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Single mom sues coding boot camp over job placement rates

97 points by akanet 5y ago

32gbsd 5y ago
yakak 5y ago
I don't really get the claim about misrepresenting their financial incentives.. Is there a lender in the middle that pays the school a lesser amount and assumes the risk? I can't imagine they qualify for a federal educational loan guarantee.
- akanet 5y ago
  in my first story[1] on lambda school, my point about misrepresented financial incentives was about, fundamentally, lambda selling off its ISAs to a hedge fund. in this case, the school managed to recoup income on a students irrespective of whether they found the job. [1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
- ceeplusplus 5y ago
  Generally these ISAs get securitized, so the risk shifts off the school's books and the school just gets paid the cut for originating the security. That being said bootcamps (or really school in general) are not a magic bullet that automatically gets you a job. Even a bachelor's in CS might not get you the skills needed to become a web developer. The core point of a real degree is it teaches you how to learn and instills basic principles that apply generally to any field. But you still need to put in the effort to learn domain specific things.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
akanet 5y ago
btw, this story is notable in that, unlike the other cases brought by the NSLDN, this student opted out of the arbitration clause in her ISA and can therefore sue in civil court. This confers numerous advantages, including being able to compel discovery.
- kodah 5y ago
  I was reminded by someone at my company that by opting out of my companies arbitration clause I can also be sued directly by a multi billion dollar corporation. I'm not a fan of arbitration clauses, but even having the opportunity to sue is not tipping the scales much.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    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.
qiskit 5y ago
Community colleges should really be filling this role not for-profit vultures preying on the poor and the desperate. Can't community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp equivalent? Does the $30K income sharing agreement mean that she has to pay $30K to the school once she starts working? And if that's after tax, then doesn't it mean she'll have to make around $50K to have $30K in after-tax income to pay back the school?
- ipnon 5y ago
  Hot take: All of the information in boot camps is available online for free, and people who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn have a harder time breaking into the industry. Any programming job requires solving new problems everyday. People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb.
  - gh02t 5y ago
    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.
    - ipnon 5y ago
      Everyone still has to jump through the Leetcode/whiteboard/design hoops to get in the door. My impression from working with bootcamp grads is that they are well-prepared for this trial, better than CS grads. The bootcamps don't teach them any theory that will "never" be used on the job.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        While true they still need a certification to put on a resume to get past recruiters. It's fine to think they shouldn't but IRL they probably do.
  - 5y ago
ipnon 5y ago
A few points: 1. I'm surprised Bloom doesn't have an arbitration clause. 2. Bloom doesn't say what percentage of privates[a] get a job afterwards. I can't imagine any lawyer would put a guarantee in the contract. 3. Bloom fully refunds the tuition if you don't get a coder job in 365 days. Getting that education for free is a good deal, even if all you get is web dev code monkey 101. If you have 2 neurons to rub together you can extend that into learning other areas of programming. Although admittedly that's hard for a single mom, it's not Bloom's fault she's in that situation. 4. Were coder bootcamps so successful that the labor market is now well and truly saturated with juniors? My estimation of the story is that the litigant is salty she didn't read the fine print and probably just isn't very talented. Learning how to program computers isn't an economic panacea, and it's hard. I got a CS degree and struggled to get a decent jobs for years. Maybe we'll see CS graduates sueing their universities if this litigation provails. [a] Somehow graduate seems inappropriate terminology for a boot camp.
- roguecoder 5y ago
  On 4, the answer is no, but Lambda school in particular has developed a reputation at least in my circles for producing people who are less qualified than folks with no bootcamp or experience on their resume because it is not an effective program. Rather than addressing their pedagogical failures, they decided to change their name, commit fraud & lie to potential students. Which opens them up to being sued, if only by students, like this woman, who opted out of the arbitration clause.
truthwhisperer 5y ago
jbirer 5y ago
- lucb1e 5y ago
  You have no idea what the circumstances were, her major life decisions are none of your business, plus it is entirely irrelevant to the lawsuit. For all you know the father died of something horrible and entirely out of their control, or maybe she isn't heterosexual, or there could be so many things. This comment seems short-sighted or flamebait, I cannot tell which.
  - truthwhisperer 4y ago
uuyi 5y ago
listenallyall 5y ago
The article is entirely unclear about whether she paid anything to Lambda School, or whether she currently owes anything to them. > She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs "Took out" of where? Her bank account? Why would she be in an income-share if she paid $30,000 up front? > for any student’s ISA payments to be activated ... landed a role leveraging skills learned at Lambda School that pays $50K or more in salary. She has not earned anything from being a web developer. So it would appear she doesn't owe Lambda anything. Are they suing her?
- ipnon 5y ago
  It seems like she took the ISA, then took out a personal loan to cover external expenses of taking the course. This is unfortunate, but it doesn't look like it's Bloom's fault.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    The faults she's suing for would be deceptive business claims about placement rates, program strength, and the hiding of illegal behavior.
    - listenallyall 5y ago
