Oh boy, you keep taking all sorts of things out of context and comparing all sorts of things that don't make any sense to each other.
A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
> Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021.
The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us.
> When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
> It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict).
> After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested.
The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up.
I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies.
OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so.
I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.
Just wanted to say you have done a good job explaining here. Unfortunately people love to concentrate on negative outcomes without thinking about the positive. On balance the few, arguably "bad" things Lamda has done seem to be hugely outweighed by the positive.
i was going to sit this one out, but i want to +1 the above with more than just an upvote. Austen seems to be arguing and explaining all the happenings in good faith with someone who appears to be hell-bent on "catching" him with something by misconstruing things.
i have never understood why Lambda/Bloomtech has so many haters but the other commenter here appears to me to be in that camp.
Austen is a terrible person and has been caught lying dozens of times and always hides behind the "we're just good people trying to help others" line to distract from the fact he and the rest of the lambda school staff (which is just all of the un-hired grads so they can boost their already pathetic placement rates) are scammers and frauds.
Calling someone a terrible person, liar, scammer and fraud with little evidence is not a good look. Even if all your points are true (Austen has refuted at least a few), "terrible person" is a huge stretch.
> I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
You keep running in circles around a very simple statement that was on the front page of your website: "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year."
Just tell me how you got to 86%, because that's wildly inconsistent with years of outcomes data, in addition to the leaks.
> This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
I'm sorry, did you just lie to my face, say, "This is fair" and try move on?
I'll be honest, I can't follow the story you're trying to tell. It sounds way more complex than what everyone watched unfold.
Your FAQ at launch clearly says it's unpaid. You had a product manager on Hacker News trying to defend the program while all the commenters explained, "This is an unpaid intern program and probably illegal." He even tried the same, "Well our lawyers said it was ok." After the Twitter backlash, you tweeted and deleted an apology, and then started acting like none of that stuff happened.
As for "no student ever did any unpaid work," didn't you pilot the program for months before publicly announcing it? (This is a rhetorical question. At this point I lack faith you'll tell the truth.)
>> > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
> Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement
Let me get this straight. You're saying, "There's no legal precedent, but hey, it might be true? So we threw it in!"
> OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing
You blocked me, making it impossible to reply.
> and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
Despite the block, I said: "Your students publish their homework to GitHub. Half a cohort failed to grasp memory management, but you rubber stamped them through the program.
You even hired one of those students to be a section lead, to teach other students."
"I am not publicly linking to the students who struggled with it, because it’s not their fault. But I did share the GitHub projects with two senior iOS developers I trust, and they agreed these students didn’t get it."
So to answer your challenge: memory management. I have sign-off from two senior, ex-Apple iOS devs. Please wire that money to the National Student Legal Defense Network, who seems to be handling that lawsuit against you.
> I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge.
It's interesting that you think this is all about you.
I said, "After looking through Lambda School’s curriculum, I’d say students are going to struggle with very basic questions you’ll get on first phone screens," and "Out of ten student projects available, five should have failed."
Yes, you had a page in the curriculum on memory management. You also rubber-stamped through people who didn't understand it, and even contracted one of those people to not-help other students on the topic.
Anyone can link someone to a page about a topic and say it's covered, but the difference between a Udemy course and $30k worth of training is the expectation that someone will actually look at homework.
Anyway, the reason you won't explain the 86% placement number claim is that it was true for one cohort in 2018. That's why you only submitted a single report to CIRR. At scale, the number has always been somewhere between 30% and 50%, but that's easier to obfuscate by coming up with your own methodology.
There's a strong parallel with the time you claimed 100% of your UX cohort was hired, without disclosing that only one student graduated. You said it's ok because you tweeted, "VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE."
And I'm sure you'll argue you didn't lie moments ago about the Fellows program due to what the word "launched" should mean. You have shown a pattern of deflecting the substance of criticism by focusing on technicalities.
Maybe this worked out for you in a different life. I suspect you've gathered so many critics, you're "attacked at all sides," because you're now among engineers. They just take your data, plug it into a spreadsheet, and let the facts speak for themselves.
But I don't think this had to be. There's an alternate timeline where you did a mea culpa, cut out the shenanigans, and the tech community washed the bad taste out of its mouth. This could have been an incredible reception arc. Instead, Paul Graham enabled you with that whole "haters" pep talk, and things went downhill from there. So it goes.
Don't really know the situation too well but I really appreciate these explanations. I think what people often misunderstand about Bloom and other bootcamps is
1) education is really really hard in general and software engineering is a really hard topic. I'd argue the default is most won't succeed.
2) Bootcamps like this are fighting an uphill battle because of selection bias. If you're applying to a bootcamp like this it's probably because you couldn't get into a college or you did but dropped out or don't have the money, etc. People think it's bizarre when 30% of grads stop looking for a job but it makes sense. These are people from all walks of life with different constraints than the average student.
3) Regulatory schemes in general is batshit crazy in the US. Messing up here and there is not always indicative of malintent, especially for a startup.
This is certainly a problem domain that needs to be solved imo so I'm rooting for Bloom unless they really prove to be harmful. We need better pipelines for people with talent and motivation to climb the social ladder and learn new skills outside of traditional academia.
Austen, I bet it takes you a ton of time to write all this up and I want you to know it's appreciated. It's really insightful to see your perspective and insight on all these topics.
A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense.
> Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs?
Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021.
The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us.
> When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid."
This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work.
> It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable.
Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict).
> After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive.
The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested.
The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up.
I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies.
OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good."
I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so.
I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.