Startup Coding Bootcamp Modern Labor Says It Will Pay You $2,000 a Month For 5 Months To Learn To Code, and Take Roughly 15% of Your Salary For 2 Years Later (vice.com) 161
Modern Labor promises to teach you to code in five months and help find you a job when you graduate -- but you're on the hook for the next two years. From a report: Most coding bootcamps almost sound like get-rich-quick schemes: Devote a few months to learning a new skill from home, and walk into a job that could pay you $70,000 a year to start. For the most immersive programs, you'll need to put your life on hold while you learn full-time. Usually, students pay for those coding bootcamps upfront while they take time off their jobs to learn.
Startup coding bootcamp Modern Labor pays people $2,000 a month for five months while they learn to code, following a curriculum remotely from wherever they live for at least 30 hours every week (working out to roughly minimum wage). After graduation, if they land a job that pays at least $40,000, Modern Labor takes 15 percent of their salary for the next two years. For example, if they find a job that pays $80,000, they'll pay Modern Labor $24,000 over two years. [...] Modern Labor's business model is an example of an "income sharing agreement," a scheme that's on-trend for Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs looking to disrupt education.
Startup coding bootcamp Modern Labor pays people $2,000 a month for five months while they learn to code, following a curriculum remotely from wherever they live for at least 30 hours every week (working out to roughly minimum wage). After graduation, if they land a job that pays at least $40,000, Modern Labor takes 15 percent of their salary for the next two years. For example, if they find a job that pays $80,000, they'll pay Modern Labor $24,000 over two years. [...] Modern Labor's business model is an example of an "income sharing agreement," a scheme that's on-trend for Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs looking to disrupt education.
How about NO? Lol what the (Score:1)
.... wait, and Take Roughly 15% of Your Salary For 2 Years Later? Hahaa... KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN (academy)
Re:How about NO? Lol what the (Score:5, Interesting)
It is worse than that. TFA isn't clear, but it looks like they pay you $2000 per month, yet you are still responsible for paying tuition that exceeds that. So YOU are paying THEM in net payments even while you are still taking the class. Since these are "online" courses, their net cost to educate you is near zero.
Only a complete idiot would sign up for this scam.
When my company is interviewing, and we have two candidates:
Candidate 1: I learned to code in a 3 month boot camp that cost me $15k.
Candidate 2: I learned to code in my mom's basement using free tutorials and Stackoverflow.
we will definitely prefer #2, who is not a fool parted from his money, but has also shown himself capable of self-learning.
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Re:How about NO? Lol what the (Score:4, Interesting)
what you learn in them doesn't stick very well because of the accelerated pace.
According to TFA, many of the people signing up for these bootcamps are recent college graduates. They are finding out that their degrees are worthless, so they are hoping to learn something useful in a crash course.
If they had put more thought into their college major, they could have learned to code over 4 years instead of 5 months.
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Of course but that is true of anything you learn in college as well. You just cut out the cruft they use to pad it, accelerate it how long it actually takes to learn that material. Either way if you actually want it to be functional you need to couple it with experience. These things are for entry level gigs. Sadly finding somewhere that doesn't want you to already have experience for an entry level position is going to be tough these days.
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TFA actually has info from someone in the program. They have you working projects, she indicated she's already completed 15. Afterward they don't guarantee placement but they have an optional staffing platform for gigs 1mo-contract to hires. So you produce actual work output as part of the camp.
I mean at face value it isn't that unreasonable. You don't need 4yrs to learn most development especially web front/backend development and getting it in one place alongside practical experience is all to the good. T
Re: How about NO? Lol what the (Score:1)
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What is very sketchy to me is the 30hr [per week] minimum.
Might that have something to do with a threshold in the US Affordable Care Act or some other labor law?
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According to the TFA it will. I don't see why it wouldn't since they get 15% of your salary if that enables you to get a job or higher paying job. The have a profit incentive to make you look good, and their students all looking good only makes them look better and their services and staffing board a better sell.
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I think this is designed to be applied to states like Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. I live in Alabama and I can tell you that people will line up for this sort of ...thing.
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They already have a proud history of schemes like this that stretches back over hundreds of years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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But #2 has to have extensive retraining. Well, so does #1 of course. But if those are the only two candidates then go digging for more resumes.
