Some of the "hacker schools" are awesome, 99% of the students love them, and some of them are basically scams. But they are all very expensive (eg HackBright gets nearly universal acclaim, but it's $15,000 for an 8 week class), and it's hard to tell which one is awesome and which one is a scam just by looking at their websites. So some sort of oversight / regulation is needed, but I'm not sure what the best way is. There's plenty of other vocational schools (all those ones that promise to get you a high paying job as a dental assistant or pharmacy technician or whatever) that are mostly scams and yet are unaffected by the current regulatory framework in place.


On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 8:34 PM, Romy Ilano <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:
Here's a good Fast Company article, they highlight the people who paid the money but didn't find jobs:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3023456/become-an-ios-developer-in-8-weeks-the-truth-about-hack-schools

  • One example was pretty weird... there was a pregnant woman who enered dev bootcamp, and she couldn't compete with her 12 hours study days against others who were studying 16 hours a day. -- wow! what were they thinking? I think a hacker bootcamp would be a terrible idea for a pregnant woman / new parent. 

  • One hacker school is in the Midwest, where there aren't that many mobile developer jobs and they were training people to be iOS Developers. Kind of weird. 

I love hacker schools, but they have to be extremely selective if they advertise to people that graduating students are going to get $70K a year jobs after only 10-15 weeks of study. The advertising of salaries is what bothers me a lot... 

As we've been discussing, I see totally shady for-profit institutions copying the hacker idea and fleecing unqualified students in the future. I don't want the good hacker schools to get shut down :(


=============================

Romy Ilano




On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 10:45 AM, Hol Gaskill <hol@gaskill.com> wrote:
industrialization of education - obscuring the intrinsic value of knowledge and showing the way forward so that the technicians will know which direction to pull the carts
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