      Which may be entirely justified, we don't know. But it also may be true that despite taking the class, she just wasn't good at being a web developer. We also don't know how many interviews she went on, or tried to, before giving up. A school with a 98% placement rate still concedes that 2% of it's graduates don't get hired.
- roguecoder 5y ago
  That's not how crimes work. The crimes happened whether or not she paid them money, and any harm is enough harm to sue. If you spend your time, that is still something you spent. If the person you spent it on was committing fraud at the time, that's a crime.
  - 5y ago
lucb1e 5y ago
What would be actually interesting, and core to the story, but is of course entirely omitted from the article, is the alleged and actual placement rate.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  A long running problem with bootcamps is gaming placement rates by hiring graduates (often at salaries far below what their marketing suggests it possible). So any placement rates need to be quantified, since bootcamp students are interesting in become developers, not teachers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cryptoaquinas 5y ago
Sounds like a hit piece against Bloom Institute/Lambda school orchestrated by failing university administrators. High paying jobs are hard to get. They are meant to be earned and not something that will be handed over in a platter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
syngrog66 5y ago
one thing I love about programming computers is that its pure merit, has nothing to do with my gender, sexuality, race, marital status or parenting status. its orthogonal to all those things. the computer doesnt care, books dont care, etc. up to you when you sit down with them. anything is possible, just up to you
- ausbah 5y ago
  but does that matter? there are more important things such as access to computers & related resources at a young age, hiring for jobs that involve computers, etc. that are biased
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I guess when you can't hack it and are literally told by employers that you do "not have the technical skills for the job" as this woman was, you can fall back on your gender, sexuality, race, marital or parenting status to make waves and garner sympathy from a society that increasingly values the right combination of these over merit.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  But programming may involve culture fit, so maybe you are hypothetically comfortable working as an older person with 22 year olds, but the rest of the team might not feel the same way.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  I suppose that’s true in some sense. But working in tech, you run into all those biases and prejudices just like anywhere else.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paulpauper 5y ago
For-profit colleges and coding bootcamps, which inflate success metrics and charge too much. The best argument yet against libertarianism, although a libertarian society would not require so much credentials though.
- alecbz 5y ago
  COVID's a pretty good argument against libertarianism; I think this is a pretty ~weak one. Any time you have an industry that's largely non-private, the private parts of it are probably going to be weird. E.g., private schools tend to cater to the wealthy. But it's not generally true that highly privatized industries cater to the wealthy. Private schools cater to the wealthy because public schools exist, which makes it very difficult for a private school to compete at "lower price points".
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
So I was looking for the text of the lawsuit, but the search turned up a person who closely matches the description of the plaintiff on LinkedIn (and not the lawsuit). I wish I could read the allegations because just going by her current and past employment, things look a little fishy. I recently heard, I think on Planet Money, that a lot of places are moving away from ISAs because they have too much trouble collecting on them. People who hit it big afterward end up having remorse that they signed the ISA and try to get out from under. A suspicious part of me wonders whether that's going on here. To be clear, I'm not saying that these boot camps are generally a good idea. I've been unfavorable about them on here for a while. But, if you do transition into a technical role after going to one, that would seem to be a success story, even if the role isn't a programmer role.
- alecbz 5y ago
  The article mentions that they were in a technical role before the bootcamp as well.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    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.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    Going by the LinkedIn profile, she was in program management, but it wasn’t a technical role; she was managing nurse practitioners.
legerdemain 5y ago
Honestly, bootcampers are on average pretty bad, but the weakest hires tend to come from some of these so-called "elite" universities. Graduates come out of ivory tower CS programs with heads full of empty theory and zero practical knowledge or good judgment. I would bring on a self-taught or even a bootcamp grad ahead of someone whose resume just has a big-name university and a string of academic acronyms after their name.
pcthrowaway 5y ago
For people assuming this is typical of bootcamps, there have been many discussions and articles alleging lambda school is deceptive, and a scam. Relevant links below: - https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucrative-tech-coding-career-low-job-placement-2021-10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017 - https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lvi6mz/lambda_school_is_consistently_deceptive/ - https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qfjorv/lambda_school_promised_a_fast_and_cheap_path_to_a/ Generalizing the experience with Lambda school to other bootcamps is perhaps unfair
xyzzy21 5y ago
Good. 99% of coding boot camps are frauds making promises they can never keep and they know it. Most people can NOT code well ever. The economy can't possibly absorb having much more than 5% of the population being coders and that's unrealistically optimistic.
mattsuth 4y ago
I don’t know about the allegations of the lawsuit, but something feels off to me: She clearly (based on her LinkedIn and personal website) went from a non-technical role to a role at Microsoft that explicitly requires someone to know how to code.

