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They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer

They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer before signing the job offer.

em-bee 7y ago
how would they do that? if they are the kind of people described in the article, then they have no means with which to evaluate the school. as a programmer, i can judge if a potential employer is doing proper software development, and if i am already in the field, i can judge whether the next class/school will teach me something that relates to what i am doing, but as a student completely new to the field i don't even know yet what and how i can best learn. so i can't necessarily judge the quality of the school. i can look at statistics for past students, but those can be faked, so short of actually talking to a number of past students, evaluation of a school is hard.
hluska 7y ago
Let me pull out a quote from the article. “But Tori and her mother, Stephanie, 45, stayed. Every weekday morning, Tori would wake up early, her mother would feed the chickens and together they would head down the serpentine mountain road to Beckley. Nights and weekends they spent in the glow of their laptops — bought from a website on credit — learning the rudiments of Ruby, the programming language.” To steal a shitty term from mainstream media, let’s unpack this. Tori [Frame] used to be an assistant manager in a Family Dollar location. She decided to take a bootcamp with her mom so she quit her job. And, the family bought laptops on credit from a website. I’m pretty sure we can all guess what kind of website that is. With all due respect to the Frames, I don’t buy that either of them were qualified to assess whether the bootcamp was any good. Instead, they sound a lot like desperate people caught up by predatory marketing.

They absolutely are the victims but it's also a students responsibility to do due diligence on the bootcamps just like you would (should?) research an employer before signing the job offer.

em-bee 7y ago

how would they do that? if they are the kind of people described in the article, then they have no means with which to evaluate the school. as a programmer, i can judge if a potential employer is doing proper software development, and if i am already in the field, i can judge whether the next class/school will teach me something that relates to what i am doing, but as a student completely new to the field i don't even know yet what and how i can best learn. so i can't necessarily judge the quality of the school. i can look at statistics for past students, but those can be faked, so short of actually talking to a number of past students, evaluation of a school is hard.

hluska 7y ago

Let me pull out a quote from the article. “But Tori and her mother, Stephanie, 45, stayed. Every weekday morning, Tori would wake up early, her mother would feed the chickens and together they would head down the serpentine mountain road to Beckley. Nights and weekends they spent in the glow of their laptops — bought from a website on credit — learning the rudiments of Ruby, the programming language.” To steal a shitty term from mainstream media, let’s unpack this. Tori [Frame] used to be an assistant manager in a Family Dollar location. She decided to take a bootcamp with her mom so she quit her job. And, the family bought laptops on credit from a website. I’m pretty sure we can all guess what kind of website that is. With all due respect to the Frames, I don’t buy that either of them were qualified to assess whether the bootcamp was any good. Instead, they sound a lot like desperate people caught up by predatory marketing.