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> They’re usually staffed by professional coders, not licensed teachers. Many of the teachers are volunteers — even though the schools are usually private compa
by Camillo 13y ago
> They’re usually staffed by professional coders, not licensed teachers. Many of the teachers are volunteers — even though the schools are usually private companies, not non-profit organizations. And many schools are backed by investments from big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
I was very surprised to read this. Volunteering can be appropriate if you're helping the less fortunate, or if you're sharing with your peers; but if you volunteer for a for-profit organization, you're devaluing your own skills while enriching those who are already rich. It's not just self-damaging, but socially regressive too.
- lostlogin 13y agoSharing knowledge is not socially regressive. I'd argue that sharing is a key part of society.
- navyrain 13y agoThere is a substantial difference between freely sharing knowledge to any inquiring mind, and sharing knowledge with only those people who have paid gobs of money, while receiving none yourself.
- blahedo 13y agoI'd also like to know how many is "many". It would seem... odd... for there to be a substantial number of them (although I could imagine a few edge cases, I guess).
- bradhe 13y agoI have had multiple hacker "schools" ask me volunteer.
- mquander 13y agoThe difference between running your own tutoring business and volunteering for a hacker school is that N dollars go into the school's pocket, instead of yours. Why would society care about that difference?
- afterburner 13y agoPeople getting taken advantage of?
- maaku 13y agoBecause it becomes harder for potential teachers/tutors to compete with free?
- snitko 13y agoThere must be a reason why people volunteer to do something. People wouldn't volunteer unless they thought it's good for them too. If it makes harder for someone to compete - great. Compete better.
- VMG 13y agoopen-source software makes it hard for commercial software vendors to comete
- Shivetya 13y agowell they ain't see nothing yet, when education moves more and move into the web that profession will not support the numbers it does now.
- michaelt 13y agoI don't know much about bootcamps, but there's a lot of hand-wringing in the UK about people working for free ("unpaid internships") in newspapers, high arts, TV and politics. Because it ends up that you can't get into those industries without spending a year working for free, and the only people who can afford to spend a year working for free are people with rich parents, so newspapers, high art, tv and politics end up dominated by the rich. Admittedly, in the SV programming climate this is not currently much of an issue.
- BootThrowaway 13y agoThis must vary from bootcamp to bootcamp - the one I attended was staffed entirely by professionals.
- codezero 13y agoFor-profits can also run afoul of the Fair Labor Standards [1] act if volunteers are acting in roles similar to paid employees or if they are being trained/evaluated similar to employees. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act
- snitko 13y agoIt's nice to see that some people are so eager to tell others where they are allowed to volunteer now. A whole new level, I'd say. Minimum wage is not enough of a burden to prevent those willing to work from getting jobs because nobody would hire them at their current skill level for that amount of money. Now it's "you can't volunteer here".
- tomp 13y agoOftentimes, volunteering is just an excuse for the companies to use unpaid workforce (students, fresh graduates, ... i.e. people that don't have enough leverage on the job market to actually get a real paying job). If it is made illegal, then companies will always have to pay for work done that is useful to them.
- golergka 13y agoOr they could just not hire them for the small amount of work they do and giant amount of education by high-payed employees they require.
- sbank 13y agoSo we should rob these people of one of the ways in which they can gain actual experience and make themselves salaried employees? The government should IMNSHO only concern themselves with one thing: is it consensual or not? If it is, they should back off and leave people alone.
- EdwardDiego 13y ago> So we should rob these people of one of the ways By working for free, they're lowering the wages of everyone else in the software development field. Who is robbing who exactly?
- nathan_long 13y agoBy working for free, they're trading work for something they value - experience, perhaps. Unless the market is being manipulated by collusion or regulation, their choice of what to charge for their work is as valid as yours.
- jes 13y agoPeople may have reasons for volunteering different than those that occurred to you when you wrote the above. The idea that a person who volunteers on behalf of a for-profit organization necessarily damages himself is wrong.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoInterns in non-engineering professions are often unpaid. This is perfectly normal.