97 points by akanet 5y ago

I don't really get the claim about misrepresenting their financial incentives.. Is there a lender in the middle that pays the school a lesser amount and assumes the risk? I can't imagine they qualify for a federal educational loan guarantee.

akanet 5y ago
in my first story[1] on lambda school, my point about misrepresented financial incentives was about, fundamentally, lambda selling off its ISAs to a hedge fund. in this case, the school managed to recoup income on a students irrespective of whether they found the job. [1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
ceeplusplus 5y ago
Generally these ISAs get securitized, so the risk shifts off the school's books and the school just gets paid the cut for originating the security. That being said bootcamps (or really school in general) are not a magic bullet that automatically gets you a job. Even a bachelor's in CS might not get you the skills needed to become a web developer. The core point of a real degree is it teaches you how to learn and instills basic principles that apply generally to any field. But you still need to put in the effort to learn domain specific things.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

akanet 5y ago

btw, this story is notable in that, unlike the other cases brought by the NSLDN, this student opted out of the arbitration clause in her ISA and can therefore sue in civil court. This confers numerous advantages, including being able to compel discovery.

kodah 5y ago
I was reminded by someone at my company that by opting out of my companies arbitration clause I can also be sued directly by a multi billion dollar corporation. I'm not a fan of arbitration clauses, but even having the opportunity to sue is not tipping the scales much.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  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.

qiskit 5y ago

Community colleges should really be filling this role not for-profit vultures preying on the poor and the desperate. Can't community colleges create an accelerated 1 semester boot-camp equivalent? Does the $30K income sharing agreement mean that she has to pay $30K to the school once she starts working? And if that's after tax, then doesn't it mean she'll have to make around $50K to have $30K in after-tax income to pay back the school?