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But #2 has to have extensive retraining.
#2 has shown he can learn on his own, without needing babysitting.
But if those are the only two candidates then go digging for more resumes.
For a $20/hour code-monkey position? In today's economy, this is as good as you are gonna get.
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#2 has shown he can learn on his own, without needing babysitting.
#2 hasn't shown that he can learn industry best practices for quality control or security. Instead of a full stack developer, you get a full Stack Overflow developer [christianheilmann.com] who is more skilled at using the clipboard than anything else.
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Yeah but 2 won't get an interview with your company, in fact if comments you've made previously are an indication 2 could have solved classically unsolvable computation problems or solved a few with previously thought impossible efficiency and you'd toss his resume in the trash because it doesn't list a degree.
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"TFA isn't clear, but it looks like they pay you $2000 per month, yet you are still responsible for paying tuition that exceeds that. So YOU are paying THEM in net payments even while you are still taking the class. "
I can't find anything on their website indicating that you pay any tuition at all.
They pay $2000/mo for the camp, if you get a job paying more than $40k/yr they get 15% for 2yrs with a cap of $30k paid to them.
It doesn't sound like the worst plan for a new college student, especially if it enab
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I can't find anything on their website indicating that you pay any tuition at all.
TFA states that tuition for the course is $14,987.
It doesn't sound like the worst plan for a new college student
According to TFA the people running the bootcamp have a history of involvement in other scammy organizations.
especially if it enables them to get an entry level position at a company with tuition reimbursement.
TFA implies that employers don't place much, if any, value in the certification.
It is really just a piece of paper that says "I failed an IQ test."
Re:How about NO? Lol what the (Score:4, Informative)
TFA is titled "This Company Will Pay You to Learn to Code, and Take 15 Percent of Your Income Later" written by Samantha Cole on 3/28/2019
You are referencing the next similar topic but unrelated FA on the page titled, "The CEO of a Failed For-Profit College Started a Coding Bootcamp" written by Jordan Pearson 2/24/2016.
There is no tuition stated or implied in TFA.
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"TFA implies that employers don't place much, if any, value in the certification."
That is going to be on an individual basis. You can apply for an entry level position with a resume that says "Voted Most likely to hangglide in high school" and "Shaved roast beef with precision at Arby's for six months" or you can put those AND "Attended Modern Labor Development Bootcamp" and reference the 15-20 production projects you contributed to and show examples of your work. You are getting shafted in that this is rea
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That is going to be on an individual basis. You can apply for an entry level position with a resume that says "Voted Most likely to hangglide in high school" and "Shaved roast beef with precision at Arby's for six months" or you can put those AND "Attended Modern Labor Development Bootcamp" and reference the 15-20 production projects you contributed to and show examples of your work.
Your comparison doesn't make sense. If someone, who is applying for a tech job, includes anything else but tech related experiences in his/her resume, then the person is very likely not to be selected. This is a known way of presenting your resume -- show only relevant experiences to the job applied. Though, this also enable another issue where people exaggerate their experiences/skills to look better than their real ones.
You can self study or you can do Khan's but a boot camp which includes actual inbound for profit tasks is probably going to be more efficient.
That is not the case here, at least for now. From TFA -- "Although people enrolled in
Re: How about NO? Lol what the (Score:1)
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"Your comparison doesn't make sense. If someone, who is applying for a tech job, includes anything else but tech related experiences in his/her resume, then the person is very likely not to be selected. This is a known way of presenting your resume -- show only relevant experiences to the job applied."
And what precisely is it that you expect to be present on the resume of a person applying for their first tech job? There are no previous experiences to list and it is insane to claim there are labor shortages
Employers that require candidates to explain gaps (Score:2)
If someone, who is applying for a tech job, includes anything else but tech related experiences in his/her resume, then the person is very likely not to be selected. This is a known way of presenting your resume -- show only relevant experiences to the job applied.
Unless the employer specifies otherwise in the job posting. I've seen a few employers that explicitly require candidates to explain all gaps in the candidate's employment history since high school graduation.
Re: How about NO? Lol what the (Score:1)
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MOD DOWN, mistaken and inaccurate. My own post is redundant but this correction needed to be more visible.
