paying livable wages for things is, irregardless of the country etc..