ipnon 5y ago
Hot take: All of the information in boot camps is available online for free, and people who aren't willing to search for it and self-learn have a harder time breaking into the industry. Any programming job requires solving new problems everyday. People who require spoon-feeding and hand-holding have a steep hill to climb.
- gh02t 5y ago
  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.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    Everyone still has to jump through the Leetcode/whiteboard/design hoops to get in the door. My impression from working with bootcamp grads is that they are well-prepared for this trial, better than CS grads. The bootcamps don't teach them any theory that will "never" be used on the job.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      While true they still need a certification to put on a resume to get past recruiters. It's fine to think they shouldn't but IRL they probably do.
- 5y ago

ipnon 5y ago

A few points: 1. I'm surprised Bloom doesn't have an arbitration clause. 2. Bloom doesn't say what percentage of privates[a] get a job afterwards. I can't imagine any lawyer would put a guarantee in the contract. 3. Bloom fully refunds the tuition if you don't get a coder job in 365 days. Getting that education for free is a good deal, even if all you get is web dev code monkey 101. If you have 2 neurons to rub together you can extend that into learning other areas of programming. Although admittedly that's hard for a single mom, it's not Bloom's fault she's in that situation. 4. Were coder bootcamps so successful that the labor market is now well and truly saturated with juniors? My estimation of the story is that the litigant is salty she didn't read the fine print and probably just isn't very talented. Learning how to program computers isn't an economic panacea, and it's hard. I got a CS degree and struggled to get a decent jobs for years. Maybe we'll see CS graduates sueing their universities if this litigation provails. [a] Somehow graduate seems inappropriate terminology for a boot camp.

roguecoder 5y ago
On 4, the answer is no, but Lambda school in particular has developed a reputation at least in my circles for producing people who are less qualified than folks with no bootcamp or experience on their resume because it is not an effective program. Rather than addressing their pedagogical failures, they decided to change their name, commit fraud & lie to potential students. Which opens them up to being sued, if only by students, like this woman, who opted out of the arbitration clause.

truthwhisperer 5y ago

jbirer 5y ago

lucb1e 5y ago
You have no idea what the circumstances were, her major life decisions are none of your business, plus it is entirely irrelevant to the lawsuit. For all you know the father died of something horrible and entirely out of their control, or maybe she isn't heterosexual, or there could be so many things. This comment seems short-sighted or flamebait, I cannot tell which.
- truthwhisperer 4y ago

uuyi 5y ago

listenallyall 5y ago

The article is entirely unclear about whether she paid anything to Lambda School, or whether she currently owes anything to them. > She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs "Took out" of where? Her bank account? Why would she be in an income-share if she paid $30,000 up front? > for any student’s ISA payments to be activated ... landed a role leveraging skills learned at Lambda School that pays $50K or more in salary. She has not earned anything from being a web developer. So it would appear she doesn't owe Lambda anything. Are they suing her?

ipnon 5y ago
It seems like she took the ISA, then took out a personal loan to cover external expenses of taking the course. This is unfortunate, but it doesn't look like it's Bloom's fault.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  The faults she's suing for would be deceptive business claims about placement rates, program strength, and the hiding of illegal behavior.
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    Which may be entirely justified, we don't know. But it also may be true that despite taking the class, she just wasn't good at being a web developer. We also don't know how many interviews she went on, or tried to, before giving up. A school with a 98% placement rate still concedes that 2% of it's graduates don't get hired.
roguecoder 5y ago
That's not how crimes work. The crimes happened whether or not she paid them money, and any harm is enough harm to sue. If you spend your time, that is still something you spent. If the person you spent it on was committing fraud at the time, that's a crime.
- 5y ago

lucb1e 5y ago

What would be actually interesting, and core to the story, but is of course entirely omitted from the article, is the alleged and actual placement rate.

bdcravens 5y ago
A long running problem with bootcamps is gaming placement rates by hiring graduates (often at salaries far below what their marketing suggests it possible). So any placement rates need to be quantified, since bootcamp students are interesting in become developers, not teachers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cryptoaquinas 5y ago