TFA is titled "This Company Will Pay You to Learn to Code, and Take 15 Percent of Your Income Later" written by Samantha Cole on 3/28/2019
You are referencing the next similar topic but unrelated FA on the page titled, "The CEO of a Failed For-Profit College Started a Coding Bootcamp" written by Jordan Pearson 2/24/2016.
There is no tuition stated or implied in TFA nor shady implications and details you r
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I would just sit them down in front of a computer, assign them a programming task and watch them complete it and make sure the program runs. Then inspect the code for neatness, logic, compactness and accuracy and of course how long it took. The problem would be relatively simple but require some complex logic to compete. The best three then go on to be interviewed to evaluate psychological worth, how good a team player are they and honestly I would be tempted to send the final person to a psychiatrist for a
Does autism imply psychopathy? (Score:2)
That testing for psychopathy and narcissism, a bit costly but hey a few hundred dollar test versus ten even hundreds of thousands of dollars (be it stolen proprietary data, stolen company property, in office conflicts and fights or simply primitive sexual assaults, that test will reduce those risk a lot, seriously well worth the investment).
Autism spectrum disorder used to be called "autistic psychopathy". How do autistic candidates score on the "psychopathy" scale that you use? I imagine that the leaders of an employer or employment agency don't want it to end up the target of a disability discrimination lawsuit.
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It is worse than that. TFA isn't clear, but it looks like they pay you $2000 per month, yet you are still responsible for paying tuition that exceeds that.
I don't see anything in TFS, TFA, or on the Modern Labor website that says there is any tuition fee.
Since these are "online" courses, their net cost to educate you is near zero.
The fine website talks about being assigned projects under the leadership of a project manager, with code reviews. This is not "near zero" cost.
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Always include the complete job description back at them in the margin in 2 pt, white on white text.
They prefer to waste your time over there's, you just have to be smarter than some HR drone. You should not be at all concerned about wasting their time, they don't care about wasting yours.
Re:How about NO? Lol what the (Score:4, Insightful)
More like the HR person only actually sends you Candidate 1 if that.
If HR is the gatekeeper for technical hiring, then you work for a dysfunctional organization.
HR's job is to do the paperwork, not make the decisions.
Hiring good people is the most important competency that an organization can have.
It is astounding how many companies are so bad at it.
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It isn't mentioned in the TFA either.
The sketchy part is they having you working on projects they are being paid for in order to get that $2k/mo, they push for 30hrs minimum but also push competition on number of hours worked coming to 45-60hrs so that equates to dramatically lower than minimum wage. So basically you work for less than minimum wage for 5months learning on the job (but apparently the requirements push for previous coding experience) and then have to pay back up to 3x that for the privilege o
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And my bet is they take that 15% even if not related to coding. For example if I go to the bootcamp, can't find a coding job, but 2 years later luck into a sales job that pays 40K a year, I'm paying that 15%.
Re: How about NO? Lol what the (Score:1)
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Capitalism in action (Score:2)
This is just capitalism in action, right? When you ask the repair shop in the desert "how much to fix my car" and they respond "how much you got?" , it's the same premise. If the company can get you trained and into a job, they will try to extract as much of your future earnings as they can, because in their eyes, without them, you wouldn't have that job.
This is not much different from the philosophy of private colleges. Just a slightly different payment method.
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No, it isn't the same premise. In the desert, you have no choice. In learning how to code, you have many choices.
The scam here is saying that you can learn to code in 5 months. It's almost as though you went to some entity that promised you could learn to reason in 5 months. I sure hope you didn't pay them for the "privilege".
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If you really need it explained to you, here is a link explaining how to learn to code.
http://programming-motherfucke... [programmin...fucker.com]
Don't forget to read the Manifesto while you're there.
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I've talked to many of them. I'd go with indoctrinated over educated. Their critical thinking skills rank on level with an 18 yr old.
And this proves the point... (Score:2, Insightful)
that so many IT analysts are making that being a programmer is becoming a "blue collar" job. Boot camps prey on people with promises of glory and being a hacker, but most of them emerge to work in places where the pay is fairly low and the job basic, like front-end Web development. Very, very few of these "graduates" go on to do systems programming, graph theory, AI/ML, etc. They just don't teach that kind of stuff, and what they do teach is fairly shallow anyway. It's better to go to a community college fo
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Programming was always a blue collar job. The problem that happened was we threw engineers at it. We have wasted an entire generation of engineers doing draftsman work - coding. Finally things are getting back to normal. The difficult part in any software is figuring out what to build and the overall architecture. After that the actual typing to pass test cases is something Teenagers should do for pocket money (aka its a McJob)
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The difficult part in any software is figuring out what to build and the overall architecture.
If you find that you've fully specified what the software you're building is supposed to do, you might have also just finished implementing it.
If for some reason that is not true, you should stop everything and write a code generator that accepts your specification as input. That is, if you're really sure that you've actually specified everything already.
Translate the C standard into a C compiler (Score:2)
If you find that you've fully specified what the software you're building is supposed to do, you might have also just finished implementing it.
If for some reason that is not true, you should stop everything and write a code generator that accepts your specification as input.
I'd be interested to see a proof of concept that automatically translates ISO's international standard for the C language and the datasheet of the Intel 80386 CPU into a working C compiler.
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Try harder.
Just assume, for your first reading, that I'm saying something that is literally true, and obviously correct to experts. See if there is a way to parse the words for that to be true. If so, then you understood me. If it sounds like it would be easily dismissed, you probably selected different definitions for the various words I used than the ones that make sense in the context.
So obviously, if you understood what I was saying, and you understand that it is unlikely that you would "automatically t
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To have this view, you must never have personally coded anything complicated and large.......Find me a pool of teens that can write code that meets specs that include multi threading and bitwise operations who will do it for pocket change and you've found an endless revenue stream.
To have this view, you must never have personally worked in any of the millions of small businesses which just need some analyses a step above a pivot table or to automate some of the regular tasks that an employee has to do.
There are tons and tons of jobs for programmers which do not require any significant software engineering. Almost any business with more than six people could likely use someone hacking together some scripts and analyses to automate blue-collar tasks. An intranet inventory sheet that's
A failure of government. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is exactly the kind of thing Government should be providing for free. It's even mostly the same deal, you earn more money, and the government takes a higher percentage of your salary.
The fact that private enterprise is doing this shows the failure of government to provide free education.
Re:A failure of government. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, I think the fact you were able to read the story and write the comment shows success at government providing you with free education.
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And ***** I ***** pay for yours.
Wow what a concept!
Cheaper than College it seems. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a 5 month "Degree" (Score:4, Insightful)
In 1990 this would have worked. But in 1990 I could crack open a book, read it, and go get a job making $70k/yr writing code because that was before H1-Bs and offshoring.
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if they do manage to find you a job you'll be in deep if you ever lose it.
It's bad to lose a job and income, and there is risk in spending time and effort, if not money, on education and training. However, this income sharing arrangement seems to be much less risky than a student loan. Losing a job after graduating with a student loan at best postpones loan repayments and sometimes not even that. The main reason to get the 4-year traditional degree with the sunk upfront costs is the expectation of better job and income prospects. Unfortunately, there are many cases where this
Sorta, you've got to think in terms of time (Score:1)
The trouble with these sorts of phony degrees is they won't get you past HR filters designed to hire and H1-B over an American. You need a 4 year degree for that. During the last recession folks with proper, 4 year degrees in useful fields (medical, business, legal, STEM, etc) were largely
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The trouble with these sorts of phony degrees is they won't get you past HR filters designed to hire and H1-B over an American. You need a 4 year degree for that.
I think this is the crucial point, i.e., is this type of 5-month training phony or real? Despite good intentions, the only thing that matters is getting a job. There are plenty of fake diploma mills that are fake because the chance of getting a real job based on that degree is small. If this 5-month program doesn't lead to a job, then it's also phony. But the free, 5-month phony program is still better than the costly, longer phony program, as the only real risk is time.
With the diploma mills, it's clea
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Sounds like your bud has some other problems as well. No way you can't find a job if you have any experience, degree or training certification. We have a hard time filling openings, our HR department is a bit slow and candidates get scooped not even a week after being available and this is an issue across the country.