Sounds like a hit piece against Bloom Institute/Lambda school orchestrated by failing university administrators. High paying jobs are hard to get. They are meant to be earned and not something that will be handed over in a platter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

syngrog66 5y ago

one thing I love about programming computers is that its pure merit, has nothing to do with my gender, sexuality, race, marital status or parenting status. its orthogonal to all those things. the computer doesnt care, books dont care, etc. up to you when you sit down with them. anything is possible, just up to you

ausbah 5y ago
but does that matter? there are more important things such as access to computers & related resources at a young age, hiring for jobs that involve computers, etc. that are biased
xanaxagoras 5y ago
I couldn't agree more. I guess when you can't hack it and are literally told by employers that you do "not have the technical skills for the job" as this woman was, you can fall back on your gender, sexuality, race, marital or parenting status to make waves and garner sympathy from a society that increasingly values the right combination of these over merit.
threatofrain 5y ago
But programming may involve culture fit, so maybe you are hypothetically comfortable working as an older person with 22 year olds, but the rest of the team might not feel the same way.
alistairSH 5y ago
I suppose that’s true in some sense. But working in tech, you run into all those biases and prejudices just like anywhere else.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

paulpauper 5y ago

For-profit colleges and coding bootcamps, which inflate success metrics and charge too much. The best argument yet against libertarianism, although a libertarian society would not require so much credentials though.

alecbz 5y ago
COVID's a pretty good argument against libertarianism; I think this is a pretty ~weak one. Any time you have an industry that's largely non-private, the private parts of it are probably going to be weird. E.g., private schools tend to cater to the wealthy. But it's not generally true that highly privatized industries cater to the wealthy. Private schools cater to the wealthy because public schools exist, which makes it very difficult for a private school to compete at "lower price points".

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

So I was looking for the text of the lawsuit, but the search turned up a person who closely matches the description of the plaintiff on LinkedIn (and not the lawsuit). I wish I could read the allegations because just going by her current and past employment, things look a little fishy. I recently heard, I think on Planet Money, that a lot of places are moving away from ISAs because they have too much trouble collecting on them. People who hit it big afterward end up having remorse that they signed the ISA and try to get out from under. A suspicious part of me wonders whether that's going on here. To be clear, I'm not saying that these boot camps are generally a good idea. I've been unfavorable about them on here for a while. But, if you do transition into a technical role after going to one, that would seem to be a success story, even if the role isn't a programmer role.

alecbz 5y ago
The article mentions that they were in a technical role before the bootcamp as well.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  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.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  Going by the LinkedIn profile, she was in program management, but it wasn’t a technical role; she was managing nurse practitioners.

legerdemain 5y ago

Honestly, bootcampers are on average pretty bad, but the weakest hires tend to come from some of these so-called "elite" universities. Graduates come out of ivory tower CS programs with heads full of empty theory and zero practical knowledge or good judgment. I would bring on a self-taught or even a bootcamp grad ahead of someone whose resume just has a big-name university and a string of academic acronyms after their name.

pcthrowaway 5y ago

For people assuming this is typical of bootcamps, there have been many discussions and articles alleging lambda school is deceptive, and a scam. Relevant links below: - https://www.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-promised-lucrative-tech-coding-career-low-job-placement-2021-10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017 - https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lvi6mz/lambda_school_is_consistently_deceptive/ - https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qfjorv/lambda_school_promised_a_fast_and_cheap_path_to_a/ Generalizing the experience with Lambda school to other bootcamps is perhaps unfair

xyzzy21 5y ago

Good. 99% of coding boot camps are frauds making promises they can never keep and they know it. Most people can NOT code well ever. The economy can't possibly absorb having much more than 5% of the population being coders and that's unrealistically optimistic.

mattsuth 4y ago

I don’t know about the allegations of the lawsuit, but something feels off to me: She clearly (based on her LinkedIn and personal website) went from a non-technical role to a role at Microsoft that explicitly requires someone to know how to code.