My local McD is advertising $12.60, Walmart $15 as a minimum and I don't even live in any big city. If you want to work you can.
Nope, it's just the degree (Score:3)
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It sounds like your bud needs to move.
I was in a similar pickle in Charlottesville Virginia in ~2002. An ISP had gone out of business dumping me and over 100 other technically skilled workers into a tiny labor pool. Six months of unemployment* and fervent job searching from North of DC all the way down to Richmond yielded nothing. I packed up, moved back to Middle Tennessee, and found a job in under two weeks.
It was crazy hard, but it was the right thing to do. It was obvious that staying in Charlottesv
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It sounds like your bud needs to move.
Which changes the question to how to find a job (like your welding job) in order to save up enough money to cover to moving to a more lucrative area (like your Middle Tennessee) and surviving there for a few months while seeking a job in your preferred field.
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I live in a town with a 36% unemployment rate. Walmart receives a lot of applications (ones they never even review because timing matters). Most people don't get an interview. I was actually rejected by an interviewer at Walmart in the early/mid-2000s, but was luckily, on my way out, stopped by the head of HR, who listened to my hard luck story of impending eviction and went over their heads to hire me. I was being passed up because I worked a government job previously, was laid off, but was making "too muc
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Finding the money to move (Score:2)
How do people raised in cities where the market is "quite chilly" find the money to move to cities where it "is quite hot"?
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You only pay 15% of your earnings, not 15% of your initial salary for 2yrs. If you lose the job you don't pay but if you get a new one you'll have to pay from that.
They actually have a staffing platform for finding gigs ranging from 1mo-FT
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Minus the $10K they paid you to learn, that's only $12K for an education and a job.
There is also a $15k tuition for the bootcamp. Nowhere do they say tuition is waived for people being "paid to learn".
So $27k not $12k.
But this is not comparable to a college degree. A BS-in-CS will get you a job interview, and likely a well paying job. A bootcamp certificate has NEGATIVE value in the job market. It is best to not even mention it in the interview. The skills you learn in a cram course are going to get you an entry level code-monkey job at best.
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The skills you learn in a cram course are going to get you an entry level code-monkey job at best.
Even code monkey jobs pays well. At least better than the average salary. Hell with 2 years experience as a code monkey under your belt, you can leverage this into a much better IT position somewhere.
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There is also a $15k tuition for the bootcamp. Nowhere do they say tuition is waived for people being "paid to learn".
Nowhere do they say there is any tuition fee for their class. There is nothing to waive.
You don't go to college to be a coder (Score:2)
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You get a 4 year degree in order to get past HR departments that are under the misconception that you do get a 4 year degree to write code.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Why don't all colleges provide free education, but in return, your wages are garnished for a period at a set percent?
Some colleges do offer these plans. There are also lenders that offer them.
Income Sharing Agreements [wikipedia.org]
They have a mixed track record.
A big problem is that the students with the most earning potential (engineering, CS, MBA) are not stupid, and are the least likely to sign up. So the ISA programs are stuck with the liberal arts dregs who have little more earning potential than a high school graduate. So they end up with high default rates.
Instead of focusing on "How to fund college?" we should focus on "Why
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Or we make all colleges free and buy a few less unnecessary tanks for the army. [military.com]
This is on the same order of bullshittery as "we could erase the national debt if we just raised taxes on the top 1%." In 2011, the total amount of money spent on college tuition in the US (note, this does not include books, housing, or food) was about half of the total US miitary budget. Since then, the military budget has declined and college tuition has increased. So no, passing on "a few less unnecessary tanks for the army" would not free up enough money to make all colleges free.
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Don't forget the total amount spent on tuition includes the outrageously priced schools as well.
Bernie and AOC think those should be free too.
A big problem with their proposal is they assume the number of people going to college would stay the same. Most likely it would go up dramatically if there was no cost.
They also assume that the extra education would boost the GDP. But free colleges tend to have far higher dropout rates, since the students have less skin in the game. So it is unclear if completion rates would go up even with far more students attending.
Universities would even less incentive t
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My wife is Polish, and grew up under communism. When you make college free, you have to implement some other mechanism to determine who gets to go. Otherwise, mother's would push every single child to be either a doctor or a lawyer. She aced all the tests, but was not able to get into medical school without her father making the right connection. Turns out, that is how ALL the med students got in. We're seeing the same thing here with the publication of the recent admission scandals.
People pushing soci
Hooray (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do you know what any of the words you just used mean? It doesn't seem like it, because most really have nothing in common with this program.
1) This is voluntary. 2 out of 3 of the things you mention aren't.
2) This is a paid educational opportunity. Nothing that you mentioned is. (Neither are college or trade school for that matter.)
3) You only have to pay for this education if you get a job paying more than $40k in the 5 years after the program. And they only take 20% of your salary for 2 years, so no 30 ye
How Education SHOULD work (Score:2, Interesting)
This model is fantastic.
Think about how modern education is currently conducted, regardless of public or private university, student loan or cash payment:
The student puts money down upfront for an uncertain outcome at an institution that, once payment is received, has no vested interest in the student even completing courses, let alone finding rewarding employment. In fact the institution is financially rewarded for keeping the student as a student for as long as possible.
In modern education, ALL the risk i
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And forgot to mention:
This company takes 15% of your salary for 2 years.
"Free education" advocates want to take 30% for the rest of your life.
Take my job, please (Score:2)
Find me a new job and you can have 5% for 1 year.
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Where can I apply for a phone app job? I wanna get the hell out of deeply embedded.
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I admit I'm moving the goalposts, but let me try to narrow the search:
Find me a job that pays living expenses in the part of the country where the rest of my family lives and you can have 5 percent for one year.
Boot camps are a scam (Score:1)
My wife gradually moved from being a business analyst into support and maintenance on the IT side of her organization, but she didn't really have much programming experience. So her employer sent her to (and paid for!) a C# "coding" bootcamp. After a little probing I determined it wasn't just about C# but Microsoft's whole MVC-pattern framework. Ok, fine.
She's pretty smart, so she passed with flying colors and got her precious certificate. And I'm sure if she had a computer with visual studio or whatever it
Take a math boot camp instead (Score:2)
Modern Labor takes 15 percent of their salary for the next two years. For example, if they find a job that pays $80,000, they'll pay Modern Labor $24,000 over two years.
Is it just me, or is this more 30% than 15%?
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Is it just me, or is this more 30% than 15%?
It's just you.
Illegal arrangement? (Score:2)
I thought such contracts were illegal or invalid.
NIH had similar requirements that if your education or training was paid thru an NIH fellowship, you had to "payback" by working in the field of training for several years. That arrangement was later ruled to be illegal indenturing.
Should make it a form of loan.
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Easy enough to get around that. Make it a loan, with an interest rate and payback schedule calculated to yield 15% of the maximum expected salary over two years. Then forgive any overrun if the salary is less than the max.
You'd have to be completely nuts to sign such a thing, but people are stupid.
This is how slavery starts (Score:1)
Why is everyone bashing this bootcamp? (Score:2)
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Many ACs are just Russian trolls.
And what Loretta Lynch goes down on is not my business. I'm guessing: not you.
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Total payback is capped at $30,000. They also paid you $10,000. So the most this can cost you is $20,000. If you earn less than $40,000 they take nothing.
Salary Payback Net Cost
$40,000 0 - $10,000 = -$10,000
$60,000 2*$9000 - $10,000 = $8,000
$80,000 2*$12000 - $10000 = $12,000
$100,000 2*$15000 - $10000 = $20,000
If you were earning less than $50,000 before you did this, it looks like a good deal.
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if you can speak German, they will pay you $19k to lie in a space bed for two months while they spin it for space research.
Does being able to say "ja" and "nein" count, or are they all fussy about being fluent and shit?
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How is this any different than a typical 4 year degree? At least they have a vested interest in getting you placed in a job somewhere. It'll probably be a crap job, but I've been in positions before that were "great places to be from".
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And after two and a half years, you have a career (or at least a job) and two years of work experience.
If you can afford it, a university will cost you 15 to 20K per year, not provide you with a stipend to cross the gap, and take four years. At the end of all that, you'll have 100K of debt and no work experience.
For someone starting out, coming from meager means, getting started fast is more beneficial than the "castle in the sky" university. This program would offer a large swath of people hope...a way o